Thorfinn

Absolutely. If you play with caveins, it means a lot of beams and/or fencepost stacks, but you can easily get enough stability back in combat to not need to return to the surface very often. There generally are natural areas that can be slightly modified, too, so long as you don't remove any supporting walls. You will want to try to find something natural though, because they don't have to spawn in the cave you are in. If there's a large cave near you, that might be where they end up, and you have to leave the area to despawn them. I'm on track for that in this playthrough. Morning of May 7 I just poured my bronze anvil and pick. Only got enough tin for one more pick, but the one should be sufficient. The other I'll give to the trader. Don't know if I have iron around me yet -- I only had enough copper for hammer and pick on day 6, but I am in basalt and there is andesite right next door. In my defense, I was getting my farm going, and also have slightly more than 1 storage vessel of honeycomb. That's a lot faster than normal. I'm usually struggling to find cassiterite until well into June. I'm not sure I agree it should be even more grindy, though. There are lots of people who are marginally into bronze by winter. My go to. I'm not as convinced. Why bother giving the new guys the size variability if the point wasn't to make the challenge different than just a reskinned drifter? I'm not saying you should build a cheese farm. Though playing permadeath wilderness survival, I need to do something to shift the odds from impossible to something I can usually accomplish. I mean, that was the point of many of the passages in the RA, but with you being the one who was having to fight hunched over or even sitting down. Agreed. Or even before that. Since the first storm can strike on May 5 (optionally, as early as May 3), you need a pretty sweet start to have 1900 units of copper by noon or so of May 4. Since you play with map, you should be able to predict within 50, maybe 100 blocks of where they are just by repeating the pattern. Otherwise, you just have to get used to judging distance by using nerdpoles.

I know what it means when @xXx_Ape_xXx likes an idea. He posted two hours ago. It's likely already on ModDB.

Playing on someone else's game last night, in a heavily forested region with king crimson and walnut (just so you get an idea of climate) when I saw a black form walking through the undergrowth. I thought it was a wolf so just waited a while watching it when suddenly it takes off after a rabbit, and ran by not too far from me. Close enough to see this was not a wolf -- the shape of the head was completely wrong, and wolf tails tend to be bushy IME. I asked the op what mod that was from, and he said he doesn't use anything that adds creatures. I checked it out this morning, and sure enough, nothing that strikes me as suspicious. I even sperged out and searched for anything that had an "entity" directory, to no avail. Granted. there were several with which I was unfamiliar, except by reputation, but I would think I would need at least some client side information on it. I'll snag the modlist when I get to that other computer, but it just seems weird. Any guesses?

Welcome to the forums, @Spyker100. Most commands of that nature require you to reload the world. If you've already done that, someone will be by shortly to assist you.

I think we just define "cheese" a little differently. I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting a fence around wherever you seek to do battle. Turn it into Thunderdome. Either you kill them all or they kill you. No running away. I don't find that at all cheesy, and would hate to have the shivers nerfed so badly that they are not able to run away from an armored seraph. That was kind of the point of adding them. Slow them down and they are just a reskin of drifters. Someone else wants to cheese it? Fine. I don't care. Makes absolutely no difference to my enjoyment. It's not like I lose my good armor because someone built a boiler. I simply could not care less if cheese is widely shared. If the devs agree that it is cheese, it will be patched out. You are correct about higher tier bowtorn. No idea if that was always the case, and I was thinking about some other creature, or if they have been butched in order to remain somewhat of a challenge to endgame gear. I participate in cheese discussions not to implement any off them, but because I know there are people who don't even hold my definition of cheese.

Noticed that. 16g is no longer enough to run the game smoothy at higher view distances. Even on my "crappy" machine, on 1.19, I was running 1024 without a hitch. Now trying that is a pretty much guaranteed crash, somewhere between immediately and 30 minutes, usually. 512 would occasionally barf. 32g fixed that, at least so far. No, not the 1024; that's likely gone forever, at least on that CPU/GPU. But 768 seems to work.

Finally! Something to do with those eagle and cinnamon ferns...

You absolutely can do that. The base directory has a Mods directory that has only the core three, but you can (or at least could) put all your mods in there. Saves is a little more difficult since they have tried to abide by Microsoft's standard for protected status based on directory structure, i.e., you can do almost anything with stuff in your own user directory, but very little in Program Files. So for saves, yes, you have to use the command line switch. [EDIT] You aren't considering running the game from the stick, are you? Database access at the speed of USB...

Sort of. The spawn location has to be physically capable of them. So a bowtorn absolutely requires a 1x3x1 space, so you are absolutely secure from them in your 1x2x1 hidey hole. Shivers require (I think, but never verified) a 2x2x2 space, again absolutely secure. You also cannot be visited by crawling drifters, nor by (I think) the current iteration of double-headed. You can have a nightmare drifter spawn in there with you. It's just very, very unlikely. Doubtful. If that were the case, there was no reason to make the collision box larger than your seraph's. The fact that the big bad scary things in this game, bears, bowtorn, shivers, etc.,. the things that are typically met with ceaseless complaints, do have such limits is a pretty strong argument that they didn't intend for you to have to encounter them with your butt swinging in the breeze. It seems to me your criteria for cheese is doing something exclusively to safely exploit an enemy's weakness? I don't think I'm taking that too far out of context. But isn't that just intelligent strategic combat? I'm not saying I disagree. I do not enjoy hiding behind a post or 6 and stabbety-stabbing from safety. But the AI specifically flees when reduced to less than 30% of HP, so they are doing exactly the same thing. Surface variants with their 12 HP don't HAVE to flee (but might anyway) until they are reduced to 4 HP, so depending on your weapon choice, they may not ever flee. But you will have to chase the higher level ones, or they will flee to outside despawn range. So don't build a boiler room? It reduces loot to minimal, anyway, so it's not even good cheese. There's no reason you need to exploit it to the point of cheese. FWIW, I'd just give the baddies immunity to heat damage and call it a wrap. I'm sympathetic to that. But I also do not think it is either necessary nor likely. They are only Tier 0. The shivers are the ones who go up to Tier 4 and pierce all but the best armors.

You don't touch landcover scale? Something about how much ocean separates landmasses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the hover text, and I should leave it at 100% I climbed to top of world several times, and mine looks almost nothing like that. First, mine is vastly more rugged. And where there is more level ground, there are ponds/lakes about the size of the ones up by your green trader. There's an occasional one like the one southwest of your pink house. If there were 2 like that fairly close, I'd snag them puppies. Before changing defaults I used to get lots of regions like around your red house. Thanks. I'll give that a whirl when I die in this playthrough.

I don't know. I never cared about spawn mechanics until 1.20. I was primarily trying to figure out why bowtorn were apparently spawning in groups rather than by the each. When nothing else was behaving the same way. Could well be that was a related bug. Just because it gets passed properly does not mean that subroutine is also working properly. Though, again, weird. Why wolves and not, say bunnies? I did check really quickly, and wolves require 50% forest. I have no idea how much you have chopped out, but there are not a lot of places on that map that look like they would qualify.

Are you happy with them? I'm not interested in large oceans, not yet. I'd prefer to retain a high land to water ratio. So I've tried 95% landcover, 10% whatever that other one is called, and, unfortunately, it turns almost every drop of water except for small ponds and a few fringes of some coastlines into salt water. And there's still an insane amount of water. On Wilderness settings, where you can't move source water, this is a bit of a problem. My current playthrough I finally managed to make an irregularly shaped farm hugging one coastline that at its max, is only 14 blocks wide. And that's including the 5 blocks you get for "free" digging a trench and letting the coastline water flow up the shore. If I place one more block, it will be in salt water. (It occurs to me now that I could let the last block of fresh water flow 4 blocks into the salt water, giving me an extra 5 blocks of farmland.) Granted, there may have been coastline cliffs that were fresh; I never checked anywhere I couldn't practically build. But it seems absurd that most coastline where it's fairly level is either salty or has only a handful of tiles of fresh. So what settings work for you? I just want my large lakes back.

Should work. You are building the firepit on top of one of the stacks of firewood, right? Are you sure each is a full stack of firewood? That often happens if one of the stacks is a few short of a full block. The hover text for all of them reads 32? What version are you playing? And the obligatory, are you running any mods?

Welcome to the forums, @Taladar! Sorry I missed noticing that the first time around, and you even mentioned that you were a newer player. All true. Which boils down to the inevitable conclusion that is not the kind of gameplay it is designed for. There's no reason a lantern requires 2 m^2 of window glass and 2 ingots other than balance. It's intended to be hard to spawn proof large constructions/excavations, except on a short-term basis. They even added a game mode that eliminates them. Alternatively, there are mods that extend the life of torches, one of which makes them permanent. [EDIT] Oh, hey, @Taladar, I was just going through updating mods to host a game, and noticed that there's a mod that introduces wooden torch holders. Might want to give it a look. https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/17498

You can absolutely do that, @JAGIELSKI. Easy peasy. It's just not a great answer, as you have to keep your mods updated in every instance. If you want a copy to run on a server still on 1.18, you have to make sure none of the updated mods get in there. This is just a way of maintaining separate instances without having to know all that much about your directory structure. Click on Mod Manager, make sure everything is copacetic, and you are off to the races.

I agree the new creatures are pretty tough. A lot to take in while still learning the game mechanics. They do have an aggro sound, though. Shivers sound something like dragging a stick across a rough concrete sidewalk. Bowtorn sound kind of like a rusty brake rotor, followed by a "clunk". They also have idle noises you need to learn to listen for. Weather and music and the like are all well and good, but default settings makes it hard to hear these warnings. The new monsters make it really important to place a lot of torches. You must make sure there are no floors more than 6 from any torch or 3 from an oil lamp. Figure out now much light is needed after you are done building, or build with you lighting plan already figured out. And either have a good fast way to get the heck out of dodge or to slow or stop the enemies from pursuing. Re: healing, you can grab horsetail pretty safely on the edges of forests. Lots of times it extends quite a ways from the trees, if you patiently scout the edge of the forest.

A small enough "forested" region as defined by the mapgen does not necessarily spawn trees. It just sets the percentage chance for a tree to be generated. RNG can still end up without spawning them. Offhand, I think it only requires a 20% forest, so if you cleared a small copse of a half-dozen trees on an otherwise treeless plain, that maybe the ONLY place with sufficient "forestation" to spawn them. And, yes, that's exploitable, if you take the time to analyze terrain first. It's also possible to find plains where the only place sheep can spawn is one smallish hill.

Where do you draw the line? Was having a "base" cheese? Lighting up your smithy to prevent spawns? Those eliminated risk to you from drifters entirely. Now, granted, a lot of us never bothered building much of anything until winter -- a fence around your farm, a "roof" over the top of your pit kilns, firepits, molds and forge, that was about it. Is anything more than that cheese? Which the creative team just did. People were cheesing the storms by running around lobbing spears. The drifters were not a credible threat. Many of us fought through them in our skivvies -- no need for armor and no point in getting your clothes damaged by silly little 1 HP rocks. To foil that "ultimate cheesing method", they introduced creatures it would not work on. There's no reason you can't disable the new monsters in the storms, or change their spawn rates to whatever you like. mobextraspawn.json. If you find something that appeals to you, bundle it into a patch mod and upload it.

Try it, then. Just change the leap chance from .01 to .2 in (I believe) 3 files in the entities\land directory: female wolf, male wolf and bear. Once you decide what the right percentage is, bundle it up as a patch mod and upload it to ModDB.

Should go without saying, but arenas need not be anything more than you need. There's no need for those who have end-game equipment to have any more arena than a fence around the arena so you can corner the buggers. As is often said, storms are more hassle than they are worth, unless maybe for a completionist trying to build all the end-game tech. But if you are less OCD, at present, all they do is squander your resources. Drifters should spawn in every storm, just not necessarily very many of them. Well, obviously the intent is that you can't run around like you used to, or they would not have designed foes that counter that style. Seems to me it's either to sleep through them or have end-game equipment. Oh, or maybe it's to learn about the weaknesses of those new monsters and find a way to intelligently use that to your advantage? I believe what you are dismissing as "cheesing"? Never fear, if Tyron thinks your strategies are too cheesy, he will change that in a future version. Happened with everyone placing rocks all over the place to prevent spawns, didn't it?

The forge is coded differently than the firepit where you can see the effect of higher temperature fuel. I do not know why, other than to make sure the forge requires coal or higher, to be hot enough to soften iron and steel. There is a reason that the Iron Age had to wait for charcoal. Looking at the code, it is intended. There is no attempt to adjust anything, other than burn temperature is at least 1000. Re: coal being worth it, if you have ore blasting bombs, you might as well if you found some. I wouldn't go out of my way. But there are a lot who find charcoal way too tedious.

Used to be able to do it with a saw.

Nice way to do it, @Michael Gates! If there's only 1 space between your door and the dirt, I suspect you could also sit on the floor and poke out the bottom door, since I don't think crawlers can make that corner. Sitting might even prevent rocks from hitting you, if you made the block in front of the door 2-high so they can't get the angle.

For the nonce, you could just turn down the volume of weather sounds and replace one block somewhere in your house with a ladder or a trapdoor. You will get the "comforting noise of the rain" whenever it's raining. You could even use the mod Accessibility Tweaks to turn down ONLY the rain, if you like.

There is a way to disable authentication that requires nothing more than a text editor. It does leave you wide open if any of those users has an active internet connection. As in, introducing rogue .dlls into your network. If you are going to consider it, I strongly advise air-gapping your LAN from the internet while playing. Check the 'tubes. I'm sure it's on there.