Thorfinn

Oh, don't misunderstand. You did a great job. I was just trying to reconcile the minimap to the main screen, and it took me a while to realize that that whole center of the minimap is below your field of view. In whatever direction you face, if you look straight to the horizon, only the outer quarter or so of the minimap is in your FOV. For example, in your last picture, you see a finger lake sticking up just off the bottom of your main screen, right above the 4th backpack slot. You only see like 3 voxels of that lake on the very top of your minimap. The tall spindly mountains behind that are several minimaps away. Similarly in that first of 2 screenshots, the white sandy beach partially obscured by that pine tree just above your first 3 backpack slots is that sandy beach clear up on the very top center of your minimap. I was just amazed at how much that perspective shows so little of what is on your main screen on the minimap.

Are you talking 1.18.1 or 1.18.2.rc-2? My comments have been based on the former. I'm planning on looking at the latter tomorrow or early next week. Do you think there will be a difference between Wilderness (my standard) and Survival? If you would prefer Survival just in case there's a difference, I'd do so.

Fair. I'm just not sure that there's a logical consistency that a shirt has the same amount of linen as a set of 4 sails.

Wouldn't edit for some reason. Strictly speaking, you don't have to put your mapgen mod as a dependency. Just put it as very early in the alphabetical filename order. The first pass through includes all files which have no dependencies. The second pass through is all the mods which now have all the dependencies satisfied. Though I did not test it, I'm guessing it would continue that process until all mods had been included, that is, the third tranche would be the mods which had the last of their dependencies satisfied in the second tranche, and so on.

No expert here, but playing around with dependencies, and looking at the logs to see how it did mod order... Looks like it loads the dependencies first, in alphabetical order, and mods which have those dependencies alphabetically at the end. So, if you want a mod to load early, put that mod as a dependency to another mod, and give it the earliest possible filename. "aaaaaaaamymod" would load before anything out there, at least that I've found. Similarly, if you wanted to make sure your change was the one that made it into the game, like changing the recipe for something, calling your mod, "zzzzzzzzmymod", and making it depend on "aaaaaaaamymod" should push it to the end of the load order.

Oh, man! I completely forgot about StepUp. I'll have to go get that again. Thanks for looking into that, @The_Cheeki Nice information. That is a weird perspective. I don't play creative, and don't nerdpole that high, so it took me a bit to realize the lake with catmint on the shore in the foreground (near the gear) in your first screenshot there is halfway to the corner of your minimap. Wow. The minimap is basically useless in creative, isn't it?

Agreed. If somehow you have more than enough ladders and fences already, sticks and boards are useful for cooking. You can save a lot of time that would have been spent chopping trees or digging peat by burning up kindling in your firepit.

It's certainly been nerfed since 1.17. Used to be it was pretty easy to have a working mill plus full gambeson by mid June. In 1.18, that's pushed off until at least mid July or early August. In any case, you can still have multiple fully-upgraded mills running before snow flies, if you choose. Even with the increased rate of hunger in Wilderness, it's easy to put up much more than you will eat over the winter by the middle of summer. Without moving a drop of water, just building out into the lakes. I thought so too, but I never got it to work, and quit trying. Wasn't important enough to me. I just opted to play the game on its terms, rather than mine. We know from history that with the medieval crop yields, maintaining (and replacing as necessary) standard clothing took around a 1/4 acre, or about 1/8 hectare, i.e., about a 30x40 field in VS. I'm definitely not growing that much my first year. A couple hundred blocks, sure, 1200, no. And a set of sails is, what, 10x the amount of linen as a set of clothes? If so would require somewhere on the order of a 100x100 field. If consistency in logic is important, then a mill should be a decade long project. Definitely more realistic, but more fun? I'm not seeing it. [EDIT] Thing is there are at least two different games being played here. If one is playing for the building part of the game, you need to have food un-naturally productive, as you don't have the time for foraging, hunting and farming that someone playing the survival part of the game has. Currently, it's heavily balanced in favor of building. The reason people lived in hovels was not because they preferred that, but because after seeing to collecting and storing food, there was not enough time left to build anything fancy. [/EDIT]

I think it would be best if you had to build the structures -- market stalls, inns, etc., to some particular standard, then traders are attracted to show up in person, without their wagons. Otherwise you have to figure out reasonable-looking multi block movable entities. If you don't regularly trade with a particular trader, he leaves, opening the space for someone else.

I've played on a server with this mod. Essentially, they only chase you if they are hungry. I seem to recall if you run into them, they bite. I don't remember if they give chase then. That server has been updated to 1.18 something, and I assume it still works. While looking for that mod, I also saw this one that sounds a little more nerfed. There are also a couple of threads on making wildlife less threatening. One a few days back was talking about bears. Same thing, just edit the wolf .JSONs instead of the bear ones.

I hear you @Arith though I don't usually encounter that. So far all but one game I've started in 1.18 has had a large, open area (albeit possibly with enough trees that may well spawn wolves sometime) that I find before noon of day 1, and that's just heading away from spawn point in whatever direction the initial temperature demands, and following the easiest path. At a guess, probably 600 or 800 from spawn, maybe a bit more. Now granted, they aren't exactly flat, maybe a one block drop per 4-10 horizontal. Or are you looking for something with less grade than that? Those still exist, but will probably need a lot more exploration. Since you are playing with the map, take advantage of it. Right at the beginning of the game, type M H to open the map and (handbook to get the pause.) Click on the 3 lines in the upper corner of the handbook to move it off to the side and look at that map. Zoom in on anything that catches your attention and see if you can make sense of it, and back out to get the bigger picture. As you learn more, you will know what else you want to look for, but for the moment, you are looking for level ground, like the small patch shown on the minimap of @imperialwaltz's first screenshot just west of where he is. His second screenshot has a fairly large flat spot just southwest of him. Will either of those open into a larger area? Maybe. The map will show more, but once you get there, check your map again. Often that reveals better stuff to look at. Move to wherever you want to investigate. (Hint: If you right-click on the map, you can set a waypoint. Select "Pinned" if it is a ways away from you, and it will show up right at the margin of your minimap to show you which direction you need to go.) Repeat M H as often as you need to. Learn to read the terrain on the map so you can plan a good route to get where you want. Sorry if all this sounds obvious. It's just the stuff I wish I had known my first few days with the game.

Sorry. Missed this. I already know one reason why. He doesn't put as much weight on the universality of mods that Tyron does. Or at least Tyron's roadmap does. On Planet Crafter forum at GOG, he just said something like, "Sorry, I don't make the rules. If it is that important to you, just buy a copy from both GOG and Steam." Which sounds eerily like what you just said.

Mayhaps rather than going off half-cocked, take a look at Tyron's roadmap? Most of your objections are answered there. I get that maybe that's not your vision, but all you get to do is persuade Tyron that should not be his roadmap. Convince him that he should be following your vision rather than his. Though I suspect this will fall on deaf ears, pay close attention to his vision for mod support, which is one of the primary reasons I chose to give VS a whirl. [EDIT] See, though you don't like it, his vision is NOT to lock mods to the game away unless you buy from a specific vendor. His vision is to build the VS community, not to fragment it. Like it or not, since mods have a significant role in his vision for the game, that HAS to be part of the argument, even though it means your argument is a non-starter that you would rather not be forced to defend. [/EDIT] Re: DF reviews, I know most were positive and then some. Some for no good reason, but many were obviously long-time players, whose recommendation was simply that it was more accessible with a GUI. True, but doesn't VS already have one of those? Built-in mouse support, industry-standard WASD movement, remappable hotkeys if you don't like the defaults, even going above and beyond with built-in macros? So their reviews are basically saying that they are happy that DF now has what VS has long had?

Right. No idea where you got the idea I was saying anything else. There exist two parallel mod systems for any games that want mod support outside Steam. Why would any sane developer want to put the effort into maintaining two different systems? I thought you said development was slow enough already. Personally, I don't mind the "glacial" progress. I generally have not taken in everything the game itself has to offer by the time the next release comes out, and certainly not all the variants on the theme that are available through mods. Mods which are not locked away depending on where you buy the game from, I'd add. Good Lord, dude. Look at what's happened to Dwarf Fortress. The Steam version is sufficiently different that there are different versions of DFHack. The reviews are pathetic. Even a review with the single word "Dorf" was helpful to someone, which speaks volumes. Look through the negative comments and reviews. They are exactly what @Rhyagellecharacterizes them as. And what in exchange? Four minor revisions in the last 6 months, some of which have no more content than a single release candidate bugfix here. VS is doing considerably better than that. You know what would really suck about offering VS on Steam? I'd be afraid that many of the good modders would spend all their time on the Steam version and leave all of us who support Anego directly swinging in the breeze. They would be constantly satisfying the whiners on Steam and wouldn't have any time left over. Kind of like what is happening with DF. Or look at Planet Crafter. The dev said the game would be progressing much faster if he didn't have to support two versions -- the Steam version and the one that everyone else uses. How about instead of just claiming you make rational, factual arguments, you look at some actual facts?

Did you bother to read what I said? Let's take an arbitrary game that is out of development, has mods on Steam but not on Nexus. Just happened 2 weeks ago with Staxel. My niece wanted to play a particular mod, but since her mom bought it on GOG, Steam's official answer was, "You have to buy it on Steam." Hardly the only case. Stardew Valley is exactly the same. If I do not buy on Steam, forget it. My Time at Portia, same. Preposterous? "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." [EDIT] Seriously, dude, your entire demeanor, your answer to everyone, just validates the impression people have described that they have of Steam-atics. VS is not developing as fast or in the direction you prefer? How did that differ from what others just finished saying about those who hype Steam? Or didn't you bother to read what they posted, either? [/EDIT]

I think it's probably a balance issue. Farming used to be gated behind a copper hoe, because, let's face it, stone age farming is really OP. I don't find it that big of a deal, honestly. I just set one of my first "bases" near a shoreline and place medium fertility soil such that it replaces the top layer of a lake. (Obviously packed soil below that in Wilderness.) No moving water about. If for whatever reason you cannot find a large enough body of water to build a farm ON, it's pretty easy to find somewhere you can dig irrigation ditches onto land from the shore, all the way around the "pond". By the time you outgrow that, you'll should have plenty of copper.

It's actually pretty easy to be a rancher. You just build a farmhouse out near wherever you caught your animals. Pigs do just fine left by their lonesome, as long as you build a pen with enough troughs. Sheep you need to have a little more active hand in milking, so live in that house until you build up your stock of cheese sufficiently. Bring along some forging and cooking ingredients and whatever else there for the time being. Once you are cheesed up, then you can move back to your city house with an inventory full of sealed crocks and whatever else trips your trigger.

This. If you are playing with map, have some key near at hand set to a macro to mark your map with whatever you find interesting. One game quite a while ago, I stumbled across tin when running in an early storm, and I did not mark it, and never did find it again. It was probably only 500 from my house or so, and I thought I would recognize the landmarks later, but no...

Here's another possibility I tried an hour ago. It's only been through one medium storm so far, so take that for what it's worth. It's also low ceiling, at 2 high. But it was a 16x16 space, so pretty good area. Anyway, I filled every floor tile with either something to knap or something to clayform. I went through the storm, replacing the completed work with another knappable or formable item as soon as possible, and got no spawns. Not proof, I get it. I've been through storms before with just my regular old 7x7x4 or 5 without getting any spawns, either. Usually it's at least a couple, but the god of the RNG has final say. @Echoweaver so far as I know, that's true only for regular spawn rules. I've plopped down a 5x5x4 (or so) house between 3 rifts, just out of range of taking stability damage, placed stones on each floor tile, with high rift activity, just to see, and got through the night without any spawns. But that is not going to work to prevent spawns in a storm.

I play permadeath, too, which is why I welcomed 1.18. Now there's a reason to bother with drifters. What's the point of repairing a translocator? There's plenty of stuff to harvest nearby. So Temporal Gears were worthless to me before. I usually spend storms running around outside, but now I focus on killing the bigger ones. It's only because of those who don't want to fight through the storm that I've bothered trying to figure out something to accommodate them. It would be nice if I could find something easy to recommend to avoid storm spawns, but sounds like you are completely uninterested in that anyway. Which seems weird -- the whole lore regarding rifts and storms and even translocators means they should be "spawning" without regard for what size room you use, or what you do with the floor. The only defense should be slaying the drifters or somehow send them back from whence they came. I don't know what the rule is, but I rarely get more than two or three drifters spawning in a normal-sized room during an entire storm, even with just a regular old dirt floor. (Playing Wilderness, there's no warning of the storm, so I'm usually not close enough to anything to try other than what I can slap together with what I have on hand. 2 or 3 drifters per storm? That's just too infrequent for my tastes. But I do understand that those who play more for the building aspect might think it too frequent.

For what it's worth, so far they don't appear to spawn on paths, either, and those are available day 1. And so far, none have been able to spawn on a bed if the ceiling is only 2 high, i.e., you have to crouch to get onto the space. If the space is 3 high, so they can spawn in the air, yes, they can, but 2, not yet. [EDIT] But even if your world has no copper at all, and you have to pan for everything, you should be able to have a chisel by 10 days in. [/EDIT]

Why move them? Milking is a little inconvenient, sure, but how often are you milking them?

I suspect this is true, but I don't know for sure. I've tried sitting out storms on a pillar trying to find out whether one could spawn in the air above me, but so far it's never happened.

I would guess they do not "update". That the current/max HP are stored in the creature entity record. No good reason to think that other than it would run faster and be easier to code. One wouldn't have to constantly look up how much the critter should heal up. Poison, same thing. You have to find the object that is "cooked mushroom", whatever it is called, and change its character, too.

According to a comment in @Rhonen 's excellent Medieval mod, things other than drifters spawning in your den is likely poor luck -- there was a spawn point that met the criteria for wolves somewhere in your den, and you drew the short straw. I've personally not experienced that, but I don't tend to leave a lot of empty space in my dwellings. What space there is is not likely spawnable surfaces -- cobblestone, path, etc. Bears are more of a problem for livestreamers, I think. If you always run (suggestion: set run to toggle) you can pretty easily outrun bears, though you may have to bob and weave if you don't notice him until he is close enough to tag you once to start with. But far more disorienting to viewers is the habit of constantly jumping so you can see a little better over and through the bushes. Between those and the constantly moving "mouse look", my wife refuses to watch over my shoulder, as it makes her motion sick. But it does pretty much bear- and wolf- proof your game. As a side-benefit, most of the copper I find I would not have noticed had I not been jumping at the time...