Bruno Willis

I was also quite frustrated when I first entered the R.A. and realized my stack of rope ladders and my explosives were useless. Then I got to enjoying the location design and I didn't mind so much, but it still bothers me. For the most part, especially when it comes to player behavior towards NPCs, I agree with LadyWYT. The current land claim system enforces the tone of the game and moral character of the seraphs, and it does it well and fairly subtlety. The story of the game suggests that we are interested in communities recovering, have good intentions towards other people, and are unwilling to desecrate significant sites. But we are also survivors and adventurers. The current land claim system limits the sort of tools the game considers 'adventurer's equipment' to a very small pool, with torches being the only placeable tools of the lot. It does this because if we adventured in story locations like we do in caves and ruins, we'd ruin special places as well as our own gameplay experience. If land claims were to change, it would have to be in a way which preserves the tone and moral character of the game, and doesn't undercut the current story location design. It might be worth changing claims because claimed areas feel a bit artificial, and also stop player using tactics they've learned elsewhere when they encounter story locations. We discussed this a bit in the "Combat is too shallow for it to be so integral to the game." thread, so I'll just summarize a few of the ideas for changes we had, and their issues as I see them now: Placement and removal of a limited selection of items within claimed areas - rope ladders, beds, cookfires and pots, maybe explosives. Issues: allows construction of artificial barriers to cheese combat in a way which doesn't support mood. Might create three separate systems, free gameplay, partially claimed, and fully claimed (for npcs), instead of two. Having those items disappear in some way - either they time out, and slowly flicker out of existence like temporal storm rust-foe do. Issue: still allows barrier building, but keeps the story locations pristine. Rust foes break or pick up those items when they would interact with them. Issues: rust foe aren't that smart and don't exhibit the ability to break stuff out of claimed areas. Still, this would keep story locations mostly pristine and not allow barrier building. Making a noise or alteration sensing system, like a sleepy monster, which gradually wakes as things are placed or broken. It would punish placing items or breaking items in claimed zones by becoming a terrible threat, lowering stability massively, etc. Issues: very story location specific, also allows locations to be damaged and altered, and areas to be cheesed and mined, for possibly very unrewarding gameplay (run away, come back when its calm, mine another couple of pretty lights, then run away again...). Rework items to work in claimed areas within existing conditions, i.e. make the scrap bomb throwable. Issues: maybe bad people kill lots of NPCs :-( Class of portable items, as with #1, with bags/back packs, a portable stove, sleeping bag, bombs & traps? Smoke screens, noise makers, flares, caltrops? which can be placed in claimed areas, automatically broken if placed in a crucial location. Issues: as with #1, could be used to block foes from getting through corridors. Griefing with bombs and traps in player claimed areas. Automatically collect 'portable items' back into inventory when the owner walks too far way. Issues: it might have to happen as a seraph walks out of arm's reach of an item, otherwise it might feel odd, but a seraph's arm's reach is massive so... This seems like a very good solution to a lot of these issues. What I see as the best case scenario for changing claimed areas is making a class of portable items which explicitly say "can be used in claimed areas" on their handbook entry, which would do double duty by informing players that other items can't be used there. Making items which Devs want to be used in adventures usable without placement where possible (scrap bombs). Adding interesting extra items into the portable items category: portable stoves, smoke screens, caltrops etc. and having them automatically collect back into inventory if you go too far away, and also become temporally unstable and disappear if a rust-foe tries to get past them for long enough (Maybe a short delay of 2 seconds before they phase out). I'd love this change but I don't think it's the biggest priority. I do think it would give the devs a few more fun options for story location design, and would make claimed areas feel less jarringly different to the rest of gameplay.

You can preserve apple juice. You fill a jar with apple juice, heat it in a pan of water till it is hot, then seal the lid. It'll keep in a cellar for more than a year without fermenting. (that is, in real life)

I feel like this game could do with supporting very sub-optimal options. It would be really fun if hanging stick and string mobiles with a rust gear in the center could reduce the percentage of rift spawns in the area by like, 0.2%, so you'd have to turn your area into a crazy witch-warren of charms to actually see any effect. Some people would do it. I would hang a few around if they had random variation in their design. I also think blackguards should be able to eat pies whole, and some drifters will go away if you offer them a nice warm bowl of stew. The game wouldn't be worse for it.

I think the monsters would be more fun if they were rarer but more lore accurate, specifically being able to climb fences and clumsily open doors. That'd make them creepier and a categorically different threat to the wildlife. Saying that, I don't think the current versions of surface monsters are that nerfed from a lore perspective. If you think about the size of that other location, one death a year would be unsustainable. I'm doing risky things, but surface monsters still murder me way more than once per year and I'm a well equipped seraph. To ordinary folk the surface monsters are still a long term existential threat. I do wish the traders would take the threat seriously though. It feels like they've paid the rust monsters protection money at the moment. That idea to make rifts spawn more in unstable areas would be excellent: It'd also help players notice faster that they shouldn't be settling down in that spot. I think having a desperate measures option to keep out rifts and spawns makes the Jonas tech more exciting. "We're out of firewood and the horrors are almost through!" "We built the woodshed out of logs, didn't we? Get cutting."

I think this brings up a key issue with combat, which is that the current combat system and foes don't encourage people to build walls and towers and fortifications, our aesthetic sensibilities do. Sure, the walls are useful, but not any where near as useful as a pit and a dirt box. I think a good way to improve combat would be to design the foes we will experience at our bases to be best countered with fortifications. That would mean giving rust foes the ability to climb fences and open doors if they try for long enough, and some way to keep the center of a fortress free from foes in a storm. Maybe that means single use mid-game technology like these maybe? It'd be cool to, for instance, set up a bonfire in the center of a walled fort, and when the temporal storm sweeps in you all run inside the walls and light the bonfire. The huge light and heat from the bonfire would prevent spawns in a reasonable area, letting you all prepare in the open and try to barricade the doors before they're breached, or open the doors just before they're breached so that you can have controlled fights. (I like the idea of a bonfire because it is A- a heavy investment of basic materials B- very medieval rather than si-fi and C- could look and sound epic.) At present fortifications are as useful as handicrafts when a temporal storm sweeps in.

On a slightly different note, the auto loot feature on the falx is actually a big change to combat. I've gone from having to kill rot beasts to just targeting the tough ones and hitting them until I get a gear, then fleeing. It's made getting loot from combat more interesting and slightly less resource intensive.

For me it was shocking because it told me the story location gameplay would use different rules and techniques than the ones I had learned through normal gameplay. It sort of feels like you're playing two different games, normal and story mode. I love VS so much, it has replaced all others for me, but that moment when I realized I couldn't use many of the skills I'd learned outside the dungeon anymore was a very disappointing one. I know now, and I have a great time and really enjoy the story locations, but I think having such a tactics divide between the claimed and unclaimed locations feels off. Saying that, the tall and timey story location is an excellent example of adding extra rules that are unique to a story location. I think that works because it is adding options, rather than removing them, and because it feels in-world justified. It's interesting to imagine what the RA would be like if it was unclaimed, but every time you broke something or sprinted in armor, or did anything else particularly noisy, a light would blink on on the darkened figure in the center, and then slowly fade to black again. Get too many lights lit and things get temporally unstable, locusts pour from high spots, essentially the space becomes unbeatable and you have to retreat. It would make it more of a tense, heist like scenario where you're pausing after every loud noise, waiting to see if the thing in the center heard you. I am not sure if that would be better or worse, but it is a different way than just saying "only combat and placing story things now". I guess what I'm getting at is the whole "you cannot break things, this place is claimed by a higher power" feels interesting and ominous, but is literally a deus ex machina for the devs. It would be more interesting if they said "you shouldn't break things here, this place is claimed by a higher power" and then backed it up in world with interesting, brutal consequences. You get almost the same gameplay, but you get rid of that artificial divide between game modes.

This mod - bare bones as it is - totally transforms the way I play the game. Just being able to see grey outlines of mountains in the far distance makes everything feel really big and makes exploration way more exciting. Including this mod in the base game and improving on it would make these grand scale terrain generation options work, and in my opinion making big, realistic terrain will make exploration so much better.

I've talked about this before, but I think it shows it's value here well: adding a satisfaction saturation bar. Essentially, spices would be able to fill this bar up faster, drinking alcohol would too, and eating varied meals would fill this up very gradually. It'd give people a good reason to pursue those hard to make meals and drinks, and to go out on a mushroom cutting expedition even when they've got their vegi garden established. I think you'd also want to make filling all saturation bars a bit more impactful, and there are plenty of options for that. From slightly improving run speed, mining speed, etc, through to increasing the effectiveness of healing poultices, all the way to giving the world a rosy cheerful filter.

To jump back a bunch to this, I think the way the key story points are designed is a lot to blame to people not liking combat. At the moment, claimed areas are almost as restrictive as they can be. You can place torches in torch holders, and you can place story items in story item slots. I think opening that up just a little more would make a world of difference and open up the design space for story locations hugely. When I first prepared for the RA I gathered up a huge number of rope ladders and anti creature explosives, because I had gotten used to avoiding hard fights if I could, or taking fights on my own terms. I was so disappointed to find that I couldn't place any ladders, especially when the situation so clearly called for them. My immersion as an adventurer in a ruined land was totally broken. I also decided to hop down to the bottom of the pit and got stuck there for a long time, but that was on me. I know being able to mine blocks would totally break dungeon design, but dungeons can still be really interesting, risky and fun spaces to explore if you are avoiding detection, climbing, looking for interesting gaps to exploit. I could see VS designing key chapter points more like heists than boss battles, but it would require a change to how claiming works. Imagine if you could place some blocks in claimed areas, but the denizens would take them down again after a couple of hours or when they bumped into them (the alterations would disappear). Then the devs would be able to design maps where players would have to look around and spot holes to rope ladder up to, places where using a bomb might be a good way to kill a band of foes, and maybe even weak points in walls which a stone breaking bomb could open up a passage permanently (although this one would be the most challenging to work with). It looks like the Zelda games do a good job at making puzzle dungeons, and I really think VS suits puzzle dungeons so much better than combat dungeons. It should be able to do puzzle dungeons better than any other game. I want to be fixing things, turning ancient and gargantuan things on, use pully systems to drop tones of rock onto robotic horrors, not just stand around hitting things with lengths of bent metal. No matter how good the hitting mechanic is. (to be fair, I can see the devs are already designing 'turn things on' and 'fix broken machines' quests, but I think they're hamstrung by how restrictive the claiming system is)

I like the idea of passive "clutter" items for kitchens, like spices, jars of oil, sauces, dried herbs, etc. They'd all stack together in the way candles bunch up, and make your kitchen look used without adding any complexity to crafting recipes. Then when you cooked, the game would automatically check if there are spices, herbs, etc. within range of your cooking fire and add a benefit. I like this benefit:

The Scottish Highlanders could reliably catch bullets with their shields too, which were leather, wood and lots of little metal studs. A musket bullet would punch through easily if it struck straight on, but they held them at an angle which meant the bullets either ricocheted off the studs or burrowed into the wood.

This just isn't realistic sailing though. When you're sailing, you can usually sail in any direction except straight towards the wind. Imagine a clock- if the wind is blowing from 12:00, you can sail in directions from 2:00 all the way round to 10:00. You can get even closer to the wind with a modern sail. All you need to do to go upwind is to tack back and forth, zigzagging upwind. It's slower, but it's no big deal. (Edit: I just watched a video on valheim's sailing, and that's how it works there. Oops.) Whatever route they follow, this would be the best, simplest change. Along with making the flag on the top of the mast point away from the imagined wind direction instead of towards it. That drives my stability down every time I notice it.

I've had serious trouble finding any sedimentary stones before, and it's always been the translocators that have saved me. Find one, go through and make a ladder straight up. You'll get to know all the stone layers on your way up, and its much more fun to go transponder hunting than it is to wander the land endlessly. Every time I've needed to find a specific stone type, the translocators have led me right.

I think it would actually be really interesting if we kept the current dominant wind direction, and had sailing ships go significantly faster in that direction, then sail at the current speed across the wind, and then tacking upwind you'd go slower. It'd give some nice rhythm to sailing and travel, and you'd prefer certain routes because of the dominant wind. That'd let windmills stay as they are. Saying that, I hate that windmills don't take wind direction into consideration - those optimized windmills with rotors on all sides look so unnatural! I'd say, make wind direction mean something, and apply that across the board, but keep the world having a dominant wind direction so you can plan around it. Occasionally the wind might blow from one of the other directions, which would cause mills to halt (like they already do when the wind falls), and would allow you to sail in directions which would usually be a pain. Oh the pain. Yeah, that's happened to me too, but it taught me to always mark my park and I've been fine ever since.

I'd love to see the way moisture and farmland works get a re-balance, so that crops can be over-watered, and you don't need irrigation right up against every block of farmland. In reality, too much water is as much of a problem as too little for crops, especially gardens which take a long time to dry out after a soaking. That could be part of the challenge for tropical life, trying to keep your crops from getting sodden and rotten during the rainy season (obviously things like rice would love being soaked though).

This trope always annoys me. In real life recurve bows and such are just straight up better than longbows. Especially composite bows, (which is what the recurve bow is in VS) they are just better in all ways, except that they're harder to make. They're also better than basic crossbows (able to pack a bigger punch with a significantly longer range), they just require more skill to use. The reason crossbows got popular was that you could chuck them at just about anyone and make an archer. A good longbow or recurve archer had to train for most of their childhood to get good. This seems like a really good way to simulate bow skill, because you can actually get better at using them as you get used to them. Crossbows really should give you a penalty for aiming for an extended time though: they're heavy and kind of awkward.

I've found deep deposits, and they're barely larger than surface deposits. If you're good with a pro-pick, they're a decent thing to look for. They seem to generate kind of high up. I've only bothered when I've got a Galena note while prospecting for something else, and it's usually been kind of difficult to actually hit the deposit, because they're so small. Persistence and having plenty of pro-pick durability is key.

I'd prefer hot air balloons. They're more renaissance age, and they'd offer a great use for distilled spirits as fuel for the burner. I think you'd have to add kites as well, so you could check the wind direction in the upper sky (or the clouds could tell you). The devs would have to be willing to add wind direction variability to the game. You'd ascend, drift along in the direction of the wind, and then descend if you arrived near your destination, or if the wind changed to the wrong direction. It'd require distilling, weaving, a lot of rope, and probably a complex smiting recipe for the burner, so it would be late game but not Jonas parts based.

I'm fine with the bears at the moment, I've learned how to avoid them consistently and without much trouble, but I can think of ways to improve them. The best case scenario, to me, would be if bears somehow chose cave entrances to build lairs in, then dragged their larger kills back to the lair to to eat them, breaking bushes on their way back. The skeletons would build up in and around their lair, and the bear would be constantly returning to the lair (so it would have a predictable location). The bear would also scratch trees to mark its territory, check those trees regularly like a perimeter guard, and in spring male and female bears would get together and make cubs, and all hang out in the same lair. If you didn't deal with the bear family early, you'd see the bear population double. That'd turn areas of forest into recognizable (but subtle) danger zones, and make it easier to go after a bear deliberately, and less likely to get hit by a surprise bear in territory you know well. I think those sorts of environmental changes would make them feel more like the surface bosses they are. Also, imagine caving, and you're tired, weighed down by your best armor, and you've found an alternative exit. As you come up into the light you see the skeletons of 20 goats and pigs, and a couple of bear cubs growling in a courner. D-:}

I think this is already the case: pretty much every safe mushroom seems like it has a look alike which is poisonous and grows in the same sort of area. I also love the bitter bolete mushroom - poisonous, but not bad enough to deter me from its succulent flavor in a stew. I'd love to be able to make decorative blocks out of bones, like the stacked bones which line the catacombs under Paris.

Yeah, I really wish arrows could stick in game animals and work their way deeper if you got a good shot, and I would love blood trails so much. It would be interesting if animals could get tired, which historically was our big advantage. It'd be pretty cool to drive deer across country and they do shorter and shorter bursts of sprinting. This mod might be useful to you in the meantime: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bloodtrail

Thank you for this suggestion by the way. It is horrifying. I can't go back.

Yes! What a horrible idea. This is great, and it'd add so much interest to travel. I love finding those big trees and using them as travel markers. I wonder if these world wonders could be tied into world generation in more than just being placed in afterwards - like if a giant tree gets placed down, the area all around it would automatically generate as forest. If an Uluru-like generated, it would guarantee big flat desert all around it. If a mountain pass generated, it'd guarantee a mountain chain to either side? I was thinking even broader, something right at world generation which says "there's a bulge on this part of the planet, and there's a deep bowl here," and then it does the usual generation over top of that. If you wanted two large land masses, you'd scale it low, and the world would generate with two huge bulges which become the high points of two different continents, and two deep bowls which would be guaranteed big oceans. If you wanted something like the current world gen, you'd scale it high and there'd be more bulges and bowls squashing up together and they'd sort of average out a bit. I don't know how flexible that part of the code is now though, probably not very.

Yeah, this is really true. Vintage story successfully makes me feel like I'm alone in the wilderness, only occasionally coming across other people. It's just that the landscape generation, while really strong on a small scale, doesn't offer that larger 'narrative' or geological logic quite as well. That means you end up seeing combinations of forest, hills, gullies, deserts and mountains - all really good - over and over again without a sense that there's a bigger 'geological story' behind them. Yeah, I really like this idea. I'd also love to see hulks still floating, all rotted and overgrown, and crawling with drifters. There's something incredibly spooky about ghost ships. You'd want them to have a way to sink if they were holed too much by the player, and they'd creak and moan all the time, and maybe have pumps which could be powered to drain lower decks. It'd also be nice if some of the traders were ocean going, pulled up on the side of an island in their houseboats (I'm pleased to hear that traders will get re-worked). I feel like the oceans will get a lot more love now that we've got a way to explore them.