Lame Fox

On the surface enemy types: he's actually told me wolves aren't an issue. Apparently the small knockback from hitting them is enough to be able to fight them indefinitely. For bears we had been using traps, since they seemed to hit through our early armours very easily. We haven't really had much to do with them lately though so I'm not sure to what extent we might fight them in the open going ahead.

I am crafting shingle roofs currently from ceramic tiles and one of the recipes is a diagonal 3 slots. So to use my whole stack of tiles I left click and drag, but, I have not even once been able to get it to drag through the middle without placing in a 4th unwanted slot, even when I take it so painstakingly slowly it would be faster to put them there some other way. It feels like this mechanic just doesn't work for diagonal recipes, which is annoying now that I've learned to use it and gotten used to it. IMO there should be more space or a small deadzone or something between the grid tiles, so that you can drag through the middle tile without touching the others. Similar to how if I drag outside the grid I can do ones on the edges without selecting the parts in between.

I guess but that doesn't seem to leave much use for ranged as combat in general since most relevant enemies only seem to spawn underground or in storms. This may be part of why we get so many then, I hadn't been checking it since I assumed the rift weather affects, well, rifts. I've never seen any down there AFAIK, so I had no idea the two concepts were even related. No mods presently. On enemy types, we've had all sorts spawn in the house so I think they have room. Although I guess it's possible they are just a more "expensive" enemy or something, and it generates fewer of them. I've actually had a medium storm while writing this though that also seems to have spawned very few enemies, to the point I went outside to look for them when normally that would be a somewhat poor idea. So I'm not sure what has happened, we're just getting few of them now. That is how I expected it to work but in practice I find that the enemies don't necessarily prioritize the blackguard, even though it's the closer character. Then more also likely appear in places we've previously cleared and attack from behind, so without controlling them via fences we end up fighting two separate melee battles. Regarding multiplayer, I usually stick to things like LAN unless it's a game type that is very tolerant of lag, because my ping to anywhere with populated servers tends to be terrible.

I mean I don't disagree with that, using fences on them isn't fun really. It's just that fighting them without fences wasn't fun either and the fences make them less annoying and let me use the bow more reliably. I've had things spawn in literally right behind me in a corner during storms, or in caves they appear in every shadow and will (apparently silently?) walk up behind from a dead end I had just cleared. When we control them with fences then at least the melee can go in ahead and I can fire at exposed enemies or target ranged ones that are firing at him, so it at least feels like we have some synergy going on instead of melee FFA. Our base was originally meant to somewhat resemble a castle, with doors sunken into the building and flanked by hatches we can open and fight through. I considered also having hatches to shoot down at the doors from above at one point, but it turned out they don't attack doors, and often spawn inside during the storms anyway. Although less often now that we get heavy storms. Are those bugged? They seem to make way fewer enemies than medium. Funny enough while we don't have a moat they like to fall into the charcoal-making pit.

Thanks, I'll have a look. I think I mapped out most nearby traders so it's probably one of them: I'd been meaning to do the story later as I didn't realize it'd start out easier than the random caves we've found.

My issue with treating it as pure survival is that once we are over the initial difficulty of starting with nothing and not knowing what to do, survival becomes routine. And to be fair this isn't a unique problem to VS, it's been true of every survival game I've ever played. In this start we were new to the game and a bit more worried than we probably needed to be, over-produced sealed food containers, and continued hunting in winter such that we survived even though I got the month lengths mixed up with season lengths and thought it would be 9 days. At this point we have a defensible shelter, pine plantation, farms going, and are accumulating animals (tangentially, I think the wiki is wrong about goats being baited by grain—this only seems to get us bighorns and zero goat interaction of any kind, they won't even break a trap). So food isn't really an issue anymore. There are storms (up to "heavy" so far) but we deal with them the same way as caves: segmenting our building interior with fences and fighting segment by segment. At this point we seek out combat because I'm just not sure what else there is to do. The environment isn't a threat anymore. We're steadily advancing up the tech tree, expanding our building and changing its materials. Caves seemed to contain some unique loot and lore related stuff, and the mobs do appear to have loot we're meant to collect (gears) so we go there and fight stuff for it. So I'm kind of wanting the combat experience to be more fun or this phase isn't going to be very replayable I think. I actually wouldn't say it leaves us at a disadvantage against foes, because honestly, the toughest enemies we encounter are baffled by a gate made of small sticks. But it probably could stand to be a bit more engaging than it is, even aside from clearly jank stuff. I don't mean it necessarily needs like dodge rolling or whatever but a greater variety of weapons and enemies at least. It feels a bit weird that at this point my bow is already the best bow in the game and now I'm just upgrading arrow material for higher DPS for example. Curiously the scrap kits despite being awful did contain an extra weapon type that I don't think is otherwise represented, some sort of mace. So maybe that's in the works?

Thanks, I'll look into it if I end up trying mods. Might depend how frequently updates break them as I've had some bad luck using mods on early access titles. I did have a falx on me for emergencies, but as hunter it seems like I'm wasting the class—and risking immediate death—to melee on purpose. I mainly use it on enemies whom I can keep knocking back until they die without ever quite getting to hit me, otherwise I seem to be better off running and getting somewhere they can't follow. tbh, I sort of get the impression this class is just not very good. Like, the resource bonuses are... ok I guess? A low % of extra resources, which I haven't really needed in the end (the game exaggerated its winter a bit I feel) plus a harvest speed buff for something that it turns out never took long to harvest to begin with. The ranged damage bonus is what I thought it would be good for and synergize with the blackguard, basically supporting the melee character and getting our food. However better armour than cloth gambesons appears to actively negate ranged DPS bonuses with the added charge time and effective ranged DPS with worse accuracy. And also lowers the walk speed which IME is the hunter's best trait. So I have one tier of armour to try from here before I'm starting to defeat the purpose of taking this class. Then on top of that, the movement and hitboxes are what they are.

Ah, that's unfortunate. I hope it's something they get around to. As fun as the rest of the game is, preparing for combat has essentially been my motivation behind progressing in exploration/crafting. I have a feeling when I reach the end of those, and have just fighting left, I will probably have to walk away from it and just read patch notes now and then to see what's new.

I put off doing it much at first, because I didn't have much in the way of gear. The few encounters I had felt bad, but I figured I just wasn't equipped for them. Now with leather armour and recurve bow with bronze arrows I've been going into caves with one other player (on LAN). So far, I find it really tedious. The janky movement of mobs makes them really hard to hit unless they're still or barely moving. Often attacks that visually appear to hit don't. This is the same with both ranged and melee attacks as far as I can tell. The guys who run around like spiders are particularly bad, it feels like most of their body is not even solid and on top of that they bounce around like a rubber ball. The incoming damage is insane and we resort to cheese to mitigate it. There's not apparently much in the way of light armour beyond the one I'm using, just gambesons. Anything else will worsen my ranged weapon which is basically the point of my class (I regret this class tbh). I did have a shield but it blinds me when I aim the recurve bow so I had to get rid of it. We've taken to just making the whole cave small sections with fences and gates because things spawn ceaselessly all around us. It looks silly and doesn't improve the feel of combat but it reduces how many we deal with at once. We could blanket the whole thing in torches I guess, but I'm not wholly sure that works. Our house is full of light and they still manage to spawn sometimes, plus, that would be SO MANY torches. We also went with one ranged and one melee class but I don't feel like there is any synergy here. The horrific bouncy movement of enemies means I rarely get a clean shot at anything he is fighting in melee, so it's almost like we're each fighting solo despite being in the same place. Is this just how it stays? Other than the gambeson all I really have to upgrade at this point are arrow types, since apparently this recurve is already the game's best bow. I've enjoyed the survival and crafting elements of this game but the combat feels so disappointing I genuinely don't know if I can stand to keep doing it.

I have not tried any mods yet, but I do agree that ranged combat/hunting as is feels a bit spammy. I think it's largely because of how erratically things can move, combined with block-based terrain making vertical movements inherently extreme. In other games I would lead ranged attacks on a moving target but here, targets frequently and rapidly change heading and bounce around as they move. This makes landing subsequent hits quite a pain, and favours high initial damage. Combined with the spread of a bow it really feels like the best chance is to just fire as fast as possible from as close as possible. I do carry some spears too and honestly they feel a little better to use but they also don't stack so space becomes an issue. If I take too few I'm in the middle of trying to hunt/fight trying to find out where on earth the spears went. Maybe I need javelins/pila. With animals in particular I've taken to relying a lot on trapping them in terrain/water or specially designed traps, then finishing them off. However it makes me regret specializing in ranged damage, since I don't even need it then. Monsters for whatever reason are easier targets but even they are flipping their heading around on a whim while moving, they seem to just have lower top speeds (so far). Although it wouldn't really solve the underlying issue, I wonder if being slowed by hits (or wounds?) would help a bit.