williams_482

Brass cannot be turned into bismuth bronze. However, you can craft brass plates into torch holders (two plates to make two torch holders). If you're still short on permanent light sources, that at least lets you salvage something useful from this.

An alternative to placing ladders as you dig is to dig down in a two-block column, straddling the two blocks so that even if you dig into a cavern, you'll still have a block to stand on*. A nice side benefit of this is that because you can dig three blocks below you at a time and your initial node searches with the prospecting pick should be done 12 blocks apart, it's easy to maintain the correct increments. Obviously, you will still want the ladders to get back up again. You just don't need to pause every other block to place them. * Technically it is still possible to fall using this approach. If the block you are standing on was entirely supported by the block you broke, it will drop out from under you as a relieved stone block, plunging you into some god forsaken pit filled with who knows what. But that's very unlikely, so why worry about it?

Every once in a while somebody on Reddit posts a picture of the RA front door or the Devastation fog and asks what the heck is going on, so it's definitely possible to stumble into them by accident if you wander far enough.

This is definitely not true. The flute will teleport the elk at a considerable distance, well beyond one chunk. Of course if you're too close (within a couple blocks) the elk will do nothing, because as far is it's concerned it's already right next to you. It is somewhat inconsistent because the elk will first try to path to the player normally, and only teleport once it decides the player cannot be reached on a relatively direct path. The elk will usually teleport within a few seconds if you are moving through dense forest, but will spend much longer trying to chase you down if the intervening terrain is open ground, or there happens to be a convenient path between you.

I don't recall needing to enter creative to get through the Devastation part of Chapter 2.

That's all true. VS is much smaller than Steam, and Tyron claims he'll shut off the DRM in a final update if the servers go down. I believe that he means that, and I have much more faith in one guy deciding to make the moral choice than a multi-billion dollar corporation, but there is a danger here and I would be considerably happier if the game didn't have DRM.

In order for tech progression beyond mere metals to be more holistically integrated into the story, the Chapter 3 dungeon will feature a boss who is deathly allergic to blue cheese.

Moose cavalry were probably never attempted, as of the two alleged examples one comes from sources writing over 200 years after the fact, and the other is explicitly an April Fools prank that gained traction in foreign language newspapers. However, reindeer riding is a real thing, even today, and I'll hazard a guess that this could have inspired the choice of Elk over moose or sheep as the mount of choice.

I think the emphasis on player choice as the critical element misses the mark to some degree. Player choice without restriction is creative mode. You can do absolutely anything you want, build absolutely anything, etc. But most people don't play creative mode. Restrictions on what the player can do and how they can do it are a critical aspect of what makes games like this fun. They give you goals, force you to problem solve, and inject some extra emotional heft into the actions you take. A seraph is not a god: they are powerful, they are immortal, but they are also vulnerable to dangerous enemies, burdened by normal physical limitations on a body of this size which can move at those speeds in that environment, and forced to exist in a world they cannot totally control. These restrictions of player agency are good and useful. Temporal storms and surface instability are infamous for good reason, and I expect them to change substantially from their current form by the time this game is considered "finished." The primary problem with both of them does come around to disruption of player agency. Temporal storms by forcing the player to do something different (and usually boring) for a little while, surface instability by forcing them to account for a non-visual factor (which new players routinely aren't aware of) when deciding on aesthetically pleasing places to build. Both of these are tricky problems, but they are fixable: Temporal Storms need to be actually fun to engage with while maintaining the creepy vibe, and surface instability needs to be visually obvious somehow. Exactly how those things can be achieved has spilled plenty of digital ink on this site, there's not need to relitigate in detail here. I'm sure the devs will figure something out. Finally, the story is really important to this game. It's right there in the name. The developers clearly really do care about it (and are going to have to really get it *right*, I'll be pretty disappointed if whatever ending they come up with doesn't measure up to how they've started). As far as gameplay is concerned, it gives the player additional goals both for general tech progression and the more explicit "go do the story location" objectives, while playing a big role in making the game's world feel real in a way Minecraft simply doesn't attempt. The devs are going to treat their story as a sacred thing which continues to grow but will not be retroactively changed in significant ways, and anything that bumps up against that is a hard stop not worth pushing for outside of mods.

Ahh, so pulling out he fuel when the kiln is not yet finished but everything inside is at 1200C (and thus will remain over 900C for some time) will actually stop the firing process? That's a little weird, but answers the question pretty definitively.

They do gain weight after killing you...

Correct, protecting your game is a great idea. That's why given the choice you should buy it from a platform which (unlike Steam!) actually gives you ownership over your copy. Steam has been a great product since it started and will probably continue to be a great product until Gabe Newell retires or dies. Once that happens, expect a harsh decline. We don't actually own any game we bought on Steam, only the indefinite rights to play them on the Steam platform. If there's a quick buck to be had in cutting people off and Gabe or a comparable ideologue isn't there with the power to veto, it will happen. That's the lifecycle of software companies these days. As for this game going on Steam, the devs are quite clear at the top of their FAQ that they do not want to do that, and why. Their reasons make plenty of sense. If you really want to be able to launch Vintage Story (or another non-Steam game) through Steam, though, you can totally do that! There's a detailed tutorial from another forum user explaining how.

In general, you want to plant cold crops like rye and parsnips in the spring (as soon as 4 am temperatures are warmer than that crop's lower temperature), plant summer crops in their place after harvesting, and put in a final batch of cold crops in August or even early September to close out the growing season. For example, you might plant parsnips (P crop) in mid April, harvest when it fully matures in mid June and replace with flax (K crop), harvest that in mid August and replace with rye (N crop) to harvest in mid October. In the very early game, if it's already midsummer and all you have to plant is cold weather crops, planting them and living with the reduced yields is better than doing nothing with them.

I realized I only answered part of your question. Farmland needs to be within three blocks of some sort of fresh water (source or flow) to get any moisture from it, but as you saw it declines by 25% for each block of additional distance. Farmland with 75% hydration because it's next to water is usually fine. You can water it, it will grow faster, but it's usually not worth the effort. If you are planning to rely on a watering can for irrigation, it's still best to make sure there's water within three blocks when you first plant the seeds. There's a bug where seeds planted in completely dry soil will grow half as fast over the life of the plant even if they are subsequently watered. In my first world I (unaware that better soils existed) planted my summer crops in dry, low fert soil and watered them regularly, but only about half of them reached maturity before freezing to death. I did have the fun experience of seeing my rye plants be stunted by both heat and cold though, so that was interesting.

I strongly recommend having a water source adjacent to each farmland block. The drop off in growth speed between 50% and 75% moisture is noticeable. In my experience flax on high fert soil with 75% moisture will reach maturity while the 50% moisture soil is on stage 7/9. That's not debilitating or anything, but it is slower, and it makes it more awkward to harvest it quickly and rotate crops between full fields. Also worth mention that the more rain this field gets, the less this matters. Any tile with rain falling on it will be at 100% moisture until the rain stops, and then slowly recede back to baseline. Ultimately, it's usually not difficult to get plenty of farmland tiles adjacent to water in the early game by digging branching irrigation trenches off a small pond, and once you have a bucket placing one water source surrounded by eight farmland is a simple, tileable, and space-efficient setup. Outside of possible organizational or aesthetic considerations, there's no reason not to do that.

I'd wager that the cellar size limit is a stylistic choice (real cellars are relatively small, after all) while the size limit on regular rooms is mostly for performance. There had to be some kind of limit, and 14 blocks is enough for most things that people would want to count as rooms. If 14 was chosen arbitrarily or because it met some performance benchmark, I have no idea.

You have two basic options for using those tools: 1. Continue your material progression. Go looking for tin or bismuth and zinc to create bronze, and then use that bronze to get some iron. 2. Use the nifty new tools you've unlocked for other activities. Your saw unlocks boards, which unlock new building materials as well as a number of agriculturally useful items like buckets and troughs. The chisel and hammer unlock the quern for grinding flour (for bread and pies) and limestone (for processing hides into leather), as well as chiseling blocks directly to add detail to your builds. Whichever of those sounds most interesting would be a perfectly good direction to go.

I was able to fire a pit kiln with the minimum 9 x 24 stacks of peat, and even pulled three per stack out after the kiln finished. Clearly less than that is possible, I'm curious where the line is.

I believe Vintage Story already has slightly different 1st and 3rd person animations? At the very least, I know my shadow's chopping/mining/digging motion doesn't always match what I see the tool itself doing. Often the shadow is moving at a noticeably different speed, never mind the different angles of attack.

According to the wiki and my limited experience, beehive kilns are somewhat less fuel efficient than pit kilns if operated conventionally. However, the wiki notes that fuel inefficiency can be increased with micromanagement, but doesn't elaborate further. I assume this is referring to adding enough fuel to fire the kiln and then pulling some of the fuel back out once it's burning, leaving just enough to heat the kiln to 950C and remain at or above that temp for 9 hours with minimal wasted heat. Has anyone experimented with exactly how much firewood or peat is the right amount for this? From reading other forum posts it seems that the kiln will behave identically regardless of what or how much stuff is inside it, and outside temps don't appear to affect firepits or ovens in a noticeable way, so I'd expect a rule of thumb about how much fuel to use to apply pretty universally.

Quite the opposite. Having armor as the outermost decorative layer is a stylistic choice that only became common after the period in which this game is set. 13th and 14th century knights and men at arms would almost universally have worn a surcoat and other cloth coverings over their armor, or even have a decorated cloth outer cover incorporated into some forms of armor (such as brigandine). Of course if we're going to be pedantic about timelines we should also keep in mind that a full plate harness like the steel plate armor or the Forlorn Hope armor set have their origins in the 15th century as well. The alwyte style emerging at roughly the same time as much more elaborate and visually striking plate armors is probably not a coincidence.

Intelligent rendering would have to be a part of this, to get the models all lined up properly. And I know that's not trivial. As you're hinting at, a big part of the problem here is the video game logic that armor neither competes with clothing for slots nor (with the exception of bear armor) provides any warmth benefit, and just piling on the layers doesn't make you any more encumbered or give any danger of overheating. Wearing a winter coat under a properly fitted suit of armor would be impossible, and wearing a properly fitted coat over the armor would be only somewhat more manageable. But you almost certainly won't do either, because outside of really extreme cold, that armor is itself providing quite a bit of additional insulation. I highly doubt that the current armor and clothing system is in it's final form, so hopefully these quirks get ironed out in time, along with a more sophisticated encumbrance system and some sort of overheating penalty.

Currently, a seraph wearing something in every clothing and armor slot will mostly only show the armor they are wearing. This is unfortunate because it hides whatever cool clothing they might have tailored up for themselves, but it's also unrealistic and ahistorical. Armor should go over most garments (pants, shirts, etc), but it should not always be the highest visible layer. Mostly this is obvious (you aren't going to put a straw sun hat under a chain mail coif; if you wear it at all you'll put it on top), but I think the historical side merits emphasis as well. The popular conception of a knight's plate armor being worn as an outermost layer without decor is a 15th century style, known as "alwyte" (all white) armor. For the centuries preceding that, across many iterations on types of armor, the style was pretty consistently to wear a cloth surcoat over at least the torso and often arms or legs. This was useful for allowing knights to identify each other, but it also just looked good. People like to look good. The cleanest way such a thing could be implemented in the current game is if coats would render over a player's armor. This also gives a use for the coat slot in warm weather when the extra warmth from wearing a coat is pointless: you can replace your fur coat with something designed to look nice, perhaps one of a set of specific surcoat items (in whatever color) that adds negligible extra warmth but is designed specifically to look good as a top layer over armor. Hats should also display differently, depending on the type of head armor worn with them. The straw hat from earlier has to go over mail or a gambleson hood, but it would look ridiculous on top of a visored steel helmet. This one has no historical backing, as I have no idea if soldiers would wear brimmed hats along with their helmets (I'm not aware of any contemporary images showing such). It is purely a realism choice which gives more opportunity to show off your fancy clothes.

Avoiding problematic edge cases is really important, and I think something easy to forget for experienced players who are long past the point of deciding if they like the game. I've argued before that there should be controls on starting positions. At a minimum it should place you somewhere with relatively flat ground for at least a couple blocks in every direction, ideally in a flat region or perhaps in the middle of a gentle slope. That spawn point should not be inside of an obstruction like a bush. The rain level should be high enough that the immediately surrounding terrain is dirt, not gravel or sand. The game should also never generate hostile animals on the initial world load. This eliminates the dumbest, most obnoxious scenarios that a new player might get into, that could plausibly chase an otherwise happy customer away with just a couple minutes of frustration. You could go further with this, such as requiring that there is clay within 50 blocks, that the player spawns into a flat, medium rain level, non-forested zone with a forest close but not too close, that there are berry bushes immediately available, etc. That's surely more work and much less necessary (if even desirable), so I don't see the point. I've had pushback when suggesting something like this before, and I'm sympathetic with folks who really don't like this kind of handholding and quite appreciate the truly random start with it's occasional insane issues. I certainly wouldn't object to making a "controlled start" setting which would shut these protections on or off. But they should exist, and they should be on by default, for the sake of stoping unlucky newbies from jumping to unfortunate conclusions.