williams_482

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.

Worth a mention that the temporal gear amulet (and temporal gears stored on an elk) do have a significant practical benefit: the produce a small amount of light. Which doesn't matter that much under ideal circumstances, but if you stumble into a puddle while caving and extinguish your torch, or you're trying to find your mount who wandered off in the dark, it can make a real difference. Never mind the benefit of having access to a temporal gear without needing to spend an inventory slot on it. So if you're in a min-maxing mood, the temporal gear amulet is already the clear best way to use that clothing slot.

It can't be hypocritical because no thought whatsoever goes into visceral "I am fine with this" vs "I am NOT fine with this" response to visual stimulus. That "ick" or lack there of is a purely instinctive emotional response. People react more or less strongly to different things, and separately people can become more or less desensitized to things that originally bothered them. None of that can be easily boiled down to simple comparative "if this is okay than that must be" statements about totally separate things. For whatever it's worth, I don't eat meat in the real world. I'll also fully admit to being relatively squeamish about gore-adjacent things. Nothing in vanilla Vintage Story triggers any sort of negative response from me. I think Vintage Story, like TOBG, taking a highly abstracted approach to harvesting dead animals is why I don't have any problem with it. Both games totally gloss over showing any kind of blood or gore, and simplifies meat down to supermarket like items of "red meat," "raw pork," or what have you. Similarly, stuff like drifters mutated bodies, bony soil, apparent sacrificial altar ruins with skeletons scattered about, etc, all hint very strongly at things which would be very uncomfortable to encounter in real life, but are streamlined enough to be merely creepy. I think that's the right zone for this game to inhabit, and the devs seem to agree. For people who want more comprehensive butchery mechanics and are less bothered than I about the accompanying visuals, there is already at least one well regarded mod out there. I won't be touching it, but I'm glad it's an option.

The falx is a real historical weapon, although a niche one. To summarize the wikipedia link, it was used by the Thracians and Dacians who fought against Roman emperor Trajan, and is portrayed on his famous triumphal column. In practice the falx seems to be a hybrid between a sword and an axe, a two-handed chopping weapon which was very effective against shields and armor alike. Modern tests have confirmed that the falx was capable of piercing roman armor, and the Romans actually added unusual makeshift reinforcement to their helmets for that campaign, theorized to be a direct response to the falx. Of course this weapon was not without problems, as it was somewhat clumsy to use and could leave it's wielder vulnerable. This likely explains why it never caught on more broadly (although I should note that there is a definite similarity in form and function between the forward curving spike of the falx and the business end of a late medieval warhammer, designed specifically for punching through plate armor. These weapons surely didn't share a design lineage, but they had a very similar purpose) and why seemingly a minority of Thracian and Dacian soldiers actually used it. Yet the falx was created and used by an actual historical people, it was effective enough that opponents developed specific countermeasures to it, and the specific way it was effective (splitting shields and punching through armor, delivering large gashing wounds) does make it a logical choice as the go-to weapon against creatures with lots of natural armor who don't seem to have a lot of vulnerable bits. As an aside, it's worth a mention that the Romans were unusual among armies in the ancient world because they marginalized and ultimately eschewed spears or pikes as melee weapons. For most of (western) Roman history, 80%-100% of the heavy infantry in a roman legion would fight with two heavy javelins (Pilla) and a short sword. Only the last of the three lines of roman infantry (the Triarii, who had half as many men as the Hastati and Princeps ahead of them) retained the Hasta (Rome's version of the classic Mediterranean infantry spear) through the republican period, and even they switched over to using Pilla in the imperial period. I've seen it argued that the relatively high-armor environment of ancient Italy is the reason why Rome moved away from spears as their primary infantry weapon, but to my knowledge that hasn't been proven. All of which is a roundabout way of saying: spears were probably the most popular weapons in the history of world, certainly the western world, prior to the advent of gunpowder, but they were not universal across successful armies. Arguably the most successful premodern military system in the history of the world barely used them at all. As I have argued before, the game doesn't currently do a great job making the falx specifically good at dealing with rotbeasts and mechanicals the way the lore describes and the actual properties of the weapon would suggest. A better balance would be to bring spears and falxes to near parity in raw damage, with the spear keeping the advantage of reach and throwability, and the falx recieving some actual armor piercing ability. Monsters (and not animals) should in turn get some damage resistance for the falx to punch through. The final effect would be that the spear is the weapon of choice against animals and unarmored humanoids, in keeping with it's historical prominence, while the falx's shield splitting, helmet piercing attributes can give it a significant edge against armored humans and metal-infused rotbeasts.

Allowing flaxseed to be turned into lubrication oil would give another use to flax, but it's not like it motivates planting even more of the stuff. It just gives a machine-related purpose to something you already have a ton of if you've grown enough flax to power machines in the first place. That if anything encourages growing more of other grains, as you won't have quite as much surplus flax grain to feed to your livestock. I've been playing a modded world recently that allowed pressing flax grain into flax oil (2 stacks grain = 10L oil) and using that to grease the wheels of my mechanisms. It meant I could build a complicated windmill despite doing almost no hunting except the occasional inconveniently placed predator and failing to find capturable pigs until early winter, and as noted above it didn't cost me anything I wasn't looking to find a use for. That might be a little too convenient, but if the vanilla version of this will require grinding flax flour and cooking it down to get a fat replacement, that's probably a fairer investment of effort.

It's pretty wild that someone who has seen all of one major version of this game (1.21 stable) and a the very beginning of one dev cycle (1.22 prerelease 1) feels comfortable concluding that the current stable is the best the game will ever be because the development team who created it are obviously incompetent egomaniacs uninterested in real feedback. This message board is full of positive and negative comments about the changes in this update, with many of the most prolific posters sharing some of each. The hyperbolic rants and slippery slope doomerism has somehow been contained to just two users in this one thread. If you want people to listen to your complaints, maybe stop treating your audience like a bunch of twelve year olds surfing for rage bait on Youtube and start demonstrating a capacity for civil discussion.

I respect the attempt, but to tell the truth I found your description pretty stomach churning. Chopping up a "meat rectangle" doesn't need to have visible blood or guts or eyes or whatever to make some people, apparently myself included, quite uncomfortable.

I recently tried out the Smithing Plus mod, which has a system like this, and I did not like it very much. Every time a tool broke I got a broken tool head that needed a little extra material to repair into a functional tool that would last slightly less time than it's predecessor. That toolhead took up an inventory slot that a broken tool would normally free up, and the process of repairing and restoring these tools to get less and less back each time quickly began to feel tedious. It just wasn't worth the bother relative to the vanilla approach of using up the tool and making a new one, while simultaneously making mining new metals feel less worthwhile. I've heard plenty of people ask for this sort of system, and plenty of good things about this mod, but I found I strongly prefer the vanilla balancing. No it's not realistic, but realistic tool durability makes mining more than the bare minimum of copper, tin, and iron largely pointless and the player should feel pressure to keep gathering more metals.

I found the structure schematic to be quite useful as a template, specifically the idea of digging out a layer or two of dirt, then using that dirt to build a peaked roof over the hole. It maximizes useable internal space relative to wall material and limits the amount of additional digging needed to get enough material. Good stuff.

To help find places where you need to apply the bucket, wade into a bubbly zone and let the water pull you around, then place a water source at your feet once the current stops moving you. Repeat until the bubbles go away.

Instead of trying to store it all, you should put it all in a big charcoal pit and fire it. That will condense it down to "just" a couple stacks, and keep you adequately supplied for some time.

As Maelstrom said, you can keep your old world, and new things will generate in new chunks (with occasional oddities). You can also use commands to regenerate parts of the map of an existing world, if you've explored extensively and want some newgen terrain closer to home.

I'm not sure exactly how the hot and cold crop checks work, but I know that when I ran off to the topics in the fall with a field half full of un-stunted rye and returned in the spring a year and a half later, my crops were all dead. Presumably somewhere in there it checks if unloaded crops are being exposed to damaging conditions. Edit: is it possible that your rye crops are high enough and far enough north that they've escaped the worst of the summer heat? If you happened to spawn further north than average and made your farm on a mountain slope at y=150 or something, then ran around doing summer things at local altitudes, that could have been the cause. If not, it does sound like a bug.

There are plenty of K crops in the game right now. You've got flax, carrots, flax, soybeans, flax, rice, flax, cassava, and flax. Oh, and also flax. P crops are pretty thin. Pumpkins are so weird that their nutrient requirement doesn't really matter, so you've got parsnips, onions, and peanuts. Another one would be pretty nice. Obviously there's a ton of N crops to pick from. I will note that spelt is a species of wheat which was commonly grown in Europe for thousands of year until it mostly replaced by modern strains in the 20th century. We definitely won't be getting a new crop called "wheat".

I think spears should have higher ranged damage than comparable arrows (they've got a bigger pointy bit on the end and more weight behind it, even if they move a little slower) but throwing them at point blank range shouldn't be a better option than stabbing, and readying a thrown spear should probably be slower than nocking and drawing a fresh arrow. The niche of a thrown spear should be relatively high damage per hit at medium range, but lower practical DPS than equivalent arrows or melee attacks. Thrown spears being significantly more damage than stabbing spears is the weird quirk that makes balancing spears difficult. It seems like this damage boost for throwing is supposed to balance the downside that a thrown spear is no longer in hand and ready to be used again, but in practice that's not much of a problem because anyone planning to throw spears will cary several, and they can be thrown very quickly. I'm inclined to argue that spear throwing and spear stabbing damage should be the same or close to it. I'd balance it such that spear damage (thrown and held) is equal to or slightly better than a falx of the same material. Falxes should be updated to include an armor penetration ability, while rust monsters and mechanicals should be updated to have fewer hit points but some amount of innate armor of the same tier as their attack. This makes spears equivalent or arguably better at fighting animals, which is reasonable (spears are historically a very popular weapon for good reason), but the falx reigns supreme as the monster masher, in keeping with it's in-game description.

Using a pike as a personal weapon wouldn't be very realistic. In the real world pikes are much to long and clumsy to be practical outside of the dense formations they were designed for. Something like a halberd or a glaive is slightly more practical, but still dangerously awkward. These weapons mostly existed for use in formation against mounted opponents, nothing like the individual duels or "one against the world" melees that dominate combat in Vintage Story and similar games. Broadly speaking: if the combatants are heavily armored then someone with a shorter weapon better at defeating armor (like a warhammer) is going to be difficult to stop before they close to a range where a halberd is useless, while in a lighter armor context, the shield + one handed spear combo is much better defensively while retaining plenty of reach and damage.

How do you dodge bear attacks reliably enough for that to even be possible? Running around rough terrain throwing spears is one thing, going toe-to-toe in melee unarmored is something else entirely. I've tried to get better at dodging bear attacks in less... vulnerable situations (i.e. wearing good armor), and I've found it quite difficult.

In my current playthrough, the strategy of simply picking up every wild crop I can find and planting them all on a mix of medium and high fertility soil (the practical difference between these two isn't nearly as much as it could be) next to water has given me well over a stack of linen sheets and enough grain that I'll struggle to eat it all in the six years before it goes bad. I'm only in early September of my first year and have another harvest on the horizon. Primitive Survival furrows made it easier for me to get the fields looking nice prior to unlocking buckets, but I could have got the same acreage without them and the extra 5% moisture is negligible. Frankly I'd be fine with cutting down the yields of vegetables as well as the grains. It's so easy to get huge quantities of food out of a very modest garden in singleplayer. Multiplayer is presumably a different animal as each additional player will bring in progressively fewer additional seeds unless the group is very deliberate about splitting up to explore different regions. SP vs MP is a tricky balance to strike, and I suspect this change was done primarily with SP in mind. If you do this, make sure you till the soil while it's raining. There's a bug (I think?) that drastically reduces the growth speed on soil tilled while dry even if it is subsequently watered, and I'm pretty sure un-tilled soil doesn't retain moisture from rain. Two harvests of flax or spelt is probably possible, but uncertain. Getting any un-stunted rye harvests is doubtful, as the window between too hot and too cold isn't all that large. Historical peoples used many different types of spears, with varying degrees of specialization. They can be divided into those categories if one is so inclined, but the most straightforward "sharp metal point affixed to a 6-8 foot haft" design works very well for stabbing people and can also be thrown effectively. The game could add all sorts of variants if they were so inclined (pikes, lances, boar spears, light javelins, pilum, etc, each with a very narrow practical use case), but sticking to the straightforward, long lasting, incredibly popular "pretty good at two things" model makes plenty of sense in this game.

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!