MKMoose

While holding the item in hand, use: /debug heldtemp <temperature> The temperature value has to be an integer in degrees Celcius, e.g. /debug heldtemp 820 if you want to set it just above the minimum quenching temperature.

It would seem that there is a 5% shatter chance on first quenching. I've found that there should be based on the code and by modifying item attributes, but wasn't able to fully confirm it myself by getting it to happen in spite of having made a couple dozen quenched items.

I did kinda mention that I think passive regression to the wild state would likely be undesirable, since it would impose maintenance when using meadows for their decorative purpose: Having thought about it a bit, I feel like a machete may be the best solution for this, as a dedicated tool for quick but destructive foliage removal. Or just the axe, which currently readily serves a similar function due to a very high plant mining speed multiplier. A machete would also be a natural fit for thorny shrubberies, jungle thickets and similar environments, especially if naturally regrowing or spreading bushes and similar dynamic flora mechanics ever get added.

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.

They've been adjusted again in rc.1. Machine gun I think is still viable at short range. Full accuracy is reached after holding for ~1.1 s if I recall correctly, though I'm not sure at this point. Damage below. Copper and bronze are neatly balanced between each other. Iron is in a limbo now because ranged damage seems to be unaffected by quenching due to a bug - if that's fixed, then iron spears will be in certain contexts better than bronze pre-update. They would be just fine if quenching was removed. "*-flint": 4.0, "*-obsidian": 4.5, "*-scrap": 5, "*-copper": 5, "*-hacking": 5.5, "*-bismuthbronze": 5.75, "*-tinbronze": 6.0, "*-blackbronze": 6.5, "*-ruined": 6.5, "*-iron": 6.8, "*-meteoriciron": 6.9, "*-steel": 7.0, "*-ornatesilver": 7.0, "*-ornategold": 7.25, "*": 3.0 If quenching gets fixed to affect ranged damage as well, then an iron spear quenched twice (or potentially a meteoric iron or steel spear quenched once), relative to a 1.21 tin bronze spear, will have: higher damage with better breakpoints (roughly the same damage and breakpoints as 1.21 black bronze), longer accuracy windup time (not as significant for close-range spam, impactful for longer-range combat), much higher melee damage (~4.75-5, whereas tin bronze has 3.75).

Very cool, a lot of these changes are genuinely great. However, there's a lot of issues I have with berry bushes: berry bushes' nutrient consumption mechanics, fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation is completely inconsistent with everything else in the game and unfitting for the simplest, most basic food source that a new player is likely to encounter and rely on; I know there are supposedly planned changes for crops and fruit trees, but even if other features are brought in line with the precedent set by berry bushes, I still take issue with them being this complex this early into the game, berry bushes' nutrient consumption beyond initial fertilization after planting is so irrelevant that I genuinely kind of don't know why it's even a thing - it would be much more intuitive to implement it as an up-front cost to establishing a cutting (potentially only softly), or as an optional way to increase yields, which would also avoid the inconsistency with wild bushes, berry bushes' fertilization requirement, minimum fertility requirement and soil degradation are simply unrealistic, and personally I see no reasonable design justification to introducing them in spite of being unrealistic - if increasing complexity is the goal, then it would be better to do it in a way that actually makes sense realistically, through soil preparation before transplantation, maintaining a suitable water balance after planting, and pruning as the single most important way to boost yields; fertilizer can remain simply as an option to increase growth rate of young bushes (keeping in mind that it should only be used after growth starts naturally) and maybe afterwards to increase yields, little has changed about the overall balance of berry bushes - they're still available almost all the way through the year, spawn in pathetic tiny patches which are unrealistically scattered and more annoying than labor-intensive 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, berry bushes are currently strictly more optimally sustained on a single nutrient for the healthy state or two nutrients for the bountiful state, and using all three nutrients (especaially early on as nutrient consumption is high) is simply wasteful, berry bush cuttings with different traits don't stack, so it feels genuinely really annoying to collect them; it doesn't help that the traits don't currently show up in the tooltips and that even the positive effects of traits are very minimal, soil degradation allows to effectively halve the cost of terra preta. And there are similarly major issues with heat treatment: quenching and tempering is tedious, repetitive and lacks any sort of skill expression, which is especially annoying considering that realistically, quenching should only be done once per workpiece, except as a way of retrying after a failed or unsatisfactory attempt, quenching is unbalanced and produces a borderline absurd jump over bronze, tempering is practically a waste of time with the current numbers, and even if it gets adjusted then without major changes choosing whether to temper or not will always be either an obvious choice or purely a matter of hyperoptimization, quenching for durability (covered in clay) doesn't make sense with the current mechanics, because if the shatter chance is greater than the relative durability increase, then it's fundamentally an expected loss. I made a long post on heat treatments as well, so I'll spare the detailed explanations. Love the update overall, but these two features have felt frustratingly half-baked and misdirected. Also, spears can still be thrown at a rate of over two per second, I think.

Motivation In the current state of the game, it's very difficult to create good-looking pastures, farms, and similar builds, and using crops on farmland requires constant maintenance. This is a group of tightly related ideas aimed at increasing environment variety and adding farming-adjacent methods for land use. It would also provide a distinct method of acquiring certain plants, especially hay and other fodder for animals as well as some herbs or flowers. Additionally, this would allow to quickly and easily create highly immersive and maintenance-free large-scale landscapes that would add visual flavor for farms, orchards and similar builds. New plants Before anything like meadows gets added, it would be ideal to consider the plants that would have to be added to grow in them: Grasses. The current grass is functional, but rather uninteresting, and it would be great to introduce more variety in this area in different climates and ecological biomes - not just in terms of height, but actually inspired by different species. This can also include different density and models rather than just textures, since the current grass only uses a cross shape, and something denser in a triangle, square or other shape would be ideal for thick grasses in steppes or savannas especially. Clovers. In some contexts, it's the meadow and pasture plant, frequently used as fodder for animals. For game purposes, it's fine if it remains very similar to grass in function, just with different aesthetics. That said, it could also have an important use in farming, since crop rotation utilizing clover is very effective due to its nitrogen-fixing capacity as a legume. Wildflowers, herbs and other. The purpose of those can be very varied in herbalism, decoration, beekeeping and various miscellaneous uses. Example plants in this category include dandelion, milkweed, poppy, knapweed, but some of the existing flowers could also be used. Left - grass (Poa pratensis, common meadow-grass); middle - clovers; right - wild poppies. Natural (perpetual) meadows Perpetual meadows are pretty simple - it's largely just a matter of improving world generation and adding new plants into it - so I don't think there's much to discuss. They should mostly appear in wetlands (low elevation, near water), near deserts, near oceans, and at very high elevations (and the different types should of course have differences between each other). They could be more localized and in some way distinguished from grasslands, but it's not really necessary. It would also be cool to sometimes generate openings in forests with meadow-like vegetation and elevated quantity of certain mushroom species. It would be quite reasonable to significantly increase the spawn frequency of various plants like mushrooms and crops in meadows, though it's not necessary. From left to right: riverside meadow, desert meadow, coastal meadow, wildflower meadow. Artificial (agricultural) meadows Since agricultural meadows are obviously man-made, there would have to be a way to create them in some simple and intuitive way. Here's what I would propose: Make generic grass convert into different plants when cut using a scythe. If it's just cropped, it would grow into special tall/dense grass, which would drop 2x or even 3-4x dry grass. If it's cut to remove it entirely, clovers and/or shorter grasses would replace it. If the climate conditions are right, allow certain other plants to grow in place of grass after it's cut with a scythe. When only cropped for grass/hay, this effect would be rather limited (though it could allow to grow 3-4x grass in favorable conditions instead of 1-2x grass in less favorable conditions), but when grass is removed entirely to grow clover and shorter species, then a variety of flowers, herbs, and other plants could spawn with it, as well as potentially certain mushroom species. Now, having a couple different types of grass and a dozen flowers is cool, but inventory management is bound to be an issue. I think that the best way to solve this is to allow the plants to have different drops when collected in different ways. If collected with a scythe, all plants would only drop grass, or a simple new item like hay or fodder (where by fodder I mean a generic item only used for feeding animals as well as making compost and maybe as cheap fuel). If collected with a knife, they would have more varied drops where relevant. I'm not entirely sure about collecting flowers and similar plants by hand, because removing plants by hand is often done e.g. when building, when inventory clutter is extremely undesirable. The natural question which comes up is "how do you cultivate a specific plant?", to which I don't have a concrete answer, as a lot depends on the exact mechanics regarding what different plants can regrow into when cut. That said, I would strongly oppose most of the plants dropping seeds that could be planted on farmland - farming shouldn't be the ultimate answer for everything, so as to not relegate artificial meadows to one-time seed collection. They're intended as a unique way of land use land and acquiring certain resources, and they should ideally remain relevant all the way through the game's progression. A lot can be done with additional tool modes for the scythe, but I would be careful with it to avoid excess complexity. Similarly, "how do you revert back to regular grass?" is a question worth considering, and again it largely depends on the exact scythe and regrowth mechanics. I don't think making it passively revert over time is a good idea, simply because these mechanics are in large part intended as a way of easy landscaping and decorating, especially for large-scale farm-like hay meadows that wouldn't require any maintenance, so it shouldn't be necessary to redo it every so often. If nothing else, reverting might be done by destroying the plants by hand, or more quickly with some other tool like axe, machete, shovel or hoe. Left - uncut hay meadow; middle - hay meadow up-close; right - orchard meadow. Related possibilities Introduce more involved, interesting and realistic composting, potentially using mechanics similar in certain regards to charcoal pits. While I'm not certain about the details yet as it's not the main topic of this suggestion, this would ideally allow using a variety of plant matter and other organic material besides rot in an intuitive way in the composting process. Allow grazing animals to create pastures using the same mechanic of converting cut grass to different plants (requires them to actually graze on grass), which could be similar or identical to the clover meadows I described. This should probably only apply to domesticated animals, or otherwise wild animals would be affecting the landscape in likely undesirable ways. Courtesy of this suggestion, it may be a cool idea to add stone and metal sickles. They would work largely the same as the scythe, but allow for more precision by only acting on a single block (and the stone sickle would also allow to less efficiently create artificial meadow creation in the Stone Age, without having to collect copper for something so basic). They may or may not have full plant-specific drops instead of just generic grass/hay/fodder, to serve as the dedicated plant harvesting tool over the knife.

My overall impression is that it's a very good update soured by two extremely poorly thought-out features - heat treatment and certain parts of the berry bush rework. Arguably the root problem here is that realistically, quenching should never be done more than once, except as a way of retrying after a failed or unsatisfactory attempt (at least in the context of a regular forge, not precisely-controlled industrial or laboratory contexts). And that's only the first issue. Made a whole detailed post on it, so I'm not gonna repeat myself too much here. The dominant community sentiment as far as I can find is that several changes were perfectly justified and are welcome, but other changes take it too far. It's also a bit of a communication disaster in regards to the fertilizer requirement (also preventable with more intentional design), because people are freaked out about excessive maintenance, yet if you actually look at the nutrient consumption then you might notice that most people literally won't need to fertilize at all after the initial cost of ~2-4 bone meal. You, for example, if you rarely play more than one year, will be largely unaffected by it, because a bush planted on medium fertility soil and fertilized with two portions of bone meal will be able to bear fruit three times at full yield in the current balance. The trait system is detrimental to the game in my eyes, if only because cuttings with different traits don't stack. At the same time, the traits aren't even good, and pretty much none of them really make a meaningful difference. That said, to some extent it also renders the fertilizer requirement even more irrelevant than it already is, by incentivizing to propagate new bushes with good traits instead of maintaining older ones. My personal thought is that berries should spawn in massive patches (almost like grass or shrubs), and be seasonally bountiful, but limited by a relatively short availability window. Incentivizing food preservation and variety. Promoting a gathering gameplay style and making berries into a plentiful but inefficient food source, perfect for the early game. Planting a garden at home should still be viable at some upfront cost, but no arbitrary and unrealistic maintenance - if anything, it should be possible to prune and fertilize the bushes as an optional boost to yields. Pizza has said in the Discord recently that she doesn't know why fruit trees are unavailable in the first year, and she agreed that they should be changed.

What I mean is that the long-lasting global phenomenon that is the temporal storm would remain with massively toned down enemy frequency, and within that storm there would be intermittent localized events. Anomalies, discharges, fissures, rifts, rust blossoms, dislocations, time shifts, ghosts. No matter how exactly it's painted, the main point is that the thought process regarding what to do during a storm should be a lot more involved than "hide immediately, unless you're prepared and willing to fight". You could potentially stay outside for a while, look at the cool gears turning, say hi to Dave, notice an anomaly, check what it did, maybe collect a funny-looking flower, then hear a loud bell nearby, get freaked out at the massive beast that made the sound and run back home, then look outside as it walks by unbothered, finally watch as your home gets torn apart for a few seconds by a massive fissure, take a peek into the rust world, and only then get jumped by a shiver that entered your world through that fissure.

Backreading this thread now, a lot of this discussion is really just silly in my eyes. Bad implementation of a good idea, good implementation of a good idea, bad implementation of a bad idea, tolerable implementation of a good idea, tolerable implementation of a bad idea, what does it matter? Fact is, the mechanic is in a half-baked and controversial state in which the ability to disable it at near-zero opportunity cost is the only reason why the community ends up largely indifferent at the end of the day. The very moment that a person finds themselves dissatisfied with storms they can just nuke the whole thing without missing out on almost anything. Simply forcing the player interact with it is only a recipe for disaster, because it offers practically no reward for the player. If no significant changes are made, the mechanic will be stuck in a limbo similar to options like soil instability, cave-ins or fire from lightning - cool for those who like it, but unsuitable to be introduced as part of the core feature set (granted, temporal storms don't have as many and as drastic problems, but they share several of the same high-level issues). My personal thought is that any changes to storms should focus on the immersive, tense, eldritch atmoshpere of them, and not focus on combat. Both danger and reward should be centered around localized temporal events or slow-roaming threats, not everpresent random spawning. The current state of the mechanic is extremely conflicted with itself in certain regards, by making the player often hide at all times due to five or ten rotbeasts chilling outside. Storms shouldn't be something immediately threatening that makes the player hide at all times - they should keep the player on their toes, sure, and make them hide if they see a beast prowling the area or a temporal anomaly distorting the nearby space, or something of the sort. It should be a high-risk situation at all or almost all stages of the game, requiring the player to avoid extremely dangerous monsters or anomalies and potentially fight weaker ones. Right now it's an extremely predictable, initially certain-death situation that actually turns out to be quite easy to survive with experience and decent gear, and ends up mostly just tedious and not challenging with the current combat system. The worst part of the storm for me is that it's entirely binary, and that's largely what makes it extremely boring. Either it's on, or it's off. You can keep chilling as long as the storm is "imminent", then you have to bolt once the visuals start getting funky at risk of getting one-tapped. Then it ends as if nothing happened, and you just have to watch out for a few stragglers. If you want to see what it should look like, simply look no further than real storms. Temporal Symphony does make some improvements, but they're only audiovisual and not functional. Putting aside whether the lore argument is sufficient, I would argue (seemingly echoing a lot of other people's views) that the problem with storms is that they already are optional, but largely pointless and disruptive as well. The player is given free choice of whether to interact with the storm, but very little reason to ever do so. Combined with very high risks, the player is just disincentivized from interacting with a massive part of the game for the storm's duration to avoid death, and given no compensation or unique activities to do instead. While you can argue that limiting player agency is to an extent exactly the point, it is unavoidable that excessively limiting player agency (and storms do cross that threshold for many people) is objectively detrimental from a design perspective and rarely works outside of specific story-driven circumstances.

The only explicit use of the word "rotbeast" in the game is in the name of one of the tapestries (the "Rotbeast" tapestry, unobtainable in survival unless I've missed something). "Rotbeast", as far as I can tell, is a purely or mostly community-given name meant to aggregate drifters, bowtorn and shivers into a more explicit package than "monsters". When asked in an interview a few months ago, Tyron said that they don't really have any internal name for them besides just "monsters".