Thorfinn

Very nice, @Silent Shadow! N00b question: How do I determine the center?

On review, I'm going to agree, @Philtre. I stared at a couple zoomed in maps and correctly identified 11 locations, 6 peat, 2 fireclay and 3 blue clay. No false positives. There were also 6 deposits of all three types that I stumbled across checking out my suspected deposits, and even when I knew exactly where to look, could not tell it from looking at the map. I think probably what happened is that when I first installed 1.16, the deposits I first found were the stealth ones. I could not distinguish them at all, and just assumed none were detectable.

Subtle? According to GIMP's color picker, the difference is non-existent. There are lots of pixels with identical colors which are not peat. Please post your seed, and we can discuss. [EDIT] See, on your first screenshot, if clay were a uniform color, there are a couple tile right west of you that would be the same, with maybe one just north of it reflecting the color of clay with grass growing on it. And yet, not so much. On the second screenshot, one would expect the low-fertility soil, having the same cover, would be the same color. Nope. Not so much. Check it and see. See if GIMP agrees with you. [/EDIT]

The only one that really matters is spring. I just started a new game. From the given map, how would anyone have any clue he had access to peat? And yet, clearly from the screenshot, I'm standing on peat!

I don't often play with a map, but as of the 1.16 (stable) release it looks to me as if you can't really distinguish clay or peat from the map anymore. At least I can't see the difference. It just comes down to wandering around the map, looking for regions like @Philtre describes. The clay is there. I usually encounter at least one of them on the first day. It's just not as easy to do as it used to be.

Yeah, I'm missing out on animal husbandry, but I tried that a couple times. It was just more enjoyable to go hunting than it was to try to keep animals well-fed. It would probably be more fun to play as a nomadic herdsman than a hunter-gatherer, sure, but the game does not allow that choice. It might be fun to be able to bring my herds along with me come spring to my already established homesteads in the north, complete with fenced pastureland, and move as they graze, but, alas, the game does not (yet) support that. Yes, ideally it would be nice if there were some game reason to settle down. But at present, it just does not exist. The reason to settle down is to be able to build the stuff you need if you settle down. Bees are not that big of an issue. I just don't move them to my "base". Set down a dozen skeps close to any wild bees, surround the area with flowers, remember (or mark, if I'm using the map) the location, and come back as needed. Bees are pretty much everywhere. Or at least can be if you are willing to sacrifice one basket slot for a skep. The time going out to harvest from the skeps is more than made up for the time I don't spend travelling from home to whatever ore veins I'm working. My home is always by definition right next to where I'm mining. But, yeah, I don't know why I'd ever want to grind large quantities of grain or any of the rest. What's the point, other than to fill storage containers you otherwise would not need if you were not grinding large quantities of grain? Re: stored food, of course I do that. It's just trivial to store up enough to last to spring unless maybe you choose to settle down in the far north. It's hard not to if you always are growing flax, at the very least. That's why winter often ends up with me starting a new game. I look at the grain, veggies, and fruits I've got stored, raw and preserved, realize there's no chance of going hungry, and no challenge to sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fire and sleeping the night away, such that my in game winter will be mostly IRL reading a book, well, that's it. I enjoyed this run, and will apply the lessons learned to the next.

Leather is not that big of a deal. You have 4 or 5 days at each location waiting for flax to ripen. If you replant once, you are golden. It's not like you need a lot of leather anyway. One set of backpacks. Some clothes. More jerkins when you need to replace armor. That's about it. And realistically, when I find iron, I'm probably there for a good month anyway, so it can cure while I'm delving. I'd really like to like steel, but from what I can tell, I don't see much of a difference between meteoric and steel. Yeah, some of the numbers look like it would be a good idea, but practically speaking, I don't see much difference in terms of actual battle. The amount of effort involved in getting a steel longblade vs. a meteoric longblade, when all it gives you is roughly double the durability, is just discouraging. For the most part, avoiding combat is by far the better idea anyway. I've probably had 3-4 drops from locusts, and it was never worth the risk or the expense in terms of damage to equipment or use of bandages. Now maybe there are combats worth doing where the tier makes a difference. It's just not enough of a difference that I've noticed it. And sure, windmill power. Did it once. Check. For as much effort as it took, I might as well have done it by hand. Not true for all people, I'm sure. People who like that kind of thing will find it's the kind of thing they like, and all that. The reason I'm starting a new game every few days, and trying out mods, is best captured by Helga in Erik the Viking. "If the only reason for going on an expedition is the killing and looting and the only reason for the killing and looting is to pay for the next expedition, they cancel each other out." I need to produce steel so that I can produce more steel to replace the steel equipment I've worn out seeking more steel. Nah, I'll just start a new game and get the edge of my seat game experience dodging wolves for the first couple days again. My actions and choices for the first few months make a big difference. Later in the game, all it does is give me AFK time.

I had issues finding tin in the first couple dozen worlds I played, but that was mostly because I was going with the idea in mind that ore would be distributed more like minecraft or minetest. I should have realized that this was not the experience Vintage Story was going for from the absence of a stone pick. The methods I had come up with in those games simply would not work in this game, because chipping away at stone nodes does not give the materials for a new pick. For a while I messed with the prospector pick, but because it was not the default, figured that was not the creator's vision for the game, either. So I had to come up with a playstyle that would work with this game's defaults. The best one I've figured out turns out to be more of a nomadic lifestyle, settling in one spot only long enough to tap all the resources in the region, then moving on. The prospector's pick in default mode tells me nothing more than how much effort I should put into exploring this area's cliff faces and caves. If there are no exposed ore veins, cest la vie. I'll go check out that outcropping off on the horizon. Maybe there's some ore there. It's a huge world. There's always another outcropping. True, it helps that I'm not interested in building cathedrals or towers or anything. I usually don't even bother with a roof, just a packed earth overhang above the pit kilns and firepits. With the way drifters now work, even large, open concept houses are a bad idea. Which probably explains why all those are in ruins...

That's cool. I don't care about any of my worlds. Kind of like Gallagher -- I don't want to run the place, I just want to set them up.

Oh, cool. I can do that. Surround them with fences and so long as I get there sometime that day, we are probably fine. Works for all crops, I assume? Though I don't have much use for carrot seeds, I don't mind adding carrots to a stew.

No, I prefer unmodded, too, using defaults to see how the game designer intended the game to be played. I just found it too tedious to spend that much time spelunking. Ore bombs are the only solution I found, though I had to find enough surface coal to build the first one. I would have just set it aside (or looked for a mining mod) if there were no way to get the second mode. TBH, I'm not exactly sure why the modes could not be combined.

There are two modes of using the prospector pick. I'm guessing you are only using one of them. To get access to the second one, that lets you track down the ore veins, you need to enable it. If you are starting a game, select Customize, move down to Survival Challenges, and most of the way down is ProPick Node Search Radius. It defaults to disabled for some reason. Most set it to 8. I'm guessing there is a way to enable it with a server command in an existing world, though it probably would require you to reload the world. [EDIT] I should have looked before submitting the post. The command is: /worldConfig propickNodeSearchRadius 8 or whatever radius you like. I wouldn't go much above 8, though. 8 will count the number of tin nodes within 8 nodes of you, i.e., a 17x17x17 box with you at the center, so it's going to count all tin in a region a little shy of 5,000 blocks. More information is available at the mining page. There's even a couple of videos linked there. [/EDIT]

By default the prospecting pick is turned off. If you don't turn that on, the only options I know of are Look for surface cassiterite nuggets (very rare), Look at cliff faces for exposed cassiterite (very rare), and, Go spelunking for cassiterite in appropriate stone layers (rare). I don't know of any other sources of tin, though I've only been playing 16 for a few days, and there may be something new. If you didn't know, press Shift-H when your cursor is on a rock to see what kinds of ores that rock might contain. No point in spelunking in caves that can't have tin.

I don't see a whole lot of difference there. At least so far as I usually play. For me, every home is Fort Dirt. I've never been interested in the building aspects of really any game, but only the survival aspects. Yeah, maybe it's a challenge to get enough of a certain kind of material for your architectural design. That's just not the kind of challenge I enjoy. I prefer the less "grindy" challenges. I just create homes about a day's travel apart, using whatever materials are at hand. Which is usually cob or packed dirt. Cobble on occasion. Plant every seed I have. Next morning, head south, build a new shelter, and prepare some fields. Go back in time to harvest the crop, and head out to my new camp to repeat the process. One harvest per camp, one day between harvest and planting, which means never worrying about crop rotation. If the game is still holding my interest come winter, I will have pushed into warmer climes by then. I am intrigued, though. How do you rush flax enough to get linen sacks earlier than mid spring? Is there a way I don't know to get more than 2 harvests per month?

Not before mid-spring, unless I've been insanely lucky with drifter drops or cracked vessels. By which time I have a home set up and don't much care anyway, and won't care until I start doing significant caving. And not even then. It's pretty common for me to leave caches all over the place rather than having to head home to resupply. But berries have a much shorter freshness, so I'd rather use those up first, even if berries weren't generally the smaller stacks anyway. Day one, I've generally got a knife, an axe, flint, obsidian, grass, logs, sticks, horsetails or poultices, and some kind of dirt I can use to nerdpole away from wolves if necessary. That's almost the entire hotbar. Reeds and roots take up 2. A couple three types of berries I have not eaten yet. Four to six spaces for crops and seeds. Not a lot of space left for mushrooms and polypores. Of course, I'm ignoring or caching any cracked vessels I encounter which are not sacks or packs. I try to camp out on some form of clay so I can start cooking. Day 2 is worse, as I also now have a torch or two, a stack of clay, possibly some peat, a cooking pot and bowl, possibly a crock or two. Maybe a few unfired storage pots. And by the end of the day, several more spaces filled with mushrooms, berries and crops. Up until I decide where to settle, I'm often setting down caches of a half-dozen firepits to offload everything I don't absolutely need. And, yeah, usually that means things like grain, vegetables and mushrooms get cached, and hopefully I can find some of them before they all go bad.

IMO, the biggest problem with a plethora of berry types and eleventy-five mushrooms and a shabillion species of trees is that the inventory space was designed around a much more limited set of blocks you could carry around. While 10 spaces and 4 three-slot reed baskets was OK a couple versions ago, it's getting pretty tight in 16. I'm to the point I'm often throwing away the second knife blade and knapping a new one when I need it. If I knap a shovel at all, it gets either used up or thrown away.

Doesn't look like the mod works with 16. The one by @DArkHekRoMaNT, I think?

Save the current list of mods, so that you can select that as a Playstyle when creating a new world. Or maybe a pulldown under Worldname? Or, heck, even in the Mod Manager. It's nice to know which combination of mods you've tried, rather than killing a bunch of trees. Second, a Save button in the Customize that lets you save that set of options as a Playstyle.

I have not found a fruit tree yet, but I've only got a little more than one evening into 16 so far. I can't recommend one way or the other, but I see someone already has a mod to give cuttings 100% chance. I'm probably going to hold out, at least for a while.

Might you have an old copy still in the cache directory? Happened to me twice in migrating to 16. Would have thought once would be enough, but no...

Just install @Rhonen's HUD Clock. Shift-O, select "Display real temperature" or whatever it's called. Voila. You don't have to use that silly system most of the world is stuck with, or bother with Google or anything else.

I'm probably imagining things, but they seem to flee with less damage. Used to be you could kill them pretty easily with a torch, but now they run away before they take enough damage. Another thing is that if I'm out and about too late, that red lightning spot shows up too far away from base, (like home is near the edge of the minimap), and I end up with nothing at my base all night. Temporal gear hunting means I have to go back out where that spawn thing is.

OK, my bad. There are a lot of mods I have not looked at yet, and now that Stable 16 is out, it's going to be a few weeks before I get to them. Based on the (presumed) storyline, it's probably more appropriate to come up with some megafauna descended from current stock, anyway.

Truth. Offering a limited palette but allowing customization would fix that. And probably for most of us, the default would work fine, the colors specifically selected to avoid common minimap colors. There's nothing stopping a color blind individual from selecting colors he could distinguish. And for those who really need 16 million colors , you can still take the time to find one to your liking. I'm not saying disable any colors, merely that adding a waypoint can be a bit iffy in the early game, particularly since IME, wolves don't seem to howl much anymore. The first you know they are there is when you are adding a waypoint and losing half your HP...

Probably a 4x4 palette would more than suit my needs. Particularly if instead of icons, I could just use letters -- Cu for copper, Sn for tin, Fe for iron, etc.