Steel General

At the bottom of your info panel, it says "Current Rift activity: Apocalyptic" - that should be a temporary condition that is supposed to be troublesome when it happens. If it's staying that way throughout your play then it's a bug.

I've had similar problems recently - was able to fix it for scrambled eggs by stacking the eggs together before redistributing them; I'm not sure if it was relevant, but they had different spoil times, and stacking them together gave them the same spoil time. However, I've also had it fail to recognize egg in soup as valid - it was just one bugged egg, others worked fine, and the bug vanished when I stacked that egg with the others. I think it might be a matter of grabbing the egg off the ground versus out of the nest.

If you play with stone instability, I'd guess the block of halite was unstable, something happened to update it, and it fell through the fence, the dirt, any cobblestone, and is now resting on top of the bedrock. I used to do the same, and I liked to set a slab of halite in my kitchen for the cookfires to be on, but unstable stone has made that a tricky proposition.

I think this was a Resident Evil game. Unpopular Opinion:

I had a game recently, 1.20.x, maybe 1.19.x, in which I nerd-poled on packed dirt, planted a lantern on top, sat down, and shortly had a shiver spawn on top of me. Its legs were off the pole to every side, and it... idled. It couldn't see me. After a while rolled up in a ball for a spasm - hanging in the air off one side of the tower - and I decided that was my best chance to knock it off so I hit it with a falx. It fell off, and it hit me back, but I did not fall for I was sitting. So no, nerd-poles aren't really safe anymore - they're just very likely to be.

I think the easiest solution, for both man and machine, would for the hives to spawn some of their bee particles among the flowers they identify as in their range.

I think the game already has an example of this behavior: hoeing dirt to become farmland is destroying a dirt block and creating a farmland block in that same location. If we can expand this mechanism, I think many interesting options would be thereby available - example, Roots: You find a block of "Dirt with Roots" - the appropriate tool is a shovel, and it takes as long as a block of dirt to break it, but no item is dropped (maybe a small chance of a piece of clay). Instead you now have, in that same location, a slightly shorter block called "Roots with Dirt", for which the appropriate tool is an axe, and it takes as long as a block of wood and drops no item (maybe a small chance for a stick), but creates in that same location a still-shorter block called "Rooty Dirt", for which axe or shovel are equally useful, and maybe at this point it drops a Barren Dirt. We could thus make undermining a valid way to fell trees, and also limit tree growth by the number of dirt blocks available to be converted into roots, so thin soil creates stunted trees. We might also need Gravel with Roots and Sand with Roots. Breaking a block of ore-bearing stone with either pick or bomb could create ore rubble that can be dug by hand or shovel but is much faster with a mining shovel, and which results in a few boulders laying around the area. I'm not sure anyone else would like that to be a more complicated process, but I wanted to come up with at least one more use for the mechanism (A side thought has occurred while writing this: can a block drop different items depending on what is used to break it? For example, breaking Rooty Dirt with a shovel could yield a dirt block while breaking it with an axe could yield sticks.)

It does work! If you have soil gravity on, use a block of cob.

Turn fifteen sticks into wattle and enclose four blocks, minus the corner away from the bear. On the side near the bear make steps of dirt that rise a block higher than the fence. Get on the steps and throw a rock at the bear and wait. When the bear starts up the steps, step back into the wattle and wait. When the bear comes down into the wattle, step through the corner and place the final wattle to enclose the bear (if it lunges it will get through open corners). Now you have a bear in a box, and you can poke it to death in leisurely fashion.

The Scientific Method is a ritual. Rituals are for getting results, not for understanding. The Scientific Method is a careful ritual that gets results from which one can attempt to understand. Understanding is not relevant to application - modern example we all use: "Turn it off and on." Maybe spiritual power is involved, maybe it's spark gremlins - the point is it's what we turn to when we don't understand. Meaning arises from context, and rituals that have no discernible effect are often efforts to manufacture meaning from associated context, for the feels. This is not the only kind of ritual.

I can imagine two processes for adding spice. Option one, put the food items in the crafting grid with the spices to make a spiced food item - redmeat with spices would become spiced redmeat, which you could then use in standard meal recipes in place of redmeat for a better meal. Option two, you could have a slow cold recipe of combining food items and spices - maybe some fruit juice or wine - in a cookpot and wait (and wait) until it becomes 'marinated', then use that in standard recipes. I don't like that option two requires a cold firepit, but I don't see it as a dealbreaker. Likewise with option one requiring the crafting grid (which seems like the only way to make garlic bread). You could make meals in which each ingredient has its own assortment of spices, much bonus. As for what bonus... increased saturation seems like the only reasonable choice, and the easy way to do that is with increased nutrition, which is not a terrible approach. Once we have status effects maybe something else will be reasonable Optionally, perhaps a spiced meal is one that can be eaten when the hunger bar is full, bypassing the need for hunger to add to the nutrition bars. It would be delightful if packing it in resulted in a period of intermittent damage signals without any damage. Marinated meat might be a possible ingredient in porridges (because I want to make my garlic sriracha chicken and fried rice ). Hah: animal fat into a cookpot with spice to make a spiceball, which can go into the cookpot with spices to add value to the spiceball, but can also just be an ingredient in a meal. That day when you visit the agriculture trader and find peppercorn seeds

In my very first Vintage Story game I spawned on a hillside covered in birch bushes, and I thought I was seeing a new approach to dynamic trees - there were clear stages of progression visible, from lone leaf block to branchy leaf block with leaf blocks around it to a lone birch log with branchy leaf blocks around it and leafy blocks around those to stacked logs and a multilayered crown. I was many months into that world before I became convinced that the bushes weren't going to grow. Yes, I like Dynamic Trees, and I too hope it someday spreads beyond the fruit trees, with drops that sprout (but, necessarily this must come with animals that actually eat the environment, not just animate at it). I've wondered if a cellular automata approach (in 3d, with multiple cell types that each have their own rules in relation to the other types of cell) might take less processing than Dynamic Trees did.

The recipe for soaked hides requires raw hides, not pelts. Pelts can't become leather.

It occurs to me that the fluid inside the gear could show motion, whirling clockwise to indicate positive stability when the gear is full, whirling counterclockwise for instability - always a little faster than the gear turns.

I'm liking the idea of using this to nerf archery You can carry arrows in your inventory as normal, but hotbar slots will only hold one arrow. You have a quiver in a doll slot that holds eight arrows, refillable manually from the inventory. To initiate archery, put the bow in the offhand - with the 'swap hands' button and an empty offhand, this will automatically draw an arrow from the quiver to place in the hotbar slot the bow was in. Every time the bow is fired, another arrow is pulled from the quiver to the active hotbar slot. So, with preparation and opportunity cost an archer can be ready to fire up to eighteen arrows without worrying about logistics; if surprised, eight arrows are available for immediate use. Getting more arrows from a stack in the luggage should take longer (but really it's just two key-presses and two mouse-clicks - easily manageable from a position that made long-term archery a reasonable tactic). If the archer wants to carry extra quivers one could expect them to swap with a right-click from the hotbar just like all the other doll slots, so there is room to multiply ready-shooting capacity in exchange for inventory space. But yes, we need other appropriate hip-pouches to compete for that doll slot. Maybe a bandage dispenser - swap the bottle of aqua vitae to the offhand and the hotbar slot gets a fresh bandage from the hip-pouch, automatically wetted from the bottle. Maybe a pouch full of candles from which to automatically refill a lantern as its candle burns out (those need nerfing too, right - at least the carried ones).