Bruno Willis

This interior is really nice! I love seeing support beams and subtle chiseled details, and wallpaper! I'd say a base is never finished, just sometimes abandoned.

Great idea. I'd suggest allowing players to make 'baskets' out of kelp (we do this in Aotearoa New Zealand by taking the broad leaves, cutting a mouth and pealing them open, then drying them open. They make stiff pouches). It'd be a nasty challenge diving for kelp in the frigid climate.

I'd like to second this - I'm relatively new to this game, and didn't have much trouble when I started. I found it harder than I expected, and instead of accepting the challenge and figuring it out for myself I did a cursory check online, listening to 1 guide while I played. The equivalent of asking a friend who'd played, then half listening to their answer. That's a player problem not a game problem - I wanted the reward before I'd done the work. I've not used any prospecting mods, and once I'd managed to use the pro-pick successfully, it made plenty of sense. Because it was difficult, once I hit ore it was hugely satisfying. I think its important when playing VS to go into things with an attitude of "this might work, let's find out" rather than: Nothing in life is certain. I think this game just doesn't suit a jump on, win win win, quit and forget sort of gameplay. While it would be nice if VS were even more popular, I think the game supports a slower, more thoughtful style.

Yes, or as a mechanism in a ruin, which could be repaired to make exploring the ruin safer or ignored if the parts are unavailable, leading to hard-mode exploration. Thanks! Yeah, the idea came more from thinking about what the past humans would have wanted than what current players might want. What I'm most interested in with this idea is the idea of fixing technology which is too advanced to make ourselves. I really think there could be an interesting voxel-based mini-game like knapping flint, but on the far opposite end of technological progression. It would be used to activate advanced and/or unique technology (and alternatively let you loot Jonas parts and ruin the tech).

The game tells me landcover scale "determines how much ocean will be between pieces of land" so when there is almost no ocean, setting it at 500% might mean you actually get oceans of a real size, just very very rarely? So when you have 40% landcover, having 500% landcover scale (read ocean scale) would try to distribute that 40% of the land really evenly across the world, leading to many smaller islands. I think what's happens is that by dropping landcover scale to 75% the world still has to have only 40% of the world as land, but the oceans aren't forced to be maximally large, so that 40% of land can end up being a bit larger and more interestingly shaped. It seems like it, although the saltwater vs freshwater boundaries are a bit weird at the moment - i.e. dead straight. Yes! I've been really wanting a good ocean travel world with decent continents, so I've been checking what anyone else had already tried. I hope people keep figuring out the vanilla world gen settings, because it genuinely looks so good and true to real geography now, but the controls are so unintuitive.

Make a strange mechanical core which lights up a huge space, increases the temperature of glasshouses significantly, allows you to grow crops underground, and then panic as your now crucial machine flickers and whines, begging for maintenance that you just don't have the parts for. Essentially this would be a costly multi-part Jonas tech orb that a seraph could make which would be able to light up huge amounts of space. If enclosed in a glasshouse it would add (up to) +10 to the farmland temperature, and enable crops to be grown underground within about 20 blocks or so of the synthetic sun. It would also produce a temporal instability zone, similar to a temporal rift, but much larger and much less potent (and invisible). But... As salvaged tech from an ancient era, the synthetic sun would be liable to break down. There would be a timer which would slowly tick down, lasting between 1 and 2 months. At the end of that time, the synthetic sun would start malfunctioning. The light would occasionally fade or flicker, the farmland temperature improvement would fall to +8, and the temporal instability zone would become a little more potent. At this point a seraph could get close enough to interact with it (well within the instability zone) and tinker with it. The synthetic sun would be hot, requiring them to use tongs and a wrench, and ideally play a voxel re-arranging mini-game to bring the synthetic sun back to full operating power. If left un-tinkered with for more than 14 days, the synthetic sun would become damaged. The light would be noticeably dimmer at all times, and would often brown out or flicker. The farmland temperature improvement would fall to +4 and the temporal instability zone would become as potent as a normal rift, but far larger. The fixing mechanic would be the same as before, just requiring a randomly chosen, specific Jonas part or temporal cog. Finally, if left damaged for more than 7 days, the synthetic sun would go critical. It would produce only a faint, pulsing red glow and no farmland temperature improvement. The temporal instability zone would double in size, meaning the whole area once lit up by the synthetic sun would be fully in the rustworld. The fixing mechanic would be the same as before, but it would require a a whole host of different Jonas parts. Imagine how useful this would be for living in a frozen wasteland or deep underground, and how fun it would be as a challenge, requiring maintenance and if you are lax, requiring you to go out and find more Jonas parts. It would make natural stories for a late-game world where the players are already good at finding Jonas parts, especially in multi-player. Of course the clockmaker would have to have a bonus to tinkering with and fixing these, or perhaps to how long their fix would last. It seems like the sort of technology the inventors of the past might have rigged up in the last moments to warm the depths and let them try to grow food.

Sure, it's nice, it does make good islands with plenty of ocean, but it could be better... And now it is! I have uncovered the actual best settings for continents: Landcover: 40% Landcover scale: 75% Landform scale: 120%. No other settings can get you better continents and seas. I think. In all seriousness, I like the 30 - 300, but it has produced quite small islands for me which made finding reeds hard, and would make elk sort of pointless. The 40, 75 set up makes large continents which might take between 1-2 in game days hard riding to cross, and each continent is separated by enough ocean that sailing is a viable travel option. Adding landform scale at 120 just makes elk travel more viable - sometimes - and gives each continent a different vibe, even if they've got the same stone type and temperature.

I've just fought and been murdered by the two headed drifter a few times, and I noticed through my blood and trumpet screaming, that I'd managed to hook loot out of the over-friendly drifter while desperately swinging my falx. I didn't kill them, but I ended up getting a temporal gear and a bunch of gears anyway. I think adding the auto-loot feature to the falx is a really interesting solution to the crazy high health of scarier drifters. The point isn't to kill them, it's to have tense moments and be rewarded for taking big risks. I can see myself ducking out into the temporal storms now, swiping the scary guys until they drop things, grabbing the glowing cogs and running back inside. That's much more interesting that having to kill everything, to me at least.

Welcome! I also haven't tried any of the class altering mods, so this comes purely from enjoying the base game: I feel like the malefactor already ticks of some of this forager class. Maybe adding some exclusive poison recipes to that class would make it more exciting, rather than adding a whole new class? On explorer, I think it's important to avoid making any class inherently and obviously better at exploring, since that's such an interesting part of the game which everyone should feel comfortable doing, using the variety of playstyles already out there. Also, malefactor already has a way to get extra loot from cracked vessels, in a way. I do think a merchant class of some sort would be very interesting though - I don't have any strong ideas about how it might be done, or whether it would disrupt the lore. I'd love to see a blacksmith class, who gets alternative, challenging smithing recipes, to make 2 knives or 2 chisels out of a single ingot for example. Actually, I think I just want those to be the normal smithing recipes. No more waste! Saying all that, this seems like a very contentious topic, with some people wanting the system to have more classes and differences and some wanting no classes at all, which suggests that the current system sits pretty nicely in the middle. Also, if you didn't know, you can totally turn off class specific recipes when making a new world (check the multiplayer tab on customized world gen). I believe you can do that through commands for an existing world too, as well as change classes (I'm sorry, I don't know what commands you'd use though).

A thought on net fishing: With the new sailing boats, I feel like a net fishing 'mini-game' would be excellent for VS. Here's the vision: You craft and fill two slots in the body of your sailing boat with an empty net, then head out to sea (specifically salt water). As you move across the water, gulls fly down and perch on the mast and gunwales, or take off from the boat and fly away. Suddenly, all the gulls take off at once and start circling the boat, screeching and divebombing the water. Looking over the side you can see a spot where the water glimmers oddly, so you ease the sails, get as close as you can, and toss out the net. After some time the water glimmer might move elsewhere, so you pull the net up. The two net slots are now filled with a full net. You can butcher the fish now, or head back to shore. What's actually happening is that boats with fishing nets would generate gull 'particles,' gaining more the closer the boat gets to a school of fish. A school of fish would work like a singe creature, with a twisting, fishy outer surface. When you got within sight range of the school, the gull particles would rise up and start a fishing animation, which would tell you that you're close. You would find the school of fish, get near it but not on top of it, and toss out the net (If you sailed right over the school, I think it would get spooked). The net would fill in a short amount of time, and could be pulled back in with a right-click. The full net would act like an animal carcass- you Alt right-click on it with a knife, and after a while it opens a storage slot, packed full of butchered fish. I would make the butchering time significantly longer than butchering a normal animal, and produce a semi random but large amount of fish. It'd be a different way to fish than in the other block game, and I think it would suit the size and type of boat we have better than fishing with a line. I think it would also add a lot to the feeling of sailing.

I'm immediately imagining underground garden chambers with broken skylights - 1 block wide shafts - that a player could fall down, onto rows of high fertility soil, gravel and rot. Honestly, that might already exist - I feel like I've seen maybe a 10th of the ruins in the game so far. I'd also love to see large fragments of sewer systems used for underground shelter, like the London underground was during the blitz.

For me, the ruins themselves are the reward. 1: A good looking ruin makes an area so much more interesting. 2: in real life ruins usually exist in places where people wanted to live, so they're usually a sign of a good location. I would like to see more ruins which signal or make a useful location: Ruined tunnel passes which generate cutting right through mountain ranges Ruined wind-mills which are good and tall and ready to be repaired Ruined towers which only generate on tall points like mountains and cliffs Ruined docks and dockyards which only generate on the coast (of course) Overgrown open cast mines/quarries Crumbling bridges over rivers It seems like the current ruins don't take much of the local terrain into consideration, so these sorts of ruins might require a different level of generation rules, but I think they would add a lot to the world. They would be opportunities in themselves, infrastructure, rather than requiring loot to be useful.

Falconry would be amazing! I think the best bet would be to have some larger, interesting, interactive birds, and then nests, or maybe 'perching branches,' to produce generic birds particles and sounds. Seeing as chickens are only kind of worth butchering, I don't think we need to worry too much about having full interactions and realism with even smaller birds. I just want to hear them and see movement in the sky.

I really like the idea of birds, especially sea and forest birds, from an aesthetic perspective rather than as a mob that you interact with necessarily. I love how bee-hives look and work. Would wild nests be an option? They could spawn naturally on trees and cliffs, have a chance to generate new ones near old ones every spring, and be able to be picked up and moved. Within a large range of the nest you would have large simple particles which would wheel about up high, then dip down to the nest block, or fly up out of it. The nest would also be the source of bird-sound, maybe forest birds if the nest is placed on a leaf block, or gull sounds if the nest is on stone or grassy soil. A seraph could fossick in nests by right clicking to gain a semi-random number of feathers and maybe an egg every now and then, causing the bird particles to dive-bomb the seraph. I get the feeling that particles, even sort of complex ones, are much lighter on lag than actual creatures.

I'd also love to be able to make salt pans along the coast. It could be something like laying stone slabs flat in the top layer of sea water and enclosing them on all but one side would make a salt pan (like how the game figures out you're making a charcoal pit). In the height of summer, or after enough days with a high outside temperature, a layer of salt could form on the central slab. I don't want to be a miner just to make my cheese.

Yes! In my first world I took things slow and used what was available, and ended up with black-bronze plate (I had more gold and silver than tin). While the armor wasn't as good as I expected, it looked epic and expressed something about my local area (that there was a lot of gold and silver around). Of course, then I found iron. I think the point of all the variation isn't to muddy the progression tree, it's to offer variety and different sorts of progression based on the availability of resources.

I think combat is fine as is, although I'm sure there are rough spots which could do with a polish when their time comes. I think there are a lot of people who think combat is boring because they've put on a bunch of heavy armor and now they can't dodge, all they can do is hit and get hit: that's not a game issue, that's a playstyle issue. Wear less armor, be more mobile: I really like the way the game handles armor for that reason - if you want challenging, complex combat, you can easily get it. If you want to play it safe and just get to the cave ruins and back alive, you can armor up and do that too. For people who are unsatisfied with the 'simple' combat, I would suggest changing up your playstyle and seeing what you enjoy most. Wearing lots of armor, or no armor + shield, or light armor, carrying a melee weapon and only one spear - don't optimize for efficient gameplay, optimize for fun gameplay. It is a game not a job.

Great investigative world making. Thank you!

I would love for there to be a way to turn medium fertility into high fertility soil, but it would have to be challenging to reach that limit. I also love the idea of creating barren soil if you're a monocropping. We need someone with familiarity with the code to tell us how impossible this stuff is, or we're just going to get carried away.

Personally I'd like (or hate) to see higher tier shivers crawling on the walls and celling towards me like locusts can. I think that'd be good and creepy, especially if they drop off the ceiling when they have their shivering spells. Yuck! I've also seen a suggestion for bowtorn to be less accurate at lower tiers, and get more accurate, or alternatively to get rapid-fire bursts at high tiers but no improvement to health. I feel like the drifters are great as is though: they're chunky little chaps, why wouldn't they get harder to kill with more bits of rusty metal bolted on?

One hundred percent, and I think this is a really good fix. It really feels like it needs to be fixed. Bumber suggested on a different thread: There's a mod that gives it a chance to drop based on the remaining nutrients. If it's fully replenished for the quality, it always drops. Another alternative would be to store the nutrients in item data. That might create an issue with item stacks (like pressed fruit), but it's on the player for not waiting. And I wonder if that alternative could work in a similar way to how when you put two ingots of different temperatures together, the temperatures average out - the calculation would be three times as complex for soil nutrients as with metal temp. but if the code isn't awful I think this would be the cleanest method.

No - that's true. If they're behind you then you'll just get an extra spine sticking out of your back (I think that's what the bowtorn are firing after the update D-:} ) I usually make an improvised shield and rush for iron, but you can make a decent shield as soon as you've got bronze to spare. The main difference with the real shields is durability. I just checked, and all shields have a 20% chance to block attacks passively, and all the shields made with metal rims and plank bodies block 6 projectile damage. That might not be enough for you, if the bowtorn are already a problem, but it feels like it makes a big difference to me.

Yeah! In other threads I've seen people saying shields are useless: this is the use case for shields. They have a decent chance at just outright blocking a bowtorn attack that you didn't see coming, and they allow you to crouch and try to figure out where the creature is with 100% chance to block the next attack. This game has a great system of trade offs - if you want to dodge the beasts of the forest, wear less armor, if you want to fight nightmare drifters, wear more armor, if bowtorn keep killing you before you spot them, get a shield or keep moving while outside. This is an excellent idea. Horrible and excellent.

I love provoking drifter arguments too.

Birch is so hard to propagate! I use shears and I have no trouble at all getting way more acorns, walnuts and maple seeds, but I am so very careful to shear every leaf-block for each birch tree I cut and I am not quite at replacement levels. I think because they have so few leaves per tree, even if the drop-rate is high, it feels like they're a precious tree. I would love to see a way for forests to regenerate perhaps, as if there are seeds buried in the ground and when space opens up they have a chance to go. Basically, forest floor would have a slim chance to generate a planted sapling if it was exposed to direct sunlight during spring. That might mitigate the need for a guarantied seed drop? I do think the drop-rate is too low, although manageable for ordinary trees when using shears.