KoviBat

For now, the player doesn't suffer from much power creep. For example, from a flint spear to a gold/silver spear, the damage only goes up by 2.3 points (3.5 for throwing). From a Copper Falx to a Steel Falx, only 1.5 points. From a Crude bow to a Recurve bow is a 1 point increase, and from a Crude to a Steel arrow, only 3.25. We experience very small amounts of growth in damage. Enemies have extreme power creep. Between each tier, their damage goes up, but their health goes up exponentially, the difference between each getting larger by two points each time. Damage, I'm fine with. But the health increase dramatically outweighs the rate our weapon damage increases, by about ten times. Difference between a Surface Drifter and a Double-Headed Drifter is 42. Difference between a Surface Shiver and a max tier Shiver is 46. Difference between least and most damage we can deal is 4. What I'm worried about is that this enemy power creep sets a precedent for player power creep, which I'd prefer not happen. By tipping the balance in favor of the enemies, the initial reaction would be to give the players more power to balance it out, and I think this is the wrong move. It's a problem D&D has as well. Fights drag on because enemies have a lot of health, and you can only do so much damage in one turn. I would like the enemy health, and only their health, to be brought down to a more reasonable level to bring the scales somewhat closer to even. This will make the fights we have be less tedious and more fun. From there, there's still room to expand behaviors and add more enemies.

I'm pretty certain this isn't in the game, but is there a way to get glass panes oriented at an angle? For windows in walls that aren't facing in cardinal directions. I'm guessing my only option is chiseling, right?

Just some small QOL areas for distilling alcohol. Namely, the ability to store sealed barrels horizontally instead of vertically, so long as a solid surface is to their left, right, and bottom. Really, all this does is aesthetic, but it does make mass storage/fermentation more aesthetically pleasing. Ideally, this would be done in the Carry-On style where you just pick up a full barrel and then place it, probably shift + right-click to place. Could also work like skeps and take a backpack slot. BIG Boiler. Looking up real distilleries, they made rather large boilers, what would be multi-block for Vintage Story. This would be useful for mass-producing alcohol over an extended period of time. You would need to put a lot of firewood underneath it, similar to coal for a cementation furnace. However, not sure what the blocks for the boiler itself would be, aside from the (currently) inaccessible copper blocks. Could also make them custom blocks, I guess, with a more rounded shape to them, and use solder or borax to weld the pieces together. And of course, bottles, glasses, goblets, tankards, and every vessel you could fill with spirits, though glasses would likely be dependent on a glassmaking overhaul, which would also be appreciated, but is otherwise unrelated to this suggestion. This also sets a precedent for steam boilers way later on. I miss anything? The ability to put bottles in a scroll rack would be pretty nice, I guess.

I am aware combat is brought up a lot, but I just want to provide my analysis of issues I take with it. This is not to bash the devs or rant. I think the game has a huge issue with power creep in the enemies. The difference between a surface drifter and nightmare drifter is that their health and damage go up by a lot. Nothing else changes. This doesn't make them more difficult, it makes them more tedious. You fight them in the same way, just for longer. It drags out fights. They don't need to only take a single hit to kill, but having HP max out at maybe 30 would be a lot more reasonable, considering that our weapons don't scale nearly as fast. Shivers and Drifters deal more damage than polar bears at high-tiers. Sure, this is intended to make you use armor in areas like story locations or deep caving, but the problem arises during Temporal Storms, when they show up without you having any control. This makes the storm utterly boring, because your only option is to stay inside, and it makes it clear that the storm itself isn't a threat to you. Seriously, all this does is drag out fights into a slugfest. Having more enemy types with comparable health pools would be a lot more fun. We could also use some more variety in environments aside from the close-quarters of hallways and caves, but the long-range threats would require a complete behavior overhaul. Combat Overhaul does address some of the problems with the core systems, but it's a band-aid solution. This is something that needs to be addressed at a core design level, and I'm aware this isn't a problem that can be solved overnight. It is going to take a lot of effort and time to develop. I just want to provide some input to make sure that the end product is nudged in the right direction.

Being able to adjust waypoint size in general would be nice

I believe there was a server on the Other Block Game that achieved the illusion of this feature, called SMP Earth. It does not address the problem of the poles, but it did have the International Sate Line wraparound, so you could continually go East or West and wind up back where you began. The real problem is the poles. I guess one way to do it would be to have the Line where you wrap around to the other side of the map actually be a curve. So the closer you get to the poles, the thinner the world gets. Of course, looking at the map for that would be extremely confusing. If you keep it as a 2d plane you'll either be jumping a lot of distance while you're at the poles using a multi-digon map projection, or you wind up with a continuous shape with a huge amount of visual distortion. I really like the idea of the world having those mechanics, even if most people would never get any use out of them. And it would require a complete change to the coordinate system to follow latitude and longitude instead of a flat X/Y

I think this is a good idea. It might be resource-intensive, but I think it's worth it. It also sets a little bit of a precedent to have voxel-based animations for breaking blocks. Having voxels break free from natural blocks like wood, stone, dirt, or sand when you break them. It also means it can get even smoother when it snows, which I would love. Having it as an option would definitely be appreciated.

Custom constellations with their own meanings would be cool. The navigational constellations would probably need their own handbook page, but would we want the stories and lore behind those constellations to be in the handbook as well, or maybe something you have to find, like Tapestries or Lore Books? There is also the question of how you navigate during temporal storms, since you can't really see the sky. Or regular storms, but that is an obstacle with a real-life precedent.

Whenever I smith an Iron Anvil Base, I always wind up exactly one voxel short when I use five ingots and I'm not sure why. Is it possible to make it with exactly five ingots? Are some voxels getting deleted when I'm putting new ingots on? I genuinely don't understand why this is happening.

I'm not sure what heat effect would be best to apply to the player, but exposed perishable rates could go up. If your food is outside a cellar or room, or if you leave pelts or bowstaves out to dry, maybe they'll cook a little quicker. A little bit of give and take. Unpreserved foods will rot quickly, but things that take time to dry will take less time. Crop moisture could also deplete slightly more in heat, though this is easily handled with the watering can. While thirst shouldn't be mandatory to this system, taking cold drinks should help lower your players body temperature. I could see putting ice through a Quern or Pulverizer to chill drinks with, be it water, fruit juices, or alcohols. Maybe even room to make smoothies and ice cream, and provides an option to do more with ice, and as a result, incentivize collecting and storing it. The game has a wind system in place, so that could help regulate heat, being in a room or cellar should help, being in water should help, etc. I do believe this is intentional, as it lines up with real life behavior of water. In cold climates, the closer the water is to the surface, where it's cold, the easier it is to freeze, but as you go down, the water is able to retain more heat. It works in the opposite way in hot climates. The surface is warm, and the deeper you go, the colder it gets. And since the water is able to insulate you against the wind and cold air, it will be ever so slightly warmer in the winter, and since it can dissipate heat from the sun, it will be cooler in summer. It's really good for temperature regulation.

Yes, we absolutely need a complete rework of combat. For one, combat mechanics need to be changed, enemy damage scaling with tiers is ridiculous to the point that Nightmare and Double-Headed Drifters deal more damage than bears do. The increased threat isn't felt in the gameplay. They aren't faster or slower, they don't have a larger or smaller hitbox. They just take and do more damage. Full parity, all variants having the same HP and doing the same damage, might be too aggressive, but they should all be comparable to their base version, even if slightly more deadly. It really just seems like padding to cover the fact that there are only four enemies. They're good designs, I especially like the Locusts, they're actually really neat on Passive, and I think having some neutral Locusts in some areas to introduce you to their concept early on would be cool. Maybe a little library ruin where they crawl around and organize books. And once you've met the hostile ones and see a neutral one moving around, you wonder if it's going to suddenly attack you. That uncertainty is a fun feeling and is certainly more nuanced than we have right now. Back on track, we need more enemy variety. Something that fights differently. More humanoid enemies would be welcome, and they've been frequently suggested. They have room to scale power a bit more evenly. You can give them shields and armor as the players gear improves. Though armor would likely be introduced sparingly, and applied piecemeal. Some would get chestplates while others got gauntlets and stuff like that. Maybe even more advanced weapons like bows and crossbows the stronger they get. It also provides a reason to engage in combat in open spaces, instead of the close-quarters that caves, dungeons, ruins, and story locations do. That's where we run into the most enemies. With humanoid enemies, you could give them a fort on the surface for the player to storm, which gives bows a chance to shine in ranged combat with more open sightlines. We really just need something to change the rules and the scenery. And yeah, bows suck. Most fighting, including hunting, is close-quarters, making bows rather redundant. They also don't do much damage in comparison to swords. The Combat Overhaul mod makes them semi-viable by having shots do more damage based on where you hit, but it's honestly a band-aid solution. They also treat the bow types wrong. There should be a Straight and Recurve version of both a Shortbow and a Longbow. Maybe even a Warbow if we want something a little goofy. Bigger bow, more sway, longer draw, bigger punch. Shortbows should also be viable from horseback. Or... Elkback. With difficulty, but possible. An accurate shot from any bow should hurt a lot, maybe even an instant kill, but they often do the same, or less, damage than their sword counterparts, which are more reliable for the materials you put into them. I'm sure there's more issues for me to analyze, most of which are probably addressed by Combat Overhaul, but the combat needs a huge upgrade for Vanilla. It's just... not fun.

First, this is not a suggestion I think would be practical to implement. This is a pipe dream concept that's fun to think about, and I do not, in any way, expect the developers or modders to seriously attempt to implement a system like this. Additionally, any time I say 'entities' just assume I mean AI like enemies and animals. I don't want to call them AI because that term has recently been associated with LLMs, which causes confusion and frustration. With that out of the way, let's begin. The focus of this suggestion is on behavior that is not influenced by player action. While player interaction with animals (such as wolves) could do with some more variety and depth, this concept instead focuses on what they do when you aren't involved. To begin, assign each creature a 'den' where they go to sleep or take shelter from storms, temporal storms, or winter. From this den, creatures will journey out in search of food and water, and will frequent places where they are able to find them. For predators, this will be caves. But for grazing animals, their den will likely migrate through more open areas over time. What this does is give animals more reliable places to find them. Finding bears at a river where they catch fish, for example, or during winter, hibernating in their den. Ideally, monster spawns would be tuned down around dens, or conversely, animals will only make dens in places where monsters aren't as common, so you don't find an army of dead Drifters beneath the claws of a bear. Monsters should also attack animals and vice versa, though monster corpses won't be eaten. Animal behavior should become more aggressive the hungrier they are, and less aggressive the more full they are. Additionally, monster behavior should discourage them from being out and about in daylight, so as the sun rises, they return to dark areas they spawned from, be they rifts or caves. Please feel free to add on to this idea.

I definitely think the health and healing systems need a rework. For one, I don't think healing should deplete your hunger bar, as this just leads to spam eating berries in your sleep as you heal, but your level of satiation should control how fast you regenerate, and decrease at a fixed rate. I like the idea of a more complex health system, I really do. But it's something that would have to come after a lot of reworks. Healing items need to be easily accessible, as if they're too rare, you're more likely to just come back and retrieve your stuff with a fresh body. But if you make them too easy to make, it just becomes tedious. Flax tends to be the main limiting factor for almost everything in this game. You need it for windmills, sailboats, bags, gambesons, bandages, and likely sutures and tourniquets. This means really only splints and horsetail poultices would be accessible in early-game. It's possible this could work if a few existing systems were reworked. Making wolves less aggressive, bears less common, and flax more abundant in some way, I'd argue by making scythes increase seed drops, so you can get a sort of delayed gratification. I do, however, like the use of herbs to deal with minor ailments. Actually having to mix some herbs to treat an infection or food poisoning would be neat, but you have to balance it out. If the herbs are too easy to find, it becomes tedious very quickly. If they're too difficult to find, you'll spend most of the game not engaging with that mechanic. Having played with a body-health mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, I found it engaging, but it works in that game because you don't have an option to get around the wound. If you die, you lose progress and get sent back a save. In Zomboid, if you don't heal, the game ends. Being able to just come retrieve your stuff with a fresh body makes the system matter less, because it removes the consequences. But those games also tend to give you more open-ended rewards for winning a fight. You can even get healing items out of it to recover any health you lost. In Vintage Story, your only reward is pelts for leather and fat for mechanical power. And meat, I guess. It is possible to make it work, but it'll require a lot of checks and balances that we don't have right now.

I feel like an easy way to accomplish this would be to make it so music doesn't play in areas that qualify as "rooms," and make it so ruined doors don't qualify as solid, so ruins amd dungeons never count as rooms.

The dummy works fine, but I think there's room (and precedent) for a more nuanced solution to beekeeping. Smoke. In real life, smoke, especially from burning burlap, masks pheromone receptors, making bees more docile for the extraction process. Unfortunately, making burlap from flax just to burn it for some honey would be way too expensive, so instead, the Jute plant should be introduced. Much like Papyrus, Tule, and Cattails (my beloved), it grows in, and near, standing water, and can be harvested for Jute fibers, which can be used to make burlap. Could maybe also be used to make Burlap Sacks, that work similar to the Bundles concept from the other block game, letting you place multiple small items into one slot, up to a certain capacity, potentially depending on the items size/weight. As for how to actually use the smoke, I suggest giving the watering can a new function. Place it on the ground, right-click with burlap and dried grass, light it with a torch or firestarter, and then pick it up. The smoker will only be active when you hold right-click with it in your main or off-hand. Ideally, there should be a mechanic for the smoker where using it too little will lead to a delayed, but still hostile response, but oversmoking has a chance to damage the population of bees in the area, but that may prove too frustrating in practice. Bees? Bees!

Final update, Blue shingles are in the game. The reason I couldn't tell is because they're the same color as all of the common clay recipes like bowls, which is a light grey, so consider this resolved.

Wanted to follow up on my previous assumptions, while you could build a beehive kiln out of fire clay, you also need the kiln door, which requires four nails and straps, and two iron bars, which gates it firmly behind the Iron Age, when this really is something you should be able to make around the late Copper/early Bronze ages. Really, the amount of resources required to put one of these together is ridiculous. You need 250 bricks of your choice of tier (12 for the door, 18 for the gratings and 220 for the brick blocks), and at least 17 ingots of iron (1 for nails and strips, 4 for the bars for the kiln door, and 12 for the iron hatch doors). Unless you want to double the amount of fire clay required, you'll also need two ingots for iron pounder caps for your pulverizer in order to make higher tier bricks. You'll also need a full windmill to power that pulverizer reliably, which is 256 Flax fiber. You can get it to work on a particularly windy day with half that number, but 128 flax fiber is still difficult to come by without getting good luck with cracked vessels. All this just to not use up a little grass, a few sticks, and some firewood is absolutely not worth the amount of effort that goes into it. Especially since the bricks can, and will, break. I think the Beehive Kiln needs to be reworked to only use fire clay bricks, and not need iron to make it. You can easily replace the iron bars with solid stone, like that used in the Quern and Coffin recipes, and the iron nails and strips with mortar. Then, reduce the heat damage drastically, and only let firewood be usable as a fuel. This makes it accessible for the mid-game, which is where it will be most useful. That's when you'll want to fire a bunch of molds for things like hammers, anvils, helve hammers, prospecting picks, and general tools and armor. Iron is still far off, even if you're in the early bronze age, but you can reliably make any ceramics you need without needing to aerate your lawn.

We already have Graphite in the game, no known use at this time, though.

I do think there's a lot of room for improvement for animal behavior. Something like an A-Life system would probably be the best (but most resource-intensive) solution. Animals don't just spawn in the open, they could have dens and warrens and caves that they live in, where they go to sleep. Then, depending on if they're nocturnal or diurnal animals, go out from during the day. They could have different food types that they specifically look for, be they plants or other animals. During winter they're less likely to come out of their dens, as they're hibernating, though some species are better suited for winter weather than others. I also think there should be a little more variety in animal behavior when it comes to violence. Big cats are ambush predators that prefer not to attack head-on. If you make eye contact with them, they largely remain still until you turn your back. They likely behave the same with their prey. Wolves mainly chase whatever runs from them on initial eyesight and won't attack things that stand their ground. Bears can stay how they are. Having a system where the way you behave can affect how some potential predator animals interact with you would be a step forward, I think. Maybe even be able to get close if you're crouching with food in hand. I'm not for wolf-taming, but I like the idea of wolf de-escalating.

We have soybeans, so soybean oil could be a pretty easy option as well. It'd be nice to have an alternative to animal fat for some recipes. It'd also be nice if cooking using oils or fats did something to improve cooking in some way. Maybe cooking speed? Or maybe a slight satiety boost?

I do think farming could use a slight upgrade in the kinesthetic department. The active way that we do smithing and chiseling is (in my opinion) the strongest point of the game, and ideally, most mechanics would have that level of detail and interaction. A more anchored animation for tilling and planting might help. I don't think we need to pick the voxels to plant the seeds in, but having something a bit more interesting than right-click-cadabra would go a long way towards making it more interesting. Also having some visual indicators to plant deficiencies would help. Right now, you have to get your cursor on it to find out if a plant is deprived of a nutrient, suffering heat damage, or lacks a sufficient amount of moisture. Being able to visually see indicators of those without the crosshair info widget would go a long way to driving player interaction, without adding any additional complexity that might be bothersome to a casual player. (Also, scythes should increase seed drop chance). I'd like farming to be more interesting, but I think it already is, it's just more difficult to engage with due to a lack of easily interpretable information.

I think you can make a beehive kiln out of just fire clay bricks, and there do appear to be Kiln doors now, rather than the iron door required for steelmaking, but the handbook really doesn't communicate very well what happens if you use fire clay bricks instead of refractory bricks, or different tiers of bricks aside from just saying "heat damage." In fact, I find this is an area where the handbook is very lacking in information. Do different types of fuel affect how much "heat damage" bricks take? So if you wanted to make a low-tier kiln for firing basic pottery, could you just fill the fuel floor with firewood and not cause any heat damage to fire clay bricks? I would hope so. Then to make it into a coke oven or a blister steel kiln you would need to use higher tier bricks because of the higher temperatures. That's how I'd set it up ideally, but there's nothing to indicate that's how it works.

Because of how the smithing works, you wouldn't actually be able to make a hollow tube, because the voxels just drop to the lowest point of the grid they occupy. The only way to do it would be to put something else, maybe a ceramic 1x1x6 voxel rod in that spot while you're smithing before moving the rest of the metal on the top. Could be a multi-step thing like clay forming. Step 1 is clear the spot for the rod. Step 2 is shown once that spot is clear, and you just right-click with the rod. Then it shows the final step, where you just move the rest of the metal on top of it. It would be a bit sophisticated, but by no means frustrating, so long as the instructions on how to make it are clear. Maybe even make it a requirement to have the ceramic rod before you can even select the tube.

Also opens the option for cold drinks to be added to lower body temperature in hot climates. Fruit juices or maybe iced tea.

Even if it's just cosmetic, having something that looks a step up from a pile of sticks on the ground is something I want. A simple stove for indoor cooking, and maybe something to heat the crucible as well. For a moment I considered the Forge as an option, but that would add some problems with its current UI/UX because right-clicking removes items from the Forge instead of opening up a cooking menu to let you put stuff in the crucible. Maybe a small iron grate like the bronze-age grill you proposed could be set on top of the Forge?