PhotriusPyrelus

Just so you know, when you find a copper nugget on the ground, it means there's at least a little bit of copper ore under the ground, straight down. The manual mentions it, but it's easy to overlook. Unless you just like sifting blocks.

I could go in game and take one stack of stone and do nothing but hack down trees with it and then I'd never need wood again for the rest of my time playing. One chert/granite/andesite/peridotite axe has 50 durability, so one stack (64) of one of those kinds of stones gives you 3150 (=50*63 because you can't nap the 64th stone in a stack; you have nothing to nap it with) durability worth of stone. In one inventory slot (well, two counting the axe itself). Since when you're timbering, you'll naturally get plenty of sticks. That's good for just under 197 stacks of logs (or 12 wooden chests full of logs, with 5 stacks left over) and who-knows how many stacks of sticks and tree seeds (especially if you break most of the leaves with your fist). Do people do that? If no, why do you think they would with metal? Even if a you wanted to do what you suppose an unbreakable tool would allow you to, you're still very limited by inventory space. You need probably two crocks, a bowl, two slots for torches (one slot in off-hand or tool bar, one slot in the inventory in case the held one gets doused), a weapon, probably some poultice - that's seven slots right there. You'll pick up several different kinds of each ore (especially if you have to mine in different stone types) which will take up their own inventory slots, unless you bring a hammer to crush them which is an 8th inventory slot. You'll also get a bunch of stone because why wouldn't you pick it up, unless you never plan to ever build with stone, and probably a fair bit of at least one kind of dirt, maybe two or three. Does a tool with unlimited durability let you go for longer? On average, probably so (especially if you have a mining sack or two), but you're still going to have to balance supplies; take too many and you can't bring back as much ore, bring too few and you'll have to head back before your inventory is full. Not having to take two or three picks doesn't completely eliminate that calculation, just makes it slightly simpler. Which I will concede is a drawback, but I think the benefits outweigh it. Maybe it could be (or already has been) considered that Tier 2 should only break Sedimentary, Tier 3 can break up to Metamorphic, and Tier 4 is required to break Igneous? :shrug: That said, that there are plenty of metals already in-game which cannot be mined with copper. You're not breaking quartz or iron (or anthracite, or borax, or black coal, or some other presently-lacking-a-function metals) with a copper pick. The metals which require iron aren't really useful for anything yet (except meteoric iron), but they are in the creative inventory, so we'll probably get a purpose to them eventually. And why would anyone upgrade to steel when steel is apparently such a pain to process and the tool is just going to break? Speaking only for myself, if I only have to do it *once* for each of my tools, I'm much more likely to invest the time and effort to upgrade it. If I have to do it every time a tool breaks, why bother? Just slum with the lowest quality I can easily mass-produce (I suspect this is why stone picks don't exist). A steel pick has 2.5x the durability of iron. If it's too much more than 2.5x the bother to make, it's irrational to make it (unless you need titanium). And as I mentioned in my OP, when replacing tools isn't a foregone conclusion, mistakes which force you to replace them become much more significant (and punishing). You think most people would bother with getting netherite tools in MineCraft if not for the mending enchant? I sincerely doubt it. The relatively marginal improvement over diamond (~33% increase in durability [iron to diamond is a 524.4% increase]) isn't worth the effort. Yes. They're better. Yes. People would want them. But the cost/benefit analysis doesn't add up. You'd be better off just mining diamonds for twice as long than spending half (or all) of that time looking for netherite. Heck, I didn't even use diamond for tools and armour until after mending; diamonds were too valuable as currency, and I had orders of magnitude more iron. For picks, 3 diamonds ~= 18 iron ingots or 2 blocks of iron. You think anyone - even before Iron farms - would have paid 3 diamonds for a measly 2 blocks of iron? Lolno. But with mending - so you only have to upgrade each of tool once - that upgrade to netherite is very enticing. That 33% increased durability goes from "as if" to "heck yeah!" ...and losing it goes from "well, that sucks" to "<voice = Darth Vader> NoOOoOOOOooOOoOooooo! </voice>" You are right, though, marginal increases to speed and damage aren't strong enough impetuses ...on temporary tools. I maintain that they are on permanent tools. And apparently, if "most players do not bother with making most tools out of steel", neither is increased durability. Again, if I spend all my time planting and harvesting trees, I will outstrip the whole server's demand for wood pretty quickly. Markets in games with a consistent population have points of saturation. ...unless people keep building. In which case they will always need metal and clay (and wood and stone) products for decoration (and structure). Especially as the number of those decorations increase, which I can't imagine they won't. And isn't that kind of the whole point of these kinds of sandbox games: to build sandcastles (not literally sandcastles)?

It depresses me that people who think like this actually exist.

I don't think forcing players to interact with the mechanic (no sleeping, building to reach sky bases, breaking to reach vaults) is necessarily the right approach. Make the mechanic interesting (and rewarding), and players will *want* to interact with it.

I appreciate the considered responses. I would like to address some of them. Regarding durability as a progression prod I cannot disagree that increased durability is an impetus to upgrade, but I don't think it's necessary. First, people naturally want 'the best'. The delta between the best and what they have doesn't even need to be that big (1% might be a little too low, but 5%? 10%? That's plenty), they're going to want the better thing. Second, I think breaking speed is being drastically underrated and underappreciated. To borrow fro MineCraft (only because I have so much more experience with it) there's a HUGE difference in time-saved when using a diamond pick over a stone pick. ...I would know, I dug out an obnoxiously large hole with stone tools (because they were cheap, and mending didn't exist; it would've cost hundreds of diamonds). It took *FOREVER*. Then I did it again (years later) with fully enchanted diamond or netherite tools and a beacon. The difference is night and day. I don't quite know how much different higher tier tools offer, but I do know using even just a lame stone shovel instead of punching clay/dirt is about a 50% reduction in time per block. Lastly, an alternate way to push players into upgrades is like Terrarria (where tools don't break) does: require you to have higher tier tools to break different materials. I'm not sure if Vintage Story does this (even if it doesn't now, it could in the future). I know you need higher tier tools for higher tier metals, I just don't know about deeper stones; I found a cave that led much deeper underground than I was ready to go, so the drifters kept me from inspecting my surroundings too closely. The magma looked beautiful, though. Regarding Multiplayer Roles I don't have much experience with multiplayer servers in this game. While I can appreciate wanting that kind of specialization fantasy... I'm not sure this game is meant to be the place for it (also not sure it's not; just don't know). But as it's built right now, it really doesn't seem to lend itself well to it; that could certainly change in the future, and the seeds of that are here with the Tailor and the Hunter, but they could easily decide to go another way. As it stands right now, any player can get a hunk of clay and make a bowl (or any other clay product). You don't even need any special tools for it like a smythe does with his forge and anvil. I don't understand why - if I was on a multiplayer server - I would wait around for 'the potter' to get online to make me a thing I want instead of just finding some clay and doing it myself. That fantasy you're describing is something the game itself may allow you to choose to do, but it isn't anywhere near enforced and would have to be a sort of gentleman's agreement between the players on the server. Contrast with ECO, where the game itself pretty much forces players to specialize and work with others because one player just can't get the SP to learn everything himself. Even accepting the fantasy argument, there hopefully will be a number of other things a smythe can make. Even now there's torch-holders and lanterns. As long as people are building, they're going to need more lanterns to light up stuff. Hopefully we get all kinds of other neat decorative blocks, like metal fencing, chains, bars. Tools that break obviously increase the work load, but I don't think they are necessary to give the smythe things to do. Pretty much every other fantasy (except maybe farmer?) is going to hit a point of saturation of his good or service (Lumberjack, for example, could produce wood much faster than it could be consumed) unless people are building. Strongly disagree. You'd have to come back regularly for food or to drop off your haul; inventory space is limited, and whatever food you bring (and mining is hungry business) is either going to spoil with haste or in a crock that takes up space even after it's empty, limiting how much "Rock and stone!" you can bring home. You're also ignoring the copious amount of scouting you'd need to do before hand to know where all that metal is, and if you know generally how much metal you've scouted (or even just how much you want) you can just, like, I dunno, bring more picks? A) That's an interesting compromise. I like it. I had thought of something similar, but thought including it would be a little too suggestion-y. 2) Stone tools are probably the ones I have the least problem with breaking; they are by their nature, slap-dash and shoddy, and the material they're made of is relatively brittle and more given to shearing and fracturing.

First, this is in discussions and not suggestions for a reason (of course, if the moderators feel differently, that's their prerogative). I'm not saying anything should change, I may prefer it, but that's not my intent in making the thread. While I would personally like to see durability as an 'industry standard' mechanic die a fiery death in the magma chambers of Kīlauea (along with RNG Critical Hits), I realize that's a pipe-dream, and the developers here have deliberate reasons to include it; at least I hope they do and they're not just doing it because that's what MineCraft did. So... what are those reasons? I'm genuinely curious, because I don't understand it, and I would like to. And let's nip the 'realism' argument in the bud right here; I'm not terribly interested in it, but if you were going to say that consider this: real tools last for years (decades, even) - even with consistent use - if you're not leaving them out in the elements to rust and rot. What I am interested in are game-design arguments. What does it add to the game? On my view, it's just an additional resource tax on...anything the tool is used to do. If I take a copper pick and hammer and I mine 300 regular nuggets of copper, I didn't actually make 1500 units of copper, I made 1340, because the pick cost 100 mining them, and the hammer lost 60% of its durability crushing the raw ore - that's an 10.6r% loss! So why not just reduce the amount of copper gained, since that's the ultimate effect? (and for the record, I have the same issue with durability in MMOs; it's just a tax, so reduce gold drops and avoid the tedium of visiting the repair NPC; and if you need a 'death penalty', deduct gold straight from the character's wallet or bank, like Diablo 2 did) I'm very interested to hear from people who like the system on why exactly it is they like it, what it adds to their experience. I completely understand the dopamine we get from crafting that very first tool. It's such a satisfying experience to get that last nugget of copper go to your crucible, smelt, cast, wait (not so fun but meh), and then stick it on the end of a...well...stick. I can see finally making that first bronze, then iron, then steel one being similarly rewarding. What I don't understand is how it is rewarding to have to regularly craft replacements. When tools are liberated from a durability system, it makes losing them to a bad death that much more painful. Instead of "Meh, it was half-destroyed anyway" it's "Aw man, that was my lucky prospecting pick, now I gotta make another one." It opens the door for more meaningful modifications or enhancements in the future, too, like MineCraft's enchanting. I was extremely selective with enchanting before Mending was added because what was the point? It was going to break and I'd have to do it all over again. I want to be clear that I'm only talking about tools (and weapons), not armour. Armour's whole purpose is to protect the wearer from injury by absorbing the punishment itself... though, I'd still rather see something a little more interesting than a magical durability bar that completely destroys the item when it's exhausted, but that's straying dangerously close to suggestion talk. Now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure how clothes lose condition in the game. If they only get damaged when you're attacked, that's reasonable, but if they wear out in a matter of weeks of normal wear, well that's just silly, too. As I write this, I'm wearing a t-shirt I've had for...probably 25 years. ...I feel so old. ;_;

One of my waking-up ideas today was how neat it would be to have a map type - kind of like Don't Starve: Shipwrecked - where there mostly water and you used a ship to travel between the islands. Large islands would be common (and you'd have to start on one to get the resources to build the ship). And when I say ship, I mean ship, not dinky little boat like MineCraft has. Best if there would be wind vectors and cool sailing mechanics, but not totally necessary and might be too complicated for the engine, who knows. EDIT: This would work best with a class ("Sea Dog" would be my suggestion for name) who couldn't actually do agriculture (farming and animal-husbandry), so you'd have an impetus to keep moving from island to island for food. If seasons are based on latitude, you could avoid winter by going the other hemisphere.

Why's that? I don't follow the logic?

I'm pretty new; I have not messed with Pumpkin's yet. I do agree that the choice between seeds and food is nonsensical from an IRL perspective, but it is at least understandable from a gameplay perspective; it's offering the player a choice (whether or not it's a meaningful choice is debatable) on how to use his resources. Like the "choice" of how to use your first 40 copper: do you get a pick and a hammer, so you can get more metal? Or do you get a pick and a prospecting pick - like my dumb-butt did my first game that got to smelting - so you can find more ore, but you can't crush it into a smeltable form? Also, as far as seed scarcity goes, do you know how many seeds an actual tree drops? HUNDREDS! But it's such a complete pain to get seeds from trees. And why the crap does punching leaves give more seeds/sticks than just chopping down the tree? Ugh. But that's a topic for another thread... You touch on a very important part of game design, something that totally drove me away from Chore-Simulator 2017 (a.k.a. ARK: Survival Evolved) a few years ago. Most people want fun from games, not chores. I realized I was logging in every day, not to enjoy the game, but to do chores just to maintain stuff. That's not fun, that's a job. I hope Vintage Story can strike a much better balance; a little bit of maintenance can be fun. Too much isn't just not-fun, it's anti-fun. I'm not sure how you do that, though: make food an omni-present concern without making it so tedious or time-consuming that you can't do anything else but subsist. If food is too easy, like MineCraft, why even have it at all? If it's as simple to solve as: "punch some trees, make some hoes, break some grass to get seeds, plant seeds to get wheat, live on bread forever" (or "find village, live on potatos/beets/carrots/wheat forever"), why even have it in the game?! The other end of the spectrum isn't really fun either, though; never having enough food if you don't dedicate so much time to it, you don't get to enjoy other parts of the game. One approach might be to make the point less about subsistence, and more about thriving. That is, eating to live would be relatively easy, but *thriving* would be more difficult, probably most easily accomplished with a more developed cooking system where good dishes/meals which are more involved to create gives not just satiation, but desirable buffs. But something like an advanced nutrition system where it builds over time so you have to maintain it, not just turning food into effectively potions like Stardew Valley does. I have not played on a multiplayer server for this game, but I did play on an ECO server for a while where time marches on even if no one's online. Though crops required (at least when I played, which was some time ago) little attention and tending. I can't imagine an outdoor (I have not messed with Greenhouses yet, not sure how they work) farming being successful on a multiplayer server where rabbits come eat your crops, or the crops dry out while you're offline. I've enjoyed farming in video games since the first Harvest Moon I played. The question should always be: what's fun about farming? And I think the Harvest Moon style gets it mostly bang on: once you get everything tilled (and if not for tool durability, I'd confidently say tilling should need to be done more than once) and fenced and planted, you want to wake up, tend your crops, then forget about them, at least until you go to bed, but probably until the next morning. As I mentioned in my last post, I really enjoyed Sakuna, but my rice farm always felt just a little too oppressive. It felt like it needed *constant* attention, if I went off to do a level, I'd come back to something needing to have been solved sooner (usually weeds, sometimes water). But it is very important, I think, to have some kind of crop-tending, otherwise you end up with MineCraft's "Oh, I'm out of food, better go harvest my MEGA FARM, that I ignore until just this situation!".

While I tend to agree, bear in mind, that 1 "seed" isn't really a single actual seed. It's seeds enough to sow approximately one square meter of farmland. See, video games - or games in general really - do a *lot* of abstraction. what you see as a representation isn't necessarily exactly what is represented. One square meter of, say, rice, is well more than a handful of grains. The average yield of a hectare is 3-6 tonnes. A hectare is 10,000 m^2, a tonne is 1,000 kg. That means in one m^2, you get 0.3 kg of dried rice. So 0.3 kg is about 1.68 cups of rice, which, when rehydrated would approximately double to 3.36 cups. So we actually end up getting more or less the right amount, don't we? Two game-units of rice cook up to one serving, so as long as you're getting an average of about 4 game-units of rice, that's pretty accurate. I can't be bothered to go through this for every kind of produce, but rice at least seems to be pretty "realistic". Except for the fact that we don't have to dry it. Or hull it. Or cook it with water. Or sort the seeds. Or grow the seeds into seedlings. Or till the ground. Then plant the seedlings. Then submerge them in just enough water. Then drain the water for a time. Then add the water back. Why yes, I did enjoy Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, how could you tell? @_@ If there's something to look at, perhaps it's the satiation you gain from one game-unit of the different foods. :shrug:

Let me first say that I really like the crafting mechanics in the game. Napping, clay-forming, smything, they're all neat little mini games that I've been looking for in 'crafting' games. That said, the smything one seems a little...tedious (Clay would probably actually be worse, but the "duplicate layer function" is amazing and clearly shows you have an interest in keeping players from being too bored). Smything also burns through hammers like crazy (honestly, tool durability in pretty much all games with it has always seemed silly to me. Have you ever used a real shovel? As long as you don't leave them in the weather to rust and rot, they last decades, even with regular use). It takes me around a fifth of a copper hammer just to make a single plate! I know I'm not doing the optimal moves, but that still seems really excessive to me. I think a simple 'fix' to both 'problems', would be to have a new tool; I want to be explicit here, this is a second tool you would use in concert with the regular hammer, because intricate stuff like the sawblade would still need the precision of a regular hammer. Call it "Smything Hammer", or some such. What it would do is, instead of just moving voxels by one space, it would move them linearly down to the next level or the next voxel on the rank or file. I suggest a new tool instead of added functionaltiy to the regular hammer because that would double or nearly double the options in the "F" menu, making it somewhat cluttered. Consider the image: The orange indicates it is a level above the red/brown. The green squares are empty. Let us call the lower left most green square (1,1,0), 0 because it is empty. The left-most single voxel would then be (1,5,1), the left orange voxel would be (3,5,2), and so on. Suppose we want to move the (3,5,2) voxel in the positive-Y direction to be on the (*,*,1) plane. With a regular hammer, that would take 3 strikes. With my suggested "Smything Hammer" (or whatever), you would hit it "up" once, and it would go to (3,8,1). If you hit it to the right, though, it would stop at (6,5,2), because the voxel at (7,5,2) would block it. Not quite sure how it would work with an analogous "Heavy Hit" move (if it should even have such). ...partly because I'm not 100% sure how heavy hit even works. For example, consider the image. I put an ingot on the anvil and I hit the (3,5,2) voxel (indicated with a blue marker). It pushes the top and bottom three adjacent voxels up and down respectively. Since the four corner voxels fall down, they don't complete the diagonal. Makes sense. I hit the (7,5,2) voxel. The top works just like we expect from the first hit, but for some reason, the (8,4,2) voxel goes to (9,4,1) instead of the expected (8,3,1). I do not understand why this happens, and in general, Heavy Hit seems very unpredictable in other less-controlled experiments, but this one I have repeated several times with several different positions; one side always behaves as expected, the other side does not.

Well, that explains it. I must fat-finger it when I mean to hit "M" for my map.

I somehow keep turning off the 'tips' that tell me what combination of LMB, RMB, Shift, or Control do what functions. How am I doing this, so I can turn it back on. @_@

OMG! I WAS GOING TO MAKE A POST ABOUT THIS YESTERDAY! It was such a surprise!

While I don't disagree with everything you said... Maybe that's exactly what they want to find out? After all, the average forum denizen isn't a game designer, the developers - presumably - are. Seems to me they'd be better-equipped to figure out what should change. Also the opinions on what to change would probably be as unique to a poster as his fingerprints. That doesn't make for very useful feedback: 100 people saying 100 different things. And how much of that feedback would like completely outside their vision of the game? Polls aren't good at finding solutions. Polls are good at finding problems. Almost two-thirds of people favour Hunter or Commoner. 75% of people think the Hunter or Commoner is mechanically the best. That alone, actually does say a lot about what should change, but again, it's not really finding a solution, it's finding a problem: most of the classes have too many penalties. I've been thinking about it a bit lately, and I'm not sure penalties even need to exist. If the bonuses are strong or unique enough, the 'penalty' for choosing Class A is *not* having the bonus of Class B. That's what economists would call "opportunity cost". But what do I know? Maybe penalties are very important to the devs. So that "feedback" might be rather useless. Feedback is a tricky issue. It's a fine line to walk, because games designed by committee suck, but so do games whose developers don't listen to their players. :shrug:

That's so freakin' cool. I thought that was happening, but I wasn't sure.

Small correction for you: it's 20% now. I equip a torch on my commoner, and my hunger rate goes from 100% to 120%.

It would be really nice if waypoints would (or optionally could) auto-fill colour and icon if I already have an existing waypoint of the same name. For example, I like to mark every cave with a sheer drop as "Pit" with red colour and the ladder-in-a-hole icon, so if I'm running for my life, I know to be careful in those areas. It would save me so much tedium if, when I type "Pit" in the name field, the colour is automatically set to red and the icon to the ladder-in-a-hole, press Enter to leave the name field and Enter again to close the waypoint box. If you have multiple different way points of the same name - say you mark "Cave" with different colours indicating whether or not you've lit them up or something - it would default to either the colour/icon of the first or the most recent. Even at its worst - defaulting to things you want to change - it would be no worse than the present defaulting to a black dot. This could only improve the player experience. Further, having some keyboard commands to interact with the icon selection would also be a boon.

For the longest time, I assumed berry bushes weren't obtainable with only a fist. I think I discovered this was a misconception when I accidentally LMB'd a bush by accident. It was probably behind a leaf block I was breaking. They are a good traveling and early-game food source, but if you can't easily move the bushes, I don't see them being a terribly useful long-term food source. I think if they required a copper-or-better tool (I suggest shovel, makes the most sense to me: digging it up to replant it) to collect them. I think that would fix most of the problem with them. By the time you can move them, you should have better sources of food more readily available. Though TBPH, boars are a much better source of food. Easy to kite into deep water and murder while they're slower than you, give you lots of meat which is more satisfying and keeps for more than twice as long. It seems strange to me to echo an IRL crop schedule while having months that are - by default- not even a week-and-a-half long.

On some level, it makes sense. I mean, plants don't stay ripe forever, they die off and regrow. Though...usually for crop plants that takes a whole season, doesn't it? I don't know, I'm only a farmer in video games.

So I'm exploring around, and I find some bits of Borax (or copper, or gold, or any mineral) on the surface; if I dig in that general area, am I likely to find more Borax, or is it completely random?

Huh. Tangentially related... do mature crops disappear? I swear I had some mature speldt at a spot right next to my base but now it's gone. x_x I was trying to wait 'til everything was grown...

I had no idea. I saw the nutrition breakdown, but I didn't really know what it meant, and didn't realise it was diminished on death.

Yeah, I figure it was just me not noticing, but thought I'd ask. I swear some other game I played had crops that could very rarely spread. I think Eco, but I'm not sure. :shrug:

It could've just been my imagination, but I swear I found a patch of - I dunno, let's just say carrots - that spawned, and when I went back after several days, there were more of them than when I found it. Did I just not-notice them all the first time, or do they actually spread like that?