Norbix

As a Vintage Story content creator and a player with around 3,000 hours in the game, I think I can contribute to this discussion. I believe the next two updates should primarily focus on refining existing mechanics and fixing what we already have. The world generator is still very unrealistic and fragmented. We desperately need more plains and rivers - how long do we have to wait for them? You’ve added boats and rafts, but outside of oceans, there’s barely any use for them. Water mechanics and water mills were supposed to be addressed as early as version 1.14 (if I remember the poll correctly), and yet we still have nothing. I honestly don’t understand why oceanic content is being added when there’s so much to improve on land (again, rivers and terrain generation). We have farming in the game, but the hoe is practically useless. Why? Because we use it once to till the soil, and that’s it. There should be periodic plowing, weeds to remove, and maybe some rebalancing, because right now, a single harvest is enough to eliminate any food-related challenges. By the way, is pepper finally functional, or is it still useless? Bees, aside from providing honey and fragile honeycombs that constantly break, don’t really exist in the game. Maybe it's time for some improvements? Different types of beehives, bee interactions with farms and herbs instead of just randomly placing flowers around a hive and breaking it to collect honey. This mechanic has been flawed for a long time - thankfully, there’s a mod like From Golden Combs to fix it. We got fruit trees and alcohol, but alcohol has no real purpose beyond "haha, I got drunk!" I’d love to see further development in herbalism and alchemy. Herbs have existed in the game for ages, but nothing has been done with them. You've added multiple goat variants, yet the world still feels empty. Insects as particle effects were a step in the right direction, but the world still lacks life. We can buy wolves from traders, but what’s the point? There’s still no taming system, and besides the current deer, we’re basically alone - no companion animals at all. The 1.20 update should have been delayed by at least 2–3 months. We got a completely bugged boss that worked differently for everyone. The new translocator was a huge letdown - I expected something more than just teleporting to Tobias’ cave every X in-game days. I was hoping for actual teleporters with limited uses, maybe powered by temporal gears. Instead, we got something incredibly underwhelming. The update was supposed to be a "huge lore update," but it turned out to be a mess. Optimization and memory leaks have plagued this game for a long time. You release an update only to push a de-jank patch immediately after because the game lags, crashes, and is filled with bugs. Either the testing process is severely lacking, or it’s time for a major code rewrite - this is not how things should be. Combat is still weak. We recently got some shield changes, which are a step in the right direction, but nothing beyond that. Fighting feels like it was thrown together last-minute. There’s essentially only one type of melee weapon aside from the bow. Armor doesn’t work well and is ridiculously expensive for the player. There should be an additional death setting: drop only items from backpacks, but keep those backpacks/armor (would be great for multiplayer servers). Mounts were hyped up as two different types, yet we only got one. And after a while, its sound effects become incredibly annoying. I could go on, but I don’t want to complain about everything - there are some great mechanics in the game, like the clay overhaul (though a pottery wheel as a later tech upgrade would be nice), archives, improved ruins, etc. I just really hope you take this survey seriously and focus on improving and refining the existing mechanics. We don’t need new content - we need fixes and improvements. Btw talk with modders, there are a lot of great ideas there. Most of them need refactoring, but most of the the ideas and base is good.