williams_482

Having thought about this, I think it's okay to increase the total carrying capacity of the more advanced backpacks somewhat. We do want the player to value these upgrades, and we are giving additional use to backpack slots so we don't want the tradeoff of giving away storage to feel too harsh. - Leather: primary backpack costs 16 leather to open 13 inventory and three additional bag slots. Secondary bags cost 8 leather and open five inventory each. Total capacity jumps from 24 to 26 inventory, total cost from 32 to 40 leather. Pretty close to current balance. - Sturdy leather: primary backpack costs 20 leather to open 14 inventory and four additional bag slots. Secondary bags cost 8 sturdy leather and open six inventory each. Total capacity jumps from 32 to 38, cost from 40 to 52. This is a large increase over current balance, but sturdy leather is one of the most fiddly and expensive products in the game to produce (requiring both chromium and sulphur, locked behind steel, complicated multi-step cooking process) and many players don't currently bother with it, so I'm okay with making it even stronger. If the player opts to use three secondary bags plus a light, they will wind up with the same carrying capacity as four sturdy leather backpacks now. I would expect that to be the standard caving configuration but I don't think it will be the choice every time. Mining bags will go in the bag slots, and be somewhat reduced in capacity, 8 slots for standard and 10 for sturdy. Still a considerable increase over comparable type-agnostic bags. Additionally, here are some other things the player might be able to use bag slots for: - A shield gives 50%(?) passive block chance to projectiles and melee attacks coming from a 90 degree cone centered directly behind the player - A barrel or other container which keeps it's contents, but it's inventory cannot be accessed unless put down. Similar in concept to the Carry On mod, but using a bag slot instead of occupying your hands. This also comes with a meaningful reduction in walk speed (-30%?) and an increase in hunger rate (+20%?). Multiple inventory blocks can be picked up as long as you have the bag slots to hold them, but the walk speed and hunger penalties will stack, capping at 10%(?) of unencumbered walk speed. This should ensure that interesting choices still need to be made about when to use this ability and when not to. Finally, if the player wants to use an unenclosed light source (torch, candle, oil lamp) in a bag slot, they will have to build some sort of crude housing for it. This won't be especially expensive (probably made with sticks, rope, and maybe a pottery component) but will add an extra step. A lantern more or less can be just strapped to the top of a full bag, but a torch is going to need to be secured somehow or you'll light your hair on fire.

I really like this idea. The current system does benefit from it's simplicity: it's well balanced, progresses smoothly and incrementally as resources are acquired, and easy to understand. As you say, though, it does seem a little silly on the face of it, and the fact that our character model is obviously only wearing at most one backpack highlights that problem. I believe the recommendation is that the single primary backpack would have a volume close to the current four backpacks put together, with the three additional slots filling out the missing inventory slots. I'm going to suggest a slight tweak where we have one backpack slot by default, and our primary backpack unlocks additional slots for smaller secondary bags. For example: - Reed baskets: Primary backpack costs 30 reeds (3x current hand basket) and opens up 10 inventory slots plus one additional secondary slots. Secondary bag costs 10 reeds (same as current hand basket) and opens up two more inventory slots. Max capacity configuration is 12 inventory slots for 40 reeds, same as now. - Hunter: Primary backpack costs 45 reeds plus 12 small hide equivalent (4 medium, two large, etc). Opens up 10 inventory slots and two backpack slots. Secondary bags cost 15 reeds and three small hide equivalent to open three inventory slots each - Linen: Primary backpack costs 10 twine (or equivalent, e.g. two twine and eight linen) and opens up 12 inventory and two additional bag slots. Secondary bags cost 5 twine and unlock four inventory slots each I stop here because balancing the progression of adding inventory slots and bag slots to the primary bag while also improving the secondary bag gets a little more difficult with leather and heavy leather while keeping their current total capacity. I think that's a solvable problem, but I don't have a solution now. What I really like about OP's proposed system (with my slight tweak) is the following: 1. It makes more intuitive sense, and 2. (more importantly) It allows for much more interesting tradeoffs with your backpack slots. Now upgrading from hand baskets to hunter backpacks or linen sacks won't just give you more inventory, but also make it easier for you to pick up multiple reed chest traps or full skeps. I also love OP's idea of allowing a light to be placed in a bag slot, finally allowing you to both see, use a shield, and wear a helmet at the cost of losing some inventory slots. The presence of mining bags make clear that the game is trying to give you interesting choices for how to use these bag slots, it just doesn't actually give a lot of options. This proposal would be a significant improvement in that respect.

I really like the boat customization ideas. Just to pick nits, from my limited understanding of how sails work these should actually be flipped: triangular sails are very good at turning seemingly unfavorable winds into forward movement, while square sails give you more surface area and thus more power in favorable winds but have more difficulties when the wind is blowing the wrong way.

Grain is better than hay if you have surplus (which you surely will if you're growing flax). Pigs will be attracted by grain but not grass, and you'll need less of it to fill the trough. Grain in a large trough will also work on deer, goats, and sheep, while in a small trough it will attract chickens. The trick with luring animals is having animals near enough to notice and be attracted to your baited pits. I've had good luck gently herding whatever wild animals that spawn within a kilometer or so in the direction of my traps. Once they are within a couple hundred blocks they'll eventually notice and wander into the pit as long as nothing scares them away. This is my preferred way to when hunt near my base. It's often easier than sneak up -> throw spear -> carefully watch fleeing animal -> repeat, and the animals will fatten up eating whatever bait lured them into the pit in the first place so you'll get more stuff. To clarify, wolves and bears don't have specific "spawn points", but a region which has spawned a bear or wolf will eventually spawn more if the original(s) are killed or relocated. The only way to permanently get rid of them is to trap them in a pit with a light source to prevent despawns and just leave them there. I usually build a fence around the pit after trapping a bear so I don't accidentally fall in myself. If you lure a bear into a pit and plan to kill it, see if you can chase a fox or raccoon into the pit first. The bear will kill it and gain weight, and you'll get more stuff when you kill the bear.

I believe they are referring to this interview:

It's generally best to harvest the immature crops too. They won't drop gran/fibers/veggies and there's a chance to lose the seeds, but wild crops grow so slowly relative to planted crops (and drop so much less when they do mature) that you'll wind up with much more stuff if you just gather as many seeds as possible and plant them as quickly as possible.

Probably for the best, although the longer growth times weren't all bad. I was starting to get used to the idea of fewer harvests. I hope they apply some rounding to these new numbers though. Flax consuming 44.4 K just looks funny.

One of the intentional changes in this update did increase crop nutrient consumption, which will effectively reduce growth speed. So you can now expect them to grow slower than in 1.21 still, although not quite as slowly as in the previous 1.22 RCs.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is still some food out there for the taking if you brave the outdoors during the winter. You can still hunt, forage for mushrooms, or if things get really desperate dig up cattail and tule roots. If you're really looking for an adventure, booking it south for 10,000 - 15,000 blocks will burn through a fair bit of food, but get you out of the snow and into territory where berries and wild crops are available again. Plus whatever random animals you come across on your travels. It's certainly a gamble though, as it will be much harder to recover your stuff if you die en route and wind up back at spawn. You've got an interesting point with the game mechanics not really doing much to pressure your immortal seraph to avoid death when dying and being reborn comes at fairly little cost. As you note it's difficult to create a stronger mechanical incentive for avoiding death without harsher punishments (which would make unintended bad luck deaths feel much worse). A reward system has the opposite problem, where more experienced players who know how to prepare and aren't at serious risk of starving to death would be getting a steady stream of free whatever just for playing the game. In your case, I'd recommend just doing whatever building and tech progression stuff is available to you, preferring indoor over outdoor when given a choice but not ruling anything out. That will be much more rewarding than sitting still in an empty room. If your food stores run dry and you wind up hunting wolves and bears for bushmeat to avoid starving to death, well, that will be an interesting adventure of another sort, still a better experience than sitting on the floor indoors all winter would have been.

The limited and irreplaceable rapid water is a very deliberate design decision, which the dev team have been considering for multiple years. They are being careful to avoid the problems with water power in Minecraft's Create mod, where players being able to create infinite sources of water power anywhere they wish becomes a significant balance issue. If all you had to do to create your own rapids was climb a mountain (or pillar up 30 blocks) and dump a bucket, players will just do that. And then do it again for every additional water wheel they want to add.

Bears aren't in a terrible place right now, but I wouldn't mind continued tuning of their behavior. Were it up to me, bears in "rampage mode" would make significantly more and louder roaring noises, alerting the player and waking up any animals which are sleeping nearby. The rest of the time, they would have a large (20-30 block) detection radius where they recognize the player and will either growl a warning, flee, or completely ignore them based on the inscrutable exhortations of their souls. They would also have a smaller radius, 10-15 blocks, where they will always growl a warning at an approaching player, and a smaller still radius (5-10 blocks with some random fuzz) where they will always attack a player who moves into that range and stays there for at least a second. That warning doesn't need to be a growl: I've had the dubious honor of coming within 100 yards of a black bear who did not want me around, and the deep roar/bark/grunt "HAROOF" sort of noise it made at me is distinctive (and carries quite a long ways, even through dense trees). Obviously all numbers are arbitrary and open to adjustment. That's not very far off from how they behave right now, with the primary difference being that bears would be much easier to detect when in their most dangerous moods, and somewhat easier to detect and avoid when they are feeling relatively calm. The growl range and agro range distinction already exists for wolves, and bears may have some logic along those lines but without noises to announce themselves.

I don't know if anyone else has run into this problem, but I do know that your friends experiencing the capricious wrath of the cabinet god would be a good fit for the humorous stories thread.

Between the renewed need to fence in crops, larger fields, and the nutrient recovery changes, this update has made removing and replacing med fert soil a more understandable strategy than it used to be. Fencing in larger fields makes it more difficult than it was to simply expand your farm instead of replacing your existing spent soil. The need for larger fields also means that a smaller portion of your fields can be expensive high fert or terra preta soil that you would never just dig up given the choice. Finally, the fact that leaving a field to fallow is now a mandatory step instead of a three crop rotation allowing almost continuous growing makes remove and replace appreciably more space efficient than allowing the intended fallowing period. I think that last point is inescapable, unfortunately: if you want players to be leaving fields fallow for a time, some of them are going to skip that and replace soil instead, unless some kind of explicit penalty for soil replacement is implemented.

How long does it take fallow farmland to recover nutrients? If it's only ~3 months to recover 50 points then this works fine.

That must be a bug, because it defeats the point of crop rotation. There's no reason to bother rotating crops of different nutrients if the soil isn't going to recover any nutrients at all when any crop is growing on it. You're going to grow a K crop, and P crop, and N crop, and then leave it fallow for a very long time while all nutrients recover, instead of the first nutrient being mostly recovered by the time the third crop is done. Rotating through three crops and then leaving all of your fields to fallow at the same time and starting an entirely new farm just feels bad, especially if it's expensive Terra Preta fields that you're leaving barren.

I've found coral in temperate zones before.

Is that all nutrients, or just the current crop nutrients?

90% of my Vintage Story game time is on a pretty beefy linux desktop with a mouse, keyboard, etc. Sometimes, though, you just want to be able to play from the couch.

My primary objection to the berry bush rework at this point is that knives break berry bushes almost instantly, and playing on a macbook with a trackpad it's inconsistent if the game will register a two finger (equivalent to right) click correctly. Accidentally and irreversibly breaking a bush while trying to remove a cutting is no fun. Other than that, the mechanics as they exist now are a little clunky in some areas but mostly make sense and don't seem particularly onerous. I'm content with them.

No mods, I'm just leveraging residual heat. If you put in a piece of peat, it will heat the firepit up to about 500C and slowly decline from there, while the food caps at 200C. The food will continue to cook as long as it's temperature is over 150C (for meals with meat) or 100C (for everything else), regardless of the temperature of the firepit or if anything is currently burning. Note that the green arrow stops animating and showing temps once the firepit goes completely cold, but cooking continues as long as the food is hot enough. You can still keep tabs on the temperature of the food by mousing over one of the ingredients, which will show correct temperatures. To take advantage of this, wait to put in a second piece until the food starts to cool down enough that it seems like it will fall below it's cooking temp, and be willing to wait too long while you learn exactly how much of this you can get away with.

A really annoying place where the two finger vs one finger macbook trackpad problem comes up in 1.22 prereleases: trying to take a cutting from a bush. Most accidental click-instead-if-right-click problems are either escapable or reversible, but because breaking a bush with a knife happens so fast and cannot be undone, I've found myself regularly accidentally smashing berry bushes while trying to propagate them.

I believe the shield in that ruin is better than any you can craft. Same absorption stats as the best steel shield, but with a higher passive block chance. It's a serious score.

I had problems with accidentally throwing rocks instead of pilling them in 1.21.6 as well.

Cooking fuel costs actually seem a little cheaper somehow, or perhaps I've just gotten better at timing. I've been able to cook four servings of hefty veggie stew or porridge with a single piece of peat, and five servings of meat stew or six servings of a non-meat meal with two (carefully timed) pieces of peat. Six servings of meat stew required three peat unless you time it perfectly (which is risky), but gives some heat to spare. Two to three stacks of peat, a quarter stack of brown coal, and about a dozen charcoal. Heating full stacks is a horror show in the new update, to the extent that I strongly recommend cooking only enough to make a bloomery, and then using that bloomery to calcinate more flint.

I caught half a dozen rabbits, two foxes, two fawns, and a boar, although nearly all was frontloaded into the first month or so. I also did virtually no hunting in the area prior to planting crops and digging my 1 wide, 2 deep dry moat immediately outside my fenced in fields.