Thorfinn

Those mods should not make any difference. Don't be offended, but the trader is offering to buy at least one of each, right? Not only are those in the grid in the right-hand panel, but they are at least quantity 1? And you can't place just one of them into the row of blank spaces at the bottom of that panel?

I thought there was some option to reveal time left in the Block Information (top center, Ctrl -B), but I can't find that in the Settings. Is that discontinued? Or was it maybe a mod? Could it even apply to a beehive becoming harvestable, where there seems to be a significant RNG?

Those are supposed to be forward compatible. I suspect that they are looking for input from you saying whether or not it works. There is no realistic way they can test all machine configurations. I know someone who has it running on a crappy i3. I don't remember which version was at the link when I tested it on an older Win7 install (admittedly, a pretty butch system, even today), but I was pleased to find out not only would it run on Win7, VS performed better on that machine. If I were the developer, I would maintain links to the most recent .NET build that my userbase had been able to confirm worked. So what say you? What are your system specs, and does the .NET7 release of VS work on it?

Yummy! My favorite!

Pretty sure what you are seeing is being "phased" partially into the ladder. Usually happens when you are too close to the ladder you are adding when extending it. Really easy to duplicate with regular ladders. That can also happen when nearby partial blocks nudge you one way or another, too. Move until you are against the wall opposite the ladder and the pain should stop.

Depends. Single player, usually somewhere between 0 and 4 or 5. Multiplayer, maybe a lot more. My daughter like to play with all the friendly collectible animals mods, so that can run into a couple dozen.

Which can be done, but it would seem more confusing to have recipes which ask for 1 l. of water/juice/broth whatever to call for 0.88 quarts(UK) or 1.057 quarts(US). There are mods for at least part of that if you don't mind working with crazy numbers.

One of the traditional trail markers was blazes, where one took a swing at a tree to skin away the bark. It was very clear not only that there was a path marked there, but also when it was laid, and in what direction it was pointed. That would actually work pretty well, IMO. At least it gives a reason to carry an axe in the early game. Software-wise, it would require a few different bark textures for each tree, plus when whomever enters the chunk, his 'puter properly ages the blaze.

Huh. Wiki is not quite right. The box that the flowers have to be in to be counted is 8 blocks north and 8 blocks west of the hive, and 7 blocks south and 7 blocks east of the hive, that is, it is a block 16 on a side. That means a hive can potentially see 256 flowers from a single plane if you hang the hives from a trellis above. Which is convenient, in that with a 4-high trellis (or, heck, just a block hanging in space) you no longer have to fence out coons and bears, nor do you have to dodge around whatever pillars you are using when collecting drops. That means all my earlier testing, which was based on a 7 block radius is not quite right, since only values of the central 4 hives remain the same. All the rest, 32 in total, are non-symmetrical in the apiary. Or more correctly, the axis of symmetry runs on the NW-SE diagonal. Easy to fix, though. Just add an extra row of flowers on the north and west sides if it matters to you. [EDIT] Never mind. No matter what you do, because the block of flowers has diagonal symmetry about the hive, the tiled pattern will also have diagonal symmetry. [/EDIT] But practically speaking, it works out really close because even the worst corner, the northwest one, which was only seeing 100 flowers, swarmed in only a little more than an hour. I don't yet know about honey. I don't think I'll probably bother. It's done when it's done.

I usually use 6xn and harvest alternate rows. The center ones in the Wiki structure were pinging 224, if memory serves. My build from last night, the central ones were pinging 450. Some mechanics I noticed (assuming I can read my chicken scratching) The skep counts the number of flowers in its range one game hour after the skep placed. It appears to report what the Wiki says in terms of swarm time. There is no difference in how the skep populates -- it looks to be strictly based on number of flowers. I don't remember any cases where it was less than large, even out at the margins of the field where they were seeing ~160 flowers. Possibly I wasn't paying enough attention, between collecting reeds and flowers. But placed by itself out in several random natural flowerbeds, you can get poor initial population. At 350 flowers, it was taking 1:10 to swarm. Somewhere between 450 and 500 flowers, (no, I don't know exactly) it will swarm exactly a game hour later. That appears to be the minimum time. At least at 675 flowers, it also took exactly an hour. (Yes, it takes a couple days dedicated just to harvesting flowers to do that.) Very much a case of diminishing returns. The skep will not be able to swarm again for what appears to be a full game day. Maybe more. There may be an RNG involved, or it may be a stronger function of number of skeps in range. But you can reset the timer by transferring the populated skep to your backpack slot and then putting it back, just as you would suspect. Maybe what I should do is reset the counters on symmetrical skeps and see if I can tell whether there's RNG Or maybe I should leave that as an exercise for the reader. Harvestable is a much slower operation, and appears to either have a large degree of RNG involved, or maybe it's that skeps figure in more strongly than 3x, or maybe I just am not understanding my notes. It does not appear to be the strong function of number of flowers it used to be. It's much slower. Not that bad of a problem -- it's still faster than I can harvest reeds or use up the honey. Flowers up to 5 blocks above the skep are counted. Those 6 above are not.

Interesting information. I have not tried much more than a stack of flowers around a wild hive in 1.18, but good to know the distance limit from swarming skep to populated skep is 3. Is that true in the apiary, too? If you use Wiki's layout, once all the skeps around a given skep are populated, there's no point in not harvesting the one in the center, even if it's large, and you still have open skeps, but they are more than 3 away? Or would it make more sense to relocate that skep to somewhere there are empty skeps nearby?

Weird. While I was watching, it entered "7" then posted. I agree that is what drifters aspire to be. They are the things that go bump in the night. My first couple dozen games were either death to wolves, to drifters, or to hunger, shivering in a tiny dugout waiting for daylight so I could get out and try to find something to eat. I *knew* that they would figure out some way to get in. So, yes, they fulfilled that role, and evidently still do. But once they no longer inspire fear, what then? How about when you learn more lore and no longer fear them, but pity them? Give them the ability to open doors, and you quit building with doors. Give them the ability to smash through dirt, you switch to stone or stop leaving places for them to stand outside your house. Maybe build a treehouse, and pull your rope ladder up behind you. Maybe make your entrance some parkour challenge. Teach drifters to fly... At some point, you are left with just stopping building at all, which seems to defeat the purpose of having a voxel-based survival game. (Though, to be fair, that's mostly what I do anyway, until winter approaches.) And worse, all these drifter enhancements have made them way too tough for people new to the game, for whom the moaning itself is quite enough of a threat. I'm not saying to increase loot. I already don't bother with anything but double-headed, and usually not them. Since I see little benefit to translocating to some random place, I see no benefit to farming for temporal gears. So the point to killing drifters has to be something else to make it worthwhile. How about it adds a point or two to the local temporal stability of the X-Y coordinate it died? Maybe some radius effect? Kill enough drifters around your base and eventually, the Rust World is not close enough to this world so no rifts spawn close by?

Hey, just broke my previous record. First hive before 9AM, 1 MAY. Gonna have to build a platform for flowers. Looks to be 9-10 blocks off the ground. [EDIT] Wild Beehive (Medium) Large population 9 flowers (there's a few lilies of the valley on a slope that must be close enough to count.) [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Wow. Second beehive, also medium with large population, 26 nearby flowers, 11:02 AM, 1 MAY. Guess I'll leave the flowers I was planning to harvest... [/EDIT2] [EDIT3] The first is seeing 41 flowers, and swarmed by 6 AM on 3 MAY. The second is seeing 83 flowers, and still has no swarm information. I don't know how it works. Though I did see a night time temperature of 6 degrees on the second one, while I saw a low of 8 on the first. But the terrain between the two is awful, so it takes a good hour to traverse, so I never saw either at its lowest, probably. What did confuse me a bit because I kept hearing buzzing when I didn't think I was close enough was that there was a third hive between the two... [/EDIT3]

Oh, well that's not the issue on early wild bees, then. Last night I had a day 1 find, and it had a large population, so I added flowers until they saw 84, placed an empty skep, then bided my time in the general area with charcoal and clay until day 4. Still no message when I quit and headed to bed.

They don't even do that, though. That's the problem with them. You can get hit with a few rocks, sure, but with a little practice, spears take down hordes at very little risk, even on Wilderness and no armor. They are the things you don't bother wasting time on in storms looking for the double-headed. Even the nightmares aren't worth losing durability on the several of your spears it's going to take. Drifters are just a minigame, and unlike the knapping, clayforming, or panning minigames, they are a pointless minigame. The first two guarantee that you have something to show for playing, the second one a decent chance, but what do you have to show for a nighttime of playing the drifter minigame? Maybe a couple fiber, maybe a temporal gear every couple months. You get far more fiber just exploring with a torch, plus you have seeds and food to show for the time, rather than, more often than not, just down a few spears.

By "reset" do you mean save and exiting and restarting the world?

Oh, OK. I'm mostly local with a little singleplayer to test new ideas. My single player maps rarely exceed about a 10k radius explored (which is not terribly hard -- I can walk and do chores on my machine at max view distance, so that's 1.5k right there), but our local worlds are vastly larger.

I'm not sure what that means. The idea of adding user-defined shaped "tools" is cool, but see below. Sure. But because clayforming (and knapping -- likely a lot of the same code) are world directional (that is, knives all point in the same direction, and, I think, directional molds like axes do, too), anything that is not x-y symmetric is likely to break things. The copy tool is an obvious exception, but I think that's probably just a different routine, not something that creates a arbitrarily shaped "tool" of 8 voxels. It probably just copies the next 8 voxels from one Z to the next. Sometimes I think knapping, clay and smithing is all to make me slow down and enjoy the game, rather than running from one task to the next.

Agree that would be nice. I doubt it would make much of a difference in performance. 10k radius revealed map just takes a lot of time to generate.

How long ago did you buy, and when did you issue a ticket? In the release notes, Tyron mentioned that he had a lot going on at the moment. Does that mean it might take more than a week? Who knows?

That's probably true if you find them too early, too. I take it if the night temp dips too low, it won't do anything that day? So if you don't check early enough on the first day the nighttime temperature was above that minimum value, and you have a stack or more flowers around them, you won't see the message since it would say, "Will swarm in 4 hours"? I'm just guessing, trying to come up with a reason why I would not see any message at all, and then suddenly all three wild hives would swarm the same day.

That's an easy one. Can't happen if you don't have a house. Houses just tie you down, man. Back when I used to build houses before late summer or so, I'd just duck out the back door, run away, and let them despawn. The only drifters that might be worth it are double-headed, and that's only if you really want to activate some translocators. But if you followed your first rule, location, location, location, you already are where you want to be, so what's the point? One of the guys who works for me came up with an ingenious solution inspired by wind turbines, and built on top of a pole that goes clear up into the 100% wind region. Rifts form at surface level. At least he said he's never known a rift to show up there. And I'll give it this -- it's a landmark you just can't miss, and it's got a killer view. And as a bonus, food lasts longer up there. I'm starting to think I had too much fear of apocalyptic rift activity. I used to hole up and do clayforming and knapping, or cooking and preserving food, or smithing and smelting if it was an option, but I've come to accept that it's not nearly as bad as I had imagined. It might take a little longer to find somewhere far enough away from rifts, so you want to get scouting while it's still light out, but sticking is a viable apoc rift night activity, particularly if you are generous in torch placement. I've even been able to dig 4 full stacks of fire bricks (16 stacks of fire clay) before it occurred to me there was no way I was ever going to use them all up. Like you said right off the bat, location, location, location. You can muddle along and do as well as you can with a bad situation, or you can pick up stakes and find somewhere better. Or at least build a secondary camp somewhere that's copper-rich, then come back when you have so much copper it's gonna make you puke. ("I don't wanna puke.") Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. If you really like that location, that's one thing. But it didn't sound like it had much going for it. Agreed. So don't end up without anything to do? If you can't do anything to improve your tech level, you can at least improve your home. Granted, improving the home doesn't really apply to me, but if you are going to have a house and all, you might as well have a nice cobblestone one. You can always upgrade it, or build a full-blown manor house on the hilltop and use this one for your guesthouse. You wouldn't want a crappy-looking guesthouse to drag down the property value of your estate, would you? But, yeah, I can see that if you ended up in those circumstances, with no clay and no flint, you would just want the night to end.

As one who plays permadeath, yeah, location is a big deal. You probably care more about retrieving your stuff on death than I do. I accept that will never happen for me. Thus, my goal is to avoid death in the first place.Which, somewhat paradoxically, means a lot of sprinting through heavily overgrown and even forested areas. That's because you can bob and weave around the bushes far better than wolves or bears can. If you are on flat ground, you are probably toast. If you are in bushes, you can pretty much always give them the slip. Now that crops mature slower in 1.18, you can still live through a start where you don't get your first farm in sometime in May. It's just quite a bit harder. You can probably accomplish it a little easier by making rabbit traps as you head south, so long as you plan ahead and leave before it gets too late. But there's food everywhere. If you are traversing virgin territory, it's not at all difficult to harvest enough wild crops to survive until you get south, particularly if you take a cooking pot and bowl with you. You can probably even survive running east or west. Never tried it, because my goal was always to establish a homestead somewhere south, but the food is there if you choose not to.. I do charcoal any time I don't know what else to do, or while I'm waiting for something or other. Particularly wild bees. You can carry 16 logs in a slot, and eventually be able to produce 15 charcoal or so, or you can put the wood in the ground right off the bat and carry nearly 5 times that. Armor, including shield, is a losing strategy. Work on your evasion skills. The improvised armor is fine, it costs you nothing, but on default settings, I wouldn't bother with anything more until you can do full gambeson. Yes, improvised armor is gone after a couple hits. So focus on not getting hit. Unless you decide to play arctic. Then you kind of need to be able to take a hit from foxes if need be, and you are counting on lucky drops from ruins, anyway. Prospecting pick is your friend. Until you are good at combat, caves are just not worth it. Just look around for the highest surface reading of whatever you need at the moment. Very High is fine. IME, you will likely find something in 3-4 vertical shafts. If not, check somewhere else. Yeah, you won't be able to build ore blasting bombs, but that just means things happen a little slower. IMO, sleeping is never a good idea. Near as I can tell, you gain nothing, not even a slower burn rate on food. If you want to do it for realism reasons, fine, but recognize that winter doesn't really care if you were faithful to realism. I think prioritization is the key. Figure out what it is you need to make it through the winter, and focus on that. You don't have all the lead glass windows you wanted for your house? Fine, so long as you do have a greenhouse that will buy you an extra month or so on the growing season. Once you have enough food to tide you over the winter, knock yourself out.

In case you are having a hard time seeing it...

Don't know what to caption this. "Does a bear sh** ON the woods?" "A lovely view of Bear Butt(e)"? "Close encounters with a bear butt"? What in the heck is he doing up there? On a more serious note, maybe that's where some of the ones I never see are coming from. The first few days, I'm far more interested in what is on the ground than what is in the trees... [EDIT] Reminds me of that Monty Python skit where the sheep are in the trees. [/EDIT]