Bruno Willis

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.

Discussing the wonderful experience of lightening triggering fires, I said that I'd use that game mode, only if forests could recover from fire. The rules that govern what happens in the game after it starts shouldn't contradict the way the world looks when you first log in. If fire can permanently devastate forests, why are there still forests? Here's a solution: Forest floor has a chance to generate saplings if there are no trees or saplings already growing within 15 blocks. The game would use the generation data to choose what sorts of saplings. If you wanted to clear a forest forever you'd have to dig up the forest floor too. When berry bushes burn down they leave have a high chance to leave "burned bushes" which deteriorate to generate 1-4 berry bushes of that type the following spring. Maybe that's a propagation method? Is that a problem? Bushes (the only leaf varieties of trees) grow spontaneously, rarely, in places where they would be generated during world gen. These would generate very rarely, say 1 bush per 100 blocks per year, so that keeping an area clear would be easy, but fire-cleared areas could gradually recover to their original wilderness.

I'm not sure how exactly this works, so i simply put wood planks around the water and carved them into a barrel. Also, the bottom is a wooden plank block instead of your normal floor. The downside is that despite its small size it takes up 3x3 blocks so you can't build directly next to it. These look really nice! Very cool chisel work. From what I can tell, you can waterlog any chiseled block that has less than a slab's worth of voxels. You might also have to click on a block adjacent to it to fill the space with water, I'm not sure.

Welcome to the forums, I am so keen to go fishing using a net and a sailing boat.

Yeah, I want to play with lightening spreading fire, but it doesn't feel realistic or fully fleshed out yet. I really think the game would thrive if it had systems to recover from disaster and deforestation. I'd go with forest floor being able to generate saplings if there are no trees left within a certain area and berry bushes re-growing from burned remnants after fires, etc.

All the amours already look different depending on material, which is fantastic. Black bronze looks sick. Falx, being a specific design lore wise, maybe shouldn't change based on material. Knifes on the other hand - would love to see a different knife shape for every material. We could go from ceremonial bronze daggers through all sorts of designs. I'd also love it if knives could always be handled with bone, no matter what metal you used, and if you handled them with bone you got another different model.

I really like this take. Particularly linking rust foe spawning proximity to character stability during storms. That ties the storms into an established mechanic, with established ways to deal with it. If rift wards were altered to fill the niche, I'd say they could produce an area where your personal stability is artificially higher, which could let you make it though storms without rust-foes spawning in your room, especially if you have a several rift wards set up. I like what The Lurf suggested too, I think linking above-ground spawns exclusively to rifts could help, as would making rust-foes spawn right inside the rifts and stumble out. Maybe rifts could be linked to darkness though, so that if you leave a dark patch in a room, it has a chance to spawn a rift there, like a nasty rusty cobweb. You'd certainly learn exactly where the problem area in your house was. I love the idea of rifts as environmental hazards. I'm imagining a huge, horizontal rift cutting across a valley. The issue would be that passing through a rift is no problem currently. I think you'd want to A. add some "guard" rust foes who hang close to rifts (as you said) and B. make rifts feel sort of viscous to pass through I.E. you'd slow down as you tried to pull free from them. I've written previously about using light and fire as a early game rift ward. I'd love to inject it in here as another part of a solution. Basically, if light prevents rifts spawning, lots of light might make a small pocket of stability during a temporal storm. You'd build bonfires, and fight to keep them lit. Big two by two or three by three bonfires that swallow whole logs and throw out heaps of light and heat. It'd make a fun game for people who don't want combat. "We're not going to have enough wood!" "We don't need that beam on that corner, cut it out and burn it!" You'd use bonfires to stay stable during the storm, which would mean foes wouldn't spawn close to you. It'd mean you could have a bonfire in a courtyard and the foes would be stuck outside the gates, as long as you could keep the bonfire lit. Maybe they could be used to burn away smaller rifts, if you keep them lit right under the rift for long enough. They'd also be a way to scare off wolves and bears, as a side-effect.

Honestly, I'd love it if butchery were a bit more challenging and gruesome. We're killing animals here people! It's not like it's a nice thing to do. It seems like it'd be pretty challenging to add more detail to butchery without making it clearer that we're cutting up a creature.