williams_482

Is allowing players to move the flow from rapids blocks a significant distance (provided they construct a viable aqueduct) actually a balance or realism problem? An aqueduct would be a significant investment, dropping one block every 10 blocks would still be a serious limitation, and water presumably needing to fall onto the water mill structure would further limit things. Aqueducts and similar watercourses are also just cool, and building them should be encouraged. Splitting rapids flows is a separate, further question. I think the big balance questions are: Can you split rapids flows the way you can with water? If not, how can that be prevented? Can you run multiple wheels in sequence off of a single flow branch? How deep under ground can water wheels continue to function? I think ideally, waterwheel setups should be possible to scale up, at meaningful expense/effort. If every rapid source equals one water wheel that seems kinda boring.

Given the game's development timeline (Tyron expects it to be in progress for many more years) I don't see any reason to rule out a sophisticated weaving system being included. Especially since eventually removing grid crafting is one of their long term goals; some alternative to make clothes would have to be found. Creating pixel art patterns on a loom and then displaying them 1-to-1 on the clothing model wouldn't be a trivial change, but ought to be technically feasible. I think you could get away with greatly compressing the weaving process to make the boring parts tolerable. Clayforming currently has some helper tools along these lines. I'm imagining a loom block you interact with using twine, yarn, or equivalent threads. By default it will place a row of the color you applied to it, allow you to add and place additional colors a la new materials in the chiseling interface, then you could lock in that row and start the next one. It should give you the option to repeat the previous row (or a block of previous rows, to allow more complex patterns) provided the correct materials are available, and should add a new row every 1/2 second or so as you hold down the button. It might even have a "weave one cloth" button that takes a little longer than weaving one row to animate, but outputs a whole piece of linen. This process should also be contiguous: you give it yarn in increments of four, up to a stack, and then hold down the button to continuously add rows until materials are exhausted, outputting a piece of finished cloth each time the requisite number of rows has been completed. Think like grinding stuff in a quern. Simple patterns could even be automated with mechanical power, assuming the devs were interested in pushing the invention of mechanized weaving up a few centuries. This would be more tedious than the current grid recipe for crafting cloth, but with the right time saving options it wouldn't be dramatically worse and it would open up more options for patterns, etc. They could also have a knapping-style interface where you shape linen into shirts, pants, etc, and an "embroidery" interface where you can freehand pixel art onto an already existent cloth item at the cost of colored thread. All things that could feel and function like other mechanics already in the game.

If this is an added cost to second, third, etc quenches I'm less bothered from a gameplay perspective, but still not thrilled. It means extra quenches are a decision with a cost tradeoff which is good, but it's an annoying way to make the best gear more expensive. I think I'd prefer a system with a persistent increase in time/material cost, or something that trades durability for power (or dig speed, on a tool) instead of being a straight upgrade.

The random break mechanic for quenching is sure to be frustrating in game, but it's also not particularly realistic? It's possible to crack a steel work piece while quenching it, but an experienced blacksmith should be able to reduce this risk to almost nothing if they quench a properly made item at the right temperature in the correct quenching medium.

From the wording, I'm pretty sure this change applies for purchased elk after your first. So you get the full 50% discount the first time you buy an elk, same as right now, but if you subsequently go back to the archives, kill the boss again, and buy another elk, the discount will be only 25%. Monsters being primarily an obstacle to avoid is explicitly a deliberate design decision. There are mods out there which you can use to adjust this as you please, but it won't be changing significantly in the base game.

Bears (and I assume wolves as well) will remain indefinitely as long as they have an artificial light source nearby. In one of my worlds I have several bears trapped in 5x5x3 pits with an oil lamp in the middle, and they have remained there for over three years, including one year spent 40,000 blocks away in the tropics.

So much to be happy about here. We more or less knew what features were likely to appear and you guys have delivered, but the tweaks and bugfixes sections had me literally fist pumping. Bigger reed piles? Better default waypoint names? Correcting item distributions in cooking pots? Fixing path blocks to look contiguous when going up slopes? Aww hell yeah, this is the good stuff! That red clay pit kiln color is gorgeous, too. Congrats on the release, and on the warning-free compilations!

A temporal gear seems very expensive for something with no practical value. Perhaps there could be a way to spray a food item with some kind of sealant to render it inedible but immune to rot? Coating it in glue would make sense, and doesn't require adding a new substance.

The vanilla interface doesn't show growth times like that. What mods are you using?

Eating gives you more hit points to work with (+2.5 max HP per nutrition bar, and you should be able to max out fruit, veg, and grain from just berries and your farm). Not starving all the time also means you will slowly heal damage instead of slowly wasting away. Having a larger and full hit point pool gives you a much better chance of surviving when you do get into a fight. And of course you won't have to deal with the nonstop sad clarinet (or whatever voice you chose) as you constantly take starvation damage. You should be able to greatly limit your exposure to bears and wolves by avoiding forested areas. Wolves are tricky to fight, but manageable with a few flint spears and maybe a crude shield. Just be careful to take them on one at a time, as getting swarmed is much more problematic. Bears are another story, fighting them is hopeless without iron gear and/or a lot of experience. When you do find a bear in an area you want to access you have a few options, but the simplest is to dig a 4 deep pit, put a light source at the bottom, get the bear to chase you towards the pit, and then jump over it so the bear falls in. If you do this with nothing in your inventory you can also just jump into the pit and let the bear kill you. Once the bear is in the pit with an artificial light source, just leave it there (but mark it somehow, so you don't fall in yourself by accident). It will not be able to escape and no other bears will spawn in that immediate area. As for drifters and the like, limit your time outside at night unless rift levels are calm. If you're at home you can make clay stuff, pan bony soil, cook food, or do whatever other indoor tasks need doing. If you're out and about, dig yourself a little safe space in the side of a hill and use a hay bed to sleep through the night.

Limestone (and chalk) absolutely can spawn in huge patches like the other rocks you mention. You aren't looking for a small deposit like with clay or peat, but a whole layer of white rock. As mentioned above these are easiest to spot when they form in mountainous regions and the bands of different rock colors become visible in a cliff edge, but it should be easy enough to tell if you've wandered into a flat limestone or chalk region by looking at what kind of loose rocks are lying on the ground. If you are desperate for lime and can't find any limestone, chalk, or marble, your two alternatives are prospecting for borax (requires a bronze or better pick) or grinding seashells to get lime. God, that sounds miserable! No, constantly starving to death is not typical for veteran players under anything but the most extreme circumstances. If you dig up every wild crop you find and plant all the seeds in tilled medium fertility soil adjacent to water, you should have all the vegetables and grains you could hope to eat after a couple of in-game months. It also helps to grab the bush whenever you pick berries, and replant it near your base for easy access when it fruits again in two months. Hunting is more dangerous and labor intensive while animal husbandry is more complicated and benefits greatly from having farms set up, so those are less worth worrying about, but farming is very easy once you get the hang of what wild crops look like, and very lucrative. I'd strongly recommend prioritizing setting up a good sized farm over traversing hill and dale to find lime for leather.

Isn't Dave officially "Thunderlord"? There's an in-game painting portraying him which has that name.

Has anyone tested if the bargain basement terminus teleporter effect still works?

Items can be re-smelted using a bloomery, the same way as iron nuggets and meteorite bits. Most items can also be broken down into bits using a chisel, and then smelted in either the bloomery or a crucible. The exception here is steel, which can be broken down into bits but cannot be smelted back down. Nothing currently in the game gets hot enough to melt steel.

Out of curiosity, which story location was this, and how did it happen? Players getting trapped in claimed locations is definitely not something the devs intended.

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.