williams_482

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.

The clutch and transmission are the components used to toggle machines on or off. The brake just adds a ton of friction and shuts down the entire power train. I have yet to encounter a situation where I wanted to do that. Maybe if you just want to make the whooshing and rattling noises stop for a while?

In some (all?) versions of Terrafirmacraft, hot springs are very helpful resources because they heal you when you go swimming in them. This is an idea based in realism: hot springs contain many minerals which have positive health benefits. There are a handful of natural hot springs around the world which draw thousands of tourists (and for some of them, local monkeys) to bathe in their warm, mineral-rich waters. Vintage Story leans hard in the other direction, helpfully reminding us that most hot springs will not improve your complexion, but instead boil you alive and dissolve your corpse. This is a more realistic default behavior, but it does make those pretty hot springs pretty useless except for aesthetics. I feel a middle path might be best. What if the water runoff from hot springs cooled a little bit for each block it travels outside the radius of the spring itself, and once given enough space to cool off, it gives a powerful healing boost? I'm envisioning something comparable to poultices in HP/sec, with the same armor-based slowdown and no initial delay or direct material cost, but only available in a prepared space near a conveniently placed hot spring. It could even slowly damage clothing and armor (a further nod to it's corrosiveness) while healing the player, encouraging birthday suit bathing as circumstances allow. This would be an extremely marginal benefit in practice, not mandatory in any way and severely limited by where these springs happen to spawn. What it does is give a practical benefit to building aqueducts and bath houses, which I for one think are fun.

It seems like most of the problems with Minecraft water replenishment come down to how easy it is to create those infinite sources. Water flows from two adjacent tiles can quickly fill up a large space. If instead three or four adjacent tiles are required, then far more labor is needed to fill large areas from scratch, but the weird holes that form when beaches and small islands are dug up can be easily patched. Especially because Water Source vs Water Flow is a much less meaningful distinction for VS than for MC. With default settings in VS, a single water source block can be used to create any number of additional water sources, while in MC you really need to set up that infinite source generator because each bucket consumes a source block.

Once you have enough iron and hammer power for it, I strongly recommend investing in iron and then steel chain. It's expensive in time and material but has light enough penalties to be perfectly workable as every day armor, as well as enough defense to take on story locations.

I assumed our Seraph had lost their memories but not their skills, and was simply applying extensive 13th century engineering knowledge to trying to survive in this unfamiliar world.

I have seen it suggested that VS could swap from generating chunks "as needed" to generating a very rough world map on initial world creation which contains very basic information (rock types, approximate elevation approximate terrain type, approximate rainfall, forest cover, and temperature, and the presence of oceans or rivers), then generate the complete chunks within those constraints as needed. This would allow for more realistic rivers and accompanying watersheds, and have the added benefit of enabling your idea here.

I believe bears have a step height of 3. I've seen them climb directly over small trees to attack me. I dig my pits 4 deep and never have a problem.

Charming. Anyway, there's a quote from Soren Johnson, designer of Civilization IV and many other games, relevant to this situation: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." The basic meaning is that if players are given a way to do something which is "better" (in this case, saves more material) they will do it, even if it's actually really annoying and un-fun. Yeah, I could just toss the toolhead and pretend it doesn't exist, but I know that's a waste of metal. I'm not going to do that and nor are most other players. Having the option to save it and eek some more value out of it becomes a drag: either it's an extra chore to do, or a regular reminder that the way you've chosen to play is inefficient in a meaningful way. The alternative where it's not an option, and you just accept that you will someday need to mine more metal (something the game wants you to do!) doesn't have this problem.