Thorfinn

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...

Thanks, LOL. Wasn't looking for super-powered. Just not drastically nerfed from vanilla. Kind of like potash in reverse. One of the easiest things to make in limited quantities IRL, enough for gardening purposes, certainly, but incredibly rare in the game. Just as I don't want a potash mod that drastically changes the game balance, neither do I want a bee-keeping mod that drastically changes the balance. For whatever reason, Tyron has set relative difficulty and rates and rarities to the kind of experience he was shooting for. Once I finish that to my satisfaction, then I'll have a go at what others think is the optimal experience.

I'm not finding it that much different, once I adjust for the fact I'm searching only about half as much due to rougher terrain. On default wilderness settings, I'm still making molds and crucible at the first clay or peat (whichever is later) in suitable rock. Plus a small 1 block charcoal pit. I'm still almost always pouring hammer and pick by sunset of day 2, often propick, too. The new terrain makes it much more likely to find exposed veins of ore, so propick is lasting longer, too.

After a few more hours of play, I'm liking it quite a bit. Used to be that finding copper or tin or lead or really anything except quartz in an exposed cliff face was quite unusual, but it is really quite different to be able to build a ladder up a cliff and dig a mine into the vein. Usually to get views like that I'd have to travel to some mountain range or build a nerdpole, but it's quite nice to build a mining camp with a great vista. In fact, I'm rethinking my early game to take advantage of the changes in 1.18.

I've only seen it on the surface. Only twice, but still...

There is a downside -- you lose your bonus HP. I'd have probably made a long trip with a stack each of grain and turnips, and make a pot of porridge now and again. Then again, 50k blocks isn't really all that far, though it's further in 1.18 because of all the uplifts and rough terrain. In 1.17, that was do-able in a standard 9-day month pretty easily, less if you were willing to travel at night. But you are correct that you can easily forage your way, too. Fish made that dirt simple. I still prefer the way the hunger clock pauses if you eat a meal. You don't need nearly as much food, so only have to pause to cook something every few days.

Would be kind of cool to be able to use a temporal gear on a creature to make it permanent (barring death, of course).

Look in Guides subforum. @Streetwindhas an excellent explanation of how to do it.

@Cheliosyour answer was in the OP, though it is buried amongst copious detail. Search this page for "Resonance Archives - at"

Nice. I was just about to report a problem with the new release of VS. You rock!

I get that you have a vision of what gameplay should be, but why are they a good default setting? For example, I prefer to play with higher difficulty than Wilderness. Greater spoilage, greater hunger, fewer HP, tougher monsters, etc. Surface copper at Extremely Rare and surface tin at Never. At defaults of Very Rare, I'm usually making a pick mold by noon day 1 to pour a pick by sometime day 2. But I don't think that should be the default. I remember having trouble sourcing copper in early game, and threads pop up every once in a while about others having trouble. People new to the game have a hard enough time getting to copper age. Rather than make them go through changing default settings when they have no idea how much each setting will change the experience, it's just better if I adjust difficulty up since I do understand the difference. If all unsupported objects fell, that would be a great argument in favor of falling dirt. But when baskets and chests hang in mid air while storage vessels behave like one would think when you remove the support beneath, suspension of disbelief is baked into the experience already. Now if you could save your custom settings so that creating a new world is as easy as just selecting "Ultraviolence" instead of "Wilderness", I'm right there with you. Offhand, the only setting I'd like to see made a default is propick radius. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a n00b to realize he should change it, or to look up the console command to change it if you didn't do so. As for wear and tear, good idea. I'd certainly give your mod a go. As said above, though, chores can already take up a lot of the day as you go along. Maintenance may not as big a problem for me, as if a block of packed earth or a redwood log wears out, it's easily replaced, but I don't think I'd run your mod if I were into heavily chiseled mega-structures that I had to spend the entire game repairing the special blocks on my buildings. I would be a little concerned about the amount of computational power involved. Or would weathering and erosion only affect player-placed blocks?

There are reasons not to build with dirt. I'm just not one to care much about the aesthetics, or do whatever someone else thinks is playing the game "properly". Kind of like in Terraria. There's no benefit to using some special building material, or to give the NPCs more than the absolute minimum, so why bother? In VS, rooms bigger than 7x7 work inconsistently, or at least I have not figured out all the rules yet, so why bother with larger constructions, either? It's not like gravity is consistently applied anyway. Place a dirt on the ground, set any of a wide variety of things on top of it, remove the dirt, the crazy thing just floats in mid-air.

Oh, gotcha. Back when I cheesed it, I would set myself up the 1x1, a variant based on the rabbit trap where I could butcher them as they died, so it didn't really matter. You didn't even need the kiln. They killed each other anyway. The kiln just made it a little quicker and finished them off when there was only 1 left alive. Even with high rift activity you could get a gear every couple nights, no storm required, while you fill your time clayforming or crafting or whatever, butchering as they die. But you are talking about sitting out a storm completely, mopping up afterwards. What do you do with all the temporal gears? Sell them? Or do you find enough translocators to put them to use?

@imperialwaltz,oops, I could have been a bit more clear. Gog is fine. It's Steam that causes the problems. Mods in Steam's Workshop don't generally work on a Gog, Humble, or a handful of other storefront installs. I've even tried buying an additional copy on Steam, but unless installed on the same machine (which defeats the point of having a second copy) copying a parallel directory structure and tweaking configs is not good enough to let you use Workshop mods on a non-Steam install. I'm sure there are exceptions, but on the ones I've tried Steam tech support says I can't do that.

I'm reasonably sure the 100% is referring to an alpha parameter to the respective term of the noise function used to generate the landform. At least that's how it works in a few other voxel games with which I'm more familiar. (Edit) Assuming that is the case, lower values would reduce the variability. Since 1.18 seems to have increased the variation in the waveform, I'd expect lowering that would get something closer to what 1.17 was.

I'm still not getting it. When one is speaking of shattered mountains, does that just mean exposed rock?

I use default settings and find it pretty easy to find a sufficient spot. True, the Great Plains seem to be much more scarce, but somewhere to place fields 15-20 wide by adding a layer or two of dirt, sure. For me, it's just the ruggedness of the terrain means I'm covering less than half the distance, so well under a quarter the area. Which translates to finding stuff at around a quarter of the rate of older mapgens.