Thorfinn

So this is or is not compatible with the latest stable, 1.18.7?

Might be because of remapping, then. I placed water not 10 minutes ago. [EDIT] Don't ask me which key it is. Instead of filling the hole or ditch, I place the bucket probably 90% of the time. I cannot for the life of me remember how to do that. Even going to fill a hole 2 blocks away, I'm more likely than not to set the silly bucket down. [/EDIT]

You can also use borax and I think alum for leather, too. Far and away, on those weird situations where I can't find limestone or chalk, so long as you have ample shoreline, it's not that hard to collect 25 shells, enough for a full barrel. Carry the quern with you because you won't find shells that stack.

Yes, but you need boards, so it's a copper age thing. Alternatively, I think there are a couple mods that let you get boards before copper. Better than Heresy and Primitive Tools come to mind. I'm sure there are more. Oh, and if you use the Better Ruins mod, there are boards loose in many of the ruins.

Pick up 3 basic stones (anything but flint, I think), combine with clay, you have 2 slabs. Alternatively 8 stones plus clay makes 2 full cobblestone blocks. Or 7 plus clay makes stairs. No pick necessary. That's usually how I end up with my first cellar.

Awesome. The new 18.7 release seems to have fixed that crash on exit problem. Thanks! Ultra High is running about the same -- mid 50s but now with a lag spike of 25 frames every second or so. Take off god rays and the spike goes away.

We do server files so don't need to do this, but my understanding of it is that you would give yourself admin privs using /op then add mods using /moddb install You will probably want to read up on things using help, e.g., /help moddb install

Sure but doesn't that turn out the same way? Some new player hops into a server, exchanges handbooks with one of the OG, and now has a more or less fully completed handbook? Give me an example to help me understand your idea. How would the system you envision make it easier for you to have figured out how to make a cooking pot? You have clay. Now what? Sometimes I'm a little dense. Are you basically saying the game needs a better tutorial? I have no idea what that is. I take it minecraft has a recipe book?

Progressive mode is pretty hard to do well. Particularly if it's tied to RNG events, like generating a particular source of information (scroll, book, journal, whatever) in a chest somewhere in a ruin, as there is no guarantee there will be a surface connection to that ruin. And if you are allowed to bypass that exploration by joining a multiplayer server and filling out the handbook by talking with someone who has the entire book filled, you reward not for playing the game, but simply for having the right friends. Alternatively, you could allow the player to craft things he doesn't have the recipe for, and then add it, like My Time at Portia does with recipes, but then you just reward those who play with the wiki open. Progressive mode works ok for set maps, and for things like lore which are interesting but not limiting to gameplay, but otherwise you end up having to calibrate the rate of filling out the handbook to the lower end of player skill. Which bores to tears those who are a bit more advanced.

Does that still work? I thought under the new spawning rules for storms, it wouldn't. I'm not quite picturing it from your description. Are you using vertical slabs then? Aligned with the outside edge of your shelter? Or is the narrow gap towards you, not towards the drifters? How do you butcher the ones that start fighting each other and don't die where you can reach them? Or am I not getting the picture?

Interesting. That's more or less how I catch livestock, but with blocks in the corners and without the fence. They happily jump down 2 blocks to get to food. The castle design looks remarkably similar to a temporal storm shelter I was using back in 1.14 or so. In the corners, do you use slabs stuck to the undersides of the second row of blocks so you can harvest underneath by sitting down? Pit kilns in the outer corners, 'cuz who doesn't love the smell of napalm in the morning?

Could be done, but likely means if you miss your spring planting window, it's going to be a very lean winter. As is, the game is very forgiving.

Oh, I hadn't thought about that as a source. Does it do better than berries, 25%? Is there anything that does better than berries, or are they all the same?

Agreed, but largely because once you have your gambeson and enough linen for a couple fully upgraded windmills, there's little point to ever planting more than a half dozen flax at a time ever again, just enough for a few bandages and repair of your clothes, and you need maybe a couple dozen blocks to supply all your food. That's one of the reasons I'm losing interest by fall -- I'm already just letting TP go fallow because why not, and ignoring any more TP I happen across while exploring. Incidentally got to thinking about optimization, and when the next start had a few coal bits not far from spawn, and a few more in a cracked vessel, it allowed me to be pouring my pick on day 1. The saw was ready the afternoon of day 2. Involved burning off everything to make it easier to see loose copper on the ground. Still wasn't until late afternoon of day 4 that I had 64 rot ready to seal up. Largely because of the wildfire, I was able to see a whole lot more terra preta -- slightly more than 1.5 stacks. And also because the fire had burned up most of the wild crops, it was also more TP than I had seeds for. It was a wildly different experience -- my first linen sack wasn't until day 5. But again, so what? I totally gimped what was probably a pretty decent starting location in exchange for a late summer "windfall" of 2 blocks of high fertility soil that I likely wouldn't even need. @ArtiKs I'll have to give that a look see. It leaves TP where it is, but with vanilla HF stats, and lets you craft potting soil or whatever they decided to call it that has the stats of vanilla TP?

Unless you are playing for more than one year, I doubt you can produce enough to bother with. Or I can't. Let's say saw by 1 JUN, and you have 64 rot waiting. Both are quite possible. I just finished speedrunning the anvil, and had the saw on 7 MAY, and 93 rot ready to go. The compost is not ready until, say, 3 SEP. (Yes, in this case, it would be 1 SEP, I think, but that was some really lucky copper deposits, plus blue clay and peat right next to each other, plus a dozen pieces of brown coal. I also did nothing other than pursue these goals except for a single hand basket until I had located the large surface copper.) And after all that, you end up with just 2 blocks of high fertility soil. Maybe another couple over the next few days, depending on how many berries in your vicinity. (So far as I know, that's all that rots fast enough to bother with on year 1.) It just seems to me you are much better off just planting in medium fertility and whatever TP you find rather than waste a fair amount of time for an absolutely trivial gain. Am I missing something, or is it really that bad?

Huh. I guess it was 1.16 when I last cheesed temporal storms. Suppose you could still do it, but you would have to use a 2-high wall with a step up from the outside? I'm absolutely certain I've seen chickens get out over a fence. They were in a 2-deep pit with a fence around the top. They got on top of one another to get up to the fence, then again to get over the single-high fence. The second level of fences seemed to fix it. Incidentally, am I overly worried about troughs, too? Used to be things could stand on troughs and get out, but that won't work now?

@Owktree, did you check to see if they can get over that with snow, like animals can? And I've definitely had chickens escape a single fence when they end up climbing on top of each other. Doesn't happen with bears, apparently? @Ewil, thanks, headed to check that out now.

If you are willing to use a mod to do that, I recommend Apache's Accessibility Tweaks. Each sound in the game can be turned up or down. There may be some settings that could be a little "cheaty", particularly the light level, but if you think some are, just don't use those.

Unlike real bears, at least in the game, your garden vegetables are safe. I thought maybe you were headed in a different direction -- that bears in the game are not relentless murder machines. Early on, yeah they were a little discouraging, but before too long, you figure out their strengths and weakness and don't play to the former. Yeah, my animal pens look like something out of Jurassic Park but bears are supposed to be good at climbing. I don't even know how aggressive bears are -- a lot of the times I "encounter" them, they are sleeping, or sitting around looking off into the distance, and I either decide I could use the hide and the fat, or we just go our separate ways. But the lore of the game has things about animals acting unusually aggressive. Or it used to. I assume that's still there, though TBH, I usually skip lore as soon as I realize I've read that one before. I've never figured out how good bears are at climbing, but a 3-high fence has never let me down yet. Put your individual pens a couple spaces inside that and Bob's your uncle. It could be that polar bears can get over three if you have snow on the ground. Don't know. But then I'd just either go with 4 high, or maybe some overhang, or maybe even try polished stone. I'm pretty sure there must be some way to contain them -- many have talked about their menageries, and how 1,18's despawn after 14 days ruined their zoos.

Why would one need to dry dehydrated berries? I thought you dried them in an oven. Has that changed in one of the newer versions?

Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I thought it was always low now. Guess I'll have to start checking. And, yeah, plant early, plant often. Even on medium fert, you won't be bringing in flax until late July. If you don't have medium fert or better by then, take your seeds and, like the plover or the house marten, seek warmer climes in winter. You can grip it by the husk. Couple games ago, I had extraordinarily bad luck and didn't find medium fert in 5 full days of sprinting in more or less one direction, probably somewhere 15,000-20,000 blocks south of spawn. I'll go a couple days just accumulating seeds, but on the third day, I'll plant them all on any soil near an obvious landmark that I can find, counting on finding more to put on better soil later.

I have not figured out the rule on when the wild hive recalculates swarming when you place more flowers. Like @Streetwind says, I'm not sure it always does recalculate. In the current game, I placed more than 2 full stacks of flowers in range of one that said it had 20-some originally, and then built a couple fairly small charcoal pits (3x3x2 and 3x3x3) and the wild hive still had no message, but it had registered all the flowers. Built a pretty large (6x6x4) charcoal pit, figuring the skep would be populated by the time I was done. Nope. But at least it gave me the message it would be less than a day. May 6th, it finally popped. I had time to collect all the charcoal pits I had built, though I left several stacks in firepits for later retrieval because I could not carry that many stacks of charcoal, only having 2 linen sacks and one hand basket at the time.

Yeah, except that Ctrl-A means run left, which sends you off a cliff. It does me, anyway.

That's weird, all right. Were you watering them or just counting on your irrigation ditches to supply everything? Reason I ask is that the row that is at ~50% moisture level absolutely should have been slower than the row with ~75%. Or did you just wait for both to be mature, instead of harvesting it as it came in? Pretty good luck finding terra preta, though. Three full stacks. If I find a single stack in a game, I feel pretty good about it. My current game is June 2, and I have found a total of 11 blocks from 2 different deposits. (Yes, usually it's half or 3/4 of a stack per deposit, but not in this game...)

Don't get me wrong, @dizzychosen, its not that it's a bad idea. The number of seconds and burn temperature could be tweaked until it does make sense. It's more realistic if every time you relight a firepit or forge, that you add at least some kindling. It's pretty hard to light coal with just a torch. My grandfather used to start a fairly small wood fire (a bit above kindling level -- sticks maybe the thickness of an adult thumb) before adding coal to his forge. It's just a level of complexity I'm not sure adds enough interest to the game to be worth the hassle with every fire.