niblhenne

While its true that alcohol does not at all help you out in the cold (it just makes you feel warmer by widening your blood vessels, so more blood flows to your extremities which are the parts that most feel cold, but that runs counter to the purpose because it means you just lose body heat faster... whatever) But Vintage Story is foremost a game, and replanting berry bushes or some future olive trees or what have you to make fruit juice and wine or brandy is a system you can engage with for many hours, and the reward (alcohol), which lasts a long time but at lower satiety (and even worse compared to meals.) Recurrants are 80 satiety per berry, or 1280 satiety for 16 berries -> five litres of juice (1000 sat) -> (400 as wine) -> (40 as brandy). If you're in a situation where you're making wine to extend the shelf life of your food, then that kind of implies you already have more than enough food to live off. If you're at the stage where you can even consider brandy, you're way past the point where you have to preserve it for shelf stability due to worries of running out of food, and you'd be doing it only because you already have so much food you cant even drink your wine fast enough (and remember, wine is already almost an 80% satiety loss compared to meals made with the same fruits) and you're just trying to keep it from spoiling. So the system ends up not really serving a purpose, I feel, because while it's something to do, you don't get any useful product out the end. The fact that alcohol in reality is pretty useless is kind of irrelevant, I think, because it shouldn't matter to a game. I dont claim to have the answer, but I feel for how involved brandy-making is, it should have some upside. I doubt anyone's actually drinking the brandy they end up making anyway. But, as one idea, maybe drinking at least one liter of alcohol would improve the duration of the improved satiety you get from eating a meal?

Re-reading my own post I can see where a few rewrites ended up muddying the message. As it stands today, you can calculate the exact instability for every block in the world; every single block above sea level ends up with a score between 0.8 and 1.5; going below sea level starts dropping the value the further down you go (technically down to -0.25). Any time you're below 1.0 stability, your stability drains; any time you're above 1.0, it increases. Instead of that, the idea would just be to have your score always drift *towards* the value. So most of the surface would return you to 100% (for a block score of 1.0 or above), and the most unstable surface regions would drop you to 80%, (or, if you're coming out of a cave, *restore you* towards 80% but not further than that.) Your story about having a "hunting ground" where you couldn't spend too long is good though. It's the sort of emergent gameplay I normally really like. Hm.

Oh yeah, for sure, if it was a toggle in the world settings I wouldn't mind it so much, but I do kind of agree with the people I've seen who say it makes the world feel more unique; removing it outright would strip away an interesting fragment of lore. Even for me, whose main world has only 40% landcover so I'm at a lack of good spots to build on and what ones I can find are annoyingly covered by unstable regions, do like the flavor it adds. (If you did want to removing surface instability altogether, while keeping underground one, you would only really have to edit this single line from TemporalStability.cs, (admittedly that is a rather crude solution, because I don't think it would apply retroactively, but alas. Exposing the constants (0.8 and 1.5 for surface, for example) wouldn't be a bad idea.))

Chiming in with a reply as a new player (maybe 20-30 hours total); Surface Instability is just not fun. What it adds to the game can be boiled down to "oh, this area is just Bad For Living In" but otherwise I never think about it. The amount of discussion about this I feel is evidence enough that the mechanic is undercooked, at least. I don't dislike the worldbuilding aspect (i havent managed to get like, any of the lore in the game yet, but its clear that something is there and as such I don't like the common answer of "just turn it off", but seeing 10k+ users subscribe to the mod that just removes surface instability is telling (not to mention how many just turn it off completely.) I don't know what the solution should be. I had a passing thought about trying to develop a mod to make it more like an ambient value that you drift towards rather than stable regions always returning you to 100% and even slightly unstable regions dropping you to 0% after long enough. So, imagine that stability on the surface goes from 100 to 70 or 80-ish. If you're in a more unstable region, your stability will drift towards the ambient stability, but not past it. So surface stability can still be "felt" without having as much of a gameplay impact (other than, I suppose, giving you less headroom during storms, and not giving you as much initial value to work with when going spelunking) Like, I live in a relatively cold country (Sweden). It's not like you can't live somewhere where the average temperature is on the colder side. You'll just be a little colder. It being cold outside means it's cold, it doesn't mean that if I stay outside for long enough I'd hit absolute zero. It feels weird that stability works this other way where even the smallest amount will give you acute temporal poisoning over time. (The fact that it's invisible also doesn't help.) (But as I said, I only have some 20-30 hours in the game. Maybe I have no idea how the stability works with regards to underground exploration and this idea would ruin how underground exploration works)