Bruno Willis

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.

I've gone up against bears with an iron falx and an iron rimmed shield and no armor, as a commoner, and it's great! Admittedly I've got a 50/50 kill or be killed score so far (when I go into the fight deliberately with that set up), but that's pretty good. I've found fighting on brushy hilly areas effective. With no armor I'm pretty nimble, I just try and hit the bear then run and get a bit of space, turn around and charge it and hit it again as I run past: they don't seem very good at turning around and they have a bit of a wind-up before they hit you back so if you're booking it down the hillside you can often get away. A few good hits like that with the falx and they'll run off to lick their wounds, which is a good opportunity to heal and wait for them to come back. I honestly don't know if the shield is much help, but it doesn't slow me down, and it has saved me from enough hits which would have ended me that I can't imagine fighting without it. The other part is having really good nutrition. I focus on eating a balanced diet, which means I can usually take one mauling and survive. Good food and a peasant's bravery is all you need!

That's a crazy amount of iron, and all that stone will come in handy too. Epic!

Yes! and when you find that vein of iron which is just overwhelmingly large - it feels like all your hard work was worth it. It's such a great reward for a hard grind. I also love the way base building feels: everything is gradual and useful, and one day you log on and realize you've built a gorgeous home.

I was so overwhelmingly pleased when I found my first hematite vein, and it was massive too. It feels like you've found the key to the good life, and all you need to do is smelt and refine and forge it out.

When I first heard 'temporal storm approaching' I thought cool! Maybe I'll see what the world looked like before the cataclysm! What I was imagining was being able to run around - in the horrible warping monster-filled madness - and see structures from the ancient times flickering into existence. I'd love to camp out near a particularly impressive ruin and wait for the storm to start, then run out and explore the cathedral in its final moments. You'd get to see what the complete structure looked like, see worshipers struck down and transformed into drifters, perhaps you might climb stairs which fell long ago into a tower which doesn't exist in your time, and steal something precious from the past, only for it to disappear when the temporal storm ends (or not disappear if you're lucky?) I don't know if that would be coding intensive or not, although I'm sure it'd be hard work. I'd imagine you would make unbroken versions of surface ruins and have them replace ruins during storms. Admittedly, that would suck if you'd built your base in a beautiful ruin. The storms as they are right now did start to drag for me, until I got good armor and weapons. Now I bake a pie, then invite a drifter in, repeat, and sometimes I get lucky and my guest has two heads and wants the whole pie for themselves.

Bears are a learning curve I think. Once you figure them out, you avoid them like the plague, unless you've got a very good advantage. I'd love to see them get a life that's not just about murder. I feel like seeing them sharpening their claws on trees, and moving from scratched tree to scratched tree, protecting their territory would be really interesting. It would also let you figure out where they live and where not to go. As an added bonus, bears scratching pine trees could be a mechanic to produce new resin logs, with the added bonus that the resin would come with a territorial bear guardian.

I bet this is some hard hard code, but damn it would be nice.

Also, here's a non-intensive way to get to New123455's original post: As far as I can see, we don't want gradual realistic improvement because that would be code heavy and get in the way of everyone, even people who don't care about farming, for the benefit of a few dedicated farmers. Instead, what if every crop had a slim slim slim chance, like 1 in 1000, to drop "good rye seed" for example instead of just "rye seed". That would still reward an attentive farmer who selects their "good rye seed", grows it carefully, and ensures that they slowly increase their stock of good seeds, but it wouldn't bother anyone who doesn't care about farming. Someone might get 1 "good rye seed" and just plant it along with all their others, not bother about it, and by doing that accidentally, very incrementally, improve their seed stock. I think I would find this rewarding, but then again, I like gardening. At present the system is plenty complex and very satisfying, so I don't see a pressing need to improve it.

Hey, on the topic of farming: farmland doesn't drop a block when broken? I've been hunting around a bit and I didn't spot a solution to this problem. Forgive me if there is one already. It's a problem because it feels weird to break a block (especially a valuable terra preta block) and not get anything back, but it's a challenge because we don't want players exhausting farmland nutrients and then just digging and placing the block down again. I would suggest that farmland which has lain fallow for a good while would revert to grassy soil of its same quality after a certain time. Specifically, the mechanic could be farmland with grass or horsetail growing on it for 4 months or so reverts to grassy soil. I think that would be easily preventable if you don't want it to happen, but obvious enough that players could discover the mechanic on their own, and use it if they want to move their farm or re-shape it. Added to that, if you break farmland without waiting, it would drop a dirt block 1 or maybe 2 levels of quality lower - so breaking terra preta would give you high or medium fertility soil. Unfortunately I think it would have to be 2 levels lower because high fertility soil still makes very powerful farmland and we don't want people ever refreshing their soil by digging it up and putting it down again. The important thing is that it shouldn't feel like you're deleting a block from the world when you break farmland. Breaking farmland can still be punishing to do though, if there is a slower, more sensible way available.

A good overheating issue could be migraine effects, or heatstroke effects, on your vision and hearing. Your vision could become more and more restricted with a dark circle (like when you're about to pass out) and the game sound could be slowly replaced with a rushing static sound (again, like passing out). Totally loosing vision is a terrifying challenge, and maybe more interesting than slowing down or taking damage? It would be an obvious indication that something is wrong, but until it gets really bad it wouldn't actually make it harder to run to the nearest cave, river or cellar.

The food variation in Vintage story is very satisfying, as is getting that extra health when you've filled most of the nutrition bars. I'd love to see a reward for eating all sorts of different foods. I'm sure there are plenty of suggestions and mods around this, but I just keep thinking about this: Firstly, I'd add a slight walk speed and mining speed buff from filling nutrition bars - way less than the existing health improvement - to slightly increase the reward for filling the nutrition bars and give a more tangible sense of having a healthy character. Second, I'd add a satisfaction bar which works a little differently to the other nutrition bars. Instead of filling every time you eat something, the satisfaction bar would fill a small amount each time you ate a food which was different to your previous meals that day, and each time you drank alcohol. It would reflect your satisfaction in eating variety, and would increase the overall power of diverse food by adding one extra nutrition bar to help you gain the health improvement and the other stat improvements. The third (optional) thing which could be added, and which would add a whole lot of character to kitchens and gardening, would be herbs, sauces and condiments. The idea would be that you might have herbs growing, and every meal cooked within 8 blocks of a herb patch would give an extra point towards the satisfaction bar when eaten. You might grow and harvest garlic, then hang it in a plait from your kitchen celling for the same effect. You might even make soy-sauce, chutneys, bowls of salt, vinegar, and combine them to create a clutter of condiments which would give every meal eaten within 8 blocks of them extra satisfaction nutrition, and would look epic on a kitchen bench.