Bruno Willis

I think this is a really solid point. Giving the early game more side progressions would be valuable. Using the tool handles as an example, one player might spend a long time in the bronze age, and get really good at choosing the best wood to carve good tool handles out of, giving their bronze tools good durability. When they eventually get to steel, they'll have an advantage that other players who rush steel don't have. This'd shine in multi-player, where the player who masters early/mid game mechanics can then combine their skills with the player who rushes steel, to get them both excellent gear. The game already does this well with animal husbandry (I think). It's a rewarding, long investment, mid tech process which can reward a whole group if one person is interested enough in it. I feel like weaving and textiles will probably gain a bit of this depth, and it would be good if there were other parts of the mid-game like this. Gardening could do with a bit of added complexity to become something which could be interacted with lightly, or gone into obsessively. I feel like a lot of the ideas we toss around fit into this bucket: Sluice systems which need tweaking and figuring out, so the panning obsessed player can figure out how to do that extra well for everyone. Fletching, so someone can learn to make personalized arrows, add colour, maybe add weight (+ to damage, - to distance) or improve accuracy and supply everyone with their specific preferences. These are systems which can be skipped, or gone into in depth, depending on personal taste.

Ah. Yes.

I've definitely felt this, especially early on. As I've gotten better at handling the foes, it's gotten more and more fun, but it could for sure be better. I wonder if changing the way the different sorts of storms feel might help? I had to run al long way through a light temporal storm yesterday, and it was almost do-able. It made me wonder if light temporal storms could be made a little less dangerous, but last longer, medium storms could stay the same, and heavy storms might become even worse, but maybe shorter, with a monster type who can phase through blocks and challenge people in their fortresses. The idea would be to give people a storm type which they can actually experience mid-game without guaranteed death. The sort of storm which might tempt people to try and travel through, but which can still spawn a double headed drifter sometimes... And then also give people a storm which is always, always scary and requires active participation.

That'd add something really satisfying to sailing. The way I see net fishing working really relies on some sort of sea birds being implemented. I'd use sea-birds more like particles than creatures: they'd signal the presence of schools of fish and how big those schools were. Boats might also generate less impressive seabird animations, and maybe some sort of sea-monster or ghost ship might attract sea-birds, drawing the player in if they think it's just another school of fish. I'm not fussed about having different sizes of fish meat, but I think having more varieties of fresh-water fish of different sizes, giving different amounts of fish meat would be good (correct me if they already exist, VS is subtle and vast already). I feel like spear fishing is a very vintage story style of fishing, and it's a very legitimate way to fish, especially in shallow, swampy waters. I'd like to see small scale fishing go this route, giving us many pronged spears which are extra accurate but breakable/no good against land creatures, and adding eels and flounder to the game. Crayfish pots and eel traps and such would also be a very peasant way to get seafood.

Different sizes of fish would be fun, but I feel like that's more a concern for gentleman fishers and the nobility, where we are more common, and should use peasant styles of fish gathering. I really think fishing should be done with nets off the sides of our small sail boats. I'd be very different to other games, feel more connected with the setting, and be a huge tech improvement over stabbing them with a spear. You'd spot a school of fish in the ocean (maybe signaled by a flock of birds!?) sail out and throw the net over the side. Then when you pulled it in you would do a harvesting animation like with a single carcass to open up the bulging net and gain access to a tone of fish meat. Delicious.

I would really like it if berry bushes had a mechanic where they actively spread and try to fill their niche - but then we need some way to keep them in balance. I feel like the world as we enter it is supposed to be represent natural balance, so we can assume that by nature the berry bushes end up in small bunches with a bit of separation. So, say the bushes spread like pumpkins, but unrestricted and slowed well down. At the start of every spring, unpruned bushes get 'overgrown' which means they produce far fewer berries and damage you if you move through them (old black current canes turn into nasty, splinter-stakes, spikes grow, etc. ) Animals and players also have a chance to trample overgrown bushes into loose sticks when they move through them, implying that the bush has become brittle and less vigorous. Browsing animals like deer might also be able to, occasionally, destroy young berry bushes by eating them (this would have to be a very low chance). That way you'd get bushes spreading wildly, then getting broken up by animal movement and browsing, and hopefully end up producing dynamic versions of the current berry bush growth. - this gets me into a wider issue, where the world at the start of the game is not implied by the events of the game, especially when you've got cave-ins, soil instability, and lightening fires enabled. It would be amazing if the world could naturally re-establish a good looking equilibrium after disasters, if forest floor could recover and forests could spread/recover slowly over time, etc. It needs it's own thread. It'd also buff pruning, not by increasing berry drops, which are quite a lot already, but by letting you keep your bushes healthy.

I am also perfectly fine with surface instability, but I do thing it would be cool if lower stability areas were more likely to spawn ruins, and also if there were larger, non-story ruins which caused their chunks to be lower stability to make exploring them more satisfying. Like @LadyWYT though, I think it would break immersion for me if we could just simply remove or dull surface instability with basic tools. Ways to deal with instability, yes! but ways to just shut it down sound boring.

Necromancy is the best. Multi-ores would be really interesting and sell the idea that mining is dirty and ores are mixed. We have to remember that the world of V.S. is not our world, and some changes must have been made to simplify early game so that new players can get an easier introduction into the complex world of mining, prospecting, smelting and alloying.

I think the map thing is a compromise really. I used the colour version when I was starting, but it quickly made gameplay too easy for me so I switched to sepia. I'm now considering figuring out how to get rid of the map entirely, and I do know some people play without the map. The sepia version is still a serious aid to navigation, but it doesn't show you where clay and peat and ruins and traders are - so they're still a challenge and a nice surprise, but not as much as if there was no map at all.

It depends almost entirely on the local stone. I've found myself using maple more than I expected to, for doors and windows often, and I like how mildewy and worn it looks. I love oak for interiors, and it matches the colour of tables so that's helpful. I like walnut too, but I think that's mainly because the trees are so good looking, and they're the first sort of special tree I've found in game. The planks work really well with some stone, and not so much with others, but I love them.

I spent several in game months hunting for clay in my current world, and it was, of course, 4 blocks away from my already partly cut peat bog. I've found the best way to deal with these things is to put the goal on the mental back-burner while you look for other things. In my case I just started looking for mature wild flax instead, because I also spawned on a massive island with a total of 10 cat-tails and I needed more gear slots pronto. I now know the location of every surface ore deposit, have a whole lot of caves marked to explore, and found the best base location I've ever had, all because I spent so much time looking for clay.

Would a deep drum roll or the creaking of some sort of mechanism work for you, tone and lore wise?

I think this would be a cool way to implement it, if it were to be added: very occasionally, a sapling would 'grow up' into a two tall sapling model, which would then take 100 years to mature and couldn't be uprooted without destroying it. It'd be a satisfying way to mark the age of your world even if you realistically never see one mature. Might also help people appreciate the old growth forests more.

Yeah, that gets me very stressed, quite often. It does get me running for my food bowl, but more because I can't stand the sound than because I need to eat. I imagine a sound designer might be able to make a stomach growl like sound with each of the instruments they're currently using, although I'm not sure if the musical vocalization is the long-term vision?

Isn't it wonderful that we can customize the instrument which our seraph uses to scream their pain? The problem is that it's always the same few sounds, regardless of what caused the pain, and the repeated hooting that you get for starvation doesn't sound like hunger pangs, it sounds like you are stubbing your toe a lot. Would you prefer it if starvation cause more of a steady, melancholy tune, which slowly got louder and more frantic the closer to death you got? Or would sad music make you more tolerant of starvation? I would like it if the sounds lined up with the source of pain more, personally. Freezing to death could produce some interesting frozen instrument sounds too.

I'd love the mechanic to encourage players to build masonry workshops: Maybe you could draw a plan of the original chiseled block by right clicking on each face with a piece of parchment in one hand and charcoal in the other to produce a chiseling plan. Then you could place that plan down (in your workshop maybe), right-click it with your hammer and chisel to "memorize" the plan, and then click each face of the new block to copy the original onto it. To make the plans more immersive, they could roll up as scrolls if stored in a scroll holding shelf, or lie flat and open if placed on the top of a block (ready for the mason to read). That'd encourage players to build a library of chiseling plans which they can re-use.

I think new plants could be a way to let players choose 'hard mode': You have common plants available which are pretty easy to farm, have little depth (as now). Then you add in interesting plants, - plants that use 2 types of nutrients, plants which need trellises and get blown over in high wind, plants which die if they get too wet, plants which get diseases and need to be pruned and maintained regularly, plants which only give seeds if treated just right. The more complex plants would need to be worthwhile in some way, but the main purpose would be to let people who like to garden give themselves extra challenges, and then let them show off when they manage to grow a really difficult crop. It'd be really interesting if players could go down a gardening rabbit hole and forget they ever promised a bronze pickaxe to that guy in the valley over.

Violins. It's clear that chapter 3 will be primarily a violin concerto arch, and we'll need a lot of rosin for our bow strings.

Okay, crafting a coracle without a crafting grid: Right-click on dirt with a stick and get options like with clay shaping. one of the options would be a pile of sticks, one would be a wicker basket, and another would be the coracle! Picking the coracle would stick your stick upright in the ground and direct you with green lines to stick other sticks in the ground to make a circle. Once you'd done that you would be directed to 'weave' sticks around the circle to make a giant basket. When you'd reach the top of the upright sticks, you'd be directed to add more upright sticks into those, and repeat the weaving until you produce a big dome shaped basket. At this point, ideally, the unfinished coracle would have a collision box unlike the current sailing boats You'd then be directed to cover it with a number of oiled pelts or leather (or copper sheets?). Once done, you'd be directed to stitch them on with twine or linen thread, oil it all with a couple of lumps of fat or bee's wax, and you'd be done. The coracle would have a "climb under" option, which would let you sleep under it like a slightly less comfortable hay bed, a "store" option, which would allow you to access a limited number of gear slots on it: at least twice as much as can be carried by a raft, and it would have a "drag" option, which would let you flip it over and slowly drag it, to get it into and out of the water. In the water, you'd have a "climb in" option to row the thing, the same "store" option, and the same "drag" option.

I really like this idea. Say when you first turn the block into farmland, all its nutrients start at half full. It's got some, but it's also got somewhere to go. I think the goal of rewarding dedication to farm plots is really interesting. What if soil types were treated more like levels that can be 'leveled up' with good farming practice: If you leave barren farmland under mulch for a single winter, it would become low fertility soil -> Low fertility soil under mulch for 2 winters becomes medium fertility soil -> Medium fertility soil under mulch for 4 winters becomes high fertility soil. By the same token there could be a mechanic for making abused soil revert down a level - perhaps overuse of chemical fertilizers, or growing the same crop repeatedly on the same soil (build-up of specific pests and diseases in the soil). Terra Preta would still be something special you need to make, but maybe it would be by placing charcoal and bonemeal and compost on high fertility soil and then tilling it, instead of using a crafting grid.

and more stylish.

But I don't want to sit in the lake, spinning in circles cause I'm not a good rower... Actually, coracles would be amazing. I think you can tip them over to make them into temporary tents. They'd be pretty much perfect for nomadic lifestyle, and could be stone age, using oiled pelts and sticks and twine.

This is key. You can learn to avoid all the fights you don't think you can win, but when you come to the boss, it's all over. Your strategy fails. If they kept the ability to get thrown into those upper chambers though, that'd give the combat adverse playstyle options in the boss combat.

Be warned. They have mouths in many places.

I think the point with the weeds is not to completely shut down a crop, but to make it less efficient. I would balance it so that a garden which is hoed and planted might get weeds growing all through it if un-tended, and have a %80 yield. Yes, that's going to slow down a speed run which relies on mass farming, but it won't shut that playstyle down (and also the yield reduction could easily be altered until the balance is right). Say weeds have 4 growth stages. 1 Little = do no harm but give visual interest. 2 Medium = host crop gives %80 yield, and the weed is visually obvious. 3 Grown = host crop gives %60 yield, harvesting the crop leaves the weeds at growth stage 1. 4 Overgrown = the farmland reverts to a soil block, crop is treated like a wild growing crop, and the weeds are tall and impressive. The growth stages would be slow, so that after a year's growing without weeding, there would be weeds all through your garden at growth stage 2. In your second year, if you didn't bother A. weeding, or B. tilling out a new big field, you'd get into the weeds seriously and end up at harvest time with reverted farmland and wild crops. The weeds would be extensions of what already grows on fallow farmland: overgrown grass, abundant horsetail and flowers, so it wouldn't be all bad. If you were implementing weeds like this, you'd want to add mulch too, which would maintain moisture and prevent weed growth until it broke down. You'd also get the materials to make mulch by harvesting a weedy garden, so you could do one massive field to get your sails up, and use the weeds to make mulch for a more condensed and easily managed garden in your second year. It adds long term complexity, but I don't think it'd make that first crop push much more challenging.