Khornet

Do you see the self-own you've just committed on yourself? I was being generous by considering the Ender Update for Windows (also labeled 1.0.0 by the way) as Minecraft's "full release" (please note the quotation marks) and you went ahead and said "actually, Minecraft was formally finished in 2011 already". And yes, that is formally correct, The End was added to Minecraft's java edition in 2011 already. Bringing Minecraft into this wasn't my intention at all, you did that. Impossible to measure "total development time" in different criteria with the same ruler here. Different scopes, different features, different goals, different business models. So to reiterate - I don't care about Minecraft. I care about Vintage Story. And I am once again voicing my displeasure at the estimated total development time of ~25 years by its main developer. Without any comparisons to any games out there; it just just a fat chunk of time that makes me lose interest and motivation to follow the development of the game at all.

I didn't compare VS to anything. Why even mention Minecraft? I think the two games are in entirely different leagues, and the comparisons are fair only for surface-level similarities, or in the context of VS's origins. I gave you raw numbers without any further context. VS's first launch was in 2016. That's almost 10 years ago. You are now saying this: This brings us to - let's go for the middle ground here - 25 years of estimated total development time. That's a quarter of a century. I don't think I'm alienated by thinking that is a lot of time for one game. But if you INSIST on bringing Minecraft into it... Minecraft is finished. It's a "complete" experience. It's been one since December 2016 (coincidentally the same year VS "launched"), since the Ender Update, which was formally the 1.0.0 version of Minecraft. Everything after that is milking profits via content drips by the big M company. I don't think this is worth elaborating upon, as I think you know exactly what I mean and you'd be inclined to agree that including those drips as the "development" time of Minecraft proper is disingenuous. The first java version of Minecraft came out in 2011, and it was developed for 2 years beforehand. This all adds up to a total of... 7 years. Not 15. "AHA, GOTCHA, Vintage Story's current build is 1.21, so according to your logic, we are 2 big builds after its formal release already!" I know you could say that, but you are damn well aware that is simply not true and just a matter of the naming convention for releases. You already admitted that the game is far from what you'd consider "complete" whereas Minecraft's Ender update literally had... an ending, with credits rolling and everything. And you are also signing off on quality checking the other project on each change as well? Can you honestly promise your playerbase that your attention is going to be undivided between the two? Look, I get that it seems that way from your perspective. You see all the guts of the code, all the small fixes and changes, and tweaks, you see the literal hundreds of lines. But the average player doesn't care about "save RAM on both client and server when many entities are spawned (should also slightly improve multiplayer server TPS for spawning times)" The average player cares about "ADDED BEARS". So I am adding my voice to those that claim that the "time to new content" ratio is overall skewed towards "time". But I will defend mechanically impressive features like the mount system (elk), or a vehicle system (boats), as justifying that to a certain extent.

Isn't this already a contradiction though? How can you be sure that the new side project isn't going to take a "very large initial time investment" that could be, well, entire years...? Especially since you've mentioned that you meticulously have to quality check everything personally? So if money is not the bottleneck, and human resources (developer studio size) are not the bottleneck... what is? Why is Vintage Story churning out updates at such a slow pace? I'll admit that seeing the "confirmation" of Vintage Story reaching formal completion in "10 to 20 years" simply does not sit well with me. I'm not one to tell anyone how to develop their game of course, but... next year VS is going to be 10 years old already from the first release. Does it really need 30 total years of development time...? That's going to be some kind of global record or something if it truly comes to that.

@Tyron Now would be an excellent opportunity to poach some talent for Anego Studios... I'd personally very much love to see the way trees were done in Hytale implemented in Vintage Story.

This is a YUGE dealbreaker for rusty gear farming in the deep caves! So basically by just hitting a mob three times I can extract all the loot from it, even without killing it? My knife's (and my sanity's) durability will certainly be grateful for this change by not needing to slice open every single corpse every time. A whole year? Oof. I personally feel like one entire in-game year of time is too much. Most people won't get to this task until quite a while in during their playthrough. Not to mention being stuck in a situation where you're blocked from doing story content because you're waiting for your elk to tame/grow up. I imagine this is gonna see a lot of tweaking. Perhaps keep tamed (baby) elks still available from traders for money...? Or add some kind of mechanic where you can speed up the process by the quality/quantity of food given to it? That's one potential resource sink for the abundant mid-late game farming resources.

Can this capture adult goats!?? Also, regarding the new ocean content, it will only apply to newly generated chunks, correct? We're still stuck with muddy gravel oceans on our current worlds?

Don't bother prospecting for silver/gold. As mentioned above, you want to find a deep quartz vein. They tend to get pretty big and there's "guaranteed" silver/gold chunks of 2-5 blocks in there. There really is no other efficient way to mine for silver/gold than chaining up ore blasting bombs in massive excavated walls of underground quartz deposits. The downside is you end up with stacks upon stacks of quartz that you don't really need.

Please elaborate on what kinds of mods you're using that make your server 18+, I might finally drop my singleplayer-hermit lifestyle for it

This subject came up dozens of times since the game's inception and the answer will always be the same (until it actually happens): yes, we need a combat overhaul. Vintage Story is a survival game. HARD emphasis on the word "survival": it's everywhere in the game's description, including this very website's main page. What could be possibly more linked to the act of "surviving" than fighting for your life against wildlife or eldritch monstrosities?? To claim combat is "unimportant" for the game overall is something I always viewed as ridiculous. It should be one of, if not THE most polished and engaging gameplay mechanics. Instead, it just... sucks. Melee: you left click to swing your weapon (only 2 types) and basically keep poking things to death before they can slamdunk you into "Congratulations, you died!". It feels weak, it sounds weak, and it turns into a chore real quick. Ranged is arguably better and slightly more fun because there is aiming involved. So it's less of a mindless spam, although still spam, because the "keep poking" thing still applies. The knockback is gimmicky/buggy. Enemies can push you "away" just enough so that your attack doesn't land on them mid-animation. You can get blasted 10 metres into the air by a high tier attack DESPITE wearing a full set of steel armor. God have mercy on you if a bellhead shiver smacks you mid-air and you're near a lava pool in some deep caves. All body hits are percentage-based. In a game where you have a base 15 HP and enemies hit for 24 damage, relying on 80% odds that they won't instagib you is NOT an option. This means that waring a full set of armor (helmet-chest-legs) is MANDATORY. So why split the armor into 3 pieces making it tedious to re-equip them CONSTANTLY? Why introduce a night-vision helmet if it REPLACES an actual helmet and thus I will NEVER EVER EVER use it because I'm at a 20% risk of dying instantly? Which also brings me to the "armor increases your hunger rate AND reduces your healing" mechanic, which further increases the tedium. "Buh buh buh it's realistic that way!!" Bruh. You know what's NOT realistic? Re-equipping a full set of steel plate armor in a single second. And, like I said, you HAVE to do this in VS CONSTANTLY if you don't want to die from 1 hit. Or if you simply want to heal. Enemy spawns are RIDICULOUS. Perhaps not as much on the surface, because these are trash mobs and their spawning is localized around rifts. But if you go mining in the deep you are STUCK fighting CHAIN-RESPAWNS of high-tier enemies, FOREVER, they just keep doing that thing from the hit Smash Mouth song featured in the movie Shrek, and now that some of them are SNIPERS WITH IMMACULATE AIM THAT RUN AWAY FROM YOU it's all the more tedious and frustrating to deal with them. Also, they don't make any footstep noises and can very easily sneak up and jumpscare you. Once again - God have mercy on you if a tier 5 shiver does that while you're trying to heal up (without your armor, because you need to take it off to heal properly). Healing sucks. Horsetail remains to have no actual medical properties in real life. Healing shouldn't be instant with poultices. Your health should regenerate faster at the price of draining hunger. Alchemy update remains benched on the development glacier. Classes suck. They all have really simple/arbitrary and often useless effects. They're not fun. They just serve as an arbitrary ways to "unlock" certain crafting recipes, rather than being game-changers in your playstyle, which includes combat of course. It's as if they were introduced in a "work in progress" state and just left there, forgotten, until "mods fix it" started to be seen as the acceptable solution. As for improving the raw combat mechanics themselves: I personally don't think dodge-rolling or melee combos or anything fancy like that is absolutely necessary. It can be better while still being simple at its core. What I feel like is necessary is a functional and fluid hitbox-based hit/block system (that means "aiming for the head on enemies" becomes an actual thing), a way to "hold" your swings, potentially for stronger attacks. I also think the game could benefit from a stamina system, linked to sprinting/jumping. Stamina drains/detriments could replace the hunger/healing/movement speed detriments for a less tedious combat experience. Damage types would be nice, and I think game code already implies this is going to happen (IIRC shivers deal "slashing" damage according to code terminology). Different wound types with different healing methods for some extra emphasis on survival (so bandages for lacerations, poultices for bruises etc.) are a far, far away distant dream of mine to see in this game, somewhere next to avian fauna and a tree rework...

It is not. You're correct in your claim that combat is one of Vintage Story's weakest gameplay aspects, and one of the most notoriously mentioned flaws since... forever. At the very least we could get knockback and hitbox issues fixed. Adding more enemy diversity in the latest content update was a great opportunity for that. Instead, it brought more issues (Bowtorns having RIDICULOUS sniping skills and knockback on ranged attacks, Shivers having very buggy movement etc.). Anyone saying that "Minecraft and VS are completely different games and it makes no sense comparing them" is utterly ignorant and/or delusional. It is a completely fair to make comparisons between these games, despite the many changes they've gone through since 2016. I expect Vintage Story to be "better", or at least to be "more" wherever it can. When it comes to combat, it is clunkier, less fluid, less satisfying, and less rewarding.

Could swear those were elements of the skybox exclusively, like ole' Rusty. Incidentally, how high above sea level did you build your house...?

Is there a list of those somewhere?

Yep, most of the frustrations of sailboat travel (swimming into an inland sea/lake and then having to backtrack a LOT because you landlocked yourself from the proper direction) could be indeed solved by adding rivers, which would allow you to swim inside them in order to "cut" across continents. Only detriment is that's a nuisance for elk travel, but a much more minor one, because it's easier to cross a river via an elk than an island via a sailboat.

I have a world generated in 1.18 for the purposes of 1.18 content - Resonance Archives. I've fully enjoyed all 1.19 content on it. I have enjoyed 1.20.pre13 content on it for two weeks. And for the past three days I've been playing 1.20.rc1 with no issues - all the new story locations generated properly and were as functional as probably intended (I think there is a minor progression issue in the Devastation for now, not sure if bugged). This, therefore, appears to be untrue. The ONLY problem I experienced is a weird worldgen issue where sometimes I would get a massive straight lines of "split" terrain, like a huge, vertical wall of square-shaped rendering. It would "cut" mountains and "cut between" oceans and such. A peculiar anomaly, and ugly one, but not game-breaking. I think it might be the same thing some people already mentioned in this thread...? The "boundary" issue? But I HAVE noticed it generating on newer chunks in 1.20.rc1 as well...

Wow, that's like... an entire stack of compost. Congrats, bro.

IIRC there is a lore reason why have the seraphs (player characters) have instrument-like voices. But I'm not surprised to read most people find them annoying.

Can you elaborate what you mean by "Nightmare" storm? If you mean the Nightmare-tier variants of the Drifters/Bowtorns and Shivers, then yes, they spawn in heavy temporal storms almost exclusively. Unfortunately not much of an option anymore, because of the Nightmare Bowtorns pelting you constantly. Unless you make some kind of farm, arena, or go underground, but that severely limits the area for enemy spawns, and the amount of our lovable twohead goobers. BUT, 1.20, intentionally or not, introduced IMO a better way of farming gears by There are apparently now "patterns" to the storm determining the spawn rate of specific mobs (I assume this pertains to the shivers-bowtorns-drifter ratio). So far I've had the unluck of getting Nightmare Bowtorns being like 90% of the mobs spawned in heavy temporal storms.

Massive spoiler alert, but 1.20 does add a... peculiar way of actually fixing our tools:

Many people don't know that you can place linen on the ground as a form of a "carpeting". Have different sewing patterns exclusively acquired via cold, hard, rusty cash is a matter of flexing.

The Lazaret has generated just fine in my world in the ungenerated chunks, have not encountered problems with it "appearing" at all. The directions you get from the treasure hunter letter worked properly - it marked a pinned X on the map... far, FAR away, and near the X was the Lazaret proper. EDIT:

They're just background noise/ambience things, dude... you don't actually get to pick them up or interact with them in any way...

I disagree. No Jonas parts needed = not really that expensive. The only expensive investment is two electrum plates. Temporal gears are not a problem, I've got 8 crates stacked with them from drifter/storm hunting. The biggest blocker is the fact it needs the recipe/blueprint. Compared to the terminus teleporter, it seems easy. Suspiciously TOO easy...

WELL, WELL, WELL, YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT I FOUND IN THE GOOD OL' SURVIVAL HANDBOOK TODAY. Serious spoilers below.

You take 3-5 stacks of cobblestone + 1-2 stacks of ladder and build a pillar stretching from the bottom of the sea to the sea level. Then you stand in the middle and carve out the middle block for a tower/chute. If you're poor you can use soil. But that's, you know, a tower of dirt, in the middle of a sea. Rather lame.