Thorfinn

Feel for you. We chose the state we moved to deliberately. My kids' engineering degrees (Purdue) were only about twice the cost of the engineering degrees my wife and I got from a no-name college. Adjusted for inflation, theirs' were cheaper.

I do have the time, but choose not to. Most of what you are talking about can be just ignored. Yes, fat goes rancid, but it is common enough by late summer that it is not a big deal. Yes building a berry patch is harder, but there's no reason you have to have one. Fruit (berries) are common enough in the wild that it's pretty easy to stick with gathering until .our fruit trees are bearing. Yes, mechanical power is different, but so long as you don't try to gear it up, it works. But by all means, follow @Zane Mordien's advice and make the game yours. Heck, if something is too tedious for your taste, no one is stopping you from typing /gm 2 and skipping the drudgery.

I'd add that you don't really need leather. The game at present can be completed with gambeson or less, and leather backpacks only add 4 inventory spaces over linen sacks.

You could make such a mod, but I doubt it would be very popular. I could be wrong, but I suspect most players already assume there is rock X, it's just a matter of finding it. What would this do for one? Even if you set it to check for rocks within, say 10,000, how does that help if you don't also have it tell you at least what direction it is?

Status effects. At least I hope so. How they choose to address that affect everything from hunting to hypothermia to hypothermia to malnutrtion to injury to... you get the point.

Welcome to the forums, @Phistandantilus I usually just use dirt, sometimes placing stones to keep grass from growing on them.

I didn't express that very well. Or at all well. Real Life™. I am always excited to see the new changes. And adapting to them. Not quite a fully new game, no, but often enough difference that I have to adapt. Mostly because as an engineer, I enjoy thinking about economy of action. But intertwined in that is that many conversations are premature. The largest wildcard is likely status effects. That's probably going to affect everything from combat to cooking. Whether an idea works well in the current game says nothing about whether it would be a complete waste of developer time to work on now. Until we see how status effects work, anything that will be affected should be left to mods.

I'll be a bit more blunt. Am I permitted to enjoy a game as it existed a mere few months ago, or do I have to adjust my preferences for current sensitivities?

Yeah, as the forum has become more steamified I've been less inclined to interact. I think I've been pretty good about how to modify files to change the game for your own preferences. But as people increasingly insist that their preferences are the "truth", I'm getting tired. Maybe the game I've enjoyed is no longer politically correct? OK, do I need to find another game, or those who insist on getting their own way win?

Tule would probably be fine if you boosted the output, or drastically reduced the amount of tule needed for a thatch block. I would be hesitant to change dry grass too much since it's used as animal feed and tinder for the pit kiln.

Selective Keep on Death, I think it's called. Was working as recently as 1.21. Probably still works, but I have not checked.

Panning is not for everyone. Not me, for sure. I just take the lack of copper as a sign I'm not in the right place to settle down yet. There used to be a mod that added some flint tools -- pick, saw, chisel, maybe some other stuff. Better than Heresy, IIRC. No idea if it still works.

I would not pan for copper, ever, because it's pretty much death. You will not have found enough surface copper deposits to produce the anvil, so will have to pan another 1000 units (900+100) to progress. Meanwhile, you are not making headway on your homestead, delaying your food independence and automation and tools. I'd advise doing as @Shoom suggests. Don't settle down until you find a better spot. Either that or restart. Tough enough learning curve without putting yourself at a further disadvantage.

This is going to sound weird, but I didn't even know you could throw them quickly. I thought you had to wait for the reticle.

I think the stone (and flint and obsidian) need another half point at least, and I would leave copper alone, and boost bronze. At the moment, the Stone Age is weak, particularly for newer players, copper makes a huge difference, and bronze is a why bother. If you are swimming in tin, why not, but it's not worth the effort to go mine more.

Pretty easy to balance out. 1 gear for a 3l jug too much? OK, 1 gear for 2x 3l jugs. Or make the market react to supply by reducing price or quantity demanded or both. Makes it good for intermittent trading, and particularly good for early game, but phases out if you spend a lot of time riding the circuit. (Yah, I know. "Why make the player play the game the way you want?" Well, players always have the trump card of Creative mode.)

I'm fine with them staying the way they are. I'm also fine with them changing. @TFT's suggestion is solid. You can't argue that it won't "casualize" the game, though. If you want a setting for a more casual playthrough, something like this should probably be included. Re: default difficulty, I do not agree it should be whatever a n00b needs to thrive, but rather for the median VS player. Games that had difficulty settings have generally placed the default at someone reasonably competent at the game, with a setting or two above and below. For example, Doom's default of Hurt Me Plenty was OK for those with a reasonable amount of experience in Castle Wolfenstein, or who had a couple playthroughs of Doom itself, but most newer players had to turn it down to at least Hey, Not Too Rough to have a prayer against the two Barons. The naming of the difficulty levels was probably intentional -- to goad the player into becoming better, rather than just playing the childproofed version. Very similar to the Rage Quit button in VS. VS's version of Ultra-Violence, Wilderness Survival, is not all that difficult. Mostly the difference is things that two-tap you in standard often one-tap you in wilderness. You go through food faster, yes, but by the time you decide to increase the difficulty, you have figured out how to make food a non-issue. And that's about it.

How could one know what most players like, when most don't even post? Generally speaking mods that increase the difficulty of storms and monsters in general or more poplar than mods nerfing them. Why would that be if most people dislike them entirely? Whether making them easier or harder, either way, it appears to be a terribly small subset of purchasers. A couple thousand, tops. The rest, we don't have any idea because we do not know the settings they use.

Can you back up any of that?

Oh, I see what you are getting at. You think of this as a "bad" distinction. Fair enough. You may even be right. Apart from new monsters and some marginal changes around the edges, storms are more or less unchanged since introduction. This may mean it's just a placeholder. It may also mean it's more or less what Tyron wanted. Time will tell. Or not. But I think it's self-evident the intent was that it somehow interrupts what you were doing, in a "fair" way in that it gives you ample warning.

No, one would be wrong to say that. Lots of games have micro transactions. It's getting to the point that not having microtransactions sets games apart.

That Other Block Game. You would not believe how long it took me to realize that's what @Maelstrom and others meant by it. By distinctive, I mean "something not present in other games, or something that is done much better in this one." Would there have been a better word for that concept?

Mining and farming are vanilla TOBG, no? Farming in Ostriv or Manor Lords is considerably more complex. All kinds of games have automation. Smithing/knapping/clayforming, sure, at least to some extent. I don't know of any games that do that. And the game definitely encourages you to engage in those voxel minigames. You have to engage in them to do anything apart from simple gathering of basic resources. Heck, if you don't make a knife, you can't even make a torch, barring some lucky cracked vessel drops. While clayforming may be VS exclusive, there is probably a reason that Knapster is kind of in the same ballpark popularity-wise as Expanded Foods. Where is the similar mod removing these aspects of storms that people think are so overwhemingly unpopular?

Don't they? Way back when, I sheltered in a trader wagon and got jumped by Mr. Dead, though he might have spawned on the porch, not inside the wagon proper. Still wouldn't that have been covered by the claim? Unless there were trees overhead. I just don't remember the specifics well enough, and a wagon is a pretty small space relative to everywhere else they could spawn.

Dunno. Probably the odd man out here, but the stability running down and eventually out while I was cooking and rearranging my sock drawer was awesome, at least in retrospect. At the moment, not so much, maybe. I was the height of unprepared, having left all my tools and weapons elsewhere and inventory chock full of the stuff I was sorting into other storages. I managed to get 2 stone spears knapped out before running out of stability and having to regain some stability by killing things. That's why I've switched to cranking the duration -- it adds pressure to engage with the game on its own terms, rather than what I might think a better game would do. It also adds to the chance of getting enough Jonas tech to do something. Kind of related to @Teh Pizza Lady's comments (I think) a good game encourages one to engage with its distinctive features. Like it or not, storms are, I think, VS' defining distinctive feature. Followed by chiseling. My "solution" to the "lackluster" impression some have? Fleshing out Jonas tech. So far, there's nothing I really care to make. Returning to your grave is meaningless in permadeath. Night vision? Why? Lanterns work, and since creatures sense you anyway, there isn't much point to not carrying one. Maybe have Jonas tech grouped by "power" so if you loot the body of a level 3 drifter during a storm, you have a chance of getting a level 3 Jonas part? Still doesn't change the fact that if you pop into an established server, your first storm is likely to be at or near max anyway. You still have to dodge all the level 4s.