Thorfinn

Fortunately, if you told just one new person every day from here on out, and he told just one new person, and so on, in a little more than a month, there would be no one on earth who didn't know about this wonderful game.

Materials used -- Is it based on rarity? Color? Do accent colors add, like they would in real life? Well, if the accent goes with the main color. How would we define garish or tacky accent colors? Does a blue tile roof go with a bauxite house? If I double the thickness of walls, doubling the number of blocks, does it double the value? What value would you assign a house made of salt? Does it matter if it's a wet climate or a desert? Shape -- Right. If you look around a high-buck subdivision, there are all kinds of house shapes. How does the algorithm decide which shapes are artistic? Chiseling -- Maybe not the best decision. Not only is it a lot of work, it can add a lot of visual appeal. High craftmanship is big bucks in the real world. But it's hard to objectively define in-game. Furnishings -- Right. How much do they help? Shells? Butterflies? How much furniture? When does it stop adding and start subtracting because it looks like a hoarder lives there? Size -- Based on footprint? Blocks of flooring? Volume of building? Do balconies add? Decks? How much? And as you note, figuring out what comprises a building as opposed to just a room is a bit problematic, particularly when the deck will be outside the house. How about view? Shouldn't it matter whether you are looking at Lake Louise or the tenements across the alley? But how could you algorithmically determine the quality of the view? How about the yard? Bonus for fruit trees or crimson maples? A pond in the back yard? In real estate, they say, Location, location, location. Probably not here though? But is there at least a downgrade for living next to the butcher or tanner or the pig pen? It needs to be fleshed out a lot more or you might as well just generate a random number and call it good. --- EDIT: I'm not trying to discourage you. Fleshing out something like this is very challenging. But it needs to be done before it can be coded.

Depends on what you mean by that. It oxidizes in seconds, forming a very thin protective coating of Al2O3. But unlike the various iron oxides and copper oxides, it does not spall or pit the metal, so it is stabilized at that. [EDIT] The metal is passivated. That's the word I was trying to come up with. [/EDIT]

Sorry. Got nothing more to suggest. Most of the guys who could probably answer this hang out on the Discord. Have you checked there?

Agreed. Don't know to what degree mods like Villagers does this, as by the time I've explored all the content for this release, there's often a new one, so I don't get to check out many mods. If you have ideas for how to algorithmically define "impressive", it wouldn't hurt to ask people creating that mod if they would like your suggestions. For example, how could one tell between artistic chiselwork and just randomly hitting it with a chisel enough times to get a bonus to "impressive"? How would one know whether you used a certain block or blocks for aesthetic purposes, or just to use up something you had sitting in a chest?

Doesn't Windows Defender scan the data that programs are trying to write to the SSD? Or have you set an exception? Yeah, you had said VS was installed on the SSD. It just was not clear whether your user directory is also there. If you didn't change it, likely it is, but I have seen laptops where that was not how it was set up.

If you play with map, crank view distance way up, as high as your machine will handle, and let it mapgen. There's usually plains not far from any starting location. If you don't play with map, head in a random direction (though south is usually a good decision) and you will probably find one by nightfall. Maybe not as large as you like, but then again... On the positive side, with more cliffs and mountains, you are much more likely to spot outcrops of desired stone and material. Some games it's been the only black coal or gold or marble or halite that found. (Of course, once I found it I didn't keep looking elsewhere, so there's that bias.) My experiences fiddling with vanilla settings have been underwhelming. If you just can't get past it, the suggestion @sushieater made is probably the way to go, though I have zero experience with the alternate mapgens.

Hmm. 800 blocks is not very far. To check whether its a throttling issue, turn graphics down to low for a while and see. You can also try pulling view distance down. You have plenty of free space on the drive? Your user directory is on the SSD, too? Your antivirus isn't trying to scan things as they are written? One of my machines is very similar to that, though it is a desktop, and it runs well on High. 1024 view distance, so I think it's probably not that. My laptop is much higher end, and it struggles from time to time, my guess is as the GPU overheats. Never really cared that much, because I prefer to play on my desktop with much bigger monitor.

Is there a difference whether you plant in water or land? Not that it really makes much difference. I'm not going to be harvesting a whole lot of roots until I have an iron knife, just the occasional; lone singletons to make a formation better suited for the scythe. When you say 3 stacks, are you talking about 192 reeds, or are you talking about some scythe-based formation of sets of n by 3 reeds?

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...