Philtre

Does the music track change, or just the speed at which it plays? Some materials will make a room into a different area type (a lot of relieved stone blocks will make a cave, for example), so you can end up with cave music being played in your cellar, or something.

IIRC the wolf spawning checks for the forest conditions at world generation, not the current forest conditions, so cutting down the trees shouldn't change anything? But there should still be a check for existing wolves.... Also, unless something got changed recently, the grace timer should only affect monsters like drifters, not animals like wolves. So if the large numbers of wolves just happened recently, there seems to be something off.

Knockback is kind of a game-y thing rather than a real-life thing, so I'm "meh" on adding it. It feels like there is already a very brief "stun" or "stagger" being applied to melee hits, perhaps that could be more pronounced. In terms of maintaining range, the easiest current strategy is to get into water and just keep backing away, or use standard voxel-game tricks like pillaring up or leading them into pits (against animals, anyway). But thrown spears are pretty good, so ranged is always an option as long as you don't get mobbed. Considering how common the devs seem to want drifters to be, giving them better loot tables would probably unbalance resource collection unless they add some new less-useful/more-niche-utility items to the drops.

I like the happy music that plays above ground much more than the tense music that plays in caves, and I'd rather have the aboveground music play underground too. I poked around in the mod database a bit and didn't see anything that seemed like it could do that, but perhaps I missed something? Failing that, does anyone have an idea of where in the game code location-based music choice is controlled?

Regarding range not matching the animation, for the player, the block-placing and block-breaking range is much longer than the reach of their physical arms. So if the attack range with a sword, for example, is adjusted to match the physical length of the sword model, you will be able to punch a wolf several blocks further away than you would be able to hit it with a sword. I think this would be far more confusing than just having a consistent mechanism where range is always longer than it looks.

Personally for me, the main draw of a survival game is the survival aspect; that is, the stat management (hunger, thirst, temperature, etc.) and resource management. Combat is an optional extra; it's a barrier to exploration and resource-gathering, so it acts as an additional challenge to overcome, but it's not a necessary feature, and it's one I personally don't particularly enjoy. Personally I prefer combat to be as straightforward as possible; dodging and blocking, etc, are not things I want to have to devote brain-space to when dealing with drifters or wolves or what-have-you, I just want to get the fight over with as efficiently as possible so I can get back to exploration and resource-gathering. So I would not be particularly interested in a more complex combat system. I'm not sure how hard it would be from a programming perspective, but I'd be OK if it were possible to make any extra frills an optional toggleable setting, or perhaps a system such that the added mechanisms would be dispensable for mob enemies, and only relevant to PvP combat.

Aside from being affected by depth below the surface when in caves, I think the variation in temporal stability between different areas is largely random. So you just have to keep an eye on your wheel; or you can turn the whole mechanic off if it bugs you too much (you can do this at world creation, or using server commands in an existing world).

Each surface deposit yields around 15-25 ore chunks, each of which yields 3-5 nuggets after processing (depending on the quality of the ore), and each nugget is 5 units of metal. So you only need to mine at most 4-5 surface deposits to make the anvil, even if every single one gives poor-quality ore. You will probably have already found enough deposits by the time you have enough free nuggets to make the starting pickaxe and hammer. If the first deposit you hit up is rich-quality and large-ish in size, you can potentially make the anvil after mining just one. And like I said, by the time you are ready to move on to iron tools and need to upgrade the anvil, the loss of the one ingot-worth of copper necessary to recycle it into nuggets will be barely worth thinking about. So I think the stone anvil idea is interesting, but the copper anvil is not much of a bottleneck (getting the free nuggets to make the initial tools is a much bigger hurdle). The real killer is tin.....

You already need to find several surface deposits to get enough nuggets to make the pickaxe and hammer, so just go back to each of those locations with your new pickaxe and dig them up. (There is always an ore deposit beneath locations with surface nuggets - this is true for for all of the ore types that can produce surface nuggets, in fact, so mark any nuggets you find.) So far I've never not had enough copper to make an anvil after digging up the surface deposits I got my first 40 nuggets from. I'm not terribly disturbed by the idea that copper is too soft to make an anvil with; it's too soft to make good tools in general, so as long as we're OK with copper pickaxes etc we should be able to accept copper anvils.

The point was that you can currently get the desired effect, even it's a bit more of a pain than making a fencepost or slab. And I don't think making a copper anvil is a big investment; you don't need a bronze anvil until you're ready to move to iron, and by then another ingot or two of copper isn't a big deal unless you turned ore spawns down or something. And for me at least, I want a saw as fast as possible, and I'm not waiting for tin to get one....

Soup is great for using up single bits of food, like if you have one onion and one piece of meat - you can't make any meal from that except soup. So soup is most useful in the very early game when you are most likely to not have a good assortment of foodstuffs available. Being able to add water from a bowl would be great.

You can chisel most blocks into pretty much any shape, so you could place a full block or slab and then chisel away all but a slim pillar in the corner.

Note the line at the bottom "Other: 0.26X". That's the base spoilage rate I was talking about (it also applies to chests and other not-specifically-for-food containers). I haven't seen it go below 0.25, even in a doorless, completely-enclosed all-stone room.

I find that occasionally if the incubation timer isn't progressing you just have to pick up all the eggs and start over. Feed them until they start laying, then try to stay at least 11 (? I forget exactly what the panic range is) blocks away from the coop for a few days. Animals like foxes and wolves coming into range will also spook the hens, so you may want a second perimeter fence around the coop about 11 (or whatever it is) blocks out. It feels like it always take a lot longer than 5 days, even if you don't go near the chickens, and sometimes, like I said, it seems that the process just stalls out and has to be reset with fresh eggs. I think it helps to have just a few hens, maybe because they have more chances to eat when you fill the troughs than they would if there were a lot of hens.

If you are having a hard time with enemies, or simply don't enjoy combat, you can adjust the creature hostility even in an ongoing game using console commands (the wiki has a list). Note that the "passive" setting is equivalent to what most games would call "neutral"; they won't attack unless provoke them, but they will retaliate if you do. The "never hostile" setting is what most games would call passive. Feel free to tweak the game by playing with settings and mods until you have a setup you like; it's designed to be flexible that way. Drifters will eventually wander off once it's full daylight, but it takes a few minutes; they don't just burn up in the sun like Minecraft. There's also a mod you can use to remove drifters entirely if you don't like them hanging around making annoying noises all night (I think it's called "Creepless" - the mod called "No Monsters" doesn't currently work IIRC).

This one's very straightforward: it's the radius of the search space, in blocks. So a setting of 8 searches a 17x17x17 cube. I think the toolDurability value is a multiplier, not a percentage, and I suspect the surfaceCopperDeposits is a percentage or fraction of some type (i.e., it's representing some kind of absolute value, not "difference relative to the default").

Hardness, when used in the technical sense, refers to scratch resistance, not general durability. Which is why diamonds are used only for teeny-tiny cutting edges; they're extremely hard, but also extremely brittle, so you end up making them very small to reduce the chance they'll shatter. Obsidian is a similar but milder case; obsidian knives are actually used for modern dissection and even surgery, but they're very small - the cutting edge is maybe 2-3 millimeters. In real prehistoric tools, when you needed to make a tool with a large cutting surface out of obsidian, such as a sickle, you typically embedded multiple small blades in a wooden or bone shaft. Like most stone tools, obsidian tools wear out either by fracturing / shattering, or by accumulated chips in the cutting edge that make it uneven and therefore inefficient. In terms of hours of use before needing to be replaced, iron and in some cases even copper will get you much farther for most types of tool. There's a reason stone tools died out so fast in every culture that invented effective metalworking... TL;DR, I think there's no even halfway realistic way to implement improved durability of stone tools. The Damascus steel idea might be interesting, and maybe justify an extended smithing mechanic? Although it would mainly apply to longblades and possibly spearheads; you wouldn't want damascened axes or shovels (the slight flexibility caused by the interleaving metals is the main reason Damascus steel swords are more durable, but that would be a negative in an axe or shovel).

Everybody can craft certain clothes, but the tailor can craft a wider variety of clothing. Mostly the difference is cosmetic, since the warmest clothing (furs) are already available to everyone, and only a handful of the tailor-specific items have better stats than the default for their slot.

Personally, I'd like a second, more advanced type of kiln; a permanent structure with a higher capacity across the board, like a scaled-up bread oven or less-expensive blast furnace. There's a number of clay items that are a pain to make in quantity using pit kilns (bricks, I'm looking at you).

Pretty sure those are already features in the game. Obsidian is a type of naturally-occurring (volcanic) glass. Refining it would just give you regular glass. In the real world it was used for cutting and piercing tools such as arrowheads because it can be broken to create an extremely sharp edge, not because it's particularly durable (quite the opposite - it's very brittle).

Based on what I have seen in my worlds, I think it means that the interior of the room (the open space, basically), must fit entirely within a 7x7x7 cube. So I think a floor plan like this will not work: xxxxxxxxxxx x-------xxx xxx-------x x-------xxx xxxxxxxxxxx Note that being near a lit fire source will always warm you to some extent; the "enclosed room" buff just allows you to stay warm when you're further from the fire (or not bother lighting one, if it's not that cold).

Thanks! I tried the barrel thing previously, but it didn't work. Breaking and replacing the barrel fixed it, so all is good now, except for that one bowl of raw pickled turnips... yummy.

If you put down an appropriate trough with food in it (small trough with grain for chickens, large trough with grain, veggies, or dry grass for sheep/pigs), animals who come within a certain range (28 blocks IIRC?) will move towards it. You can use a series of troughs to lure members of these three species into pits or fenced areas, so as to trap them for breeding or as an emergency food source. Animals will not despawn as long as they get a certain minimum amount of light, so as long as you don't try to keep them in a completely dark room, they will be fine.

So I pickled my very first batch of turnips, and put some into crocks to see how that worked. This has now led to some burning questions: 1. Is there any way to get pickled turnips out of a crock other than by using a bowl? 2. Is there any way to get pickled turnips out of a bowl other than by eating them? I suppose if the answer turns out to be "no" to both, at least I have a couple of years to get hungry enough to eat raw pickled turnips.

As far as I can figure out, the best possible base spoilage rate (i.e., inside a generic container) is 0.25. To get this, you need every block of the walls/ceiling/floor to be a soil-, stone-, or ceramic-type block. Putting in a single, standard wood door that is positioned so as to not let in sunlight changes the rate to 0.26, which as far as I'm concerned is not a big enough difference to warrant the inconvenience of breaking and replacing blocks every time I want to fetch something out of storage. And as Malfiros said, artificial light sources do not affect spoilage, so go ahead and light up your cellar. Note that slabs won't prevent spawning during temporal storms, since during storms drifters can actually spawn in mid-air if there is no other suitable spawning space; the only preventative is having the space be physically too small for them to spawn into (via creative use of chiselling, for example).