Thorfinn

Targeting the right hitbox does leave something to be desired. I usually just build multiple pens with gates between, leaving the gates open, and then when slaughter time comes around, shut the gates and kill all the stock in whatever pens have the older generations. Is your idea that you could designate certain tags for culls? That would certainly make things easier, though maybe limit it to the cleaver? Making a good reason to bother with one and all? Weapons still use the hitbox method?

Thanks! I've always been a little hesitant to bring the ladder down because playing permadeath, it wasn't worth the risk. So you are saying if I leave the first two blocks of the cliff empty, and a ladder on the 3rd, that's bear proof? That would be a heck of a lot easier of a jump to make. Almost not missable.

Don't know. I'm not complaining, just saying that since I'm more about gameplay, that was not a big draw. On the other hand, back in the '90s when I was writing mods for Baldur's Gate, having an invisible, invulnerable creature that could be summoned made a whole slew of "magical" effects possible. There are all kinds of ways this could be put into VS. A swarm of fairies, for example, could spin the stability wheel at up to breakneck speeds in whichever direction that kind of fairy does. Another could nudge the percentages for more or less favorable drops. (Think panning or harvesting crops.) Possibly one could capture some live like in Primitive Survival to get a permanent, relocatable effect. One could use a truly invisible (no model, or whatever that means) to give a region a temporary character that lasts until the creature despawns or is otherwise unsummoned. I'm seeing not the butterflies, but the game potential. Right. And with sand somewhere between 1.5 and 2 tons per block...

Heck, chickens can kill you. Ask me how I know. Re:cooking, are you talking about bread and pies and such? Honestly, I don't think they are worth the effort anyway. If you want that for aesthetics, that's fine, but stews and porridges are really the way to go. I rolled my eyes at the butterflies, too. Yeah, I get that the collectors out there will love that kind of thing, but not my cup of tea. To be fair, though, the whole idea of temporal storms and rifts and transporters and eldritch horror and player characters who sound like musical instruments doesn't strike me as pseudo-realistic. At least not in the universe I find myself in. Inspired by nature, sure. Modeling nature, to some degree. Realistic, no.

Haven't yet seen any that managed to jump at the right time to climb a ladder starting on the 4th block up. Course it takes some practice for you to do it, too.

Oh, there's a new RC? I really should look a little more often... I did several 1-3 day starts on RC-1. I'm not sure I was seeing a lot of difference from 18.1. There isn't a whole lot of change in terrain that I could tell. Occasional widely separated spaces with water, flat enough for me to do an early farm, which is all I'm really shooting for. I'm still getting lousy luck with loose copper on the sedimentary layers. Out of 4 starts on conglomerate, I've only found one set of bits, and those were revealed in the cliff faces anyway. Got one more slate start, still no copper. I did get a few patches of bits on a chert start, enough for the triple set of tools on late day 2. But it still looks to me as though basalt is king.

I play mostly Wilderness, so take this for what it's worth. Because there is no radius search for the propick in Wilderness, this new mapgen is a godsend. The alternative to running past kilometers of cliff faces looking for ore outcrops is delving through caves, which is often a real slog. If the propick reads High or Very High, a vertical shaft can work, but that kind of reading is rare in my experience. The mostly vertical walls are also great for the rare occasions when I cannot dodge or outrun a bear -- just a handful and I'm up higher than he can reach. True, I could do the same thing before, starting from the ground, but it's a heck of a lot faster getting out of the way when the mapgen spots you several of the ladder sections. And if I'm stuck in a sudden storm in terrain that I can't plausibly fight in, I can go up far enough to be out of reach, build a roof, and box myself into a minimal space to wait it out. I get that you like the lower uplift. Awesome that when we create the game we can select the kind of terrain we get, yea?

I'm finding surface copper to just be a lot more variable. In some areas, you can't swing a dead cat. Probably my best ever first day was in 1.18.1, with 126 surface nuggets. But I've also had a lot more where I've had to pan my way to the prospecting pick. The copper is still in the rocks, it's just not on the surface. So far, with probably a confirmation bias kicking in, surface nuggets on basalt seems at least as good as it was in 1.17, maybe even better. Granite is also about the same, maybe a bit lower. But sandstone, conglomerate, etc., seem much lower. And I've had large slate spawns were I found not a single nugget. More often than not, I'm ending day 1 with no more than 20, and day 2 with no more than 40. Unless, so far, basalt or granite start.

Rather than adding a new knapping recipe and whatever that entails, what about just give a low percentage drop of a "hammerstone" from hard (good idea, @dakko) boulders in lieu of the normal drop of stones? Skip the knapping step entirely. The durability of the "hammerstone" is set sufficiently low that few would bother going that route once they have enough metal. Maybe as little as one or two pieces of copper (and only copper?) ore, or to be more faithful to the idea, maybe 5, enough medium ore to pour a copper hammer? Or 7, so a single hammerstone could get enough from low-grade? To keep things as normal as possible, a granite hammerstone can be placed in the crafting grid by itself and converted into granite stones? Or for verisimilitude, two hammerstones in the grid become as many stones as two boulders would drop? [EDIT] Or, hey, how about changing the drops of boulders to be "boulders", stack size 16, so as to keep inventory management the same. Then place a boulder above an ore in the crafting grid to convert it to nuggets, destroying the boulder, or a boulder by itself to convert it to stones? [/EDIT] That said, panning is not that horrible. In a single night, you can easily pan up 20 nuggets. Worst case, if you spent the daylight exploring and the nighttime panning, and you found no copper at all, you could be prospecting with pick in hand by day 3, day 4 fully kitted out.

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.