Thorfinn

I might be misunderstanding the idea in the OP, but I think he meant that if there are 5 open faces, using the pick on the stone itself drops the relieved rock, not the handful of rocks that you would otherwise get. So in your example, the stone would not automatically pop off, but only when you tried to remove it with a pick. Then you would get back the stone. The downside is that it seems one would potentially be able to relieve about twice the current number of stones with a single pick. If the goal was to maintain natural rock as a premium building material, this doesn't do it.

It populated by June 1. Don't know how warm it was there. Probably around 2000 north of spawn. I created a new shortcut to the exe, just in case I messed up a config or something, and bees seem to be working more or less OK. Wild hives still seem a bit slow, but everything else is working fine. In my apiary, they are showing 228 flowers, or whatever the number is. Now end of June and I have almost a full barrel of honey, so doesn't seem much has changed

I was wondering the same, but that's always in the spring, and default start. Not sure whether I'm far enough from snow, but I can see glacier ice within 256 blocks. For whatever reason, this time the wild hive is seeing 77 flowers that I had in by late 3 MAY, it's now early 7 MAY, still no block info about swarming.

The in-game handbook is probably right. Bees eventually work. It's just wild hives sometimes take forever. Once you get your first domesticated skep, everything seems to go the same as the Wiki, except that flowers are capped. Which is for the good. In 1.17, you could set up hives that would be harvestable almost immediately.

They can take a while. The most important variable is supposed to be number of flowers within 7 tiles in any direction. But that is now capped -- I'm not sure what the formula is, but I've seen both capped at 64 and capped at 35, no matter how many flowers are in range. I assume number of skeps is still a part of the formula, but I'm starting to think that adjustment is POST cap, so putting more than one empty skep in range slows things down. From experience, it appears to be by a lot, much more than the 3 it used to be. I'm not convinced the Wiki still has correct information. I didn't see anything there about what appears to be a hard cap, and I've spent several days in early game next to a large pop wild hive with 35 flowers, and it never gave the message that they would swarm. The Wiki suggests that they should swarm in under a day, but that's not what I'm seeing.

I just consciously decide whether the improvement in speed and durability of a given copper tool is worth the effort to collect 20 nuggets and spend the time working it. If it weren't, I would not use copper, but stick with stone. For example, making firewood is not usually a task for copper, chopping trees often is. If you didn't prune most of the leaves, time-wise, you are usually better off sticking with flint unless it is a tree with few leaves, like acacia. Now that stone knives have doubled in durability, it's really hard to justify a copper knife. It's a bit over twice as durable, and only 20% faster, which means for the most part they just aren't worth it -- it turns something that would require 5 whacks to only 4. By then, apart from skeps, you already have harvested most of the cooper's reeds you need, which are the major slow stuff for which the speed boost would matter; forging a scythe is a much better use of time and materials. Indeed, if you value your time, you are almost always better off sticking with flint knife tech until you can make an iron one. Yeah, point being there's more of a balance act than just metal "disappearing". Tweaking speed or durability would be a better means of accomplishing the same end, IMO. And would give a reason to make some tools at all, other than for bragging rights.

Is it a huge problem to have nuggets reduced to providing 4 units instead of 5, and more or less keep everything else you suggested? Chisels are awful for "waste", as are knives and shears, but if you are getting back about half an ingot when you smith a knife, that puts you appreciably ahead of the current 5 per nugget. Only things that have little waste, like anvils, nails and strips, etc., would cost more in terms of how much you need to mine/pan. I'm guessing there must have been a reason to just go with waste. Maybe it's as simple as knapping often leaves you much of the stone as waste, so what's the difference? But I'm just guessing. I suspect the reason for not casting knives, etc., is to lock some things behind enough metal for an anvil. That and it is fiendishly difficult to cast anything that will hold an edge. Most metals I can think of are far too brittle or weak without forging.

I've only run into it once. Ever since, stability is just another factor in whether someplace is an ideal place to set up shop. When I remember, anyway. I don't spend all that much time there anyway. I think it depends on what one thinks stability is. If it's a measure of how "close" the Rust World "plane" is to the seraph's world's "plane" at that point in the multiverse, I'm not sure why a new sofa should affect that. If it's more of a psychological thing, it makes sense. Pulling up a chair in a scenic location should help recover your "stability". But from what I know of the lore, I am leaning much more toward thinking it's the former.

Medieval lets you make waterwheels, though they are quite resource intensive in their own right. But at least then you can get by without a flax farm as far as the eye can see. If you actually intend to do anything with the metal, Helve Hammer Extensions will save some sanity points. But if you are playing vanilla, I'd just leave that ore in a chest until I needed it. At most, I'd use only as many bloomeries as I need to keep the helve hammer in business knocking out iron ingots for an eventual steel industry. Which, really, is maybe just 4. Or that's about as much tedium as I can tolerate. I can cook and store food while I'm waiting for the ingot, and, well, that's about it. If I start building, I soon forget that the reason I'm building is to fill time while waiting for the helve hammer to finish.

LAN parties weren't driven by piracy, though. Some games required 1 CD per 8 players, some 1 CD per 3 players, some allowed client installs, and I recall several that were, say, 30 day installs. But I think you are right. The option of on-line gaming made that model too unrealistic. It was too easy to Hamachi what was intended to be a concession for LAN parties into outright, well, piracy isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Like @Locklear says, it's not that bad. About $15 a throw in quantity 4. That's a whole lot better than a lot of games in the late '90s where they were $50 each, and each needed it's own CD.

Oh, you mean 4 real-life hours, not 4 in-game hours. My mistake. Even if you use coal to fire the blue clay, that takes a minimum of 12 in-game hours. I just could not see how you could accomplish that by noon of day 1 without getting at least a crucible and mold as loot. Malachite? Are you in limestone? Be sure to mark the spot. I frequently find Bountiful copper in limestone under malachite bits. Not sure whether I've seen Bountiful anywhere else. Must have, but nothing comes to mind. @Jackal Black I just meant that I run from everything except rabbits and sometimes chickens. I, too, tested speeds in a world made in creative and switched to survival so I could run backwards and watch what happened. You can figure out how to time your jink to avoid the rush, but it is inapplicable to a real game, because running backwards, you cannot avoid the bushes, trees, slopes, etc. that stop you and allow the critter to catch up. So in-game, you just have to trust that if you execute well, you are making headway, then turn around at the top of slopes to watch their movement patterns to figure out their weaknesses. Bears are particularly easy to lose in thicker bush tree cover because while you change your path slightly to get through, they have to slow down to crawl over bushes, and there are a lot of places that are too narrow for them to navigate at all.

Oh, I am. Permadeath makes me a chicken. Is that still true? I thought that was patched. I don't think that's still the case, though at one time I thought I was sure it was. They may both be faster on the straight and flat, I don't know, but where you can outpace them is dodging around blocks and timing your jump properly when ascending slopes. Watching them, I'm pretty sure they both run into the block, stop, go around or up, start again. I kind of wonder if their pathing has trouble if you are out of sight, too. For whatever reason, it's not too hard to give them the slip by bobbing and weaving through trees. I have to agree that's a pretty good one to tweak. It doesn't do much to change gameplay, other than give you some margin of error. Holy cow, how did you do that? I've never built a copper tool that fast. Found one, sure, but never made one. I know it's possible to find enough coal and copper nuggets by then, but how did you get the crucible and mold? Lucky drops from cracked vessels, or panning? Or is it a ruins find or something?

Oh, ok. I figured rho meant something other than density, because most of these types of equations in engineering are for STP and you have to adjust from there. I was actually amazed the equation was that simple. There's generally an empirically-determined eta or alpha or mu or f or something embedded in the formulas/correlations to account for efficiency or properties of specific materials. But this is generalized to the point it works for any fluid, from microtorr helium to molten neutronium. As such it's not very useful in this case, is it? It's just an upper limit that is in no danger of being breached, kind of like the quart of gas in my chainsaw is not going to be getting anywhere close to E=mc^2. [EDIT] The main reason this piqued my interest is that I'm doing some engineering on an off-grid wind power application, and according to the documentation the manufacturer was supplying, power output did not increase with the cube of the wind velocity or any exponential equation at all, except for a very narrow band near v=0. Indeed, it looks more like the limit of an infinite series, converging on a constant. Maybe a log function. I was hoping that maybe there might be some way to take advantage of the cubed term instead, but that is clearly not the limiting factor in real-world wind power applications. [/EDIT[

If you want to keep an area drifter-free, and are going to be gone for more than the 2 days your torches will stay lit, it's arguably worthwhile. Drifter drops are too pathetic to waste time on. Placing rocks is a pretty serious time-waster, too. I'd think the only time it might be worth it is either in caves under your base so you don't have to listen to the moaning all the time, and on the top of a salt dome, where you basically do it once and then dig out the block under it. So long as placing the rock is not too clunky, I'd consider it. Well, as long as it doesn't interfere with regular placement for knapping. I wouldn't want anything that makes that more involved or time-consuming. [EDIT] For example, if thrown rocks became placed rocks on the nearest open surface, sure, why not use that? [/EDIT]

Oh, hey, while I'm thinking of it, you can also place Wildcraft plants (berry bushes and poison plants) into your trenches and they will slowly kill off foes. At least they used to. OK, maybe not bears. Not sure. But they used to take out drifters and wolves for sure.

Have you tried Primitive Survival's traps yet? How would you improve on them? I agree it's a good idea. I just wonder what you would suggest the game do differently.

Just finished a half-dozen one day runs without using ladders, and I'm getting roughly what @Streetwind does. 25-43, typical value somewhere around 29. The other thing I noticed is that it is vastly more difficult to find clay or peat without getting to an elevated position, though I suppose that is what the map does for you. I don't recall the map color varation being as obvious, though. It's also a little more difficult to stay down a HP or so in order to burn through more food. Natural drops are either too short or too tall. Much more controllable to just fall off a 5-high ladder now and again. I also wasn't thinking through the fact that Wilderness has higher hunger rate. With standard survival mode, I think you can't get much above 3 HP bonus by dawn, no matter what you do. At least I'm not sure what else affects hunger. Sprinting, being wounded, something in off-hand. Anything else? That I can do in early game? [EDIT] Urk, just had a bad start. I didn't get out of extremely uplifted gravel/sand until about 4pm, and ended up with just 8 seeds. The only positive is that it is in medium fertility, so it won't cost me time to go find that. Is anyone else finding medium fertility soil much less common? Or maybe it's just my perception? I've started grabbing a stack of medium fertility as soon as I find any because it seems otherwise I have none. [/EDIT

Cool, @Cosmic Hermit I take it rho is efficiency? Which is presumably empirically determined? Three blades is standard because more would involve both heavier bearings and "fouling" from vortex shedding? As opposed to, say, water windmills that need a higher torque, so fill more of the swept area with blades? Do you happen to know why it's 3rd order? Wind resistance is a 2nd order function, and though it's been a while since I took diff, it seems to me that was derived relationship. It looks to me as if this equation is just the integral of wind resistance, but I'm not seeing right off-hand why that should be so. Or is it just as simple as summing up wind resistance over time?

Looks like all you need and then some. Cozy. I spread warming huts like that all over the place so I never have to worry about freezing in winter. I try to make sure there's a crock of food cached under the floor (qualifies as a cellar), a bowl on the floor, a firepit already stocked with firewood, an unlit torch on the wall, and usually a firestarter leaning against the wall inside. If I accidentally fall in freezing water, I'm not far from safety.

35-40ish in a day's scouting is a much more normal number. Yes, it involves ladders. Climb up 10-20, depending on terrain and your ability to memorize where things are, look around for where the flax spawns are (sometimes you can even spot a copper deposit), climb back down, collect your ladders, and run from flax to flax taking all the flax from blue up. It also involves holding down the run key (or in my case, hitting the macro key on my gaming keyboard that I have programmed to toggle the run key). Plus jumping all the time, making it a little easier to see copper and flax you might have missed. It also is a laser focus on the important stuff to get done, and refusing to get distracted. Ruins? Bees? Terra preta? That's all stuff for another day after you get your crops in. But I have hundreds of games I've played only the first few days, trying to figure out the best way to optimize the early game for my goals. Just like sometimes there are 3 ripe flax in one stand, and 2 in a stand a handful of blocks away, if you play enough times, sometimes the random numbers align and you you get sky-high finds. And, to be fair, there's probably a lot to getting used to seeing the slight difference in color/texture. The difference between how "x" model grass and "#" model crops appear at a distance. But like @Streetwind says, that playstyle is not to everyone's liking. [EDIT] Until you get used to taking in the scene at a glance and finding stuff from the top of your ladder, if you are on single player, you can just hit "H" and move the handbook out of the way while you spend some time looking at things, seeing what they look like from this perspective. I also noticed this last playthrough (a well-above average 83 seeds by dusk) that stage 2 flax also drops seeds. Maybe 25% or so? If I knew that before, I forgot it. So take 'em all. Not like you are going to just happen to be coming back through when they are ripe. Another useful thing is as soon as you start accumulating some food, put an unlit (so you don't fret over jumping into water) torch in your off-hand, to increase your hunger rate. It's pretty easy to end up with 5 or more bonus hit points your first day, so long as you can burn through the food fast enough. By end of day, it means you can tank a hit from any bear, which is pretty nice. If it's just black bears, you might tank 2 hits. [/EDIT]

For basic drifters, the comedy of a shield and torch is a fun change of pace.

OK. Not really. When I find a Very High reading in something I want, I do a cursory look to see if there's any veins sticking out of the cliff faces. Then look for any caves. If not, that's fine. I dig straight down from there hoping to encounter a vein of ore. If not, climb back up, move over 15-20 blocks or so and dig another vertical shaft. It rarely takes more than 3 or 4, and that's much quicker than spelunking. Granted that does not work for things like gold or silver, but you don't need those. Nah, I don't like drifters just because killing them is useless. They have absolutely no loot I'm interested in. At least bears have the decency to drop hides and fat. It's not that I'm afraid of caves or anything. They are just almost always slower ways of making progress in the game, unless you are looking to find all the lore in this playthrough, or you really want to find a translocator.

I mostly go into caves anymore only when there's a Very or Ultra High reading of something I want. Because of the size of iron deposits, I'll check even Decent if that's the highest reading I find. Now that I've seen all the lore I'm likely to see in this release,and because there's always enough to do without heading off to some random translocator somewhere to a map section to end up in another part of the world that is also generated randomly, I find them next to useless. I can't come up with a very good reason to go into caves most of the time. If they did collapse, I would be that much less likely to bother with them, and definitely not if I had to start carrying around posts and beams to shore things up. I'm all in favor of variety. As a player, I'd prefer variety that makes me more likely to engage with a game's features than variety which makes it less likely. It would definitely add to variety to have 1 in 100 sheep be toxic to eat, but it would just mean I wouldn't bother with sheep anymore.

How does this improve the game experience? I'm not trying to knock it. I just want to understand what part of the game is lacking that you think this improves on. Don't get me wrong. I can see you've put some effort into the idea. And maybe it would be the next big thing. I guess I lack the imagination to see what it is this fixes.

[EDIT] Had another thought about how the weirdness works, and tried it out. Sure enough found it! Stand on top of top of the ladder you are building. Happens when you climb all the way up and look around. Now look down and add a ladder section below you. Ouch! Descending the ladder does not remove the ouch!, but backing up does. Working hypothesis: this makes you enter the block, and because of when the check for collisions happens, descending the ladder leaves you inside a block. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Those new ladder sections appear to lack the boundary that keeps you from entering them, too. If you climb back up the ladder and step forward, as happens when you climb with W instead of Space, ouch! [/EDIT2] [EDIT3] Wonder if one could exploit that to kill drifters before it gets patched... [/EDIT3]