williams_482

Ahh, so pulling out he fuel when the kiln is not yet finished but everything inside is at 1200C (and thus will remain over 900C for some time) will actually stop the firing process? That's a little weird, but answers the question pretty definitively.

They do gain weight after killing you...

Correct, protecting your game is a great idea. That's why given the choice you should buy it from a platform which (unlike Steam!) actually gives you ownership over your copy. Steam has been a great product since it started and will probably continue to be a great product until Gabe Newell retires or dies. Once that happens, expect a harsh decline. We don't actually own any game we bought on Steam, only the indefinite rights to play them on the Steam platform. If there's a quick buck to be had in cutting people off and Gabe or a comparable ideologue isn't there with the power to veto, it will happen. That's the lifecycle of software companies these days. As for this game going on Steam, the devs are quite clear at the top of their FAQ that they do not want to do that, and why. Their reasons make plenty of sense. If you really want to be able to launch Vintage Story (or another non-Steam game) through Steam, though, you can totally do that! There's a detailed tutorial from another forum user explaining how.

In general, you want to plant cold crops like rye and parsnips in the spring (as soon as 4 am temperatures are warmer than that crop's lower temperature), plant summer crops in their place after harvesting, and put in a final batch of cold crops in August or even early September to close out the growing season. For example, you might plant parsnips (P crop) in mid April, harvest when it fully matures in mid June and replace with flax (K crop), harvest that in mid August and replace with rye (N crop) to harvest in mid October. In the very early game, if it's already midsummer and all you have to plant is cold weather crops, planting them and living with the reduced yields is better than doing nothing with them.

I realized I only answered part of your question. Farmland needs to be within three blocks of some sort of fresh water (source or flow) to get any moisture from it, but as you saw it declines by 25% for each block of additional distance. Farmland with 75% hydration because it's next to water is usually fine. You can water it, it will grow faster, but it's usually not worth the effort. If you are planning to rely on a watering can for irrigation, it's still best to make sure there's water within three blocks when you first plant the seeds. There's a bug where seeds planted in completely dry soil will grow half as fast over the life of the plant even if they are subsequently watered. In my first world I (unaware that better soils existed) planted my summer crops in dry, low fert soil and watered them regularly, but only about half of them reached maturity before freezing to death. I did have the fun experience of seeing my rye plants be stunted by both heat and cold though, so that was interesting.

I strongly recommend having a water source adjacent to each farmland block. The drop off in growth speed between 50% and 75% moisture is noticeable. In my experience flax on high fert soil with 75% moisture will reach maturity while the 50% moisture soil is on stage 7/9. That's not debilitating or anything, but it is slower, and it makes it more awkward to harvest it quickly and rotate crops between full fields. Also worth mention that the more rain this field gets, the less this matters. Any tile with rain falling on it will be at 100% moisture until the rain stops, and then slowly recede back to baseline. Ultimately, it's usually not difficult to get plenty of farmland tiles adjacent to water in the early game by digging branching irrigation trenches off a small pond, and once you have a bucket placing one water source surrounded by eight farmland is a simple, tileable, and space-efficient setup. Outside of possible organizational or aesthetic considerations, there's no reason not to do that.

I'd wager that the cellar size limit is a stylistic choice (real cellars are relatively small, after all) while the size limit on regular rooms is mostly for performance. There had to be some kind of limit, and 14 blocks is enough for most things that people would want to count as rooms. If 14 was chosen arbitrarily or because it met some performance benchmark, I have no idea.

You have two basic options for using those tools: 1. Continue your material progression. Go looking for tin or bismuth and zinc to create bronze, and then use that bronze to get some iron. 2. Use the nifty new tools you've unlocked for other activities. Your saw unlocks boards, which unlock new building materials as well as a number of agriculturally useful items like buckets and troughs. The chisel and hammer unlock the quern for grinding flour (for bread and pies) and limestone (for processing hides into leather), as well as chiseling blocks directly to add detail to your builds. Whichever of those sounds most interesting would be a perfectly good direction to go.

I was able to fire a pit kiln with the minimum 9 x 24 stacks of peat, and even pulled three per stack out after the kiln finished. Clearly less than that is possible, I'm curious where the line is.

I believe Vintage Story already has slightly different 1st and 3rd person animations? At the very least, I know my shadow's chopping/mining/digging motion doesn't always match what I see the tool itself doing. Often the shadow is moving at a noticeably different speed, never mind the different angles of attack.

According to the wiki and my limited experience, beehive kilns are somewhat less fuel efficient than pit kilns if operated conventionally. However, the wiki notes that fuel inefficiency can be increased with micromanagement, but doesn't elaborate further. I assume this is referring to adding enough fuel to fire the kiln and then pulling some of the fuel back out once it's burning, leaving just enough to heat the kiln to 950C and remain at or above that temp for 9 hours with minimal wasted heat. Has anyone experimented with exactly how much firewood or peat is the right amount for this? From reading other forum posts it seems that the kiln will behave identically regardless of what or how much stuff is inside it, and outside temps don't appear to affect firepits or ovens in a noticeable way, so I'd expect a rule of thumb about how much fuel to use to apply pretty universally.

Quite the opposite. Having armor as the outermost decorative layer is a stylistic choice that only became common after the period in which this game is set. 13th and 14th century knights and men at arms would almost universally have worn a surcoat and other cloth coverings over their armor, or even have a decorated cloth outer cover incorporated into some forms of armor (such as brigandine). Of course if we're going to be pedantic about timelines we should also keep in mind that a full plate harness like the steel plate armor or the Forlorn Hope armor set have their origins in the 15th century as well. The alwyte style emerging at roughly the same time as much more elaborate and visually striking plate armors is probably not a coincidence.

Intelligent rendering would have to be a part of this, to get the models all lined up properly. And I know that's not trivial. As you're hinting at, a big part of the problem here is the video game logic that armor neither competes with clothing for slots nor (with the exception of bear armor) provides any warmth benefit, and just piling on the layers doesn't make you any more encumbered or give any danger of overheating. Wearing a winter coat under a properly fitted suit of armor would be impossible, and wearing a properly fitted coat over the armor would be only somewhat more manageable. But you almost certainly won't do either, because outside of really extreme cold, that armor is itself providing quite a bit of additional insulation. I highly doubt that the current armor and clothing system is in it's final form, so hopefully these quirks get ironed out in time, along with a more sophisticated encumbrance system and some sort of overheating penalty.

Currently, a seraph wearing something in every clothing and armor slot will mostly only show the armor they are wearing. This is unfortunate because it hides whatever cool clothing they might have tailored up for themselves, but it's also unrealistic and ahistorical. Armor should go over most garments (pants, shirts, etc), but it should not always be the highest visible layer. Mostly this is obvious (you aren't going to put a straw sun hat under a chain mail coif; if you wear it at all you'll put it on top), but I think the historical side merits emphasis as well. The popular conception of a knight's plate armor being worn as an outermost layer without decor is a 15th century style, known as "alwyte" (all white) armor. For the centuries preceding that, across many iterations on types of armor, the style was pretty consistently to wear a cloth surcoat over at least the torso and often arms or legs. This was useful for allowing knights to identify each other, but it also just looked good. People like to look good. The cleanest way such a thing could be implemented in the current game is if coats would render over a player's armor. This also gives a use for the coat slot in warm weather when the extra warmth from wearing a coat is pointless: you can replace your fur coat with something designed to look nice, perhaps one of a set of specific surcoat items (in whatever color) that adds negligible extra warmth but is designed specifically to look good as a top layer over armor. Hats should also display differently, depending on the type of head armor worn with them. The straw hat from earlier has to go over mail or a gambleson hood, but it would look ridiculous on top of a visored steel helmet. This one has no historical backing, as I have no idea if soldiers would wear brimmed hats along with their helmets (I'm not aware of any contemporary images showing such). It is purely a realism choice which gives more opportunity to show off your fancy clothes.

Avoiding problematic edge cases is really important, and I think something easy to forget for experienced players who are long past the point of deciding if they like the game. I've argued before that there should be controls on starting positions. At a minimum it should place you somewhere with relatively flat ground for at least a couple blocks in every direction, ideally in a flat region or perhaps in the middle of a gentle slope. That spawn point should not be inside of an obstruction like a bush. The rain level should be high enough that the immediately surrounding terrain is dirt, not gravel or sand. The game should also never generate hostile animals on the initial world load. This eliminates the dumbest, most obnoxious scenarios that a new player might get into, that could plausibly chase an otherwise happy customer away with just a couple minutes of frustration. You could go further with this, such as requiring that there is clay within 50 blocks, that the player spawns into a flat, medium rain level, non-forested zone with a forest close but not too close, that there are berry bushes immediately available, etc. That's surely more work and much less necessary (if even desirable), so I don't see the point. I've had pushback when suggesting something like this before, and I'm sympathetic with folks who really don't like this kind of handholding and quite appreciate the truly random start with it's occasional insane issues. I certainly wouldn't object to making a "controlled start" setting which would shut these protections on or off. But they should exist, and they should be on by default, for the sake of stoping unlucky newbies from jumping to unfortunate conclusions.

That does seem a more likely explanation. The lowest spoilage zone is the wall opposite the door, and the structure is above ground.

I have a cellar where milk spoils slightly faster in one corner and slightly slower in the opposite corner. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that one corner of the room is in a slightly cooler region than the other.

I think a lot of this is good, but this one I'm not thrilled about. If new players getting burned setting up bases in nice looking unstable areas (or more experienced players realizing they shouldn't set up in those places) is a problem, players discovering that their base has randomly become an unstable zone for some unknown amount of time is going to be even worse. I'm also not huge on removing the indicator from the UI. Admittedly I play with the HUD mod that literally shows you the stability percentage at your current location, which is maybe too much information, but it is a huge help to be able to see at a glance it I'm in a good, okay, or bad place to recover stability. I could get roughly the same information from the gear, I'd just have to look at it longer. Recently I went mining for Casserite in an unstable area some distance from my base, and had to emerge from my mineshaft on a regular basis and run off to a stable area to recover stability. The difference in recovery time waiting in an area with 105% stability vs a full 150% stability is substantial, never mind the difficulty of trying to recover in an almost-but-not-quite stable region. This sort of rough categorization (very stable vs barely stable vs barely not stable) would be much harder to convey via environmental clues, and that in turn just forces you to wait around for longer in the middle of nowhere on mining expeditions.

In my first world after purchasing the game, generated in 1.20, I spawned in a small grassland flanked by two tall plateaus. I had hunted seemingly every nearby wild animal to extinction in my first year, and now was franticly trying to find pigs and sheep to capture and domesticate. Eventually a solitary ram spawned which I (at great personal cost) lured into a pen, but finding a ewe proved more difficult. I decided to give the plateaus another look. After climbing to the top of one of them and wandering around the circumference looking for animals stuck on small ledges, I was in luck! there was a bighorn lamb (sex unknowable from range) trapped on a two block outcropping against the side of a sheer cliff. Being unfamiliar with the intricacies of animal behavior, I figured I should be able to work my way over to a nearby ledge, build it an escape route to ground level, and herd it into my pen from there. But once the lamb noticed me climbing towards it, it panicked and took the only possible action to escape. I watched as this lamb launch itself into open air 50 blocks above ground level, then in mid flight mature into an adult ram before crashing to it's death on the ground below. Free extra meat, I guess. I'll take it.

The bone flute essentially already does this, teleportation and all. It has a range limit, but it's pretty far; if you give it a toot every minute or so while sprinting through the undergrowth your elk will keep up with you well enough.

So this incredibly rare item cannot be picked up once placed? That's really unfortunate.

Regarding bells, I won't say I'm super experienced in cave fighting and I definitely don't play on wilderness survival, but I've had some luck using this approach against bells who spawn in largeish caves: 0. Build some kind of safe room or prepared defense, out of the bell's alert radius. Could be as simple as a small two block high wall of fences or dirt blocks with a narrow entrance to block off shivers and limit how many enemies can get to you at once. 1. charge the bell with a stack of torches and place a few of them as fast as possible, then turn and run away. 2. Once you've run far enough that the bell isn't ringing, turn and deal with whatever monsters are chasing you. 3. Once melee enemies are dealt with, shoot the nicely illuminated bell with arrows from outside it's agro range until it dies. If there are Bowtorn around it you can kill them first, as the bell can't spawn more until you get closer.

Two in-game months is only 18 days on default settings, and they gestate for 25 days (give or take). Give them another month and you'll have piglets.

I'll note that if rifts are set to invisible, they won't drain your stability even if you're standing right in one. I see in the chat log that you had an extended grace period before monsters start to appear. Perhaps that's causing a weird interaction with rifts and/or the low temporal stability punishments?

This is a bit of a digression, but even an "underpowered" primitive firearm was pretty near unrivaled in it's time for pure killing power if it managed to hit somebody. Most people have an exaggerated sense of how lethal and unstoppable arrows are from movies (which themselves are mostly porting tropes of gunpowder warfare to more primitive tech), which makes it harder to understand why anyone would bother with the oldest, clumsiest, hardest to use personal firearms. It definitely wasn't ease of use for minimally trained and disposable soldiers: crossbows were cheaper to build, easier to use, and much more reliable. That's assuming you needed ranged troops, and thus didn't want to turn to the old standby of giving them a twenty foot long pointed stick and training them to move in formation with it. A great archer can shoot a lot faster than that musketman, and under certain conditions might be more accurate, but his effectiveness and that of his fellows is coming from volume. Arrows could, did, and still can kill people, but against armored soldiers any given arrow was much more likely to go glancing harmlessly off a piece of steel plate. Those that did bite flesh were much more likely to do superficial damage than to disable or kill. The lethal effect of English longbowmen at battles like Agincourt was because they put so many arrows on their targets, from many different angles, that many lucky hits were inevitably scored through small cracks in armor. And putting that many arrows on target required time, which required some combination of clever planning and favorable battlefield circumstances. Some historians have argued that in most cases the value of archers on a battlefield was psychological: a sustained bombardment of projectiles which mostly don't hit anything, and when they do mostly don't hurt, and when they do mostly don't do real damage, and when they do mostly don't kill, is still a painful, miserable, and deeply unnerving experience. In a battlefield situation where everybody is under tremendous strain and yet sill required to keep firm and follow orders, that sort of psychological effect can easily be decisive. No, the reason you bother arming your troops with clumsy, heavy, slow-firing, not very accurate, weather-affected, occasionally explosive matchlock arquebuses is that they're incredibly good at punching through nearly any practical personal protection and delivering an incapacitating blow. Steel plates which will reliably stop an arrow can be punctured by an arquebus, and things like mail or a heavy quilted shirt which offered very meaningful protection against muscle powered weapons were totally useless against them. For a bonus, they replace the arrow swarm's slow, grinding psychological impact with something much simpler: these things are very loud and make scary clouds of smoke and if one does happen hit you, you're probably dead no matter what you're wearing or doing. If Vintage story were to add firearms, they should be expensive. They should be complicated to use. They should be slow to reload, and they at the very least shouldn't be much more accurate than bows and spears (although they should be easier to aim, because the projectiles will travel so much faster and drop is less relevant). But they should also do a whole shitload of damage if they do manage to hit a target.