Thorfinn

This. I haven't looked at the code in a coon's age, but the minForest value includes (or included) bushes. Even if you clear them out, it's still pretty easy to have met that condition at worldgen. Brown bears, for instance, are (or were) minForest of 0.2. However, I have a sneaking suspicion the routine has been tweaked a bit.

The only real difficult part is if you die to a sawblade or similar, as they will camp your stuff, and have a longer despawn timer than your dropped loot timer. Maybe a bear, though he is easy enough to draw off, or even kill, now that you know where he is. If you have a backup weapon at spawn, even the sawblade isn't that tough, as you can always build a suitable defensive structure and lure him back to it.

The easiest answer to wolves and bears are your world settings. Turn creature strength down to 25%, seraph health up to 35 (or whatever max is), give yourself faster walk speed. Eventually you will improve enough you start bringing them back to defaults. Unlike Real Life™, you can easily outrun wolves. Bears, too, unless you encounter a brown on flat, featureless plains. Even there, but I can't time my bob & weave unless I'm in max distance 3rd person camera. YMMV. But if you have at least some bushes or uphill grades, it's easy to give them the slip. You can time your jumps so you don't stop sprinting, they can't. You can also take them out at max range, and most of the time, when they flee, it's away from you. You can even pretty easily take them out running backwards while sidestepping (hold down Sprint-A-S for example), using nothing more than a shield and a stick, though a spear (any kind) makes that a lot easier. There are mods that add footfall sounds to nearby critters, but most of it can be handled with situational awareness. A couple dozen ladder sections makes you king of all you survey, as you see behind the bushes, plus it makes finding resources simple.

Yes

Steam Deck in particular, I have no idea, but it does work on laptops, both Windows and Linux.

Welcome to the forums, @TheLetterB123 Interesting. I'd never noticed that, probably because you don't have to play very long before you realize how bad an idea it is to eat cattail roots. Not only because of the need for the next growth of reeds, but also because it takes so much time using a flint knife that it's rarely worth it. But you are right. It maybe should be in the handbook somehow.

Welcome to the forums, @SkyDaz The two most common causes IME are memory and storage. Not all MBs treat all the memory the same way. One machine I have works well until it starts using the second bank of RAM, and it doesn't really matter which modules are in which slots. Turns out it's an undocumented "feature" of the MB. To keep it's blazing 1st bank numbers, it nerfs 2nd bank operations. SSDs, even worse. There are some units out there with way too little cache, They work great until that fills, then throughput drops significantly, with some of the lower end SSD dropping to 1% of nameplate specs. How much of your RAM is in use? How much of your SSD is free? Is your SSD outrunning cache? Do you have a way to monitor those while playing? Are you heavily modded? If you are filling up your atlas, some machines will drag. Badly. Are you running anything else, especially a browser, that would suck up RAM?

Welcome to the forums, @Rex Lindsey Is your system up to snuff? Lots of people with the recommended specs have troubles when there are other things running, especially browsers.

Welcome to the forums, @Sha3der Salty´s Manual Scraping

With international commerce, it sometimes takes a while to process. It kind of depends on your credit card company. Most will process within a couple days. How long have you been waiting?

Look at the reply immediately above yours, @Nightless

So I've heard, though protein is almost always my first nutrition bar filled, and it's always with more or less useless bushmeat, with an occasional redmeat or poultry drop from a wolf kill. I'd vastly prefer to escape the tired old trope of the boss fight entirely. Since CRPGs and FPSs came out, it's always been the same old same old. "Oh, look, a boss fight." Hard to believe no one has come up with anything different over the course of 40, 50 years.

No. Saw it in the patch notes a while back, but never checked it out. "Never suffer a bear to live" is my motto.

Sure. That just happens while you are waiting for other things to finish up. Strictly speaking, you don't need any more than a ladder to hang a block in the sky that you can hang a windmill from. But what else are you going to do with all the time? Sleep? I just don't do chiseling, because I suck at it, and don't care to practice something I don't find fun anyway, and my primary build material is whatever is local. Sure, limestone and chert and andesite are great for accents, maybe some design feature of malachite or copper in slate, which I also think looks nice, but the main build material should be local.

The real value of linen sacks is that it makes limestone or chalk almost irrelevant. Yes, if you skip from handbaskets to leather backpacks, finding limestone is a big deal. It's 12 slots, doubling your inventory space. If you build the sacks, it's only another 4 slots. No big deal. Besides, it takes 2 full rotors, 720 fiber, to run a helve hammer. About the same for gambeson, about the same for the boat. The 80 for sacks is more or less round-off error.

Agreed. The OP was complaining about how long it took to achieve those things. If you are OK with playing at a slower pace, then you would just skip the sacks.

That's intentional. Bears despawn after 14 days, regardless of what you do. Wolves, too, IIRC. The reason was to prevent players from essentially removing bear spawns from their worlds by making a zoo.

It never lets you pick them up? As in it never registers it as a drop? Presumably they disappear on a server restart, and the blocks you dug are still missing?

Nice! Didn't know you even had a channel. What do you use to record and edit on Linux? Not that it really matters, I guess. I don't have the gift of gab. Intentionally or not, all my content would be without commentary. [EDIT] BTW, Wanderlust would be just too far from David Bowie.

As carefully as I strip wild crops, yes. I'm pretty sure I'd notice them regenned if I had spent any time in the area. [EDIT] I think it's probably a side-effect of playing without a map. You have to basically commit the area to memory.

I don't play with map, so can't say. I doubt they appear on the default map, though.

Guess I'm the odd one out. Most games I make only 3 handbaskets because I can usually get at least one linen sack on the first day. I think heavy scouting for flax is essential because of all the flax you need for gambeson and sailboat and windmill sails. Everything else can slide some if it has to, but if I don't get a couple stacks of flax into the ground by mid May or so, it's hard to make the rest of the timetables work. On occasion, I find a trader who sells them for one gear, which is great, because you can sell them back for one gear. Though on my server, I allow you to add one more linen and two plates to turn sacks into mining bags.

This was the only way to accomplish many effects via modding (or whatever we called it back then) of Baldur's Gate and BG:TotSC. That would break the verisimilitude for me. What's so special about me that the only place the world changes is where I am?

That kind of reminds me of how when we were in school in the '70s, we were told that within 50 years, an ice sheet would cover New York because of global cooling. That's like next year. That would be a Mickey Spillane twist there, I tell you. No one would expect it.

I like that. It works as expected until it hits a certain depth (probably so deep you can't get to the surface without drowning), and then takes its real form. Or until there are aquatic rusties, it's true form could be the diving hell.