Bruno Willis

Some people find traveling in V.S. boring. I find it frustrating sometimes myself, especially if I die far from home, or see repeating areas of forest, then hills, then forested hills, etc. I do not think adding more ruins or villages, or any sort of structure, is the right way to add excitement to travel, they would just make the world feel weirdly busy. Everyone wants to see rivers added, and I think they're a really good way to improve travel, and we can learn from them to find other ways to improve travel. Rivers, if done well, can be 1: a barrier to travel, 2: an aid to travel, and 3: a landmark. A person might need to find a wide part of the river to ford it, or a narrow part to bridge it, or they might use a boat to row up or down it, depending on their intended direction. Finding a river makes travel more interesting because it adds a large-scale challenge, which can be turned into a powerful, travel related reward which helps add a sense of narrative to travel. Drawing from that, I think travel would be really improved by building challenges to travel into world gen., which have interesting solutions. Think about stories where travel is a key component. A mountain range becomes a serious barrier, and a pass or tunnel through it becomes a huge reward if found. A swamp becomes a terrible threat, unless one knows a safe way through. It seems like making rivers work will require a serious re-working of the world gen. system. I would love to see, alongside rivers: a system to produce good long mountain chains, which generate with exciting-to-find passes cutting through them. a system to produce swampy regions with sinking mud potential, and with safe paths through, which can be marked bit by bit, using trial and error. a system to produce rocky reefs and regions of stormy seas, with safe, deep channels threading through them. To make those challenges more interesting, I think we'd need to add: avalanches (as purely snow related mechanic separate from the messy sideways stability soil mechanic), some sort of challenging mud or deceptive pond scum, and faster drowning? (because drowning really doesn't feel like a serious threat at the moment), and the possibility for boats to take damage on collision (perhaps only during storms).

Big kelp grows in cold areas, and it's really useful for making carry bags:

Corvids would really suit the V.S. tone. The tropical version could be parrots, since they can be similar sized, and are also smart and curious and can learn to talk.

From my experience, I shot a deer in the head and it ran a good 40 meters before sitting down, still alive (it was a very distressing hunting experience), and I shot a deer above the heart, in that artery dense area, and it dropped immediately and rolled down the hill, dead (a much better hunting experience). As a hunter, the current hunting experience in VS is a bit stressful, because you really don't want to be wounding an animal, but not killing it. Once I've hit an animal in V.S. I chase it all over the place and try to finish it off, because it seems cruel to leave it mortally wounded. I know that's not how animal health works at the moment, but that's how it comes across to me. I think these are good points: I'd love to see animals have a state between "calmly doing their thing" and "fleeing madly". Imagine if deer could hear you move through bushes, and would perk up, get alert, heads up, ears twitching, and they'd move off slowly towards denser forest. If you made another noise, then they'd bolt. I also think taking wind direction into animal's senses could be really cool. In real life, wind carries smell and sound, so if you're up wind of an animal, it will become aware of you quickly and move slowly out of the area. If you get downwind though, they can't really hear you that well, you can push through bush and move a bit faster without them noticing, and you can usually get into a better position. Obviously this would be a way cooler mechanic if wind direction could change in V.S. but I still think it could be cool. You'd think about terrain in a different way when hunting than when traveling, and you might feel more confident hunting when the wind was up a little. Actually, maybe decent winds should make projectiles less accurate, and animals keener to settle into sheltered spots.

I'd like to see geese in the sky signaling seasonal changes, and little birds singing around ripe fruit trees and berry bushes, and falcons circling above corpses that haven't been harvested yet.

To be a bit nit-picky, they really aren't. Compound bows are more about taking the weight off your arms when they hit full draw than about adding power, (although they can do do that), so that people can hold them at full draw for longer and aim in the way you aim with a gun. Traditional recurve bows can be outrageously powerful too, and just as accurate, but people usually draw, aim, and fire in one motion so they don't have to hold the weight very long. For aiming, it's like the difference between chucking a stone and using a slingshot. I'd say it's more likely that an animal drops dead / incapacitated, or you have to follow a blood trail for a long way. Hunters usually aim for an area around the heart rather than the head or spine, I think especially with arrows? I would say, I'm pretty sure medieval hunting arrows are really nasty, designed to work their way deeper as an animal runs, so there'd definitely be a blood trail, and probably a body at the end of it. Yes. I'd love a little instant kill box on all the game animals, which I've written about in this thread here:

Much appreciated. I personally don't like the skill tree approach, I think it's better to design a system which is complex enough that players can actually develop player skills. I don't want to be told that my seraph is good at smithing now, I want to figure out how to respond to a poor tempering from previous experience. It's like smithing sheers - it feels really good when you learn how to make them from one ingot. I wouldn't want to be given that ability just because I'd smithed an arbitrary number of other items.

Sourdough! It's very easy to get a basic starter going with flour and water and little else. We've been eating sourdough in V.S. and it is delicious.

I'd prefer to see the very basic version: a hollowed out log set upright, and a pole with a metal cap (one pulverizer cap). You just stand there, smashing down into the hollow log until the thing inside is turned to dust/pulp. Not efficient at all, but enough if you are determined not to get mechanical. They were a common tool IRL, I think.

Damascus steel seems like the perfect way to use steel bits from broken tool heads. I like the idea that you might get bits and pieces of steel here and there as your tools break or when you quench too close to the sun, and you store them up in a little owl chest in the roof for a special occasion. That way by the time you've become a skilled smith, you'll have enough steel bits to make your masterwork: a Damascus steel, perfectly quenched and tempered tool, a falx, spear or maybe a hoe.

Yeah, I think sticking close to realistic smithing mechanics here would help the devs. If there were a wider range of choices involved in working metal, you'll get a small percentage of people getting really obsessive about how to game a complex system, learning how to mitigate different issues, you'd get master smiths, instead of bored people following a spreadsheet. And then you'll also get very thankful customers for those master smiths, instead of people going "I could have done that, but I didn't want to spend the time." To be fair, I'm not sure how complex the system needs to be to get to a point where some people can't be bothered but some can master it and have fun doing it. Maybe the current system is already doing that?

I personally think it'd be more fun to find an animal, track it, and bring it down with a perfect shot, and be done with hunting for a while, than it is to see an animal, hit it, chase it, see it again, hit it, repeat until dead. The second option is not so realistic, but also looses some of the anticipation and risk in taking the shot, which I think is the exciting part of hunting. It's all about: "Do I take shot here, or do I wait for it to step closer to the pool? Should I creep closer? If I do, I might spook it, but if I don't, I might miss." At the moment you just take any shot that you can, and the worst that happens is you lose your last spear and have to spook the animal trying to retrieve it. I was thinking about this, and if an instant kill yielded more meat, a guaranteed way to get an instant kill is to kill a domesticated animal with a cleaver. I think it would be a really interesting trade-off if in order to get a full meat yield you could either: Hunt skillfully and drop targets in one shot, or domesticate animals, and then reliably drop them in one with the cleaver. In this situation, I'd say the more times an animal was hit before it died, the less meat it would produce. Sort of like how an animal which falls off a cliff is too mangled to offer much meat.

V.S. health is tied to nutrition already, in a very nice, subtle way, using the nutrition bars. The higher each nutrition bar is, the more health you get. It doesn't seem like much, but when you get them all full you really notice the improvement. I would like an extra "nutrition" bar for something like variety, novelty, flavor, etc. If we had that extra bar, I could imagine adding an extra type of meat, something like a "prime cut," which could only be taken from domestic animals, which would fill the novelty bar faster, as well as be a more filling version of red meat.

Yeah, I wonder if domestication could also result in fatter, healthier animals, I.e. more fat and meat off gen. 1+ animals than off wild game, as a way to offset hunting being easier... Although that means the whole game gets easier, which we don't want.

Welcome to the forums! I love the idea of getting an echo when you hit a block with a hollow behind it. That would add so much mystery to the feeling of caving, and help those of us fools who play with cave-ins enabled avoid being crushed. I'd rather it if they did all of this with in-game mechanics rather than a block prefix. I.e. a wet block might have beads of moisture running down it, while a warm one could even hurt to get close to? It seems like it'd be worth it to have a strong warning before you mine into a lava pocket.

These are the sort of mechanics that really add something to V.S. It remains hidden unless you go looking for it, or already have some small amount of knowledge. I think V.S. does a great job already getting players to ask "Wait, can I do..." and answering "YES". I don't see any downside to adding this in depth mechanic except dev time to make it happen. Surely it could be a rainy day side project.

Yeah, I'm leaning towards the current abstracted approach, personally. We already get plenty of gameplay out of the actual hunting aspect, and other things need more attention right now (like spinning and weaving).

Actually, that's a really fair reason to add more mechanical depth to butchery. It'd add quite a lot if you could choose to kill fewer animals, but get good at butchery and get more out of them. I like how bushmeat is used in recurve bows, symbolizing using sinew. That's a really nice abstraction of a real process. It references reality without being too obsessive or gruesome. If there were some way to do that with the butchery process that'd be good. I like the idea that bush butchery leaves a carcass which attracts flies and wolves, vs. home butchery which is cleaner and more profitable. That way, being wasteful is gruesome, and being respectful is cleaner and less disturbing. Totally agree. Keep it abstracted, but use the abstraction to reference real world practices.

Likewise, the out of sight out of mind thing makes me pretty uncomfortable, but I think it's worth keeping gore out of player's faces if possible while still getting some good gameplay. I don't think there is any way to add detail to butchery without making people uncomfortably aware that they're turning a living creature into cuts of meat. It is what it is. Either the devs leave that part of the game tastefully abstracted, or they add a bit of mechanical depth to butchery, and it makes people uncomfortable (as it should). I don't mind either way. I don't play vintage story to get my hands into offal. Actually, scratch that, I want random pieces of offal from butchering. Liver and kidney omelet! Yum!

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.