Thorfinn

Looks like all you need and then some. Cozy. I spread warming huts like that all over the place so I never have to worry about freezing in winter. I try to make sure there's a crock of food cached under the floor (qualifies as a cellar), a bowl on the floor, a firepit already stocked with firewood, an unlit torch on the wall, and usually a firestarter leaning against the wall inside. If I accidentally fall in freezing water, I'm not far from safety.

35-40ish in a day's scouting is a much more normal number. Yes, it involves ladders. Climb up 10-20, depending on terrain and your ability to memorize where things are, look around for where the flax spawns are (sometimes you can even spot a copper deposit), climb back down, collect your ladders, and run from flax to flax taking all the flax from blue up. It also involves holding down the run key (or in my case, hitting the macro key on my gaming keyboard that I have programmed to toggle the run key). Plus jumping all the time, making it a little easier to see copper and flax you might have missed. It also is a laser focus on the important stuff to get done, and refusing to get distracted. Ruins? Bees? Terra preta? That's all stuff for another day after you get your crops in. But I have hundreds of games I've played only the first few days, trying to figure out the best way to optimize the early game for my goals. Just like sometimes there are 3 ripe flax in one stand, and 2 in a stand a handful of blocks away, if you play enough times, sometimes the random numbers align and you you get sky-high finds. And, to be fair, there's probably a lot to getting used to seeing the slight difference in color/texture. The difference between how "x" model grass and "#" model crops appear at a distance. But like @Streetwind says, that playstyle is not to everyone's liking. [EDIT] Until you get used to taking in the scene at a glance and finding stuff from the top of your ladder, if you are on single player, you can just hit "H" and move the handbook out of the way while you spend some time looking at things, seeing what they look like from this perspective. I also noticed this last playthrough (a well-above average 83 seeds by dusk) that stage 2 flax also drops seeds. Maybe 25% or so? If I knew that before, I forgot it. So take 'em all. Not like you are going to just happen to be coming back through when they are ripe. Another useful thing is as soon as you start accumulating some food, put an unlit (so you don't fret over jumping into water) torch in your off-hand, to increase your hunger rate. It's pretty easy to end up with 5 or more bonus hit points your first day, so long as you can burn through the food fast enough. By end of day, it means you can tank a hit from any bear, which is pretty nice. If it's just black bears, you might tank 2 hits. [/EDIT]

For basic drifters, the comedy of a shield and torch is a fun change of pace.

OK. Not really. When I find a Very High reading in something I want, I do a cursory look to see if there's any veins sticking out of the cliff faces. Then look for any caves. If not, that's fine. I dig straight down from there hoping to encounter a vein of ore. If not, climb back up, move over 15-20 blocks or so and dig another vertical shaft. It rarely takes more than 3 or 4, and that's much quicker than spelunking. Granted that does not work for things like gold or silver, but you don't need those. Nah, I don't like drifters just because killing them is useless. They have absolutely no loot I'm interested in. At least bears have the decency to drop hides and fat. It's not that I'm afraid of caves or anything. They are just almost always slower ways of making progress in the game, unless you are looking to find all the lore in this playthrough, or you really want to find a translocator.

I mostly go into caves anymore only when there's a Very or Ultra High reading of something I want. Because of the size of iron deposits, I'll check even Decent if that's the highest reading I find. Now that I've seen all the lore I'm likely to see in this release,and because there's always enough to do without heading off to some random translocator somewhere to a map section to end up in another part of the world that is also generated randomly, I find them next to useless. I can't come up with a very good reason to go into caves most of the time. If they did collapse, I would be that much less likely to bother with them, and definitely not if I had to start carrying around posts and beams to shore things up. I'm all in favor of variety. As a player, I'd prefer variety that makes me more likely to engage with a game's features than variety which makes it less likely. It would definitely add to variety to have 1 in 100 sheep be toxic to eat, but it would just mean I wouldn't bother with sheep anymore.

How does this improve the game experience? I'm not trying to knock it. I just want to understand what part of the game is lacking that you think this improves on. Don't get me wrong. I can see you've put some effort into the idea. And maybe it would be the next big thing. I guess I lack the imagination to see what it is this fixes.

[EDIT] Had another thought about how the weirdness works, and tried it out. Sure enough found it! Stand on top of top of the ladder you are building. Happens when you climb all the way up and look around. Now look down and add a ladder section below you. Ouch! Descending the ladder does not remove the ouch!, but backing up does. Working hypothesis: this makes you enter the block, and because of when the check for collisions happens, descending the ladder leaves you inside a block. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Those new ladder sections appear to lack the boundary that keeps you from entering them, too. If you climb back up the ladder and step forward, as happens when you climb with W instead of Space, ouch! [/EDIT2] [EDIT3] Wonder if one could exploit that to kill drifters before it gets patched... [/EDIT3]

Someone said in a thread once the official answer was something like 0.6C per block, but I'm finding it's usually about half that, more or less. I think it might vary by location. For a given size stack of ladders, I'm not getting a constant delta T. But I think it's close enough to right that if you climb a ladder around noon and check "C" (or install something like HudClock) you can find out what height you need to be around there to avoid stunted crops. Then just look around for something about that height. Better yet, look at the coldest temperature at around midnight, and make sure you are planting somewhere sufficiently above the minimum temperature. Turnips being a little chilly is better than being too hot. Rye is another one that is just a royal pain for being stunted. No, vanilla. You want to avoid mods if you want high counts. Certainly anything affecting mapgen. Though I love things like Wildcraft Trees, it obscures your sight too much to see crops well. Even things that do not affect mapgen slow things down just enough that I'm sometimes seeing flax suddenly "appear" while I'm looking off into the midrange distance. My best ever was 126 seeds on day 1. I was really hoping to end up with needing 3 stacks for flax seeds, but alas...

Yes, you can start them from flat ground. That's how I usually start them. But I only use them for recon. Spotting flax, bears, and the best route to passable terrain, stuff like that. They are useless for escaping from bears, for example. Oh, and it's a bit weird,. but you are best off placing all your ladder sections at once, or at least above you while you climb. There's a bug of some sort where if you resume building and maybe you are too close, you will start taking damage and won't be able to do anything about it, and your death will be reported as "pancaked". I haven't figured out exactly what conditions are. It's happened a couple times to me, but since I play permadeath, I don't care to investigate too closely.

Ladders are day 1. A stack of a dozen is plenty to give you a day 1 scouting nerdpole. Amazing at how much difference that little of a distance makes in finding flax. I used to get through the first month or two with a short stack of 25 or so, but I've rearranged how I do things of late so I build to a stack of 63 in night 1. It gives me a better shot at seeing which direction would be most fruitful to explore. The increase in upheaval makes it a bit more important to get extended scouting going. I'll give it a shot again. Maybe a stack of bales is a better use of time than a stack of ladders. @Echoweaver was obviously using them to get out of the reach of predators, so I agree hay would be better than ladders if you can spare both the inventory space and the time to gather that much grass.

Yeah, you definitely want to get turnips in early and late, never in the middle. Though check your temperature noon or so of the first day. You may not even be able to plant turnips early enough the first year unless you head north or turn your upheaval back up so you can find a plateau to do some highland planting that first year. With highland gardening, you might even be able to grow through the heat of the summer. I've even seen flax burn in the late summer in the valley, probably not 2500 south of spawn. Usually it does fine if you get it planted in the first half of May or so. Do crops automatically adjust growth times for longer months? Another possibility is that Vinter Nacht did a good job of balancing Fields of Gold for use with Golden Combs, though he said in that thread he did not intend for you to be able to get all frames of a Langstroth placed in the first year. My best was just short of 5 full, but that was by foregoing every use of linen but sacks. I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4. Man, isn't that the truth! When I have to play on my laptop (17", I think) I only do about a quarter, maybe a third as well as playing on my home system. This is the first game I've ever played where the screen size made this dramatic of a difference.

I'm guessing @Streetwind is figuring out whether to add something about it, or to change his OP a bit. Doesn't matter to me which way he chooses to do. Or even if he does. But I suppose you could offer him a cookie. Oh, and another cool feature that would be handy is a switch to --addMacros that lets you specify where your macro files are.

Oh, nice. Might have to start doing that. I was just so underwhelmed with the glider that I haven't bothered to do much with it. But I can see that once set up, a network of stations would work well. Why not just use ladders, though? You have ladders running up the side of those towers anyway, right? Or is there some way of climbing them I don't know about?

What an awesome way to boost your "Solution" stats!

? Ladders are even faster.

Yeah, it's really cool because by copying whichever link, then editing the --dataPath switch, you can segregate your games, too. For example, the active games I'm playing with my daughter and son are accessed by clicking on the "<daughterName> 118" and "<sonName> 118" shortcuts on the desktop, e.g., E:\games\vs\vs118\vintagestory.exe --dataPath e:\games\vs\vs118\daughterGames --addModPath E:\dl\vs\118 [EDIT] Oh, and did I mention it would be great if there were an --addMacros switch? [/EDIT]

Oh, hey, another possibility. More of a work-around, I guess. Apache's Accessibility Tweaks lets you adjust the volume of individual sound effects. I'm guessing you can turn the drifter sound effects down (maybe off?) when you are in your house, and turn the sounds back on when you head out and need to hear them. And, yeah, if your base is in an unstable location, bad juju. On Low rift nights, you can pretty easily get clay and peat, as long as you didn't lose the lottery and get a rift right on top of the deposit. I even did pretty well on a medium rift night, though I ran between 4 different reasonably close deposits. BTW, best way I know of to mark your deposits (or even your path) is using a single fence post and put a firepit on top. (The post is just to get it up out of the grass. That and it's cheaper than dirt, literally. A stick and a log gets you 6 posts. Add a single piece of dry grass, and Bob's your uncle.) It has a low glow (3, I think) even when it's not burning so it's really obvious in the full dark. If you leave some firewood nearby, you can light up the area quite well, and you might as well take the opportunity to fire some torches. You are going to need them anyway.

I guess I never really paid attention. Do drifters spawn on Calm nights? I thought they started on Low. Then again, I've never really figured out the timing of the rift activity changes. Just that, "Huh. I could have sworn when I checked earlier this evening it said 'Low'. It's 'Medium' now." Now granted, if you accidentally built on top of caverns, you will hear the buggers all the time. I don't know there's anything you can do about that but move. Or maybe that gizmo that was mentioned above. Don't know. Never built it.

I believe you are right. Not sure, because its possible they spawned on close to a tree or something, but I've seen them far from Forest Floor.

I don't mind even high rift activity nights, depending on what needs done. Sticking, for example, is fine because you don't need to stay in any one spot for very long. If you shut off music, and stay away from rifts, and relocate every time you hear a stone being thrown, or a drifter moan, you can collect several stacks of sticks in one night with very low risk. But even medium is too much to collect clay or peat. Apocalyptic is another matter entirely. That's a good time to hole up and knap a gazillion axe heads to split all the firewood to make the charcoal that you will need for steel. There is a really easy way to deal with the spawning issue if it bothers you, though. Rifts form on the surface...

That's really easy to do with command line switches. @Streetwind has a thread on it in the Guides section. For example, I just download all my mods into the same folder, at the moment, it's E:\dl\vs\118 Then for playing with all mods, just add the switch to the end of the "Target" field. --addModPath E:\dl\vs\118 So I have two links for each version I have installed, Vanilla and Modded. The "Target" field in "Vanilla 1.18" is E:\games\vs\vs118\vintagestory.exe --dataPath e:\games\vs\vs118\mygames and for "Modded 1.18" is E:\games\vs\vs118\vintagestory.exe --dataPath e:\games\vs\vs118\mygames --addModPath E:\dl\vs\118 But I do agree it would be nice to be able to save a modlist. My daughter likes a more relaxed game, so we play with Wildcraft, so food is never an issue, and with all those decoration animal mods, while my son prefers more hardcore, so we skip the mods that add food and add the dangerous animals. OK, technically dangerous animals are food mods, but they are berry bushes that hunt you down and kill you. It would also be nice if it automatically unclicked all the older versions of mods by default. Oh, and it would be really sweet if there an --addMacro switch so I don't have to manually copy my macros from install to install, and make sure when I update one I update the rest.

Sure. But remember you have to balance risk and reward or there's no point in even going near the ocean. Looking at how low-key ruins are, as in if you loot enough ore vessels, you MIGHT be able to find enough tin to more or less skip the copper age, but very unlikely. The loot it would take to make me tangle with Leviathan -- don't know that it exists. Maybe a device that let you choose which translocator you want to be sent to? Might be worth it, but in practice, it would mean you need to bring at least temporal gears with you in order to get back home. Though I don't find translocators worth the hassle in the first place. Love the idea. Just not sure it's a good fit for the game.

Wish you luck, then, @dakko. I've only started a 4 games in 1.18.6-rc1 and I'm not seeing much difference. However, I did change stuff around this last start (a couple hours ago) and went heavy on sticks so I could get a full stack of ladders on day 1 so I could see the same perspective as @brndd . Yeah, there are quite a few areas that look kind of like what was posted. I just never noticed, as I either avoided it entirely or ran through the valleys looking for a region more traversable. It occurs to me map is not your friend. I wanted to go check out a ruin that I probably would never have seen, and the only way there was through that mess of a terrain. When I shut off minimap, it was not much problem because I went where the terrain dictated, not trying to get anywhere in particular. @1Joachim1 if I can make a suggestion? I had forgotten how much easier this game is with StepUp installed. Highly recommended for anyone but the most die-hard vanilla player. When I did a clean install of 1.17, (or maybe it was 1.16), I forgot to add it to the mods folder.

@Rufkut as I look at the sails whist standing next to the rotor, they are cambered, aren't they? Or is that my old eyes playing tricks on me? @Cosmic Hermit interesting! That's probably why the angle of attack changes as it reaches the end of the blade in a modern wind turbine? It must change, or the wind speed is not sufficient to provide lift at the tips? Also, if it's a function of area, why not make the blades a bit wider? Obviously it is not optimal, but why? (If this is too OT, someone say so. I just find it fascinating.) @PhotriusPyrelus isn't the wind direction always the same? I use cloud motion to orient myself and that appears to be constant worldwide, independent of seed, even. Or are you talking in a future release where both wind speed and wind direction vary?

The Rust World breaking through is supposed to be the point, and drifters avoid the light (no big secret there) so darkness spawning drifters makes sense, particularly with the kind of darkness that is VS. It's darker than a moonless night. In the real world, if you are out in the middle of nowhere, if you have a cloudless, moonless night, you can see the shadow cast from the light of the Milky Way. VS is darker than that. I've never investigated the spawning mechanics themselves -- having that knowledge seems cheaty to me, at least until I want to change the game experience, which kind of has to wait until the game is in it's more or less final state. Instead of static (or even semi-static) spawn blocks, including the cavern mechanism described above, my preference would be for the game to pick some arbitrary air block outside some range of any PC. If there is currently game within an arbitrary range of that block, then the spawn is likely predator. If there are berries in range, likely a trash panda. If a certain density of tall grass, and no livestock, likely them. Etc.Obviously, your homestead as we currently build them would favor spawning bunnies, coons and predators who are seeking your crops, berries and livestock, respectively. If you want the area around your homestead to be predator-free, easy enough. Grow no crops or berries, keep no stock, and remove all the grass or keep it closely cropped. If you so much as let the grass regrow, you will spawn rabbits who will draw predators. But that's why there is very little wildlife in cities. Keep your garden and livestock out at your country estate.