Thorfinn

@Owktree, did you check to see if they can get over that with snow, like animals can? And I've definitely had chickens escape a single fence when they end up climbing on top of each other. Doesn't happen with bears, apparently? @Ewil, thanks, headed to check that out now.

If you are willing to use a mod to do that, I recommend Apache's Accessibility Tweaks. Each sound in the game can be turned up or down. There may be some settings that could be a little "cheaty", particularly the light level, but if you think some are, just don't use those.

Unlike real bears, at least in the game, your garden vegetables are safe. I thought maybe you were headed in a different direction -- that bears in the game are not relentless murder machines. Early on, yeah they were a little discouraging, but before too long, you figure out their strengths and weakness and don't play to the former. Yeah, my animal pens look like something out of Jurassic Park but bears are supposed to be good at climbing. I don't even know how aggressive bears are -- a lot of the times I "encounter" them, they are sleeping, or sitting around looking off into the distance, and I either decide I could use the hide and the fat, or we just go our separate ways. But the lore of the game has things about animals acting unusually aggressive. Or it used to. I assume that's still there, though TBH, I usually skip lore as soon as I realize I've read that one before. I've never figured out how good bears are at climbing, but a 3-high fence has never let me down yet. Put your individual pens a couple spaces inside that and Bob's your uncle. It could be that polar bears can get over three if you have snow on the ground. Don't know. But then I'd just either go with 4 high, or maybe some overhang, or maybe even try polished stone. I'm pretty sure there must be some way to contain them -- many have talked about their menageries, and how 1,18's despawn after 14 days ruined their zoos.

Why would one need to dry dehydrated berries? I thought you dried them in an oven. Has that changed in one of the newer versions?

Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I thought it was always low now. Guess I'll have to start checking. And, yeah, plant early, plant often. Even on medium fert, you won't be bringing in flax until late July. If you don't have medium fert or better by then, take your seeds and, like the plover or the house marten, seek warmer climes in winter. You can grip it by the husk. Couple games ago, I had extraordinarily bad luck and didn't find medium fert in 5 full days of sprinting in more or less one direction, probably somewhere 15,000-20,000 blocks south of spawn. I'll go a couple days just accumulating seeds, but on the third day, I'll plant them all on any soil near an obvious landmark that I can find, counting on finding more to put on better soil later.

I have not figured out the rule on when the wild hive recalculates swarming when you place more flowers. Like @Streetwind says, I'm not sure it always does recalculate. In the current game, I placed more than 2 full stacks of flowers in range of one that said it had 20-some originally, and then built a couple fairly small charcoal pits (3x3x2 and 3x3x3) and the wild hive still had no message, but it had registered all the flowers. Built a pretty large (6x6x4) charcoal pit, figuring the skep would be populated by the time I was done. Nope. But at least it gave me the message it would be less than a day. May 6th, it finally popped. I had time to collect all the charcoal pits I had built, though I left several stacks in firepits for later retrieval because I could not carry that many stacks of charcoal, only having 2 linen sacks and one hand basket at the time.

Yeah, except that Ctrl-A means run left, which sends you off a cliff. It does me, anyway.

That's weird, all right. Were you watering them or just counting on your irrigation ditches to supply everything? Reason I ask is that the row that is at ~50% moisture level absolutely should have been slower than the row with ~75%. Or did you just wait for both to be mature, instead of harvesting it as it came in? Pretty good luck finding terra preta, though. Three full stacks. If I find a single stack in a game, I feel pretty good about it. My current game is June 2, and I have found a total of 11 blocks from 2 different deposits. (Yes, usually it's half or 3/4 of a stack per deposit, but not in this game...)

Don't get me wrong, @dizzychosen, its not that it's a bad idea. The number of seconds and burn temperature could be tweaked until it does make sense. It's more realistic if every time you relight a firepit or forge, that you add at least some kindling. It's pretty hard to light coal with just a torch. My grandfather used to start a fairly small wood fire (a bit above kindling level -- sticks maybe the thickness of an adult thumb) before adding coal to his forge. It's just a level of complexity I'm not sure adds enough interest to the game to be worth the hassle with every fire.

Or any of the equivalent USB input devices? Mine has been sitting unused for the last year or so and when I saw it towards the back of my desk, realized that could be the answer to running out of hotkeys. And it works extraordinarily well. Of course, you have to either move either your mouse hand or your kb hand to use it. I've found using mouse hand is probably better -- easier to find "home keys" when bouncing back and forth, and allows me to, for example, add waypoints or send pre-defined chat messages while moving by pressing only one button. I even found a way to connect it onto a Win7 box (Elgato Stream Deck is Win10+ ONLY) I had been using a gaming mouse, but don't have one on every box I play on, so was kind of a pain -- sometimes having to push a particular mouse button, sometimes using the console command.

No. The water block has to be on the same Z as the farming block.

When I first started, yeah, it was a big deal. I guess I don't mind it anymore, or even give it more than passing acknowledgement. It does not take too long before you look at that before you start building just to make sure you are in a good region. Quite often, you only need to build a short distance away. Either that or you don't bother to live wherever you build, or even to bother building at all until later in the game. Unless it is apocalyptic, you don't really need to shelter in place, and with a little practice, not even then. If it's only a place to stash the stuff you want to keep, it doesn't really matter. But you be you. If you are more of a builder type than survival type, just turn that off in the game setup until you are ready for that, if ever.

I fiddled with Buzzwords for a while, thinking it would help me figure out how to better find bees. But Buzzwords has a range of only 10 blocks, and audio a range of about 40, but practically speaking, about 30. Buzzwords also has a few second delay before it begins, so it's easy to move in a straight line through that 21 block distance without triggering any indication. By the time you are in range for Buzzwords to work at all, the audio buzz cannot be missed. Anyways, Buzzwords will detect if you are in any of 441 blocks centered on the hive, while audio is easily in the range of any of 3721 blocks, potentially as many as 6561 blocks. So somewhere between 9 and 16 times as effective. Plus all that stopping to wait a few beats for the effect to register is dangerous, maybe the most dangerous act in the game, since bears will sneak up on you in the meantime. Relying on Buzzwords is usually going to fail, IME. I was toying with loading up Block Overlay, but, realistically, since the sound fades to essentially nil after about 40 blocks, I doubt I will be able to improve much on the 30 or so block distance I can pretty easily hear over the other environment sounds and my footsteps. [EDIT] Thinking about the asymmetry of beehives in seeing flowers made me start a new game and seek a hive, which came up before 11AM. Anyway, it, too is asymmetrical. You get audio 40 blocks south of the hive, but only 30 blocks north. It's also 40 east, but only 33 west. But there were rifts and water and caves with drifters and an F5 tornado going on, so I might not have pinned it down exactly. Plus, it was more or less flat ground, only a few Z difference, but there was a huge difference in terms of intervening foliage, in case that makes any difference. If anyone thinks its worth bothering with, figuring that out would be a whole lot easier in creative. Just pop down a hive at origin and see. [/EDIT] [EDIT2] I'm not saying you are wrong. Just that I used to be very, very wrong about the exact same thing. Pigs and the right kind of forest has never failed me since I realized there was some kind of correlation there. [/EDIT2]

I used to think that, that there simply were no bees. But as I've fired up old worlds, the bees are there; I just was not very good at finding them. Worlds I would swear had no bees turned out to have them with usually no more than a day or two search with the music and weather off, and the environmental turned all the way up. Once I find pigs and forest floor, the bees are there; I was just mistaking things like water and wind in the trees with buzzing. There are areas where bees do not spawn, sure, just like there are places where copper does not spawn. But why would one choose to settle there? I've never failed to find a good spot with copper out the wazoo and a few bees marked on the map within 2-3 days.

Maybe it does. I just don't know where to find that, evidently. It doesn't say it in the block info at the top of the screen. It just says "Tombstone" or something like that. Maybe I have to collect it and put it in my inventory to look it up in the handbook? Yeah, I checked out the Better Ruins Loot Nerf mod last night. It adjusts things in chests, but all the placed items are still there, free for the taking. Land claim has always seemed to me to be a workaround to make your world less subject to jerks, but maybe that's what the Better Ruins needs. At least a config for it. It's used for traders, so why not? At least it gets rid of day 1 lanterns and iron doors (that you don't really need until Steel, but still...) and chests and other things of that type that would otherwise require some effort and fleshing out the tech tree to have. Even though it's pretty, I have to choose between Better Ruins and view distance above about 512. I can't have both. 1024 is right out. Probably busy generating so many ruins in that area.

Thanks! I think I did figure out what he was talking about, though. It was using the /pause command from Single Player Handbook Pause mod, which no longer works. That evidently was not a true pause either, but it did stop time, prevent hunger, and creatures stopped moving about, but curiously did not prevent one from interacting with the world. The background processes apparently ran to completion. I don't have any personal knowledge of it, but I'm halfways tempted to download it and add it to 1.16 and see what it did.

Fair. I misunderstood. I was basing it on how it's done in Useful Stuff, which I think is a mid-Copper Age "automation", so potentially as early as mid to late May. The balance there is that you get only one potential item per block of sand/gravel. If you are using windmills, how does that help with early candles? Aren't you awash in beeswax by the time you can make a couple sets of sails? Unless I get insanely lucky with terra preta or saltpeter, the quickest I can get a windmill is late June or even early July.

My great nephew is running VS on an i3 (don't ask ) and I was helping him update to 1.18.6. It used to be that whatever he used for pause (maybe just sitting on the "choose your character" screen -- I didn't quite understand what he was talking about) would let the game chug along and do the mapgen. He would come back an hour later after his disk drive had calmed down, and could play just fine, once the world had been generated. But it appears that does not run in the pause anymore, nor does it appear mapgen will run in the background with the handbook pause. Is there a way to get that back apart from running it as a server and using a throwaway character who just nerdpoles to generate the world and dies to the wolves and bears who surround his nerdpole by the time it is done? Which is suboptimal, as just sitting there means a couple days closer to winter...

Yeah, they are pretty, but I have a "look but don't touch" when I play in servers with that mod installed. While you can still make a day 1 bucket, at least making wooden trunks on day 1 is no longer possible. I think. I've not found any complete anvils yet. Ingots, yes, hammers, yes, but no functional anvils. Well, until someone decides to mod in a nails and strips drop on rabbits or chickens carrying anvils or something. Fortunately, you can set books and scrolls down right next to the partially collapsed trunk where you found them, so you can get the Better Ruins lore without preventing others on the server from also reading the added lore. Thing is, even with their new companion mod, which changes the loot, it does not appear to affect the placed loot. So a fairly small hut in the middle of nowhere can still have fancy beds, storage vessels, torch holders, lead glass windows, advanced tools in tool racks, iron doors, etc. But that's why I wondered whether tombstones were part of Better Ruins, even though the guys who are running the server insist it's just a part of vanilla I've not yet encountered. There was just so much loot! Is there a way to get more detailed information from the hover? Specifically, which mod it's from? Seems to me I used to be able to see that something was from Primitive Survival or Expanded Foods or whatnot, but maybe that was through Survival Categories...

I'm wondering if it's part of the Better Ruins mod. I'm pretty sure one of the ruins I ran into was from that.

Or do they belong to some mod? Two of the guys who work for me swear it's now a vanilla thing, but I can't hardly believe it. The rest of the game seems to be hard-core avoidance of skipping ages, with the exception of some tin-bronze tools in cracked vessels here and there. I was running around in their world, stumbled across a grave, and it held a complete, undamaged set of copper lammelar, plus a bronze falx of some kind. Several other items that I could probably sell for decent scratch. That just seems an absurd day 1 find based on the rest of the game's balance. So vanilla or mod? I was thinking there was some way I used to be able to see the mod from the Block Info, but maybe that was from a mod, too. Do you know an easy way I can tell which mods a given block/item is from?

I can't speak for whether or not it's the intention, but the game can be pretty brutal to those who set down roots right away at or near spawn, for the reasons @Streetwind explains. On the other hand, living at least your first few days as a nomadic forager is almost trivial at default settings. Unless you started in a massive gravel pit or sand box, it's pretty easy to have a couple full stacks of berries by sunset of the first day. And that's including sprinting everywhere, scarfing down the small stacks of berries (white currants and blueberries, I'm looking at you), turnips and flax grain and making sure you are always slightly damaged so the healing gives you a higher burn rate of food. And now that crops take significantly longer to grow, the effect, if not the intent, is to further discourage an early shift to sedentary neolithic farming. To encourage you to enjoy the paleolithic for a bit. Yes, you should probably get the seeds you find planted ASAP, but there's no reason you have to live there. The flax isn't going to be ready until the end of June. Just come back later to harvest, and take the seeds back to wherever you did decide to call home. Basically, it's a whole lot easier if you each play the early game (at least the first day or two) as if you were in singleplayer so you are not foraging the same ground. You may all be ready to start building a common settlement by the end of the month, but that's not a given.

That depends on what you mean by "lag spikes", @Moon_Dew. If your RAM is low, and you are trying to render a lot of blocks, it will be swapping to disk constantly. Is that what you are seeing? You can try lowering the view distance, but if the blocks it needs to render are fairly common, that's not going to help much. If your hard drive space is low, that throws a different kind of "lag spike". If your hard drive simply cannot keep up loading map blocks, or your CPU can't keep up mapgenning new blocks, yet more kinds of "lag spikes." For starters, what happens with a new, completely vanilla game? Next, go back and create a new megamod game with a lower quality preset. If you set it to low, then move the Max FPS slider up, do you see the framerate numbers going up? Do controls and movement seem good, or do they seem a little "hinky"? If that's good, try loading your existing megamod game. Then start looking at log files.What kind of ticks are you seeing listed in server-main.txt? For example, on loading with a gazillion mods, it's not unusual to see something like, [Warning] Server overloaded. A tick took 2746ms to complete. But you should not see a 3 second lag or anything remotely like that any other time. Say you see some of the greatest lag ticks are taking 700ms, and then they drop off to the 400ms range. I'd set /debug logticks 600 play for a bit, open server-main.txt and see if you can figure out what's going on with the worst offenders first, then work your way through lower numbers. Though, like @l33tmaan says, I doubt you will find any particular mod doing it. It's probably just going to turn out that you don't have a beefy enough machine for what you are asking of it, or your machine setup is the bottleneck. Do you have RAM sucked up by browsers or other stuff running? Are you certain your virus scanner or malware detector isn't the cause? Etc. Way too many possibilities once we get to that level. [EDIT] Incidentally, I doubt you are going to be able to get acceptable performance with a highly modded game with only 12 GB RAM. And anyone who is running a heavily modded game on a hard drive, not an SSD, is going to be beating his head against a wall. True, there are some high end hard drives with massive amounts of cache that might give acceptable performance, but if you are going to be spending that kind of money, you might as well buy a SSD and a lower performance hard drive and reserve the SSD for things that need the speed. [/EDIT]

Game balance is probably why it's not in the game -- it would be far too easy to just set up a couple dozen sluices, fill the loading hoppers, empty the receiving hoppers and just hole up and let things run until you have enough tin/copper/gold/arrowheads/whatever, not bothering with the game itself. Better yet, do so on a server so you don't even get hungry while doing so. And particularly if you add mods that let you pan other materials or change the drops of existing pannables. Panning is supposed to be tedious to prevent people from setting up AFK loot farms. Sure, you can kind of do that with windmills, but they are a substantial time and materials investment, and only process materials far more scarce than sand.

To be fair, I doubt that is @Big Shasta's fault.