Bruno Willis

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.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I wonder if for specific things like candles, they could have placement similar to support beams (i.e. can be placed anywhere you can right click). Candles would need a few extra restrictions compared to support beams, i.e. They must always point upwards, and must be placed on an upward face of a block, even if it's just on one tiny chiseled notch in an otherwise horizontal wall.

RIP my first copper pick, hammer and chisel. By the time I realized what was going on I could only save my misc. chests and my rack of molds. I felt like such an idiot. I did this recently too.

This is a link to the mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/ecomachina I really second this recommendation. I hope the devs see this and add it to the game as soon as possible, it makes trees look like the tree on the icon. It's the most beautiful implementation of realistic trees I can imagine. Very very vintage story.

Yeah, and it'd make wood feel softer and easier to work with than stone. It'd encourage you to build a carpenter's workshop with your axes, saw, knives and chisel. You'd go there to process wood into planks and such, and also to do some of your wood carving for aesthetics. Anything that encourages dedicated realistically useful builds is good in my book.

Welcome to the forums! I don't think there's anything wrong with using recipes to decide what you're making first, like clay forming, but I'd like it if you could ruin a few boards with a miss-click and still get most of the boards at the end anyway, that sort of thing. This bit is really exciting. It'd be interesting if these tools could be toggled between recipy mode and chistling mode (in the way that the pro pick can toggle between states), so that the knife, axe and saw could chisel wooden blocks for aesthetics instead of recipe crafting. It'd be pretty handy to be able to carve beautiful wooden detailing pre-copper with your axe and knife, but still be restricted from any stones.

Yeah, what water looks like really helps sell what it is. Waves really made the ocean much more exciting. I've written before about the appearance of water, specifically waterfalls, in the "improving water" thread. For the sake of collecting ideas in the same place, I'm going to throw that idea up here too. (if you've read this before, please excuse me). Waterfalls: At the moment, when water falls, it remains a full block of blue liquid, which looks nothing like a real waterfall. Characters can swim up it too. I would love to see waterfalls changed so that when water drops it gets a different texture, becoming white water, and turning to mist if it falls more than 10 blocks. If possible, it would be nice if falling water could fall in a sheet, rather than as a full block of liquid. It'd be lovely if when falling water hit a solid block at the end of its fall it produced a dramatic water splashing animation too. On top of that, I don't think the swimming up waterfalls mechanic needs to stay. It's not really that useful, and it seems like an emersion breaking hold-over from TOBG, rather than anything realistic or uncompromising.

That's a very cool solution that sounds good to me (a luddite with no coding knowledge). For those of you looking for interesting river options to test out right now, this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/realisticwater has really excited me because it's looking at making water more realistic/interesting, and sort of accidentally produces water features. It might have slid under the radar cause it's not explicitly about river gen. It feels a bit messy right now, but not as emersion breaking as the river gen mods. I feel like by giving this mod's water: erosion powers the ability to make swamp mud, and flood-fill divots of a certain size then running the water rapidly during world gen (like rapid growing fruit trees) might make some very good water features. Maybe not full navigable rivers, but creeks, swamps and pools, for sure. If you're going to play this mod, just make sure to turn off your ability to place water. That's what makes it really shine.

I think this is sort of missing the point. With the addition of dynamic dungeons it is very easy to find many many copies of bits of clutter. Clutter used to feel really special to me, and now most of it is just an obstacle which takes extra long to mine through. I would like it to feel special, and I think making it fragile would make clutter feel more realistically old, and make repairing clutter feel more like archeological preservation than rare collectable collecting. I want to feel like I'm rescuing delicate traces of the past before they're lost forever. This is a good point, clutter fragility would need to be used selectively, probably applying to anything made of wood, cloth, ceramics, etc. It'd also probably need some more distinctive and fun sounds keyed to wood collapse, vs ceramics, etc. The current sound seems like it's designed to make you regret breaking that pile of rotten wood. If clutter were easier to break, and breaking it was somewhat intended behavior, I imagine the devs would make satisfying, not too invasive sounds to add to that feeling of being a heavy, clumsy fighter in a delicate space. This would be excellent too, adding to the experience of dungeon delving. I'd love to see rickety bridges with a slim chance to collapse, every time you use them. I'd also like to see the dynamic dungeons be smaller, but with more hidden areas. My concern here is that the real treasure of dungeons, at least for me, is the blocks they're made out of. They've really opened up building in stone for me. I'd like mechanics which meant either it's just not viable to spend time mining out the floors of dungeons because of a growing threat (so no nice blocks, but more risk vs reward looting gameplay), or mechanics which make mining out sections of dungeon not leave ugly floating ceramic crumbs and wood rubble There are now endless, easily accessible options to collect that sort of clutter. We can afford to accidentally break a bit of it. I think the devs would get the most out of making dynamic dungeons more survival mode friendly, and keeping the curated gameplay and exciting one-off set-pieces to story locations. I'd say this could be tuned well by setting a specific chance for foes to break clutter, somewhere very low but above 0%. What it would do though is add slight time pressure to preserving valuable artifacts once you've cracked open a historical site. That's realistic, and adds a bit of tension to a gameplay experience which is currently static. Not saying it's not fun to mark clutter, leave it for a year or two, then go collect it later, just that it might be more exciting if you felt like you needed to go get it quick or it might be destroyed. Wouldn't be an issue for clutter that's out of your regularly visited areas of course, and probably wouldn't be a real risk most of the time. In my experience, the good stuff is up against the walls, and it's rotten wood, anvil stumps, rusted iron bars and crates at risk of being stepped on by you or the foe.

I'll do cover art for you if you want it

I would say, I think the devs want travel to be a big part of V.S. so it'd be nice if they implemented methods from traditionally mobile cultures to support that gameplay (traveling to far distant story locations). Rather than a crook, (or probably alongside it) I'd love to see herding dogs used. I'd love to see early dog domestication as part of herding. A working dog would circle the herd to keep them bunched while traveling, then leave them alone to have a good sleep if fed meat, (or return to nature and devour a goat if left hungry too long). Working dogs could also frighten off wild wolves, or fight them, and a loyal, highly domesticated one might go up against a bear to protect the flock. You could smith spiked "wolf collars" to give your working dogs better defense and the ability to throw damage back at an attacker. In the other block game, the pets feel awful because they don't really do much and just get left waiting around, begging for pointless interaction. I'd hate V.S. to add dog domestication just because people want dog pets, and herding would be a great real reason to keep dogs.

With the new dungeons, clutter is more easily accessed. It looks great, but doesn't feels rare anymore. If Clutter were delicate and likely to break, it could be used all through ruins and still be precious. I've been looting dungeons for aged stone variants, which has caused me to A: have the most fun building I've had so far and B: burn through two pickaxes and a chisel on aesthetics in the very early game. I think both things are great for gameplay, but I've left behind an absolute mess in the looted ruins, (a worse sort of mess than before). I'm too early game to take any clutter, so it's just floating in defiance of time?/gravity. My looted dungeons look horrible now. To solve this, let's make clutter actually fragile: Have clutter disintegrate very quickly when mined without first gluing. (mine speed increased to something like that of haybales). Keep the slow mining speed once clutter is glued (to imply you are being very very careful with the repaired piece). Give clutter a high chance to disintegrate if walked on (10% for rust-foes, 20% for malefactors, 50% blackguards, 30% everyone else). Let clutter be affected by gravity, and be guaranteed to disintegrate if it falls (With something like a 60% chance to survive falls after it's been glued up). Have clutter disintegrate if hit with an attack? (I don't know how attacks interact with the environment so please correct me if that wouldn't work) That way when you enter a ruin and see the clutter you don't just gloss over it thinking, "I'll loot and clear this place out, and come back for the clutter later." You move cautiously around the ancient space, accidentally shattering old tables and rusted iron grates with the smallest touch, and when you see something special you make sure to glue it up quickly, before it gets destroyed on accident. That way you really value the clutter you glue up. It'd let you feel like an archeologist if you're careful, or a barbarian in a ceramics exhibit if you're not. Also, imagine how satisfying it would be to fight a shiver in a dungeon, being nocked onto a crate, which shatters under you. You swing wildly, miss, and destroy a rotten table with a single blow...

Sticky dirt. Lets you play with block sideways instability without the hillsides sliding off their bones when a rabbit walks past. Gives you wonderful moments when climbing and a clod of earth breaks free from under you and you've got a second to jump to safety or plumet down with it.

I like the idea of simulating the movement of large groups of animals like this: I think, unlike predator animals, you don't want prey animals to have the ability to keep spawning (I don't think you were suggesting they could, I'm just extrapolating from the dens discussion). Having a big group move into an area at the start of each spring seems like a really interesting way to encourage hunting in set areas, getting to know the tricks of the location etc. If animals are not re-spawning until the next spring, the player might choose to hold off on hunting until the summer or autumn when the animals get a bit of weight on them, in which case you'd be more incentivized to wipe out the bears and wolves before they whittle down the prey animal population. You'd feel more like you were competing for protein with the other predators, and for a wee while you'd feel pretty outmatched by the bears.

All of the above! I love this idea. Sounds like the sort of rust foe that might follow you up out of a dungeon and get you when you least expect it.

And here's a horrible idea: cave flooding during rain. Would it be crazy if caves with water flowing in them had the chance to gradually fill up during/after rainfall? They'd dry up again after a while. I'm imagining the game noticing when flowing water is under ground, and when that water stops flowing horizontally (becomes blocked), the game uses a temporary flood-fill command, layer by layer, to fill that part of the caves with pooled water. Maybe 1 layer of water for every day after rain starts, with the flooding starting at the end of the first day and ending 2 days after the last rainfall. Using the pre-existing flood fill mechanic means larger spaces can't get flooded out, only contained depressions. If it were flood-filling using a special type of water which knows it's going to dry up again, maybe it wouldn't be too complex? The flooding would also be restricted to areas underground which already have flowing waterfalls going into them, so it would be a risk you can notice as you go in, and wouldn't be overly widespread. Caves seem like a more controllable environment to attempt flooding mechanics than on river banks, and also offer more dramatic flooding because water is getting channeled and condensed, so it can rise really fast (this is one of the big risks of caving, I think, so it'd be exciting to see it in game). It'd also be amazing if water dripped from the ceilings of caves for a good while after rainfall.

With the addition of the new dungeons, I feel like the devs could replace most caves in hard stone regions with old mining cavities. Imagine a straight shaft dropping directly into a maze of obviously hand-dug branches, half flooded, full of cave-ins and rotten support beams. They would be empty of loot, just a replacement for the current caves in those regions, with the same possibility for cave ruins to generate attached (or maybe a slightly increased possibility of generating cave ruins?) To re-cap, that'd mean: - And in the hard stone regions where we wouldn't realistically see caves, instead we get abandoned mine shafts dropping straight into narrow, zig-zagging branches.

I've started a bunch of new worlds recently and run about them in survival, and as I got used to what the new berry bushes look like, I found it just as easy as before to get a good berry feed in the very early game, just with a bit more variation. I also feel like wild berry bushes in the same group have more variety in when they're going to ripen, which means it's now a lot easier to keep relying on wild berries and harvesting a handful here and there, even in places you've already harvested before.

This mod here: https://mods.vintagestory.at/realisticwater is going in a really interesting direction. I've been playing with various river mods, and all the explicit terrain gen mods just can't handle water mechanics. If any other terrain feature interrupts a generated river, you get horrible messy water or hollows carved through hills. By focusing on making water work more realistically, this mod maker has gotten closer to realistic rivers (in my opinion) without changing the terrain at all. By giving water properties which let it work more realistically, and allowing it to alter terrain over time, I think this would get us to rivers in a way which also supports soil instability, aqueducts, and damning rivers. Build realistic water before trying to make shapes that look like realistic rivers: that way the rivers will feel like rivers not just look like them.

If bear and wolf spawns were decoupled from fixed spawns in general, and then the individual animals had a new behavior which let them make dens which would then establish their long-term presence, that might get around many of the issues. What if certain structures like ruins and cave entrances had a tag attached to them which said "suitable for den", and then we moved to slightly reduced, randomized wolf and bear spawns. Then those individual animals would get a new behavior which asks them to find the nearest suitable den location and build a den there - lets use the bear dragging a kill home as an example. The game would change the tag to "den". Those mob-built dens would then become an anchor point for that randomly spawned predator, and could generate a new predator after 5-10 days there if the original dies but the den remains intact (yes, that's still farmable, but just worse than farming pigs). An additional way for the danger to grow over time might be that once a randomly spawned bear or wolf makes a den, it doesn't count towards the mob cap? anymore, which lets the game potentially spawn another wandering predator in the nearby area. This might be more realistic for bears, but less realistic for wolves (bears are solitary, wolves are not). Maybe wolf dens would have the ability to multiply by themselves every spring, where bear dens don't? With this change way we keep the chance for predators to just wander close to your base (which I agree is a good feature) but we also get this feeling of tracking threats to their homes and wiping them out for good (game progression not tied to tech tree or story). I also think the current spawn system simulates animals wandering into the area surprisingly well, so we get to keep that effect while adding the feeling that they can set up homes and become a worse issue if left to thrive. And of course this: I'd also like to keep the bears marking their territory with scratch marks: Maybe each bear spawns in with the ability to scratch logs 3 times total, and only starts doing that once its established a den. One of the things I like about tying resin logs to bear scratching is that it means every time you see a resin log you start thinking: "has a bear moved in here? Oh no." And you also start thinking: "Oh, the local brown bear's over there right now! I can sneak into her den and harvest all that resin that seeps out of her warning trees." I.e. this mechanic gives resin an established threat and reward system, which I think would be fun. Another thing we get from dens which is useful is that the game can then give out information about threats. Imagine talking to a trader, and the game flags the presence of a bear den near the trader. "You want to watch out newcomer. There's something dangerous in the woods over yonder" marks on map. Or "A nasty old bear's wandered close and set up a den around here." marks on map "Makes getting supplies in a challenge. You bring me its head and you can have some of my stock, free of charge... within reason." (discount with bear head).