Bruno Willis

Oh 100%. I've had rats chew through concrete to get into my hen house.

I really like these ideas, and don't have much to add. I'm not 100% on locusts, just because they're small, so they'd be hard to make interactable, and also, they'd strip the wild trees and bushes too, and we don't have a way for nature to recover yet Rats: I would love to see mechanics which gradually show the progression of time, and I think rats could be part of that. They could work by generateing rat-holes in the interior walls of rooms, rarely, after year 1. The holes would have a higher chance to generate in wood, wattle and daube, easily chewed blocks, with a small chance to generate in cobblestone, and no chance in natural stone. The holes would occasionally output a rat at night, which would then seek food placed out in the open (think on a table, on a shelf, etc.) If it ran into a storage vessel or food filled chest though it would add that storage to its list of targets, and come back to it the next night. I'd say storage vessels would be pretty hard for a rat to get into, but a chest with food in it would be no trouble, just gnaw a little hole in it. The rat would be a little animated creature with a hit-box, smaller than a racoon, but not too small. You'd be able to fill rat-holes with daube or mortar, but if the rat wasn't killed, the hole would re-open pretty quickly. Then of course, you'd need rat traps and rat-ona-stick barbeque as a minimum, with cats and dogs as a nice to have for later.

I really like the idea of, even if they're not mechanically different, each class having different animations for things, as well as different ways of interacting with things. I could see a situation where each class has one unique attack among all the possible attacks they make. I love the idea that your blackguard friend actually always tears flimsy doors off their hinges, and the tailor minces around carefully, never breaks the flimsy door, etc. And then they feel different to play, like the hunter has really long strides in their animation, the malefactor moves faster crouching than others, sees better in darkness but the daytime world is colour-graded in a noir style (just subtly). I'd even like it if classes with shortsighted were actually shortsighted in game, but in an aesthetic way. I played as a clockmaker with my brother - hunter - and my computer was way weaker than his, so he spotted the bears way before me: "Look at that mountain over there, that's sick!" "What mountain?" "It's just over there" "Where?" It was really fun. Basically I want someone to go "Uh, I'm just going to play hunter this playthrough, I'm sick of malefactor" and then get a real surprise at how the game feels. "They live like this?!"

Trying to repair a broken fuel line during flight sounds like fun. I'd love it if you could try and land and fix things safely, or stay in the sky, crawl out of the cockpit, and tie something together again with flax twine and pitch glue (heated on the exposed engine of course). Personally, I love bi-planes and tri-planes, and I think they'd look pretty vintage story. You get those fabric wings that look just like windmill sails, + a motor which would have to be very Jonas tech.

Thinking about favorite foods, I think it'd be really fun to have a mid-late game mechanic so that you can establish your favorite foods. What if that was what proper cutlery and plates were for? Finally I've made knifes, forks, spoons and chopsticks, and a glazed plate and bowl. I'm going to sit down at a table and eat a meal, a meal I think my seraph likes a lot. The first time you eat a specific meal using all the best culinary tools, the game rolls a dice, maybe having a 1 in 3 chance to hit, and make that food one of your favorites. Maybe each seraph can have 2 - 4 favorite meals max, and you have a part to play in choosing them, but you're not guaranteed to get it right. If we're using the novelty mod system, your favorite foods could fill the novelty nutrition bar twice as fast (but if you're eating the same meal over and over again, it's going to stop helping pretty quickly, whether it's a fav. or not). Otherwise, your favorite foods could fill their appropriate nutrition bars further, or apply the hunger cooldown for longer (as suggested in some of the previous comments). The point would be that you still have to try several meals to find what's your favorite, but you've got a bit of choice as to what ends up as a favorite meal. It would also be fun to lay the table properly, for one, and then carefully eat the stew you've been subsisting on for a year, only to confirm, "yup, that's not my favorite meal. Thought so."

Hey, sorry to jump into this full on discussion without reading all the arguments, I just want to add my two cents to the general topic: I really like having reasons to eat lots of different meals, and the current nutrition system helps with that. This mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/novelty takes that mechanic a bit further, adding an extra nutrition bar which gets filled a little each time you eat a substance you havn't eaten recently. Suddenly the wide range of mushrooms make sense, and I find I'm fishing more, collecting many types of berries and making mixed berry pies with all three basic doughs. It works, really well. If you care about a sense of realism when it comes to food, I'd really recommend checking this mod out. It solves the problem. Personally, I think it should be adapted into the base game and wouldn't need much changed.

I really don't see the point in giving a pommel attack to swords, as realistically, it's going to have the same range and damage as a punch with an armored fist: i.e. meaningful, but not meaningful enough to have a special mode for. I'd guess it's not going to deliver more force than the blunt force that comes off a strike with the blade (leverage). The only time a pommel strike makes sense is when you can't hit them with the blade, and just want to punch your enemy to get a bit of distance. I'd say rather than using slashing, piercing, crushing damage types, it'd be more useful to have damage and 'true damage.' damage is blocked by armor and shields, while true damage is not (or is not blocked as much). Basically edged weapons are doing a lot of damage, but very little true damage, while clubs are doing only true damage. I think that removes an unnecessary differentiation between piercing and slashing but retains the idea that some weapons just deliver more force, while others wound far worse if they can find flesh.

I'm picturing pressing F and choosing a mode (like with a pro-pick) in the middle of combat... Doesn't sound very smooth to me, but maybe it could be? I could imagine holding a weapon in hand and pressing F and being given a quick list of stances to choose from instead (maybe 4?). Aggressive, precise, wide and defensive say. Those stances would then change the type of attack each weapon does, and offer alternative animations with them: Aggressive: Swords, falx, axe = big overhead swings, get more damage out of falx and axe. Spears = slower lunges with more power. Bows draw faster, for less damage. Precise: Swords, spears & bows deal extra damage against the head, all weapons deal a little extra against armored opponents. Wide: Longer weapons can be swung in wide arcs, hitting multiple opponents (sword, falx, axe). Spears and Polearms (ruined bardiche, etc.) deal some extra damage (or maybe just have a wider arc). Bows gain extra range. Defensive: Nimble weapons (sword, spear) get a parry option. Shields block extra damage. Bows draw slower for more damage. You'd have to press F and choose a stance whenever you wanted to shift stances, which would mean the average player would set a stance as they went into a fight, and leave it at that. It'd be a real skill learning to pick your moment and switch stances mid fight, which might be cool. Although, maybe stance switching could be keyed to your movement keys, since you're already going to have your fingers there while fighting. Essentially, you'd press F, which would bring up a grey cross with the four stance options, then if you pressed W (forward) you'd go straight into aggressive stance, if you pressed S you'd go into defensive, and to either side would do wide or precise. That way, even if you are flummoxed or press F accidentally, you don't get locked into an inventory screen, you might just enter a stance that's not ideal. You'll still be able to attack.

I 100% agree with this assessment. This is my wish-list for foe changes: Drifters: More mischief than malevolence. I'd like them to beg for food if you are carrying food, rather than attacking. I'd also like them to be somewhat passive, sometimes just swinging at you once as they walk past, but also have a special attack which only triggers when you turn your back on them, where they rush over and shove you (think about caving). I'd also like to see drifters pick up and throw locusts at you, if there are locusts around. Bowtorns: If they fall over onto you as they die, it should hurt, a lot. Also, maybe a mechanic where, if you can get close to them while their back is turned and right click them, you've got a chance to grab onto their arm stumps and aim them like an arbalist. Shivers: I love the o.p.'s suggestion. I'd also like to see shivers climbing (slowly) and hiding in wait up high. Locusts: Have a chance to cling onto you, slowing your move speed but not dealing damage. The move speed reduction would add up for how many were clinging to you, and they would have a chance to drop off at random and keep attacking. (also could let pet locusts cling to you as a light source). Bears: More likely to warn you or swipe you once than actually attack, except in winter when they'd sneak around and murder you. Also, bears should eat any meat you were carrying on you if they kill you. Wolves: Scared of fire, and will back away if you point a torch at them. The ones behind you won't though so watch out.

This sort of news is always so exciting! The V.S. dev team seem to out-do expectations every time, in such creative ways. If you're working on combat and hitboxes, I'd love to see some of that work translate into more accuracy-based hunting too, but regardless, best of luck.

Very good idea. For realism and kindness, I'd say: Wooden pan = 200 durability Pure gold = 300 durability + extremely fancy looks. Copper pan = 800 durability Bronze pan = 1000 durability Iron and Steel pan = no durability lost, only difference between them is aesthetic (both look good, steel looks cleaner).

One of my first deaths was to a raccoon. Easy little meal I thought. I'm starving to death so why not...

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.