Ceridith

Short of a miracle, I don't see rivers making it into 1.22 at this point. We're already into release candidates, which should mean the version is feature complete but going through bug fixes and balancing. As for when 1.22 stable releases, that depends on how quickly the majority of bugs can be found and fixed to a point where the game is considered stable. With how things look to be going I would guess another week or two, but that's just my perspective of someone who has been playing through the 1.22 pre and rc releases.

It's in the 1.22 RC5 patch notes, yes. And I was noticing similar behavior of bears agroing from fairly far away, even from behind hills and thick forest, so it's nice to see it toned down. I've only had a little bit of time on RC5 so I've yet to see exactly how the bear changes play out or if there's any lingering odd behavior. Pacing seems much quicker in the early game for me as well for surface bits. I'm not sure if I've just been extremely lucky, but in the playthrough I started in RC4 I was able to find enough copper and tin bits on the surface to completely skip the copper age right into tin bronze. I've also noticed the grain changes making it much easier to gather enough flax fibers to make bags in the early game before even being able to grow flax -- though that's also in part due to the crop nutrition issues slowing farming down in RC4. As for edible uncooked grain, I found it pretty useful in the very early game to survive as wild berry bushes don't seem quite as reliable for nutrition with the changes, but that could have also been related to RC bugs as it looks like the RC5 notes have some additional berry bush fixes. That's not to say I'm complaining about apparent increased abundance, while certain things seem easier to find others seem as difficult if not a little more difficult so it balances out. It's rather removed a lot of the earlier game frustration about being unable to find certain resources like tin if you're unlucky.

We can all rest a little bit easier now.

Bears have been getting a bit too over tuned to the point where it's becoming a realism versus gameplay issue. Are bears really deadly and fast in real life? Yes, of course. Does it feel unfair to have a stealth torpedo of furry inescapable death appear out of seemingly nowhere to chase you down and maul your character to death? Also very much yes. Wolves will at least announce their presence in an area with their howls, which gives fair warning to players about their general direction and to have their guard up. Bears are basically silent even with the 'footstep sounds' that were recently added in 1.22, which are hard to hear over ingame music. If you're close enough to hear a bear's footsteps you're essentially within agro range and more than likely about to be attacked so it's not much of a warning as you can't outrun them. Which speaking of bear agro range, it feels like it was made further in the 1.22 pre/rc, or in the very least bears seem much more aggressive than they used to be and will attack unprovoked from much further away.

I like the intention of the changes, but I feel like they still need tweaking. Specifically, the fertilizer and soil requirements. I understand the intention to prevent berry bushes from trivializing earlier game food scarcity, but the inability to transplant bushes and having to rely on the new clipping mechanic to propagate bushes addresses the issue. I don't think medium fertility soil should be a minimum requirement, but low fertility soil should at least slow clipping growth unless fertilized as a compromise. I feel that the curve for how much fertilizer is needed to maintain berry yield could use some tweaking as well, with high fertility soil able to maintain a normal berry yield without additional fertilizer indefinitely, and balance around that. Additionally, I think that the better nutrients a grown bush has, the cooldown for taking clippings should be reduced.

Just because you would enjoy the extra challenge doesn't mean the majority of players will as well. The cave-in, soil instability, and fire from lightning mechanics are disabled by default for a reason. They're extra challenge mechanics that end up feeling more obnoxious than they do challenging for most players. Making rot beasts kill livestock and break structures would fall squarely into the same category of niche enjoyment of an otherwise obnoxious challenge mechanic. If this were ever forced into the game I would immediately disable temporal storms completely and never look back. And I say that as someone who regularly plays with cave-ins turned on. I fully understand that it's something many players would get frustrated with, and while I enjoy that particular extra challenge I don't want all players to be forced into dealing with it unless they have an interest in it.

It's that it feels like an over correction. Preventing digging up and relocating mature bushes and time gating trimmings to propagate bushes does enough to balance out the issues berry bushes had. Requiring fertilizer and reducing the fertility of soil blocks trimmings mature on feels punitive. It pushes into into the territory where many players are feeling like cultivating berry bushes isn't worth the trouble. And then there's also that it's just kind of backwards from a realism stand point. Many berry bushes grow like weeds in real life and have no problem thriving even in what would effectively be low fertility soil. I have a black currant bush in my backyard IRL that I have to aggressively prune back every summer, I have never once fertilized it yet am always swamped with berries.

The changes to prevent berry bushes from being completely uprooted and replanted is a good thing, this made gathering food trivial during the first year's summer and fall seasons if the player simply relocated every bush they came across during the spring season. The addition of traits rewards players who want to go out of their way to min/max cultivation is a welcome change as well. I'm in agreement with others however, that the fertilization requirement goes a bit too far. That's not to say that soil fertility and fertilizer shouldn't have any impact. Planting a clipping on higher fertility soil should allow it to mature faster, as should optionally adding fertilizer. Higher soil fertility and fertilizer should also have a chance to increase berry yield as well, and in my opinion should also somewhat reduce the cooldown for taking subsequent clippings. But most importantly, this should be an optional choice players make to increase berry production beyond baseline, rather than something they're forced to do to maintain a regular amount of berries. The main issue was the ease of relocating and hoarding berry bushes, making it too quick and easy to make a large berry farm. I'd say the inability to uproot and replant bushes and instead having to be time-gated by the clipping system, along with the incentive to be picky about what bushes to take clippings from, addresses this issue well enough.

Doesn't work, unfortunately. I dug through the crafting recipes and the grass shirt has the exact same recipe as haybales, so it looks like it's superseding it. I changed the grass shirt recipe in upperbody.json to be a 3x3 grid recipe of G_G,GGG,GGG with 1 dry grass per grid, and haybales were craftable again.

For a particular story location... Were I to have full design control of the temporally related mechanics, I wouldn't make it a binary effect, but modular. The more or less temporally stable an area is, the more or less portals are likely to appear, how many and how powerful of rust beasts can come through, the chance that unique flora, fauna, or other temporal related resources are likely to appear, etc. Temporal storms should act like a negative modifier against stability for their duration, where already unstable areas are made much worse, neutral areas become unstable, and stable areas are weakened. The more powerful the storms become, the stronger the negative modifier to stability applied, to the point where particularly stable areas could still become somewhat unstable during stronger storms. I would also add ways for players to impact temporal stability by building devices that impact the area around them, either for better or worse. Another possibility is for future story locations that reduce the intensity of storms, or make the world overall more stable, once they're progressed through. But that's my own personal thoughts of what I would like to see out of a temporal mechanics overhaul.

This kind of threads into the whole issue of temporal instability being a half-baked mechanic which could use an overhaul as well. Currently above ground temporally unstable locations seem arbitrarily scattered about with no rhyme or reason, with the only impact being that your sanity drains more or less quickly while in them. It would be interesting to see temporally unstable areas have more uniqueness to them, but also some incentive to visit them as currently they come off as more of a nuisance area to be avoided. The stability of an area should also have an impact with temporal storms as well, in that areas that are already temporally unstable should become extremely dangerous to be in during a storm. Conversely, there should be areas which are more temporally stable which are less effected by temporal storms. Most importantly, this should be presented as an optional trade off for players. Do they make a base in a neutral location and deal with the occasional temporal storm? Do they specifically seek out a temporally stable location to mitigate the impact of storms on their base, at the opportunity cost of limiting where they can settle? Or, do they decide to brave a temporally unstable area with higher risk but with possible higher reward of unique temporal related resources?

Oh absolutely. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some design vision that the developer aims for, but they also need to be aware of the fact that what they want won't necessarily be enjoyable for everyone. Not that it necessarily has to be either, but there needs to be some compromise along the way that if their vision is too narrow they'll end up alienating most of their player base. With regards to 7DTD they arguably did exactly that, as the developers spent so much time and effort focusing on the horde night mechanic and tweaked so many gameplay systems to try to force players into a singular path of 'acceptable' player interaction with it, that they ended up making the rest of the game unenjoyable for many players. The main reason the game has remained relatively popular is because of player made mods that overhaul the majority of the game to be more in line with what it used to be. For sure, though my main worry is that I hope they don't fall into the same pitfall of obsessively tweaking the rest of the game to try and prop up what they think should be the singular 'correct' way to engage with the mechanic. And it's not just the ability to disable temporal storms entirely. I'm not against engaging with a temporal storm mechanic, but the key point is actually engaging with them, which isn't really an option currently. It's not so much the having to run for cover aspect of them, that's fine and does add some tension. It's the 'and then sit around to wait for them to be over' part that's not fun. Particularly when things can spawn directly behind you in a well lit home, as you mentioned, which adds an extra level of irritation which limits what you can do during them. Even if it's being able to build some kind of crude temporal stabilization device in the earlier game using a temporal gear that 'skips over' the storm, similar to how you can skip over the night by sleeping in a bed. Something that's easy enough to make earlier in the game, but not something that's too easily constructable on the spot or otherwise portable, so it forces players to have to run for cover in their base to activate it safely. To balance things out, maybe the crude device only works for weaker storms, and more elaborate devices are needed to have the same effect for stronger storms. Though the earlier devices should still provide some protection, if even just in a small area directly around them.

It's interesting that you should bring up 7DTD actually. It's horde night mechanic is the closest thing to temporal storms in VS, so it's a fair comparison. But It's also one of the most divisive mechanics in the community for that game. The developers have made countless changes to many other aspects of the game to try to prop up said 'core mechanic' which have been largely disliked by the game's community. For over a decade the devs of 7DTD have been actively at odds with their own player base by trying to force them to engage with the horde night mechanic. Upgrading the AI to have ridiculous pathing calculations, making zombies break defenses with ease, giving them the ability to dig through the ground to get to a player trying to hide in an underground base, amongst other things. All in an attempt to punish players who try to find ways to hide or fortify against hordes, trying to force players to actively fight the zombie horde as that seems to be the only acceptable option the devs wanted players to have. But these changes also arguably ended up going too far in an attempt to stop the min/maxers, that the majority of players were too harshly affected. That might be the 'design vision' for the developers, and sure it's 'uncompromising', but for a huge chunk of the game's players it's simply not fun. I'd argue that most of the game's players like the game more for it being a sandbox zombie survival game, and the horde night mechanic is a side mechanic which many players actually dislike and either turn off or turn down. It's to the point where the devs of 7DTD have finally seemed to realize the unpopularly of the mechanic and related changes and are finally going to add options in the base game to disable most of the punitive changes they've made over the years, likely because many of the most popular player mods do just that. I'd really rather not see Vintage Story go down that path. I can't speak for everyone, but to me my enjoyment of VS is primarily about it being a survival sandbox game with enjoyable survival and progression mechanics. I do still enjoy the story/lore elements, even the concept of temporal instability even if I think it's also poorly implemented. But they're not the main focus of what makes the game fun, they're thematic flavour that gives context to the setting of the game. VS has also been about being to overcome challenges in different ways, offering differing paths and solutions to issues. Temporal storms in their current form are in complete odds with this however, it's one of the few mechanics in the game that severely narrows down player choice and forces them to stop what they're doing and wait it out before continuing on.

This sums up exactly why it's currently a bad game mechanic. Firstly in that players can completely sidestep any challenge of it by simply boxing themselves in for the duration, but more importantly that doing so is the only reliable way to survive it in the earlier game for most players. It's arguably even the preferred way to deal with it mid to late game as there's little payoff for fighting off monsters that are spawned during it. If a game mechanic makes the player want to step away from the game to wait for it to be over, it's not a good mechanic.

I have yes, that was my whole point. The inclusion of temporal storms in the game makes sense in context to further completion of the story content and/or the implied addition of devices or other mechanics to mitigate or reduce storms. Their implementation in the current state of the game however, has them come off as needlessly punitive and more of a nuisance to be worked around rather than something that can achievably be overcome. Hence why I skip over them if not disable them entirely, they're currently not an enjoyable mechanic to engage with.