Narcosis

The thing here is how can you describe a victim? Were their machines destroyed? Their systems crashed? Their personal data stolen? Nothing of such had happened, aside from the minor inconvenience of not being able to play and having no idea what's going on; the only factor being anger and lost time. This is not a typical malware case, even though what Maltiez did with the mods can be pinned underneath the boundaries of the definition itself and is - of course - still inexcusable. In my opinion, people throwing the word 'malware' left and right already did far more damage to the game than Maltiez & Anego altogether. The entire situation looks more akin to employee going rogue; even though his goals were most likely noble, he went too far thinking he can 'fix' the issue without asking anyone for input; there's obviously far more things to consider but we probably won't ever know the actual factors. I can only hope there's no malice on anyone's side, because it doesn't bode well for the future of the entire project. Throwing around the word 'personal vendetta' is at best unjustified and at worst, outright malicious. I highly doubt Maltiez wanted to hurt the game or community; he's just the kind of person that will. simply. not. admit. to. his. mistakes. lol. It is what it is. What's done is done. I think Maltiez was still punished way too rashly and too harshly but in a way - he got what's coming. Let this serve as a reminder and warning to others. I'd advise everyone else to simply give the entire thing more time. If you're upset, take a break. If you don't care - mostly as I did, partially because I already knew this entire thing was absolutely blown out of proportions - carry on. I hope this entire hoopla resolves itself in best interest of everyone involved and maybe, perhaps we'll even learn something out of it, particularly Anego. This sort of experience is still very valuable and might help mitigate further, future issues down the line. And yes, I use Maltiez' mods myself. No, I luckily never had a crash which wasn't me being a dumbass. Yes, my game is very heavily modded. Go guess.

As much as I love VS and will continue to do so... I cannot help myself to consider this blunder more of Anego Studios' fault, rather than Maltiez himself. People are really directing their anger at wrongly and while what Maltiez did is inexcusable - to a degree - what most miss is that he didn't do this by himself; Anego knew about it - and out of both good faith but also tomfoolery - they allowed him to proceed. The actual issue here is miscommunication and lack of proper transparency, particularly between devs themselves who are the core of the team, not the other way around. My question is - why not simply provide a simple transparency rule on mod db? No obfuscated code. If you don't like it, you don't post there and your mod is not officially supported and as such - if downloaded elsewhere its purely at user's behest, simple as. I know it's not what Tyron originally wanted, but it cannot be helped. The thing is - it was inevitable to happen. I expected it to happen, the moment VS passed the threshold of becoming popular about a year ago. This means not only more people and growth but also more people with malicious intentions. It's inevitable. You can't change people, therefore solutions need to be found to keep both the game itself safe and it's community informed and while the former cannot and shouldn't be done in an authoritarian fashion, I think what truly helps in such cases is indefinite transparency and information sharing; to put it bluntly, you build trust between members of community and the devteam. It's very easy to kill trust and building it takes time but when done right, it helps preventing situations like the one that happened already, because a healthy community manages and moderates itself without the need of an 'omnipresent nanny' in the form of harsh community/db mods or god forbid - automated bots. A lot of people are now rightfully unhappy because that trust was eroded - even if many of them aren't knowledgeable or were misinformed; it's still not their task to know everything about the game and issues surrounding it; that's the devteam's job. In a way, Anego has failed the community more than Maltiez himself, because they didn't keep the transparency, didn't provide info they know about the malicious mods and instead of doing so and maybe even gaining more support - out of various reasons, financial perhaps? - they decided to keep quiet about it. And honestly, this upsets me more than the entire 'Maltiez did malware' thingy. I have seen a lot of anger on community's part but that anger is absolutely misguided. It also upsets me because now I know, large part of the community seems to be incredibly ignorant and will jump to the first, easiest conclusion when in reality, things are far more complex behind and as I mentioned above - it truly doesn't help, when Anego Studios doesn't try to make it easier. What a shame.

Quern's still absolutely broken in 1.22.2. Outputs wrong stacks, milling takes a split second for the entire stack, then the stack disappears once you take it out as a material for any other recipe, especially ones that involve machines or objects, like barrels etc. I have no idea what's causing it, might actually be something bigger than just every major object in the game with it's own inventory slots. Edit: Turns out I somehow missed an ancient version of Chuteable Quern still running in my modpack, which somehow didn't refuse to work on the latest version of the game but caused all sorts of issues. My bad.

This release actually came out faster than I expected. Lovely but not without major bugs - the quern milling/stack bug is still here. Output material from quern will disappear after closing any container that's not your own inventory. Quern then doesn't reset it's progress bar, which results in ultra fast, near instantaneous milling of entire stacks of materials; it does not matter though, as they will all disappear if you try to craft something out of them or place them in any container or move any other item/stack into their place on the grid. Also, a lot of block entity models are now duplicated in a single spot upon placement, quern being one of them; this results in constant Z-fighting. Other than that, this is probably one of the most major and substantial updates to the game in quite a while. Thanks for all the work and I can't wait to see what the future will bring.

This is a bug and it's still in as of rc8. I haven't tested it thoroughly but it seems to be connected to the produce; when you for example process certain materials into another with larger quantities and move it out of machine's inventory slot into your inventory, it will often disappear - but - it doesn't really disappear either. When I placed it directly in the grid as a crafting material, it was gone but once I reloaded the game, it appeared back, stuck in the same grid slots I left it at. I think there's more to it than just that; no idea if anyone else bugtracked it yet but since it's in rc8, its been either not dealt with yet or its unknown.

I think that was something that's been already presented and brought up a couple times in the past to no avail, sadly. In my opinion the game would benefit greatly from these - an entire library could handle all the buff/debuff/injury/ailment system together and it would allow for a lot of freedom in terms of content additions and modding. Large wounded animals could get weaker/slower but also more ferocious - like bears (fight/flight response); wounded animals could also leave a blood trail behind them with periodical drips of blood visible on the ground to spice up hunting mechanics; a percentage-based system on the ailments could basically dictate whether the animal will survive and heal itself after a while or just collapse and die, making hunt searches an interesting and alternative way to deal with large predators (think of potential bear traps, spikes etc); now you wouldn't necessarily have to only hunt, you might expect a dangerous predator you fought with but didn't quite managed to fell might be laying somewhere around in the area, dying. Obviously - polishing such a system would require adding more animations for wounded states etc but overall - for starters, introducing a mere wounded state with a slowdown on herbivores and maybe a buff for some predators to enter an "enraged mode" could be fun. Not to mention - the player's own survival potential with new mechanics like illnesses, wounds, healing methods via salves and herbal medicine - as well as health or stamina buff via herbal concotions or natural drugs (with potential later drawbacks) etc. Vintage Story feels like a deep and immersive survival-focused experience, I'd really love to see this included and expanded; Obviously this also begs for a complete combat overhaul. Its not something that probably will come anytime soon, if ever at all though.

Go straight into the game! Beginners usually don't get far anyway at first so it's better now to just have fun and learn the mechanics; once the 1.22 stable drops you'll have far more experience to tackle on bigger projects and get into the meat and potatoes of the game.

TFW you stumble into a rich iron deposit in your first few hours of playtime, while searching for tin

This game is not the other block game; it's in fact its direct opposite aimed to focus precisely on survial aspects, instead of sandbox nature. What's good and what isn't is not up to you to decide. You may think redstone is fun, meanwhile I consider it what derailed Minecraft's original vision. In the end, there's nothing modding cannot fix, provided a game is popular enough. If a need arises, people will make it. I personally see no reason to add advanced logic to VS... yet. Maybe in the future, when we'll get the steam power and full jonas endgame content integration? It would make sense - depending on Tyron's vision - to have some ability to control all the intricate machinery. For now, though? Not so much. I like the gritty, early medieval fantasy atmosphere of the game. I hope it stays this way. I don't want another clone of that other block game. Again, it is exactly why we're all here.

I'm seriously hoping Tyron will finally introduce hydration, would make all this juice and drinks finally make sense, not to mention open up a whole new world of interesting mechanics for characters and making the tropic/desert starts far more challenging. Add prospecting for spring water (which could for example be an actual block source located deep underground, depending on local rock strata), which could then allow - paired with a network of pipes and a mechanical pump powered by a simple windmill and then steam engines - to transport water into large barrels and then canisters and we get an incredibly engaging system that would add a ton to actual settlement building and allow for some incredible future prospects. Add leather water bags, low-level gourds and then metal canteens as means for personal water carrying; animals could drink too which would create ecosystems based on water amount/proximity. @Tyron Is there any chance we could get the ability to chose between the old and new moon in the option settings? I can't live without the new moon, the old one is just :- ( and feels too basic.

A rope & pulley system would be rad further down the development line to create more complicated mechanical contraptions. We already have clutches, transmissions and brakes. It might also become a step to later implement belts and beginnings for Jonas-derived advanced mechanical devices, like the ones we saw in the Library.

Man, that moon looked so great... not everything in this game needs to be square, you know.

If nothing went wrong, it should be fine now. Another good thing is a lot of slightly outdated popular mods seem to be working fine as well, despite message warnings. If you play with more than a couple mods, I'd recommend checking the game on a test world first to see if everything loads fine and there's no potential crashes.

Good question. Last RC update broke the worldgen, causing glitched terrain on the borders with previously generated chunks. It should be fixed by now, but there's no telling whether it truly works as intended or not; one of the reasons these versions shouldn't be used as a base to move from towards release with your generated worlds, as they often carry over all the bugs. Albeit there is an ability to re-generate terrain afterwards with the new worldgen commands, it often comes at a cost of losing your creations... or just does not work at all. Hence, it's best to wait for the release, RC's are only meant for testing and to showcase new features.

I can see this work, particularly with the kind of contraptions and advanced machinery that can be seen in dungeons. Whilst the latter work on the principles of technology we don't know much about yet (temporal gears etc), one I also consider more of an endgame goal, the ethanol fuel industry could be meant as something of a post mid-term progression which could also serve them well into endgame. I really dig this concept.