Thorfinn

Sorry to hear your frustration. My original post was about exactly the situation in which you find yourself -- sometimes you cannot seem to find copper, but IME, it just means you need to move to a different locale. I rarely settle within a couple thousand of origin, anyway, and usually it's more like 10,000. Either that or you can take a chance panning enough bony soil to be able to make enough black bronze to go straight to iron. If playing with the map, finding ruins is easy, and from my recollection, it only took 8 stacks or so. Or keep your eyes peeled for bismuth. A single deposit plus a little sand panning will reliably get you to iron. Or luck out finding a commodities trader. There are several ways of doing it, but IMO by far the best way is to just restart if you find yourself in a world that is no fun. I don't think I'd want to something I enjoyed for 12 straight days...

@Taska, I'm pretty sure that's my situation, too. I link all on-line financials through one email account, and only if I mess up does anything else use that account. I wouldn't actually swear to it in this case, because initially my real name was my forum user name, and I'm pretty sure I've got my real name only linked to the one account. @Streetwind, I'm not sure why the forum structure could not be tweaked to put more in the registered user section. Mods aren't very useful unless you own the game. Suggestions don't mean much if you are only playing VS Classic. The public section really only needs to field questions about VS Classic, too. But the solution to the current issue might be really easy -- give you and a few of the other long-term members and all those with published mods the ability to delete (or at least hide) spam. You are right that @Tyron should not have to pay the costs of hosting spam, it looks bad and diverts money away from where it belongs. And I agree that the policing should not fall on @Tyron's shoulders. But that's where the community could help. If a handful of trusted members had the ability to click a check box in the topic list and the topic vanished, whether deleted or filtered out, the problem is more or less resolved. As well as it can be on the internet, anyway.

My guess is incredibly bad luck. Either that or there's some mod interfering with mapgen. I was just messing around doing first day runs, and have 57 copper in hand at 3PM. Yes, way over the norm, but I'm usually within spitting distance of 20 by dusk. All that's really important is 20 by dusk of day 2, 40 by around 2PM of day 3, though. It's easy to have that with just panning. Did you crank your copper scarcity all the way down? Or are you playing on a MP server? Something weird must be going on. Since I had a clue, I've never had such a start. And I've never had the circumstance of not having copper by winter, even in MP. If you want to post your seed, I'd be happy to take a look. [EDIT] Alternatively, 1789142442, all survival defaults except propick radius 8 is a very nice seed. There are copper bits right underfoot at spawn, and they are all around the lake just south of you. Plus, more than enough reeds, a big deposit of clay, more than enough food. And it's right on top of limestone, so you know where it is when you need it. There's even a bee tree not far away. What's not to like? [/EDIT]

Not my forum, so not my decision. Question, though. I thought there already was a section for purchasers. It's just that people prefer posting in the open section, and the paid section gets a post every couple months or so. Anyone bothered by spam, just post in that other section. This looked to be a one-off spamfest (first I have seen it since November) and hitting Page Down once wasn't that onerous. But from my point of view, I probably would not have purchased it if I could not have seen people talking about the kinds of issues they were having in the game. [EDIT] In fact, spam would probably have sold me on giving it a shot. A friendly topping every once in a while that there was a spam-free section available for those who purchased the game where I could get more friendly information would likely have done it. Whatever it was it cost (no, I don't remember) wasn't very much. $25 to get access to a better coverage of game knowledge would have been a no-brainer. [/EDIT]

Last game I found copper while digging a hole to make charcoal in. Never looked in lake bottoms, but cliff faces and caves, yeah. More luck that way than prospecting, for sure. Though I do use the pick to decide whether to even bother spelunking. But more often than not, I just move somewhere else. It's a big world. I'm likely to find surface copper somewhere. Wow, 14 picks? Could have just skipped straight to iron. I've kind of adjusted my starts around panning, as a more sure way of getting copper age by day 2, 3 at the outside. Get a stack of clay, a stack of peat, a stack or two of sand/gravel, then set up shop in an area with good trees. It's not too hard to be able to get 12-16 stacks of charcoal started before dark, then spend the dark hours getting the 6 essential clay items firing, and then pan until dawn.

Why are they different than fences?

Oh, my bad. Missed that in the release notes, I guess.

I'm using it on 1.16.4. If you enjoy the cooking/crafting part of the game, it's a nice addition. Even better if you add Expanded Foods on top of that. It's just a very slow process to make food out of acorns. You can't just eat them, and unless you are running a tannery, you will rapidly end up with barrels of tannin you don't know what to do with. Since that's not the part of the game I like, I just stick with stew and porridge mostly.

The only times I've seen it grow are when the coverage of the dirt block changes, that is, when it changes from bare to very sparse, and again to sparse, etc., or whatever those levels of green are called. Farmland grows, but not just dirt. There are some who have seen other behavior, but it must be fairly rare, or settings other than more or less Survival. I've let a 20,000 tile dirt field alone (using Survival settings except for passive creatures and 0.25 hunger) run for about 12 hours real time, and another 8 or so the next day and never saw anything grow. Now granted, that only got me through a couple years, but it seems to me if it were going to be useful, it would have happened in that time. (No, I wasn't bored, just letting it run on the machine next to me while I was working. Listen for the sound of hunger pangs, top up, and back to work.)

Saw a new one for me the other day. A block, I think 4x4 but with the corners knocked off, smouldering, sticking out of a hillside. With defaults, I hear a few each day. There are a lot that when I chase them down just have some, I don't know, sparks? that go away after a minute or two. Never do find a crater or anything. They are not really common. I still usually end up with finding more from worldgen than from Meteoric Expansion, but I like the mod. I don't even bother looking if it is overcast.

I bought some proprietary software for my business and it's never been updated, so I still have a couple dozen Win7 boxes. They are not on-line, though.

As of last fall, you could still update to Win10 for free. Assuming you aren't capped because of needing to run non-updated software, or low RAM or something, lust look for "free update windows 10"

Well, you hope to kill them, but unless you are ready to chase them or are fighting in deep water, they will just run away once you take them down some amount. 2/3 maybe? Don't know. You don't have to get more than a few hits into them before they run. You can outrun them. You are faster. I just find that if I try to run away in the forest, I either end up in thicker woods that I can't sprint through, or I step on another wolf. Personally, I think I'd prefer it if you could "scrape" them off you by running past chickens or sheep or something. Yeah, @Ashery, that's a good way too. Probably don't even need to invoke creative for that -- just keep your stuff on death should do it.

Oh. I guess I don't know about that. I generally leave things on defaults. I just remember having tested things with /time speed 0 and flirting with starvation. In fact, playing with /time speed<40 becomes a pretty good challenge.At 20, I don't know that you can just build -- you have to go hunter/gatherer to supplement your food.

This does not affect your hunger rate, only the growth rate. Your crops and berry bushes will not mature, and you will continue to get hungry. If you want to reduce the amount of hunger per in-game day, you have to increase time. Say /time speed 120. That would make crops grow twice as fast, but since your hunger rate is real, in-life time, you will soon have way too much food. Or at least that used to be how it worked... [EDIT] /time speed 0 should only be used if you need to keep it light long enough to get a torch, or if you are just exploring. You can't keep up with food at speed 0 unless you are always moving. [/EDIT]

Yeah, that is suboptimal, for sure. I've just come to the point that I only save absurdly long-lived stuff like grain and preserves, and forever stuff like seeds, then replant whenever I restart. It's not that horrible. Nurse turnips along and they mature in 4 days. It's easy to just get by on porridge that long. Only real problem is when you quit it's spring and when you log back in it's winter and everything in your house is rotted. Just trashes the immersion. I don't know how to address that, though. If someone has been playing non-stop, and it's now fall for him, how can it also be spring for you? Far as I know, same. There are no wild crops, the peat is gone, the minerals are gone, the clay is gone. If you want to progress, you kind of have to spread out into the hinterlands. So far as I know. And again, I don't know that there is an answer to that. A survival game might simply not be applicable to multiplayer, unless everyone agrees to play at the same time.

Certainly a valid way of playing the game if you are looking to relax. I just don't find that relaxing. I keep thinking, "If I wasn't in this stupid multiplayer world, I could be running around picking up nuggets and seeing some advancement." But I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's not a good way to look at it. Maybe panning enough to make a bronze pickaxe, hammer, anvil and a copper prospecting pick is enough. Rush to iron. And by rush, I mean rush. Potentially as early as day 4 if you spawn in a sufficiently large deposit of sand/gravel. But that's like 2 hours of nothing but just sitting there clicking, taking a food break here and there as needed. Not exactly my idea of fun, even if it is effective.

There is a mod that reduces their aggressiveness (https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/1627) and one that removes them entirely (https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/2020) but I'd really recommend that until you learn how to deal with them. you just reduce their damage. Improvised Armor gets you only one more hit before death. Big deal. When you run from one, you are probably going to encounter another and it's death anyway. Tanking it or running away is not going to cut it. You have to learn to deal with them without taking more than the one surprise hit, killing it or making it flee, then healing up, which, thankfully is probably available right there. Maybe the best way is to reduce their damage from 8 to maybe 1 or 2 or whatever it takes until you learn? They are not that bad, but like any skill, it takes some practice and it's a pretty nasty critter to have to have to practice on. It's a pretty simple change, and a common enough request that maybe a configurable mod would be worth it? [EDIT] Another option is, of course, just burning the forest to the ground. Makes it much easier to scout around for copper anyway. Just scrounge enough food or find enough reed roots to get by for a couple days and channel your inner pyro. If you find some seeds and make a rabbit trap, so much the better. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] I'd forgotten that you can also turn up your HP to slightly more than double, and turn down the damage critters do to a quarter, IIRC. That should be enough there, I think. If the wolf's damage is only 2, and you have 35 HP, that's kind of like picking a fight with chickens. [/EDIT]

What do you do on those occasions when you should have copper, but can't seem to find it? When the gods of the RNG just aren't doing it for you? Panning is boring as heck, but on the other hand, by the time I get enough for a pick, I usually have at least a couple tin and often a temporal gear. Alternatively, I can run around for a couple days and maybe find more, maybe not if the RNG is still uncooperative. I've encountered that a lot in multi-player worlds, where running around finds me nothing, and eventually I find a mine shaft that explains it. There's just no way of knowing whether someone has cleared the area unless you find the mine shaft. Not that I know of, anyway. And unless propick was turned on, finding enough copper to just replace your tools is touch and go. With my luck, I usually have to top up by panning just to keep going long enough to be able to mine iron, which is everywhere in massive quantities. So what's the answer? Essentially turn a multi-player game into a single player game by going far enough away from everyone else? Seems to defeat the purpose. Maybe it's something for a mod? You pan enough to be able to build a sluice box so you don't have to just sit there in the water all day, you can spend your time gathering sand, filling the sluice box and collecting what it finds? Still tedious, but at least you are more or less guaranteed something for your trouble, while running around looking for surface copper is not. Maybe if the sand was left behind as tailings you would have some clue where has been explored? Thoughts?

Thank you. I've been trying to figure out why when I package things up they don't look like I thought they should vis a vis domains. So do you just manually create the zip?

I have a little better idea of what's going on, I think. Correct me where I'm wrong. Russia has been repeatedly promised NATO would not expand one inch closer, starting in 1989. Two districts (whatever they are called), Donetsk and Luhansk, have declared their independence from Ukraine. Their complaint is that Ukraine wants closer ties to EU, while they want closer ties to Russia. Putin recognized their independence. So far as I know, they are the only ones. Further, Russia committed to protecting them from aggression. Russia's current demands are that NATO honor their word, and that Ukraine let Donetsk and Luhansk self-rule. Is that pretty much it? If so, I don't see what the problem is. How can we insist that China respect Taiwan's claim to independence if we don't allow it WRT Ukraine? What's the point in NATO anymore? Not to oppose Warsaw Pact, several former Pact members now members of NATO. Invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc? Maybe we could try not invading countries for a while and see how it goes...?

I'm going to wait a bit. In my country, (The US) everything they've said is a lie. No, I don't know until later, and even then, I have to parse it closely to figure out what is the truth. Basically, my opinion is that whatever is released is intended to help the tyrants. Rarely do the tyrants or the anti-tyrants actually give a damn about the real victims of tyranny.

Not much meat on the young ones, but, man alive, are they tasty.

I kind of like the pit kiln. You can place them in your dry moat and just harvest the drifters.

Yeah, that can be a problem for sure, @Pestilence. I think the solution has to be something more like stuff within land claims only "ages" while that player is logged into the world. Something other than what it is now, anyway. Multi-player is really counter-intuitive. And that's just the beginning of the problem. Assuming the point of multi-player is to form a little community, latecomers have to either be given seeds from existing players or go increasingly far to find wild crops and berry bushes. And, of course, surface copper. Once you are canning jam and putting grain in your cellar, the dozen or so year shelf life makes that less important. By the time you could implement the ice box, you don't really need it, and because the ice presumably melts through the summer, doesn't solve the problem anyway.