Thorfinn

I never had much luck getting Better Ruins to not drag my system down. Similar performance hits whether I'm on my i5/980 Strix or my i9/4070 Ti. I'm not running out of ram or SDD in either case. And both are running 1024 or greater view distance. As cool as Better Ruins looks, I just can't.

If. Turns out they are not. You need them not to establish a home but to create a spawn point. I play permadeath, so have no need of them apart from repairing translocators, which I largely find pointless, at least until I have the map to the RA. And usually then, too. Seems they never take me anywhere I have any interest in going. I could save-scum, I guess, but just feels too cheaty. Then, yeah definitely look into Homo Sapiens mode. I'm just saying that I think once you get a handle on how food works, you will find it's less a survival game and more a cozy builder game. I'm not sure the gears are, either. I think maybe it used to do that. A few bread, a temporal gear, and miscellaneous other stuff.

Oh, BTW, @thatnub0541, welcome to the forums. Sorry to hear about your troubles, but as said above, I think we all went through that phase. I forgot the other thing you can try until you get good enough at the game to survive those attacks -- set your death penalty to not drop anything.

Welcome to the forums. If you are only playing for the survival, turn off storms, temporal stability, rifts, etc. Remember that drifters are your principal source of temporal gears, needed to set your respawn and fix the translocators. I think it won't take you very long to realize that the survival aspects of the game are not as challenging as you now do, and you need something to liven things up.

A third option would be to go into creative and gift yourself a temporal gear. Obviously, setting respawn was supposed to be more difficult than in that other game. Before I'd cheat a gear into the game, I think I'd start a new game with easier settings. Turn you HP way up, the damage taken way down, disable early spawns, etc., until you get good enough at the game to get a gear for yourself.

tryOnlySurface means just that. It can only spawn on a surface block. Basically, if there's sky above. minForest is minimum forestation. I don't know of a way to check what the forestation level is, other than you can maybe try to guess based on other spawns. Maybe wild hives? Re: spawn radius, that's someone else's baby. I've never cared enough to find out. FWIW, I've never seen anything spawn except during a temporal storm. You might be out of luck with minForest creatures if your skyblock didn't have any (or enough) forest. You might try pulling view distance down as low as it goes, but later spawns are pretty slow things. Like game months slow.

Go to .\assets\survival\entities and open whatever critter you want to know about in your favorite text editor/viewer.

Oh, the increased hunger in early game is the goal. The nutrition bars drop much slower than satiety, so you want to increase hunger rate so you eat more and increase your HP faster. The shield is just irritating, getting in the the way of seeing anything. So I usually use a torch in off-hand. That's also why its a good idea to take a little fall damage now and again to increase hunger rate. If there were other tricks to increasing hunger, I'd probably do that, too.

I vacillate on the shield. Yeah, its nice to have the chance to avoid damage, but the shield doesn't increase hunger rate, does it?

When running into a lake, make sure it's at least 2 blocks deep. So far as I know, you are the only dangerous thing that is slowed by 1-deep water. Learn to time your jumps to land in deep water.

Huh. Hadn't even occurred to me to see whether helm and greaves incurred the penalties. If I'm grokking this, I could equip steel greaves and helmet, and retain the minimal disadvantages of gambeson, while getting additional benefits if the attacks were against head or legs?

Yeah, definitely this. I posted in several topics about nerfing wolves before I realized how easy they are to more or less ignore. See the following. This, for sure. If starting in forest, I generally shoot for 4 poultices before the second basket. Then, it depends. If I have several slots left, I'll fully fill the poultices before making the rest of the baskets. Not that it matters in the OP's case. He evidently already has all the hand baskets he needs.

The other thing you might want to do is turn your view distance way down. This is more of a technical detail, but time does not pass (in terms of your stuff despawning) unless the chunk your items are in happens to be loaded, which depends on your view distance. But yeah, lots of great suggestions here. Another might be that if you create firepits, you can take back the firewood, and have 2 slots to store stuff. So at the cost of 4 dry grass, you have the same storage capacity as 24 reeds. And if some of the stuff you are storing is meat or grain or veggies or even ore, and if you made a cooking pot or a crucible,place it on the firepit, and you can store up to 5 stacks of stuff. I'm amazed you managed to pick up both copper and tin. That's awesome. I get that it's lucky RNG, but noticing that the tin nugget was something different is not typical in a new player. Running is your friend. If you are on the flat and level, yeah, brown bears can outrun you, so you need to know what you are doing to get away from them, but everything else in the game can be outrun. Equip improvised armor. You will likely survive a couple of wolf attacks if you are wearing it, and probably a black bear. And it's only firewood and dry grass. Welcome, BTW.

You shouldn't. There were issues with it, so it was removed. Various people have tried adding them back in through mods, though.

Not sure what you asking. Have you checked out the road map? (Top of the page, under Devlog.) [EDIT] As an aside, possibly what you are asking is intended to be addressed through mods. This is among the most mod-friendly games I've ever seen. No need to reverse-engineer the data files or anything like that. The devs supply a thoroughly documented API, and are very active in updating it. What would really help would be a Mod Requests forum. Most of what appears as Suggestions would be more appropriate as begging those who create mods to consider adding or changing [this feature]. I get the resistance to using mods, but, seriously, that's one of the important design features of this game. If you don't care to tweak the game to the settings you like, whose fault is that? [/EDIT]

Sounds good. Still prefer to see it in a mod first, but seems like it would be a good fit, eventually. You should add legumes to your nitrogen-fixing crops. Also, brassicas are common in cover crops (planted at or a week or two before harvest) for corn fields in our area. And alfalfa will eventually slow down or even die out if too much nitrogen builds up in the soil. I think the game does this by default -- all crops (even fallow) essentially "fix" whatever nutrients they do not use. The improvement of soil in situ is an interesting one. Not sure its too realistic, though. Yes, it's been the standard for land management for the last century or so, but we are finding out that it's wrong. The interaction of hooved animals in large, dense herds always on the move appears to be the key. The three-wide strips is a good add. I realized later that if I plant the 8-around-1 differently, it's only 4 scythe swipes for 2 tiles, instead of 3 for 2 in the base game, but the three-wide strip makes it more player-friendly. Incidentally, you already kind of have to do crop rotation. Either that or fallow. You can't just plant the same crops in the same field and have any kind of productivity.

Oh, sorry. I always run through the combinations when I'm trying to write on signs. But I did that recently enough that I (mis)remembered it as Sneak.

Nice! Not really a greenhouse per se, just that it's warmer underground. When I start taking cold damage, I usually just find a convenient cavern to explore rather than building a fire. If you play with gravity on dirt, took at the blocks way deep in some of those vertical holes. The ones that get enough light turn into grassy blocks, the ones that slide too far off to the side remain dirt. [EDIT] Or did you mean "such that it is sufficiently warm" instead of "that gets the effect of a greenhouse"? Interesting question: Might one be able to place a glass block in that hole and also get the benefit of a greenhouse, reducing the depth you would have to go? [/EDIT]

Sneak-R Click.

Welcome, @Hex-of-Hearts! Very nice. I like it a lot, though I would fall off it all the time. And I play permadeath...

It does happen from time to time and I have no idea why. I just come back to my computer several hours later and see I died ages ago. So far, the handbook pause has never failed. Or at least I wasn't AFK long enough to notice it wasn't properly paused.

So far as I can tell, all pests and blight would do to the game is nerf the scythe. Instead of planting in 8-around-1s butted up against each other, you would separate them by paths or packed dirt or other non-spawn blocks. In the current game, you can harvest two plots with three scythe swings, under this suggestion it would be 3 scythe swings per plot. Or 1 scythe and 2 knives, whatever trips your trigger. So long as it doesn't spread across the path, who really cares if you lose a plot here and there? The big deal is the vastly worse harvesting. [EDIT] Or, I guess, if you are willing to lose 2 of the 8-around-1s (there's got to be a better way to say that) you don't have to change a thing. Now the pestilence would have to jump at least 3 full blocks. But it does make planting much more tedious, for very little benefit. Again, how about making this into a mod? Maybe it would add to the enjoyment that I'm just not seeing. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Been a while since I played Banished, @LadyWYT. It's not even installed on the machine I've had for nearly a decade, so it was before that. Might have to fire that up again. It's been long enough that I will have to figure most of it out again, apart from the first few minutes, which were always the same game to game. Thanks for the reminder. [/EDIT2]

Have you looked into Sticky Dirt?

That means you need to be a homebody and pay closer attention to your farm instead of going out exploring and mining, but how would that be more fun?

Sure, but "balanced" means different things to different people. My "standard" farm is 33 blocks long (just over half a stack, so I don't have to count it out), so a "row" of crops is 91 plots (baseed on the 8-around-1 design). That makes several stacks of grain. Even at current drop rates, you would rapidly be swimming in food at even 3:1 "loss" during ramp-up. Which seems unrealistic in itself -- the grain is the seed, right? The only ones that should be "lost" are the shriveled grains, which might not germinate. Which is not going to be anywhere near a third of the crop. If we want to make the change for the sake of realism, we shouldn't probably toss out realism just to make it "balanced".