MKMoose

This has apparently been changed to make the tempering process less tedious. A fix to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, if you ask me, but anyways. I think the best way to improve it, possibly alongside the change mentioned above by @LadyWYT, would be to make the cooling rate vary in different containers as well - it's only natural that a firepit should retain its temperature much longer than a flat piece of metal exposed to air.

You need to take the jug with your cursor and RMB while hovering over the glue in the pot's UI. Also, it can't be modified with shift, I misremembered that.

It is a known issue of sorts, which has been in the game for a long time, and it's caused by the pot technically not being a container. When picked up it drops the items inside, but since liquids can't just be dropped like regular items, they get spilled. You can take the glue out of the pot using any liquid container, that is a bowl, a jug or a bucket, using RMB.

As a small preface, the current implementation seems to still be very much a work-in-progress despite it being already a release candidate, though I'm not seeing any reason to expect significant gameplay changes (only visual improvements and new species are really likely), and I wouldn't expect pruning to be added anytime soon unless they find a quick way to create visually satisfactory models for the pruned bushes without the need to nearly double the required texture work. Fair enough, I can mostly see this, though I feel like pruning would probably be quite different from the current fertilizing (I'd expect it to be a regular, annual thing, and it probably shouldn't get less impactful over time). And while I can't disagree that fertilizer can boost yields often quite significantly, the point about outright requiring it being unrealistic still generally stands. It's much more generous than this, and the upfront cost is disproportionately high since nutrients only start at 25% if planted on medium fertility. And it's especially generous due to the current (possibly to-be-patched) ability to maintain a bush on one or two nutrients while the rest is at zero. After ~5-10+ years the nutrient consumption is extremely low already, and after ~15-20 years the it is effectively paused. And it's also halved for strawberries. Each trait has an independent 15% chance to be applied (which gives an ~52% chance for a bush to have at least one trait). If a trait does get applied, then it has a 40% chance to be positive. It's just that berries stay on the bush in the "ripe" stage for a longer or shorter time. I'd say it's a borderline pointless trait - even clustered berries can be neat by speeding up the time it takes to harvest a large farm, but extended ripe time has absolutely no effect unless the berries are left on the bush to decay on their own. This is largely consistent with what I said, so I'm honestly not sure what you're disagreeing with. The impact of traits on wild bushes in early-game gathering is paractically negligible, because the expected effect is very close to net zero. People probably don't want to collect bushes with negative traits, which will result in fewer total bushes, even if the average quality of collected cuttings is higher. The effects of traits on cultivated bushes can be fairly neat, but it's gonna take time to propagate them, making them mostly a late-game benefit. My main argument regarding traits, besides unstackable cuttings, was something along the lines of "it introduces unnecessary complexity in the early game where complexity can easily be undesirable, while simultaneously offering very little benefit for the player until the late game". I haven't noticed almost any complaints about this, though it might be because I don't play on large servers myself so I may not be paying as much attention to them. That said, I don't think it's a significant issue in the current balance - the fertilization requirement is so low that past some initial setup cost there will be basically no maintenance on long-running servers. Aye, I'm glad we can at least agree on this stuff, because I would argue that these two changes are easily the worst (or at least most unnecessary) parts of the rework, while traits and the fertilization requirement at least have a slightly clearer purpose. Tying growth speed to higher fertility soil could end up more inconsistent in some capacity, because crop growth speed is tied to nutrient and water levels and not to soil type. I feel like the simpler solution would be to just make nutrients slowly replenish back up to the default level like they do for crops, with some constraints or other adjustments to keep everything neat and purposeful, so that different tiers of soil would allow a bush to stay at different health levels with no long-term maintenance.

There, I tried. And I appreciate it. To be honest, I'm getting tired of these discussions myself in some capacity. It feels like no matter what people say, a large portion of the pushback to criticisms of the rework fundamentally misses the entire point of what it's directly responding to, and a lot can easily feel outright rooted in unwillingness or incapability to take words for what they are. That's not directed at you, to be clear, I'm mostly talking about some impressions I got on Discord here. An infuriatingly common sentiment is just a number of variations on "the changes are good", which, to be clear, is completely acceptable as standalone feedback, but seems rather questionable to me when it's a direct response to criticisms. It's also in no way exclusive with the argument that certain parts of the rework are a net negative in spite of the overall direction being solid. I think I'm gonna put this in a more space-efficient spoiler box. The differences between different species is something that does seem like it should be implemented sooner or later, and I think I've seen some JSON work to that end in the game assets. Strawberries are already a bit different from other bushes. Bushes spreading dynamically would be pretty neat, and I would love it if new bushes could spread onto burned land especially, since certain berries are very fast pioneer plants (meaning that which readily colonize disturbed environments) and it has apparently been used historically to promote berry growth as sort of radical way of berry cultivation. I also recall @williams_482 mentioning that bushes could consume nutrients from adjacent tiles as well. I didn't really like it for all bushes, but I think would actually be a very neat and realistic way to distinguish currants and certain other larger fruiting bushes that may prefer more space from the smaller ones that grow into denser thickets and carpets. Applying a similar effect to fruit trees would also make sense.

Problem The current mechanic is entirely binary - either a windmill is affected by the turbulence or not - which means that different kinds of mistakes or attempts to game the system are punished equally, which ends up wildly disproportionate to their severity: a player unaware of the exact mechanics and ranges may easily happen to slightly underestimate the required distance between windmills and end up with no power gain until they relocate the windmill (or reduce its size), or even reduced total power if the new windmill affects multiple other windmills, placing windmills even one block too close as a result of forgetfulness, miscalculation or aesthetic reasons is punished in the exact same way as intentionally placing them so close that the sails visually hit each other, placing two windmills close to each other is punished in the exact same way as cramming many windmills in a small space (e.g. in an optmized 4 x N windmill). Main suggestion The main way to address these issues is to make turbulence scale with distance (the simplest way is linear, the theoretically ideal way may be gaussian, a good compromise is probably cosine or a polynomial approximate of gaussian) and scale with the number of windmills (possibly just stacked multiplicatively from each windmill, but some different relationship could be better). Additional ideas In no particular order: increase the turbulence range along the axis of rotation and reduce it otherwise, to incentivize side-by-side windmills instead of just any haphazard placement as long as it's far enough from each other, make turbulence update for a rotor right as sails are added to it, and remove the randomness from the automatic update.

Possibly because they're ridden with a variety of problems. Falling blocks phasing through other blocks and disappearing entirely in certain cases. Simple and easily exploitable rules that incentivize rigid patterns and certain cheesy strategies. Damaging the landscape. Among other things.

Mainly because damage is heavily affected by breakpoints (e.g. the 5 damage breakpoint is extremely valuable for ferrous spears). Even when breakpoints are so high that they barely matter, damage can easily be much more valuable than durability and material savings by increasing DPS, not just total damage. It's bugged in some way at the moment. Damage should be proportional to power as far as I can tell based on the code, but the buffs currently behave in a number of clearly unintended ways. That has literally nothing to do with the other issue. But I goofed on this one in a rush, so you can disregard it.

In the current system, soil quality is only relevant for the initial nutrients. Passive nutrient regeneration is paused while the block has a bush on top of it. Also, it consumes nutrients when the fruit ripen, not when they are harvested, so it will consume them even if you don't collect the berries. Based on a quick glance at the code, low temperatures seem to only affect mature bushes, if I'm reading it correctly. I'm still gonna answer your longer reply, just so you know.

You're not maximizing power and minimizing risk. You're maximizing the expected total damage per unit of metal, which, to be honest, isn't a very useful metric. You can remove the sequences that end with tempering, because in the current balance it's strictly a loss to temper and not quench afterwards. Also, I haven't checked exactly, but it seems to me that your quenching power multiplier is 0.2 while it should be 0.1. The power ratio between QQT and QQ being ~0.98 also seems odd.

Yeah, that's been probably the most common complaint regarding new bush models, though in terms of aesthetics alone the feedback has been very positive from what I've seen. I'm definitely not noticing them from as far as I used to, especially because the color of the ripe fruit alone is not an immediate giveaway anymore, though the bushes are now a bit more distinct from the everpresent birch leaves. I don't personally mind this change, as I think the old bushes were pretty ugly, used to really stick out and were kind of difficult not to notice once I knew what to look for. Slight texture tweaks could help, but it's also probably not too difficult to get used to their new appearance. New player perspective would be very useful to get on this, though I've also argued that berry bushes should be much more plentiful in the wild, which would likely largely alleviate the issue of the currently very sparse bushes being somewhat difficult to spot. Well, the bowtorn firing squads were a bug, and that got fixed. At least they were a bug after storms - I don't recall it affecting high-activity nights as well, but I could be wrong. Bowtorn themselves are somewhat divisive to this day, but personally I don't really have significant issues with them besides simplistic AI, which basically applies to all entities in the game. Also, they belong to the more fantasy, eldritch lore-related part of VS, so they get more allowance to be implemented however the devs see fit within reason, they aren't restricted by realism, and they've been used to address clear design flaws that were present when there were only drifters. But the berries? Apologies if I'm repeating myself too much, but I'm really just baffled and disappointed with several of these changes (same as the heat treatment mechanics, by the way), especially because most of them seem fully intentional: Several of the new bush mechanics are completely unrealistic (the fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation). Several of the changes are solving very few if any issues while also creating new ones, which makes them arguably just a net detriment to the game (if there's one good change, it's the cuttings, which solve obvious problems and cause very few if any). Virtually all of the changes are inconsistent with the rest of the game, at least as long as other food sources aren't reworked to match (even the cuttings are in multiple ways different from fruit tree cuttings for no clear reason). The total effect of the changes arguably makes the berry bushes unfittingly complex for the earliest food source that the player is likely to rely on, to which I actually got the response that gathering is unaffected, which is kind of fair enough, but still 1) health states and traits are extra clutter which is almost entirely irrelevant for a beginner and 2) trying to replant berry bushes which are inconvenient to collect regularly is a very intuitive thing for new players to do as far as I can tell. Like, those aren't just the devs' interpretation of what they want the game to be, as could be argued with the bowtorn. To me, most of those are kind of fundamental mistakes. And you know what I honestly kind of hate? Almost nobody has given any pushback to these complaints - because there's almost no pushback to give. I welcome any attempts, though, or at least corrections. I'm not really expecting the berry bushes to be exactly what I would want them to be - that would be disregarding other people and making a game just for myself, and that's why I'm pointing out issues more than I'm proposing any larger changes - but I genuinely think that the fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation would be better off just rolled back, because I see no reasonable justification for them to be added in the first place. Or at least no justification that trumps these specific changes being unrealistic. There's a lot of functionally similar mechanics that I could easily appreciate, like soil preparation, water balance or pruning, because those could at least be realistic. Traits are better, but the unstackability issue is still very significant.

As the #2 berry bush rework hater, I do actually agree that some of the changes are definitely beneficial in the long term. Taking cuttings instead of full bushes is an obvious good change, though after that it kind of goes downhill for me for the most part. I don't personally think the rework even achieves what you're saying that you like about it, and I'd argue that many of the changes are largely misdirected, they are at odds with the gameplay role of berries for the average player, and are also unrealistic. Even if they were to stay roughly as they are, there's still a couple significant issues to fix, most notably that cuttings with different traits don't stack with each other, which is a sacrilege towards player inventory space and has no simple solution besides nuking the trait system back out of the game. The dominant community sentiment, as seen for example on this Discord thread requesting to remove the fertilizer requirement, which got 11k messages in 5 days and ~80% reactions in favor, I would summarize as "yes, but not like that". The 1.21 berries clearly needed a rework, but the changes are the most controversial part of the update by far. Some of the changes are good, but most can be easily argued to be arbitrary, pointless, purely detrimental to the player, unrealistic, or a combination of those, while some of the biggest issues with berries remain mostly unaddressed. They're still available almost all the way through the year, spawn in pathetic tiny patches which are unrealistically scattered and annoying to collect (which is the main reason why aggregating them from a large area has been such a common strategy - they're just really inconvenient otherwise), and they remain easy to replant in large quantities even if it requires to wait a couple months longer and fertilize a bit for full yields. I've made a whole list of what I don't like about the changes here, and I really hope that at least the seemingly unintended issues will be addressed. Now, it's also worth mentioning that a part of the negative reactions could have been prevented with more intentional design or better communication, because when people initially saw that "berry bushes require fertilization or they will stop bearing fruit", many people quite naturally started freaking out, because it was easy to assume that it would actually require regular fertilization and render berry bushes effectively worthless. In reality, the average player will never need to use more than 4 bone meal, or 3 compost or saltpeter, or 2 potash, which gets your bushes into the healthy state for something like 4-5 years in the current balance, which is a pretty moderate upfront cost more than it is maintenance. Not saying that appreciating those changes is in any way wrong or whatnot - you are free to enjoy the game however you see fit - but I just personally really don't like them for a whole host of reasons, and the community at large is clearly dissatisfied. Just for a bit of context, the devs have said they won't be implementing detailed butchering and skinning due to gore concerns. A lot of people have been suggesting ways to simplify the system and minimize gore (myself included), though I'm not aware of any dev statements suggesting that anything is planned for anytime soon. There are some plans for animals, apparently, but it's very vague and I don't know when any of it might come and whether it will involve anything related to butchering.

It's only when the bush initially matures, not when the fruit ripen, just to be clear. And it doesn't really go to barren, because for some reason they've decided that the cuttings can only be planted on medium fertility or higher. Otherwise correct. It should be on average 5.5 months [it's more, I forgot one stage] between initial planting of a cutting and first berries ripening. The changelog is wonky on this. Granted, it may still be too long to see any berries before the first winter, depending on when exactly you plant them.

My thought has been that the tailor should focus a lot more on trading, and all clothing outside of certain basics should be tailor-exclusive in crafting but usually purchasable from the clothing trader and perhaps other traders like luxuries and survival in certain cases (ideally alongside a change to make them sell all items from several clothing sets at once instead of completely random items). Requiring a purchased sewing kit for some clothing and making sure that they require some rarer resources also seems like a pretty reasonable idea, though I don't think there should be two different-cost recipes for the same clothes, unless it's only implemented through some sort of intermediate item that the tailor could craft more efficiently (which may also help with every other recipe that uses hides being craftable with hundreds of possible item combinations that make it kinda annoying to look them up). Then maybe add a special system where different NPCs (primarily traders, but maybe Nadiyans as well) would "request" some clothes (frequently tailor-exclusive) and pay handsomely for them (they currently do buy some clothes, but it's inconsistent, has little variety and is mostly limited to lootable clothes), so that a tailor would effectively switch the balance around by being a trader themselves. Other classes would buy clothing from a merchant, whereas the tailor could actively go around and sell clothing for a hefty profit. A similar system could be extended to other materials to go in line with Tyron's idea that he shared a while back to make a merchant an actually gameplay-viable player job of sorts. There's also a whole number of clothes for which the tailor kind of provides no advantage besides being potentially cheaper (e.g. all items except shoes in the arctic fisher and embroidered fur sets compared to the arctic hunter set), which further begs the question of "what's the point of the tailor?". Also, the reindeer herder clothes have some of the most arbitrary warmth values in the game, it feels like, and I think different sets should be unified to make them mostly equivalent to each other instead of making a patchwork from different sets the technically optimal set for warmth. With the new buff system, I think it may be really good to allow the tailor to add lining to most clothes, making them ~0.5 C warmer and reducing the need to specifically balance the tailor's clothes against other sets. This would make the tailor's advantage independent of the specific clothes that they can craft, and allow to keep different sets consistent with each other, leaving the choice of clothing more to the matter of taste.

You can, but the berry bushes currently downgrade the soil when they mature, meaning that the soil you dig up will be lower fertility than the one you planted on. Water is currently wholly irrelevant for berries. Breaking a bush now drops a couple pieces of plant debris - replanting can only be done through cuttings. Keep in mind that the current system is a rather controversial one and some changes or at least fixes and balance adjustments are likely to come before 1.22 stable.