Zaph42nd

Even with boxy designs I find chiseling can go a very long-way in improving the aesthetics of builds, same goes for support beams... Generally what I do for boxy homes is smooth out the corners, add some flare-outs to the roofing (VS Roofing mod helps a lot), add internal support pillars, and chisel framings for any windows, that works well when you are modifying a rough shape/frame. Sketching out your builds also works well, dimensions also don't need to be geometrically perfect, I'd argue some roughness adds a bit of charm but some would disagree on that

As far as story-content yes, as far as monster behaviors and damage, no. I know a lot of people, myself included, tend to turn off or reduce temporal storms or otherwise modify rust monster spawns since Vintage Story's homesteading elements seem more engaging and thought out as it stands now (combat and monster AI will need an overhaul to make temporal storms and temporal activity more fun to engage with imo). In the future, I think the story could play more into the otherworldly elements of the rust monsters and temporal system, but it feels more appropriate as story content rather than just mechanic changes alone.... Thunder lord I think is a good implementation of the sort of otherworldly/slightly creepy elements of the world and I'd be curious to see more of that or at least subtle soundscape changes or just minor background creatures watching you would be pretty neat and mechanically wouldn't change much

Grain probably given that corn's historical (and modern) usage, although I'm not sure how it'd fit into the crops of VS since corn is a new-world crop (Americas) and would probably end up saturating the already pretty large list of grains. I do see its usage for alcohol-making and of course for breads, stews, etc...

Calculator is good while you are still new to the game, though I think the longer you play it becomes an intuitive decision as to what alloys you can feasibly make based on your stockpiles. I'm not, however, against some manual counting tool since it could also extend to other mechanics where you'd need a good #s count (off the top of my head, meals are one where a little math can help you get balanced diets faster)

Yep, setting free mouse makes knapping a lot less annoying, same goes for clay-forming (super tedious without free mouse). One tip too is if your mouse has a mouse 4/mouse 5 button, consider remapping either to alt as well (just to make it even less tedious)

Yeah tedium in multiplayer is definitely part of the fun since everyone's starving for the first day or two (and of course with new players, it's figuring out how to play), even in singleplayer there's some fun in the stone-age (stone-age feels like the ideal time to adopt a more nomadic playstyle actually or begin the search for where you'll eventually settle-in) once you get around the basic gameplay quirks (it took me a while to get decently fast at knapping).

I think the issue is to do with perspective and approach, Vintage Story first and foremost is a survival game with semi-realistic elements (or better said, grounded elements). The sandbox part of the game while present, isn't the first thing to jump to, I'd argue the creative experience starts once you've gotten past the stone-age and decently into the copper-age (by then you'll have access to chisels, ladders, planks, etc...)

Not totally against it, but I think falls more into modded territory or as a story dungeon reward for the post-steel age, gliders are a novelty first and foremost with Vintage Story since elks and boats serve as the main decently fast travel-tools for most of the game (and I suspect that is by design to encourage you to look around and slow down). I think I've only ever used the glider once, it's not bad for getting down mountains or hills in a pinch but rarely seems worth it

Meat stew and wine, wine is good for fruits, meat stews give you protein, grains are easy with charred bread but been meaning to get more into making pies. Fishing is also decently viable during the winter in a pinch, although typically not a first-resort unless you've built on a decently large lake (or near an ocean)

Usually just get whatever works for bronze first, my late bronze-age goal is always black-bronze, bismuth and tin bronze are still good, but mainly for me at least useful for mass-lantern making or trading. Deposits wise, plentiful or very high will get you set for a decent while, trace/poor deposits aren't super useful but worth noting still since if time (and hunger) permit on return trips, it's never not a bad idea to get additional resources if they are decently close to the surface

Not sure on the modding debate since I haven't heard much on this and Minecraft did get some pretty big improvements to data-packs within the past year or so (and continues to get more options there). Monetization wise, I doubt Minecraft Java would include that anytime soon unless major parity changes to BE/Java are made, which seeing as they are two completely different backends (C and Java) I am a little doubtful on. Now as for development, I think the issue I've had with Minecraft is largely that its development cycle now doesn't substantially implement game-changing features, the content-drop system incentivizes Mojang to release smaller updates with minor content which, while it keeps some engaged, does not really work as well in my mind as Vintage Story's major update cycles. Put another way, what I like most about Vintage Story's development is that each update changes core gameplay aspects and refines existing mechanics, new mechanics/biomes/etc... aren't added at random or are totally disjointed from other game systems/mechanics

Fair, I think it'd also need to come with revamps to temporal mechanics on the whole, but that's a separate topic. Still integrating it with crops would make some lore sense, but gameplay wise it'd be a mixed bag

On a gameplay perspective I'm a little mixed on this, crops being just weather and nutrient sensitive is gameplay friendly but not fully immersive. Things like blights, pests, and other threats would add a lot of difficulty, immersion, and challenge with little reward so might not mesh well with the gamey aspects of the game. A compromise maybe, perhaps high temporal activity could cause your crops to suffer such that rifts would blight/rot crops if planted too close or extend growth duration? Either way, more integration with other mechanics could make crop-management more interesting and engaging

Big fan of low sax or low tuba, though I've never played with high-pitched voices nor really used more than sax/tuba

Not really exacts for each food group but my recommendation for sustaining nutrition is always meals, sealed crocks with meals for each major food group is what I find useful (last a very long time in a cellar), mix and match as you need. Pies are also worth it, though more as an everyday meal option (since you get grains plus whatever filling you've used). For proteins, hunting is what I prefer, fruits berry bushes in the early-game and fruit trees in the late-game, for veggies I'd recommend cabbage since it high satiety (450 in meals) or in the early game mushrooms (roots from cattails and papyrus can also work in a pinch), and for dairy traders for the early-game (since cheese-making is annoying till gen 2 or higher offspring) and animal husbandry for late game.

I think TOPS is conceptually a good idea for live feedback and player engagement, but the execution sometimes leaves much to be desired as being a single-server it has its player and bandwidth limits. Namely my issues with TOPS have always been: limited server capacity, latency (mostly an issue because of my location/proximity to the host-server being as I am in the US), and sometimes certain game-behaviors differ (since TOPS is where testing takes place anyways) but that's a minor issue at most. For just playing, I'd actually say single player or self/community-hosted servers are the better option and much more stable, plus you can easily play around with mods in these environments which is nice. Now if I had any suggestions, I'd push for either an additional server or more proxy-servers, though I don't think it's expressly necessary since TOPS targets players who want bleeding-edge builds and are open to being play-testers (still, I'd argue it's worth briefly exploring TOPS if you get the chance, maybe not playing on it as your main-way of playing the game but plenty of builds I like and use for inspiration in my single player worlds)

For me Minecraft and Vintage Story appeal to very different niches, in some ways the whole VS vs MC debate reminds me a lot of how Terraria historically has been compared to Minecraft, both different games and sharing only perhaps surface-level traits. That said, I find myself preferring VS for its survival and challenge, MC for its breadth of mods and sandbox feel, leading me to flip-flop between the games from time to time depending on my mood and what I'm actually going for gameplay wise (that isn't to say VS can't be a sandbox for large-scale builds, just that its "thesis" is very much focused on survival gameplay first whereas MC markets itself as a sandbox)

I think aside from aesthetics, waterwheels have the distinct advantage of being effective at any height and don't have a major de-buff for close-distance between each other (where windmills are less effective if clustered). Not a major thing for most people but I find it allows me to build in more places which feels nice. I think when rivers do eventually get implemented, waterwheels will definitely be significantly more common

Interesting but I'm not sure if it makes the most sense with the sort of tension Vintage Story pushes (in my mind, that is struggling to survive till you eventually get set up and stable). That said, I'd think temporal storms could include more ambient horror elements since currently it includes: increased rust monster spawns, more drain on the temporal stability meter, and visual and sound changes. That could be expanded for other effects like doors knocking, more creepy ambient sounds, etc... But admittedly, I've never been a huge fan of temporal storms since they feel a bit disjointed from everything else in the game

Fair, I should've probably prefaced, for TOPS my experience mainly has been exploring bases and spawn, not really playing on the server. Learned more in theory from singleplayer and the handbook but certain multi-blocks (for the longest time I didn't know that you didn't need a pit for charcoal making), TOPS showed me those in a tangible way which was useful (albeit I think you can do the same thing by exploring other servers or watching videos)

Definitely like the idea of visual aids for multi-block structures, one other idea akin to this would be tutorial worlds. I know Minecraft was mentioned previously but one of the features its console editions had that I really liked were pre-generated worlds which had structures already built out. Perhaps something similar could be added to Vintage Story which has all multi-blocks built so that you can get a sense on structure dimensions

Vintage Story starts difficult but I suppose the word is uncompromising; however, I think a lot of players seem to come from Minecraft which is fundamentally a different game. My recommendation (and many others certainly) to new players is and always will be, don't neglect the tutorial toast and do use the guidebook since that's where the game lays itself out. Combine that with a good eye, using the map, and much of the game should start to "come-together" if that makes sense. As for non-standard advice, TOPS (official public server) can provide you with some game-knowledge too (spawn and exploring bases can give you insight on some of the lesser-explained mechanics like rooms, cellars, etc...), unless the world spawn had changed since I last played it used to contain some semi-tutorial structures.

Regarding monster spawns, for the most part my issues are that the current light-levels for spawns maybe could use some tweaking and I'd also, much like many others, like to see changes to combat to make monsters more worth fighting (as it stands, boxing yourself in during temporal storms or avoiding monsters all together is more worthwhile than fighting). As it stands, the current spawns really discourage playing with dimly-lit bases and make cellars a bit tedious, lowering the spawn threshold (e.g. light levels of 5 or below for drifters and other rust creatures) helps but currently no option in-game to tweak that (this I think would be a good option to world-creation settings or server-operator commands, it'd also be nice to increase spawn rates in some instances too). I'd also be interested to see temporal storms either majorly reworked or altered in some way as currently they feel a little unfinished mechanically speaking (e.g. there's no effective way to decrease intensity, though a story-progression based tool could be good for this perhaps). Same goes for temporal rifts, they prove more annoying than mechanically satisfying for me at least since while I like that you need to work around their locations when building bases, the amount of control over them players have is limited at best.

For the most part it is, the only time you need to log-in as others have stated in on initial installation or updates, though once logged in once, you don't need to re log-in. Mainly I suspect log-in is there for multiplayer and game-authentication purposes, otherwise it's not really too intrusive

Highly recommend making meals with crocks, usually I cook up a couple crocks of each major food group, then mix/match for optimized food-sources since sealed crocks in cellars last anywhere from 3 in-game months to over an in-game year or more. Cheese and wine are not bad options for dairy and fruit, but I'd say sealed crocks still beat out most options in versatility and storage longevity. Other options to consider are charred bread for grains (lower satiety but good for keeping once winter hits) and pies (just a good year-round food and easy to get most food-groups in a single pie)