Bruno Willis

IDK, people should be queasy about killing animals. It isn't nice, but I eat meat so... I guess part of it is that you can be a vegetarian in V.S. and if killing animals would make you uncomfortable, don't do it. But it's a game, and I get that the devs want everyone to have fun and enjoy a wilderness survival fantasy, not contemplate the morality of meat.

I've just written about this topic on a very busy, contentious discussion thread, and I'd love to put it more clearly, somewhere more relevant and constructive. Also, I love the blood-trail mod, and I think it is a good addition to the game. As hunters IRL, both me and my brother enjoy V.S. hunting as it is, but if it needs improving this is what I'd do: In real life, most wounds to an animal will be fatal eventually, but unless the wound drops the animal immediately, you're going to spend the rest of the day looking for it. A deer can run kilometers with a fatal wound. To stop that sort of thing happening hunters will aim for a cluster of arteries just above the heart, at about the top of the shoulder blade. If it hits, blood leaves the animal's brain instantly, killing it on the spot. If they miss the general spot they hit the heart, lungs or break the shoulder blades, which kills the animal almost as fast, or at the least drops it. Any other area, even with a high powered rifle, will allow the animal to run or scramble a good way away (we're talking goats and deer here, not rabbits). To reflect that: Add a instant-kill hitbox inside the center of animal's chests. It would have to be small enough to be hard to hit, and only be able to be hit with piercing style weapons (arrows, spears, swords). Reward instant kills with more meat. If you're hitting an animal with multiple wounds, or god forbid, wailing on an animal with a tool intended to tear into rust-foe, you're going to damage the meat and spoil some of it. If an animal is dropped in one hit, it yields more meat. Ensure that arrows are more accurate than spears. That way spears can still outpace bows in damage, but bows become better hunting weapons because they can drop an animal instantly, more often. Keep the current damage system alongside. Currently animals run away when injured, then lie down for a rest. Keep it, or make them slightly more intelligent about where they hide, but that might be too punishing? There's no need to go full realism, and have them scramble into unreachable bracken to die. There are a few caveats. Wild pigs are notoriously tough to kill IRL, so I would make the instant-kill hitbox only available from the front, so you can have them run on your boar spear, medieval style. Bears are too big to reach the heart spot (or at least, I feel like they need to remain a boss-level threat, so lets say they are). Small animals really shouldn't be able to survive a hit from any of the weapons in the game. I've shot at a rabbit, missed, and it died of shock anyway. Give small animals an instant-kill hitbox which takes up the whole front half of their body.

To derail the argument for a second, (and I think the thread has moved on a bit since I started this one but oh well) I've hunted a fair bit, and the story about the deer being hit, walking a bit, and then dyeing sounds quite possible. If you shoot an animal with a decent gun, it will die. The question is how far it will run/where will it hide before it does die. If you don't hit an animal's heart/lungs it can run kilometers before dying, so a lot of hunters will aim to hit an animal through the shoulder, just above the heart, where the big veins to the brain are. If they miss, they hit it's lungs or break it's front legs so it can't escape. With small animals, like rabbits, I've shot at a rabbit, missed, and it dropped dead from the surprise. Realistically small animals wouldn't survive any hit from any weapon, what-so-ever. Hares are a bit tougher, but an arrow or spear to the body would kill them, no two ways about it. If I were to improve hunting, I'd add a hitbox in the center of animal's chests, at about shoulder height, which would be an instant kill if hit. It'd be small enough to be a challenge, but wouldn't change size with animal, so that it would be easier to instant-kill a goat than a moose, and almost guaranteed to instant kill a hare. Pigs might need to be a special case, where the instant-kill box is only available from the front (cause I believe wild pigs are pretty unkillable unless stabbed through the heart). On a side note, headshots are not really a sensible option hunting IRL: it's easier to miss, and even if you hit, you have to hit the brain, and even then, with an arrow or spear that might not be instantly fatal. Animals can run a good way before their body realizes it's dead. This should maybe be a separate thread, but it's a late response to something from earlier. Ignore if necessary.

That'd work nicely. I'm thinking about how clean the transition from grassland into forest floor is during natural generation, but that texture is suggesting leaves and twigs lying over grass, which you want to have a smooth gradient for. If that sort of ground were overtaken by grass again it would be fine if it were a bit patchy, cause it's grass. It's not a smooth process. It gets hold in one patch, then it spreads. I'd say the grassland to forest floor process should happen all at once so you get that nice transitional texture. You'd center it at the trunk of the tree, then replace all dirt with forest floor out from there, using the already existing world-gen technique to make it look nice. I think autumn could trigger that change, and perhaps each tree would just have a single chance to do it each autumn. The chance could also be fairly low, so that creating a whole forest floor would take several years.

Yeah, for sure. There needs to be some downside. There are often fast growing things which take a forest fire as an opportunity though. Lupins maybe? It would be cool if there were a long-term sign of forest fires left behind. I'd love it if there were a mechanic for some trees to survive, with fire scarred trunks. I'd love it if forest floor would form naturally, and also get replaced by grassland naturally. That'd be fantastic. I would say that trees IRL often leave seeds in the ground that can germinate years and years later (thank goodness). But yeah, performance quality is a big deal. Maybe the game would check to spawn saplings on forest floor only during spring, maybe only at the moment rainfall stops. Replacing forest floor with grass, and grass with forest floor, how would we do that? The way forest floor has that nice fade in texture makes it a bit of a challenge. I imagine in autumn trees could turn the ground under them into forest floor (as if they were dropping leaf litter), essentially re-writing the forest floor texture under them, (although that seems like a big performance ask too?) I really don't see how they'd get grassland to overtake forest floor again though, although I wish it could. It seems like it'd be really hard to get a nice transition.

Imagine if ruins had their generation chance tied to temporal stability, so that if you saw a whole lot of ruins in one place, you'd know it was low stability. That makes them more exciting to explore, and lets you know you shouldn't build there unless you really want to. It could also be the case for underground ruins - you're more likely to find them if you get into caves in unstable areas, but... you better be quick. You'd still find ruins in stable areas, just not as often, and you'd probably get a slight uneasy feeling even if they were safe. That's how a seraph should feel, seeing remnants of their familiar world turned to ancient ruins.

Discussing the wonderful experience of lightening triggering fires, I said that I'd use that game mode, only if forests could recover from fire. The rules that govern what happens in the game after it starts shouldn't contradict the way the world looks when you first log in. If fire can permanently devastate forests, why are there still forests? Here's a solution: Forest floor has a chance to generate saplings if there are no trees or saplings already growing within 15 blocks. The game would use the generation data to choose what sorts of saplings. If you wanted to clear a forest forever you'd have to dig up the forest floor too. When berry bushes burn down they leave have a high chance to leave "burned bushes" which deteriorate to generate 1-4 berry bushes of that type the following spring. Maybe that's a propagation method? Is that a problem? Bushes (the only leaf varieties of trees) grow spontaneously, rarely, in places where they would be generated during world gen. These would generate very rarely, say 1 bush per 100 blocks per year, so that keeping an area clear would be easy, but fire-cleared areas could gradually recover to their original wilderness.

I'm not sure how exactly this works, so i simply put wood planks around the water and carved them into a barrel. Also, the bottom is a wooden plank block instead of your normal floor. The downside is that despite its small size it takes up 3x3 blocks so you can't build directly next to it. These look really nice! Very cool chisel work. From what I can tell, you can waterlog any chiseled block that has less than a slab's worth of voxels. You might also have to click on a block adjacent to it to fill the space with water, I'm not sure.

Welcome to the forums, I am so keen to go fishing using a net and a sailing boat.

Yeah, I want to play with lightening spreading fire, but it doesn't feel realistic or fully fleshed out yet. I really think the game would thrive if it had systems to recover from disaster and deforestation. I'd go with forest floor being able to generate saplings if there are no trees left within a certain area and berry bushes re-growing from burned remnants after fires, etc.

All the amours already look different depending on material, which is fantastic. Black bronze looks sick. Falx, being a specific design lore wise, maybe shouldn't change based on material. Knifes on the other hand - would love to see a different knife shape for every material. We could go from ceremonial bronze daggers through all sorts of designs. I'd also love it if knives could always be handled with bone, no matter what metal you used, and if you handled them with bone you got another different model.

I really like this take. Particularly linking rust foe spawning proximity to character stability during storms. That ties the storms into an established mechanic, with established ways to deal with it. If rift wards were altered to fill the niche, I'd say they could produce an area where your personal stability is artificially higher, which could let you make it though storms without rust-foes spawning in your room, especially if you have a several rift wards set up. I like what The Lurf suggested too, I think linking above-ground spawns exclusively to rifts could help, as would making rust-foes spawn right inside the rifts and stumble out. Maybe rifts could be linked to darkness though, so that if you leave a dark patch in a room, it has a chance to spawn a rift there, like a nasty rusty cobweb. You'd certainly learn exactly where the problem area in your house was. I love the idea of rifts as environmental hazards. I'm imagining a huge, horizontal rift cutting across a valley. The issue would be that passing through a rift is no problem currently. I think you'd want to A. add some "guard" rust foes who hang close to rifts (as you said) and B. make rifts feel sort of viscous to pass through I.E. you'd slow down as you tried to pull free from them. I've written previously about using light and fire as a early game rift ward. I'd love to inject it in here as another part of a solution. Basically, if light prevents rifts spawning, lots of light might make a small pocket of stability during a temporal storm. You'd build bonfires, and fight to keep them lit. Big two by two or three by three bonfires that swallow whole logs and throw out heaps of light and heat. It'd make a fun game for people who don't want combat. "We're not going to have enough wood!" "We don't need that beam on that corner, cut it out and burn it!" You'd use bonfires to stay stable during the storm, which would mean foes wouldn't spawn close to you. It'd mean you could have a bonfire in a courtyard and the foes would be stuck outside the gates, as long as you could keep the bonfire lit. Maybe they could be used to burn away smaller rifts, if you keep them lit right under the rift for long enough. They'd also be a way to scare off wolves and bears, as a side-effect.

Honestly, I'd love it if butchery were a bit more challenging and gruesome. We're killing animals here people! It's not like it's a nice thing to do. It seems like it'd be pretty challenging to add more detail to butchery without making it clearer that we're cutting up a creature.

It has a superficial similarity to gourmand, in how it looks, rather than how it plays. No negatives, just a benefit if you fill the bar up, just like the other nutrition bars, except it's tracking how recently you at that meal. You fill it up naturally, gradually. It doesn't take anything away from the nutrition of other foods, even favorite foods. But I get it, it suits my play style, and that's why it's a mod. I personally think it helps the game without changing much, but we all have different tastes.

This sounds amazing, but I think it could end up being pretty gruesome anyway. I'd love it if the meat, fat, bushmeat, etc. were wrapped around a length of bone, but I feel like that could be gruesome. It'd be really cool if the shape of the bone was sort of random - sometimes it's just a length of bone, sometimes it's ribcage like, which would be harder to butcher from.

Try the sticky dirt mod. It gives blocks with grass or plants growing on them a bit of extra stability, so you won't get whole hillsides collapsing, but dirt still caves in when you're digging it, and climbing gravel hills is still a slippery mess.

This mod really does work well. It just feels like the simple fix the game needs.

Try Novelty. It does a really good job at encouraging you to pick mushrooms and make berry gardens without punishing you. I think because V.S. already has 5 nutrition bars, adding an extra one doesn't feel like it is pressuring you to fill it out. It's like how you don't even think about the dairy bar until you've got a decent house and garden set up, and then you go "well, let's go find some goats now!" With the novelty bar, you'll notice it ticking up as you eat all sorts of weird mushrooms and berries from all over the place, just passively. Then when you get all set, it just encourages you to expand your diet a little, but it doesn't punish you for not doing that.

Use the Sticky Dirt mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/stickydirt It is fantastic, makes sideways soil instability make sense. It ties soil instability to vegetation cover. Plant roots make things more stable, essentially. You'll still have blocks slip out from under you if you're climbing steep cliffs, and dirt still caves in when you're digging it, but it stops whole hillsides collapsing because a rabbit walked by. I never play without it, and without enabling soil sideways instability. I wish sticky dirt was part of the vanilla game.

There's an excellent mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/novelty which adds an additional nutrition bar which is gradually filled by maintaining a varied diet. It makes having a larger fruit patch with all sorts of berry bushes really rewarding i.e. "I'm sick of eating red current all the time, I wonder if I can find some ripe blueberries somewhere?" Actually filling that bar is pretty challenging, and actually requires you to have a well-stocked and varied garden, an interest in mushrooms, and a willingness to catch fish. The reward for filling it isn't quite as smooth as filling the vanilla nutrition bars. It feels like the game devs could take this idea and make it pop. I think something like this mod would really really help V.S. justify having a lot of different interesting foods. The world looks better when there is more variety, and exploration is more fun too, when you start seeing unusual fruits, animals, trees, etc. It's a lot more fun when those things have a mechanical impact.

Welcome to the forums, This is a really good, balanced contribution. I particularly like: I think this would really help players feel like they were making progress. Perhaps at gen 5 animals would have a 100% chance to run away, dropping by 20% each subsequent generation until it it 0% at gen. 10? That would go alongside Lasercar's above suggestion. It would be great if fed baby animals grew up either faster, or bulkier and healthier. I'd love it if petting an animal ticked up a secret stat for that animal which could also make that individual animal tamer. It'd have to be very gradual though, so that it wouldn't undermine actual domestication.

Yeah, looking at the above plan, I think you'd get a lot of flooded caves. I'd hope it would end up producing haff-full caves, running like rivers, but then cave generation is more vertical and wiggly than horizontal and underground-river-like. I think this sort of thing would really have to be part of a world gen re-design. If caves in soft stone generated like real limestone caves do, horizontal, with sink holes into lower horizontal river passages, it would end up working beautifully. Even the caves without water would feel realistic, and be fun to travers. I'd imagine you'd get underground streams, pooling occasionally, and occasionally making it down into big subterranean lakes. There are definitely some flaws though. The good parts are, I think: Water being restricted to streams, which don't spread infinitely, and don't compress down when other streams flow into them. I think that'd get us closer to tributaries, which gradually add up into rivers, and it would make working with water a bit nicer Water using the flood-fill command to flood basins. I think it would be very rewarding to give survival players limited access to that powerful tool, at the cost of having to build realistic water infrastructure. It would also make mucking around near pools when you don't have a bucket less aesthetically painful. I hate leaving random spots of forever disturbed water when I dig up some sand. Water coming from somewhere deliberate. I think world gen could get a bit more realistic if there were a way to assign the starting points of tributaries in some way. Perhaps aquifers are the wrong way to do it, but it would be good if the game could generate water sources high, in valley creases, and let the streams follow the land. It would good if game rules tended towards realistic rivers, not just world gen, so that player action doesn't gradually make the world less and less believable and pretty.

This may be way beyond what the V.S. game code could handle, but... I've been thinking about a different way to do water. Buckets would not be able to create water source blocks. Instead: Aquifers would form, in the same sort of way that iron veins form. They would be wide, 2 to 3 block think veins of "aquifer gravel", generating more in high rainfall areas, and generating more commonly in sedimentary rocks, which would cause them to be often close to the surface. If a single aquifer block is exposed to air, it would change to become a "spring" block, a water source which produces up to 2 water blocks, and all the other aquifer blocks would turn to "spring supply" blocks, which would "supply" the spring block with water. Remove too many supply blocks, and the spring dries up. Water would then work differently. Water blocks would flow, using the same flowing method as currently, but without the ability to spit. It would only ever make one stream from one water block, and that stream wouldn't merge with other streams. Each flowing block would check if it had solid blocks or water surrounding it on all sides. If it did, it would fill up, becoming a full block of water. The flowing water would repeat that process until it was all either flowing or full blocks, which would bring it to a standstill in a depression. When these streams meet depressions, they would be able to form pools or lakes. Essentially, when a water stream stopped, the game would check how many water streams connected at that stopping point, and then run a "flood fill" type command, with constraints based on how many streams were contributing. One stream could "flood fill" an area up to 6 blocks by 6 blocks, say, increase it to 10 by 10 for two, or 14 by 14 for three streams. The game would flood fill one layer, then count how many streams now entered the pool, and flood-fill the next layer, stopping when the area to be filled exceeded the flood fill limit (14 blocks by 14 blocks for three streams). It its turn, a pool would be able to support a number of streams equal to the number of streams feeding it, +1. Essentially, you'd be able to take 2 streams from an aquifer, lead them together in a depression, which would fill into a pool. You could then take 3 streams from that pool, lead them together to another depression, and make a larger pool, and so on and so on until you had rivers. The big issue I see is that the game would need to essentially retain a unique identity for each "stream," remembering that they don't mix or spit, except where they become pools. At the pool, a new "stream" would be added to the others. I feel like that'd be a lot of work for the game to keep track of? but I don't code. To take it to the next level, when a flowing block checked if it could become a full block, it could instead erode any soil or gravel block below it, and fill that space with water instead, making nice, indented river beds. The ocean would be considered slightly differently, having an essentially infinite flood-fill capacity. The ocean would be able to self-correct if you dug a block out of the coast, or if it were spilling into a cavern, it would fill that cavern up until the water level was level with the ocean. The flood-fill process might have to take a bit of time so that it wasn't overly taxing on gameplay. Tell me I'm crazy.

Yeah, I get that. But I would like it if "rapids" had something to do with the steepness of water's decent, rather than be a special, unique block. I understand why they're doing it like they are though. It's simple, and works to make water power localised, which is good.

I think the problem in V.S. is that we are able to move water. We can, if we want to, make an entire, wide river, by placing bucket loads of water and then causing them to flow endlessly from those sources. In that world, it makes sense that water rapids would be easy to make, just by placing a bucket of water above a steep slope. That'd make water power trivial, which is not good. But why does V.S. allow us to make water source blocks with buckets? It seems like a hold over from TOBG. and it is linked with how gardening works. At the moment, gardens need a source block of water right next to every farm block, which is so very very unrealistic, and looks bad. If water sources were non-movable, and if gardens had more believable moisture systems (I.e. rainfall on an average year is enough to keep a garden watered), and if large bodies of water naturally corrected themselves (If you remove a block on the shore, that block fills with a water source?) I think we'd get a more realistic game. In that scenario, I could see it being viable and reasonably balanced to be able to make rapids by steepening a water flow, or by moving water with an aqueduct before dropping it over a wheel.