MKMoose

There's recently been a related discussion in another thread as well, largely echoing your sentiments. Personally, I think that this penalty should just be thrown out the window, and instead a benefit for using some specific tools and other items with two hands (i.e. with an empty off-hand) should be implemented. And possibly some items could only be used with two hands. Buffing two-handed items instead of penalizing using items in the off-hand has a whole number of advantages, as I see it: It actually benefits what the player is currently doing which keeps its scope within the short-term gameplay loop together with switching items into and out of the off-hand. It encourages keeping the off-hand empty for specific, targeted actions instead of at all times whenever possible. It gives the player arguably much more interesting agency - instead of only putting anything in the off-hand when necessary and treating an empty off-hand as the default, it actually would make an empty off-hand into a choice that the player makes when focusing on specific activities. It's only active when the player is actually using a relevant item, whereas the current debuff is applied regardless of whether the player is using the item in the off-hand, and its severity is not correlated with the benefit or use of that item and the player's current activity. You could be sprinting with a shield mid-combat, chiseling intricate decorations, or sitting around and cooking food with an item in the off-hand just because you forgot to take it out - all of them apply the same nagging penalty. Some items like the shield or a lantern could retain a debuff, because the player can benefit from them in sudden situations or passively. Even in this case, though, simply adding an opportunity cost through more items that can be used in the off-hand (e.g. knife or other weapons, bag or basket, walking stick) could also be sufficient to make the player think twice about which item they want to use, making the penalty completely unnecessary and even detrimental to gameplay variety. Only tangentially related, I just had a thought that it could be really cool to make the bow only usable in the off-hand, with an arrow in the main hand. Would be much more sensible and immersive than using the bow in the main hand with the off-hand free to do whatever it pleases.

The main potential problem that I see with this is that it completely shifts the design function of classes, from an initial horizontal choice that serves as the basis for the character's identity as well as the player's social identity in a multiplayer context, to a vertical progression system comparable with RPG skill trees that focuses on a sense of progression and character ownership as well as enables optimization. Not unlike described by @LadyWYT above, this new system could easily lead to existing classes losing a lot of their identity, and the initial choice being much less meaningful - while it's not necessarily a wholly bad thing and it can be in some ways mitigated, it's still more difficult to justify doing so than it is to justify changes that purely build off of what's there. Personally, I would argue for largely the opposite - that the initial choice should have greater impact on the game by altering the available and optimal playstyles more heavily than just through minor buffs and debuffs. Because as it stands, class selection still largely boils down to just making some things a tiny bit easier or more difficult, a tiny bit more convenient or time-consuming, but without significantly affecting the way that the player makes decisions or progresses through the ages - especially in singleplayer where the player has to do everything themselves either way. Why tie skills to high-tech or magical items? Since you're already suggesting memories, why not tie new skills to temporal events, lore discoveries (including those made as part of the main story), and allow unlocking recipes from written formulas and schematics? Why give players penalties for progressing? The primary purpose of negative traits, beyond establishing character identity, is balancing against the traitless commoner, which just isn't necessary in a vertical system. Debuffs may make progression much less satisfying or even discourage the player from seeking out new skills. Allowing to specifically select drawbacks would also risk enabling greatly excessive optimization. If anything, I would expect to be able to choose thematically matching pairs of positive and negative effects rather than select them separately. Spawning in with items in hand sounds to me like a great way to break immersion and place the player's focus in the wrong place, at least as long as the game is supposed to be a wilderness survival and not an RPG or adventure game. If the items are random, then it could also inadvertently encourage rerolling until the player gets good starting skills. Finding them in ruins or elsewhere is generally fine, but if you want starting skills then retaining the existing traits pretty much as they are now would be quite fine. The primary way to address this issue, albeit certainly not the lightest in terms of development time, is to give each class their own specific skill tree of sorts. Don't Starve Together has been doing pretty much just that - started in 2023, and they still have 6 of 18 characters to update, which they have been doing interspersed with other content releases. This is a problem that so many class or skill systems fall into, and I genuinely don't know if there's any reason for it besides bandwagoning onto what's popular without actually understanding how to make it good. They're supposed to increase player expression and allow meaningful choice, but actually end up leaning into hyperoptimization and reducing variety as a result. The current class system is simple to the point of arguably being simplistic, but it's quite serviceable and from what I've seen, contrary to some opinions, no class seems to be dominant or significantly underpicked on multiplayer servers. See a recent TOPS class poll for an example.

They should be able to spawn everywhere, albeit most commonly in cold and temperate climates. In warm and hot climates rivulets spawn less frequently on the whole, and in icy climates they might also not spawn quite as often due to a large portion of the world being covered with ice. Source: source code. If they are actually unable to spawn in some climates for you, that would more likely be a mod issue or a bug.

Realistically, metal doors with heat-resistant glass viewports seem to have only started appearing in the 19th century. But regardless of the exact temperature ratings for different types of glass, I think it would be fine enough to add a metal door with a viewport, even using regular glass. There's plenty of minor historical and realistic inaccuracies in VS already, and adding one with an actual purpose would be quite fine. You can also just use glass in the wall of the charcoal pit, and a solid door for the entrance. Granted, in your specific example that glass would have to be somewhere on the side since it wouldn't fit on the front (or the door would have to be moved and glass left on the front, or the pit could be made taller), but to me that still seems much better than having to break the glass to go into the room.

Whenever you're wondering about recent TOPS news, the #tops-news Discord channel is probably the best place to check. The server was brought offline due to the griefing event, but there is currently no ETA for when TOPS will be back online.

Kind of, though I was thinking that the commoner is more akin to a farmer (which would constitute potentially upwards of 90% of medieval society), whereas a "laborer" is a person who does manual labor, mostly seen in larger cities and often associated with construction work. They would move goods, load and unload ships or carts, work at construction sites and do the the physical work in workshops, kilns, furnaces, landscaping, this sort of jobs. Granted, though, it could potentially be argued that it falls under the same broad bucket as the commoner. Seems like a very good way to differentiate the doctor. Doesn't even necessarily need to be particularly realistic, as there is a lot of shenanigans that could revolve around the unique flavors of the game with ingredients sourced from drifters or other stuff related to rot, rust and whatnot. Overall could be interesting to let the doctor use a couple of their own unique medical cures, and repurpose poisons as healing items or vice versa - all classes could heal all injuries or diseases at a basic level, but a doctor could be more flexible and may use nonstandard ingredients (poisons, leeches, rot, rust) in potent but risky treatments.

Personally, I see the hub as four 3x3x3 cubes with holes on the sides, one empty 3x3x3 cube in the middle, and the corner parts which connect the cubes, so I will use that description. The way I do it is as follows: Place three ingots or a plate and an ingot on the anvil - it's fine to just place them all at the same time for simplicity's sake. You can rotate the workpiece three times with RMB before placing the third ingot, if you're using ingots. First build as much of the four outer 3x3x3 cubes as possible, which should probably be the easy part (just treat them as solid 3x3x3 for now): If you're using ingots, start by moving the material from layers above the third layer down into the cubes. You can use heavy hit to make it faster, but you might then have to pick up some material from the sides and move it back up. If you do so, you can leave one voxel of material in the corners which aren't part of the cubes, and it may also be useful as a staircase for other voxels. If you're using a plate, start by moving all the material from around the hub inwards and upwards. Leave one voxel of material in the corners which aren't part of the cubes, and use them as a staircase for other voxels. Then you'll need to move the material from the top layer of the central 3x3x3 cube to finish the outer cubes. You will be missing five voxels if you're using a plate or have left one voxel each in the corners below - don't worry about that at the moment. Once you have the four outer 3x3x3 cubes (optionally with a few missing voxels), you need to fill out the corners - looking from the side, it's: down > down > right > down > down the five first images show which voxel I'm targeting for that move, and the last one is the finished result. Repeat for each corner. If the first voxel is in the corner already, then you just skip the first step, and you might need to move the third in from somewhere else if you're missing something on that side. You should now have a cross with five voxels in the second layer of the central cube, and two voxels missing from each outer cube for a total of 8 missing voxels (or three voxels missing from one of them for a total of 9 missing voxels if you're using a plate). Move the voxels from each arm of that cross in the second layer of the central cube clockwise or counterclockwise to have an X, and then bump them up to the third layer of the outer cubes to fill out the voxels which you've just used for the corners. You can also move the central voxel to fill out whatever your're missing. You should now have at most one voxel missing from each cube. You have to now destroy the middle voxel from the lower layer of the central cube to access the other ones. Then, you need to move the missing voxels from the bottom layer to the top layer: Make sure that your missing voxel is centered like this, at least for the first side, since you can only access four voxels adjacent to the one removed from the center at the moment: Then you need to make space by temporarily moving a voxel to the fourth layer, and bring the voxel from the bottom layer up: up > up > up > down > down the five first images show which voxel I'm targeting for that move, and the last one is the finished result. You can account for this step by leaving one voxel on the fourth layer earlier, but I skipped that for simplicity's sake, in part also to show that you can do it on the fly as well. If you accidentally break some voxels, you can use the other voxels at the bottom in a similar way to make up for any losses. Remove excess voxels in the middle, and remove the excess voxels from the sides of the outer cubes (make a 2-voxel deep hole in each cube). For the voxels in the middle, you can just jump on top of the anvil to reduce the risk that you look at something wrong and break something. I strongly recommend to sit using G when removing the voxels from the sides, and rotate the workpiece with RMB. Figuring out whether you need to break another voxel in the hole can be a bit tricky here due to the black and purple wireframe being very similar, so you have to be kinda careful here. Feel free to tell me if anything is unclear.

Updating to 1.22.5 should fix it.

I've also found this kind of progression very satisfying, though I think the current system can easily fall flat in a lot of ways. To me, the progression from a couple torches out in the open to a large number of lanterns in a fenced-off area feels almost like an unintentional consequence of a few unrelated design choices, which isn't really reinforced in any way (and many players just never seem to experience it, if they just make some different choices as they progress). Games like Don't Starve Together or The Long Dark tend to really make a point that darkness being dangerous, and they make sure that fire is critical to survival. But in VS, there is little intentionality - monsters don't spawn in lit-up areas, sure, but then they aren't in any way repelled by fire or even interact with it in any way besides sometimes burning, and temporal storms ignore the spawning restriction either way. Fire is basically a non-issue, it is almost entirely free, and has little purpose besides lighting up firepits and pit kilns. I've been thinking that it could be interesting to make fire more crucial to the game by at least implementing some sort of fear of fire into monsters, and possibly some other changes like making most if not all light sources expendable, increasing the utility of fire, adding better firestarters and various long-lasting sources of fire. Imagine how unnerving it could be to see monsters moving into the light of a torch or brazier then cover their eyes and recoil, clearly trying to get to the player but kept at bay by the fire. Or even how cool it could be to maintain a huge fire in something almost akin to a ritual in the center of a settlement through the duration of a temporal storm. Frankly, I've never seen the point of rift wards, and as I see it there's already practically no reason to bother building them: they are pretty expensive to make compared to simple light sources - three Jonas parts, iron plate, electrum ingot, and some miscellaneous stuff. they require maintenance with temporal gears, whereas light sources are infinite, they aren't fully reliable, unlike light sources - they occasionally still allow a rift to spawn, plus rifts can spawn monsters in a 20 block radius which can sometimes greatly reduce the apparent range of the rift ward. I think I would like it if light and rift wards served two distinct purposes - light could be used to deter or repel monsters in some capacity, especially once they've already spawned (serving as a protective tool in some sense), whereas the rift ward could be used primarily to increase the stability of an area and reduce spawns in a large radius (as the primary method for large-scale prevention). Regardless of how it's done exactly, I think that it would be better if they complement each other rather than compete for almost the same function. Yeah, very much so. I would imagine that some storm-related effects could start upwards of around ten minutes before any threats start appearing. The point is to make the start of a storm (and then the storm itself) into an immersive atmospheric event, not unlike how real-life storms might start with strong winds, birds flying low, rain clouds closing in from the distance, and so on. I've been saying somewhere around here that anything which can be made more immersive by moving it from the UI to the in-game world should be given these diegetic tells, and I think all the temporal mechanics would especially benefit from it given their otherworldly nature. I would argue that storms should be an environmental effect first, and a combat challenge could even be almost entirely optional. Naturally, low stability should be risky and inadvisable over prolonged periods of time, if storms are to remain notably threatening, but a storm just dumping a dozen monsters on the player like they owe something to it is not great - it would be ideal to find a good balance there, not swing the pendulum between extremes. It seems to me that the maximum light level for spawns is there largely just to prevent annoying spawns inside of the player's home - while it is pretty gamey, it is also pretty important, and removing it would require that some other way to prevent random spawns in player-owned spaces is added (and the simplest solution of preventing spawns in rooms is probably not enough, plus it could be finnicky and frustrating to make sure that everything is a room to prevent all spawns). There are options, naturally, and they would just have to be implemented, while light level is right there, free to use, and it's a quite simple and intuitive solution, even if somewhat flawed. Fun fact: many animals also don't spawn at high light levels, specifically (as indicated by comments in the assets) to prevent them from spawning straight inside farms or animal pens and eating all the crops (in the case of herbivores) or killing the domesticated animals (in the case of predators).

Yeah, that's the easy and immersive solution. Alternatively, you can just wait for the nutrients to replenish, though that still leaves the problem of how long to wait if the nutrients are not visible. The recovery rate should be 0.25% every 3.5 in-game hours on average, so ~1.7% every in-game day or a little less than 6 days for every 10%. Nutrient consumption falls off to just ~20% of the base value after 10 years, so the bush will have consumed ~80% of all nutrients it will ever consume by that point (neglecting variation due to differing health states) and further uptake is almost negligible in most cases. As I see it, extending their lifetime is significantly easier than dealing with breaking and replanting, unless maybe when you're mass-producing rot. At least, that is when you have sufficient fertilizer - I always have an excess of bones, but I don't know about your playstyle. Frankly, for me it's a hard no. If apples didn't last well over a year in a cellar and ripen faster than bushes in Year 1, then I would be a bit more willing to bother with berries after Year 0.

Assuming good player stability and no temporal storm active, they can't spawn at all in areas which have an artificial light level of 8 or more even while in range of rifts (technically "OnlyBlockLight", so only light emitted by blocks, but that's synonymous with artificial light for most purposes). It can be annoying to light up a large area sufficiently, and having some small spots with lower light level can sometimes make it seem like they occasionally spawn in lit areas regardless. It is also true, though, that rifts can occasionally spawn monsters in broad daylight - at just ~0.63% of the standard spawn rate, or slightly higher when multiple rifts are close together. Somewhat reminds me of Project Zomboid, which has a relatively high initial density of zombies with a low respawn rate. For that game it works very well, retaining the danger of exploring and looting new locations while reducing pressure on the player in already-cleared areas, though it is a quite different game. I think it could be nice to have something like this implemented for monster spawns in VS, and it could be done in many ways, though I have some doubts about the specifics of your suggestion. Currently rifts last 24 hours if I recall correctly, and new rifts would still bring with them new monsters (unless the maximum is tied to chunks or whatnot, instead of directly to rifts). Having a maximum number spawned per rift could still be useful, as it would prevent a single stray rift spawned close to home from potentially ruining a whole night, though it solves a somewhat different issue from what you've described. Also, "random nighttime spawns" are not exactly a thing, as those either come from rifts or crawl out from caves or other dark areas. At least a small quantity of respawning monsters would probably be desirable - I feel like it could be cool to allow reliably blocking or exhausting rifts, but also to let drifters drift through the world, stumbling upon the player occasionally. Overall I would appreciate something like this being implemented as long as it's not completely endless spawns, as that would defeat the point of clearing the place of monsters in the first place. It could be implemented via closable rifts. Or a sort of depletion mechanic, where monsters would be more plentiful initially, but after being killed they would replenish very slowly, perhaps over several months if not longer. Personally, though, I don't think it's really debatable that some changes to temporal stability, rifts and storms on the whole are overdue, so I feel like reworking monster spawns as part of a larger overhaul would be more worthwhile than just reworking monster spawns themselves. Spoiler-marked just because it's long. Broadly speaking, the way I see it, this tends to boil down to a couple simple design rules which aren't respected by VS particularly well: Especially at the start of the game, any monster spawns should be finite, periodic or just very slow to give the player breathing room - this is partially already achieved by the fact that monsters for the most part spawn at night only, but it is also not achieved particularly well because sometimes monsters just spawn in forests or in caves and can keep harassing the player almost 24/7. At least there's the grace period in world configuration, but a new player often won't think to deliberately make the game easier for themselves. In an area that the player treats as home, monster spawns should be greatly limited or entirely absent, especially if the intent is to facilitate a feeling of ownership over the homestead and allow creating a safe zone in which the player can prepare for a trip into more dangerous areas - lighting up the area already somewhat protects against spawns, but temporal storms break it, the rift ward doesn't help, and there is basically no hostile regions or locations that the player could prepare for anyways. Respawning threats, especially those that harass the player periodically even in a home location, should be designed in such a way that even a new player is expected to fight them, and can learn to do so organically - rifts and temporal storms are almost a complete failure in this regard. They should also ideally offer some sort of reward for dealing with them efficiently and let off in the late game once the pressure they apply risks becoming tedious, cheesing becomes more appealing, and voluntary challenges are more desirable. In special locations that are designed to be looted like ruins or story locations, respawning should only occur if some loot respawns as well, or at least the enemies can be looted. Ideally, though, don't make it into a regular farming spot. If there is no loot to respawn, then I see no reason to respawn enemies as well. Overwhelming, high-frequency monster spawns should be used almost exclusively as a means of communicating that head-on combat is not the optimal option, plus in extreme optional challenges - while temporal storms do kind of seem like they are supposed to be avoided so they could fit the bill, the devs have also said that they want to encourage interacting with storms more. Plus, I think it goes largely without saying that hiding during storms as it is now just isn't really fun. The fix to all of the above is pretty much just to create dedicated high-risk areas and challenging dungeons, while limiting random harassing spawns from rifts and storms to be less disruptive. Also as a side note, respawning or persistent threats out in the world are useful to make travel more challenging and engaging, while fast travel options and non-respawning threats are useful to facilitate a sense of progression for exploring and clearing out an area - both are generally optional and are currently done in some capacity. I see no need for any big changes here (or if any changes were to be done here, I would focus on world generation and animals, not monsters). Thing is, though, that when people are complaining about rifts or storms or whatnot, they aren't always complaining about combat. Sure, better combat would make things more manageable and less frustrating, but I think a lot of the issues that people have stem from a feeling that the game doesn't respect their space and time, which seems closely related to when and where monster spawns occur. While some level of pressure on the player is only natural in a survival game, it just gets frustrating and tedius when I want to do one thing, but the game basically goes "nuh uh" and makes it impossible to do anything except sit about until the night ends or the storm wanes. In this context, how good combat mechanics are starts to more properly matter only when combat is unavoidable - and the funny thing is that combat is almost 100% avoidable, but the way to do so is just sit about and do nothing, which is not exactly the definition of fun either, and if a player doesn't feel prepared to fight then they will just have to sit it through. Well, combat also matters when I specifically want to try my hand at combat and take on something difficult, though there are currently almost no interesting challenges, and a huge portion of combat in the game boils down to either out-damaging a crowd of basic enemies while wearing heavy armor or cheesing them with ranged weapons. Improving hitboxes or animations is important but it won't meaningfully change the basic combat loop or provide difficult challenges and new ways of player expression.

It seems to me that the best way to make these three concepts stand out while avoiding excessive overlap would be to have each of them focus on a fundamentally different worldview in a sense and only secondarily derive gameplay functions from there, as that would serve as a sufficient differentiation even if all three were to have some relation with alchemy and science. Any kind of perfect lore accuracy isn't really necessary, in the same vein that it makes sense in gameplay even though there's no real lore reason to, for example, make every single tailor invariably weak and kind, or every single Blackguard invariably clumsy and heavyhanded. Doctor - Rot and shady experiments. Managing the dying and the dead would have been quite high on their list of responsibilities, and rather than focus on something akin to first aid (which could be the domain of the tailor) they seem like they would be similar to real plague doctors. "Plague doctors rarely cured patients, instead serving to record death tolls and the number of infected people for demographic purposes." False cures and experimental treatments wouldn't have been out of place, which in gameplay could translate to double-edged healing or buffing items and dangerous or questionable brewing and alchemical ingredients. Where malefactors forage to survive and tend to stick to what's safe and reliable, where tailors stitch up regular wounds and care for the patients, doctors experiment, record, and move on indifferently to the next victim of the Rot. Forlorn Hope - religion and faith. Prayers, rituals and magical symbols would have been common, be they effective in some capacity or just a superstition. Blackguards are practical, efficient and driven by necessity, whereas the Order is proud, self-righteous or downright fanatical. In gameplay, this would easily translate to pseudo-magical trinkets or symbols, and classical alchemy in the pursuit of prima materia - perhaps allowing to interact with temporal stability and storms, protecting a seraph from harm or incapacitating a drifter. Implementing something like this wouldn't be unreasonable even if all of their pre-Machine symbols and baubles were utterly ineffective in practice. Noble - science and history. Educated and travelled, they know the world, are familiar with relatively recent events, and quite notably, they are well literate - which can't be said for most people in the Middle Ages. Contrary to the Order of the Forlorn Hope, nobility wouldn't have placed as much weight on religion, and instead they could focus more on grounded, rational science. They can make use of ruins, but while malefactors are more likely to loot them, nobles are better equipped to find information. They could read notes and books to discover recipes, locations of other ruins or of some biomes and resources, and they could potentially discover exclusive lore. As a side note, these classes could very neatly flesh out the roster of city dwellers - nobility, more or less clergy, plus a merchant we've mentioned before. The clockmaker is probably an artisan, the tailor is something like an apprentice or journeyman, and we could maybe use some kind of a laborer and a servant to have a practically complete set of social classes. Less "prevent them from using flax at all", and more "make them use other (foraged or looted) resources in place of flax to make the same products". Give malefactors an alternative way of obtaining some things within a gameplay loop more centered on exploring, foraging and looting. Change the means, but don't significantly change the end result - so there's almost none of the problems that class-exclusive recipes cause, real or imagined. My general though process is that it is largely well-known and proven in game design that some of the best methods to achieve meaningful distinctions between classes (or between characters, weapons, skill trees and so on) rely on significantly changing the gameplay style between them to match different player preferences and means of player expression. This is done fairly well on the side of lore and theming for the existing classes, but actual gameplay differences are currently quite minimal. Being slightly better at some things and slightly worse at others changes borderline nothing about a player's playstyle if there's still just one way to do each thing, which different classes just make a bit more or less time-consuming. It also makes it easy to compare classes directly and determine which of them is strictly better, which can produce a clear meta. One difficult part of it is that a focus on realistic survival mechanics can make it tricky to introduce meaningful changes to core gameplay, since it's not straightforward to properly justify other characters being unable to use relatively basic mechanics - this is in part already visible in class-exclusive recipes. Many differences are virtually impossible to realize, and it is easier to rely on efficiency differences and not completely new mechanics to direct the player to alternatives, but this doesn't prevent people from sticking to the generic mechanics. And that is why I was wondering if it would work to make it entirely impossible for the malefactor to use flax for some things - unless you force people to search for the alternative, they might just keep farming flax and complain that it's less efficient. Another difficult part is that almost everything in the game is currently only made in one specific way (potentially with minor variations like borax instead of lime in leatherworking), so there are almost no existing alternatives to make use of to differentiate classes. But, there's a plethora of alternatives that could fit right in: Wood carving, bark containers, gourds, glassmaking and metalworking <=> various pottery items. Bone carving and cold working native metals <=> early metalworking. Wool and wild bast fibers <=> linen. Drifter skin, felt, waxed textiles and bark <=> leather and paper in certain contexts. Wickerwork <=> wood in certain applications. Scavenging ruins <=> prospecting and mining for metal - that's the part of the discussion about finding metal scraps in ruins. Foraging could provide alternative means to obtain a whole host of things. Brain tanning could offer a different method of obtaining leather. Rawhide (actual rawhide, not fresh skin named "raw hide") could be an alternative to leather for several purposes. And if we had some of these, then it wouldn't be difficult to introduce big distinctions between classes. Some might do well with relatively "primitive" mechanics, others would depend on quick technological progress. Some might favor exploration and scavenging, others would prefer a stationary lifestyle. Some might deal efficiently with heavy labor, others would excel at finer crafts. Do keep in mind that the primary goal here is to provide the means for diverse player expression, not to apply arbitrary restrictions or whatnot. Additionally: A tilt hammer could be added to accomodate weak characters unable to forge efficiently, placing more emphasis on quick tech progression when playing those classes. Similarly, a lathe, a sawmill, a pottery wheel, a loom and other machines could bring some mechanics to classes which aren't adept at them normally. Some classes might get significantly increased (hunter) or reduced (tailor) loot from animals, and at the same time likely opposite effects on some agricultural processes. Some classes could favor certain food types and potentially know some special food recipes, be it in a systemic way or more explicitly - most notably, any class leaning towards a hunter-gatherer should prefer meat and possibly fruit as well as may be able to eat bone marrow and know ways to prepare tree fruits and foraged plants, whereas classes that focus on a more stationary lifestyle should probably prefer grain and dairy and may get a greater satiety bonus from proper cooked meals. And the final big problem is the question of "why not just allow the player to choose themselves what they do without making some things better or worse based on the class?" But at that point, I don't see why the existing classes shouldn't face the same question and perhaps be limited to just cosmetic clothing and lore background. The whole point is to make the basic gameplay loop (especially the early game) play out differently and fulfill a different fantasy for each class. I have yet to see a single survival game with a medical system developed enough to be a meaningful factor in class selection, especially since (1) most basic health mechanics are inherently shared by all classes, and (2) a lot can be easily achieved with maximum health, regeneration rate and one or two special damage types like poison (all of which are pretty much already implemented). Also, if your disease is dangerous enough that resistance to it is a valuable class advantage, then that sounds to me like a pretty good reason to either just never implement that disease in the first place, or to make it part of the core focus of the game (in which case it would arguably be better implemented as Rot or some temporal shenanigans, not some malaria or cholera).

I'm not sure that this is supported in lore. Example flavor text from item descriptions: There is quite a lot of interesting things that could be done with Forlorn Hope which may tread on completely new gameplay territory. Example flavor text from item descriptions: Overall, my thought on these classes is that: A doctor is extremely straightforward to support from a lore perspective, and it's a safe yet interesting pick. But, it can be tricky to implement in a satisfying way - herbalism, brewing and possibly some kind of alchemy could offer a lot of options, though we don't really know anything about how that will look like as of now, and at this rate we may not even get any of it in 1.23. I would find it most interesting if the devs decided to go to the lengths of implementing diseases (possibly actual Rot) and letting the doctor more efficiently delay or treat their effects. I do also think that it has to focus on more than just healing - poisons and stimulants of some sort could be interesting. A Forlorn Hope knight feels to me like it aims the wrong way - how about a servant, scholar or alchemist? Regardless of which way it goes, I think it would be worthwhile to make this class focus on the more scholarly and religious side, allowing some less immediately explicable interaction with temporal mechanics and the rust world through improvised trinkets and alchemical symbols or tinctures or other adjacent means, possibly ritualized in some way. Maybe even try going in the direction of something like astrology, geomancy, divination?. A noble may be somewhat questionable from a gameplay perspective, but it could be very interesting from a lore perspective. If I were to choose a gameplay direction to go for with a noble, then I would consider giving them some benefits to exploring ruins and reading books, like special recipes, revealing locations of other ruins, biomes or resources, and exclusive lore. A noble might not be the most adept at survival, but in the Middle Ages there was a pretty huge education gap between social classes, so it seems quite adequate to show that education gap through gameplay. On a multiplayer server, the noble could then end up being a sort of guide, unironically. A merchant seems pretty simplistic, and switching it to something more like a smuggler could make them stand out more, with a stronger lore hook and easier integration of mechanics that don't just boil down to better trading. Similar to the doctor, though, I feel like it's not really possible to implement a good merchant or smuggler without having some more mechanics in place, and that would likely require a pretty large overhaul of trading. I think it's also important to keep in mind that a merchant or smuggler should ideally be implemented in such a way that they don't just end up as the dedicated delivery guy on servers, always sent to buy and sell stuff because they have better prices. I think each of these both makes quite a lot of sense in lore and could provide a pretty unique gameplay focus, and are overall arguably the strongest candidates for new classes for the vanilla game. Yeah, largely the same here. The only class I've ever played besides the commoner is the tailor, because it seemed fun as a sort of challenge class which can also provide cool items for other people on the server. Though there is the caveat that reducing debuffs could contribute to classes feeling more homogenous. Arguably the best way to make classes more unique is to introduce meaningful differences into their gameplay that don't devolve to buffs and debuffs and instead change how these classes are played on a fundamental level, though that can be very difficult and time-consuming to implement in a satisfying way, especially with the large amount of content which is already in the game. Mostly spitballing here, just to show the kind of ideas that could be considered, on the example of the malefactor: make them less skilled at using the bow and further debuff their melee combat, but give them more options for slings and sling projectiles (and maybe some other unique weapon), and possibly make slings a skill-based weapon that requires practice and timing; likely also specifically buff the malefactor's efficacy with these weapons to keep them from being excessively good when used by other classes, outright prevent malefactors from doing certain things like perhaps weaving and sewing (or at least make them very inefficient), but also add some special forageable or lootable resources (from the wild, from ruins, or from rust monsters) that only they can use (or at least they can use massively more efficiently) as replacement for the resources like linen which they would be unable to obtain normally - it could be borderline anything, like stinging nettle fibers as replacement for flax in some recipes, drifter skin as replacement for paper, some moss or spiderwebs as healing items, make malefactors spawn directly in ruins on their first spawn, in some way reduce the reliability or efficiency of obtaining metal or using metal tools for malefactors, but add more scrap tools and enhance their ability to find and craft these tools or restore ruined clutter. Changes like these which introduce large differences between the way that different classes are played could greatly increase the game's replayability and variety in ways that simple buffs and debuffs can't really achieve, and give players more distinct reasons to try different classes - a much stronger fantasy and a tweaked progression system, not just "they're better at this thing and worse at that thing".

Repairing bear hide armor takes much more resources than it should, and it's a quirk of the way that repaired durability is calculated - there is a bug report on it (#9771). I would say addressing that should be the priority. Making it repairable with bones and possibly also rope is very reasonable either way, though it may conflict with the apparent intent of it being the wild, scavenged armor of sorts. You'd just need to obtain bear hides for the first time, whereas repairs could be easily done with bones from other animals, and I don't know whether that's exactly fitting thematically. One of the advantages of bear hide armor is that it has very light penalties, similar to gambeson and only worse than improvised and leather armor. It also provides some warmth, which may give it ever so slightly more value in cold climates.

For precise control over individual sounds, it seems you can use a mod like Accessibility Tweaks. In the vanilla game, the closest you'll get is "Settings > Sound > Effects Sound level". It will affect a bunch of other sound effects as well, but may be better than nothing if you can't or don't want to use mods.