Thorfinn

I'm not sure what it is you are not following. Blocking a portal is only really plausible if you rework the way rusties spawn so they emerge from a single voxel. I agree that might seem the most obvious way for them to spawn, but Tyron chose not to do that. Why? Dunno. His desire to avoid his baby being full of exploits is my best guess. Why give drifters rock throwing? Probably to stop pillaring cheese. Why make placed rocks no longer prevent spawns? Maybe to stop you from cheesing your mines? Why have the axles smoke if you try to make supercharged querns? Why remove fish from small ponds? Why get rid of ice elevators? I'm not the one who made those decisions and more, and there are some I would not have done, at least in that way. You wanna be mad at someone for being "that guy"? Take it up with Tyron. [EDIT] The placed rocks thing is really telling if you look at how that was done. It's not just hardcoded for loosestones-*, but it's actually a list of things that explicitly do not block spawns, so you can add things to the list in seconds as people find other ways to cheese spawns.

Don't be that way. I want to be the guy who argues for adding useful features to the game instead of wasting time and effort on fluff.

Maybe someday they will explain the logic behind the choice. It's not just early game, either. I once wanted a collection of all the shells of every color. But each one taking it's own inventory space? Suffice it to say I've never set a goal like that ever again in this game. I looked at how many trips it was going to take clearing out the RA and said, "Nah. I'll leave it here for someone else to enjoy."

You obviously have not played a game as detailed as Dwarf Fortress. Or Vintage Story.

Agreed. I once thought a foraging sack that more or less did this was a good idea. Might still be. But I confess to being much more interested in seeing where the developer's vision is headed. The very limited inventory and storage space, particularly in early game was a design choice. They could have, for example spotted you 10 inventory spaces before you started adding baskets and backpacks.

No. Just reflecting on how the guy who's been on the job for 3 weeks thinks he understands the company well enough that he's right about everything. [EDIT] I should temper that somewhat. Your view of the game is important to what is (or used to be) a first impression. You have enough experience at it that you have an informed opinion. Maybe not grounded in enough depth, though.

So this is more of a virtual "stacking"? If you put a poison mushroom in the bundle it doesn't make the rest "kind of toxic"? Rather that it's effectively turning a slot into a bag that accommodates as many different substacks as you give it, so long as it doesn't exceed the total for that type? Rocks one type, ores another, presumably? Coal and charcoal can probably combine, firewood and peat not so much? If you don't consider inventory management an important part of the game, why not just make the bags bigger?

Wow. Someone using an already implemented means of making the game more to your liking? Don't let that get around. Someone might accuse you of cheating or being dishonest or putting the toilet paper on wrong or something.

The team obviously has a vested interest in having a game that is not chock full of exploits. If they didn't care about the image of their game, they wouldn't have bothered to put in the effort to nerf drifter drops depending on cause of death. They've nerfed spears because they are OP. Why would they bother implementing something that could be so easily exploited, when it would be easier to just leave things be and expect people to learn how to deal with it, or just shut spawning off?

But it's fine for them to dedicate time to making it easier to cheese things? Look at all the exploits they have patched out. Kill boxes are a prime example. Was that creepy, too?

I don't know. Maybe as few as two? As many as 8? Absolute worst case if they have to spawn in the one block around the portal, twelve. Maybe as many as 4 portals within 25 of your "base". Portals were an answer to complaints about the prior spawn mechanic, which I think was a radius around the player. If you plan one step ahead, you can work through the night by choosing your worksite outside range of the portals, and have only have to deal with those that happen to randomly wander close enough to you. Plan a couple steps ahead and you can relocate in case another rift spawns near you. It's not that I'm opposed to change. It's just that I hate the game I love being nerfed to the point it becomes an activity. What's next? Instead of having rifts and rift wards, you have to build a Jonas device that enables rifts?

Hahahaha!

I meant the meat. If you land a 1 kg fish and a 0.3 kg fish, how does that work? Count it in hg, so this is a stack of 13? Count in kg, and anything less than 1 kg gives no meat, so just 1? The standard they are trying to keep to appears to be a max stack of 64.

I can give a good example of exploits from a game I played a bit the last few months, No Man's Sky. You can buy upgrade modules from a trader, and sell them back to the very same trader without leaving the trading screen and make about a 50% profit. Def exploit, yet been around several versions and never patched. There's a similar exploit in Outlaw systems. The game has lots of loops where you exchange easy to acquire money for power. In single player, who cares? If you like cheese, you be you. In multi, which is implicitly PvP, big deal. Particularly since some of those players are running characters they have had for years, while n00bs are, well, n00bs. Fortunately, you can max out everything combat related in a dozen hours or so, at least with a lot of practice and a little luck. [EDIT] Dunno about explicitly PvP, but combat loses a lot if there is not friendly fire.

No, it's about PvP. No way the single scout would put a player down. Castle/bronze in 15 as long as it was full boom. Castle built in 15 with a baby boom if you were planning on a UU attack, so I think that was a 12-ish Castle. I don't remember timelines for rush. I preferred the boom, but against players, you have to mix it up or they use your predictability against you.

Agreed, and they are pretty good about this. Changes tend to be pretty significant and for the better. Like pit kilns instead of fire pits. And they also set expectations well. Make it harder than maybe it needs to be, then relax things. Like all the new rusties, and the bears when they were new, and the currently (IMO) overly-nerfed spears.

Ditto. I must have done thousands of 15-minute drills of Age of Empires and Age of Kings. I never finished those games. It was about getting my rush or my boom down pat.

I think I might have misunderstood you. Are you saying simply, "So what if players can block a portal?" OK. Might be a problem for MP, but we can always boot disruptive players. Well, as long as the admin agrees. If you feel strongly enough about it, you can just abandon this server for another with an admin closer to your preferences.

Nice. I like it. Democracy is a crappy way to run anything. But I doubt most players are that upset about rifts. We have a very vocal group that are, but I think that's like a lot of activism. It tends to be a highly visible minority.

More concentrated ore, not sure about that. It implies areas of less concentrated ore. Aren't there already a great plenty of parts of the map that are more or less worthless? Maybe just change it so that for the low, low price of one TG (or maybe one of those Jonas parts) you can change its destination?

And they provided a very easy way of accommodating that gameplay. Understandably, shutting off rusties also shuts off lore. Traders? Murky at best. I'd just chalk it up to early access, and focusing on making the game Tyron and Saraty want to play. We are free to go along for the ride, mod it to our liking, find another game more appealing, or, ideally, producing our own game that has the features we want.

I like the idea, though agree with the caveat @ifoz mentions. I would not be averse to seeing stretches of road or bridges in appropriate states of disrepair. That's AI generated? Huh. Very HOMM3. It even looks kind of like the Castle town and the Necro town with elements of Rampart and Fortress mixed in. Not even that different for the 25 years since that game came out.

Dunno. How would stacking work? Or does a large fish just generate more fillets? More than two seems a little strange, but whatevs.

Not me. Like another poster keeps mentioning, players will learn to meta out anything interesting in a game. Not necessarily a bad thing, but how many fence sections would it take to negate a portal if that were the case? So now we have to introduce rusties destroying fences or walking through them? Players switch to blocks. Then chiseled blocks. Not tough to see where this all ends. At least with a 25(?) radius, containing spawns from a single portal entails a significant amount of time and material. I think instead of a portal, maybe it would be better to have something that looks kind of like a rift ward, but works exactly the opposite. Maybe it's the rust perversion of the rift ward. Or maybe the rift ward is Jonas' reverse engineering and creation of the opposite effect. Which necessarily shares a lot of the same look.

I suspect you are conflating multiple people here, and largely misconstruing them at that. Most people are not here for a simulator, but a game. Or at least that's largely been the case. Realism is fine as long as it doesn't get in the way of a good gaming experience. Respawns comes to mind. Most people are not bothered by this immortality. The complaint that often appears is that it's not unrealistic enough -- I want to keep all my stuff and not be dinged by nutrition loss and respawn in my safe, secure home next to my comfortable bed. Pretty sure you are talking about me here, but are too cowardly to name names, hiding behind internet "anonymity". Pathetic. But again most people are here for a game. Good game design has a lot of elements, but the one you are demanding to violate here is that a good game should be generally challenging. N00bs generally have a tough time of that first 40 copper, medium, ok at it, the first month or thereabouts, high end often have them by the second day, or even at the end of the first, even with surface copper set to "Very Rare". That's not much of a challenge. What you proposed makes tool production even less of a challenge. At least with default settings, you have to keep track of durability and make sure you don't blow it all before you have enough copper for another pick, and maybe another hammer. Even n00bs would have no trouble finding another few bits to repair a tool head, even if they had to pan a couple blocks of sand. That's no longer a game, but more of an activity. A pastime. If you want that, just set tool durability to max. 400%, I think. Or set ore to Very Common or whatever the highest setting is. Or cheat a tool head in via console or creative. What you propose could be balanced out, sure, by making ores much more uncommon. If you think 4 should repair a 20 tool head, you need to reduce ore spawns by 80% to keep things in the same balance they are now. Which puts n00bs especially in a world of hurt. [EDIT] I feel compelled to mention that I was in your shoes once. If you look, you will see several instances where I was pushing various ideas to make the game easier, including this one. I also championed removing durability entirely. And then I got a few more hours of experience in the game and realized that the balance is pretty good, particularly at Wilderness settings. It's just a bit of a steep and harsh learning curve.