Fogman

By the time you pan for enough gold and silver to make a black bronze anvil you would have far more than enough gemstones from panning to trade to a merchant for gears and then trade the gears for more than enough tin to make a tin bronze anvil. I suspect that even if you were panning with the specific goal of getting gold and silver bits to make black bronze, that you would become able to make an anvil of tin bronze sooner by the same method.

It's a complete strawman to compare VS alcohol to VS quenching and you know it, because the character drinks alcohol but the player gambles. Or do you have a hard time telling fantasy from reality? I don't care whether you've ruled that it constitutes an "unlikely jackpot" or whether an "unlikely jackpot" is necessary for something to be gambling (it isn't, by the way) because even a 1% chance where someone could consecutively lose tool heads from quenching would mean that hundreds of people will experience it and even a 90% chance that you will complete one 5-quenched tool in 3 attempts means that hundreds of people will spend hours making and remaking the same tools over and over in an attempt to complete it. It's unrealistic, but more importantly, it's gambling, and it's garbage game development. And no, your character drinking alcohol in vintage story does not intoxicate the player, in case you really were confused about that one.

It is a bad idea to include gambling because people continue to gamble despite not enjoying it. Something like 96 million people worldwide have a gambling addiction. Out of all of the things you can possibly put in the game, just about the worst thing you can put into it is something that people will continue to do despite not enjoying it, since it makes the game (and, insofar as people's lives are made up of hours that might be spent to play the game), their very lives, unfun. I think this about FOMO with limited-time events, I think this about daily quests in MMOs, I think this about everything that is designed to keep people spending their time or their money despite getting nothing in return. Convincing someone on a visceral, animal, "operant conditioning" level that something good will happen if they continue to sit there and press the button is not good game development, it circumvents the task at hand by baiting and switching the fun people want for the conditioned response that they seek. If you look at the current market of what developers have chosen to include mechanics exactly like this, you will find that all of them directly benefit financially from getting their userbases to keep gambling, even if they don't enjoy it, because that's what these sorts of mechanics exist for, even if Tyron himself doesn't recognize that.

I think that a good compromise would be to hold off on quenching and tempering altogether until a simplified version of MKMoose's system can be implemented, where a tool can be quenched and/or tempered, once, in a few different methods that decide the trade-off in durability or power gain, and if done incorrectly should either have no effect, or yield an item with only negative additional effects. The game does provide specific information with regards to the current temperature of work items, and work items which are different colors visibly glow differently, and it makes sense to tie this into a heat treatment system. Work hardening and annealing bronze would be an interesting addition but a point against it is that it doesn't seem like it would be a good introduction to quenching ferrous metals because annealing seems at a glance to mirror the quenching process and has the opposite effect on the metal, softening it and increasing toughness while reducing hardness. I like that but it's counterintuitive and could confuse the player. Either way I think that repeatedly heating and quenching an item for a chance to turn the work item into air is a wholly unreasonable and unwelcome addition.

Well, first of all let's get this question of definitions out of the way. gambling noun gam·bling ˈgam-b(ə-)liŋ : the practice or activity of betting : the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet Anyway, unless you object to merriam-webster's definition of gambling, risking "other stakes", in this case, a tool head in a game (in this case, Vintage Story 1.22), fits the definition of gambling without issue. There is by necessity randomness in the game's world generation and loot tables so that each playthrough is different even if you made the same decisions. It doesn't follow that all sources of randomness improve the game. When the world is different in each place you are encouraged to explore more of the world (and this is a net gain insofar as it is interesting to explore the world), but when your items randomly and inexplicably break due to KRMMO child gambling mechanics when they are heat treated you are encouraged to keep trying until you succeed (and this is a net gain insofar as it is interesting to do the same thing over and over), and my answer is that this does not actually add anything fun to the game. It is just gambling with a thin veneer. It punishes the unlucky and makes people who want something spend more and more of their time and effort in an attempt to achieve it with absolutely no promise that they ever will, and it rewards the lucky who will take for granted that it is normal to receive the reward that they did. You misunderstood my comment on a conceptual level. I said that the two people are both attempting to quench each item the same number of times (in this case, 5), not that each person attempts to quench it until it breaks and then the first person has it break on the first quench every time. There is no scenario where in trying to quench an item a person "shatters the tool head 5 times" because that is actually them failing to quench 5 different items. This sort of misunderstanding is probably why you believe that this system is a "working risk vs reward vs effort mechanic" since you imagine that "an item" is an entire imaginary set of multiple items which could potentially be completed if you kept trying. There is in reality no way in this system for your effort to mitigate your risk because for every additional item you attempt to temper to a given level, you once again risk the entire item.

It isn't even a gacha game mechanic actually, a gacha game would make you pay to gamble for copies of the item and then if you won, you could combine copies of the item into a stronger version of it. Rather, it comes from predatory Korean MMORPGs like DFO. That game in particular became the highest-earning videogame in the world, generating more than 23 billion dollars worth of revenue by selling pay-to-win features like performance enhancing "avatar" equipment, powercreeped "title" and "pet" equipment and, last but certainly not least, the tickets I mentioned that keep your item from being destroyed when you upgrade it one too many times and fail the roll. Since DFO, this mechanic has become a tried and true favorite of Korean and Chinese MMORPGs and it's a huge revenue generator for them because it has the ability to get their player base of mostly children addicted to gambling. No, it does not "present a working risk vs reward vs effort" mechanic as demonstrable from the fact that two people who each try to quench their weapon the same number of times produces one person whose weapon randomly breaks (they get nothing) despite attempting it with dozens of items and one person who randomly succeeds (they get the best possible item) in only one try. The former player has accepted more risk and gone through more effort but lost everything while the latter player has accepted less risk and put in less effort and won. There's a name for this system and it is "gambling" and the reason why gambling is very popular in the world is because people get addicted to it. The reason why all sorts of miserable looking old people are sitting and pulling the lever at slot machines in Vegas isn't because they're thrilled and it's very fun, they are there because they are addicted to the feeling that maybe this next one will be "the one" and they will finally be rich. It is unrealistic in practice and unfair in principle for your steel item to explode and disappear because you heat treated it. Vintage Story does not need KRMMO child gambling mechanics.

Your suggested process does add a ton of complexity and I can take that or leave it, but more succinctly the reason I think this post is accumulating so much positive attention is because none of us like the bizarre KMMO style "rerolling for +# until you fail and break the item" quenching and tempering implementation. One quench and temper cycle to make the tool more durable makes sense, but having your shovel head burst into a cloud of temporary particles and disappear like a firecracker doesn't make sense, and it doesn't add anything good to the process of making tools. It's a skinner box hamster wheel for gambling addicts and every game I can name that includes a feature like this also sells "get out of jail free" tickets in a real money "cash" shop where you can pay ~$20USD to avoid your item breaking next time you fail the roll.

It's true that the classes don't add much, and they aren't well balanced either. The majority of experienced players pick Hunter or, if they're bored of Hunter or thinking more about the late game, Clockmaker, in order to get the increased movement speed. Personally, I just feel bad if I'm playing the slow classes. Some argue for Malefactor's ability to obtain more gears by selling cracked vessels to traders, but I personally feel like it's easy enough to get enough gears for whatever you want without it. If classes were removed from Vintage Story, I wouldn't feel bad about it. If you wanted to roleplay as having a certain background, the 6 available options make for a very limited set to choose from and aren't particularly interesting. If you wanted gameplay customizations, you can't really beat movement speed since it can compensate for everything else. If anything, I don't understand why Vintage Story even needs to have classes. If you're playing with friends and class-specific recipes are enabled, then its little more than an inconvenience to whoever volunteers to pick Tailor to make everybody else a tailored gambeson, and a lot of people who play solo already play with the class-specific recipes disabled and then make the gambeson themself (or even obtain a couple pieces of tailored gambeson by other means). The way that you personally choose to play Vintage Story says a lot more about who your character is and what they do than whether you clicked "Blackguard" or "Commoner" at character creation, and as far as I'm concerned, that's fine.

There are going to be times when it's dangerous to walk around outside, so it's helpful on the first day to prepare either a bed, or things you can do at night. Clay forming and stone tool knapping are good ways to efficiently use the indoor hours early on, but if you cannot find clay, and you already have many extra stone tools prepared, it isn't a bad idea to pass the night by sleeping in a straw bed to save real time.