williams_482

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.

In 1.22, planted crops surrounded by a 2 deep pit will catch quite a few animals, even if the crops are fenced off enough to be inaccessible. Eventually you'll kill enough that they won't come back for a while. This won't work in 1.21 though.

I was grumpy about this at first, but I'm coming around. The indirect buff to Terra Preta is a good thing for the game. The delay on windmills and gambeson armor is a little annoying, but there is always stuff to do in the mean time.

The update should not have affected stage 1 growth times. The bug which was fixed was a "fencepost problem" with nutrient consumption as crops grew. Flax, for example, has nine growth stages and is supposed to consume 50 K nutrient. Previously it was consuming 50 / 9 = ~5.5 K per growth stage. This is wrong because although there are nine stages, there are only eight transitions between stages because crops start at stage one, so flax should have been consuming 50 / 8 = ~6.3 K per growth stage. This results in significantly slower growth, but concentrated in the later stages. Under the old system flax in 75% moisture med fert soil at stage 6 would still have ~23% K fertility left to work with, and would grow to the next stage at 58% of baseline growth speed. Now under the same circumstances it will have ~18.5% K fertility left at the same stage, dropping it to 29% of baseline growth speed. All in all, this should increase total growth times relative to the old system by about four days on med fert soil, two days on high fert soil, and zero days on terra preta. That's meaningful (much harder to get two harvests in year one, and functionally impossible to get three in years 2+) Based on my first year crop in my 1.22 test world it seems like things have slowed by more than that, which could be me losing track of days, or could be one of the other factors (light level, temperature) interacting with the already slowed growth times in an unexpected way.

The game is set in 13th or 14th century Europe. Potatoes are a new world crop and did not exist in Europe until they were imported in the 16th century.

I'd be happy to see hides become ground stackable, so you could put a pile on the ground, scraping them with a knife and picking them up in sequence with minimal added effort. This is in-world so it's more immersive than grid crafting, but still quick and easy. I definitely don't want to be forced to squiggle the mouse back and forth for something I'll wind up doing dozens, maybe hundreds, of times, often in short succession. There's a difficult balance to be found with these in-world crafting interactions. Clayforming demonstrates this well: it's great for most things because you only need to make jugs, bowls, vessels, pots, etc occasionally. Repeatedly crafting vessels can get somewhat tiresome, but you generally don't need more than a couple dozen across an entire playthrough. Where it falls apart is with roof tiles, which if you need any, you need a whole bunch, and crafting that many becomes a miserable slog. I think it's important when designing these mechanics to differentiate between high frequency and low frequency actions, making the infrequent ones complex and the frequent ones either extremely simple or complex but eventually automateable. Clayforming would be improved dramatically if there were moulds we could craft for the high frequency items like shingles (or bricks, once the grid crafting option is removed) that allow rapid sequential crafting with simple inputs like holding right click with a stack of clay in hand. There's a mod out there that does this reasonably well, although I think it could be better balanced. Scraping hides, as a high frequency task that will have to be done over and over again for most playthroughs, needs to be more shingle mould than shingle clayform. The alternative is pain.

The axe only spends durability breaking the logs of the tree, not the leaves or branches. I just tested in game to make sure. I recommend forging metal axes to chop trees and break blocks quickly, but making flint axes (and using the copper axes you occasionally find in cracked vessels) to split firewood and do other inventory crafting tasks where durability is the only relevant factor.

You can test this by making a backup of your world, then going into your world in a 1.22 prerelease and placing your stored bushes to see what they do.

I may be misunderstanding you, but this is how the game currently works? If you use an axe to break the bottom block of a tree trunk, the whole tree will break.