shockingboring

and they obviously respawned always right at their current caravan. jokes aside, its a serious problem for traveling. How about placing the gear on the ground to set a spawnpoint that you can pick up any time? the drawback of that could be that spawning there costs you temporal stability so you get in big trouble if you die too often without rest. an alternative for setting the spawn with a temporal gear would also be nice though.

Yes I completely agree. In my opinion a combat overhaul is an absolute necessity for the game to succeed. PvE as well as PvP. It needs more variety in attacks and more interesting AI. Its never a good idea to just ramp up damage, speed and hp to make enemies more difficult. I would be interested in some kind of block and dodge combat. but there are enough combat threads out there. that machine would have to fit in with the lore of the game so I have no idea. My suggestions are more on a mind-map level than an actually fleshed out concept. I like the Temporal Storm idea. maybe make the machine prevent temporal storms in a certain range around it? Just adding the machine however wouldn't serve the intended purpose of providing an actual goal. I mean .. in the end it would just be another mechanic to make survivng even easier when it's already not too hard. The goals have to be linked with the lore of the game and provide a satisfactory point at which you, and the game, can say you've beat the game. (in your profession of interest) yea sadly. I think the exp part would be one of the most difficult to balance. like what actions would reward exp? it is just one example of how a game can give every player, regardless of playstyle preferences, some kind of sure reward for invested time and as such I am convinced it would help keep players interested. In my opinion static characters actually harm the game experience even more than a badly balanced progression system. I wholeheartedly agree. thats why I said several goals would be best. My point is just that something where players can work towards needs to be provided by the game since many people are not content with having to find their own goals. Just a silly idea but it would be fun if there was even some gardening goal like growing some rare or gigantic crop that is insanely complex to grow. Again, if the game states that this achievement is the gardeners endgame-goal, then it is and people of that interest have something to work towards. And maybe some kind of exploration goal where you can find one special place like a underground city or portal if you follow hints or riddles you can find in ruins around the world. (I am not qualified for more fleshed out suggestions as I really don't know much about the lore) The pure sandbox approach of leaving the goals to the players has its serious downsides (one of which is: it doesn't work for the majority of people) interesting. well can you play a game forever if it does not have an end? the goals should be just something to work towards. theres no reason to force the players to stop playing or delete their progress once a goal is reached. Like I said It would be best if the goals are even repeatable in my opinion.

Seeing as I've also encountered this issue almost right after I discovered the game I just want to leave my 2 cents as well. By now I've been just playing alone for weeks... after burning through all my friends and it's really sad to be the only one in my circle that is interested in the game with what it currently provides. Many players leaving is a huge problem as the game, with its unique classes, is clearly built for multiplayer and requires multiplayer to allow each class to shine. I don't think it is a lack of crafting or building content that drives the majority of players away after a short while, I don't think it is the complexity of the crafting and refinement processes either. All of my friends found the crafting and refinement, the generated worlds, the game itself great and really cool but quit because of the same thing: Some scattered lore you can find is not interesting enough for many players to warrant spending hundreds of hours preparing for it. Simply surviving for survivals sake is just boring. I disagree with the opinion: Minecraft profited hugely of being the first wiedely known voxelbased sandbox game when it came out. Vintage Story is not in that position and needs to provide more to survive as a game. The game needs an end goal, or several. Some ideas that come to mind would be: Bossfights Finding something special (that has some sort of use other than lore) Building some kind of final machine Some special degree of character progression Surviving a predefined timespan (which would kind of require permadeath) There are several aspects of the game that can appeal to different kinds of players: Building Exploration Survival Combat Technology Mining Hunting Farming Foraging Ideally there would be endgame-goals which speak to each of those different kinds of people. The goals should also be challenging, rewarding and repeatable. Aside from having a goal the gameplay itself also needs to be rewarding in each of those areas. The game does a relatively good job at that but some areas are really lacking (combat in general mostly...). A big part of the game is acquiring knowledge, materials and building structures that allow for progression. From my experience only very few players in a group take the lead on those aspects and feel a sense of accomplishment after reaching a new milestone. for all others, reaching some milestone is only mildly rewarding as they didn't actually take much part in it other than run errands. To provide those players with a sense of accomplishment I would like to suggest a character based progression system. the simplest way would be exp, levels and stat points or skills with a slight bonus to existing activities or even new actions in addition to what the classes provide. It would be very important that higher levels are desirable and players have to make decisions and cannot have all skills at some point as that would reduce the value of having a team. With a system like that, or anything comparable, players that can't feel a sense of accomplishment for a milestone they didn't actively take part in would have something of their own to come back to. I know that having exp, levels and skills/stats is very cliché and might not be what the developers envisioned for the game. however the value it would have for rewarding players should not be underestimated. The problem with having no character progression is that playing feels useless as you could just simply come back when someone else has built what you need to advance. Likewise having procedurally generated worlds makes exploration feel useless as there is no real soul in the places you find. Those problems can be overcome and I would love to see Vintage Story accomplish just that. So yea. it's not that there isn't enough to do, it's not that it is too complex or too difficult. The game just needs to provide incentive to play and advance as just an extremely small amount of people can deal with a pure sandbox experience. I need something my friends and I actually want to build that Steelarmor for.

While I do like the Idea of imaginative text and the ability to convey our senses aside from seeing and hearing in games are severely limited, I am not sure if text alone could do the importance of our senses justice. Our senses provide unique information regarding our surroundings and especially with a game that aims for a certain realism they become more and more important. Another issue I see with imaginative text is: where would it be placed? what triggers this additional bit of information? a random chance for a text-summary of the situation upon entering a new chunk or biome? I'm not saying that would be bad but we wouldn't gain much aside from feeling a little more immersed in the game where Vintage Story already does a pretty good job in my opinion. Now I know this requires a lot of data, touches concepts that are currently not implemented (and I am not sure if planned) and wouldn't be the most important addition to the game but I would like to present my idea of how the characters senses could be added to the game in a way that, speaking for myself, allows the players to get a sense of what the character senses. I tried to include a selection of feelings that should allow to cover most situations and provide all relevant information while still keeping it relatively simple. These information could help with: navigation finding resources detecting threats like poisonous plants before eating (automatically smelling food that is in hand) gasses (yea, not implemented) others... (I'm sure theres more) the design of the UI can help with conveying the desired senses more accurately. the sense of touch would allow players to navigate some in complete darkness which tankfully exists in this game. (love it) (width -> distance (smaller -> further away). like ... you start feeling a block when you're about half a block away or so)... the senses could react to the characters current status and little events, helping to visualize the story you are experiencing. they could also be used if concepts like injuries, diseases or exhaustion were to be implemented which I would be very excited about. (a more in-depth health system than just a bar). an extension to the touch sense could allow to locate sources of heat (or cold) helping the player to identify danger or salvation depenting on the situation. (color is temperature, width is distance (smaller-> further away)). I know this post might be kind of off-topic since I'm not taking part in the challange but the thread was posted under "Discussion" so I feel like it shouldn't be misplaced. I'm relatively new to the game (copper age)(also first post) so, while I'm at it I'll just leave some general first impressions about the game. the knapping, clay forming and smithing mini-game crafting mechanics are solid gold and pretty intuitive in my opinion. keep up the creative work and leave the abstract 3x3 crafting behind where possible. dying from hunger within a day is kind of immersion breaking, I would love to see a more in-depth health system with debuffs like weak, starving, broken bones, bleeding, etc. where you can starve for days but will eventually end up getting yourself in deadly situations in an attempt to keep yourself fed to avoid the debuffs if you didn't plan ahead. I would like to see the building blocks have more effects than just different appearance. apologies if I missed something in my inexperience. I am very excited for the future of this game.