williams_482

Under current settings it's actually quite difficult to get fruit saturation in equatorial climates until fruit trees get going. There are no berry bushes, Fruit trees still take a long time to actually produce their first crop, and pineapples combine rarity, low yield, and a comical six month growth time. I actually found honeycomb to be the fastest source of fruit sat when I travelled down south and started a new base there. Slowly developing scurvy as you try to set up shop in a jungle would be such a bizare thing to deal with.

The more I read this, the more I like the idea of early iron as being more durable and higher tier than, but otherwise equivalent to, (tin) bronze tools an weapons by default. More advanced processing like quenching and tempering brings iron equipment above bronze, and steel far and away exceeds both. I don't think it's necessary for cast/pig iron to produce significantly better equipment than processed bloomery iron, because a more efficient higher volume process for converting iron ore into useable iron would be a huge buff to iron usage all by itself, but I'm also not opposed to it. Maybe pig iron tools would draw slightly more benefit from quenching/tempering than bloomery iron? I'm not convinced that making the bronze -> iron jump initially about durability and then gating quality benefits behind additional processing would be meaningfully more confusing. You'd still rather have iron for the durability benefits alone, you can still make your iron equipment better than your bronze equipment with some extra work. Game-wise, that should be fine. Historically it's absolutely more accurate. People were using bronze equipment alongside iron well into the iron age, and it wasn't because they were morons. For example, we've recovered a number of bronze Montefortino-type helmets used by republican Roman soldiers, who at that point were very familiar with iron and used it for most equipment. The reason bronze was eventually phased out was gradual improvements in the processing and forging of iron to get slightly more favorable carbon ratios slightly more easily, slowly pushing the material upwards on the (very fuzzy!) spectrum between pure iron and modern steels. Bronze isn't meaningfully worse than typical early iron age wrought iron, but it is clearly inferior to low grade steel. Also worth a mention here is that bronze (usually referred to as brass, but definitely actually bronze) had a meaningful battlefield role well into the 19th century. Because casting iron into large, precise shapes without cracking it as it cools is so difficult, bronze cannon were considered the superior type for a very long time. They were much easier to create with precise tolerances, which made them both more accurate and less likely to explode if something went wrong. They also wore out more easily, and risked overheating and "drooping" if fired too frequently in a short span of time, but these were considered manageable problems until steel cannons became fully viable.

We don't have a great understanding of exactly what happened in the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but "new empires using iron weapons overthrew old empires who insisted on sticking with bronze" is not accurate. If anything the increase in iron usage is probably a result, not a cause, of those empires and their trade networks collapsing - armies had to make do with what they had locally, and while essentially nobody had both copper and tin, everyone had iron. There's a pretty nice and digestible summary of what we do know about the LBAC here if anyone is interested. Setting aside the geopolitical inaccuracies, Bronze doesn't wear down over the course of a single battle, and bronze equipment which had been worn down over much longer periods could still be melted down and recycled.

When will Vintage Story be brave enough to simulate the pains of leaving the iron in the fire 15 seconds too long and pulling out a warped and bubbly looking sparkler instead of whatever you were trying to make?

I actually had faction/civilization dynamics in mind here. On servers where groups of people expect to fight other groups of people, having as many faction members as possible dumping as much time as possible into the quenching lottery to get the group as well armed as possible would probably be a decisive advantage that few participants are likely to actually enjoy long-term. Even at the individual level, though: If you can get steel at all, you must have a relatively safe place to hide away and do industrial stuff. Provided some reasonable amount of food, you should be able to hide away there playing the quenching lottery for as long as you like, and when you do eventually emerge with the best weapon you could manage you'll have an appreciable advantage in fights against players who decided on a less miserable means to arming themselves. You can certainly decide not to do that and just wing it with "good enough", and other people doing it and beating you up more as a result doesn't force you to try it yourself, but there's definitely pressures in that direction. In short, it's a big "players will optimize the fun out of the game" risk. That danger is there in SP but much worse in any combat-heavy MP situation, where the pressures to be "optimal" are much greater. That's a problem.

For singleplayer right now having a super fast tool or super powerful weapon is a total luxury item that most probably won't bother with at all, so this brinksmanship lottery of higher and higher tool stats is a pretty harmless thing. I do worry about what it does to any kind of PvP multiplayer setup, though, where a stronger weapon actually would start to matter. This sounds like it would create a miserable extended gambling minigame of cranking out steel falxes in bulk and quenching them over and over again in an arms race for better and better equipment. It's also not realistic for infinitely more quenches to continue to improve material characteristics. I'm not an expert (although I have some limited blacksmithing experience), but it doesn't look like quenching something more than two or three times is a normal thing for smiths to do. Capping the number of quenches at three cuts down on the slot machine elements and gives you a meaningful maximum damage figure for a triple-quenched steel falx that other stuff can be balanced around.

There is a mod which gives molds for making bricks and shingles: https://mods.vintagestory.at/brickmold

That doesn't seem any easier than placing windmills next to each other, and doesn't seem like much of a realism problem either. We don't/didn't do that in the real world mostly for structural reasons that don't really apply in Vintage Story.

Wouldn't a very simple fix for the goofy quad windmill designs be to make windmills only work if they are facing the wind? Wind currently has a direction, which is obvious visibly when it's blowing hard (thanks to particles) and quite consistent within a given region. That direction seems to always be in line with the cardinal directions. When I first started I assumed that would be relevant, and deliberately set up my windmill so that the wind would blow into it (before expanding to the standard quad design as power needs increased and I learned direction was irrelevant). If windmills would only work if place perpendicular to the direction of the wind, and suffered a compounding loss of power for each block placed between the windmill and the direction the wind is coming from*, then we would very quickly be in a place where the optimal windmill construction has the sails laid out in a fairly realistic manner, for realistic reasons. *I'd probably say the game should check twenty blocks out from the windmill at the same radius as is currently used to check if the windmill has an obstruction preventing it from turning. The actual impact of an obstructing block should have a roughly pyramidal distribution, with a block or two near the edges and 19 meters out from the sails having very little impact, but a block directly in front of the windmill hub significantly reduces efficiency all by itself.

The clutch and transmission are the components used to toggle machines on or off. The brake just adds a ton of friction and shuts down the entire power train. I have yet to encounter a situation where I wanted to do that. Maybe if you just want to make the whooshing and rattling noises stop for a while?

In some (all?) versions of Terrafirmacraft, hot springs are very helpful resources because they heal you when you go swimming in them. This is an idea based in realism: hot springs contain many minerals which have positive health benefits. There are a handful of natural hot springs around the world which draw thousands of tourists (and for some of them, local monkeys) to bathe in their warm, mineral-rich waters. Vintage Story leans hard in the other direction, helpfully reminding us that most hot springs will not improve your complexion, but instead boil you alive and dissolve your corpse. This is a more realistic default behavior, but it does make those pretty hot springs pretty useless except for aesthetics. I feel a middle path might be best. What if the water runoff from hot springs cooled a little bit for each block it travels outside the radius of the spring itself, and once given enough space to cool off, it gives a powerful healing boost? I'm envisioning something comparable to poultices in HP/sec, with the same armor-based slowdown and no initial delay or direct material cost, but only available in a prepared space near a conveniently placed hot spring. It could even slowly damage clothing and armor (a further nod to it's corrosiveness) while healing the player, encouraging birthday suit bathing as circumstances allow. This would be an extremely marginal benefit in practice, not mandatory in any way and severely limited by where these springs happen to spawn. What it does is give a practical benefit to building aqueducts and bath houses, which I for one think are fun.

It seems like most of the problems with Minecraft water replenishment come down to how easy it is to create those infinite sources. Water flows from two adjacent tiles can quickly fill up a large space. If instead three or four adjacent tiles are required, then far more labor is needed to fill large areas from scratch, but the weird holes that form when beaches and small islands are dug up can be easily patched. Especially because Water Source vs Water Flow is a much less meaningful distinction for VS than for MC. With default settings in VS, a single water source block can be used to create any number of additional water sources, while in MC you really need to set up that infinite source generator because each bucket consumes a source block.

Once you have enough iron and hammer power for it, I strongly recommend investing in iron and then steel chain. It's expensive in time and material but has light enough penalties to be perfectly workable as every day armor, as well as enough defense to take on story locations.

I assumed our Seraph had lost their memories but not their skills, and was simply applying extensive 13th century engineering knowledge to trying to survive in this unfamiliar world.

I have seen it suggested that VS could swap from generating chunks "as needed" to generating a very rough world map on initial world creation which contains very basic information (rock types, approximate elevation approximate terrain type, approximate rainfall, forest cover, and temperature, and the presence of oceans or rivers), then generate the complete chunks within those constraints as needed. This would allow for more realistic rivers and accompanying watersheds, and have the added benefit of enabling your idea here.

I believe bears have a step height of 3. I've seen them climb directly over small trees to attack me. I dig my pits 4 deep and never have a problem.

Charming. Anyway, there's a quote from Soren Johnson, designer of Civilization IV and many other games, relevant to this situation: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." The basic meaning is that if players are given a way to do something which is "better" (in this case, saves more material) they will do it, even if it's actually really annoying and un-fun. Yeah, I could just toss the toolhead and pretend it doesn't exist, but I know that's a waste of metal. I'm not going to do that and nor are most other players. Having the option to save it and eek some more value out of it becomes a drag: either it's an extra chore to do, or a regular reminder that the way you've chosen to play is inefficient in a meaningful way. The alternative where it's not an option, and you just accept that you will someday need to mine more metal (something the game wants you to do!) doesn't have this problem.

Worth a mention that the temporal gear amulet (and temporal gears stored on an elk) do have a significant practical benefit: the produce a small amount of light. Which doesn't matter that much under ideal circumstances, but if you stumble into a puddle while caving and extinguish your torch, or you're trying to find your mount who wandered off in the dark, it can make a real difference. Never mind the benefit of having access to a temporal gear without needing to spend an inventory slot on it. So if you're in a min-maxing mood, the temporal gear amulet is already the clear best way to use that clothing slot.

It can't be hypocritical because no thought whatsoever goes into visceral "I am fine with this" vs "I am NOT fine with this" response to visual stimulus. That "ick" or lack there of is a purely instinctive emotional response. People react more or less strongly to different things, and separately people can become more or less desensitized to things that originally bothered them. None of that can be easily boiled down to simple comparative "if this is okay than that must be" statements about totally separate things. For whatever it's worth, I don't eat meat in the real world. I'll also fully admit to being relatively squeamish about gore-adjacent things. Nothing in vanilla Vintage Story triggers any sort of negative response from me. I think Vintage Story, like TOBG, taking a highly abstracted approach to harvesting dead animals is why I don't have any problem with it. Both games totally gloss over showing any kind of blood or gore, and simplifies meat down to supermarket like items of "red meat," "raw pork," or what have you. Similarly, stuff like drifters mutated bodies, bony soil, apparent sacrificial altar ruins with skeletons scattered about, etc, all hint very strongly at things which would be very uncomfortable to encounter in real life, but are streamlined enough to be merely creepy. I think that's the right zone for this game to inhabit, and the devs seem to agree. For people who want more comprehensive butchery mechanics and are less bothered than I about the accompanying visuals, there is already at least one well regarded mod out there. I won't be touching it, but I'm glad it's an option.

The falx is a real historical weapon, although a niche one. To summarize the wikipedia link, it was used by the Thracians and Dacians who fought against Roman emperor Trajan, and is portrayed on his famous triumphal column. In practice the falx seems to be a hybrid between a sword and an axe, a two-handed chopping weapon which was very effective against shields and armor alike. Modern tests have confirmed that the falx was capable of piercing roman armor, and the Romans actually added unusual makeshift reinforcement to their helmets for that campaign, theorized to be a direct response to the falx. Of course this weapon was not without problems, as it was somewhat clumsy to use and could leave it's wielder vulnerable. This likely explains why it never caught on more broadly (although I should note that there is a definite similarity in form and function between the forward curving spike of the falx and the business end of a late medieval warhammer, designed specifically for punching through plate armor. These weapons surely didn't share a design lineage, but they had a very similar purpose) and why seemingly a minority of Thracian and Dacian soldiers actually used it. Yet the falx was created and used by an actual historical people, it was effective enough that opponents developed specific countermeasures to it, and the specific way it was effective (splitting shields and punching through armor, delivering large gashing wounds) does make it a logical choice as the go-to weapon against creatures with lots of natural armor who don't seem to have a lot of vulnerable bits. As an aside, it's worth a mention that the Romans were unusual among armies in the ancient world because they marginalized and ultimately eschewed spears or pikes as melee weapons. For most of (western) Roman history, 80%-100% of the heavy infantry in a roman legion would fight with two heavy javelins (Pilla) and a short sword. Only the last of the three lines of roman infantry (the Triarii, who had half as many men as the Hastati and Princeps ahead of them) retained the Hasta (Rome's version of the classic Mediterranean infantry spear) through the republican period, and even they switched over to using Pilla in the imperial period. I've seen it argued that the relatively high-armor environment of ancient Italy is the reason why Rome moved away from spears as their primary infantry weapon, but to my knowledge that hasn't been proven. All of which is a roundabout way of saying: spears were probably the most popular weapons in the history of world, certainly the western world, prior to the advent of gunpowder, but they were not universal across successful armies. Arguably the most successful premodern military system in the history of the world barely used them at all. As I have argued before, the game doesn't currently do a great job making the falx specifically good at dealing with rotbeasts and mechanicals the way the lore describes and the actual properties of the weapon would suggest. A better balance would be to bring spears and falxes to near parity in raw damage, with the spear keeping the advantage of reach and throwability, and the falx recieving some actual armor piercing ability. Monsters (and not animals) should in turn get some damage resistance for the falx to punch through. The final effect would be that the spear is the weapon of choice against animals and unarmored humanoids, in keeping with it's historical prominence, while the falx's shield splitting, helmet piercing attributes can give it a significant edge against armored humans and metal-infused rotbeasts.

Allowing flaxseed to be turned into lubrication oil would give another use to flax, but it's not like it motivates planting even more of the stuff. It just gives a machine-related purpose to something you already have a ton of if you've grown enough flax to power machines in the first place. That if anything encourages growing more of other grains, as you won't have quite as much surplus flax grain to feed to your livestock. I've been playing a modded world recently that allowed pressing flax grain into flax oil (2 stacks grain = 10L oil) and using that to grease the wheels of my mechanisms. It meant I could build a complicated windmill despite doing almost no hunting except the occasional inconveniently placed predator and failing to find capturable pigs until early winter, and as noted above it didn't cost me anything I wasn't looking to find a use for. That might be a little too convenient, but if the vanilla version of this will require grinding flax flour and cooking it down to get a fat replacement, that's probably a fairer investment of effort.

It's pretty wild that someone who has seen all of one major version of this game (1.21 stable) and a the very beginning of one dev cycle (1.22 prerelease 1) feels comfortable concluding that the current stable is the best the game will ever be because the development team who created it are obviously incompetent egomaniacs uninterested in real feedback. This message board is full of positive and negative comments about the changes in this update, with many of the most prolific posters sharing some of each. The hyperbolic rants and slippery slope doomerism has somehow been contained to just two users in this one thread. If you want people to listen to your complaints, maybe stop treating your audience like a bunch of twelve year olds surfing for rage bait on Youtube and start demonstrating a capacity for civil discussion.

I respect the attempt, but to tell the truth I found your description pretty stomach churning. Chopping up a "meat rectangle" doesn't need to have visible blood or guts or eyes or whatever to make some people, apparently myself included, quite uncomfortable.

I recently tried out the Smithing Plus mod, which has a system like this, and I did not like it very much. Every time a tool broke I got a broken tool head that needed a little extra material to repair into a functional tool that would last slightly less time than it's predecessor. That toolhead took up an inventory slot that a broken tool would normally free up, and the process of repairing and restoring these tools to get less and less back each time quickly began to feel tedious. It just wasn't worth the bother relative to the vanilla approach of using up the tool and making a new one, while simultaneously making mining new metals feel less worthwhile. I've heard plenty of people ask for this sort of system, and plenty of good things about this mod, but I found I strongly prefer the vanilla balancing. No it's not realistic, but realistic tool durability makes mining more than the bare minimum of copper, tin, and iron largely pointless and the player should feel pressure to keep gathering more metals.

I found the structure schematic to be quite useful as a template, specifically the idea of digging out a layer or two of dirt, then using that dirt to build a peaked roof over the hole. It maximizes useable internal space relative to wall material and limits the amount of additional digging needed to get enough material. Good stuff.