DoctorSnakes

Maybe VTML is only for "internal" use for interfaces and such?

I just want to say that there is no reason to use any antivirus on Windows besides the included Windows Defender. Anything else is just bloat at best. Just use that instead, the free subscription stuff is just a trick to make you want to use it. As for your problem, I'm pretty sure you don't need any port forwarding. That's only needed if you are hosting your server from your own network, but you're using an external service for that. So my first thought is that there is still something in your firewall that blocks the connection. I don't use Windows that often, so I don't know if you can do this, but if I were you I'd try to just disable the firewall completely (or temporarily remove all the filters or whatever it calls it) and then try to connect to the server. If you still can't connect, then you have excluded the possibility of the firewall being a problem. (Just remember to turn it back on after!)

There are several mods for sharing waypoints (which you call pins). The one that I have used is this one: https://mods.vintagestory.at/nbcartographer, but you could try some other ones if you want if you search the ModDB. As for sharing the map of the terrain with your friend, there doesn't seem to be such a mod available right now. But I have actually been working on one for a while ;) I should be ready to release it in a few days.

Well, if it gets booted off the database for being defective for too long, then that's fine. But I doubt that, since I have seen lots of old mods on the DB that don't work (according to comments) and are still present. In any case, it's better that the user doesn't bother with the mod if it doesn't work. So this inconvenience will make the user either drop the mod from their list, or report it. And that's good, I think. A silent failure could make the game fail later on unexpectedly, and cause problems for the user.

It seems that the game only crashes if one of its own processes gets an exception. If a mod's StartClientSide crashes, then the game just seems to ignore it, and the mod effectively doesn't do anything. At least, this is my experience working with a Harmony patch mod. I was thinking if 1. it is possible to make the game crash in StartClientSide (or elsewhere), and 2. if it is a good idea to do so. I think it'd be good for a mod to loudly crash, rather than silently not work. This way, the user would definitely understand that the mod isn't working and they would hopefully report the problem to the mod author. Thoughts?

Firing clay is already affected by time spent in a bed. As for cooking in campfires, not sure. There is this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/realtimefirepit, but I don't know if it affects cooking.

Good suggestion @zimt. In the meantime, I have made a mod to make that list alphabetically sorted: https://mods.vintagestory.at/alphabeticallysortedprospectinglist

Yes, it is unlikely for people to move to new platforms. It does happen rarely. But I don't think that this is a good argument against it, it's an argument to advocate for it more than anything. If the only thing dictating whether it is right to use a platform is its popularity, then Vintage Story would be on Steam right now. It isn't, because of various reasons. Similarly, there are various reasons (discussed in this thread) to not be on Discord, and to be on other social media platforms instead. I think those reasons should be evaluated more than anything relating to popularity or exposure if one cares about more than publicity.

You're right, it does seem to be technically against their TOS from what I see online (anyone feel free to chime in on this). Although, it doesn't seem to be enforced much, but yes. In that case, I advocate for an official Matrix or other free (as in freedom) social media channel for Vintage Story which isn't connected by a bridge.

There are plenty of Discord servers with bridges to Matrix, and I have not seen this to be an issue. Could you elaborate why this is a problem? Many bridges relay message deletions. This one, for example. You're open to liability for all of those things regardless of whether you use Discord or Matrix. The benefit is that you can communicate with people without your personal details and behavior being exploited for reasons beyond allowing you to use a social media platform. You can essentially get the same service, genuinely, for free (free to use and freedom from excessive data collection), with something like Matrix. Not seemingly for free as it is with corporate social media. When it comes to such platforms, you pay not with money directly, but with your data. That data can be your e-mail, banking details (saved after paying for social media microtransactions, for example), name, IP address. It can also be your intimate DMs with friends. This data can and does, intentionally by a company or not, get used for reasons beyond enabling you to chat with people. It happens intentionally when companies use it to predict your behavior, so that they can target ads more accurately against you. It happens unintentionally when the data that they have collected is handled irresponsibly and gets into the hands of hackers. People should not be taking the risk associated with closed and for-profit social media when open and community-driven social media exists.

I'm making a mod which might involve sending pretty big packets, and I came across a problem where a client disconnects if they send too big of a packet. In the logs, it said something like: [Server Notification] Client {IP address here} disconnected, too large packet of {packet size here} bytes received I only found one mention of this problem on the internet, here: https://github.com/mja00/VS-LiveMap-Revival/issues/30. The author of that mod documents in their fix that this packet size limit is apparently 64 kilobytes. So, my first question is if this is correct? Is the packet size limit 64 kilobytes? I couldn't find where this log might get made in any decompilation of the Vintage Story DLLs, so I couldn't verify. It would be nice to have this properly documented somewhere. Secondly, knowing the packet size limit, what would be the best way of sending big packets while respecting this limit? The author of that mod actually fixes this issue pretty well, by compressing the big packet and then dividing it into a bunch of chunks which get sent separately. However, if I'm not mistaken interpreting the decompiled DLLs, the methods to send packets in both IServerNetworkChannel and IClientNetworkChannel seem to already compress the packets before sending them. In that LiveMap mod's case, I guess there is compression unnecessarily applied twice: once by the mod, and then by the game itself. It's probably not a big deal for performance, but it would still be preferable to have a separate method for dealing with this oneself ... and maybe that already exists with the "SendArbitraryPacket" method? I haven't looked into it that much yet, and I have no idea how to effectively use that method to communicate between the server and client. If anyone has even a basic idea of how one can send and receive packets between the client and server using those methods with "Arbitrary" in their name, please do tell about it!