williams_482

My guess is that the current requirements for chiseled blocks to count as sealing a room were put in as a temporary "good enough" solution that makes some logical sense, doesn't have much performance cost, and was easy to implement. I would expect it to be improved eventually, but it will probably be quite a while before someone either decides it's a priority, or finds an easy way to improve it while working on something else.

This whole thing sucks, for very human, embarrassingly predictable reasons. The devs made the classic PR blunder of choosing empathy for a person they personally know and judge to be a useful contributor, along with practical steps to prevent them from doing anything like this again, over sating the bloodlust of an angry mob. You can just see the naive programmer logic here: we made sure this person won't do this again (in ways we tried to explain but can't directly demonstrate at this time), we're still doing our best to improve this game you all love, why are you all still mad at us? A huge corporation would not typically make this mistake, because 1) they have expensive PR people on staff to handle this kind of thing, 2) huge corporations are big enough that the decision makers are generally not personally aquatinted with the accused (when they are, these mistakes are far more likely), and 3) they are usually far more concerned with perception and short term sales than with the long term quality of their product. It seems pretty clear that the folks here who understand software development do not see Maltiez's reduced role as a plausible vector for new malware in either the base game or any of his existing mods. Those who still want him gone are speaking on moral or general policy grounds, which is fair enough and an unsurprising theater for reasonable people to disagree. We don't know exactly why Anego doesn't want to cut Maltiez out completely, but it's probably some combination of familiarity with the project and valuing his perspective on design questions totally unrelated to vigilante malware injection. There's also a huge group of people in here who don't understand the technical aspect of this (because it's bloody difficult to differentiate expertise in an unfamiliar field from confident idiocy, especially with emotions running high as they are now) and want this guy gone because they think there is still a credible danger of Maltiez secretly infecting their computer. There is not, but the misconception is understandable. Finally, we have people who are just angry. There are a lot more of them on Reddit than on these boards. Some of them are fans who feel betrayed and aren't worried about the details, some of them are just along for the ride because joining in with the mob and yelling about the failings of others is a pleasant distraction from the complicated problems of daily life. Nothing short of immediate, unambiguous, and complete separation from Maltiez was going to satisfy, and if that happened then that vitriol wouldn't even be gone, just focussed on Maltiez the individual villain. Which is worse, because it increases the small but believable danger of real wackos taking extreme steps against him. I'm not exactly overflowing with sympathy toward Maltiez myself right now, as he did make some dumb choices and has come across as a real asshole. Although, I can't help but wonder how the rest of us would come across if unexpectedly berated by hundreds for a questionable choice in our own pasts. I am feeling very sympathetic towards Tyrone and the rest of Anego, who were suddenly thrown into this whole thing and forced to make a very public decision which had no definitive right answer, and carries with it a terrifying range of unlikely but very serious dangers. The whole thing sucks.

Can we refrain from using ableist slurs here?

Sorry to ask the stupid question, but are you using a knife to harvest the corpses of the animals you kill? If yes, have you tried disabling your mods, starting a new test world, and checking if you can harvest meat from animals there?

I'm not convinced you know what some of the words in your edit actually mean.

We know exactly what the malware in question did to the computers of people who downloaded it. We know what code was snuck in secretly, how it worked, when it triggered, and the effects it caused. It caused difficult to trace crashes for players who entered a multiplayer game while running mods which fit a specific, known, overly inclusive criteria. That's it. The situation is not good, but there is no imminent danger to anyone's computer, and no need for fearmongering about imagined threats.

That seems... dramatic

I am a little surprised to see anyone describing panning as "quite fun." I find it quite dull. You stand in water with a pan, clicking twice on a sand/grave/bony soil block every couple seconds. I will do it for bony soil once I have a lot of it because I find the rewards to be worth it, but I don't particularly like the idea of making this very passive activity even more lucrative. Players should be incentivized to gain resources by exploring the surface, diving into caves, prospecting, hunting monsters and animals, etc. Those are proactive tasks which get the character moving around, seeing different things and doing at least a little planning and strategizing for best results. I worry that making panning better would create an optimization trap, where players looking for the "most efficient" way to get certain resources will decide on (or be talked into) panning for them instead of something most people will find more engaging. What about panning do you enjoy? Do you view it as a quiet, contemplative activity, and find fun in that aspect? Or is there another angle I'm not seeing?

I think if cart movement worked similarly to existing animals (noticeable slowdown when climbing a block, wide turning radius, very fast on flat ground) but somewhat more extreme, this could work well. The one thing that would need to change would be treating slabs and stairs like flat ground movement-wise, something I hope could apply to mounts as well. It's a little silly that adding stairs or slabs to a road makes your elk traverse more slowly than if you left the elevation changes as full blocks. As I see it, the other problems with paths right now are: - Expense. Four stones per block doesn't sound like much, but it adds up in a hurry. Paving roads with proper paths requires that you go dig up a lot more rocks than normal mining and quarrying activities will give you. - Elk have quirks that don't play nice with paths. In addition to the slab/step issues, it's impossible (or very difficult) to tell an elk to go perfectly straight on a cardinal direction. Exacerbating this, elk are wide enough that they never benefit from one block wide paths, and only benefit from two block wide paths if they are right in the middle with little room for error. Three block paths work very nicely, but nobody has the spare rocks for that.

If it had protected your server, how would you know? I don't think the kinds of trolls willing to pay for a cheat mod are inclined to do things like pop into public servers and say "FYI, I wanted to jump in here and ruin everyone's day, but the mod I used kept crashing my game so I guess I'll settle for playing legitimately."

Apparently the cheating mod is now defunct, although given the very public hubbub about all this, it's conceivable the mod author might try to resurrect it. Which would be a painfully ironic outcome for this controversy. This seems like a good time to mention the importance of backups for any server. A malicious user with a cheat mod can do all sorts of damage in-game, but once they are discovered and banned, rolling back to an undamaged backup will undo anything they did at the cost of some lost time. Not a perfect solution, but far better than alternatives.

If explaining why someone made a choice is taken to be tantamount to endorsing that choice, we are in a very dangerous place indeed.

Ironically I think the reason this blew up so severely is that the damage was so minor and the motive relatively benign. If this malware had been an attempt to steal credit card info, for example, the reaction would have been immediate and extremely harsh. Anego would have immediately and publicly distanced themselves, shut down the affected mods and explicitly warned any users that they should be uninstalled, etc. More people would have been actually harmed, and there would still be ample concern about security problems, but there wouldn't be nearly so much rage floating around directed at Anego themselves. As is, the ambiguities about this situation (very minor accidental damages, from a foolish but well intentioned and effective action targeting an obvious villain) meant that Anego as a group was slow to figure out their preferred course of action, and individuals within the team had different opinions and ample opportunity to communicate those opinions publicly. This created a perfect environment for wild rummormongering. The people who both understood what was happening and felt most strongly about it loudly complained that nothing was being done, inciting a much larger group who didn't understand what was happening but did know that anything relating to malware is bad. Everything spirals wildly from there, including the usual cycle of "engage in righteous assholery -> get banned -> claim you got banned for the righteousness instead of the assholery" that dominates any controversy in moderated internet spaces. It's all a huge mess which mostly serves to highlight existing security problems that don't have easy technical solutions, putting us right back where we started but with more anger floating around.

This is what's bothering me. There's at least one highly upvoted comment in the reddit announcement blaming ConfigLib for crashes they allegedly spent hours debugging, but other users pointed out that the crashing behavior they described could not have been caused by ConfigLib. All we have to go on to understand the scope of the collateral damage here is guesswork based on a combination of crude statistics (very few downloads for confirmed conflicting mods, a long time between the malware going in and anyone connecting it to a legitimate mod crashing) and the host of people operating entirely on vibes, blaming ConfigLib for any crash they don't currently have a good explanation for. Some people erroneously blaming ConfigLib for crashes it didn't cause is totally unsurprising: mods causing crashes is a fairly common occurrence especially with the huge modlists many folks run with, and crashes are frustrating things that can be very difficult to debug. It's possible that ConfigLib actually did cause some real damage ("bricking" saves, for example) to innocent users, which would justify some of the vitriol flying around. My suspicion is that this alleged damage is being harped on specifically to justify the rage folks were already feeling, not because of any strong evidence that it happened, but I have no way to know for sure.

Herpetology error. Their username clearly indicates that they are a lizard.

Some aspects of this situation may well be blown out of proportion and some people have definitely been overly hasty in their reactions, but what happened is still troubling. Insulting people for their concerns is rude and out of line.

(Emphasis mine) I want to be clear on something which is being obscured in this statement and others like it: that "specific group" which Maltiez targeted were the developer and users of a *paid* mod designed for the purpose of cheating on multiplayer servers. A "specific group" who either paid money for the ability to harm other players, or were happy to earn money facilitating that harm. The mod and developer have not been named because they are a cancer on the community and advertising for them does us all a disservice. Maltiez's actions were, in my opinion, ill-considered and both legally and ethically dubious. I am not defending the actions or the person. But I also think understanding the motives here is useful.

I'd advise anyone to wait until they actually "circle the wagons" around this guy before deciding that this dev team (and by extension their game) are disreputable. This is a small team, likely lacking anyone with real public relations training, who just stumbled into an unexpected and very tricky situation. Here we have: - A recently hired employee, and also creator of a large number of very popular, functionally load-bearing mods, who did something which is clearly bad and ill advised but with apparent good intentions, and reacted very poorly when this came to light. - A large group of people who are justifiably angry, but have also whipped themselves into a frenzy over exaggerated claims of exactly what this guy did and why, and are demanding immediate and harsh action against them. Anego knows this is a serious situation and they are taking time to get all the facts and make a careful, considered decision of what to do. Taking that time to make the best decision possible is clearly the correct process here. Judge them for their final decision when they've actually made one.

This is rude and uncalled for.

Meteoric iron is very easy to find in large quantities with some practice viewing a map, and easier to process than iron because the bloomery converts it directly into ingots. I use it as my primary tool material until I have an adequate supply of steel, beyond what I need for higher priority armor and pickaxes. After that point, I'll use my meteoric iron stocks for generic stuff like nails or lanterns. Between the ease of processing, the superiority over regular iron, and the distinctive color and pattern, I think meteoric iron already has a meaningful niche in the game and I'm happy with that.

Flatpack releases for Vintage Story are routinely late, and you're not the first to notice that this one has seemingly been forgotten. Hopefully the devs notice this thread, or the complaint another user made in the 1.22.7 thread earlier.

The thing with clay is that new players struggle to see it because they don't know what it looks like. They will commonly walk right over clay deposits without recognizing them, and get frustrated. The challenge becomes how to show a new player what clay looks like in the wild, without just handing them some on world spawn, or loudly telegraphing the location of all clay deposits with particles.

That option exists, but there are serious side effects. Leaving items hanging around forever is liable to result in significant lag. Skin the corpse/grave/whatever as you please: it could be a bag, a pile, a glowing teal orb, an oversized drifter in candystriped pajamas who does the macarena when you get close, anything. I'm sure the devs can come up with something that they can apply a reasonable lore explanation to.

The corpse mechanic fills a very desirable niche between the two options available in the vanilla game. Without mods, you can either: 1. Drop all stuff on death. You must race back to where you died within 10 minutes or you lose everything. There are plenty of circumstances where making it back fast enough is difficult or impossible, leading to extremely frustrating scenarios of fighting your way back to the original death location only to find your valuable stuff is all gone. 2. Keep inventory on death. Dying is totally harmless, and actually a great way to get back home with all your stuff faster. Both of these suck if you want death to be a punishing disruption, but don't want to be forced into a desperate, time-boxed scramble to recover all you were carrying or lose it forever. The corpse mechanic means you have to return to the place you previously died and deal with whatever challenges you left behind, but it means you have time to do so properly, even if you died a very long ways from home or very deep underground. Death is disruptive and recovering your stuff is difficult, but it is never lost forever unless you decide or your own accord that returning to pick it up is not viable. I think it should be obvious why many people prefer this to the two vanilla death options.

My recommendation would be to allow the player to create some kind of specialized structure, or at least a specialized block, which can be "charged" with a temporal gear to create a permanent respawn point which can be temporarily overridden by a temporal gear or a duplicate structure elsewhere, but will still act as the fallback spawn point until it is broken by the player. In conjunction with a starting temporal gear amulet this gives a player the opportunity to spawn in, run far away from spawn, permanently set up shop in a new location, and play normally from there without needing to worry about what happens the 21st time they get munched by a bear. This structure should be relatively small, buildable without metal tools, and look nice. Perhaps some sort of cobblestone shrine, which once charged gets a faint glow and some pleasant chiseled details. In Homo Sapiens, that structure might work without a special charge, or would be charged with something mundane but relatively expensive like a gold ingot.