williams_482

A single windmill, assuming the maximum five sails, is definitely inferior to a waterwheel. Prior to 1.22 it was easy to combine four windmills in close proximity to get a large amount of power, but that became more difficult to do without very goofy aesthetics due to the new turbulence mechanic. Large windmills (the ones that require iron components) are supposed to make up for this, but in practice they are quite inefficient relative to spending the same amount of flax on regular windmills. The rough pros and cons for watermills vs windmills are as follows: Watermills: - more powerful - constant power regardless of conditions - no flax required Windmills: - can be built anywhere (although higher is better up to y170 and some regions seem to get more wind than others) - no iron required I think the general idea is for windmills to be a relatively inexpensive power source for smaller scale stuff wherever your starting base happens to be, while your primary industrial workshop (and probably your primary base) should be set up somewhere with at least one rapids source for water power. A waterwheel powered up-geared triple helve setup will be plenty for your smithing needs, and milling/pulverizing can be powered adequately by another water wheel if you're lucky or a couple widely spaced windmills if you aren't.

If you are in a position to be searching for Bauxite to make steel, you should be in a position to construct a boat. Boats are fast and give good visibility of the shoreline, so they are pretty good at searching for a desired top-layer rock type. I recommend building a boat and going north, see what you find. There's a good chance you'll need to go north for story-related reasons anyway if you haven't already.

The berry bushes will use the nutrients in the soil they are planted on. The better that soil, the less fertilizer they will need to reach the same yields. I recommend medium fertility soil: it's plentiful and easy to find but clearly better than low fertility soil. High fertility soil is probably better used for crops, or converted into terra preta (again for use with crops).

In SP, damage types wouldn't add much, especially since the falx (at least under my proposed system) is going to be the best weapon or close to it against both rotbeasts and mechanicals, while remaining effective against animals. For day-to-day stuff in the copper or bronze age on, that's your go to and not much thinking is required. That model would make the club into an actually useful object as an early-game falx alternative. My early game loadout would switch from spears to club + spears, mirroring the late game loadout of falx + bow. But the big benefit would come from MP and boss fights, where weapon/armor matchups could be significantly more impactful. I've seen people complain before that group combat on MP servers is really boring. Apparently it typically devolves into small mobs of steel plate clad seraphs wailing on each other with falxes until someone dies. More diversity in weapon types and armor effectiveness against those types would create an environment more like an MMORPG, where you have some rock/paper/scissor stuff going on that motivates more complex team tactics. Boss fights also create a somewhat predictable scenario where the player can reasonably anticipate in advance and bring multiple weapons to, where different damage types could become more relevant. Perhaps there's a boss who is well armored and difficult to injure with piercing weapons, except at a few specific moments where vulnerable parts become vulnerable to damage specifically by high-sharpness thrusting weapons which can fit through small openings? Or maybe you get attacked by two small groups of "minion" enemies with different damage resistances, and the correct play is to take out one group as fast as possible with their optimal weapon before turning on the next group with a different weapon. Etc, etc.

The wood at the center of a big tree's root system has been prized for some time in the construction of large sailing ships, because it is exceptionally strong and has beneficial grain to be used for high-stress connecting pieces in the hull. Something interesting along these lines could definitely be done with stump wood.

Was your inventory full at any point? You may have accidentally dropped that stack on the ground somewhere, and then after 10 minutes it would have despawned.

Regarding damage types, if they were implemented I'd like to see something like this. Note that any numbers are illustrative, not exact. - Weapons have two modes of attack: swing and thrust. Many have only one mode (i.e. arrows), others have two but one is obviously superior (i.e. spears) - Thrust attacks do piercing damage, swing attacks do cutting damage. Cutting attacks have higher base damages and are more likely to deliver disabling status effects. Piercing attacks are more likely to deal extra damage to fleshy creatures if they penetrate armor significantly, but won't do very much against mechanicals. There is also a third damage type which we will cover below, blunt damage, which might have some extra benefits against mechanicals. - Every weapon attack has a base damage along with two other stats, which we'll call "sharpness" and "heft". Sharpness effectively refers to how small the business end of the weapon is, while heft is how much force it strikes with. Let's imagine sharpness is on a scale of 0 to 1. A club (blunt instrument, no edge) would have a sharpness of zero for both swing and thrust attacks, a rapier (sharp point, weak cutting edge) would have sharpness 1 for thrust and maybe 0.3 for swing. A falx (no real point, big sharp cutting edge) would be sharpness 0.2 for thrust but 0.8 for swing. Etc. - Sharpness determines how well the weapon can penetrate various forms of armor. Armor has different resistances to thrust and piercing attacks. Chain mail is a notable example: it will stop cutting attacks cold assuming comparable material between weapon and armor (swing sharpness reduced by 90%), but is vulnerable to small points which slip between and possibly split the rings (pierce sharpness reduced by 20%). - Heft determines how much blunt damage is dealt if the weapon partially or completely fails to penetrate. Different armors will mitigate blunt damage different amounts, but all armors will mitigate blunt damage less than piercing or cutting damage. Based on the effective sharpness of weapon vs armor, the attack will deal a percentage of it's damage as either piercing or cutting, then the remainder as crushing damage, modified up or down based on the heft of the weapon. A club is a hefty weapon will fail to penetrate even an unarmored target: it will always deal 100% blunt damage. A falx is a hefty weapon which will at least partially penetrate most armors, but even poor penetration will still deal significant blunt damage. A rapier is a sharp but very light weapon. When swung it will very rarely penetrate even light armor, and will deal negligible blunt damage either. When thrust, it has much higher sharpness so it will get some penetration against all but the heaviest armors, but if stopped it will again deal negligible blunt damage. This system has several advantages: - it's realistic. This is a pretty good model for how points, edges, and blunt instruments interact with various armors and with human bodies. - It creates sensible tradeoffs. Different weapons are good against different armors and different targets, but there would still be a clear progression of better armors. Chain is extremely popular in-game, as it was historically. It's exact penalties and benefits should be tuned to maintain that, despite it being relatively less effective against drifters and bowtorn than against shivers, bears, and falx-wielding humans. Clubs become most useful against heavily armored opponents and mechanical creatures, while spears are the better bet against animals and lightly armored players. Bells become much more dangerous under this system: they are obviously mechanical, and will be highly resistant to arrows. Shooting them from outside detection range won't really work, you have to run up and bash them with something heavy. That seems appropriate. There is one obvious disadvantage: complexity. Which I'll admit might be fatal. The complex formulas are not that important to the player and easily hidden, like armor calculations are now, but it does add a number of extra stats to each weapon: damage, sharpness, and heft for each of up to two attack types per weapon, and sharpness reduction for two attack types plus damage reduction for three damage types for armor. It also leaves the question of controls for two types of attack per weapon. left-click swing, right-click thrust falls apart immediately for spears which can also be thrown, and F to select modes mid-combat is much too clunky to be workable. With only two melee options F as a swap key instead of bringing up a menu might be fine, but does require that the interface clearly communicate what mode you are in.

I've seen people say this, but in my experience it's not accurate. An elk makes travel enormously faster as long as you have a bone flute and are willing to dismount in really rough terrain. Riding on flat ground or very steep terrain is much faster than on foot, and when you encounter a dense forest there's no need to go around it. Just dismount and run through it, blasting away on the flute to keep your elk close, and when you reach clear ground again hop back on and keep riding.

I agree encouraging variety by making novel foods more effective at being foods is a much better setup than providing arbitrary buffs. However, I suggest that instead of adjusting satiety (which as you note has some serious problems) it should adjust the duration of the hunger pause from meals. The hunger pause is useful, but not as crucial as the immediate health bar filling effect of a meal. It's also hidden from player by the current interface, so gradual adjustments to the values aren't likely to cause confusion to new players. Make a hidden "recent foods" bar, similar to that satiety bars, which fills up as you eat. Once the bar is full, new foods displace the "memory" of older foods, making the new food less effective and moving older foods closer to peak effectiveness. How much food is "remembered" for how long, how broad or specific food categories can get, how large the hunger pause reductions can get, etc, is all up in the air and can be configured to get the desired effect. I think this would work because it provides a modest mechanical benefit for variety and some incentive to strategize, and it can do that while still being tuned not to cripple players who insist on just one or two favorite meals, and while having minimal effect on a new character just starting out in the world who hasn't eaten enough to get tired of anything yet. It creates a reason to have high-satiety travel foods which you specifically avoid eating at home so they have the most effect when eaten on the road. For example, it could be configured such that players eating 1-4 different unique meals with 4 or fewer unique ingredients between them would suffer the maximum penalty, with only 50% of the current hunger pause per satiety consumed. A player eating two varieties each of four types of meal (of the six possible - pie, stew, porridge, soup, scrambled eggs, jam) and using 2-3 unique ingredients per food group across those meals would be minimally inconvenienced, getting 80-90% of the current hunger pause. More variety of that would certainly have diminishing returns, and the question becomes where to cap it. I also really like the idea of alcohol cutting into that "recent foods" bar. If you are limited to a small subset of foods (such as during your first winter) or you're about to go on a trip with some high density foods you know you ate recently, you can spend a night getting plastered in your cellar and emerge having largely forgotten what foods your character had grown tired of, then be able to eat them again at maximum effectiveness. This not only gives a mechanical purpose to alcohol, but one that lines up nicely with when you are likely to have access to it.

I have had a similar experience. Waterwheels seem extremely buggy still: they often rotate in the wrong direction, and they don't seem to work together regardless of if they are turning the same or opposite directions.

There is a cooldown for the rickety translocator, but 1) this isn't documented in-game anywhere and thus I thought the thing not working was just a bug, and 2) that cooldown is forgotten when you exit a world and then load it agin. All in all I found the rickety translocator to be a bit of a mess, and wound up cheating in a teleport block next to it that did more reliably what the rickety translocator supposedly should have.

I think there is a bug with item heat based on what is in your hand and/or inventory when pulling an item out of the forge. Before 1.22, I would routinely hold cold ingots in hand when pulling an ingot (or two) out of the forge, so I could immediately replace it and get the fresh ingot heating up while I worked it's predecessor. In 1.22, using that strategy resulted in the hot ingot beginning to cool immediately. I adjusted my approach: now when forging large quantities of ingots or blooms I pile the cold ingots in front of the forge, pull hot ones with an empty hand and place them on the anvil, then grab cold ingots of the pile and add them to the forge and go back to forging the hot piece on the anvil. Normally when something is pulled off the forge hot it holds it's temperature for a while. I think pulling something hot while similar cold items were already in hand or in the inventory was confusing whatever logic implements that temperature pause, causing it to "forget" and start the item cooling immediately. If you're having problems with inconsistent cooling, try to make sure you are pulling from the forge with an empty hand, and never have an identical item (i.e. another ingot) in your inventory when you do so.

You're definitely correct about respawn mechanics strongly disincentivizing any risk taking while far from home, unless you have a comfortable surplus of temporal gears and can anticipate in advance that you're making a high risk choice. Setting a respawn point before entering a story location? Easy, obvious. Setting a respawn point before a dungeon? Tough choice if you're low on gears. Setting a respawn point before you stumble blindly into three brown bears who apparently spawned right next to each other in a dense forest your elk can't navigate, and by dint of surprise, sheer number, and unfavorable terrain are able to claw through your steel chain before you can kill all three? Impossible, unless you're clairvoyant, and when this happens ~8,000 blocks from the last place you set your spawn, itself ~8,000 blocks from home... not a super fun time. Ask me how I know. There is a Jonas device which solves this problem, the trouble is that it's a pretty expensive one, and specific Jonas parts are a total crapshoot. So that's not really a solution, especially when this story location is supposedly intended to be handled with iron age gear. I think if the game wants to make these long journeys fun, it needs to either make that expensive to operate terminus teleporter a little less prohibitive to construct, or give the player some ability to respawn within a manageable distance of their death point if they are wearing a more obtainable object, such a s a temporal gear amulet. That won't affect the amount of planning necessary, or the usefulness of creating way stations. It just opens up more possibilities for whimsical exploration en route without the 10,000 block corpse run of Damocles hanging over your head.

I think males just need to have eaten recently, regardless of if they escaped their pen in the mean time. I'm not sure how long it takes for them to need more food, but it's fairly quick. Maybe 3-5 days? Definitely less than a month.

The epiphany I had that made me invest in better tools is that the only truly relevant cost for any equipment in this game is time. Time to find the material, time to mine it, time to process it, time to craft it. Flint tools are "cheap" in that the materials they use are easy to find and require no processing, but continuously crafting new flint tools is actually a major time suck, well in excess of the time spent mining out another impact crater, shoving the resulting meteoric iron chunks in a bloomery, and smithing out a few tools that last twenty times as long as flint equivalents. I will still occasionally craft bone-handle flint knives or axes for use in grid recipes like scraping hides or splitting wood, but for any tool that I'll be carrying with me and using regularly, give me the one I won't have to replace for a long time and I know I'll come out ahead.

Regional temporal stability varies in all 3 dimensions. There are occasional pockets of unstable space high in the air, and occasional pockets of stability underground. Sounds like you got unlucky with where your windmill is located.

I remember being very anxious about the monsters when I started playing about a year ago, with feelings similar to what you're expressing here. My recommendation is the following: 1. Build yourself a small home with a door (ideally made from two fence gates, the crude door is total garbage) and adequate illumination to prevent spawns. This is your safe place of retreat, whatever happens. Make sure there's a big, relatively flat area nearby, with minimal vegetation. This is ideal terrain to fight monsters in. Then do whatever normal game stuff until the grace period you set runs down. 2. Knap 3-5 flint spears, and craft some improvised armor (or wood lamellar, if you're rich in hides and resin) 3. Remove everything else of value from your person and put it on the ground or in a container. Light a torch and put it in your off hand. Scarf down a big meal, and have a few more ready. 4. Get yourself hyped up. 5. Attack! Run out into the night, find a monster, charge it, and stab it until it dies. Repeat. Prioritizing charging bowtorn: this is tactically smart because they have a powerful ranged attack, but it's also psychologically beneficial because the horrific, grotesque, terrifying creatures will turn and run in a blind panic once you get close enough to them. Remember to keep moving. Don't bother to loot corpses right now unless there really doesn't seem to be anything else around. Practice stepping up to drifters, stabbing them, and then backpedaling to evade their counterattack. For shivers, notice that if you get a couple hits in they will often run away for a bit. They also have this odd habit of curling up on the ground twitching, which is a perfect time to attack them. Try to learn what works against these things, and apply those lessons. Eventually something will kill you. Good! Dying isn't that bad, and the only way to reinforce that is to have it happen. Run back in there, retrieve whatever weapons you dropped when you died, and go again. It might or might not help to have a target number of deaths in mind. E.g. "I am going to kill as many drifters as I can before I die five times or the sun comes up." But the goal is to push through the initial anxiety and deliberately suffer consequences for rash actions, to internalize that these consequences just aren't as bad as the anxieties built up around them. Once your night of berserker rage is over, gather up your equipment and assess the condition of your character, your gear, and your own feelings. If you're anything like me you'll probably be feeling pretty excited, and your anxiety about monsters won't be gone, but it will be greatly tempered. You CAN fight these things, and win. Sometimes it will go wrong and you will die and that will be okay too. Note: do not try this approach with real life terrifying violent creatures, unless you are actually an immortal being capable of returning fro the grave. It will not go so well.

Fully agreed. These changes would have prevented my own confusion when getting books from the RA the first time, and would make organizing a library far easier. For the most part VS is very good about giving you useful information in tooltips, so having something actually helpful in the book tooltips would hardly be out of place.

Do you have screenshots of the location? It sounds like a nice one.

Judging by your chat log, you were probably in a slightly low temporal stability area, then a temporal storm (apparently a very early one, given your limited equipment) swept through and tanked your stability. Because your current location happens to be unstable your temporal stability kept getting worse until it bottomed out, and never improved. The solution is to just run in whatever direction until that gear in the UI starts turning clockwise, and then everything will eventually return to normal. How you as a new player are supposed to know that, I'm not sure.

I can see a case for this. I think it would have to require a proper bed, not just a hay bed. Aged beds might give more respawns, in accordance with their rarity. If such a thing were implemented, the game would have to be smart about fallbacks. On death, first check if the player slept in a qualifying bed which still exists in the world. If none, then check if their most recent temporal gear spawn point still has respawns left, then finally default to world spawn. Bed respawns permanently overriding temporal gear spawn points would be very bad. For arguments against, I recall a post from a while back (I've tried to find it, no dice) from someone who had just bought the game with their friends and started up a small server together, asking what the point of food was. After a long and confusing back and forth (what do you mean there's no reason not just starve to death?), somebody figured out that they had installed a bed respawn mod from the start, and whenever they died of starvation it took them right back to their house to keep doing exactly what they were doing before, with effectively no interruption. The bed respawn became a crutch to avoid needing to engage with food at all, which cut out a big chunk of the interesting early gameplay and left them unprepared to do any real exploring once this pattern was established. Respawning in a chosen place is a powerful ability; it should be expensive enough that a clueless new player isn't likely to stumble into it before they've figured out how to play the game.

Not that I've found, unfortunately. It's definitely a bother, although you might be able to mitigate most of the problems by hiding angled gears in room corners and sealing off the occasional hole by covering the protruding axle.

The origins of bells are strongly hinted at in one of the story locations.

I think smithing should reward skill, and hubs requiring some experience to make with three ingots instead of four is a part of that. Personally I do enjoy smithing hubs, because for me they are large enough that I have to think about how to do them instead of being completely rote, while presenting a manageable challenge. The trick to efficient hubs is placing your three ingots with the workpiece at different rotational positions. Each ingot will form most of a spoke naturally, and leave the fourth spoke as an open space which can be easily built up by pulling material from the center. With that said, punching out the side holes in the final steps is dicier than it maybe should be, punishing a misclick very harshly even if you left some extra material. I'll admit to rage-cheating in a hub after punching out the wrong voxel and spending multiple heats trying to move a surplus voxel into the right spot to replace it. One thing I wish for that would make smithing hubs, anvils, and other large projects a bit easier is an indication of where a fresh ingot will actually be added to a workpiece (and if voxels will be stripped off due to the height limit). I still tend to guess wrong by a voxel or two exactly where an ingot will go.

What I like about the current system is: - It's a meaningful penalty, but not a debilitating one. 20% more food consumption matters enough to care about it, but not enough that you have to cut out big parts of the gameplay to avoid it. - It encourages you to keep an empty hand most of the time. Carrying stuff in each hand is more tiring than not. - Because there is a cost, you have a decision to make on when it is or isn't worth it. Decisions are good, generally. - This cost becomes much less significant once you are food stable, effectively making reducing this penalty part of the progression. What I don't like: - It's poorly documented and not shown in the UI at all, which makes it a trap for new players. This is a serious issue and must change. - +20% for everything is clearly arbitrary, and it really should vary depending on what. Both shields (heavy) and torches (awkward) should be relatively costly, smaller tools like tongs and chisels relatively cheap but not free. I'm intrigued by a system where many tools (pickaxes, axes, bows) require two hands, either to use at all or for maximum effectiveness. Needing to place light sources in order to both see and use a pickaxe efficiently would be an acceptable tradeoff to me, at least under most circumstances, but it would be considerably more annoying than accepting the current +20% hunger penalty. I would want a way to negate that later in the game. Relatedly, the fact that weapon / light source / shield is currently a "pick two" sort of deal and never really goes away is also a problem that I would want solved in the progression somewhere. The night vision mask is supposed to be a solution, but it fall short because 1) it takes up an armor slot (much more costly than losing a shield) and 2) it doesn't stop mobs from spawning the way actual light sources will. I'd like to see this solved with a backpack change that allows dedicating a slot of more advanced backpacks to a lantern, allowing a trade of inventory space for lighting. I see the suggestion along these lines upthread, and I offer my own rough proposal here: