Thorfinn

Don't know if you are committed to Steam. GOG has Space Rangers, Space Rangers 2, Space Rangers: Quest and Space Rangers HD. The last is on sale now for $2.24. Don't know anything about the last two, other than for $4, I figured they were worth trying, so I bought them a couple days ago. For trader games, I like the Patrician series and the Port Royale series. IMO, II is the best for both. For a slight change of pace, both Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and its sequel (the name escapes me at the moment) and The Guild are related and fun.

I'll have to look at my notes at work tomorrow, but off the top of my head, you get more rows above the hive than below. In Survival, you can plant flowers every other Z, for a total of 4 layers of flowers above and 4 below. You also get 8 flowers N and W of the hive, and 7 S and E, if I'm remembering the directions properly. With over 1500 flowers, the honey production is nearly instantaneous. As soon as it counts flowers, it's ready to harvest. But even with just 500 flowers, it's pretty darned quick. Also, and here is the exploity one, if you put a populated hive in your pack slots, then replace it, it will determine the population after 1 game hour when it counts the flowers in range. That means after it swarms, you go from low to high population and swarming in 1 game hour. Really nice for getting the initial hives going. Just pick up the hive after it swarms and put it back wherever there's an empty skep in range. In your case, the number of populated skeps would be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, so you if you can click reasonably quickly, you can populate every skep in your apiary in under 5 game hours. Thus why I need so many reeds... [EDIT] Don't know when it changed, as I have not been exploiting the mechanic, but it looks like in 1.19, you only get 5 rows above and 5 rows below now, so a total of 5 rows of flowers max. Times 256 flowers per row. Somewhere north of 1250 or so? That's still a lot of flowers to collect. Around 20 full stacks. Thinking about it, that's probably the change I first noticed in 1.18, when I had to make sure the empty skep was closer to the wild hive. Used to be 7 or 8 below, but now I was having to build a platform to get flowers and the empty skep close enough to the wild hive to swarm. [/EDIT]

Fair, @Maelstrom. I mostly do steel just to satisfy the completionist part of me. 10-20% improvement in relevant stats, and doubled durability just is not worth the hassle to me. For shovels, I think it does nothing for me but durability, for axes, it's a few chops faster for a big tree, but by then, what's the point? So once I build a full set of steel tools, finis. My only metal armor (that I'll never wear -- it's for the armor stand only) is meteoric, just because I like the looks of the set. If there were something after steel, yeah, I'd probably make more, but at that point, with nothing significant to do, I'd rather just restart and play the parts of the game I enjoy. That said, I usually leave a few dozen 3x3x3 or better charcoal pits littered about the world when I start a new game, usually by a year in or so. I just don't know what else to do with all the free time (there's a lot of hours of darkness to fill in the winter with no crops and no bees), and I'd like to deforest everything in range for the visibility alone. With at least 4,000 charcoal waiting to be tapped, I could have made a lot of steel, if I cared to.

IMO, the copper pick is the only thing that might stick out, but more often than not, even if you got a pick drop at 9AM day 1, it gains you less than 2 days. Even if copper saw were a possible drop, that means a lot less now that chests are no longer just made of boards. Offhand, the biggest impact would be barrels, but without limestone and hides and oak, so what? I agree. Things are well-gated in VS, and not in the contrived fashion of some other games.

Right, but under what circumstances would one want to do that?

When would this be useful?

Could easily be done by two stakes, @UnderTow. Post them on opposite diagonals of the right parallelepiped (there's probably a word for a shoebox shape, but I don't know what it is) that you want to claim. Alternatively you could simply claim planar rectangles, allowing you to adjust the size of the claim each level your tower ascends, if desired.

Bees don't work quite as given in the Wiki either. It's close enough for most purposes, but understanding how distance, swarming and honey production really works means you can radically improve on the standard repeating 2 flowers between skeps pattern. Not really worth the hassle, though, unless you are interested in exploiting the mechanism for some reason. The limiting factor is still reed gathering, not the footprint of the apiary.

Even if it's only a reskin, it takes time to do. Tyron has a vision, and if that vision includes major graphical changes (see the latest minor change in the model for wolves) every model will have to be updated, slowing down or even discouraging new implementations. Over the long haul, I'd imagine critters would be handled similarly to mods now -- just enable whichever creature pack mods you want. Fortunately, the way the mod system works, you can have all those critters without slowing down mainline development.

Can't think of a time I've ever wanted to do it, but sure, you could place a single item on your crafting grid, put the stack back in inventory, then pick the single up.

I think maybe the wolves are toned down. They still take a bite out of you if you run right over the top of them, but if you clear them by about 3 blocks, they don't react fast enough. If you run past at 6-7 blocks or so, they often don't even aggro. Bears, too, seem to take a couple shakes longer to react. Browns used to be hard (sometimes impossible) to outrun, and they are still scary if you lose your movement advantage, but they are no longer a big threat if you keep your wits about you.

This one is the other way around. A pretty solid single player experience with a clunky multiplayer bolted on. [EDIT] Why is sticking so bad? After about the second night, I'm done sticking until I can make the shears, and at that point, sticking is trivial. Are you sure you are not overdoing the early mining? You only need enough copper and bronze to get you to iron, and once you have that, mining becomes pretty fast, unless you are trying to quarry solid blocks for a mansion or something. I doubt I spend even a whole day mining until I have iron tools. The game strongly encourages rushing to iron. [/EDIT]

Oh, the effect happens in Creative, too? Yeah, I'd say that needn't be. But in Survival and up, underwater construction should be more difficult than surface construction. I don't care how, just that there should be some bragging rights to doing an underwater build.

??? Underwater construction is already far easier than it should be in a pre-industrial world. What am I saying? Construction is already far easier yadda yadda. BTW, welcome to the forum.

Which parts are you finding grindy? About the only part I run into is the ~1000 reeds I need first year. Of course I wouldn't need so many if I weren't such a wanker building 6x6 or even 8x8 apiaries. Used to be a mod that allowed splitting cattail roots. A @Vinter Nacht mod, I think. On the Beach or something like that. His From Golden Combs mod is really good for reusable hives, but IMO, its a little grindy in itself. I don't know that I'd call flax too grindy -- just two plantings is all I ever do. Most of the clayforming is not too bad once you figure out the easiest way to make something, then put between 4 and 8 of them in a circle around you, (that works better than putting them in a line for me) so that you are only changing the tool once for the whole bunch. And it's not like you need more than a couple dozen anyway. The helve hammer takes most of the tedium out of metalworking. If you wanted a floor of polished malachite, yeah, that could get a little grindy. OK, a lot grindy.

We all have our, "Fool me once" story, don't we...

If you set up the server on a second machine, you can get a substantial performance boost. Alternatively you could just learn to resist temptation.

I'm pretty sure cattail roots do not spoil until you cook them. But your issues are exactly the ones I dislike about multiplayer -- berry bushes, crops, stones, trees, cattails, etc. are generated only at mapgen and never again. It's particularly bad on a public server where some players have lost interest in the game and never log on again, yet have claimed all the relocated berry bushes and cattails. The seeds he accumulated are locked up. Any knappable stones are long-since gone, converted to paths and fences and buildings. Even animal spawns (except maybe wolves -- not convinced one way or the other) seem to wait until the prior ones are dead and gone before respawning. One player with rabbit traps seems to prevent rabbit spawns. I've even been in the situation I could not knap the knife to make a pan, nor the axe to gather the wood. Your only choice is to leave the developed world and head off on your own. At which point, why not just play a single-player world? But that's more of a multi-player complaint than a respawn complaint. Though, since I play permadeath, setting a respawn is less than pointless. [EDIT] In case my point wasn't obvious, in permadeath, there is no such thing as 'the holy game play enabling gear'. It's all about learning how not to die. [/EDIT]

Hmmm. Doesn't seem to address the issue that the guy playing the farmer class is going to have to be active anytime the server is running, or the crops will go beyond mature into seed, or rotting in the field, or whatever. Looking forward to seeing how that is addressed.

The sun starts rapidly expanding, and we all die slowly and painfully, being baked to death, and it continues to grow, eventually encompassing all matter in the universe. Game over, player everyone. Oh, and I still had about a half bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. [EDIT] Oh, worst that could happen from having Creative Mode? Guess they'd have stuff you don't want them to have. A stack of magma or something. [/EDIT]

Probably the land cover. I generally play whatever defaults are, of whatever mode, and I don't think I've ever seen a case where there was no land in sight in at least 2 directions.

Tried to follow you, but not sure where this is headed. Are you saying you want to plant three crops in one tile? (Three Sisters). OK, but dirt is cheap. Why would one want to do that? Or Pyrite? A firestarter works after at least one try. Are you suggesting something better? If not, what would be the point? When you probably only use it once per game? Or bone marrow, whatever it does?

Yeah, grizzly/brown bears are much worse. Blacks you can just outrun, like wolves. Browns you have to scrape off through trees or shrubs.

It's a little slow, but, yep, @Julio Ángel Infante Sedano, that's a solid way to deal with it. [EDIT] @LastChime, that looks insane. What mods are you using? [/EDIT]

Don't know anything about 2b2t, let alone almost anything about Minecraft. (It's some kind of a voxel game, right?) But, yeah, avoiding dying should be the point.