Bruno Willis

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.

Mulberries feel very old-fashioned in a good, vintage story way. It'd also be cool to have a fruit tree which produces berries. As an added bonus, white mulberry leaves are the food source of silk-worms. Mulberries would make a great addition, at the time when the devs want to add weaving and better textile systems. I'd love to have mulberries, silkworms and silk.

I like this ide in some respects, but I feel like you have to know where the mountains are and the coasts are to generate rivers. Perhaps they could use a low complexity river map, which stores information about where the mountains are, and where the coastlines are, and how the rivers flow between those two points. Then you get valleys generating around rivers, and depending on the stone type in that area, you either get abrupt sandstone cliffs or broad glacial bowls. Rivers really are so important to the way a landscape forms, so it would make sense to them right at the core of world gen, but I really don't know how the world gen. system works. I feel like I'm just throwing guesses into the wind here.

Oh for sure, but square sails are blunt instruments, where the triangular sails ask you to do some interesting things to get the most out of them. In reality, a square sail is not going to be your "go anywhere" sort of sail, but it is going to be your simplest sailing experience. A triangular sail is going to be able to let you sail upwind and stuff, but it's going to feel finicky and skilled. So to simulate the experience of sailing with a square vs. triangular sail, I think it works. (I would prefer it if all sailing took wind direction into account, but that seems like something the devs have decided not to do, so I'll work with what we've got, which is still very cool)

I see where you're going with the status effects idea here and I really like it. Practice your archery for a a bit before going hunting to add a bit of accuracy and range, or set up a manakin and swing at it with your falx to get back into shape before heading into the first story location. That'd be really satisfying.

Shutters would also stop those pesky drifters from throwing stones through our windows. Its the right time to add shutters, and to give them utility by making drifters into the vandals they should be!

I was thinking recently that I'd like a bunch of different boat hulls to choose from, a few boat decks, and then a few different sails to choose from, so you could design boats for specific needs. At each stage of constructing a boat you would choose which version you would build. For example, Hulls: Round hull. Goes deep into the water, meaning it can hit the sea floor if it's two blocks down or shallower. Has good storage and good speed. Flat hull. Flat and wide for shallow water sailing, it just needs one block of water depth. Has good storage but slower speed. Sharp hull. Goes deep into the water, needing two blocks of water depth, poor storage, great speed. Decks: Open deck. Good storage and sightlines. Cheap to build. Sheltered deck. Has a little deckhouse which offers protection from the elements to you, and reduced spoilage times for stored foods. Less storage space and sightlines. Sails: Square rig. The current sailing system. Low skill, it just works. Lug rig. A triangular-ish sail. Takes wind direction into account, and can be considerably faster or slower than current sailing, depending on skill and weather.

These gifs are amazing, really helped explain the idea. I would say, I'm pretty sure rivers almost never split once they start flowing, it's more likely you get streams converging as they flow down hill (which your model also does). I think this might be solved if rivers had a data identity for the river as a whole, which would record how big and fast it was, which would help determine how it ends up falling across terrain, which I think you were getting at, Gummyslav: That way a large river will hit small divots and check how big and fast it is, and then just barrel through, maybe reducing its speed by a few ticks in the process. Damn, you're right. Does the game generate a "height map" or something before it generates terrain? I think that's what the farseer mod uses to get its distant mountains? If it were generating a vague outline of the terrain height, could it not have a second vague outline which just records the paths of rivers relative to the terrain height, so that when the game goes to generate terrain off the height map, it also takes into account the "river map"? Saying that, I do think the devs will have to do this sort of re-vamp of world gen. anyway to give landscapes more large scale coherence, and rivers will be easier as a result. The way you described islands being alright to do, but larger landforms needing plateaus, makes me think about essentially stacking islands overlapping each other, like scales, to get elevation change while still using those smaller shaped landforms? I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about with geomorph, or if that actually solves anything. Currently I really like seeing the terrain generation where there are obvious geological slabs sticking out of the ocean on these dramatic leans, with slight steps where the land looks like it's eroded to a hard ridge and then left a bit of it jutting out. What makes those look so good it how often they are at angles, which really sells their tectonic origins. You wouldn't want to lose that by generating based on elevation offsets.

Imagine rocking up to your favorite survival goods trader, only to hear a cough from behind their door. Is it worth going in? Do you want to buy salt, and get the flu for free? Do you have enough honey and thyme to make warm drinks for your recovery?

This. I've seen mods where the modder has included a line in the description saying "looking for thumbnail art" and then crossed it out when they got some. That's a great way for those of us with art skills but no money to "pay" for mods we like.

Welcome to the forums! I've also had one of these sessions, and I like what you've got here. The way I read this section is that the game would essentially draw out an elevation map and then overlay a number of likely rivers, then choose the best of those rivers following realistic parameters (fastest flow, most direct route downhill etc.), and generate terrain, those rivers included. Is that right? Reading this, I initially thought that rivers don't typically split again once they've met (the exception being braided rivers which are wonderful and not common). Reading it again though, are you suggesting that the game uses the branching mechanic to propose alternative paths, and then chooses the best of the three possible options and generates that one? I like that idea. I really like the idea of floods, but I've also been listening when people explain that a full meter of water rise would A: not be realistic and B: cause a lot of problems with terrain gen. But, your post gave me an idea about special river-flat blocks which might let us do flooding in a cool way: They'd essentially be dirt slabs, which would generate when a river ran through flat dirt land. They'd generate on either side of the river, out until they met an elevation change. They'd be able to have plants placed on them (I know, that'd be an issue but bear with me), which would grow extra bushy around the base (allowing the devs to use their normal plant models and then extend a half-block of tangled foliage filling the space below). The river-flats would be able to be tilled, and would have good fertility, but if dug up would just produce "silty earth" which would work like fertilizer rather than a placeable block. When rain fell for an extended amount of time though, all rivers with river flats would rise one block higher, and the river flats half blocks would flood, destroying any plants and crops (except rice?) which were planted on them. Any missing bits of river flat would re-generate if there were river flat blocks adjacent (simulating silt washing over the flats). It'd stay flooded for four days after the rain stopped, and then return to normal, except the river-flat blocks would be refreshed to full nutrient value, be un-tilled, and stripped of any grass which might have grown on them.

Welcome to the forums, and thank you for such an in-depth response. Yes, I think this is an area the game could improve on. I found that chiseling was a very rewarding winter pass-time, but it does chew through nutrition. It feels like this might be a good time to weave and do little, time intensive, low effort tasks, but then we have the problem that spending lots of time on minor tasks might not be all that fun. I imagine when the devs add weaving properly, that could end up being a really fun, time intensive mini-game which you might want to do during winter, but it's still a challenge to fill that winter time. Panning, again uses heaps of nutrition. Maybe chiseling and panning should use less nutrition to encourage saving up those jobs for winter? I would say, going hunting is still viable in winter, and it is beautiful out there in the snow. I would love it if there were more of a reward for surviving a long time, but I think the game wants to keep the cost of dying low because you will almost certainly die a bit if you interact with the storyline, or go out and have fun during temporal storms. It's a bit of an issue, where they want to encourage not dying, but they also want to encourage adventurous risk taking, and those things just don't align. I find filling up the nutrition bars really rewarding, so that's a good encouragement for not dying for me, but I'd love it if there were a solid reward for surviving a full year, which helped you survive just a bit more. It could even just be an extra little bit of health. That way, if you're trying really hard not to die at all, you can gradually tick up your total health, which would be a nice reward for people who play perma-death: as their investment in a world increases, they get slightly better odds for surviving. As it is, I would recommend improving your base over winter. It's a great time to just tinker round, especially with interiors. If on your next play through you want something closer to perma-death but less brutal, you might try increasing the re-spawn radius to something ludicrous as a death punishment. It'd be like starting a new game each time you die, except occasionally you'd run into the remains of your past lives.

This would be the route I'd use. I think the devs are a bit stuck with water as long as they keep the weird TOBG water rules. Personally I would love to see a total re-imagining of water mechanics, so that water sources aren't something which can just be placed or destroyed, where water can flow continuously towards low points, rather than just sink into the earth, and where water can be diverted or blocked to flood areas. It's a huge ask, but I think the devs could come up with far better water mechanics than TOBG has, and I think better, more believable water would seriously elevate the game.

This is something I care about as well. I'd love to see a way to wrap storage vessels in wet linen or something to keep food cool on long journeys. I guess also, use long-lasting foods, like pickles and salted meats? I've never had enough salt to really do that, but I guess that's already an option.