Thorfinn

There are already mods that do most of that, @Brandybuck. I doubt it would ever be anything official, as it contradicts the lore. It specifically says the animals have become more aggressive, and that drifters do what they do...

Cool. Did you think fewer than 1 try per chunk for iron was too much? Or that the iron deposits too small? Iron in particular is something I almost always find only by caving, not prospecting.

Not that I know of. So far it's been mostly just try things and see what happens. That's my preferred way to play anyway. Most of what I have determined by trial and error turns out to be in the release notes.

That's amazing! When I saw the title, I couldn't imagine it in VS. Fine work!

I've been pondering it overnight. I don't think the coding is going to turn out to be as difficult as I first thought it might. The concept of the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings came to mind, specifically Jackson's interpretation. You can hear the drifters sniffing the air, trying to smell you out. If you happen to be in range, (which is greater, and through more blocks for the higher level drifters), they switch to that screaming, screeching sound they make. And then the sound of scratching away at dirt, stone, whatever is in the way... [EDIT] And then you hear something moving around on your thatched roof, sniffing... [/EDIT]

Welcome, @Deaderpan. And what do you do with it? Does it change your voice when held? Is it just decoration? Maybe playing it in otherwise comfortable surroundings (i.e., at the very least, not underground) restores stability at a faster rate?

A horror game is really difficult to pull off. Ambience helps, a lot, but it's not sufficient. There has to be an actual threat for it to be scary. The first night, listening to drifters moaning one dirt block away from you was scary because you know how easy it was to dig up that block. Once you figure out they can't do that, you just learn to ignore the sound. It goes from something that can engender fear to some pathetic background noise. Drifters really, really need the ability to dig through walls. Maybe half as fast as a stone shovel, so you have time to try to figure out where you need to reinforce. You can go through cobblestone, so can they. I'd even give [EDIT: deep drifters] half copper pickaxe speed going through stone. Quartz or similar would stop them, but not higher drifters. And then the types of drifters that spawn on surface would be dependent on phase of the moon. On the nights when there is no moon, nightmare drifters appear, and can dig through any stone, but are stopped by metal plates. Or maybe only silver or cold iron, for the eldritch-inclined? If you are not this side of frantic placing blocks in front of the guys digging into your panic room, and eventually leaving through the back door to run for your life, it's not really horror. [EDIT2] Obviously, I'm talking about something more than a content mod. I'm imagining watching the blocks get cracks in them, like they do for you, though not as quickly, and you could "repair" those cracks with the same material, or maybe mortar, If too many start destroying the same block, you will probably have to back up and place another, hopefully stronger block between you and them, and get ready to start repairing that it it's not enough. [/EDIT2]

That's why I suggested a mod. Passive+ is not likely to be anything anyone uses for very long. And it almost completely eliminates the danger of caving if the drifters and locusts just ignore you. Might as well play in creative mode. Might I suggest one of the mods that removes the rock-throwing from drifters as an intermediate? You can easily outrun drifters. Heck, you can easily run through drifters. Learn to fight them at a distance, with almost complete safety? [EDIT] Would hardly surprise me if the developers keep an eye on which are the popular mods. There are several dozen mods to nerf drifters, and many don't get 1,000 downloads. On the other hand, mods that butch drifters are much less common, but have an order of magnitude more downloads. It's easy to see which is the more popular. And since the same is true with wildlife, it would not surprise me in the least if that's one reason they keep wolves and bears more or less as is. People are already modding the game to make them more dangerous. [/EDIT]

Don't be disheartened, but I doubt that's in the cards, other than through mods. The game's vision is something based on horror, and if you are never in danger, it's pretty hard to even be afraid, let alone the edge-of-your-seat feeling they are trying to achieve. I think the recently-added Homo Sapiens mode was the official answer to the people who didn't care for the game as intended. Furthermore, you won't be able to complete the RA anyway if you can't deal with a few drifters. The RA doesn't even make sense without them. Neither does most of the lore. Seriously, before long they won't even be a speed bump. You will be looking at a trunk full of temporal gears and jonas parts and think, "Gee, I don't remember killing that many of the buggers."

Sure but 10k is only a couple days, 3, maybe 4 if you run into absolutely lousy terrain and have to go around. The location of the RA appears to be a strong function of your exploration -- if you run short view distances, find everything you need quickly, and don't go through translocators, it can spawn almost on top of you. There used to be mods that tweaked drifters into something similar to passive+. It's just a JSON. Look at the differences between sheep and drifters. Or set their aggro distance absurdly low, like you have to be in melee range for them to do anything but wander around and worship cats or whatever it is they do.

Or spawn rate increases as distance from original spawn point, up to some limit, maybe? And as depth increases, obviously. New players don't tend to travel very far anyway, and those who absolutely, positively MUST have purpleheart or ebony should face some kind of a challenge. There's probably a reason they spawn so few seeds.

Yeah, you don't need the firepit. Even if I see a dead rabbit on day 1, I can't afford the inventory space. Meat is worse than mushrooms. At least I can eat the mushrooms if I need the space. Until I need to smelt copper, I generally only build firepits for storage. But I could have sworn torches used to be just 1 grass.

It should give you ten minutes before anything despawns. When you set up your game, set the death penalty to don't drop items. You can go into creative and get your stuff back. Just throw it on the ground and pick it up when you switch back to survival.

Has it always been 3 grass? I could have sworn when I started (shortly after you, I think) my first game version was just 2 grass, 4 sticks, 2 non-sedimentary stones. 'Course my first game was more like a handful of berries and a half-dozen dirt. Figuring survival games meant you needed to wall yourself in at night. By my second game, I realized all you really need is 2 dirt blocks and enough food to not starve. (No, that's not true anymore.)

Nice, @sushieater! Doesn't make much difference to my builds, as they are usually 6x6x6 or 6x6x7 (6 high -- still confuse the coordinate order), so I can't use that information to any effect. At least I can't think right offhand how I can access those other blocks. I'm already reaching past the blank space around vessels and firepits and the table. Not that I really need any more storage -- fully decked out, there are 21 trunks glued to the ceiling, and 20, I think, below my main walkway, which is the tops of storage vessels. Plus a bunch more... [EDIT] Oh, wait, maybe I can reach the one on the bottom I couldn't figure out. Just replace the blocks my firepits are on with fenceposts. Then I should be able to reach that back one. Oh, but wait, there's more. The obligatory water block could be around the fence(s), freeing up one more space. If I were willing to make do with fewer than 4 firepits and 4 ovens, I could do even better. [/EDIT]

Mine was fresh and new. I tried it on an old world that I had completed RA on, and it was fresh, too. No, the default is player, not admin. Is that what's throwing the error? And well removed from anything explored. If you are savvy enough, you can find an area that has not yet been mapgenned, and use the absolute address for it. Then the landscape will be continuous from block to block. Otherwise, you are going to have to go in and manually tweak thousands, tens of thousands of blocks where the new mapgen meets the existing.

It really depends on what you want to change. For example, a common complaint is skeps take too much resources. To change it, just open up skeps.json in your favorite text editor (mine is Notepad++) and you see [ { ingredientPattern: "LLL LLL LCL", ingredients: { "L": { type: "item", code: "cattailtops", quantity: 2 }, "C": { type: "item", code: "clay-*", quantity: 2 } }, name: "skep", width: 3, height: 3, output: { type: "block", code: "skep-empty-east" } }, { ingredientPattern: "LLL LLL LCL", ingredients: { "L": { type: "item", code: "papyrustops", quantity: 2 }, "C": { type: "item", code: "clay-*", quantity: 2 } }, name: "skep", width: 3, height: 3, output: { type: "block", code: "skep-empty-east" } } ] You could change the quantity for "cattailtops" to 1 and now need half as many. Or say you wanted to substitute something easier like dry grass. Torches use dry grass, so open up torch.json, and find out the game's name for it (unsurprisingly, it's "drygrass") and add a recipe for skeps that use dry grass and clay. Or dry grass and dirt. Or whatever trips your trigger. You could also see in the torch.json that "quantity" is an allowable trait in the output line, so you could easily set it to make an entire stack instead of just one, as unrealistic as that sounds. Or how about a mod that lets you make terra preta with dry grass and rot instead of compost? Or make compost by adding rot, dry grass, and some vegetables? Don't like nails and strips for chests? Fix it. Want to be able to make baskets or rope with grass? You be you. Packed dirt is packed...dirt... so the output should be halved? It's your world. Add a recipe to disassemble fences? Piece of cake. Open up some thing that you can disassemble (hand baskets, for example) and see how it's done. This is NOT best practices and it will get overwritten by the new release when it comes out, so you will want to go through the Wiki and set up your own workspace/domain once you catch on, but tweaking JSONs to your liking is so easy even a caveman could do it. Should go without saying you need to back up all the JSONs you fiddle with so you don't have to reinstall just to get back to vanilla.

Slacker. The bottleneck is always hanging them to age a bit. If the game warden sees a dozen deer hanging in your machine shed, he's going to get a bit suspicious and want to inspect the tags.

I've seen Tyron say several times that the vision is to have an experience that can be easily modded to one's tastes. Thus all the mod integration. Heck, every game "ships" with a packager so pretty much anyone can bundle up his own JSON mods. Granted, many of the suggestions are beyond simple JSON editing, but not that far, and even if you aren't a coder, there are open-source mods that do something quite similar that one could learn from, and, depending on the license, even copy almost verbatim, changing the details like materials, workstations, etc. [EDIT] That's why all this, "But I don't want to use any mods!" seems slightly off-base. You don't want to play the game as the designer(s) intended? [/EDIT]

Expanded Foods.

Primitive Survival.

Pretty sure they will eat darned near anything. Tiny velociraptors.

There's a mod that does that. At least with dry grass. No idea if it takes lilypads or other plants with little to no game use.

Pretty sure there's a butchering mod that does approximately this.

The command works on a new world. I can even create a second one at a different location, though I have no idea if it erased the old one or not. My guess is it's probably hardcoded that it can only be completed once. [EDIT] The command string I used was /setstorystrucpos resonancearchive l[] true which I think is what you have, too. [/EDIT]