Thorfinn

Bragging rights. I can't imagine myself ever doing it again. Even starting in the center of a redwood forest with a couple stacks of steel axe heads, it still took an insane amount of time, and I didn't end up using any of it.

Instead of stairs, just use the slabs.

It's not really that hard, but as you point out, not really worth it other than bragging rights. If you set it up right, all you have to do is light the fire, climb up the rope ladder, remove the rope ladder, remove one non-gravity block (hay would be quickest) so all the wood stacked on top of it falls into the hole, plug it up. All told, 3 seconds or so. I think you could probably obviate the "plug" step by putting a sand block on the very top of the firewood, but I've not tried it.

Case in point would be things like torches or cobblestone or stone paths. If I had to make torches one at a time, I think I'd just find a less tedious activity. (At that point, it doesn't seem like its really a game anymore.)

Yeah,. pretty much. I've seen 2 of the lore things that talk about the wolves going aggressive. @Streetwind says there are 3 now.

I used to think it did. What I think is more likely is that there's a whole lot more to see, so the boredom doesn't hit as much. It doesn't seem to take any longer to go from home to my current mine whether I'm jumping or not.

Whatever "stability" is, Jonas parts can be used to ameliorate it. There's no reason that needs to be the only thing that brought about the downfall, nor that whatever else is happening needs to have some real-life parallel. Rather than some mundane cause that can be mitigated simply by piping clean air, I think it would be better to go with your original idea, where there's something quasi-magical that cannot be understood (thus the horror part -- something well understood is less scary than the unknown), but that in he past/future/whatever the rust is, they found a way to mitigate the threat, at least temporarily, using, say, protective suits, and a combination of gears, temporal gears, metal parts, and Jonas parts. Then, yeah, you can operate in that environment so long as the energy from your temporal gear lasts.

Marble is amazingly easy to find, in massive quantities. Just type /gm 2 ...

Or, and just a thought, we could accept that whatever it is that the lore is talking about that made the wolves more aggressive also affected other animals? Heck, something affected the pigs in recent history, between 1.18 and 1.19. The horror builds!

It's not a die-hard purist thing, though. There is absolutely no reason you could not choose to play regular old standard mode, with its 50 block radius respawn. Build your starter home near spawn (probably outside the 50 radius so if you are not spawning near where the pack of wolves who killed you are) and once you have your first temporal gear, then relocate somewhere to build your dream house. The only reason the spawn mechanic is an inconvenience is that people insist on traveling a month of Sundays looking for their ideal location before building more than a 2x2x2 hole in the ground. This game is really not like that other game at all. If you have not figured out the tricks of battling wolves and bears and drifters, it's going to be really difficult to just go around with crappy armor and count on holing up at night. And that's as should be. If you make the basic seraph too durable, there's little point to the handful of HP you can build through nutrition, little point to building better armor, unless you also increase the damage of wolves, drifters, bears, etc. to compensate for nerfing the threat. At which point, why rebalance things in the first place?

Pretty sure it's on open. Tested this several versions ago, by making a backup copy of a world, opening either a chest or a vessel, I don't remember which, exit and load the backup world, and there was a different drop.

It's probably just the utility. By the time you can start making your second lantern, you have (or can have) ingots stacked to the ceiling, . Also, while your pick will break after a few hundred or a thousand blocks, the lantern is forever.

Must have been a mod I used once. I was pretty sure I did that several versions ago. Or was that some other game? Oh, wait. Maybe that wasn't me...

I'm a little, no a lot hesitant about adding progression-skipping drops. I suppose that's just a personal preference, but it's the reason I didn't use Better Ruins mod for a long time, until they also released something to nerf the loot, though there is still way too much placed loot for my tastes. Why worry about lighting the place up with lanterns when there are over a hundred torch holders free for the taking within a day's radius of your home. And filling chests with fluff seems a little pointless. You only have so many inventory slots, so most one-off stuff I don't have a real use for just gets tossed. I guess putting some bauxite or limestone or sylvite in a chest here and there would be OK, but I'd probably not pick that up, either. Maybe the limestone. Rockhounds nave a term for most of that loot -- leevarite. Leevarite where you found it.

Fortunately, if you told just one new person every day from here on out, and he told just one new person, and so on, in a little more than a month, there would be no one on earth who didn't know about this wonderful game.

Materials used -- Is it based on rarity? Color? Do accent colors add, like they would in real life? Well, if the accent goes with the main color. How would we define garish or tacky accent colors? Does a blue tile roof go with a bauxite house? If I double the thickness of walls, doubling the number of blocks, does it double the value? What value would you assign a house made of salt? Does it matter if it's a wet climate or a desert? Shape -- Right. If you look around a high-buck subdivision, there are all kinds of house shapes. How does the algorithm decide which shapes are artistic? Chiseling -- Maybe not the best decision. Not only is it a lot of work, it can add a lot of visual appeal. High craftmanship is big bucks in the real world. But it's hard to objectively define in-game. Furnishings -- Right. How much do they help? Shells? Butterflies? How much furniture? When does it stop adding and start subtracting because it looks like a hoarder lives there? Size -- Based on footprint? Blocks of flooring? Volume of building? Do balconies add? Decks? How much? And as you note, figuring out what comprises a building as opposed to just a room is a bit problematic, particularly when the deck will be outside the house. How about view? Shouldn't it matter whether you are looking at Lake Louise or the tenements across the alley? But how could you algorithmically determine the quality of the view? How about the yard? Bonus for fruit trees or crimson maples? A pond in the back yard? In real estate, they say, Location, location, location. Probably not here though? But is there at least a downgrade for living next to the butcher or tanner or the pig pen? It needs to be fleshed out a lot more or you might as well just generate a random number and call it good. --- EDIT: I'm not trying to discourage you. Fleshing out something like this is very challenging. But it needs to be done before it can be coded.

Depends on what you mean by that. It oxidizes in seconds, forming a very thin protective coating of Al2O3. But unlike the various iron oxides and copper oxides, it does not spall or pit the metal, so it is stabilized at that. [EDIT] The metal is passivated. That's the word I was trying to come up with. [/EDIT]

Sorry. Got nothing more to suggest. Most of the guys who could probably answer this hang out on the Discord. Have you checked there?

Agreed. Don't know to what degree mods like Villagers does this, as by the time I've explored all the content for this release, there's often a new one, so I don't get to check out many mods. If you have ideas for how to algorithmically define "impressive", it wouldn't hurt to ask people creating that mod if they would like your suggestions. For example, how could one tell between artistic chiselwork and just randomly hitting it with a chisel enough times to get a bonus to "impressive"? How would one know whether you used a certain block or blocks for aesthetic purposes, or just to use up something you had sitting in a chest?

Doesn't Windows Defender scan the data that programs are trying to write to the SSD? Or have you set an exception? Yeah, you had said VS was installed on the SSD. It just was not clear whether your user directory is also there. If you didn't change it, likely it is, but I have seen laptops where that was not how it was set up.

If you play with map, crank view distance way up, as high as your machine will handle, and let it mapgen. There's usually plains not far from any starting location. If you don't play with map, head in a random direction (though south is usually a good decision) and you will probably find one by nightfall. Maybe not as large as you like, but then again... On the positive side, with more cliffs and mountains, you are much more likely to spot outcrops of desired stone and material. Some games it's been the only black coal or gold or marble or halite that found. (Of course, once I found it I didn't keep looking elsewhere, so there's that bias.) My experiences fiddling with vanilla settings have been underwhelming. If you just can't get past it, the suggestion @sushieater made is probably the way to go, though I have zero experience with the alternate mapgens.

Hmm. 800 blocks is not very far. To check whether its a throttling issue, turn graphics down to low for a while and see. You can also try pulling view distance down. You have plenty of free space on the drive? Your user directory is on the SSD, too? Your antivirus isn't trying to scan things as they are written? One of my machines is very similar to that, though it is a desktop, and it runs well on High. 1024 view distance, so I think it's probably not that. My laptop is much higher end, and it struggles from time to time, my guess is as the GPU overheats. Never really cared that much, because I prefer to play on my desktop with much bigger monitor.

Is there a difference whether you plant in water or land? Not that it really makes much difference. I'm not going to be harvesting a whole lot of roots until I have an iron knife, just the occasional; lone singletons to make a formation better suited for the scythe. When you say 3 stacks, are you talking about 192 reeds, or are you talking about some scythe-based formation of sets of n by 3 reeds?

Don't know if you are committed to Steam. GOG has Space Rangers, Space Rangers 2, Space Rangers: Quest and Space Rangers HD. The last is on sale now for $2.24. Don't know anything about the last two, other than for $4, I figured they were worth trying, so I bought them a couple days ago. For trader games, I like the Patrician series and the Port Royale series. IMO, II is the best for both. For a slight change of pace, both Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and its sequel (the name escapes me at the moment) and The Guild are related and fun.

I'll have to look at my notes at work tomorrow, but off the top of my head, you get more rows above the hive than below. In Survival, you can plant flowers every other Z, for a total of 4 layers of flowers above and 4 below. You also get 8 flowers N and W of the hive, and 7 S and E, if I'm remembering the directions properly. With over 1500 flowers, the honey production is nearly instantaneous. As soon as it counts flowers, it's ready to harvest. But even with just 500 flowers, it's pretty darned quick. Also, and here is the exploity one, if you put a populated hive in your pack slots, then replace it, it will determine the population after 1 game hour when it counts the flowers in range. That means after it swarms, you go from low to high population and swarming in 1 game hour. Really nice for getting the initial hives going. Just pick up the hive after it swarms and put it back wherever there's an empty skep in range. In your case, the number of populated skeps would be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, so you if you can click reasonably quickly, you can populate every skep in your apiary in under 5 game hours. Thus why I need so many reeds... [EDIT] Don't know when it changed, as I have not been exploiting the mechanic, but it looks like in 1.19, you only get 5 rows above and 5 rows below now, so a total of 5 rows of flowers max. Times 256 flowers per row. Somewhere north of 1250 or so? That's still a lot of flowers to collect. Around 20 full stacks. Thinking about it, that's probably the change I first noticed in 1.18, when I had to make sure the empty skep was closer to the wild hive. Used to be 7 or 8 below, but now I was having to build a platform to get flowers and the empty skep close enough to the wild hive to swarm. [/EDIT]