Thorfinn

I don't play on a high latency server, so can't comment about that. But with a low ping, I don't see those kinds of issues. I suppose if I did play on one, I might have to forego doing things outside at night? At least on the worst nights. High and even very high is still pretty easy if you scope out where all the rifts are before dark, and, ideally, light up the space between where you plan to work and the rifts. Keep then from being able to spawn within seeking range and you only have to worry about the random walkers. And usually not even them, you just slap down a dozen fence sections between you and the closest rift. Maybe sucks to be trapped indoors, but I could usually find something to do. Might even agree to sleeping through the night now and again. I'm still curious how they plan to support 200+ player games...

I guess at core, I don't understand why every game must become a "twitch" game. Games like Banished kind of defined the survival game genre, and had no combat at all. No twitch, all strategy. SdV bolted on a combat system, which was inferior to VS in terms of combat in all but one way -- weapons had special attacks. If you wanted to set "high scores", sure, you needed to be good at twitch, but you could also do perfectly fine skipping combat almost entirely, focusing on growing crops and petting animals. Slower, sure, but Kroebus still sold iridium sprinklers, there are multiple sources of iridium if you really must have the iridium hoe, and Clive (?) sells the base metals so you could build machines and upgrade your tools. You just have a slower development of your farm. I'm not sure what is meant by "machine gunning" spears. I've tried to duplicate that, but if I don't let the crosshairs narrow enough, I either abort the throw entirely, or it misses a critter at just barely out of stabbing range. Other than that, spears seem to have about the same cooldown as any critter has. But even if there's some way to toss the things faster, you are the one running the keyboard and mouse. If you think it's cheesy, don't do it. Same with sprinting backwards. You don't need someone to prevent you from doing cheesy things. A little willpower is all it takes.

Right, and, really, you don't have to flog combat to the point it becomes tiresome. If you try to make a meal out of it, I imagine it does get a little repetitious. But as salt? Spice? Consider how many other parts of the game you could be replaced by a bot. Point to the block you placed the flint you want to knap, tell it what you want knapped, and a bot could easily replace you, and do it quicker. Smithing, obviously. It could easily minimize durability loss on your hammer. Baking a pie to perfection? Finding resin on a tree? What you have is the ability to plan out your progression. That, to me, is the appeal. Every game is at least somewhat different. If you didn't find enough copper your first day, you have to decide how you want to top yourself up to 40. Which will vary greatly depending on your starting location. If you didn't get enough flax seeds, where in this world do you need to go look for more?

Not sure what you would try to display for entity path finding. Many have very different rules. Goats can path up a 2 high space, and bowtorn require a 3-high space to pass. I suppose you could ask whether entity x could path itself to be on block y, though it would be possible that's a very long path to get there. In any event, I don't believe such a thing exists at present. Spawn validity, again a bit more complex. Most animals spawn anywhere that meets the biome requirements, which, in a typical world, means pretty much everywhere, since many of them have ranges like 25-95% forest. The only one that's relatively easy is the eldritch monsters, because they spawn in low light conditions. Don't know of a command, but there is a mod that displays low light levels. It shows areas that are spawnable. Simple Light? Easy Light? Something like that.

No. I don't mind the combat at all. It's rather that the rewards means it's a waste of time. Which was obviously the inten or the rewards would have been better.. Mining is hardly something I'd call "fun". It's just something you have to do to progress. Panning is double-plus unfun, but fortunately you do not have to do it to progress. Is farming fun? Plant a seed, wait a while, harvest, repeat. Not really, but it's what you accomplish, not the click to plant, click to harvest that makes it worthwhile. Combat is way better than those, but since you don't need it to progress... [EDIT] I'd even go further. Apart from the feeling of accomplishment you get from achieving your goals, combat is one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game. It can surprise you from behind the very next bush. Everything else, clayforming, firing, steelmaking, forging, chiseling, etc. is completely deterministic, completely within your control.

The game definitely needs more "biome" based creatures. And someday there probably will be. I just think they have to be creatures adapted to the environment. A highly-adapted forest creature, for example. might be only 1.5 blocks high, 0.7 blocks wide and be able to vertical climb any number of blocks of tree or brachy leaves. A true death from above. Shivers have a climb similar to bears. If you want to keep them in the caves, you can't allow any routes that are only a 2-block climb. IME, though, they are pretty common in the caves. Between fences and torches and a few strategically-placed rammed earth to block missiles, you can make any cave that does not have locusts into safe zones for seraphs given enough time.

I've got nearly a crate full of layers of sticks, and it's early September. I have no idea why. By next spring, I'm going to have close to two crates, and they will all go to waste when I start a new world. OCD, I guess. It just seems so wasteful to just let all those branchy leaves decay.

If you have a calm night, find the nearest thick bushes and go to town. Axe is a tad faster, but not worth it. Use a stick in your hand, or a torch, if you've already topped up the nutrition bars in the food categories you have. Three stacks of sticks by morning, easy.

Expanded Foods adds the spile. I have no idea what all saps it covers, but I know maple is one of them. If pine is not one of them, that would likely be an easy addition.

Without a serious rewrite to worldgen, shivers in caves and bowtorn in forests would be a big nothingburger. Shivers are unable to move effectively in cramped spaces. For the typical cave, just one or two fence sections makes them free loot, as little as it is. Abd forests are already difficult for the seraph, at 2 blocks high. It's nigh unto impossible for a 3-high entity to get through, c.f., elk.

.If you reflect on the challenges presented in Chapter 1, you can build a simple structure to cheese pretty much everything except locusts, which you almost never see on the surface. They are just wandering damage. Bowtorn you can always hear before they shoot, so avoiding damage is pretty easy unless they are to your side, shivers you should only take one or maybe two hits from before you can give them the slip, and that's what poultices are for. Even on Wilderness, where they do 3.75HP, and you start with 10, they aren't a serious threat unless you let yourself get boxed in. And if you can scroll to your poultices while running, they can't hurt you fast enough until you run out.

So as long as I'm not firing lime or flint or making torches, I no longer face a production penalty for sleeping. Good to know.

It tells you where your data is. Since I had no idea if you were on linux or windows, I gave you the link that tells you where to find it on either system.

Were the firepit and cementation furnace updated to use game time rather than real time? I was quite disappointed when I went to bed expecting the stack of torches to be done, but nada. Then I noticed the same thing making steel -- you couldn't speed that up, either.. Pit kilns used game time, IIRC So did the barrel recipes. I never did decide whether crops or skeps or reeds used real time or game time. Basically, the only time sleeping would have been useful, to reduce the amount of IRL time to get vessels and pots and crocks to finish firing, I needed those hours to form the next batch of pottery, and to gather the sticks and grass. So, never useful.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Vintagestory_folder

There's always the third, that the whole point of this thread was to argue that the combat system was boring and easy, so making it even easier seems to be a couple steps backwards. Thing is I think it would probably take quite a bit of rework to do the called shot thing because the hit is determined when the missile reaches the target, not when you throw/shoot it. This allows for the accuracy thing to be taken into account. It also lets one dodge the missile and take no damage, or even step into the path of an oncoming missile. It would seem odd to have the kill shot succeed even if the target moved away before you hit it.

Fair. But I think there is a difference between a 4-player game and the planned 200-player game. Unless you have an enforced bedtime, you can't fast forward time until everyone or at least x% of the current players are in bed. What do you do with the others? Collapse on the spot and Harvey hauls you home? Collapse and be vulnerable to attacks? Collapse but are not subject to being attacked? Just fast-forward time so the crucible with 2500 units of copper that you were just about to pour cools down and you have to expend all that charcoal again? I don't think any of those are very good answers. Particularly for those who are doing something that is not physically demanding, like cooking or clayforming. And an even worse answer is not fast-forwarding time at all, so you get to sit and watch your character sleep for 16 IRL minutes.How do you handle things when one player is in a basic hay bed, so sleeps for 7 hours while another player is in an aged wooden bed and sleeps for 9.5? Everyone sleeps 9.5? No one sleeps 9.5? The 9.5 guy has to stare at his blank screen for 5 IRL minutes until he wakes up? You could obviously create "rust" in skill levels, and I think that's probably a part of the planned status effects system, though I hope it doesn't become the mess that is parodied in that Survival Game Logic vid. But that just takes you back to the same question. What does skill rust do in a game which is not skill-based? Would fatigue cause you to fail at cooking? The UI prevents you from putting ingredients into the correct slot? Or does it turn into rot or something? Baking is a matter of watching when to take it out of the oven, completely immune to skill rust. Unless maybe you change the colors so fatigued people could not see when to take it out? And also change the hover text that tells you what state of done-ness the pie is? Just seems to me that's a whole lot of futzing around for something I don't see the need for in the first place. More of a solution in search of a problem to solve. But I could be wrong. How do you envision this system working? Not to the level of pseudo-code, just broad-strokes. [EDIT] Oh, hey, there was a mod, Ned's Survival something or other, I think, that added fatigue in addition to a bunch of other tweaks, mostly progression based. I thought it an interesting, but sometimes tedious take on the survival game. Seemed everything was gated behind something else, and gameplay became very linear. No idea if it's been updated, (I think it was for 1.18, or possibly even 1.17) but that might be a good place to start to see what kinds of complications arise. Wasn't terribly popular, IIRC. Kind of like diseases and infections and parasites and the like. Seems like a good idea, but almost no one plays those mods.

Oh. It's been a bit since I watched the @Dubbs Malone vid, but I think he had 2 leaps in it. But because the leap is where you are, not where you will be, side-step while sprinting (backwards) makes the leap miss. That's a good point. But crits will be seriously bad in a hitbox system. The game already assigns a hit location, head, body or legs to determine which part of the body was hit. A bowtorn does 5, so any leg hit will cripple. Well, assuming you are not giving the leg hitbox at least 6HP, which seems to defeat the purpose -- being able to take down an animal with a called leg shot. It's kind of like tabletop RPGs. Critical hit systems are wildly popular until the monster rolls a 20.

For a rock not to do an accidental "critical" to a knee, the leg hitbox needs more than 1 HP, right? So 2 HP per leg, times 4 legs, so we are up to 8HP already, How many other hitboxes are we considering? I assume the same is true for seraphs? 2HP per leg, 2HP per arm so a single drifter rock doesn't disable you. On wilderness survival, your total HP is 10, so there's only 2 left for the entire rest of the player character? Turns pretty much everything in the game into a one-shot.

OK. But is it fun? Would you ever try to convince a friend to buy the game based on how it handles fatigue?

I wasn't going to bother, but when I looked at my Notepad++ window, I had wolf-male.json loaded in one of the tabs, so I took it as a sign. Looking at the following snippet from there... code: "seekentity", entityCodes: ["player"], priority: 1.51, movespeed: 0.045, seekingRange: 9, belowTempSeekingRange: 25, belowTempThreshold: -5, animation: "Run", leapAtTarget: true, leapAnimation: null, animationSpeed: 2, leapChance: 0.01, sound: "creature/wolf/growl", whenNotInEmotionState: "saturated" ...you have no idea what you would change to increase the leapChance? How you could change the movespeed to something higher than 0.045 if it were in the seekentity mode? C'mon. I believe in you more than you do.

Oh, sure, that's fine. But good for the goose, good for the gander. A bowtorn gets a lucky shot into your knee, you are drifter chow. If he gets a lucky shot to the heart, you just die.

After a bit of reflection, how about just reducing the HP of game animals? Make it so they do die from one arrow or spear or whatever would remove the tediousness. This would be a trivial mod, off-hand, maybe a 8 or 9 patches? Though it would be nice to add something that does less damage so you could damage a sheep or a pig to lure it into your pen, rather than killing it by slapping it.

I don't know whether or not there is one. Because of the people who play on my server, I don't look into mods that make combat more difficult. But it would be relatively easy to change the AI to do that. I mean, consider the alternative if the feature is as popular as you think and it does not exist. Shoot, it is now! But I'm all for nerfing sprint. Make it work for forward and quartering forward only. Most n00bs would have no issue with that. It's something that only veterans can use to any effect, but, for whatever reason, rather than simply not using it, insist that it be removed for everyone. There are things I consider cheesy, so I don't use them. So...? That's the kind of cheese I hate. I want to be able to kill other things easily, but I don't want my foes to have the same rules.

But that's not true. Whatever new AI gets implemented gets implemented for everybody. You can't just avoid the bear outside your house because he is going to be there for at least 14 game days. You can't just go on with your life. If you like the bear as it is, how do you keep that? [EDIT] To riff off a recent joke, "If you like your bear, you can keep your bear."