Thorfinn

I'm not all that big on the roleplay aspect of the game, so adding classes has no appeal to me, but for people who like that kind of thing, that would be easy enough to do. Just look at any of the dozens (hundreds?) of mods that add classes. For recipes, you would probably have to break complicated things like chairs down into sub-assemblies, kind of like the way you do large gears. Maybe put nails and strips into the crafting grid to get (say) a dozen nails and a few mending plates?

I've been pondering this for a while. There are mods that add recipes, but that gets to be pretty big. Lately, I've been considering just introducing craftsman NPCs very like the merchants who barter for goods relevant to their needs, almost as if it were a functional economy. The furniture guy probably could do his own smithing, but he'd prefer to trade, say, two chisels and a saw for, well, whatever the furniture trader sells now. Maybe he'd take some fresh fish or smoked meat, leaving him more time to do his thing.

Things like other recipes for dyes of existing colors are trivially easy. In some cases, it's nothing more than adding the name of a material to a list. And as a bonus, you know exactly what's in the mod you are using. I'm probably going to do something similar to the chapters as a mod, though probably not using claims, but I want to get bored with the Stone Age and Phanerozoic critters first.

IANAL, @Nossin, and have no idea what definitions are used in Europe, but in security terms, what Malt did qualifies as PUP, not malware. [EDIT] And if you are concerned about The Wrath of Maltiez, maybe hyperventilating about this whole situation was a mistake, which might give him cause to believe he was maltreated? Just sayin'. Whatever you think of Maltiez, he's probably not going to break into your house and install real malware on your machine. If malware does somehow get on your machine, look in the mirror.

No, that's my preference, too, for the reason I cited -- there is no way to practice this skill outside of story locations. But this is the game the devs want to play, and they obviously like boss battles. On the positive side, you can simply opt out of the boss battles. I'm not a huge fan of mario bros jumping from platform to platform, either, but at least that is a skill you can practice in pretty much any cavern. All you need is a stack of packed earth in your inventory, because there are a lot of places you can't "free climb".

IMO, this should all be resolved similar to the way Terraria did it -- mini-boss fights that you encounter before the story line. Skeleton warriors defending tombs, for example. No, double-headed or nightmares do not count, because they are not anywhere close to the same level of challenge, plus they are swarms. Like Fezzik (Andre the Giant) put it in The Princess Bride, "you use different moves when you're fighting... half a dozen... people... than when you only... have to be worried... about... one!"

Maybe. But that means everyone who plays single is going to get perf-dinged for stuff that can't affect him in the slightest. It also means latency when playing with friends. Or maybe it's maintaining two types of servers -- trusted clients and non-trusted clients. But that was definitely not the intent here, as solo play is also run through a server. I think cheaters are scum, even those who just save-scum, but so long as it's not griefing or PvP, or maybe a couple things I have not thought about, I don't really care. I play the game the way I like, and it doesn't really matter to me if someone has a hack that gives his tools infinite durability, or faster speed. The most sane path, IMO, is heightened server security as a mod, maybe eventually an official mod. If you want to take the performance hit in exchange for making sure someone else isn't eating 800 satiety berries, hey, you be you.

Sure. The difference is... emotion. Either way, you still have a flat tire to deal with. I'd actually feel better about the friend doing it, because all I have to do is run the air compressor and change the locks. I don't have to put on the spare and go to the tire place to get it fixed. I think that's been the pretty consistent take. I prefer to leave the emotion out of it, you don't. If it helps, think of it as not just a flat tire, but someone put you in a wheelchair for life. Does it really make any difference if he intended to do it? Does the paralysis end earlier one way or the other?

OK. Kind of what I thought before I read (and, I guess, misinterpreted) your earlier reply. The examples given are extreme, so are simple cases. But wouldn't it still be cheating if the client reports a 150% mining rate? 120%? This would be particularly important on a PvP server, where an otherwise negligible advantage is all it takes. How any clock cycles do you want to burn verifying corner cases, when nearly 100% of the client reports are going to come back as legit anyway? [EDIT] @MKMoose, consider your reply to have a "Like".

I'm already out of reactions for the day. Pretend I did a "Like" or "Thanks" or the incredibly rare "Wolf Bait" as appropriate. FWIW, I'm a lot like @Teh Pizza Lady (and, frankly, most people) in that I tend to just nod at things I agree with or shrug at things not worth disagreeing with, and respond only to the points of relevant disagreement. That your company or your morals and ethics would deal with this in a given manner is potentially interesting, but irrelevant to Anego's policies. I tend to give a lot of latitude to those who are directly involved, and less so to the (IMO) hecklers. I get that people are getting all emotional about this, though I don't really understand it. So far as I know, there have been no legs broken or pockets picked (H/T, Thomas Jefferson), but merely some angst when a modded early access game crashes. Like that's never happened before, or that it was targeted at you, personally. I understand that you are angry. I just don't understand why, except for a few cases like server admins. Is this all just like suing for emotional distress or something?

I don't know. I was actually basing this simply off your description of "the client says it did X, so the server accepts it". Should be relatively easy to check. Change the drop rate on the client and see. Lower something relatively innocuous on the the client mods, like seed drops to 1%. Pretty sure mods like Zippy's cattail mod are server side, though.

OK, but when/where do you draw the line? The advantage of a decentralized design is that it can accomplish more than one centralized machine being a server by "farming out" computing time to the clients. @Diff gave an example I had not thought of -- that a client says it mined out all the blocks in a given radius, and the server just accepts it. I did not know that was the case, but it certainly is ripe for abuse. Servers can already get bogged down with just mapgen if you have a bunch of independent-minded players on a new world all sprinting in different directions. And the plan is to be able to support servers of 200+. Sure, a Ryzen 7 9800 is a couple years old, so probably not the hottest thing out there anymore, but if the plan is to support smaller, independent servers, you probably shouldn't be muscling out machines like that. Very much this. Which is a good share of why I am so disappointed in the histrionics of late. Here we are, a game in early access, some cheat mod comes out that for whatever reason, the dev team can not or does not immediately step on with both feet, so someone takes it upon himself to address the incipient issue, albeit in a weird manner. Not the behavior of the cheat itself, but the idiosyncracies of the coder. I'm not (necessarily) saying Maltiez should get a ticker-tape parade, but what is happening seems extreme in the other direction, let alone what the more vocal seem to want.

Exactly. To make the point explicitly. I recognize your right to have an opinion. Why can't you recognize that I have that same right? Instead, if my opinion differs from yours, your "professional" diagnosis is that my monomania is the problem. You speak of empathy, but obviously have made no attempt at all to try to see a different perspective as valid. [EDIT] I should have read all the posts to the end before replying, as both @Mushroomancer and @Teh Pizza Lady covered it a bit more tactfully. Again, I'm not saying your perspective is wrong, or that there is something wrong with you for holding it. I'm just saying I do not share it.

Oh, so that's why I don't care about this very much. /sarc Please don't pretend you can read minds. You have no freaking clue who I am or what I think. That's as asinine as me saying you, with your piddly 10 posts, have no valid opinion on the subject.

Dunno. You could probably come up with some maximum values of blocks broken, but it needs to include things like XSkills in addition to everything in the base game. And, of course, all the stuff with RNG (like the 70% drop rate for seeds from immature crops) is a real problem. since it cannot be duplicated on server side. How could the server decide whether your quench roll was fudged on client-side? How can it verify that cracked vessel really did drop a copper scythe? And in the grand scheme of things, does it matter? Ultimately, it's just a game. If you are still enjoying playing the game, who cares if someone else is cheating? If it really bothers you, find another server. Or do single-player, so you know for sure whether someone is cheating.

Now let's not be hasty here. I think it's, um, what's less than a "nothing burger"? A game in early access crashes when you add a bunch of user-created mods? Say it isn't so! Sure, most of the time, that's just a mistake in coding. not something intentional, but so what? Why aren't we all fired up about people negligently releasing code that crashes the game? At least this was crashing the game for a good reason, albeit the net was cast a bit wide.

Huh. Good thing I don't use ConfigLib, I guess. I rarely use more than 2 or 3 characters in my own mods, and sometimes I even flog case if I'm running out of names. Merging what @Teh Pizza Lady said, this allows one add new permissions or something? Just make it harder for the server to distinguish between a valid and invalid request? Abusing the updating routines? Adding a block that rots into redstone or something after one day? Not sure I see why short names would do that, but it would make it harder for a human to track.

Huh. So if the cheat had just used longer names, Malt would have had to come up with something else? Was the cheat getting past domains somehow? How was it affecting things out of its own scope? [EDIT] If that's a C# vulnerability, I don't need to know. [/EDIT]

Hey, @Diff, I have not looked at the three incompatible mods at all. Do you know the deets of why they were flagged? What was being misperceived by Malt's algorithm?

As someone who got kicked out of college for what was then the undefined charge of "hacking", and immediately getting hired on at one of the biggest mainframe companies to tighten up their security, I'm a little disappointed Malt isn't officially recognized on the team. [EDIT] I'm absolutely certain they recognize what they are letting slip past. [/EDIT] I'm more than a little disgusted at the bloodthirstiness of the mob. Though I suppose outrage porn over the latest thing is just a fact of life anymore.

My guess is that those links no longer point to those other threads because those threads no longer exist. They are here. I thought the same thing, BTW. WHAT? When I went to bed, there were only 10 pages, now there's 30!?!?!

I don't know. Sounds a little extreme. I think I'd draw the line somewhere before having them drawn and quartered. Maybe not much short of that, but still. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the intartubes. Ethically, it might be a little grey, but I'm fine with it. Except when sworn in, no one is obligated to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Parts of the West used to be high trust, but I don't think it exists anywhere anymore. As a functional adult, you need to figure out a way to handle these kinds of things, because they happen, and will become more commonplace as society degrades. As for correctness, it was the only means that would work at all. And I've always been more of a consequentialist than a deontologist so far as ethics go, anyway.

This is why I suspect the download numbers on ModDB are probably way high relative to actual users. If you bounce around a few servers deciding which you like, you may download some mods several many times.

I do verify them, plus anymore I mostly run on a virtual machine with nothing on the physical drive but OS and games. The extra effort to verify is why I usually skip code mods unless it's something I really, really want. Which is not configuration software. Run the mod briefly once, look at ModConfig and see what options there are. Not that hard. I would never do that. Way too time consuming, plus if the standard is to supply source, and this is an exception, that's a red flag all by itself. (Note: that's not what happened here, but it is implicit in your hypothetical.) That's why I said give the source a quick look-see for anything that sticks out, then compile and compare. If they don't match, I don't bother. I don't dismiss the problem, but, yes, what goes on your machine is your decision. No one forced you to download anything against your will. @Bruno Willis, Exactly. And in this case, @Diff says it would have been pretty easy. Compile and compare. Bzzzzt.

Yeah, I don't bother much with it. As with open source, I generally scan it quickly to make sure there's nothing crude like a buffer overflow, and, occasionally, check to make sure some overly complex pointer is going to something reasonable, then compile. If it doesn't match, I assume it means I don't have some include or other, and go on my merry way. I don't use ConfigLib, so would not have encountered this particular thing, but I'm pretty confident that, like @Diff, my compile would not have matched. If there were a field for it, I'd have noted it, with the proviso that it might be a nothing burger like missing a library.