SteveHanley

You can speed run Minecraft in under an hour if you already know how to do everything because you’ve done it a hundred times. I’m not talking in reference to that player. I’m talking in reference to players who are not only new to the game, but don’t have afternoons to spare trying to figure out the best places to look for copper or learn exactly what red clay looks like against med fertility soil. I understand the intent behind the devs restrictions and agree, but balance is the key to gameplay. If you get enough people calling something grindy, it’s probably grindy, and that’s the observation I keep coming back to with new players, myself included. I flat out stopped playing a new world yesterday because I’m in the Stone Age and found the perfect spot to make a homestead, but ended up quitting and playing something else because I knew what the grind was going to look like to get it up and running. Again, this isn’t for the player who could already play the game with their eyes closed. This is for casuals and newbies trying to get into a game but who find the door sticks when opening

Is there a good place to commission someone to make a VS mod? I have zero coding skill but a few ideas, and I know other games have forums and such that act as markets.

Save files, multiple, if you’re talking about worlds. And no, I wiped the slate clean before reinstalling

I'll admit that I'm relatively new to the game, but I find it rather odd how restrictive the stone-age tools are, and it honestly makes for a grindy experience trying to progress through the early game. I understand and appreciate the more down-to-earth, rugged difficulty that VS has, but no stone woodsplitting? Basket and stick traps that almost never work over real world snares? For casuals like me who don't have hours on end to spare, it's almost not worth it to play the game because of how much time is required just to make it past the first tier of progress. I've tried a couple mods to mediate this, but they're only so-so stable. I've already had to sign out from my computer a couple times because when VS freezes, it really freezes. For stone woodworking, I feel there could be certain tools restricted to Granite or some harder rocks in the same way arrowheads are restricted to flint. These tools may involve woodsplitting, hammers, and even low-level mining. There's no way someone couldn't just fasten a rock to a stick to make a hammer. Another big example of the grindiness is getting from Stone to Copper. I've had to walk for almost half an hour in some worlds just to find nuggets of copper, and panning is almost as bad. It almost feels like VS is missing something - a tool or tools that are advanced stone that aid in getting to copper a bit more reliably then panning an entire biome of gravel for nuggets. They wouldn't even need to be an insta-fix for copper, but make it a bit more reliable. For example, maybe patches of dirt that have low-levels of ore. The only way to extract the nuggets is to smelt the blocks, leading to a slow but reliable source of ore. This method has ties in the real world as a primitive but effective means of capturing actual nuggets of ore, and I feel would fit well in gameplay. Overall I feel like the early game could use some TLC. I know I'm not alone in this observation either, and "grindy" is a description I hear tossed around often when discussing early game. Like I said, I enjoy the more realistic gameplay of VS, but early game is actually less realistic due to how few things we can actually do to progress.

I ended up doing a reinstall of the originally downloaded game files and that seemed to work.

Thank you for the welcome! Most of my searching has been through forest biomes, I’ve studied all three variations in a creative world as well as several YT tutorials on the matter, and part of my efforts was panning pretty much an entire a field of claystone gravel. It’s good I suppose to know you can pan clay, but hasn’t helped. Tons of copper, quartz, and other goodies, but no clay of any kind. I’m totally serious when I say I spent almost two hours last night just looking for naturally occurring clay. Could it be come kind of bug? This is going on in every world I have.

So I'll admit I'm relatively new to the game, still in my "Looking around" phase, and noticed something odd: In the multiple worlds I've gone thru, not once have I found a single block of red, blue, or fire clay in the wild. I have gone thru the tutorials and guides, checked everywhere I'm supposed to, used every map trick I can get my hands on, have found several quartz deposits and multiple surface ore veins from how much I've searched, even going so far as flying around for 20 minutes in creative mode specifically looking for clay, and cannot find any. If it weren't for the handbook telling me about pottery, I wouldn't even know clay is a thing. Because of this, I have two questions. 1. What gives? Clay is supposed to be an early game gateway to metals, so what's going on? 2. Why can't we pan for clay out of claystone gravel? It's kinda in the name that that would be expected.