williams_482

What if the mechanics for berry bushes gave you a choice between packing them densely and needing to fertilize, or spreading them out and getting full yields without maintenance? Perhaps they could draw nutrients from not just the block they are planted on but the eight adjacent blocks (or the four cardinally adjacent blocks) as well, and at optimal dispersal they would draw nutrients at the same rate the soil refreshes nutrients. Pineapples are an existing crop that grows so slowly relative to their nutrient consumption that they don't actually deplete the soil, so that part is already possible with the current game rules. So if you have a huge field to plant in and you spread berry bushes evenly across it, you can set and forget. If instead you want a densely packed set of hedges or a continuous field of berries, then you'll need to fertilize, more often depending on how densely you've packed them.

This is a result of a bug fix in when nutrients are consumed from the soil, and it sounds like that bug might have been unexpectedly load bearing? You really shouldn't need to fertilize a crop planted on max-nutrient med fert soil. Admittedly I don't mind the compression of the effective growing season given how easy it is to accumulate a huge amount of grain and vegetables, and in practice this is a nerf that limits capable players more than inexperienced ones because there should still be plenty of time for the first crop to be harvested even with a lateish start. Personally though I'd much rather see a reduction in vegetable yields per plant and the ability to get 2-3 harvests per year than this, because harvesting, rotating, and replanting is much more engaging than a single harvest year one and a choice between a single summer crop or two stunted cold weather crops in subsequent years. Plus, as you note, having the crops sitting there seemingly almost done for a month feels terrible. The primary reason nobody makes their own torch holder is that they're too expensive. 2 plates = 2 torch holders is a lousy deal when a bee farm or som bony soil panning and a few minutes mining quartz will upgrade that to two brighter, more versatile, and all around far superior lanterns. Torch holders should be a single ingot smithing recipe, and we'll see more players use them. Ideally they should be smithable with bronze and ferrous metals as well as brass, although I agree that copper would be too early.

Milking becoming fully reliable at gen 3 is not the problem. Large animals continuing to flee as late as gen 3 is both unrealistic and unfun, that's the problem.

Are you playing the latest unstable build?

Oops. You are correct. What I want to know is if trying to milk sheep is now as infuriating as milking goats is, or if a fenced in ewe will let you get close enough for that without fleeing in terror. As an aside, it's pretty ridiculous that a gen 3 goat is terrified of you for existing near her, but if you manage to grab her teats while she's actively fleeing she'll let you milk her no problem.

I don't understand why people think replacing the dirt is a good idea even now. Instead of digging up your field, just leave the existing field as it is (or plant a different nutrient on it) and start a new field with the dirt you were going to use to replace the existing field? Unless you insist on farming in a ravine or something you should have plenty of space, and you obviously aren't short on med fert soil because you keep replacing it. Is this a water problem, done by people who have water source movement off and also grow very little that isn't flax? On default settings dirt replacement just seems like a silly waste of time compared to the way the devs obviously intend players to manage their farms.

Build your fenced in chicken area large enough that there are at least 10 blocks between the outside of the fence and the nest boxes. This will ensure that predators (and you) won't spook the nesting chickens. If disrupting the roosting process is what you're worried about, that will fix the problem. If it's something else, like the noise of chickens getting spooked is annoying you, I don't have any suggestions. There's nothing in the game that makes foxes go away except for killing them, or chasing them into a pit somewhere.

Are the fertilizer and traits actually relevant to the very early game? It sounds like the early game is going to be pretty much the same as far as berry bushes are concerned: eat the wild ones that are ripe, and take a cutting while you're at it if you have inventory space. It means you won't get the extra convenient big late summer/early fall berry harvest you got under the old system, but you can go pick all the wild berries which are still out there because you didn't dig up the bushes, and by that time you should have enough veggies and grains to keep you stocked for a long time anyway. EDIT: I will say I hope berries are primarily N crops. Fertilizing with ground bonemeal every once in a while is no problem, but P fertilizer is more annoying and K would just be cruel.

There's Hematite literally right there in the screenshot, so it seems our hopes for inconveniencing this lucky son of a gun will have to lie elsewhere.

Given the way the steelmaking process allows unrealistic arbitrary pauses when it runs out of fuel for the benefit of players on large servers, I'm sure any blast furnace model would ultimately be similarly permissive. With that said, designing the blast furnace as a way of iteratively casting a huge amount of iron in overlapping batches over a relatively short time, with the idea of producing enough pig iron to be set for years, would be a way to preserve some of those complexities. The player shouldn't be waiting around for IRL hours waiting for the metal to heat up, but have maintenance tasks to do (working the bellows, dealing with slag, replacing the sand molds, etc) over 2-3 in game hours between casts. I imagine a model similar to the cementation furnace (set it and forget it except for regular refueling, after a set time the product is complete and good to go even if left untouched for days) would be preferred, but it is hard to square that with casting, instead of a simple heat treatment. It could cast automagically once the requisite time is reached, but that 1) is unrealistic, 2) is more automated than any process currently in the game, and 3) gives opportunities for player confusion if the sand molds are wrong, nothing casts properly, and the whole process fails silently while they were looking the other way.

I wish there was a "place every matching item in your inventory" button. I find myself placing a dozen stacks of dirt into a crate on a regular basis and it feels so tedious.

The current bloomery process might be efficient by some measures, but also I kinda hate it? Bloomeries having to be crafted in two separate parts, individually placed, loaded up five nuggets at a time up to 120, and then broken at the cost of ~25% of materials is just slightly more annoying at every individual stage than it feels like it should be. A blast furnace which has a comparable upfront brick cost to a dozen bloomeries plus some iron-requiring components, then can make somewhat more cast iron in one firing than a brick-equivalent number of bloomeries and requires fairly minimal rebuilding between batches? That would be so much nicer to use. You lose the free heat you get with carefully timing the bloomeries so you can break them immediately and get hot iron on the anvil (because presumably the pig iron would have to fully cool and then be broken into ingot-size pieces), but that's a manageable cost which can be made up for elsewhere. It's always seemed strange that dirt and sand are not chiselable by default. They could add an earlier, cheaper tool (a trowel?) which can chisel dirt and sand for very early game prettifying, and also be used to carve mold shapes out of sand. Control + right click on a sand block below the output spout of a valid blast furnace or adjacent to an existing valid mold to get the knapping interface, and trowel away from there.

I don't know of a mod like that, but one thing I've had success with doing in my builds is digging a one block shaft to the surface and sealing it off with trapdoors. That lets in sunlight and prevents the game from treating the space as a cave, with at most slight penalties on the effectiveness of a cellar. I do wish the game had better logic for differentiating caves from intentional builds like this one.

If the players have a choice of either 1) do the un-fun thing that definitely works, B) not do that, go do in-game stuff they like more, and occasionally get beat up by someone who decided to stick with the un-fun thing, then you're dealing with a significant risk that they actually choose option III: go play another game where they don't have to make that choice. I don't think I can emphasize enough how bad it is for the best equipment to be balanced only by how much of a miserable slog it is to acquire. It seems far, far better to have mechanics such that the blacksmith faction could be formed of players who have personally gotten good at an in-game forging system with many subtleties (such as precise temperatures and time in those temperatures having meaningful effects on stats produced from a limited number of successive quenches). In the current system the primary skill of blacksmith faction members is tolerance for doing the same process over and over again, hoping that this time, their 4% (or whatever) chance at a 50% stronger falx will pan out. There are people who will tolerate that kind of grind in support of a community goal, but I doubt there are many who will actually enjoy it.

The primary benefit to unlocking cast iron shouldn't be to unlock a new kind of iron, but to make it easier to produce iron in bulk. That bulk produced iron also needs to be useable for steelmaking. Fortunately, requiring that pig iron be reheated and worked with a helve hammer to create regular old wrought iron ingots (exactly the same as the output of a worked iron bloom) is both pretty close to reality and consistent with current ways of refining iron, so it shouldn't be too much of problem difficulty for players to understand.

This was all chunks generated after the 1.21 update, in a world originally created in 1.20. I found, using standard 100k pole to equator distance, that burry bushes dried up about 30km south of spawn except at high elevations, where they would show up occasionally. That was a bit of a nasty surprise for me, as I'd assumed that I could get fruit saturation as needed from foraging just like temperate zones, and would up settling for occasional saguaro fruits until I could find enough flowers (also surprisingly rare in the tropics) to get a bee farm going.

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.