Thorfinn

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]

I might be misunderstanding the idea in the OP, but I think he meant that if there are 5 open faces, using the pick on the stone itself drops the relieved rock, not the handful of rocks that you would otherwise get. So in your example, the stone would not automatically pop off, but only when you tried to remove it with a pick. Then you would get back the stone. The downside is that it seems one would potentially be able to relieve about twice the current number of stones with a single pick. If the goal was to maintain natural rock as a premium building material, this doesn't do it.

It populated by June 1. Don't know how warm it was there. Probably around 2000 north of spawn. I created a new shortcut to the exe, just in case I messed up a config or something, and bees seem to be working more or less OK. Wild hives still seem a bit slow, but everything else is working fine. In my apiary, they are showing 228 flowers, or whatever the number is. Now end of June and I have almost a full barrel of honey, so doesn't seem much has changed

I was wondering the same, but that's always in the spring, and default start. Not sure whether I'm far enough from snow, but I can see glacier ice within 256 blocks. For whatever reason, this time the wild hive is seeing 77 flowers that I had in by late 3 MAY, it's now early 7 MAY, still no block info about swarming.

The in-game handbook is probably right. Bees eventually work. It's just wild hives sometimes take forever. Once you get your first domesticated skep, everything seems to go the same as the Wiki, except that flowers are capped. Which is for the good. In 1.17, you could set up hives that would be harvestable almost immediately.

They can take a while. The most important variable is supposed to be number of flowers within 7 tiles in any direction. But that is now capped -- I'm not sure what the formula is, but I've seen both capped at 64 and capped at 35, no matter how many flowers are in range. I assume number of skeps is still a part of the formula, but I'm starting to think that adjustment is POST cap, so putting more than one empty skep in range slows things down. From experience, it appears to be by a lot, much more than the 3 it used to be. I'm not convinced the Wiki still has correct information. I didn't see anything there about what appears to be a hard cap, and I've spent several days in early game next to a large pop wild hive with 35 flowers, and it never gave the message that they would swarm. The Wiki suggests that they should swarm in under a day, but that's not what I'm seeing.

I just consciously decide whether the improvement in speed and durability of a given copper tool is worth the effort to collect 20 nuggets and spend the time working it. If it weren't, I would not use copper, but stick with stone. For example, making firewood is not usually a task for copper, chopping trees often is. If you didn't prune most of the leaves, time-wise, you are usually better off sticking with flint unless it is a tree with few leaves, like acacia. Now that stone knives have doubled in durability, it's really hard to justify a copper knife. It's a bit over twice as durable, and only 20% faster, which means for the most part they just aren't worth it -- it turns something that would require 5 whacks to only 4. By then, apart from skeps, you already have harvested most of the cooper's reeds you need, which are the major slow stuff for which the speed boost would matter; forging a scythe is a much better use of time and materials. Indeed, if you value your time, you are almost always better off sticking with flint knife tech until you can make an iron one. Yeah, point being there's more of a balance act than just metal "disappearing". Tweaking speed or durability would be a better means of accomplishing the same end, IMO. And would give a reason to make some tools at all, other than for bragging rights.

Is it a huge problem to have nuggets reduced to providing 4 units instead of 5, and more or less keep everything else you suggested? Chisels are awful for "waste", as are knives and shears, but if you are getting back about half an ingot when you smith a knife, that puts you appreciably ahead of the current 5 per nugget. Only things that have little waste, like anvils, nails and strips, etc., would cost more in terms of how much you need to mine/pan. I'm guessing there must have been a reason to just go with waste. Maybe it's as simple as knapping often leaves you much of the stone as waste, so what's the difference? But I'm just guessing. I suspect the reason for not casting knives, etc., is to lock some things behind enough metal for an anvil. That and it is fiendishly difficult to cast anything that will hold an edge. Most metals I can think of are far too brittle or weak without forging.

I've only run into it once. Ever since, stability is just another factor in whether someplace is an ideal place to set up shop. When I remember, anyway. I don't spend all that much time there anyway. I think it depends on what one thinks stability is. If it's a measure of how "close" the Rust World "plane" is to the seraph's world's "plane" at that point in the multiverse, I'm not sure why a new sofa should affect that. If it's more of a psychological thing, it makes sense. Pulling up a chair in a scenic location should help recover your "stability". But from what I know of the lore, I am leaning much more toward thinking it's the former.

Medieval lets you make waterwheels, though they are quite resource intensive in their own right. But at least then you can get by without a flax farm as far as the eye can see. If you actually intend to do anything with the metal, Helve Hammer Extensions will save some sanity points. But if you are playing vanilla, I'd just leave that ore in a chest until I needed it. At most, I'd use only as many bloomeries as I need to keep the helve hammer in business knocking out iron ingots for an eventual steel industry. Which, really, is maybe just 4. Or that's about as much tedium as I can tolerate. I can cook and store food while I'm waiting for the ingot, and, well, that's about it. If I start building, I soon forget that the reason I'm building is to fill time while waiting for the helve hammer to finish.

LAN parties weren't driven by piracy, though. Some games required 1 CD per 8 players, some 1 CD per 3 players, some allowed client installs, and I recall several that were, say, 30 day installs. But I think you are right. The option of on-line gaming made that model too unrealistic. It was too easy to Hamachi what was intended to be a concession for LAN parties into outright, well, piracy isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Like @Locklear says, it's not that bad. About $15 a throw in quantity 4. That's a whole lot better than a lot of games in the late '90s where they were $50 each, and each needed it's own CD.

Oh, you mean 4 real-life hours, not 4 in-game hours. My mistake. Even if you use coal to fire the blue clay, that takes a minimum of 12 in-game hours. I just could not see how you could accomplish that by noon of day 1 without getting at least a crucible and mold as loot. Malachite? Are you in limestone? Be sure to mark the spot. I frequently find Bountiful copper in limestone under malachite bits. Not sure whether I've seen Bountiful anywhere else. Must have, but nothing comes to mind. @Jackal Black I just meant that I run from everything except rabbits and sometimes chickens. I, too, tested speeds in a world made in creative and switched to survival so I could run backwards and watch what happened. You can figure out how to time your jink to avoid the rush, but it is inapplicable to a real game, because running backwards, you cannot avoid the bushes, trees, slopes, etc. that stop you and allow the critter to catch up. So in-game, you just have to trust that if you execute well, you are making headway, then turn around at the top of slopes to watch their movement patterns to figure out their weaknesses. Bears are particularly easy to lose in thicker bush tree cover because while you change your path slightly to get through, they have to slow down to crawl over bushes, and there are a lot of places that are too narrow for them to navigate at all.

Oh, I am. Permadeath makes me a chicken. Is that still true? I thought that was patched. I don't think that's still the case, though at one time I thought I was sure it was. They may both be faster on the straight and flat, I don't know, but where you can outpace them is dodging around blocks and timing your jump properly when ascending slopes. Watching them, I'm pretty sure they both run into the block, stop, go around or up, start again. I kind of wonder if their pathing has trouble if you are out of sight, too. For whatever reason, it's not too hard to give them the slip by bobbing and weaving through trees. I have to agree that's a pretty good one to tweak. It doesn't do much to change gameplay, other than give you some margin of error. Holy cow, how did you do that? I've never built a copper tool that fast. Found one, sure, but never made one. I know it's possible to find enough coal and copper nuggets by then, but how did you get the crucible and mold? Lucky drops from cracked vessels, or panning? Or is it a ruins find or something?

Oh, ok. I figured rho meant something other than density, because most of these types of equations in engineering are for STP and you have to adjust from there. I was actually amazed the equation was that simple. There's generally an empirically-determined eta or alpha or mu or f or something embedded in the formulas/correlations to account for efficiency or properties of specific materials. But this is generalized to the point it works for any fluid, from microtorr helium to molten neutronium. As such it's not very useful in this case, is it? It's just an upper limit that is in no danger of being breached, kind of like the quart of gas in my chainsaw is not going to be getting anywhere close to E=mc^2. [EDIT] The main reason this piqued my interest is that I'm doing some engineering on an off-grid wind power application, and according to the documentation the manufacturer was supplying, power output did not increase with the cube of the wind velocity or any exponential equation at all, except for a very narrow band near v=0. Indeed, it looks more like the limit of an infinite series, converging on a constant. Maybe a log function. I was hoping that maybe there might be some way to take advantage of the cubed term instead, but that is clearly not the limiting factor in real-world wind power applications. [/EDIT[

If you want to keep an area drifter-free, and are going to be gone for more than the 2 days your torches will stay lit, it's arguably worthwhile. Drifter drops are too pathetic to waste time on. Placing rocks is a pretty serious time-waster, too. I'd think the only time it might be worth it is either in caves under your base so you don't have to listen to the moaning all the time, and on the top of a salt dome, where you basically do it once and then dig out the block under it. So long as placing the rock is not too clunky, I'd consider it. Well, as long as it doesn't interfere with regular placement for knapping. I wouldn't want anything that makes that more involved or time-consuming. [EDIT] For example, if thrown rocks became placed rocks on the nearest open surface, sure, why not use that? [/EDIT]

Oh, hey, while I'm thinking of it, you can also place Wildcraft plants (berry bushes and poison plants) into your trenches and they will slowly kill off foes. At least they used to. OK, maybe not bears. Not sure. But they used to take out drifters and wolves for sure.

Have you tried Primitive Survival's traps yet? How would you improve on them? I agree it's a good idea. I just wonder what you would suggest the game do differently.