williams_482

It would be nice if smithing, clayforming, and potentially other in-world crafting systems had a "freeform" output option. The player could select this option and place/move voxels however they pleased without a guide, adding and expending material as normal, until the player decides they are done and can pick up a "finished", non-functional item of their desired shape. The purpose here is to allow an alternative to chiseling to create small freeform objects out of materials that are either not easily chiselable (clay) or very expensive and inefficient (metal blocks). For example, if I wanted to create a small figurine out of meteoric iron, I could craft a full block out of plates and then chisel that down, or I could place two hot ingots on an anvil and shape from there. Note that while this is possible by picking some other smithing output and ignoring the voxel placement indicators, those indicators are somewhat annoying while shaping the object, and the "finished" object will always appear as an incomplete knife or whatever in the inventory. For freeform clay, construction would still be layer by layer, with the player having to "lock" each layer before starting the next one, and then finally locking the final form before firing. Coloration post-firing would be very basic, matching the base color for a brick of the same clay type and firing conditions. For both clay and metal, the final product would be very slightly smaller (5-10%) but proportionally identical to the set of voxels which were just formed, mirroring the subtle shrinkage when a normal crafted item is completed and switches to it's standard texture. These finished freeform items would behave differently based on their size: if the item is less than or equal to eight voxels in both length and width, it is treated as a small ground-placeable item (like a bowl or crock), if larger than 8x8 then it is treated like a full block item (like a watering can or a vessel). This would be a purely cosmetic addition, with no practical benefit except some minor material savings. Nothing crafted freeform would be able to store fluid or items, hit for any extra damage, or have other characteristics that would have to be carefully balanced. They would simply exist, and (hopefully) look nice.

The patch notes for 1.21 said they had fixed the issues with animals phasing through blocks when the player is far enough away to unload their chunks. I'd say your testing confirms that they succeeded.

As someone who currently just shuts the storms off, I agree with this. There are several things that would make storms a significantly more tolerable inconvenience, one that I would consider leaving on even without some extra rewards: - They should be predictable several days in advance. Not with perfect precision, but our seraphs should know (and be shown) the same information that we players could derive from knowing the temporal storm cadence set for the world. I want to be able to know, for example, how risky it would be to set out on a multi-day trip now vs staying home until right after the next storm. - It should be possible to do normal indoor things in a smallish home during a temporal storm without being jumped by something that spawned in right behind you. No monsters spawning within (for example) ten blocks of the player would mean that a typical room is always safe to do panning, smithing, cooking, etc. You can then experience the atmosphere and suffer the inconvenience of the storm while doing things you probably would have done some time soon anyway. - Temporal storm monsters should scale with player progression somehow, perhaps with story progression benchmarks. The fact that a light temporal storm will still spawn large numbers of monsters strong enough that a typical player would struggle to 1v1 them with a flint spear is fairly absurd. The downside here is that the double headed drifter's drops are the one real reward for fighting through a temporal storm right now, and I don't think that should be locked behind a trip to the second story location.

Several questions here. Spoilers below. You've been warned.

I have two armor stands that have been in my home for several updates, placed centered on their blocks. I recently picked up an aged armor stand, and was delighted to find that it would place on an edge instead of in the center of a block, allowing me to place it in front of the other two armor stands in a triangular formation such that all three were visible from the front. I assumed (for lack of other explanations) that this was a deliberate behavior, special to the aged armor stands to allow precisely that sort of staggered placement, and was grateful for it. I now know thanks to this comment that the behavior I saw is a bug which currently applies to all armor stands. Oops. If/when that bug is fixed, I hope some way of placing armor stands on block edges or block centers is retained. The thing I mistakenly thought was happening, where regular armor stands are placed on the block center but aged armor stands are placed on the edge, wouldn't be the worst way to do it.

I would have expected someone who plays permadeath to be very careful about managing risky situations? You only get one chance, so you completely avoid dangerous situations when possible, or enter them deliberately only with careful preparation. Having watched the closing minutes of your video, that's not what happened here. I agree with the poster upthread who said this situation was completely avoidable. Attacking that bear the way you did seemed outright reckless. Bears are supposed to be things you avoid to the best of your ability. Running into one unexpectedly should be an "oh, SHIT" situation. They aren't unbeatable, but you need some combination of many ranged weapons, prepared traps, and considerable skill to take one on. I don't doubt that you are experienced with fighting animals in Vintage Story, but here you were overconfident about how much room you had to work with and got it slightly but fatally wrong. If you let that bear go about it's merry way, you would have been fine. If you gave it 15 blocks of space, threw one of those spears, and then ran to your prepared defenses: probably still fine. What you actually did? I'm sure sometimes, maybe even most of the time, it works out. But sometimes things don't go exactly as you expect, and then this happens. That's why it's important to give yourself a margin of error. Very few people are good enough at dealing with bears that they can win 100% of the time when out in the open equipped with two flint spears and a backpacked falx. I'm not totally certain anyone is, forum legend Thorfinn included. The fact that you aren't (yet?) at that that level is hardly a black mark against you, but it's not damnation on the game either. For what it's worth, I'm sympathetic to your complaints about temporal storms. Sympathetic enough that I just shut them off in my games, while you have apparently opted to install a mod that implements the behavior you want. That's great! Nothing wrong with that, nor with installing other mods to customize your experience to a level of difficulty that feels fair for a permadeath playstyle. What is wrong, is coming in here and making nasty comments about the developers, then lashing out at people here who didn't agree with you takes.

Good notes about the bear armor. Seems like an intentional choice to make the more difficult to kill bears give more useful armors. As for Panda/Sun bears, they seem to behave identically towards the player. They'll run away if you get close to them, but usually turn aggressive if attacked. They are also both capable of the same indiscriminate "rampage mode" as other bear types, where they run around killing whatever they can find (including you).

Both anvil parts do require five ingots, but it's quite easy to waste voxels by stacking new ingots beyond the maximum height of the work piece. Add one ingot at a time only after the previous ingot is spent, completely filling out each layer from the bottom up. And definitely don't destroy any voxels until everything else is done. The anvil bottom requires slightly less than five ingots worth of voxels, and is relatively easy to complete with just the five. The anvil top, meanwhile, requires exactly as many voxels as five ingots will give you, so you have zero room for error. I often get this slightly wrong and have to use six ingots. There's a detailed set of instructions in the wiki which I found to be quite helpful.

Ideally they would only produce the particles when not yet interacted with.

Are there any parts of the story that intrude on regular gameplay if you don't go out looking for them?

I did ultimately return to the archive and pick up a slew of missing lore books, including the conclusion to "The Spy and the Sparrow". Most of these were found after combing through the library shelves, but I also went through the rest of the archive chambers looking for lore books in back rooms I hadn't noticed on my first pass, and I believe I found at least one of my missing books there. I imagine the new particles for selectable books would have made this much easier than it was on 1.20, but that won't help for books stashed in ruined chests in the corner of some secret bedchamber. If you can't find the last book in the library, it's probably tucked away somewhere else in the structure and you'll have to dig around for it. Here is my updated and complete list of RA-exclusive books: - The Weight of Stone: nine sections, eighteen pages - Admirer of the Miller: ten sections, twenty two pages - The Patronage of Tibalt Amaro: five sections, ten pages - The Spy and the Sparrow: ten sections, seventeen pages

I just tumbled into this one, and it turns out you can just break the barrel to get your salt back.

I don't think it does, and although I am just one person I would definitely not like to see the actions being removed from direct environmental interaction (think smithing, or turning a quern) and have that moved to a "mini-game". IMO, it's really important for the game to remain consistent, not just for the new users but for the rest of us. I've never played the game in question so I'm not sure what kind of gameplay the shown "minigame" is diverging from, but everything shown in that video (read a recipe from a book, pour a base liquid into a cauldron, put it over the fire, put an herb in and boil for a bit, grind another herb and add it, pour the contents into a bottle - all by manipulating object in a room) is in line with the kinds of direct environmental interactions that you describe. I'd expect a potion brewing mechanic in Vintage Story to function similarly.

Assuming a square map, it's shaped like a donut where the diameter of the vertical cross section of the donut ring is the same as the diameter of the donut itself, and the circumference around the outside of the donut is the same as the circumference of the hole in the middle. That's not like any donut I've ever eaten.

If any limitations were placed on the distance the map will render (which seems pointless, I suspect it works that way because it's easier to continue infinitely in whatever direction than to find a natural seeming way to establish world borders), then they should stitch the world boundaries together to implement a rudimentary bi-directional world wrap. Civilization 4 had a world wrap option they called "toroidal", where both the north/south and east/west boundaries of a rectangular map of grid squares would connect to each other, allowing you to walk around the "globe" in any direction. The actual zoomed-out shape of the resulting planet is physically impossible and difficult to visualize, but that's not noticeable from the ground, and certainly not at Vintage Story's first person scale. I think it would be really cool to simulate a globe like this, allowing people to journey south 400km and find themselves back at their base. It also shouldn't be too difficult technically, with the biggest problem likely to be figuring out how to make the map boundary terrain look seamless.

This falls firmly in the "why would you ever do that" category, but I don't see any reason to prevent it. I guess it makes panning marginally more possible in extreme arctic starts? That's probably good.

Interesting, because I'd take the exact opposite position. Unstable surface areas containing weird and creepy sounds, off colors, occasional flickering/insubstantial blocks, etc, produces a much more visceral sense of discomfort (and with it a much more immersive experience) than just seeing the gear spin the wrong way. The "neon sign" is a feature. Luring new players into traps which an experienced player can trivially avoid just makes for a more frustrating experience for them, with little benefit. It's also counter to most of the other gameplay loops. Most mechanics in this game fall into one of several categories: 1) Genre staples and in-your-face problems. There's a hunger bar, you need to eat. There are monsters who attack you, you need to fight back or run away. etc. Most players will intuitively understand these things, and those who don't are probably going to recognize that they are out of their depth and go to the tutorial or a youtube video to get themselves sorted. Even if they just try to muddle though without help, "there's a little grey guy throwing rocks at me" is at least easy to identify as a problem. 2) Obvious how-to questions (How do I find food? How do I protect myself from monsters?) which can be answered relatively easily in the handbook or with a little in-game experimentation, but require work to obtain any practical benefit. Progressing in this game is essentially a sequence of asking how to get a thing you want, finding the answer, and then executing on it. 3) Non-obvious questions about lore and the world at large (what are these weird monsters?) which the player isn't even going to know to ask until they stumble across something in game and will have to do some legwork to answer at all, but which don't directly impact their engagement with the survival and progression mechanics. Surface stability *should* fall firmly in the third category, weird things about the world that you'll learn about over time. Unfortunately it's treated as if it belongs in the first category, and thus becomes a trap. New players who get unlucky picking a location for their base don't even recognize there's a question they need to ask until they've wasted a big chunk of time building a base they can't really use, and that's incredibly frustrating.

Regarding monsters breaking into your house during temporal storms, I was impressed by the suggestion in a reddit post from several months ago that monsters (and rifts) could make blocks temporarily insubstantial, then pass through them. If more expensive and/or sturdy materials take longer to break through, players would have a reason to build specific temporal storm resistant structures. Personally, I'm firmly in the camp that temporal storms are currently much too disruptive and annoying to bother with, so I just shut them off. If there was any real preparation I could do to allow me to just sit in around and make pots or whatever without being harassed by random otherwise-impossible drifter spawns, I'd be more inclined to actually engage with the mechanic. Preventing drifters from spawning too close to the player but giving them more ability to reach an unprepared player seems like a decent compromise.

The three tree types you listed all grow closer to the equator. If you go south about 10K blocks you'll start to see redwoods, and in another 20K blocks or so Ebony and Purpleheart will (occasionally) appear. The equator in a standard world is about 50K blocks south of your spawn.

I didn't keep detailed records for "proof", but yes, wild crops absolutely do slowly progress through their growth stages, and eventually revert from their maximum growth stage back to the first stage. I've actually seen a patch of wild rye revert from full to seedling before my eyes. I also made a regular habit of checking up on wild crops near my base and harvesting them only when they reached maturity, which did reliably happen. Do you always harvest wild crops when you find them, regardless of growth stage?

Under what circumstances do you have to crouch to place a ladder? I've had no trouble laddering out of vertical shafts just by right clicking a wall the place the ladder.

Are bowtorns actually 100% accurate still in 1.21? Not long after updating I pillared up 10 blocks or so to sleep, and woke up in the morning to a bowtorn firing wildly around me as I stood motionless. several of the shots missed by several meters below me. I assumed that bowtorns are actually shooting the same bone arrows they drop when killed, with their innate 30% malus to accuracy. But I haven't made any attempt to test that.

Tying tree growth to specific climate parameters and increasing the growth times of rarer trees seems like a better way to prevent players from surrounding their base with a forest of purpleheart after one trip down south. It just feels wrong that these trees are not only difficult to find, but inherently unsustainable to harvest.

I wonder if the game would benefit from an optional but default-enabled worldgen setting that guarantees that the player starts in a >= 100x100 block grassland, with moderate rainfall and guaranteed clay nearby (ideally on a gentle slope for easy visibility). This doesn't guarantee the player anything particularly powerful, but it does avoid the worst pitfalls for a new player to fall into (such as having wolves routinely spawning in your front yard, or there being no crops, reeds, or mushrooms in easy reach because you were dropped into a large expanse of gravel).

Huh, I guess it treats single player worlds differently from servers? I am surprised you don't have permission to run that command in-game on your own server, but I'm not familiar with how VS does user permissions on servers. Hopefully someone more experienced can weigh in.