Silent Shadow

That is not what I found. Wood does indeed provide a bonus. Below is a comparison of an outside pot, and two 3x3x3 blocks with a pot inside, one wood and one dirt, at 15 C :

• Outside pot - (V)egetable: 0.41, (G)rain: 0.28x, (O)ther: 0.55x
• Dirt enclosed pot - V: 0.19x, G: 0.13x, O: 0.26x
• Wood enclosed pot - V: 0.2x, G 0.13x, O: 0.26x

The shelf life of grain and meat placed in the pots mostly reflects the above numbers in its lifespan (keep in mind your "days per month setting" will alter the "years" a food lasts for):

• Outside pot: Grain - 3 years, Meat - 2.7d
• Dirt enclosed pot: Grain - 6.5 years, Meat - 5.8d
• Wood enclosed pot: Grain - 6.4 years, Meat - 5.7d

Once at ~8 C, the difference was negligible between dirt and wood enclosed pots.

• Dirt: Grain - 6.5 years, Meat: 5.8 days
• Wood: Grain - 6.4 years, Meat: 5.7 days

No real change in difference between the two pots' reduction stats after some time/seasons. 

• Dirt: Grain - 4.7 years, Meat: 1.1 days
• Wood: Grain - 4.7 years, Meat: 1.2 days

Once we look at higher temperatures (37 C in this case), the advantage of dirt/stone cellars becomes apparent:

• Outside: Grain - 74.8 days, Meat - 10.8 hours, V: 1.8x, G: 1.2x, O: 2.4x
• Dirt: Grain - 4.9 years, Meat: 5.2 days; V: 0.19x, G: 0.13x, O: 0.26x
• Wood: Grain - 1.6 years, Meat: 1.8 days; V: 1.47x, G: 0.38x, O :0.76x

Looking at the data, it is pretty clear that blocks other than stone, dirt, and ceramics will give a bonus to food shelf lives. Stone/dirt/ceramics give almost an equal bonus at 15 C (a very common temperate temperature), but foods sheltered within "cellars" will not suffer additional spoilage due to higher ambient temperatures.

Basically, stone/dirt/ceramic walls are only better than wood in hot climates, and wood does give a bonus to food preservation. That said, dirt is pretty much everywhere so you may as well build a cellar with it.

On 9/26/2021 at 2:09 AM, allstreets said:

I built a cellar today that had the spoilage rates double when I replaced the initial claystone block floor with ebony slabs.

You probably broke the game's recognition of the room, as having the pot in a room (cellar or not) about halves the spoilage rate. As for the slightly lower spoilage rate you got after putting in cobblestone blocks, the amount of sunlight reaching the cellar may have changed (either by you rearranging the entrance or a change in the sun's path slightly altering the path of sunlight to the cellar.) Try removing all doors and trapdoors and filling them in with solid stone/dirt/ceramic blocks.

The game Eco had dirt and stone ramps players could make for this purpose, but there is no real point to carts as carrying capacity is rarely a long distance issue.

Stone and earth are supposed to give better results than wood, but the main thing to account for is temperature. Stone and earth are better insulators than wood and so give a better bonus. The game seems to track temperature beyond just ambient climate temperature, but I am not sure if it is on a block by block basis or not.

Keep in mind that cellars are only a benefit if the ambient temperature outside is 8 degrees or more. 

The downside would be to remove one of few reasons players have to leave their base, and one of even fewer reasons to build a road. I do wish you could recruit people to live and work in your village though.

Well, history has plenty of examples where much of the metal smelted from an ore ended up in the slag rather than the ingot, so there is some basis for better smelting resulting in more metal from ore. Crushing ore, either by hammer or heave hammer, should not increase the amount of metal recoverable, and it should only reduce the amount of slag generated (which is entirely absent in the game) and reduce the fuel needed.

On 9/24/2021 at 2:59 PM, Omega Haxors said:

I want there to be a way to pull from the ore map directly through some kind of mechanic. Being able to extract trace minerals from the ground would go a long way in preventing the probability-based system of actually looking for a deposit, and remove those annoying situations when an ore has a high chance to spawn, but doesn't.

The realistic options are panning, which would only see nuggets from eroded ore sources (i.e. not most ores), or crushing and melting the entirety of all rocks/gravel/sand harvested at an enormous energy cost (fuel and player calories). Second option is not done IRL, as it is vastly inefficient, from durability losses of hammers from crushing rock/gravel (the whole point is to get metal, not lose it), the staggering amounts of fuel and flux required to separate and reduce the metal, and the massive amount of slag waste generated (in the game however, slag is not depicted).

Probably neither is gonna happen, so you should just increase the amount of ore spawned.

On 9/24/2021 at 4:10 AM, Stefano Da Giau said:

Voted long ago but since the comments are list opened for the thread.. I don't mind the idea of supporting beams and cave-ins mechanics.. That being sad, adding something like that definitely needs a rebalance on how to find veins/clusters, and their size/rarity.. No one wants to waste many resources in making a tunnel fully supported by beams, that take a lot more time to set up, just to have a false positive based on how the map cluster has the chance of spawning a ore vein, not actually spawning it

I like the idea, but disagree with changing prospecting, you can already find ores pretty easily and wood is pretty cheap. Even using logs every few blocks would not be that bad.

Apart from ladders though, there is no real reason to invest in mine infrastructure. Most real mines invest in ventilation or moving rock by the tons, neither of which are an issue for the player thanks to no weight limit, the cheap mining bags, and the player's apparent lack of the need to breath.

Blasting bombs are not useful because they do not save you any time, with the debatable exception of low value quartz. Theoretically they would be quite useful if used to counter a severely reduced mining speed, the player would only dig a hole and then place a charge in and blast the rest of the tunnel in seconds instead of digging it after some time. What defeats this idea though, is the fact that players do not need tunnels nor shafts wider than 1 block. Since blasting charges only serve to widen holes, their only reasonable application is to quickly blow apart ore deposit discs and they negate this advantage by deleting some of the ore (10%?). Perhaps a better idea would be to use the chisel and hammer to cut a 2x2 voxel hole 2 blocks into the rock face and place charges in it, this way players could blast tunnels out in a direction quickly instead of just widening a hole out,

Glass blowers can use molds to facilitate quick production. You would take the molten bubble at the end of a tube and place it in a 2 piece mold, and then blow the bubble into the mold to make items such as bottles or jars. Free blowing glass becomes quite complicated though, as it relies on spinning the workpiece and pressing mandrels or tongs into it, cutting it with pliers, fusing new glass pieces onto it, etc. Maybe the devs will introduce a "lathe" system where you build a type of workbench and when you right click on it, you automatically spin the item and you then have to press tools into it to form the item. Quite complicated, but it could at least to used in other industries.

The benefit of lamellar armor is that you can quickly make it. All of the other metal armors have to be forged whereas you can cast all the metal pieces in one go, assuming you have the molds. Also more fuel efficient as the ore is only heated once.

The game could use more movement options, but I would rather see the translocaters get more love as the fast travel option. I find that roads are enjoyable to build and use in this game, especially when the terrain is rugged or just impassable, but they are only worth it for a few reasons: traders and some mines. If you could fast travel from any trader to another, roads would cease to have any real impact. There is no point to boats unless you could bring a lot of stuff in them as your character can swim just fine.

If this does become a thing I would expect a significant cost to doing it (20+ rusty gears per km or something similar).

So turn rocks into sand for more panning? Wouldn't mining the ores normally be more metal efficient and faster anyway? Why bother?

I also don't really like how it passively rewards the player with "byproducts" for zero extra effort. If people want resources, they should have to work for them in a survival game. Just giving it to you is not going to make it valuable to the player, they should have to mine them as ores. If you want these available as early teasers (or gambling) for players just make the nuggets of the ores spawn in the ruins' loot pots. This system would also make players have to decide whether to keep these one or two special nuggets early on in their limited space or chuck it out for something immediately useful or more valuable (which I am fine with, but you may not be with the FOMO thing you said above)

Doubling the ore just doesn't make sense as you said, but I do like the idea of crushing ore with the pulverizers, which would be nice if only to prevent having to replace the hammers I normally use in exchange for time and power. You would get to save the metal for the hammers for something else and it would be a nice function for an otherwise underused machine, but it would not break the game.

3 hours ago, Omega Haxors said:

Drifters are overpowered in the early game:

This is like saying zombies are overpowered in Minecraft or chickens are too strong in Runescape. Drifters are only a problem if you cannot maneuver or block them off, and it is easy to do either on the surface.

Where to start? It is not like combat in Vintage Story is all that complicated.

50 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

It takes like 30 hits to kill them with the torch and they deal like an 8th of your health if they hit you. Even if you do kill them, another one will spawn in its place.
Notice how I have half my health missing? That's from when I thought it was a good idea to try and fight back, yeah it didn't work.

Even if I did have a proper weapon, it's going to break in like 4 kills anyway which is going to require I stay put for a bit to, oh wait there's 2 more now I have to deal with

• It takes 24 hits assuming you don't do what l33tman said and burn them, and you have a very fast attack rate with melee weapons (except spear thrust) to the point that killing one takes around 5 seconds. Not great, but if you set a patch of grass on fire and draw them over it, they will die much faster and you can hurt multiple drifters at once.
• If you want easy kills, jump into the water shown above (not anything deeper, unless you place a torch) and abuse their severely reduced speed to safely poke them to death with a spear (works on wolves too).
• If you are missing health, horsetail and reeds are easy to find in most forests. The lighter armors (even improvised) do wonders against the surface drifters too.
• If you find yourself running out of spears, just carry a club around or a small stack of flint spear heads. Each spear can kill 5 drifters with just thrusts, so two should see you through almost all fights. Any sword (like the one you have in your pictures) should be able to kill at least 75 surface drifters before breaking.
• If you need to stick in an area, then you can always (ugh) abuse the pillar strategy while marking your map or making a new spear. You can also make a safe area (fences are cheap to make) or sleep.
• If you are just passing by, then you can easily out pace drifters.

I cannot remember the last time I lost half my health to surface drifters, let alone die, so I kinda wonder if you are just not very skilled in combat (which is fine, but don't assume everyone is playing at that level when making assumptions/assertions about the game) since you are struggling against packs of three drifters with an iron sword.

On 9/18/2021 at 9:58 AM, motor services of chepstow said:

Hi everyone, I am finding it hard to get my head around how to find ore apart from copper. Is there a mod I need to get to help ? Or can anyone suggest a mod to make it easier. As currently I am just running around with the prospecting pick digging random holes and not finding anything. Thanks 

If you didn't enable node search on the prospecting pick then type this into your chat (t):  /worldConfig propickNodeSearchRadius 8

Finding ores is much harder without it.

In general, efficient prospecting goes like this:

• Figure out what the parent or gangue rock is for the desired mineral/ore; you can check from the handbook or from this handy table. This can help prevent wasting your time searching in areas that will never have it or helping find areas with the highest grades (poor, medium, rich, or bountiful; not % chance of finding them) of ores. Case in point, Galena (lead) and borax can only be found in sedimentary rocks which are always the top layer of rock (usually, basalt and other sedimentary rock layers can be on top too but this is uncommon), so if you want those minerals, you need to find one of the 8 sedimentary rock layers like sandstone or chert. If you want cassiterite (tin), then you should look in regions without a top layer of sedimentary stone layers to increase your chances of finding a deposit closer to the surface or of a higher grade.
• In a region with the right rock types, you can start doing prospecting samples (needs to be done on stone, with 3+ blocks between each sample in one axis {x, y, or z}). Record the results on the map and compare; you should be trying to first locate the mineral/ore you want and then trying to find the highest concentration of it you can find.
• (Optional) Once you find the highest point of concentration, you can do a grid survey around it to find out the ideal area to be looking through for ores/minerals. This makes it easier to dig in from a cave/tunnel/shaft that spawned naturally.
• Once you know the area you need to mine in, you should look at the depths the ores/minerals spawn at and get down to that level (keep in mind that some heights are based on distance to the top of the ground and others to sea level. Read carefully). Generally it is much cheaper to dig vertically than horizontally, as ladders are much easier to make than pickaxes are. You can use tunnels and caves you found to do that and save time and pickaxes, but keep in mind that you will have to deal with the dangerous denizens of the underground.
• Locating the actual ore/mineral deposit will consist of using the node search function of the prospecting pick (switch functions with f), which will detect any non-stone ores/minerals within 8 blocks. If you do not find a deposit, try digging a shaft or drift 16+ blocks away (twice the detection radius) and use the prospecting pick again. Eventually you will find the target deposit. If you want to save on pickaxes, try to dig with more vertical shafts than horizontal drifts as your character cannot traverse 1 block high openings. The ideal search method will resemble roots branching off downwards.
• The final step is triangulating the ore deposit. The prospecting pick will only reveal the amount of ores around it in an octahedron, so you will need to check how the readings differ along each axis (x, y, z) to find the deposit. When checking along an axis, you should keep checking until you read a change in the amount nearby. Mark the change with something (torches work well) and go in the opposite direction until you get the same change and mark that spot too. In between the two marks is where the deposit sits along that axis. Repeat for the other axis and you will find the deposit.

Good Luck!

On 9/20/2021 at 5:00 AM, Saricane said:

I made a full steel armor once, thinking I would be the master of the deepest caves. Pffff .... I died so quickly by the first corrupt drifter encountered

How? Even with the worst conditions (weak character, worst steel armor, no satiety hp bonus) he should have needed 6 hits to kill you.

On 9/20/2021 at 3:11 AM, Domkrats said:

I guess it is realistic that wearing metal armor make you more tired and hungry, but somehow it still felt too punishing for me to feel good about it.

I usually take my armor off to heal unless I am almost dead and still fighting, but it is still fine to heal during a fight since their damage reduction matches your reduced healing. You can also save food by blocking off the entrance to the ore deposit you are mining out and taking off your armor while you mine.

If you really want to save on hunger rate and movement speed, you can keep your armor off and in your hot bar. If you see/detect a threat, you can fully suit up in a second by selecting the three slots and right clicking. You will be vulnerable to surprise attacks though, so awareness (sound and constant visual checks) becomes essential to survival.

Tool Durability is in the game for the same reasons hunger, healing over time, having to fuel your furnaces and cooking stations, dark nights, and other aspects are in the game. They are challenges for the player to overcome but not in a "I did it" kind of way, but a "I built a system to overcome it" way.

Temporal storms are a challenge on harder difficulties because of the increased creature damage and much bigger food cost to skipping them. Most people do not like them on lower difficulties because they do not add much to the experience.

3 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

because we wouldn't want players to have choice in a game, right?

There are plenty of reasons to restrict choice in a game. Hard choices are much more interesting to make than easy ones, but they are only possible when the easy/best options are not available. Such things may not matter for a creative game, but for those who want a more survival experience, such choices are much more interesting to deal with. Players are also notorious for giving themselves a bad experience in order to proceed with a game as Rahjital said.

Players have the choice of sticking with stone tools with a low investment or they can put the work in for better metal tools that out perform stone tools in numerous ways. 

17 hours ago, junawood said:

1. That would be a bad thing for those who actually like the pillar strategy.

2. That would be a bad thing for those who dislike ranged attacks.

3. Then even more people would just skip the storms.

4. Modifying the pillars a bit would help against ranged attacks, it would just make it a bit more complicated.

1. Good, anything that discourages a player from just standing on top of 2 blocks and not doing anything for a good while is a good thing. Players should be nudged towards activities more fun than standing around listening to drifter serenades. That said, I doubt many people do this regularly as it is so boring (but then people like panning, so what do I know).
2. And a good thing for people who like ranged attacks. People cannot seem to agree on anything about combat except that it needs improving. Some people will be unhappy regardless of what is implemented. Not introducing a new feature that adds substance to the game for most players because some (ideally the minority of) people may be unhappy with it will only allow the game to stagnate. There is also the configurable nature of Vintage Story that enables players to tailor the game to their preference, so more options should always be good regardless of popularity.
3. Doubt it, pillar strategy is the least attractive option and I bet most people only do it when they have no other options they are comfortable with (such as walking around in the night or forest). If they are not skipping storms already I don't see why they would when pillar strategy is gone.
4. Also good, and though it depends on the ranged attack, you at least would have to work on your pillar a bit then or carry more materials around.

If ranged attacks are not good enough then perhaps a floating ghost entity that can pass through all blocks would suffice as Thalius suggested. You could run or fight it, but pillars would not save you.

14 hours ago, l33tmaan said:

There is no pillar "strategy". It is not even a tactic. It's just abusing AI and the poor state of enemies in this game. If just having mobs with ranged attacks invalidates such a simple "strategy", then it should have never existed to begin with.

It is a strategy in the sense that you are gaining safety at the expense of the most valuable resource: the player's time, and there are already simple strategies better than it that have apparently not eliminated it. It is a time wasting crutch for a bad player imo.

10 hours ago, junawood said:

And that is why a castle/tower like IRL (where it can even be completely dark) isn't enough in the game and a good way to deal with that is an almost safe pillar or a couple of strategically placed ones farther away from your base with some trenches around them to trap some drifters.

Can't you make a structure with slab floors (offset from full blocks) that prevents them from spawning inside? If you make crenellations or arrow loops on your castle tower or fortress you could kill the drifters from range too.

10 hours ago, Ari said:

Yeah some of this feels a bit like "how do we force everyone to play in one specific way?" which is... why? If someone likes cheesing the drifters with murder holes, why prevent them? If someone doesn't find that playstyle fulfilling, then why wouldn't they just play the way they want?

There are a few reasons to restrict players' options.

• Game balance: Being able to farm drifters for gears and flax upsets the balance of the game as items like temporal gears and rusty gears are supposed to be rare and flax fibers and their products are meant to be quite limited until you get a farm running. Farming gears should require either a lot of time to acquire (set up infrastructure to "farm" them via trade goods or spawns, or exploring for ruins to find them; otherwise, items the traders sell would also be too easy to get. Temporal gears should be rare enough that players cannot just drop spawn points often but maybe once every few IRL days, otherwise the fear of death is not an issue. in multiplayer this is more important as players will stop feeling the need to rely on each other so much as just depending on the ever present 
• Protect player from not experiencing stages of the game: Having quick access to metal tools via traders and linen sacks/armors from flax fiber drops before having to make many stone tools or crafting the lower tier armors (wood lamellar for example) would skip entire phases of the game. Being able to cheaply (relatively, when farming gears) purchase everything from traders means you don't need to setup or upgrade the infrastructure for making the items traders sell. Maybe you would prefer to start in a later progression stage, but you can already do this by changing to creative mode and giving yourself whatever items you want and then switching back to survival.
• Maintaining a survival aspect: Being able to cheese a portion of the survival challenges detracts from the survival theme/mood (if you don't want to deal with it and just want to build/explore, that's fine but you should just disable the storms entirely and let it become a harder challenge for those who want it) and the accomplishment of overcoming it.
• Protect the player from themselves: The game will not seem very fun if you have to sit idle doing nothing while you wait on a pillar simply to not die. A better option is to force players into something more exciting so their time is not wasted by a boring experience, even if they die more often. Players can have the experience of learning and getting better or they can at least decide not to deal with it.

The pillar strategy would quickly be dropped if there were enemies with ranged attacks.

If you have an ingot, you are better off just forging it into the tool you want than remelting and casting.

I think it would be cool if sharpening were part of the crafting process. You take the tool from the mold/forge and put a finished edge on the tool. Durability should still decrease with use but there could be a separate property of tools: sharpness. Having a sharper tool/weapon would have a higher attack damage or harvest speed, but the sharpness level would fall with use and every time you sharpened it, the durability would be decreased. Players would have to decide between maximizing tool speed and weapon damage, or maximizing the tool's lifespan albeit at slower speeds.

Recycling should be a thing, but the majority of the metal should not be recoverable, as it would reduce the amount of mining the players needs to do as well as all the supporting activities done to support mining.

Right now, I would say temporal storms only have an impact on the early phase of hard difficulty games. On Wilderness Survival mode, where creatures have 50% extra damage and the player has a 125% default hunger rate, temporal storms become much harder to ignore. If you want to skip it, you have to spend lot of food that may not be easy to gather in the early game. If you want to keep exploring, you have to be careful where you go and you may not be able to harvest all the resources you find. You can kill the high level drifters for the flax fibers and gears but at the risk of being killed and losing your stuff. Later in the game when those resources are easier to get by other methods, temporal storms become more of a tax on the player's time.

Just so you know, this also includes the cross hairs when not in your inventory or a container. You can look at a block in range and press shift + h and it will bring up the handbook entry on it.

I have never tried it, but I think it can work. Flowers can be planted in planters and there is nothing saying bees need to be outside; the wiki just says bees need to be able to path to the flowers. Flowers do not grow (except horsetail, kinda) so I doubt they need sunlight.

Give it a go, but I would ensure to build it in an enclosed room.

There is a limit to the maximum number of each type of drifter, and a set world height range each can spawn in. When you are in the range of (55% to 85%), (35% to 55%), (20% to 35%), (10% to 20%) world height, there can be 18, 15, 21, or 18 drifters alive respectively. Since dead ones do not count, the game can keep spawning fresh ones while you are trying to grind through the rest, and so you can end up with an endless horde. On the surface, the maximum you can have is ten, and you can typically out maneuver them easily. The surface drifters also cannot spawn in during the day, and they and the deep variants are much more likely to flee when receiving damage than the tainted and worse drifters. Basically the deeper spawning drifters stay on you more and in greater numbers. Since people typically try to have a decent metal weapon when descending that deep, people tend to encounter these groups then and not before on the surface with a basic weapon.

The easiest solution for dealing with the underground mobs is to corral them into a fence lined, one block deep pit so that more cannot spawn. You could also light all areas within 15 blocks (drifters aggro range) to light level 8 to prevent the game spawning drifters in range of you, but this is pretty hard during a mob fight. Running away is also an option.

8 hours ago, Rinklestein said:

Most people in the topic think it could use some improvements is all I'm going to say.

Not really, more like half at best, and the improvements they want are already part of the handbook.

Awareness seems to be the bigger issue.

I find it funny that "erasing" the writing will give you back the material to be reused.

4 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Do people do that?

People do not do that because it would take around a couple IRL hours to accomplish and the game will force you to stop and fulfill your character's needs, not because people do not think they will need the wood (and they might depending on their goals). I can reasonably make 5 axes per min, so 63 would take 12.6 minutes. It takes roughly 2 seconds per log cut so 6300 seconds (105 minutes) to exhaust all ax durability, perhaps double if you take the time to get rid of the leaves by hand. So around 2 hours to get that job done, ignoring the time for inter-tree travel, de-branching, and drifter interference. Even with a tin bronze axe it would still take over an IRL hour. The limiting factor for timber is not tool durability so it doesn't matter in this regard (I could more than fill all 4 leather backpacks (24 slots) or all 4 linen sacks (20 slots) with what I could chop down with a single tin bronze axe), but it is a different story for mining.

5 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Even if a you wanted to do what you suppose an unbreakable tool would allow you to, you're still very limited by inventory space.

With a single tin bronze pickaxe I could mine 450 blocks in about 15 minutes for around 600 stones and/or ore chunks. 600 stones/chunks will take up 10-12 slots. Aside from the hot bar, you can get 40 slots for mining products but only 24 for anything else. All you need is 80 flax fibers and 1600 bronze units to make the mining bags, which is easy to acquire for anyone in the bronze age. You basically have room for 4-5 bronze pickaxes worth of stuff. You could also pack 2 iron pickaxes instead and save 2 to 3 slots thanks to it having ~2.22 times the durability of bronze. A steel pick could do the work of about five and half bronze ones and save 3 or 4 slots, not to mention the speed gains. With those free slots you can bring in more medicine or supplies so you can mine longer (more room for crocks) or safer (ladders and fences) which is good for winter, or on harder difficulties with higher hunger rates. This is why durability matters for pickaxes unless your metal needs are quite restrained, and is one of the interesting ways durability adds depth to the game.

Players also do not need to make a calculation beyond reacting their experience, which will show as more slots/ore per trip for higher durability pickaxes.

5 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Does a tool with unlimited durability let you go for longer?

Yep, you would only need one slot to max your inventory. For other tools like axes, maybe not unless you went on a long expedition.

5 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

You'll pick up several different kinds of each ore (especially if you have to mine in different stone types) which will take up their own inventory slots, unless you bring a hammer to crush them which is an 8th inventory slot.

Don't do this, it is more space efficient to keep it as a chunk and absorb the extra slot than to break chunks into nuggets. A full stack of medium grade ore chunks breaks up into 2 full stacks of nuggets and rich breaks up into 2.5 stacks. Even poor grade chunks break up at a ratio of 1 stack into 1.5 stacks. 10 broken stacks of poor grade chunks will become 15 stacks of nuggets, so just hold the rare crystallized chunk and accept that maybe two or three slots won't be totally filled.

5 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

That said, that there are plenty of metals already in-game which cannot be mined with copper.  You're not breaking quartz or iron (or anthracite, or borax, or black coal, or some other presently-lacking-a-function metals) with a copper pick.

You are right, I did not know that bronze or even iron was required to mine some ores and minerals in the game.

6 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

And why would anyone upgrade to steel when steel is apparently such a pain to process and the tool is just going to break?

It is not so much that people do not value the various capability increases from iron, but the fact that steel is effectively the end of the game. If people played for a longer time beyond when they reached the cementation furnace then I bet we would see steel tools more often (if you already built the cementation furnace, why not just load it up every now and then?). Would you make any tools at the end of the game knowing you would not use them? Maybe some neat ones like a sword or even a set of armor, but you are not expecting to use them often.

Steel tools do break, but they also last much longer than the other tools, weapons, and armor. Steel durability is over 100% more than iron for many items like swords, so it lasts more than twice as long, while also being faster. If durability were not a factor then the devs would have to push the properties of metals up and up to make them worth the cost of upgrading to more complex facilities.

6 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

mistakes which force you to replace them become much more significant (and punishing).

Why? It is not hard to replace 4 or 5 tools, as we have seen with the current needs from the effects of tool durability. In fact, I would say that is probably the least terrible thing about dying. Armor is kept by the player upon death so the amount of metal you lose is much less than a trip to the mine can bring, especially with extra slots saved by needing only one tool. If anything it should be less punishing, because you don't have to worry about tools (and thus metal) going to waste and you will be losing fewer tools (why bring replacements for tools that do not break?). With infinite durability, you could have a pool of metal to make replacements with because you are not constantly replacing broken tools.

You might be thinking of the loss of more unique tools as seen in minecraft with enchanted tools whose individual characteristics may be hard to replicate, but there is no such tool in Vintage Story that can be crafted by players. Each tool (for a given metal) is made with identical stats and once you set up the infrastructure to make it, there is not much more work required to keep making more of them, even for steel.

I would not compare netherite from Minecraft to Steel in Vintage Story as the jump from Iron to steel is currently over 100% more durability and for much less work (more concentrated ore) than required to get the lessor 30% durability jump from diamond to netherite (with only a performance bonus of +1 damage for tools and weapons and no work speed bonus). Not that it matters, as steel (and netherite) are at the end of the end game so why bother getting it? Those items are an achievement, not a tool to be typically used over time.

6 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Again, if I spend all my time planting and harvesting trees, I will outstrip the whole server's demand for wood pretty quickly.

I doubt that, not only because you would have to spend hours to provide enough for just you, but you would also have to break to gather more stones and get food. Keep in mind all the firewood needed for each person; firewood to fire the containers needed for their food storage/cooking, the firewood needed for cooking each meal, the firewood needed to make charcoal (at a 3/16 conversion ratio for firewood to charcoal) for everyone's tools (and their replacements, not to mention armor), their houses, and their profession (farming, barrels, mechanics, ranching, etc.). It quickly adds up and that's before vanity projects and moving the wood to where it would be useful. In a more capitalist group, nobody would trade with you for more wood once you satisfy their immediate needs so that wood would just sit until they used up their supply (better spend some time getting, or give up more valuable stuff for, containers to store the wood or else enjoy chopping it again), so I highly doubt you would continue chopping in favor of getting food to eat or better equipment. Invisible hand theory and all that.

But let's say you do. Would you not say that is a reason for wood items to have limited uses or a potential for reliable damage to wood buildings? So that saturation is never permanent and people have a reason to specialize into all tasks? If there were more items with durability, then there would be more of an economy in multiplayer don't you think?

7 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

And isn't that kind of the whole point of these kinds of sandbox games: to build sandcastles (not literally sandcastles)?

That is the goal of sandbox games, of which I am not sure the survival game Vintage Story falls into (unless in creative mode). The point of survival games like Vintage Story is to make use of scarce resources and time to satisfy the needs of your character so he doesn't die, as well as to progress to a state where survival is not a question anymore. Vintage Story has added a lot of decor items and mechanics, but the focus remains on survival. Once you can survive with minimal effort most people either start a new game or build a vanity project and this is no different in multiplayer.