Thorfinn

Or any of the equivalent USB input devices? Mine has been sitting unused for the last year or so and when I saw it towards the back of my desk, realized that could be the answer to running out of hotkeys. And it works extraordinarily well. Of course, you have to either move either your mouse hand or your kb hand to use it. I've found using mouse hand is probably better -- easier to find "home keys" when bouncing back and forth, and allows me to, for example, add waypoints or send pre-defined chat messages while moving by pressing only one button. I even found a way to connect it onto a Win7 box (Elgato Stream Deck is Win10+ ONLY) I had been using a gaming mouse, but don't have one on every box I play on, so was kind of a pain -- sometimes having to push a particular mouse button, sometimes using the console command.

No. The water block has to be on the same Z as the farming block.

When I first started, yeah, it was a big deal. I guess I don't mind it anymore, or even give it more than passing acknowledgement. It does not take too long before you look at that before you start building just to make sure you are in a good region. Quite often, you only need to build a short distance away. Either that or you don't bother to live wherever you build, or even to bother building at all until later in the game. Unless it is apocalyptic, you don't really need to shelter in place, and with a little practice, not even then. If it's only a place to stash the stuff you want to keep, it doesn't really matter. But you be you. If you are more of a builder type than survival type, just turn that off in the game setup until you are ready for that, if ever.

I fiddled with Buzzwords for a while, thinking it would help me figure out how to better find bees. But Buzzwords has a range of only 10 blocks, and audio a range of about 40, but practically speaking, about 30. Buzzwords also has a few second delay before it begins, so it's easy to move in a straight line through that 21 block distance without triggering any indication. By the time you are in range for Buzzwords to work at all, the audio buzz cannot be missed. Anyways, Buzzwords will detect if you are in any of 441 blocks centered on the hive, while audio is easily in the range of any of 3721 blocks, potentially as many as 6561 blocks. So somewhere between 9 and 16 times as effective. Plus all that stopping to wait a few beats for the effect to register is dangerous, maybe the most dangerous act in the game, since bears will sneak up on you in the meantime. Relying on Buzzwords is usually going to fail, IME. I was toying with loading up Block Overlay, but, realistically, since the sound fades to essentially nil after about 40 blocks, I doubt I will be able to improve much on the 30 or so block distance I can pretty easily hear over the other environment sounds and my footsteps. [EDIT] Thinking about the asymmetry of beehives in seeing flowers made me start a new game and seek a hive, which came up before 11AM. Anyway, it, too is asymmetrical. You get audio 40 blocks south of the hive, but only 30 blocks north. It's also 40 east, but only 33 west. But there were rifts and water and caves with drifters and an F5 tornado going on, so I might not have pinned it down exactly. Plus, it was more or less flat ground, only a few Z difference, but there was a huge difference in terms of intervening foliage, in case that makes any difference. If anyone thinks its worth bothering with, figuring that out would be a whole lot easier in creative. Just pop down a hive at origin and see. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] I'm not saying you are wrong. Just that I used to be very, very wrong about the exact same thing. Pigs and the right kind of forest has never failed me since I realized there was some kind of correlation there. [/EDIT2]

I used to think that, that there simply were no bees. But as I've fired up old worlds, the bees are there; I just was not very good at finding them. Worlds I would swear had no bees turned out to have them with usually no more than a day or two search with the music and weather off, and the environmental turned all the way up. Once I find pigs and forest floor, the bees are there; I was just mistaking things like water and wind in the trees with buzzing. There are areas where bees do not spawn, sure, just like there are places where copper does not spawn. But why would one choose to settle there? I've never failed to find a good spot with copper out the wazoo and a few bees marked on the map within 2-3 days.

Maybe it does. I just don't know where to find that, evidently. It doesn't say it in the block info at the top of the screen. It just says "Tombstone" or something like that. Maybe I have to collect it and put it in my inventory to look it up in the handbook? Yeah, I checked out the Better Ruins Loot Nerf mod last night. It adjusts things in chests, but all the placed items are still there, free for the taking. Land claim has always seemed to me to be a workaround to make your world less subject to jerks, but maybe that's what the Better Ruins needs. At least a config for it. It's used for traders, so why not? At least it gets rid of day 1 lanterns and iron doors (that you don't really need until Steel, but still...) and chests and other things of that type that would otherwise require some effort and fleshing out the tech tree to have. Even though it's pretty, I have to choose between Better Ruins and view distance above about 512. I can't have both. 1024 is right out. Probably busy generating so many ruins in that area.

Thanks! I think I did figure out what he was talking about, though. It was using the /pause command from Single Player Handbook Pause mod, which no longer works. That evidently was not a true pause either, but it did stop time, prevent hunger, and creatures stopped moving about, but curiously did not prevent one from interacting with the world. The background processes apparently ran to completion. I don't have any personal knowledge of it, but I'm halfways tempted to download it and add it to 1.16 and see what it did.

Fair. I misunderstood. I was basing it on how it's done in Useful Stuff, which I think is a mid-Copper Age "automation", so potentially as early as mid to late May. The balance there is that you get only one potential item per block of sand/gravel. If you are using windmills, how does that help with early candles? Aren't you awash in beeswax by the time you can make a couple sets of sails? Unless I get insanely lucky with terra preta or saltpeter, the quickest I can get a windmill is late June or even early July.

My great nephew is running VS on an i3 (don't ask ) and I was helping him update to 1.18.6. It used to be that whatever he used for pause (maybe just sitting on the "choose your character" screen -- I didn't quite understand what he was talking about) would let the game chug along and do the mapgen. He would come back an hour later after his disk drive had calmed down, and could play just fine, once the world had been generated. But it appears that does not run in the pause anymore, nor does it appear mapgen will run in the background with the handbook pause. Is there a way to get that back apart from running it as a server and using a throwaway character who just nerdpoles to generate the world and dies to the wolves and bears who surround his nerdpole by the time it is done? Which is suboptimal, as just sitting there means a couple days closer to winter...

Yeah, they are pretty, but I have a "look but don't touch" when I play in servers with that mod installed. While you can still make a day 1 bucket, at least making wooden trunks on day 1 is no longer possible. I think. I've not found any complete anvils yet. Ingots, yes, hammers, yes, but no functional anvils. Well, until someone decides to mod in a nails and strips drop on rabbits or chickens carrying anvils or something. Fortunately, you can set books and scrolls down right next to the partially collapsed trunk where you found them, so you can get the Better Ruins lore without preventing others on the server from also reading the added lore. Thing is, even with their new companion mod, which changes the loot, it does not appear to affect the placed loot. So a fairly small hut in the middle of nowhere can still have fancy beds, storage vessels, torch holders, lead glass windows, advanced tools in tool racks, iron doors, etc. But that's why I wondered whether tombstones were part of Better Ruins, even though the guys who are running the server insist it's just a part of vanilla I've not yet encountered. There was just so much loot! Is there a way to get more detailed information from the hover? Specifically, which mod it's from? Seems to me I used to be able to see that something was from Primitive Survival or Expanded Foods or whatnot, but maybe that was through Survival Categories...

I'm wondering if it's part of the Better Ruins mod. I'm pretty sure one of the ruins I ran into was from that.

Or do they belong to some mod? Two of the guys who work for me swear it's now a vanilla thing, but I can't hardly believe it. The rest of the game seems to be hard-core avoidance of skipping ages, with the exception of some tin-bronze tools in cracked vessels here and there. I was running around in their world, stumbled across a grave, and it held a complete, undamaged set of copper lammelar, plus a bronze falx of some kind. Several other items that I could probably sell for decent scratch. That just seems an absurd day 1 find based on the rest of the game's balance. So vanilla or mod? I was thinking there was some way I used to be able to see the mod from the Block Info, but maybe that was from a mod, too. Do you know an easy way I can tell which mods a given block/item is from?

I can't speak for whether or not it's the intention, but the game can be pretty brutal to those who set down roots right away at or near spawn, for the reasons @Streetwind explains. On the other hand, living at least your first few days as a nomadic forager is almost trivial at default settings. Unless you started in a massive gravel pit or sand box, it's pretty easy to have a couple full stacks of berries by sunset of the first day. And that's including sprinting everywhere, scarfing down the small stacks of berries (white currants and blueberries, I'm looking at you), turnips and flax grain and making sure you are always slightly damaged so the healing gives you a higher burn rate of food. And now that crops take significantly longer to grow, the effect, if not the intent, is to further discourage an early shift to sedentary neolithic farming. To encourage you to enjoy the paleolithic for a bit. Yes, you should probably get the seeds you find planted ASAP, but there's no reason you have to live there. The flax isn't going to be ready until the end of June. Just come back later to harvest, and take the seeds back to wherever you did decide to call home. Basically, it's a whole lot easier if you each play the early game (at least the first day or two) as if you were in singleplayer so you are not foraging the same ground. You may all be ready to start building a common settlement by the end of the month, but that's not a given.

That depends on what you mean by "lag spikes", @Moon_Dew. If your RAM is low, and you are trying to render a lot of blocks, it will be swapping to disk constantly. Is that what you are seeing? You can try lowering the view distance, but if the blocks it needs to render are fairly common, that's not going to help much. If your hard drive space is low, that throws a different kind of "lag spike". If your hard drive simply cannot keep up loading map blocks, or your CPU can't keep up mapgenning new blocks, yet more kinds of "lag spikes." For starters, what happens with a new, completely vanilla game? Next, go back and create a new megamod game with a lower quality preset. If you set it to low, then move the Max FPS slider up, do you see the framerate numbers going up? Do controls and movement seem good, or do they seem a little "hinky"? If that's good, try loading your existing megamod game. Then start looking at log files.What kind of ticks are you seeing listed in server-main.txt? For example, on loading with a gazillion mods, it's not unusual to see something like, [Warning] Server overloaded. A tick took 2746ms to complete. But you should not see a 3 second lag or anything remotely like that any other time. Say you see some of the greatest lag ticks are taking 700ms, and then they drop off to the 400ms range. I'd set /debug logticks 600 play for a bit, open server-main.txt and see if you can figure out what's going on with the worst offenders first, then work your way through lower numbers. Though, like @l33tmaan says, I doubt you will find any particular mod doing it. It's probably just going to turn out that you don't have a beefy enough machine for what you are asking of it, or your machine setup is the bottleneck. Do you have RAM sucked up by browsers or other stuff running? Are you certain your virus scanner or malware detector isn't the cause? Etc. Way too many possibilities once we get to that level. [EDIT] Incidentally, I doubt you are going to be able to get acceptable performance with a highly modded game with only 12 GB RAM. And anyone who is running a heavily modded game on a hard drive, not an SSD, is going to be beating his head against a wall. True, there are some high end hard drives with massive amounts of cache that might give acceptable performance, but if you are going to be spending that kind of money, you might as well buy a SSD and a lower performance hard drive and reserve the SSD for things that need the speed. [/EDIT]

Game balance is probably why it's not in the game -- it would be far too easy to just set up a couple dozen sluices, fill the loading hoppers, empty the receiving hoppers and just hole up and let things run until you have enough tin/copper/gold/arrowheads/whatever, not bothering with the game itself. Better yet, do so on a server so you don't even get hungry while doing so. And particularly if you add mods that let you pan other materials or change the drops of existing pannables. Panning is supposed to be tedious to prevent people from setting up AFK loot farms. Sure, you can kind of do that with windmills, but they are a substantial time and materials investment, and only process materials far more scarce than sand.

To be fair, I doubt that is @Big Shasta's fault.

BLUF: Reduce your view distance. Check other FPS hogs and see which you can live without. Kind of the nature of the beast. If you are a hard-core explorer using a large view distance, you can end up with default Survival worlds a gig or larger in the first month. Singleplayer. It takes a decent SSD to deal with that kind of load. If that's limiting you, and you can't spring for a better SSD, you can cut view distance back to restore some snappiness. Another possibility is RAM. If mods create lots of blocks, those have to be loaded somewhere to be rendered. And, of course, each different type of chiseled block has to be loaded somewhere in order to be rendered, too. The less RAM, the more things need to get swapped out. It's eye-opening to review real-time graphs of SSD use and see how mods and playstyle affect the amount of swapping. Translocators can also be hogs if you are being moved to a different biome and it has to swap out all the snow and larch for desert or jungle or savannah. So long as you are playing default, where translocators are all underground, the system has time to swap those out and it's not as obvious. But with mods that have above-ground translocators, the system may have to swap pretty much every block in your entire view distance all at once. That lag will be noticeable on pretty much any system, sometimes revealing the cavern structure of the region you are bouncing to. Even if you are sparing with chiseling, there are mods which are not which will tax your system, particularly with high view distances. While a one-off chiseled block in a chunk you can't view may not take any RAM, if that block is anywhere in your field of view, it will. Sprinting can also cause problems as it makes the rendering work harder, plus, it may be running mapgen at the same time. It takes a pretty good system to deal with sprinting with view distances of 768, or even 512. With some systems, you might have to drop below 256. And check on graphics settings. They helpfully tell you which are the major hogs. Figure out which are essential to your desired game experience, and which are nice to have.

Fair. That's how I figured it worked. Should be able to lock it down tight enough by only granting the vs directory to the user the server is running under. Everything else on your box is off limits to him. A moderator is mostly dealing with booting griefers, maybe removing a rift if some n00b is having problems with one just outside his Chateau de Terre or things of that nature. He doesn't really need to be able to do block id remapping or query block ids or run a stacktrace, like a real admin might. Once VS is out of early access, it would not surprise me if that is incorporated. But for the moment, if you don't think you can trust the people you trust, you have the tools to fix it.

Flax. Needed for windmills, armor, linen sacks, etc.

True. There used to be a crops mod or 6. I seem to remember potato bread, too. On the other hand, if you are going for realism, they are primarily a K crop, so they would just be left right where they are, like the unloved carrot.

But "administrate the server" just means moderator, right? You are not talking administrating the physical box or even the OS, but rather just this instance of VirtualstoryServer, right? Admittedly, I'm not a Unix guy, so I don't know what that word entails in your system. In Windows, Admin is a special, near-root level access. No user (including Admin) and very few processes would have unrestricted root level access in any reasonably designed system. And VS cannot grant you system privileges greater than whatever your process is logged in as. On a VS-Admin login (which has r/w permissions to only the VS directory, the mods directory (likely a subdirectory of VS) and wherever the SQL is (again, for ease, likely within the VS directory)) the OS itself would prevent more than corruption of the world and deletion of game files. I do agree, though, that I would not grant anyone else Admin until I was absolutely sure you couldn't do some buffer overflow trick or pull a Bobby Tables and do something you should not be able to in a properly designed system. It's not like Moderators really need to be updating mods regularly anyway. Those can wait until the superuser is on.

Incidentally, just noticed that in the new version, flowers are only detected Z+5 to Z-5 from the hive. I'm pretty sure it used to be +/-7, or possibly 8 for one of them, again to get a s=16 cube. But that's why some of the wild hives high in the tree see no flowers.

Why not just limit who you give admin access to? Or are you getting at that there should be a separate Moderator class with a limited subset of admin privileges? I'm pretty sure you can do that through /role and /player. At least in a different voxel game (no, not THAT voxel game) that was exactly how it was done. By default, there were only Admin and Player classes. Any other classes you wanted were defined at the console, or, ideally, in the config.

Check the Multiplayer forum. I have no idea why a server intended to remain private wouldn't use the /serverconfig password and /serverconfig advertise commands, though. Pretty rude, IMO.

18.6 .net7 release still has the same crash-on-exit error. Performance on ultra-high is a tad less -- average 53, minimum 48. If I'm sprinting all the time (and, more or less, I am) it feels a just little hinky. Stand still and in a dozen seconds or so everything smooths out. But on High, it's a bit better than 1.17. Almost a rock steady 80.