Bruno Willis

Maybe instead of adding pumpernickle bread explicitly they could give rye and rye bread a longer shelf life but a slightly lower nutritional value than spelt bread. It'd give the grains a little more identity. It could be quite a small difference initially, just enough to hint that rye lasts longer, and then charred rye bread could have a crazy long shelf life. I wouldn't worry about an iron baking tin, or sourdough, as a gate to pumpernickel since, IRL, if you can make a type of bread in an iron baking tin, you can make it in a clay tin, or without any tin at all, with very little recipe change, and bread currently doesn't use yeast to make, which implies that we're already making sourdough bread or using natural yeasts, and the method has already been simplified for gameplay purposes. Actually, as another option the devs could add an extra stage to rye bread, so that it goes from: rye dough -> part baked rye bread -> rye bread -> pumpernickel -> charred pumpernickel. The pumpernickel stage would have decent nutrition and a very long shelf life, and the charred pumpernickel would be essentially useless as a food.

Perhaps this could be made to happen deliberately during temporal storms, with a bit of extra rust, just for fun.

I've been playing V.S. obsessively for the last few days, without better ruins, and really enjoying my ruin looting adventures. I thought I would screenshot the best ruin so far (probably best of 30 ruin sites) to show what vanilla ruins can be: Looks like there's some interesting underground/underwater rooms which I haven't explored yet, but I'm very excited to. I also set surface copper to very rare, and then looted a copper pick from one of the ruins, so I'm a very happy seraph at the moment.

I enjoy the subtle difference between some types of berries (cranberries last longer, but have lower nutritional value for example), and I'd love to see that for mushrooms too. King bolete look so big and tasty, but I'm pretty sure they're the same as the woody shelf mushrooms when it comes to both nutrition and how long they can be stored. I'd love to see fleshy mushrooms like bolete, field mushrooms, red-wind caps, etc. have a quite short storage potential, but lots of nutrition, and woodier, more easily dried mushrooms, tinderhoof, reishi, could have longer storage potential, and lower nutrition. Then you'd be able to offer special mushrooms, like shitake, which might have the extended lifespan of the tinderhoof, but a normal amount of nutrition, and King bolete, which might have just a whopping amount of nutrition for a mushroom, and a normal storage potential. It'd also be interesting if some mushrooms gave 1/2 and 1/2 vegetable and protein nutrition, as the thing which makes them special. This isn't an important suggestion, but I think something like this would add a lot to the experience of harvesting and cooking with mushrooms.

I am having such a blast with this update. The world is just feeling so wild and alive, with all the different goat and sheep varieties, the berries, the new vegetables and fish. I've been loving this game ever since I got it, but this update has given it a really noticeable step up in quality. I'm so pleased, so thank you! Well done!

Or give you the status effect: Horrible Itching Pain. Which would occasional and randomly damage you a tiny bit, (very distracting), and also cause your seraph to stop what they're doing and scratch themselves every now and then (sort of like when you're in the desert and you raise your arm to shelter your eyes, but more annoying).

I'd also love to fall into a dense tangle of nettles while running away from a bear. That sounds like a perfect V.S. experience.

Damn, I'm completely wrong. Hand-axes were just the convenient way to make a very early knife, they weren't used to cut down trees, there's no historical reason why they could take the place of both a knife and an axe. Apparently they were used for digging though, so there's our stone shovel-knife! I really like the idea of the stone age tools not fitting neatly into the exact same categories as the metal tools though. I like the idea of a wooden shovel+hoe, and a stone knife+hand shovel+axe head. I'd also like to see antler get more uses. It would be lovely if knifes could be handled with bone or antler all the way through the metal ages as well as the late stone age. Apparently you can get a good knapping effect with wood as well as with antler, although I'm guessing it's a very hard wood, not your average pine branch.

This is a really good point, if early game is supposed to teach lessons which become more relevant later. It'd be pretty cool to get a flint knife out of a ruined pot and realize it not only looks way nicer than your glorified sharp stone, but it's way more effective. Then you'd wonder how to get there. I also think if early early stone knapping gave you a hand-axe instead of an axe or knife. It would work as a stone knife currently does, but could also be hit with a club to cut down trees. (teaching about the off-hand mechanic later used for chiseling). You'd have an early early tool which can do a lot, and looks very different to the later stone knife you get from ruins/antler knapping. You'd also get your first weapon (the useless club) as a by-product of wanting to cut down trees, ensuring everyone has a weapon when night falls. I also really like the idea of carrying antler late game, (cause you found it, cause you want to make a really nice antler handle for a knife, etc.) and when a metal tool breaks, just knapping up a really nice stone version with the antler, instead of falling right back to the bottom of the progression tree with the crappiest stone tools.

That sucks, really. Here is a way for you to get into the game again, using vanilla mechanics: When you make a world, customize it. Go into the "Player Spawn and Death" section (it should open automatically when you press customize). Click "Grace Timer" and decide how many days you want before monsters start showing up. It sounds like you're pretty experienced, so I would recommend 1 to 2 days grace timer. It could make the game a lot more fun if you're feeling the pinch in the early game but still want the challenge when you're a bit more prepared. The other one you might want to change is under "Temporal Stability" you can change the frequency and intensity of the storms too, so you've got a bit longer before the first one hit. I used to do that every game. Use the tools it offers to change it until you're happy with how it plays. Adjust to your tastes. It's a wonderful game like that.

I've just started playing with the new bushes, and I couldn't be happier. They are so fun to find, they look so good, and it's just added so much interest to the world, wondering if that bush is a special one? what about that one? I bother checking bushes without fruit, just incase I want to come back and propagate it later.

These would be great, and clay as a subsoil is an excellent idea. It seems really realistic to have some regions where there is a small layer of topsoil and then clay for 4 or more blocks before you hit stone. I grew up in an area IRL which has about a finger's depth of topsoil, and then clay down for meters, and it's like that for kilometers around.

I'd use the placing system for pots and bowls, where you can click in a corner, and start placing the bowls in each corner, or you can click in the center and place a single bowl in the center. For doors, you'd have, I guess, five placement locations. You could click close to any of the four faces of the floor block, to get the door to place close to there, or you could click in the center of the block, and the door would be placed in the center oriented to block you. (give me a minute, I'll try and draw a diagram). The only issue I can see is that when a center placed door opens, it's going to open beyond the block it's been placed on. Trouble.

The main things for me are recency and amount. The better ruins ruins mostly look like they were ruined only 100 years prior or less, while the vanilla ruins look like they've been ruined for a century. Adding better ruins immediately makes the game less "stumbling through the bones of an ancient civilization" and more "wandering through burned down Riverwood." None of the vanilla surface ruins have wood remaining, because it would have rotted away. Most of the better ruins do have wood present. Which makes you expect to see other survivors much more often than you are actually going to. The other thing is that because vanilla ruins are really old and damaged, they're harder to identify. You don't really feel like you've seen the same ruin 4 times, because they're basically piles of rocks with the suggestion of a window, set into the landscape. The better ruins are more whole, therefore more distinctive, so as soon as you see your second one, it breaks emersion. There are way too many better ruins. You come across them easily, and as LadyWYT said: You become more of a tourist than someone who is re-building almost from scratch. Saying that, I really enjoy running across the larger vanilla ruins, and I've built fun bases in some of the larger ones, (a wall segment with village ruins behind it) and had a great time. I can understand why it's fun to use better ruins to up your chances of running into more impressive ruins, but honestly, I'm willing to wait for more vanilla ruins. I'd love to see the devs gradually adding more vanilla ruins, bit by bit, in their vanilla style where everything is super old and overgrown and sunken into the earth. Vanilla ruins I'd add would be: The remains of a mill-race. Just the mill-pond, some low stone walls, maybe a little bridge, and rapids flowing from the pond down the race. The whole thing would be heavily bushy so that it'd have to be cleared to figure out that it's not just landscape, but an ancient human structure. Towers on hills and mountain tops. I'm guessing this needs a re-work of the way ruins are generated, but Europe has towers and castles on one in ten hills, it feels like. That's where they have built their towers in V.S. too. I'd love to see some absolutely eroded away towers on the tops of hills, just for the atmosphere. Port infrastructure. Basically ruins which interact with the coast a bit. The remains of harbor walls, a stone jetty, the ruined walls of a warehouse. It'd be cool if they generated mostly submerged, or too high on land to be useful for boats, suggesting that the water level has changed drastically.

Yeah, I think vintage story could do amazing things if it did planned world generation. Imagine if the game sketched out certain key things, mountain ranges, large rivers, oceans, and then placed significant terrain into the world based on those landmarks: mountain passes, mountain forts, overgrown quarries forming in the mountains, the second story location forming near one of the rivers, and on other rivers maybe large ruined cities, or just old bridges with ruined roads leading to other locations and landmarks. The game could start of placing these large bits on a vague map, and once the biggest land features were set, the parameters for the next most significant features would become clear, and the game might work its way down from there. We'd end up with an interconnected world (even if it would lose some of that random generation charm). This does feel like a radically different way to generate a world, and I'm not sure it would support the re-playability of a noise map as well, but who knows?

My offers are: Sticky Dirt: Makes soil sideways instability work in a reasonable way, taking into account the plant growth on and around the block. The game feels much more alive with this mod and sideways instability active. You notice small cave-in's occasionally, but they aren't world-ending show stealers anymore. Can't play without it. Can't play without sideways instability now either. Feels more vanilla than vanilla instability. Novelty: Rewards eating a varied diet by slowly filling a bar, identically to filling any other nutrition bar, except only filled by varying your diet somewhat. Means that there is a mechanical benefit to collecting a wide variety of berry types, and gives you a reason to pick wild mushrooms, even after your garden is flourishing. Feels vanilla. Temporal Symphony: Makes mini-temporal storm effects to warn you about an approaching storm diegetically. Temporal storms feel more natural and threatening than when you just get a text warning that they're coming. It feels like the right way to announce the arrival of a storm. I haven't found that many mods that really enhance the gameplay for me, although I have been trying many. Of all of the mods I use, these three feel like they could be added to the game without changing the vibe of the game at all, and would just fix some holes. I've tried better ruins, but honestly, they pack the world with things which really don't feel right. I promise you, the vanilla ruins are really nice, they're not packed with loot though (which I think is a good thing). I strongly feel that vanilla ruins generation hits the spot better than better ruins (although it could of course do with even more ruin options, just in a vanilla style).

Yes, absolutely. I'd love to see wood ash and its historical uses used in V.S. I'm pretty sure you can make lye with wood ash, and use that instead of lime water to cure skins (so in real life you'd just burn some wood instead of hunting for a lime region).

I genuinely don't understand the block game obsession with over-watering crops. In the real world, farms that close to water are going to rot their crops, unless they're very special crops like rice. Too much water is as bad as too little, and I wish V.S. could get fully away from TOBG's unrealistic watering system. That rain hydrates farmland is a great step in the right direction, as are watering cans. I'd love it if crops could be watered too much, meaning you'd only want irrigation channels in arid landscapes where the gardens get a chance to dry out. Alongside that, it'd be good if moisture levels could be kept steady for longer (mods with mulch do a good job at this). That way people would be more likely to build realistic farms that can rely on rain and the occasional hand water during droughts. In the real world, if you had a meter wide pool after every meter of farm, you'd end up with a muddy mess.

Caves like these would be so good. They look like they'd be amazing, interesting challenges to explore. If I can pick your brain a bit, what do you know about the shapes of caves forming in harder stones like granite? I'm guessing they're less common than karst style caves in limestone?

I had no idea rope ladders were such a reasonable and realistic choice, that's epic.

Welcome to the forums. This is a great idea.

Perhaps they could generate a "landmass" at once, rather than the whole world, and then hide the borders under oceans (I play on a world with lot of water, but I don't think that is the intended standard). If that didn't work they could consider each "Landmass" to be a different geological region and where each landmass met, if it were above water, you'd get mountains. That way, you wouldn't usually see the next landmass generating because it'd be hidden behind a mountain range. The benefit of that would be that you'd guarantee big mountain ranges on continents big enough to constitute more than one "landmass", and you could generate rivers flowing out of that meeting point, the mountain range.

Yeah, I've written about it in the past too, that current caves are fine, but they feel like they're designed for seraphs to walk through. I do think more realistic caves would really shine with the inclusion of climbing gear though. I like using rope ladders to get around, but it doesn't feel realistic. I don't know much about solo climbing with ropes, but I feel like it would really make caves more exciting if we had a system for that, as well as realistic cave formations. I think tying the types of caves to the type of stone would be the easiest way to make a big exciting difference to cave generation, and would really add to your sense of place in game. You'd get used to your local cave types, and be unprepaired in other stone types. I love finding those big, stepped cliffsides that are propped on a diagonal, looking geological. It would be really satisfying if the caves in those sorts of formations didn't just pockmark it with holes like Swiss cheese. If the caves formed as wide cavities following the same diagonal as the rest of the rock formation, I think that'd look excellent, and make good base locations.

All wild meat is a bit gamey. I'm pretty sure bush-meat refers to eating carnivore meat, which is notoriously potent-flavoured IRL. Apparently when carnivores are fed mainly vegetables they taste better, but I don't imagine anyone is that excited to catch wolves and feed them turnips until they've changed the taste profile.

I think lime speleothems would just be a good improvement. I don't think there would be any problem with lime being easier to access, as long as you're willing to dip into the caves. And welcome to the forums! I love these suggestions so much. I think if vintage story used caves like these it would feel much more interesting to go caving. They'd feel that much more alien and unwelcoming, and have good contrast to the underground ruins.