Thorfinn

Oh, I think I see. If you are looking at a copper node, and click on a button, it adds an appropriately colored, titled and iconed waypoint? Didn't it do that before? If you had something in hand, and you right clicked on the node, it would add a waypoint? I think it was something like Ctrl-Rt-Click? Or maybe that marked everything the same way? I agree, that would be nice. I think that's what something I had installed did, though...

What do you mean? The first non-air node the mouse cursor is pointing at? Not critical, just curious. What would that do that marking your current location does not? And that's easy. Just go into the game, hit Ctrl-M (or whatever you have Enter Macro Editor set to) and assign whatever key you like to: /waypoint addati star2 ~0 ~0 ~0 pinned teal Stuff! Check out the wiki for some other options, like if you wanted to just leave the default dots, or the color, or whatever.

Personally, the release could not have come at a better time. I've stayed on stable release. Maybe I'll start bleeding edge if I begin modding. IDK. Downloaded 16 last night, and the drifters' attack took me by surprise. I'm looking forward to seeing what other changes I'm going to need to make to my "standard" gameplay. I don't know if there have been minor tweaks to mapgen, but my first 3 days ended with a tad fewer copper nuggets (not quite enough for hammer and pick), and no tin, so can't "skip" the copper age, but I got a whole lot better loot from cracked vessels. Probably just the RNG. Time will tell. Re: mods, I'd much rather play the game as intended for a bit before I add them back in. I do miss the HUD clock, the waypoint mods, and CarryCapacity, though. Hadn't realized just how much I think of those as core.

Depending on how big, pleistocene aurochs were well over 8' at the shoulder, weighing in at over a ton and a half. By the time they went extinct in the 1600s, they had shrunk to the point an average adult male was a "mere" 6' at the shoulder.

1.1.2 on 1.15.10 Start a new game with all mods enabled, there are no crops anywhere I could find. Exit, disable Wild Farming, start a new game, crops as normal. If I'm understanding the logs right, I generated somewhere north of 1800 chunks looking, while in the restart, there was one within a few tiles of the origin.

Fair enough, @Yondu, burnout is not the right word in my case. And I'm not at all nervous about it. Just sharing what I think are the elements that make a game interesting to me. The kind of thing I would like to see more of. For example, the challenge of food can burn bright for a day or two, depending on the gods of RNG, but regardless of the RNG, within a week, that concern has been largely or completely solved, and you are to the point of beginning your winter grain storage. When it takes that long, I often find myself more or less skipping copper age and going straight into bronze, because while wandering about in my quest for seeds, I've found enough tin, too.

Not necessarily. There's no reason ALL copper ore needs to have surface nuggets on mapgen. It's not like people are going to be stripmining in search of copper, so the ore is still there. And don't fret about realism; in the real world, frost pushes rocks to the surface every year. It's why you have to clear the all the rocks out of the hayland every year or two so you don't break out too many sickle sections. In the real world, one would hardly be surprised to find a flint stone very near to where you found one last spring. And in the real world, sticks on the ground replenish themselves every thunderstorm or stiff wind. Just do something like critter spawning. Once per day or week or whatever, spawn an ore a nugget above a copper vein if there's not already one within, say, a 3 block range. Same with tin, or whatever, and get rid of the prospecting pick, something there only because it makes the game playable, not because it's at all realistic. Realistic would be way too grindy, taking a sample, firing it in a crucible, doing an assay. It would work out much better in the MP world to do something like that with crops, too, so late joiners aren't completely screwed if the current players won't spare a seed or 4, or aren't actively playing when you join the server, and you have few options but to starve because everything around the origin has been stripped bare. That said, I don't know what all is running in the background. If you are doing a lot of farming, that might be sucking up a lot of cycles with nutrient and water depletion/replenishment. So far as I can tell, trees appear to have no change through the day; they must just be updated at night or something. But it could well be that adding new crop and rock/mineral spawns on top of everything else might bring a computer to its knees. And I agree you don't want to do that with ruins. Once found, those cracked vessels do not regenerate. I should have put together an outline rather than just rambling, but I'm too lazy to go back and organize it into something that flows better.

Right. In single player, it's easy. Much less easy in multiplayer. Sometimes I see a short pillar of packed earth or tilled soil or something and know it's probably marking copper, but you never know how many surface nodes were just collected and not marked, or marked in a more subtle fashion, i.e., 17 tiles S and 5 tiles E of the marker, or even if it's just a dummy marker. Particularly if you are joining a game that's been in progress for a while, the surface nodes are often non-existent. Then it's almost always quicker to just pan for it.

Very cool! Great job! Adapt an idea from Terraria. If a meteorite's destructive radius will hit a chest, storage vessel, basket or other placed storage, it auto-converts to an airburst.

A lot depends on what kind of a "challenge" you want to spend your time on. Day 1 food, for instance, is often feast or famine. Either you have scads of berries and crops or there's nothing to be found. You can trap meat overnight when you stop exploring anyway, and if you stay put for a few days, you can easily grow enough food. If you can find enough to tide you over a night or two, it's pretty much no "challenge" after that. The tool durability "challenge" isn't even that. It's not hard to wander around randomly, looking for surface copper. (Assuming you are not on a multiplayer server and someone just walked around and collected it all. Then finding copper other than in exposed cliff faces can be an issue.) It's just grindy. Lather, rinse, repeat. Worse, because you have to go full nomad to go from deposit to deposit, pretty much any base building you did earlier is going to be wasted. What I'm saying is that what is being called a challenge is IMO more tedious than anything. That said, I don't know how to go about adding content that would make an engaging game without involving a lot of grind. Maybe if it were more of a voxel city builder, where you build a village that attracts NPC smiths and cattlemen and growers and such. But if the game model is one of a lone wolf, durability is one of the only ways of giving a goal. It's not like building a nice house, or a leather sofa, or pretty much anything else is that engaging in single player. Might as well build a small hovel out of cob for all the benefit you get out of having a lavishly-furnished mansion.

It only takes 24 reeds to make an 8-slot basket. And you get 12-slots by making a container (don't recall the name) from blue or fire clay. From a space POV, the baskets are better in that you can stack one on top of another getting 16 slots in the same space as you would otherwise get only 12. For my money, though, I really like the clay storage vessels. Just get yourself a couple slots worth of peat and build a temporary safe space over a clay deposit and make vessels. Or mine a bunch of clay and take it to wherever home is and craft there. The advantage to forming (but not firing) at the clay site is you can stack unfired 4 high, and each pot takes a bit over 1/2 of a stack of clay, so you end up being able to carry over twice as many if you fire them wherever you are using them. Not that you need more than a half dozen of those before you get chests. Lugging home 2 stacks of pots and 2 stacks of clay should be more than enough.

Oh, I wasn't confused. I thought it was most likely just materials from some other site or sites repurposed. Although I was kind of hoping that maybe there was something like that somewhere. I've run into some really big, I don't know, churches, for lack of a better guess of what they might have been, and rebuilt them trying to remain faithful to what the original building might have looked like. Was just thinking I might need to do some more exploring to see what else I might not have seen. But maybe I have seen most of the ruins types out there.

More I think on it, I don't think it needs to be that ambitious. Just pick some arbitrary number like 100 and make that distance around the spawn point a wolf-free zone. No hostiles spawn there. Well, apart from drifters in caves and at night, but obviously one can avoid them by holing up at night and staying out of the caves. No, it would not guarantee copper, but that should be enough to learn the basics anyway, and n00bs don't think of it as wasting time on a tutorial world.

Pro tip -- don't plant 'em too deep. That looks like a big ruins. Apart from theatres or stadia or whatever those square things are, I don't think I've seen anything like it.

Thanks, all. That's kind of the conclusion I reached, too. @Hal13, interesting. Never even thought to look to see how deep the water was. Quite possible that a deep cave right offshore explains the difference. Starting to wonder if it might not have something to do with the number of non-solid nodes in the columns around you? Like if you are atop a large cavern, that's more unstable? Which is why somewhere with mountains is inherently more stable, with many nodes above sea level being solid? That would at least be useful. If it's just random, I'm not sure it's worth leaving on. Way too much terraforming for too little benefit.

What I'm encountering is issues with initial spawn point. Many of the people I've tried to introduce to the game are not very good at combat, nor at mousing skills. (TBH, my mousing skills leave something to be desired, too, though I'm pretty good at combat.) The fact that they start bare-naked, often within spittin' distance of a wolf, the worst surface enemy in the game, sometimes on the Handbook screen when they die because they have no idea how the game plays, is something of a downer. Like @Hal13says, it's more a problem of people not getting the spark in the first place. IMO, it would be better for new characters to spawn into a reasonably safe area (i.e., not wolf domain) like the middle of a plains area, sparse trees, and let them learn the game. Like I said, I'm pretty decent at the game, but it still can be an issue when there's a wolf right behind a small bush who gives no indication of his presence, and you get hit once before you have a prayer of responding. Yes, you can run away at 1/2 health, only to run into another wolf, or you can try to nerdpole your way out of danger, but definitely not something someone new to the game should have to deal with. This "safe" area should not allow one to get past copper, or maybe even into it. Definitely the better metals should require travel into areas with increasingly worse monsters/mobs. I don't care if your game progresses through high carbon steel, titanium, vibranium, light sabres, whatever, those should require exploration in increasingly challenging environments.

I'm not asking for any top secret algorithm. Just if I climb to the top of a ridge, is there some rule of thumb that the valley I see will be good or bad? Quite often anything close to the shoreline is garbage. But not always. If I'm in the middle of a broad, flat plain, the gear might be turning slowly. Climb one hillock, the gear speeds up, climb another a few dozen blocks away and it will turn the other way. I'm just not able to come up with any patterns. Or was that the idea? You have to go there to find out? Thanks!

@Pamela Wild, just use a macro (Ctrl-M). I have F9 set to "/waypoint addati star2 ~0 ~0 ~0 pinned teal Stuff!" Just press F9 and I have a marker. Wait, what? Anywhere there is surface obsidian, there are obsidian blocks below? I've never even bothered to look...

Awesome! My son will be coming over for Thanksgiving tomorrow and we will have a chance to give it a whirl. I was really, really hoping for Thursday rather than Monday. Thanks!!

Sure enough, that was it. Thanks for the help!

Game works fine. The mods aren't. Wondering if the .NET I'm using needs to be updated. Or something like that? Very encouraging to know it can work, even though I have not managed it yet.

And can I do anything about it other than migrate to 10? Or more likely just do without? Most (all?) of the mods I've looked at work fine on Win10, but not on Win7. I don't really use all that much, but on those rainy days, or when I'm deciding if I have enough time to form another storage vessel before daylight, t's nice to look at the HUD to see what time it is rather than pressing "C" to get that same information.

Haven't spent a whole lot of time looking at it, but I think it would be easiest to just change the damage dealt to something you can manage rather than making them passive. In 1.15.9, assets/survival/entities/land/wolf-female.json line 123 says, [code]damage: 8,[/code] I have not tested it, but seems to me dropping that to 1 or 2 would make it much more survivable, and teach you how to battle them. For my part, I don't find them much of a challenge unless I'm still completely naked, and in that case, I can usually outrun them, and definitely outswim them. Note, you would also have to change the appropriate line in wolf-male.json. Oh, since you have never done modding, be sure to save a copy of the files first so you can undo things if they don't work out...

I'd guess he'll be a bit put off by that. I had no idea he was colorblind because he conceals it from everyone but his wife because he does not want people to treat him as disabled. If I do it, I'll have to do it on the sly, that it's for me, not some special treatment for him.

That's what I figured. I was showing the game to a friend that I did not know was colorblind, and while he can distinguish between various tints, the tints of some hues look identical. I tried to show him what clay was on the worldmap, and he could not tell where the light green stopped and the grey/blue began, even when I took a screenshot and zoomed in until there were only a handful of the map pixels on the screen. I tried tweaking some of the .pngs and found that was not the answer. I could change the color of the clay forming, not the map color or the block color. And I could not find where that node color was defined.