Bruno Willis

I played recently with a mod that let me keep bits of metal when a tool broke or when I took off material when smithing, and it was a pain in the bum! Honestly, I appreciated having extra metal available for like, two days of gameplay. After that it just clogged up chests and gave me busy work. I got so stressed trying to use every bit of iron, I pretty quickly uninstalled it.

Love this. I especially love the idea that it also picks up things you shouldn't investigate. You'd want that to happen pretty rarely, and also happen around temporally messy areas like story locations 1 & 3.

Caves are actually pretty lucrative, you just have to explore quite a few of them. The best way I've found is to go in fast and run around before too many foes spawn, and see if I can spot any ruins (typically you'll notice slightly odd cave wall generation, and then a two-wide door gap) or any ores. I don't try to be a completionist, just try to cover as much ground as I can. If there's nothing, I either try again later when the foes have disappeared, and I check any spots I didn't notice last time, of I simply go to another cave. You can find unique loot, some of it special un-craftable and very good gear, and it's a great way to get gears, so I do think it's worth it. Don't fight the foes if you don't have to, just run past. Prioritize a shield over armor, because it doesn't slow you down. Carry blocks and rope ladders, so you can get up spots and block off dead ends. This video might help, although some people have questioned the narrator's motives.

This is what TOBG is missing from it's op redstone farms, and I think we're getting there with the mechanic for wooden bearings to catch fire if spinning too fast. A machine only feels like a foolhardy and mad experiment if there are risks. I'd love more mundane ones - wooden cogs catching you and chopping off fingers sort of thing - and if we actually get Jonas tech machinery, I'd expect eldritch horror level issues. It makes you feel like you're really doing something with consequence. The key is to make the consequence an interesting gameplay experience. The clockwork sun idea is: fail to keep the machine fueled -> make a danger space in the middle of your base -> the fight of your life as you try to re-start the machine. I like the idea of Jonas tech components which make certain aspects of daily life easier, so they can be plugged into more mundane processes, and I like the idea that they all have a way to go horribly horribly wrong. Here's a couple of ideas: A spider-limbed mechanical loom which spins and weaves fiber into cloth quickly and efficiently, but will break free and turn into a gigantic horrible locust if it's powered with the small attachable steam-engine instead of through mechanical power. A Manufactor which will draw ingots and charcoal from hoppers to replicate whatever metal example part you've given it (pickaxe head, falx, strips and nails, etc.) But if you don't change the example part, after a certain number of times it will start making bells, one part at a time: Bell tail, bell head, then bell clapper, at which point the bell gets up and starts causing trouble. A tunnel-bore which occasionally veers off course, and if left to it's own devices too long, just mines a tangled maze and hides in the center, spitting out low stability. If you can reach it you can take control of it again just fine.

To keep on the crazy train, what if drifters could pick up and throw locusts (including, occasionally, these explosive locusts). That'd make me laugh. Or cry.

Yeah, I can imagine it working quite well to have two of the slots in the hotbar be explicitly "on the belt", maybe the farthest left and farthest right slots, or the center two slots. I imagine things that would have special effects when equiped there would be: Lanterns, which would shine as if held, but with light decreased by 15% Arrows. On the belt slots would become the only locations arrows would be drawn from when re-loading a bow Fishing bate. It would automatically re-bate your line when fishing. Pouches for carrying small things. I like the idea of pouches which can hold lots of small items. The way I'd do them would be to equip them in one of your two belt slots, and when you right-click on the ground, open them up as if they were a chest. Have them be able to sit in chests with small things stored in them. The devs would need to tag a whole lot of things as small enough to be pouched, and it'd have to be only very small items, but I think it'd be a nice use for a belt slot. I don't like the idea of carrying an extra bag in your off-hand. We can already carry so god-damn much it's ridiculous, and I think interacting with them from the off-hand will always be a bit clunky. What we need are wheelbarrows, crates, pullies and winches: that's the stylish way to shift heavy loads. No matter how the game words this effect, it will feel like a severe de-buff whenever you have something in your off-hand. I understand the realism reason, but I feel like this would cause more frustration than the current mechanic, unless hands-free lighting were implemented. I do like the distinction you've gone into with the specific items though, it is persuasive. I don't think bows need to be two handed. I can hold things in my bow hand while loosing arrows, without much trouble IRL. A full shield would probably require a bit of practice, but I bet it's doable. That one already has a good, realistic downside: you can't see where you're aiming. Otherwise, it would be interesting to have different effects with the way a weapon is held. It'd be good if they felt like alternative methods, not strictly better one way or another. Spear in two hands vs spear and shield is a good example, and a good justification for why it'd be good to give a damage buff when double-handing some things. Tools though, realistically you are always going to use the tool in the most optimal way. It's not a choice. If you want a pickaxe to be two handed, it's not really meaningful to offer the choice of wielding it inefficiently with one hand. I would be alright with exclusively two-handed picks, as long as I can carry a light on my belt. With all these changes, I would still keep a hunger increase, but tie it to heavy work rather than exclusively to the off-hand slot. You'd get increased hunger when wielding any tool tagged two-handed, as well as when using a hammer in one hand and chisel in the other. It makes sense and helps distinguish heavy work. It would be nice to have it varried based on what the work is (chiseling should increase hunger less than mining with a pick or digging with a shovel for example). With that said, I'd love to tie body heat to jobs that burn extra food. I'd be pretty happy with having extra hunger from two-handing my shovel if it meant I kept warm longer over winter.

I think Vintage story does a good job at abstracting things, and the hotbar is a really good one. I tried the sheaths and belts mod, and it just felt like a complex way to get an awkward extra slot on my hotbar. Now it feels to me that the hotbar is your belts and sheaths, but it functions so fluidly and effectively that we forget what it actually represents. To drive home the idea that the hotbar is your belt and pockets, lamps and lanterns in your hotbar could be made to produce light when you're not actively holding them (slightly dimmer than when held, cause you're not directing the light intentionally). If I were changing that, I'd also have it so torches cannot be carried on the belt while lit, but light a lot faster. That way you've got passive lighting on your belt from a fat lamp or lantern, and if you want to use lots of cheep lighting sources placed all over the place, you place torches down and set them on fire, and put them out before you shove them back in your backpack. You'd have to be careful to keep your torch in your hand or off-hand, which would be awkward, but it would feel more like fire. I've been finding I'm picking up sticks into my off-hand on accident a fair bit since fishing was added? I really like the idea of weighting the hunger penalty to different items. I could even imagine having a stick in your off-hand could reduce hunger by 2% (referencing a temporary walking stick), there could be a carved walking stick which reduces hunger even further, and then a torch could increase hunger by %10, tongs by %15 hammer by 20% and shield by 25%. I love my shields and that'd still be an improvement for me. Thanks for starting a productive discussion about how to improve this feature. We may not all agree, but I think we're getting onto some interesting solutions.

Yes

Hey, this is obviously a big deal to a lot of people, but I really don't get it. As soon as I get my farm going, increased hunger becomes a good thing (so that I can balance nutrition faster). A little extra hunger for carrying a torch is not a penalty, unless you're running close to starving all the time. And that's just poor planning. What would be a big penalty though is halving mining speed or weapon damage. I think this applies to this alternative system, moreso than the current one. There's a very well established way to mitigate added hunger: grow more food, hunt more, farm more. Normal gameplay loops. You're already going to do those things, so doing a little more doesn't have any impact. Mitigating halved mining speed or weapon damage is not possible. You'd have to completely forgo the off-hand torch, almost all the time, and go around placing and breaking torches, flickering between pitch black and bright torchlight as you cycle between axe and torches. That sounds really tedious to me. I do appreciate that you're looking for alternatives rather than just complaining, and I think there's totally a good realistic reason that we shouldn't be able to swing a pick while wielding a burning torch, but I think it helps the game that we can do it. Mining would be so much more frustrating if I had to keep my off-hand free. A little extra hunger is just not a big deal. Much less efficient mining is so significant that I don't think anyone would be using their off-hand while mining anymore. You'd have the same issue, just much worse. If you're worried about the extra food you eat while holding something in your off-hand, you're just not growing enough. Make a bigger garden.

It's that temporal gear turning in the center of the screen that suggests it to me, along with the mechanic where we cut ourselves open and insert a temporal gear to increase our stability. It makes me feel like the drifters were failed attempts, and we were the successful versions, and both run on temporal gears. That's just my head cannon, having gotten only about halfway through the existing story material.

I've written elsewhere about clustering traders and small communities and I'll attach a link to it at the bottom. I really like the idea of upgrading existing structures by helping out, but I think it'd be important to do it carefully. The biggest question these sorts of mechanics make me ask is "Why did it need me for this job to get completed?" I don't feel like the humans in V.S. are helpless, just busy with menial tasks and challenged by the rust-foes. I think this is a really good sort of quest, because it's suited to seraphs and not suited to humans. The wilderness is genuinely too dangerous to risk human lives building roads through, the rust-foes would make it impossible. Building more onto existing structures seems like something traders (or small homestead families) would be able to do, if they needed to, and not so well suited to seraph intervention. I think the best way for a seraph to help human settlements would be to help bring lonely humans together. I imagine you could find a small gathering of traders in a well-defended area and speak with them. They might say "We need more people here, to work the gardens, do the accounts, fight off the deamons in the night," or they might say "Young Jennifer is getting too big for her boots, she needs to find somewhere where she's really needed." You could then offer to guard and guide a human on their travels, to establish a new trader somewhere where they're wanted. Then there would be a sudden need for building projects, etc. because there's a new person to house. You could also either suggest what sort of trading goods would be in need in the new location, or direct them to a location which you want to improve because it's close to your place. I also think we could do with figuring out how the traders get their goods, and why they've set up scattered across the middle of nowhere. It's very weird. Maybe that's why they're always laughing behind their hands when we speak. They're hiding something.

This is one of the real strengths with the current dialogue system. Adding more in depth dialogue or alternative greetings is just altering dialogue trees. They can add a huge amount of personality and diversity of options without much coding work. Seems like low hanging fruit for improving the game. I'd love it if traders were rarer, but more often clustered together, and if you could talk with traders to learn where other traders were. It'd be cool if you had to sort of gossip to get information. Like, traders would let things slip, details about their favourite food, or reveal that they're actually in love with a nearby trader, but they're from different trading factions (the banners...) that sort of information could then be 'traded' through dialogue with other traders for juicer gossip, locations of specific traders, ruins locations, cheaper trades, etc. It seems likely that we seraphs have at least one temporal gear turning inside us which gives us our unique properties. I could imagine a faction which does not distinguish between rust foes and seraphs, and is willing to incapacitate a seraph in order to harvest a temporal gear from the seraph's chest, which might leave the seraph desperately low on stability, deep in the rust world, facing foes which the human bandits aren't even aware exist.

Welcome welcome! And can I suggest https://mods.vintagestory.at/realisticwater . Make sure to disable the ability to place water sources first. Use it on a new world. I think one of the problems is that we want to keep water as is and just change the terrain it flows over. It turns out that making river terrain during world generation is actually a huge job, but this realistic water mod feels like it's halfway to rivers, from the opposite direction. The water acts more interestingly and more realistically, which means it's more forgiving of terrain generation quirks. It flows into and around stuff, like real water does, whereas the river mods I've seen generate over and through things, making weird bridges and tunnels, sometimes with hovering water. If the water in the realisticwater mod could erode soil slowly, and could fill pools up in the right contexts, we would have a very good smaller river system which adapts to the environment and to player intervention.

I've played around with some of the rivers mods, but they all made my world feel very unrealistic for me. While the rivers look alright from a distance, up close, running around them, there are just so many broken patches, places where water is flowing weirdly, and just odd generation problems. Algernon's watersheds didn't look good for me, although there are a lot of controls I could fiddle around with to make it better. You still get the issue of rivers running over caves and sort of breaking at that point. I also like to play with soil sideways instability (+ sticky dirt mod), and that quickly and irrevocably messes up the water flow: essentially as soon as you generate a river, a few blocks fall into it and the water starts flowing very strangely. My feeling is that these river mods sort of set up a good looking, static river, but don't have good systems to let it work like a river when it is interacted with. You start out with a good looking world, which breaks down as you interact with it. That's not very vanilla friendly, thats more TOBG style Algernon's worldheight landforms mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/watershedslandforms is lovely though, and makes a good addition even without their watersheds implemented. I've found worldheight landforms combined with https://mods.vintagestory.at/realisticwater does some interesting things. Realistic water does not make rivers, but it does make water interact more realistically, re-filling lake edges when they're disturbed, allowing waterfalls to produce lakes, etc. I'd like to see some combination of this and Algernon's watersheds: some way to give realistic water the ability to erode, and to start of the world with good looking riverbeds for the realistic water to run into would be great.

I've written about this before, but it's nice to put things in lists so: I'd like a fragile mechanical sun which needs to be fed maybe 2 temporal gears each year to keep running properly. It seems like something which would have been very valuable to the cave-bound survivors. The mechanical sun would: Produce a huge amount of light; enough to fully light up one of the larger caverns. Allow crop growing underground within a certain radius. Increase temperature within a certain radius. Provide temporal stability to seraphs within a wide radius. Have a small chance to "degrade," (maybe 5% chance per month) which jumps to a high chance if not fed temporal gears on time (maybe 40% chance per month). If it became degraded, the mechanical sun would bring up a specific Jonas part when moused over (rolled randomly), alongside any temporal gears it needs. Right-clicking those parts into it would return it to normal function. There would be three levels of degradation: The light it produces occasionally flickers and dims. It no longer provides temporal stability. Has an increased chance to degrade further (maybe an additional 15% chance per month). The light it produces flickers and fluctuates constantly. Slightly reduces temporal stability to seraphs within a wide radius. Has an increased chance to degrade further (maybe an additional 20% chance per month). The light is reduced to a pulsing red ember, surrounded by rift-like distortions. Reduces temporal stability as if it were an enormous temporal rift. Increases temperature significantly, with a small chance to set creatures and crops on fire. This would offer an alternative, underground playstyle for late game players, with a built in challenge and potential disaster.