Philtre

Alum only spawns in very specific locations. First, you need to find a desert; not just a sand/gravel area, an actual hot-climate (average temp between 15 and 40), no-rain (rainfall between 0 and 0.3) desert. Look for cacti and bones/skulls lying around. If you spawned in a temperate climate (the default) and have climate distribution set to "realistic", expect to have to travel for a couple of real-world hours to find one.

Then make sure the top-most rock type is sedimentary (claystone, sandstone, shale, chalk, limestone, chert, conglomerate). Then dig in low-lying areas; it will usually be just below the sand/gravel, or maybe under a layer or two of rock, not very deep. Not all deserts have it, and not all locations in any specific desert has it, so be prepared to keep trying.

You can check the average temp and rainfall stats at your current location with this command: /wgen pos climate

Alternate, much easier option: find a commodities trader, wait for them to have alum in stock, and buy it.

You can disable temporal stability in an existing world using commands, if it really bugs you. Also I heard somewhere that finding and reading lore books (such as the ones you can find while panning bony soil) makes you resistant to stability drain, but I cannot confirm or deny.

13 hours ago, Fredrik Blomquist said:

I just noticed that even 2x1 cube dont work. They spawn inside that cube aswell. If you don't have a chisel you can't protect yourself. Not sure if ladders inside that cube helps?

You can use stairs and half-slabs to make a space that has enough room to stand in but includes no full-size empty blocks (put two stairs facing each other, extend the "walls" on either side with vertical half-slabs, more stairs as a roof, block off the other two sides with full blocks).

16 hours ago, Karel Vranovský said:

Well, my name should give away that I'm not American. Central Europe.

[...]
Just the gameplay balance of how much material / time you need to keep them in repair compared to other items. That is what really needs to be addressed.

When not playing games I hang out on boards where a lot of people name themselves after fictional characters, and Karel is a character from an old SF novel by Jack Vance, so it didn't really occur to me that it was geographically meaningful, I apologize.

I kind of suspect that scythes in particular are *supposed* to be relatively expensive in materials cost, since they're essentially a convenience item. You are trading the time spent on mining and processing metals for less time spent gathering grass or harvesting crops, or whatever.

15 hours ago, Karel Vranovský said:

It would also probably need to make a change to how the jugs work and allow you to transfer water to the cookpot more easily without buckets.

[...]

What I would like to see with that is actually an element of seassoning. Salt and herbs could add a lot of additional recipes and systems into the game. Some seasoning could for an example, negate the sickness otherwise caused  by the food being spoiled and so on.

You can already add water to a cookpot using a bowl, and I thought you could with jugs too, but I don't remember exactly.

I agree it would be nice to have some more cooking systems, and in particular incorporating milk, wine, etc. into recipes. For example, posset, which was popular from Roman times into the late medieval era, was a sort of half-beverage, half-soup made of milk, wine, cheese, and grain boiled together (with salt and various seasonings). People who have tried making the stuff using historic recipes agree that it's somewhere between weird and disgusting, but it was an important and characteristic foodstuff across much of early Europe.

There are a number of herbs that already have (unused) visual models in the game (rosemary and thyme and so forth), so perhaps the devs already have some ideas for using them.

On 2/2/2022 at 1:00 PM, Karel Vranovský said:

I have actually never seen or heard of anyone using a STEEL Scythe in my life. It's pointless to waste steel on something that is by it's core function, flimsy and largely disposable.

Over the last 200 or so years, American scythes have typically been made of milled steel with a whetstone-ground (not hammered) edge (and a different blade and handle shape compared to traditional European scythes, see 2nd pic here for comparison: https://extension.psu.edu/mowing-with-a-scythe ). Modern scythes using the American design can potentially be very thin tempered steel with minimal reinforcement along the back edge, because of the inherent strength and flexibility of the material. That's what I was assuming you were using as a reference, since I didn't know where you were from. (Although some American styles are quite hefty, to allow for cutting tougher plants and for repeated sharpening.)

While a medieval scythe would be overall a lot more similar to the ones you have used, you were still most probably using an industrially-produced product rather than a hand-made piece made with the comparatively impure wrought iron that would be typically available to the average agricultural community around the 1300's. Surviving scythes from around that time (which are admittedly few) are heftier and have thicker ridges at the back than the styles you see from the 1800's or even the mid-1700's, which are about the oldest items you are likely to find still in use nowadays. Also, NOTHING made of metal was disposable in the medieval era; mining and working metal was extremely labor- and time-intensive, and you used as little metal as you could get away with and made it last as long as possible.

In any case, the game does not base material costs for smithed items on realism or on the voxel volume of the model; I don't see anyone asking for longblades to use four ingots' worth of metal. I think this whole issue is a side-effect of the way the smithing minigame is designed; it makes you focus on the voxel volume of the model, even though that is irrelevant. Thus things like the "metal recovery" mod. If the game used a basic grid crafting system for creating metal tools rather than the smithing minigame, I doubt anyone would have come up with the OP's suggestion....

Personally, I am not in favor of increased complexity to combat in general; if some method can be worked in to allow directional blocking and parrying and suchlike for those that enjoy it while also keeping straightforward approaches viable for those who don't, that would be fine. But in particular I don't like the idea of designing combat around PvP. Only a portion of VS players habitually play multiplayer, and only a portion of those engage in PvP, but *everyone* has to deal with drifters and wolves, unless you turn mob hostility completely off. There are plenty of games, even in the survival genre, that focus heavily on PvP; i don't think every game needs to go down that route. But again, if VS can incorporate some of the more PvP-centric techniques in a way that doesn't over-complicate PvE encounters, that would be fine with me.

Water is used in the soup recipe, and nothing else. Considering that the cooking pot only has 4 slots, using one for water reduces the maximum nutritional value of the meal by 25%, so requiring all the meal recipes to use water would substantially reduce the maximum buff you can get from meals as well as the amount of nutrition you can store in crocks.

6 hours ago, Karel Vranovský said:

A scythe may seem like a relatively large blade due to it's surface. But in reality, it's made out of INCREDIBLY thin sheet of metal, between one to two milimeters thick, usually. Several times thinner than a knife blade or even a sicle.

We're talking about a medieval-era hand-hammered scythe; it wouldn't be nearly as light and thin as a modern tempered steel scythe. In addition, the back edge was often built up extra thick to help support the blade and keep it from bending. In the real world, it would have been made out of iron; however, if you were trying to make a scythe out of a soft metal like copper, it would have to be relatively thick to keep it from bending too much in use. So still on par with a hammer or axe, which also cost one ingot.

A real-world scythe doesn't use significantly less metal than a light sword; definitely more than a hammer does. Similarly, a hefty knife might use about as much metal as a light hammer. I think that the smithing mechanism in the game, while cool, leads players to think about material consumption in terms of the voxel dimension of the model, which isn't how it's designed in practice.

8 hours ago, Tyron said:

Fixed: Fruit trees correct color on map, no longer white

Farewell to the days of easily finding those guys. It's going to be a lot harder now....

Try placing the boiler and condenser before putting anything in the boiler or placing the firepit under it. The game may not be able to deal with placing the condenser once the boiler is already running.

I dunno. The color difference does look less visible in the screenshot - but the image gets compressed/downsampled to make the png file, and colors get simplified as part of that. But I found those areas on the map while still a few minutes' walk away, put down the markers I'm standing next to in the screenshots, and went to the marked spots. And they had the clay/peat. And I don't think it was just wild luck, since I've been using the map to find stuff just as much since 1.16 as before. It's definitely harder, and you're much more likely to miss stuff, but it's still doable (except in autumn - the browner grass just masks everything colorwise for some reason).

Edit: the clay (and peat, for that matter) is indeed not "a uniform color". But it varies relative to the colors around it in a way that doesn't correspond to the shading caused by the topology; there's a roughly oval area that has a overall slightly bluer shade, despite the various shadows and highlights. Similarly, the peat is a roundish area that is consistently slightly more brown/red than the surrounding areas.

Seed: 875844952

Settings:

{
  "worldClimate": "realistic",
  "gameMode": "survival",
  "temporalStability": true,
  "temporalStorms": "off",
  "graceTimer": "10",
  "microblockChiseling": "all",
  "polarEquatorDistance": "25000",
  "harshWinters": "true",
  "daysPerMonth": "9",
  "saplingGrowthRate": "2",
  "allowUndergroundFarming": false,
  "temporalGearRespawnUses": "-1",
  "temporalStormSleeping": "1",
  "startingClimate": "temperate",
  "spawnRadius": "50",
  "deathPunishment": "keep",
  "seasons": "enabled",
  "playerlives": "-1",
  "blockGravity": "sandgravel",
  "bodyTemperatureResistance": "0",
  "creatureHostility": "off",
  "creatureStrength": "1",
  "playerHealthPoints": "15",
  "playerHungerSpeed": "1",
  "playerMoveSpeed": "1.5",
  "foodSpoilSpeed": "1",
  "toolDurability": "1",
  "toolMiningSpeed": "1",
  "propickNodeSearchRadius": "8",
  "globalDepositSpawnRate": "1",
  "allowCoordinateHud": true,
  "allowMap": true,
  "tempstormDurationMul": "1",
  "temporalRifts": "off",
  "worldWidth": "1024000",
  "worldLength": "1024000",
  "worldEdge": "traversable",
  "globalTemperature": "1",
  "globalPrecipitation": "1",
  "globalForestation": "0",
  "surfaceCopperDeposits": "0.12",
  "surfaceTinDeposits": "0.007",
  "snowAccum": "true",
  "allowLandClaiming": true,
  "classExclusiveRecipes": false,
  "auctionHouse": true,
  "playstyle": "surviveandbuild"
}

The color difference is much more subtle, and it depends a lot on the grass color, but you can still spot them. I started up a new world and saw these on the map, went directly there: 

Make sure the mods have been updated to be compatible with 1.16. If they haven't, they won't show up.

53 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I don't often play with a map, but as of the 1.16 (stable) release it looks to me as if you can't really distinguish clay or peat from the map anymore.

It depends on the grass color (which varies with location and time of year), but most of the time you can still spot clay and peat. It's definitely harder than it used to be, though.

35 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Nah, I'll just start a new game and get the edge of my seat game experience dodging wolves for the first couple days again. My actions and choices for the first few months make a big difference. Later in the game, all it does is give me AFK time.

I agree that pursuing metal upgrades is of limited utility. There is no real reason to go past bronze except for increased durability, which is great for convenience but doesn't add much to gameplay. I suppose if you never grind large amounts of grain, or make large numbers of metal plates, or process a lot of steel blooms, or do anything requiring a pulverizer, automating those tasks is of little importance. But being nomadic still cuts you off from a lot of gameplay; for one thing, no bees, no livestock, no advanced food processing (cheese, pies, the new juices and distilling stuff). And if you're starting in a temperate climate, getting through the winter without stockpiled food and resources must be a PITA. Frankly, I can't see the appeal of keeping yourself in a state where you never progress your larger (non-metal) tech capabilities; for me at least, the main satisfaction of this kind of game is expanding what you can do and how easily you can do it, which in this game requires a lot of space and infrastructure.

Interesting, but you would still need barrels for making leather and mortar and planks for making plaster blocks, so you would still need to get to smithing before you can do anything with your lime....

High-throughput processing option already in game: build a quern, build a windmill, attach the former to the latter, throw a stack of chalk rock or whatever into the quern and knock off for lunch.

Rifts should not spawn in well-lit areas (currently this may be a bit buggy). Spam torches in and around your base until you can spam lamps or lanterns.

Note that rifts spawn and despawn every few hours, and when you move to different areas; even if you stay put, that one will go away eventually, and be replaced by others elsewhere. If they really bug you, there is a worldconfig option to turn them off.

Clay spawns in grassy, low-lying areas with moderate to heavy rainfall. Look on the map for oval patches of grass that are just a bit more blue (blue clay) or pink (fire clay) compared to the surrounding grass. Once you have found some, open the map and look at the color difference so you will recognize it more easily next time.

Currently, there are two valid recipes for curdled milk: 25L milk + 1 pickled vegetable = 25L curdled milk, or 20L milk + 1 pickled vegetable = 20L curdled milk. However, the recipe for cottage cheese (10L curdled milk + 1 salt) requires multiples of 10L, and making a finished cheese requires 25L cottage cheese. This means that if you make 25L of curdled milk, which is theoretically enough for one cheese, the only thing you can do with it in practice is throw out 5L, convert the other 20L into cottage cheese, and eat the result with a bowl. It would be great if there was a second recipe for cottage cheese that would let you make a 25L batch: for instance, maybe 25L curdled milk + 3 salt, which would make it a touch more expensive in salt than making a 50L, 2-cheese batch, but would fit the quantities of the other cheese-making steps.

I'm trying to make a cooking recipe for rice pudding, on the grounds that 1) I want more things to do with milk, and 2) I want to try to learn how to create a mod.
 

So far I've managed to start with the porridge recipe and get it to accept milk as an ingredient (see below). I can cook the thing, and get back an edible item with the right nutritional content (for the non-milk ingredients, anyway... I have no idea where to even start with getting it to have a Dairy nutritional value). But it always has the description "unknown" (as in: "contains 1 portion of unknown"), and the food is invisible, even though for now I'm trying to just reuse the games' texture files for porridge. I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong in terms of how to tell the game where to look for textures, etc., but looking at other food-related mods, I'm not sure what. Taking out the "game:" in the shapeElement entries causes the game to crash when using the recipe (with a complaint about missing textures), so it is apparently doing *something* with the texture files... Does anyone have an idea of what I'm doing wrong?

{
	code: "pudding",
	perishableProps: {
		freshHours: { avg: 96 },
		transitionHours: { avg: 24 },
		transitionRatio: 1,
		transitionedStack: { type: "item", code: "game:rot" }
	},
	shape: { base: "game:block/food/meal/porridge" },
	ingredients: [
{ 
			code: "game:milk", 
			validStacks: [ 
				{ 
					type: "item", 
					code: "game:milkportion", 
					shapeElement: "game:bowl/milk"
				}
			],
			minQuantity: 1,
			maxQuantity: 1,
			portionSizeLitres: 1,
		},
		{ 
			code: "grainbase", 
			validStacks: [  { type: "item", code: "game:grain-*",  shapeElement: "game:bowl/grain/*" } ],
			minQuantity: 1,
			maxQuantity: 3
		},
		{
			code: "fruit-extra", 
			validStacks: [ { type: "item", code: "game:fruit-*",  shapeElement: "game:bowl/fruit 1/*" } ],
			minQuantity: 0,
			maxQuantity: 1
		},
		{
			code: "fruit-extra-2", 
			validStacks: [ { type: "item", code: "game:fruit-*", shapeElement: "game:bowl/fruit 2/*"  } ],
			minQuantity: 0,
			maxQuantity: 1
		},
		{
			code: "topping", 
			validStacks: [ { type: "item", code: "game:honeyportion",  shapeElement: "game:bowl/topping/*", cookedStack: { type: "item", code: "game:jamhoneyportion" } } ],
			minQuantity: 0,
			maxQuantity: 1,
			portionSizeLitres: 0.2,
		}
	]
}

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

So I had to come up with a playstyle that would work with this game's defaults. The best one I've figured out turns out to  be more of a nomadic lifestyle, settling in one spot only long enough to tap all the resources in the region, then moving on.

Not a fan of this idea: it cuts you off from all of the more time-consuming or equipment-intensive crafting, such as leather-working, as well as from using windmills to automate stuff, animal husbandry, etc.

If you're having trouble finding large amounts of metal, it is completely viable to just continue to use stone for anything that does not absolutely require metal until you have a good stash of metal, then use the lowest-tier metal that will get the job done until you have a good stash of higher-tier metal. Basically, prioritize using metal for essential items like saws and for tasks that will get you more metal. Ores are not actually all that rare, just tedious to find: you can go for years on what you can find as surface deposits or exposed in caves just within a day or so's travel from your base, as long as you use stone for everyday axes and shovels and whatnot.

And large houses are fine in the current version, you just have to light them well. Which means lots of lanterns. Which means a helve hammer, because making plates by hand is a pain....

14 minutes ago, Heiko külsen said:

Tho what I dont understand is that most tell, take a sample before a hole, see if there is any, and then go in, but the samples only work for that chunk you tog the first sample in.
Will say if you take a sample in a chunk, then you go down in a mine, and then go over to a new chunk berceuse you go deep, then your first sample mean nothing, then it is pure luck you find what you are look for?

Use ladders and dig straight down. You can dig while standing on a ladder, so you don't have to worry about falling into holes. It also uses less pickaxe durability than digging staircases. If you don't have a lot of sticks, there is a second ladder recipe that uses mostly boards.

10 hours ago, Fredrik Blomquist said:

 When defending from a wolf throwing away your spear at it should be the last thing you should do.

Make a bunch of spears and take the beastie out at range (it takes 3-4 thrown spears to kill a wolf). Dealing with a threat before it gets close enough to bite you is always a good idea. Most real-world primitive spears were in fact intended to be thrown.