williams_482

You're definitely correct about respawn mechanics strongly disincentivizing any risk taking while far from home, unless you have a comfortable surplus of temporal gears and can anticipate in advance that you're making a high risk choice. Setting a respawn point before entering a story location? Easy, obvious. Setting a respawn point before a dungeon? Tough choice if you're low on gears. Setting a respawn point before you stumble blindly into three brown bears who apparently spawned right next to each other in a dense forest your elk can't navigate, and by dint of surprise, sheer number, and unfavorable terrain are able to claw through your steel chain before you can kill all three? Impossible, unless you're clairvoyant, and when this happens ~8,000 blocks from the last place you set your spawn, itself ~8,000 blocks from home... not a super fun time. Ask me how I know. There is a Jonas device which solves this problem, the trouble is that it's a pretty expensive one, and specific Jonas parts are a total crapshoot. So that's not really a solution, especially when this story location is supposedly intended to be handled with iron age gear. I think if the game wants to make these long journeys fun, it needs to either make that expensive to operate terminus teleporter a little less prohibitive to construct, or give the player some ability to respawn within a manageable distance of their death point if they are wearing a more obtainable object, such a s a temporal gear amulet. That won't affect the amount of planning necessary, or the usefulness of creating way stations. It just opens up more possibilities for whimsical exploration en route without the 10,000 block corpse run of Damocles hanging over your head.

I think males just need to have eaten recently, regardless of if they escaped their pen in the mean time. I'm not sure how long it takes for them to need more food, but it's fairly quick. Maybe 3-5 days? Definitely less than a month.

The epiphany I had that made me invest in better tools is that the only truly relevant cost for any equipment in this game is time. Time to find the material, time to mine it, time to process it, time to craft it. Flint tools are "cheap" in that the materials they use are easy to find and require no processing, but continuously crafting new flint tools is actually a major time suck, well in excess of the time spent mining out another impact crater, shoving the resulting meteoric iron chunks in a bloomery, and smithing out a few tools that last twenty times as long as flint equivalents. I will still occasionally craft bone-handle flint knives or axes for use in grid recipes like scraping hides or splitting wood, but for any tool that I'll be carrying with me and using regularly, give me the one I won't have to replace for a long time and I know I'll come out ahead.

Regional temporal stability varies in all 3 dimensions. There are occasional pockets of unstable space high in the air, and occasional pockets of stability underground. Sounds like you got unlucky with where your windmill is located.

I remember being very anxious about the monsters when I started playing about a year ago, with feelings similar to what you're expressing here. My recommendation is the following: 1. Build yourself a small home with a door (ideally made from two fence gates, the crude door is total garbage) and adequate illumination to prevent spawns. This is your safe place of retreat, whatever happens. Make sure there's a big, relatively flat area nearby, with minimal vegetation. This is ideal terrain to fight monsters in. Then do whatever normal game stuff until the grace period you set runs down. 2. Knap 3-5 flint spears, and craft some improvised armor (or wood lamellar, if you're rich in hides and resin) 3. Remove everything else of value from your person and put it on the ground or in a container. Light a torch and put it in your off hand. Scarf down a big meal, and have a few more ready. 4. Get yourself hyped up. 5. Attack! Run out into the night, find a monster, charge it, and stab it until it dies. Repeat. Prioritizing charging bowtorn: this is tactically smart because they have a powerful ranged attack, but it's also psychologically beneficial because the horrific, grotesque, terrifying creatures will turn and run in a blind panic once you get close enough to them. Remember to keep moving. Don't bother to loot corpses right now unless there really doesn't seem to be anything else around. Practice stepping up to drifters, stabbing them, and then backpedaling to evade their counterattack. For shivers, notice that if you get a couple hits in they will often run away for a bit. They also have this odd habit of curling up on the ground twitching, which is a perfect time to attack them. Try to learn what works against these things, and apply those lessons. Eventually something will kill you. Good! Dying isn't that bad, and the only way to reinforce that is to have it happen. Run back in there, retrieve whatever weapons you dropped when you died, and go again. It might or might not help to have a target number of deaths in mind. E.g. "I am going to kill as many drifters as I can before I die five times or the sun comes up." But the goal is to push through the initial anxiety and deliberately suffer consequences for rash actions, to internalize that these consequences just aren't as bad as the anxieties built up around them. Once your night of berserker rage is over, gather up your equipment and assess the condition of your character, your gear, and your own feelings. If you're anything like me you'll probably be feeling pretty excited, and your anxiety about monsters won't be gone, but it will be greatly tempered. You CAN fight these things, and win. Sometimes it will go wrong and you will die and that will be okay too. Note: do not try this approach with real life terrifying violent creatures, unless you are actually an immortal being capable of returning fro the grave. It will not go so well.

Fully agreed. These changes would have prevented my own confusion when getting books from the RA the first time, and would make organizing a library far easier. For the most part VS is very good about giving you useful information in tooltips, so having something actually helpful in the book tooltips would hardly be out of place.

Do you have screenshots of the location? It sounds like a nice one.

Judging by your chat log, you were probably in a slightly low temporal stability area, then a temporal storm (apparently a very early one, given your limited equipment) swept through and tanked your stability. Because your current location happens to be unstable your temporal stability kept getting worse until it bottomed out, and never improved. The solution is to just run in whatever direction until that gear in the UI starts turning clockwise, and then everything will eventually return to normal. How you as a new player are supposed to know that, I'm not sure.

I can see a case for this. I think it would have to require a proper bed, not just a hay bed. Aged beds might give more respawns, in accordance with their rarity. If such a thing were implemented, the game would have to be smart about fallbacks. On death, first check if the player slept in a qualifying bed which still exists in the world. If none, then check if their most recent temporal gear spawn point still has respawns left, then finally default to world spawn. Bed respawns permanently overriding temporal gear spawn points would be very bad. For arguments against, I recall a post from a while back (I've tried to find it, no dice) from someone who had just bought the game with their friends and started up a small server together, asking what the point of food was. After a long and confusing back and forth (what do you mean there's no reason not just starve to death?), somebody figured out that they had installed a bed respawn mod from the start, and whenever they died of starvation it took them right back to their house to keep doing exactly what they were doing before, with effectively no interruption. The bed respawn became a crutch to avoid needing to engage with food at all, which cut out a big chunk of the interesting early gameplay and left them unprepared to do any real exploring once this pattern was established. Respawning in a chosen place is a powerful ability; it should be expensive enough that a clueless new player isn't likely to stumble into it before they've figured out how to play the game.

Not that I've found, unfortunately. It's definitely a bother, although you might be able to mitigate most of the problems by hiding angled gears in room corners and sealing off the occasional hole by covering the protruding axle.

The origins of bells are strongly hinted at in one of the story locations.

I think smithing should reward skill, and hubs requiring some experience to make with three ingots instead of four is a part of that. Personally I do enjoy smithing hubs, because for me they are large enough that I have to think about how to do them instead of being completely rote, while presenting a manageable challenge. The trick to efficient hubs is placing your three ingots with the workpiece at different rotational positions. Each ingot will form most of a spoke naturally, and leave the fourth spoke as an open space which can be easily built up by pulling material from the center. With that said, punching out the side holes in the final steps is dicier than it maybe should be, punishing a misclick very harshly even if you left some extra material. I'll admit to rage-cheating in a hub after punching out the wrong voxel and spending multiple heats trying to move a surplus voxel into the right spot to replace it. One thing I wish for that would make smithing hubs, anvils, and other large projects a bit easier is an indication of where a fresh ingot will actually be added to a workpiece (and if voxels will be stripped off due to the height limit). I still tend to guess wrong by a voxel or two exactly where an ingot will go.

What I like about the current system is: - It's a meaningful penalty, but not a debilitating one. 20% more food consumption matters enough to care about it, but not enough that you have to cut out big parts of the gameplay to avoid it. - It encourages you to keep an empty hand most of the time. Carrying stuff in each hand is more tiring than not. - Because there is a cost, you have a decision to make on when it is or isn't worth it. Decisions are good, generally. - This cost becomes much less significant once you are food stable, effectively making reducing this penalty part of the progression. What I don't like: - It's poorly documented and not shown in the UI at all, which makes it a trap for new players. This is a serious issue and must change. - +20% for everything is clearly arbitrary, and it really should vary depending on what. Both shields (heavy) and torches (awkward) should be relatively costly, smaller tools like tongs and chisels relatively cheap but not free. I'm intrigued by a system where many tools (pickaxes, axes, bows) require two hands, either to use at all or for maximum effectiveness. Needing to place light sources in order to both see and use a pickaxe efficiently would be an acceptable tradeoff to me, at least under most circumstances, but it would be considerably more annoying than accepting the current +20% hunger penalty. I would want a way to negate that later in the game. Relatedly, the fact that weapon / light source / shield is currently a "pick two" sort of deal and never really goes away is also a problem that I would want solved in the progression somewhere. The night vision mask is supposed to be a solution, but it fall short because 1) it takes up an armor slot (much more costly than losing a shield) and 2) it doesn't stop mobs from spawning the way actual light sources will. I'd like to see this solved with a backpack change that allows dedicating a slot of more advanced backpacks to a lantern, allowing a trade of inventory space for lighting. I see the suggestion along these lines upthread, and I offer my own rough proposal here:

I assume from this that you do a lot of premodern reenactments, which would explain standing around with a shield for hours. What are you doing holding a torch for that long?

A forecast tool would be helpful but not game breaking, and could be presented as either mundane sensing tech or as exploiting temporal weirdness for a fuzzy lookahead.