Chrondeath

I'm getting dumb ideas that might square the circle here, although they're probably too much effort (maybe as a mod): wandering traders taking commissions. I'm envisioning maybe a separation between traders who reside in a fixed location and traders who maybe use the old cart model and actually move between sites, although probably by teleporting and not actual movement, maybe requiring some kind of "cart parking spot" structure to avoid collisions. The non-moving traders would spawn with one of those and then you'd be able to build your own to let a wandering trader spawn at your base. The wandering ones would have higher prices because they're making their money (in theory, maybe also in practice) by doing the "buy low sell high across long distances" things. Maybe they have an eclectic set of marked-up things from other traders in the area. The commissions idea, then, is that you would make a request, ask a wandering trader to go visit some specific non-wandering trader that you had previously found, to buy or sell something specific, and the wandering trader would, for a fee / markup, go do that for you, giving you a timeframe in which they would be back. Maybe let them bypass the stock rotation, maybe not. That way, there's still reasons to make a big run out to the (stationary) traders and do the trades yourself, because you'll get a better price and you can move faster than the guy with the cart, but you'd be able to delegate the trip at a cost of time and gears. Feels to me like it would be thematic and balanced but there's probably issues I haven't thought of.

The old-school Privateer player in me kind of likes the idea of being able to make a profit by traveling between points, buying the things that one location produces and selling them to a different location that needs them. I'm not sure the traders are 100% set up to make that profitable, though, and it's kind of a superfluous activity to the rest of the game. I wish there was a little more...enforced variety in traders, like, prevent two "adjacent" (per the trader spawning grid pattern) traders from being the same type. I've found a lot fewer traders in 1.22, not sure if replacing the carts with compounds has made the spawning more likely to fail. Thematically it definitely felt like the traders in carts were supposed to be (at least cosplaying as) mobile; moving to compounds makes them more match what they actually are but mobility is kind of what I wish they had. Wouldn't actually make a lot of sense without larger settlements for them to move between though.

Were you smithing out in the open? I had an experience like this during my first time smithing in 1.22, and it turned out to be rain causing my work piece to cool immediately. With a roof over my forge / anvil, it feels like it's consistently about a minute(?) before it starts cooling at all (and then the temperature drops pretty fast once it starts cooling).

I don't think you got to the point where you actually explain what it is you're complaining about. What is it that you don't like about the existing traders?

Following from my stance of "there are behaviors that I like seeing incentivized and made meaningful"--Valheim and Vintage Story have a non-overlapping set of things that they do this well on, and I wish it was possible to combine some of their features. Vintage Story is better on food and seasons and crafting, Valheim is better on roofing and smoke and transportation infrastructure (via weight), and it has better-than-nothing mechanics for fluff / comfort items. I don't think it's weird to wish that there was more meaning than just aesthetics to replace my dirt hut's roof with thatch or to build a chimney.

Difficulty for the sake of difficulty is a mistake. The thing that makes VS attractive is how the difficulty adds meaning and incentivizes specific interesting behaviors--it is *more interesting* to build a windmill in VS because the windmill isn't decorative. All the starvation and winter mechanics are necessary because all the food preservation technology isn't meaningful without the pressure of food being necessary and with varying seasonal availability. I do not find that "avoid getting killed by wolves" stops being interesting just because it stops risking the loss of hours of progress. I think building a bedroom is *under*-incentivized--right now, there's no reason to sleep at all, and the meta play is to never sleep and maximize what you can get done before winter by finding tasks that you can do at night. It would be more interesting with something like Valheim's comfort system, although (a) that's a little too linear and (b) there isn't a stamina or xp system to tie a bonus to. I don't know that spawn-setting is the right mechanic for a bed, but I don't think "find a rare-drop magic item from the zombie equivalent" is a very compelling alternative either--what realistic world process is that incentivizing? Maybe if beds set spawn *once* per full night's sleep? Incentivizing both sleep and death avoidance? Hmm....

If keepinventory can exist as a world setting without destroying whatever masochistic ego effect it is you're getting from thinking of VS as THE HARDEST HARD THING EVER, so could bed spawning.

Now that I'm home and can check the handbook, the Hide Hat looks like the most efficient way to convert Large Hides to Small Hides if that's what you're looking to do, as it can be made with just one Large Hide and gives a Small Hide refund. The Rawhide Wrap and Rawhide Tunic can also refund you a Small Hide, but require additional large/huge hides to make the piece, so they wouldn't be worth it for pure conversion, only for if you also needed the clothing piece.

I don't remember what recipes it is, but I'm fairly sure that while I was looking through warm clothing for winter, some of the smaller recipes could be done with a large or huge hide and would give you a "refund" of a small hide along with the item. I suspect that's what it's referring to.

Is it raining and are you outside with the anvil uncovered? I had a very similar experience with ingots cooling down immediately and it turned out to be the rain.

It's not hard to get a stack of flint over time if you just pick it up any time you see it (also helps if you have igneous rocks or chert and lean on those for stone tools). Flint and vines are two things that I try to collect as I happen across them, and then I have a stockpile by the time I have to start using them.

How many harvests are there within two years....? If it doesn't hit the nutrients every time, is it chunking them pretty good when it does hit?

My understanding, though it's all secondhand information, is that the berry bush health checks are thresholds checking against total nutrition across all three types. The only specific threshold number I've heard is that Bountiful requires 240% total, which would suggest to reach that requires--long-term, at least--fertilizing all three nutrients (assuming the bushes can't go over 100% in any one nutrient). I don't know what the threshold between Struggling and Healthy is; I assume a pure-Bonemeal diet at least keeps them off Barren though.

But that, too, is something RNG dictates whenever you are lucky or not to have those traders in your area. If you can manage to spot them. It would be nice if traders had options to point you towards the nearest trader of all types, not just treasure hunters. I feel like the distance should be enough to make that balanced. It's for grain crops. Yields have been cut in half from what they previously were, so players will want to make their fields a little bigger. That's all. To balance it out, wild grains now spawn in larger patches, so it's easier to gather more seeds quickly. Wasn't there also a bug fix to crop nutrient consumption that was going to make all crops (15%?) slower? And I thought at least one person claimed they were unable to get two sets of crops to mature before first winter, though there's a lot to confound that, obviously.

Surely the maturation time for the replacement cuttings would be a large enough obstacle to doing this? Or did the maturation time get cut short enough that you could dig up and replant all your bushes at the start of winter and have them matured by spring? It would also be using up the once-per-year cutting to do that, preventing you from duplicating bushes with good traits.... I'm still unclear whether the soil quality has an effect on bushes other than the initial nutrients. Does bush soil try to revert to its base capacities like farmland does, or is the soul quality forgotten once the bush matures and it's just "add to it with fertilizer, consume some on harvest"?

I don't know, this all seems pretty....screwed up ()

Pies, because I'm making pies anyway to optimize the satiety from and lifespan of berries. First winter I've always got a giant pile of berries going into it that will expire long before winter is over, and a significantly smaller pile of grain, so the main order of business is figuring out how to maximize what I get from berries. Juicing reduces their sat instead of increasing it and takes up barrels to store, honey's too hard to come by in quantity and takes up crocks to store, porridge doesn't have as good of a berry-per-grain ratio as pies. Since I'm making pies anyway, there's not much need for something else to cover the grain nutrition. Now, second year when the fruit trees are producing and I have boatloads of grain and a full container of pears or something that have significant duration by themselves....yeah, then bread might be the plan for the excess grain, though the fruit pies are still on my mind.

I think it depends entirely on how much you already dug out the area. If you dug one shaft, hit a cassiterite vein halfway to mantle, dug it out, and that's all you've been using? Sure, there's almost certainly more veins around there, because if there was only one vein in the area then it's improbable that you found it with so little effort. If you soda-crackered all over (dug multiple shafts in a pattern like the holes in a saltine) and they all went to bedrock without finding anything and then you finally found one cassiterite vein after a dozen shafts, then yeah--I would still guess there's probably more veins in the area but the expected effort to find them would be even higher because you're getting further from the peak.

I have never been convinced that the hunger pause is actually tied to the cookpot. This explanation is more plausible to me (roughly: the hunger pause is proportional to the highest nutrition value in the last bite you ate, but most things you would eat before getting a cookpot aren't high enough to really notice it). Pies certainly do pause hunger, I've watched the hunger value drop at a roughly consistent rate in the character pane and then stop dropping after eating a slice of pie, at least in the immediate term. If the linked theory is correct, a red meat pie slice should have the same hunger pause as a 2x red meat + 2x vegetable stew, which is something I vaguely want to test sometime but I'm not sure if I could measure accurately enough. The relevance to spices is that spices can't apply the "special cookpot effect" to other things, because there is no special cookpot effect. Applying a multiplier to the hidden-hunger-pause-nutrition might be plausible but without making it un-hidden it would be hard to explain what benefit the spices were having, though?

Oh, that sounds like an entertaining kind of bug, code-wise.

Well, that sounds like an extra nightmare to add on top of searching for thousands of blocks for limestone and bauxite to make leather and steel.... I do really like Valheim's cart mechanics, but over the distances that are needed for different stone types and with the mountains and hills that generate currently, it seems implausible. Maybe if the 1.21 "more easily traversable" thing works out.

I really liked how Valheim's smoke mechanics required me to incorporate some kind of chimney or smoke solution into my builds. If there's no mechanical reason for me to build something like a chimney, I end up either not building it or feeling a little disappointed that there was no purpose if I do. I feel like cellars are a similar existing nudge. If food preservation and cellars hadn't been a mechanic, I probably would have ended up with all my food stored in a pile of chests in my main room, as usually happen in my minecraft bases. I have a semi-related desire to see fire safety apply to more things than pit kilns; I kind of wish that the standard campfire required a little preparation (maybe an opportunity for the tutorial to teach new players about packed dirt and rammed earth), leading to a mechanical need for fireplaces (though preferably paired with it being easier to recover from screwing up a fire--maybe limited spread, or converting blocks to "scorched" variants instead of destroying things).