MKMoose

I get being annoyed about RNG, but one iron bar will last you on average 90 shots. I could as well say that due to the RNG mechanic, one iron bar can last you forever, and focusing on that too much is just as pointless as focusing on the minimum. Granted, the average is still much less than one iron spear. First two only problem being additional resource costs (clay and what have u) sounds reasonable, and the more u tempt fate, the more chance to get shafted, that also sounds good. Hope devs will come with reasonable numbers for all that. Literally just reading the changelog will tell you more or less everything you need to know. If not that, then reading the handbook will. Or if even that's not enough, you can test it in creative. Here's a few details: tempering never shatters the work piece, quenching starts off at 0% shatter chance, then increases with each next quenching (so it's always risk-free and worthwhile to quench once), you can quench a piece as many times as you wish, and you can temper a piece at most as many times as you've quenched it (and ideally you generally probably should temper before each subsequent quenching after the first one, unless you're short on time or fuel, though in the current balance it seems like it barely makes a difference anyways unless you're going for durability and not power), both tempering and quenching only apply their effect once the temperature of the piece decreases to below 100 C (when the piece is considered cooled down and the character takes the item off the tongs into their hand), both tempering and quenching have a specific temperature range that the piece has to reach for the treatment to take effect, the piece saves its maximum temperature that it has reached since last being cooled down completely - if the maximum temperature that the piece has reached is not within the temperature range of either tempering or quenching, then no effect will be applied (I'm not sure if there's other ways to mess up, but whatever you do, you should be fine to just let it cool and try again), if you heat the piece up above the quenching temperature range, you have to cool it down completely and heat it back up (with not shatter chance, interestingly). What is bugged? Are you trying to use regular clay instead of fire clay? It currently doesn't use a different model or at least texture, but you can see it in the tooltip and it should work perfectly fine. The durability boost is twice as high and doesn't decrease with tempering (or at least shouldn't).

It doesn't even generate as of now, just so you know.

It's a null reference when the game tries to get the melting point of the contents of a crucible.Maybe the game doesn't check whether an item slot is empty before trying to access its contents, or tries to use the crucible's properites to determine the melting point of its contents, I can't be certain, but it doesn't seem to be a key change that would make it into the changelog. At least that's one of the crucible-related crashes, maybe there's more. Both this crash and a bunch of other issues (including a crash related to the water wheel) seem to be already resolved and coming in pre.2.

The logic behind this is that a wooden pan is made by woodcarving, hence the knife. There's good chance that woodworking or more specifically woodcarving will be a more developed mechanic at some point in the future, since it's listed on the roadmap. If you need the bucket for your farming needs, then keep in mind that you can set up farmland near natural water, or alternatively (though it can be a bit tedious) keep the crops watered with natural rain supplemented with a watering can. The advantage of the current design is that it creates a clear progression milestone and spaces out unlocking various items without throwing all of them at the same time at a beginner. Making boards craftable without a saw would effectively throw a wrench into the current progression system, because many of the important progression motivators like doors, buckets, chests, barrels and henboxes would be unlocked significantly earlier. Having one specific way to obtain boards also prevents new players from getting bogged down in a slow and inefficient early-game process when trying to craft larger quantities of boards instead of finding a clear and obvious goal to progress towards. I wouldn't expect this to ever get added to vanilla, but that said, I could see a way to craft specific items a bit earlier. It could either be done with more basic woodcarving and woodworking processes, or with alternative item variants and alternatives like clay amphorae or leaden vessels to allow more efficient liquid storage and transport before buckets and barrels.

That's fair. I've learned to pay a lot more attention while mining for silver and gold, which can be a bit difficult to first notice in quartz, and I actually got a good laugh out of noticing weird dots on granite and struggling to figure out for a moment that it was sphalerite. While I've personally never found almost any significant issues with it and would say that the current state is good for me (maybe besides this one specific case of sphalerite in granite), it's an understandable issue. It seems to mostly be caused by ore textures just being overlaid on top of rock textures, which is bound to be fairly difficult to make out when the rock and ore colors happen to be similar. It's sometimes difficult to make changes without making the textures unrealistc, but for sphalerite specifically I would be in favor of some texture adjustments to make the black dots more prominent and maybe add some weakly colored accents for further visual interest. The color of granite could also be changed (potentially to make it more realistic as well), but that would require reevaluation against all other ores as well and could mess up the visuals of some builds.

Something like Shift-RMB an axle while holding a wrench in the off-hand and desired block in the main hand. If it differs due to remapping or something, the tooltip should inform you how to do it.

As mentioned before me, it is referred to simply as borax everywhere, and it should be available under the same name in the handbook. A few extra tips on finding borax, some of which people tend to neglect or just aren't familiar with: it is only found in sedimentary rock, so it won't even show up in density readings if your top layer is igneous, it only generates near sea level or below, so you'll generally want to look in low-lying areas, you may be able to find loose borax chunks on the surface in those areas, identified by white intrusions in the rocks (you can see what they look like if you look up borax in the handbook); loose chunks indicate a deposit below them, and it may be preferable to first search on the surface once you find relatively high readings before putting time and resources into mining, the density readings for borax are somewhat out of whack, so you will never find any readings higher than "decent", and in this specific case a "poor" reading is generally enough to find plenty of borax. All surface deposits that can show up on prospecting readings except copper, cassiterite and salt beds are indicated by density readings, because they are spawned with the same mechanism as deeper deposits. If you find a surface deposit, then outside of obscenely rare edge cases and the mentioned exceptions, you will always find a reading at that location. You do you, but I'd argue that this mod greatly takes away from the uniqueness of each ore texture, because it uses the same arbitrary near-cubes for every single ore. The block textures try to be more varied and in some capacity respect how the ore forms in real life, and the mod kind of throws that out the window. Not that it's bad, but I really wish it was better.

Man, that's what I was thinking, honestly. Granted, many things on here are completely optional and have little to no gameplay benefit. They only really serve for additional variety, depth, immersion and endgame improvements (and the game is arguably better off for it): animal husbandry offers very little except feathers and milk; once you get chickens, goats or sheep you already have protein, so there is nearly zero benefit to hares and pigs (I'm hoping for rabbit pelts soon, at least), milk is just a bit of extra HP, while cheese is nearly useless in gameplay terms (although it's very satisfying to make), steel and meteoric iron don't actually unlock practically anything, they only really offer numerical upgrades at the moment, coke is only useful for cupronickel for Jonas tech (though there's a chance that something may change with the 1.22 forge changes), chromium, titanium, and lapis lazuli are currently mostly one-trick ponies with little use, and lapis lazuli can be purchased for dirt cheap, lantern lining is expensive, but it's also possible to just make another lantern, pulverizer isn't useful for much besides refractory bricks, hoppers and chutes are only really useful for automating the pulverizer as of now, maybe also the quern but it's more finnicky and expensive, beehive kiln only offers quick bulk ceramic firing and new ceramic colors, alcohol is near-useless besides for alcohol-soaked bandages, the sturdy mining bag is a minuscule improvement over the regular one, and the regular mining bag isn't particularly amazing either, metallic armor isn't really that useful, and gambeson is much better for general-purpose protection outside of deep caving, temporal storms and boss fights. Personally, I have some 200 hours in survival and have done almost everything in the game besides the sailboat, though admittedly I did rush through some things a bit. One of my notable achievements is finding nearly every single type of ore deposit in the game on a single save, almost all of them on the first attempt, only missing lapis lazuli (its generation parameters are kind of absurd), alum and salt beds (I've not gone to hot climates besides for crops), and gemstones (there's practically zero reason to get them besides as a flex). I don't really have a to-do list, just because I no longer have much to do that I haven't done. The main thing I would like to do over the next playthrough is build and decorate something akin to a small village with multiple functional buildings tailored for regular gameplay. Maybe also make a butterfly collection.

Foxes, raccoons, hares and chicken have had their health reduced: foxes and raccoons have 5 health down from 6, chickens have 2.5 health down from 3, hares have 3 health down from 5. This makes the thrown spears not as bad as they would be otherwise, but is also an indirect buff for all other weapons in that damage range. Assuming no damage modifiers, pigs now take 5 thrown flint spears, up from 4. Both surface drifters and bowtorn take 4 thrown flint spears, up from 3. In order to two-tap a surface bowtorn, you need at least a tin bronze spear, where previously you could do it with a copper spear. I haven't noticed any JSON changes to bears' spawn conditions, besides panda bears which were mentioned in patch notes. If something was changed, it was somewhere in the underlying code. Do note, though, that spawning during chunk generation is different from runtime spawning, and can sometimes cause an unexpectedly large concentration of animals if you get lucky or unlucky. For bears specifically, I think there's a 0.7% chance to spawn a bear in every chunk with matching conditions when it's first generated. You're not the first to say that, but while bears were adjusted slightly, wolves don't seem to have any behavior changes, unless it's somewhere in the source code and not JSON assets. Not sure. You would need to directly create the lamp using clayforming, but the raw oil lamp recipe seems to be entirely missing from the assets folder as of now (already reported as a bug). Once you have a fired oil lamp, you can just combine it with a piece od rendered fat, no need for flax. I'm thinking that both changes will be very good for new players, especially considering how much of a progression barrier early food and flax can be. Cooking increases satiety from grain four times (slightly less for rice), so being unable to eat grain outright will force new players to look for more uses for it and likely stumble upon the highly beneficial porridge. Larger patches are also more difficult to miss. That said, I do agree that not being able to eat grain to clean up the inventory is a little annoying.

I would imagine that this is the goal, though I can only guess whether it will come in 1.22 or at some point in the future. Making sheep more accessible to the average player is basically a requirement for the addition of wool processing to be actually worthwhile. Small update on this: I've found a related bug. Dunno how they may choose to resolve it.

I forgot about about Blackguard's damage buff again. Melee damage of spears hasn't been changed in the prerelease, so it's not that. But I did a diff on the asset folders to be sure and found that several animals have less health than they used to have (which wasn't mentioned in the changelog as far as I can tell): foxes have 5 health down from 6, which checks out with your experience, raccoons have 5 health down from 6, chickens have 2.5 health down from 3, hares have 3 health down from 5. These changes to smaller critters constitute a notable indirect buff to all weapons in this damage range, and it makes the changes to spears much more difficult to evaluate accurately. Likely less detrimental to the game than I thought, though still very much not ideal. Also, a lot of fish have more than 2 health now, it seems - small fish have 2 health, medium fish have 4 (including salmon), larger fish have 6-8, and there's a couple of exceptions with even higher health (e.g. greater arapaima at a whopping 24 health). One thing that I can tell you is that huge boars seem to have much smaller hitboxes than they should have. As for behaviour, though, there are very few JSON changes, so if there's actually significant differences, they're likely caused by changes to the underlying code. A whole bunch of things have changes with pigs' visuals, but I'm not seeing any logic changes. Bears have seen a couple small changes: their meleeattack task priority is now higher than seekentity, though I have no idea what practical effect it might have, their meleeattack range has been increased (by 100% for brown and polar bears, by 50% for other types), which may mean that they will attack from further away and consequently be easier to dodge, brown and polar bears will no longer chase hare and chicken babies (?), brown bears now drop 3 fat, up from 2. They don't seem to have almost any JSON changes except new footstep sounds and some animation adjustments, so if there actually are differences, it will be somewhere in the source code.

The mouflon is a variant of sheep which can spawn: at lower elevations, in temperate to warm (not hot) climates, in areas with at least some rain and not too much shrubs or trees. The real mouflon "is thought to be the ancestor of all modern domestic sheep breeds" (as per Wikipedia), which alone makes it pretty cool that it has been added. Other than their appearance and spawn conditions, they are practically identical to bighorn sheep, which makes them similar to goats except that they don't flee on sight (but will attack you if you get too close). No more having to search across mountaintops for your animal husbandry needs! The mouflons aren't especially common, but they can appear in a lot of areas typically desirable for settling and hunting, unlike bighorn sheep and most goat species which tend to spawn in dry areas and otherwise have more restrictive spawn conditions. At the very least, there is now an accessible alternative to valais goats in temperate climates for areas with limited mountains. But that said, bighorn sheep have also had their spawn conditions adjusted (which was actually mentioned in the patch notes, unlike the mouflons) - they will now spawn in drier areas with not too much shrubs or forestation at slightly higher elevations. Note: this image might be a bit misleading since it's 100% forest, but that's where I happened to find them (I'm thinking whether it might be a bug, unless the maxForestOrShrubs property only cares that both aren't too high at the same time; I might have to double-check it). For those interested, these are the exact spawn conditions for mouflons: minTemp: 3, maxTemp: 20, minRain: 0.3, maxForestOrShrubs: 0.5, minY: 1.1, maxY: 1.4 and these are the updated conditions for bighorn sheep: minTemp: -10, maxTemp: 17, minRain: 0.05, maxRain: 0.5, maxForestOrShrubs: 0.4, minY: 1.4

It's not a thing as far as I can tell, but I got a different crash with the same stack trace. Shouldn't happen, unless the fox was damaged by something else, since a flint spear has 2 damage and the fox has 5 HP. If it actually died in two hits from full health, then you've got another bug to report.

Note that sharpening using the grinding wheel pretty much does this, currently only for the falxes and swords as far as I can tell but hopefully more in near future. Sharpening the weapons increases critical hit chance (chance to deal double damage) at the cost of a small amount of durability. The difference is too small to make any big impact in most cases (I think it's capped at +10% critical hit chance, equivalent to +10% DPS even assuming no overflow damage). The durability loss means (as far as I can tell) that you will generally be dealing very slightly less total damage per amount of metal used, though it seems to be a bit more worthwhile on higher weapon tiers due to smaller relative durability loss. Well, throwing is less effective, and some larger fish might be difficult or impossible to one-shot. They now also try to escape more quickly when you scare them. An additional limiting factor might be simply the quantity of fish, because I actually couldn't find any in the wild and had to spawn some for testing. It's technically possible, but I don't yet know if it will be practically viable.

They've actually done quite a lot of what you're recommending, besides the matter of Stone Age spears. Overall kind of makes me hopeful that they know what they are doing, even if I would prefer them to take a different direction with higher damage and lower frequency of attacks. In terms of raw damage, the progression is now much smoother than it used to be, with gaps of 1 damage point between flint, copper and bronze. That said, tin or black bronze is still extremely valuable due to the breakpoints on common 5 HP and 15 HP targets, so copper spears remain mostly a waste of material. damageByType: { "*-granite": 2.5 (4 on the current stable), // only one-taps chickens and small fish "*-flint": 3.25 (5), // one-taps hares "*-copper": 4.25 (5.75), // one-taps some medium fish "*-tinbronze": 5.25 (7.5), // one-taps foxes and raccoons, 3-taps pigs and wolves "*-iron": 6 (8.25), // one-taps pudu deer and some medium-large fish "*-meteoriciron": 6.1, // two-taps T0 drifters "*-steel": 6.2 // no notable breakpoints },

Right now the fat overhaul can be boiled down to two main changes from what I've seen, though some more is probably on the way: using fat now requires to render it first in a cooking pot, allow it to solidify, and dump it out, oil lamps can be crafted using olive oil as well (requires a fruit press to juice olives). Linseed oil can be made by boiling three portions of flax flour with one liter of water in a cooking pot. It seems a bit odd to me, as I would imagine that it would be obtained by pressing seeds. And it doesn't look like it's useful for anything at the moment. That's what the teal gear in the middle of the hotbar is for. That's not what the teal gear is for. The UI gauge is primarily designed to communicate player stability, and while it does also allow to tell the ambient stability, it's not a visual, in-world indicator which was, dare I say, quite clearly the topic of the question. I really want to smack you with the "you can just turn it off if you don't like it". Tough to say how similar functionality would be implemented into the base game, but the config should allow you to turn down the mist intensity to nowhere near a "bright glow", disable it entirely (leaving only particles, if that's preferable), toggle it with a hotkey, or make it so that it's only visible while wearing a rusty or temporal gear amulet. The mod literally doesn't make it any easier to notice unstable areas as long as you're not forgetting about the UI gauge, and only gives a small added indication of particularly stable ones. I want to ask you, what kind of effect wouldn't be in-your-face? Everything that can be noticed in the world can be seen this way, especially when you are familiar with it and know what to look for. At a point, muscle memeory will take over the moment you notice tiny signs in the corner of your eye. It feels like every single suggestion to add diegetic indications of stability is met with what largely boils down to "it would be too easily noticeable" from you. Which is especially annoying because making it more obvious is almost never the goal of these suggestions - making it more intuitive and immersive is the goal. Personally, I would say that the UI gauge is already in-your-face quite enough and I would prefer something that requires more intentionality or agency from the player.

Do note that the spear changes go beyond simply making space for iron and steel. The new steel spears have notably lower thrown damage than bronze in the current stable. Even Stone Age spears were significantly nerfed (arguably even more so than copper and bronze). Ergo, making iron and steel balanced is not the only motivation behind these changes. And even once we settle on spears being nerfed, I believe that the specific way they've been changed is detrimental to the game and reinforces complaints about the combat being spammy and weightless. Making them slower but retaining damage from the current stable or even increasing it would make them much more enjoyable to use. Was thinking the same. Game balancing seems like a fairly reasonable explanation, though, because otherwise there could be no reason not to quench everything as many times as possible besides initial setup time and then fuel costs (and maybe quenching medium costs if it's not water). Also, first quenching doesn't seem to have any shatter chance.

There is already a wireframe colors setting in the Accessibility tab, albeit there's only three presets and not free selection. There's also wireframe thickness next to it. If you need further accessibility tweaks, you can also try checking out the Accessibility wiki page, which you can also access through the Accessiblity tab in the settings. That said, certainly wouldn't mind some mroe settings added to vanilla. Smithing: left - preset 1; middle - preset 2; right - preset 3 (there is some added color difference due to different item temperatures on different screenshots). Clayforming: left - preset 1; middle - preset 2; right - preset 3. Wireframe thickness on preset 1: left - 1x; middle - 2x; right - 4x.

Thrown spears were kind of gutted. Here's a couple notes (edited to account for health changes to small animals): flint spears at 3.25 damage (down from 5) can still one-tap chickens and hares just like on stable, but struggle with medium and larger fish that tend to have 4 or 6 HP, tin bronze at 5.25 damage (down from 7.5) achieves very strong breakpoints for common targets with multiples of 5 HP (foxes, raccoons, surface bowtorn, wolves and pigs) making it unexpectedly powerful compared to copper, though for these specific targets the breakpoints are actually the same as on the current stable; adjusting this might be done by tweaking the health of some of these targets, and not necessarily through further changes to spears, steel spears at 6.2 damage have lower damage than a bow with steel arrows, and significantly lower damage than bronze spears on the current stable, overall, breakpoints for small and medium targets haven't changed too much, but the nerf can be felt when fighting high-tier rotbeasts and larger animals like bears, you can still easily throw more than two spears per second, spears have also had their accuracy adjusted to focus the projectile spread slower, so you'll have to charge them longer for accurate long distance throws (~0.59 s for optimal accuracy, up from 0.35 s), though it's less significant for short-range use, steel spear melee damage is roughly as expected at 4.4, with a very similar damage increase over bronze to what falxes get, durablity has already been already much lower than falxes for bronze, and increases slower with iron and steel (steel spears only have 700, compared to steel falx's 2125); while I'm not sure that this should be changed unless something like more advanced tool handles get added, it is nonetheless a notable balance factor, note: the damage of erel, ruined, hacking and ornate spears seems to not have been touched yet. Spears are now weaker than they used to be despite the addition of new metal tiers. Their breakpoints against small targets remain similar and raw DPS in cases where aiming doesn't matter can still be decent, but I think overall the changes took the wrong direction in some capacity. I think the spears' charge time could be increased to a second or higher, but instead their damage should be kept at least as it used to be. As it stands, this further reinforces one of the most common complaints about VS combat - that it feels spammy and weightless. The long claws and antlers of sorts honestly make me think of a Leshy. If it's a rotbeast or other monster, then I would love if it could stalk the player. That said, I could see it just being a regular shiver mid-transformation, or something like that. Tyron has said in Elvas' most recent devstream that something related to combat will be coming "soon". Dunno if he meant the changes to spears and other adjustments in this prerelease, or something bigger on the horizon.

Well, and would you look at the 1.22.0-pre.1 changelog: Dunno what that was caused by since there don't seem to be any reports for them except a fairly vague one in the discord with no responses. Might wanna do a diff on the files to see exactly what was changed. Either way, would be pretty lame to keep searching for them on current stable.

If you're using node search (short-range mode) in each of these vertical shafts (roughly the way I described in the second paragraph), then you will find most of the deposits and only miss some small ones. It's pretty rare for that to happen, as long as you search efficiently enough in reasonably rich areas. Even if you actually dig a 110-block shaft, it's literally just 110 blocks, which is less than half the durability of a copper pickaxe, and may allow you to find multiple deposits within a single shaft. It's preferable to keep some spare resources just in case, but usually it's pretty easy to get more ore than you use up on mining. If you still use up all of your tools without finding anything, then you'll have to resort to panning and/or locate some surface copper deposits again. True, although when a single surface copper deposit easily yields some 5-10 ingots of metal, and underground ones yield much more, it will be pretty rare to lose or use up all of it after a decent mining session. And that's still talking about copper, while bronze and iron will allow you to get a higher quantity of more durable gear.

If you're interested, then the general strategy is to perform a density search every ~80-200 blocks, and once you scan a nearby area this way, then sink vertical shafts in areas with decently high readings for the ores you're after. It's generally not necessary to dig the shafts more frequently than every ~20-25 blocks. Ladders are often favored for vertical movement, especially rope ladders since they are more easily reusable. If you're not familiar with the exact generation mechanisms, then it's often optimal to sink the shafts nearly all the way down to the mantle (~110 blocks deep), and repeat until you get what you're after. While digging a shaft, take a node search (short-range) reading every ~5-10 blocks (assuming you're using the default range of 6). This allows you to determine the approximate depth of deposits, e.g. if you take readings at 8-block intervals and get a result two times in a row, then it's quite likely that the deposit is near the middle depth between these samples. Once you have an approximate depth, dig horizontal side tunnels at that depth in different directions to attempt to locate higher short-range readings at ~5-block intervals, and dig a couple blocks up and down when you find higher readings to see if the deposit is slightly above or below. Be careful about temporal stability while underground - if you notice the cyan gear in the middle of the hotbar rotating counterclockwise and turning more gray, then you may want to return back up to the surface after a couple of minutes and regenerate your stability back up before it drops too low (sometimes even the surface is unstable, then you need to move elsewhere to regenerate stability). There's a lot of complexity beyond this which you can feel free to read up on or ask about, but the above should get you started with a good baseline.

True, I've seen some suggestions regarding the camera drift myself. I would expect that camera drift would work best as a penalty for holding the bow for too long, whereas for other purposes (especially while moving) crosshair drift would be much more reasonable as it should involve pretty quick and periodic movements. Using crosshair drift instead of camera drift would avoid the accessibility issue, as far as I'm aware.

Fair enough, there is a small window within which a shot is realistically practically random, but for a skilled archer it's much less than the current ~50 cm at 20 m (with no accuracy modifiers). Shot drift could also be less purely random and instead influenced by actual effects like wind strength, making it possible to partially counteract it. There isn't, though, as far as I know? You could hold a bow for as long as your muscles don't start giving out, I think, within reason, with little to no practical difference in terms of power or accuracy within a pretty respectable time window. And even if there is a relatively short optimal firing point, the current implementation only relies on a simplistic threshold after which the arrow can be launched with no further increase to neither power nor accuracy, and also doesn't have an upper limit for how long the bow can be held, which is hardly realistic. Really not a fan of this one. I prefer the current style, where there's a indicator of the area the shot could go and that's it. Better quality bows have a very small window in which the shot can potentially go, and thus produce more consistent shots. This seems to be almost entirely unrelated to what you quoted and more to the previous point, or I'm misunderstanding something. Just in case, I'll note that by "camera or crosshair drift" I mean the actual camera rotating slightly or the crosshair moving across the screen, by "accuracy" or "spread" I typically mean what you seem to be referring to as "shot drift" (shot drift is typically less random and more due to wind as far as I know). Either way, I can briefly explain the intent behind both parts of the suggestion: random camera or crosshair drift when moving or holding a weapon for too long - primarily intended as a more involved and interesting mechanic than just random spread, to impose a penalty for improper shooting but still allow to hit the shot with some skill, instead of purely with luck, partially predictable camera or crosshair drift when initially drawing the bow - expressly intended only to force the player to readjust their aim after each shot in a way that can be mitigated with experience for faster consecutive shots (admittedly, I would have to try playing with it to know if it's not too annoying). Regardless of exact implementation, a crossbow should be easier to use effectively than a bow at the cost of primarily reload time. Reduced shot drift seems like a fairly reasonable way to do it, though I would be careful not to make the crossbow preferable at long distances due to better accuracy. More intuitive advantages for the crossbow would probably include a much longer or indefinite optimal window to take a shot, due to the ability to keep it drawn and ready for long periods of time.

Motivation When I say the ranged weapons are simplistic, I mean it. Throwing a spear or shooting a bow only requires to hold the appropriate button for a minimum length of time, after which the weapon can be fired with, as far as I can tell, no other complications. No aiming mechanics, no charge-up, no focus or exhaustion mechanics, nothing of the sort. Momentary accuracy seems to only be influenced by some factors external to the bow like player movement, but otherwise it's constant. This causes a number of design-level issues: most of the time, ranged weapons heavily reward timing and robotic consistency - the faster the player presses their mouse button without undershooting the minimum hold time, the better, even in cases where aiming matters more, timing and accuracy are completely independent - firing recklessly does not mechanically apply any disadvantages as long as the player is able to keep the cursor on target, barring external factors, accuracy is constant, and exact shot placement is ultimately random - it just isn't rewarding to line up a shot neatly, only to have it miss through no fault of the player, there is no reward for aiming carefully beyond placing the cursor on target, and there is no penalty for holding the bow for too long besides opportunity cost, the only penalty for using bows and spears while sprinting is poor accuracy, but that barely matters when shooting at short distances, leading to the cheesy strategy of sprinting backwards and shooting at whatever is chasing the player. There's also a couple of additional issues which are specific to the current balancing: bows require to hold for 0.65 s, which is both completely unrealistic and arguably greatly detrimental from a gameplay perspective, as it further encourages rapid, haphazard shooting, spears require to hold for just 0.35 s, which is even more absurd in several ways, and I'd go as far as to say that combined with high alpha damage it is the single biggest cause behind all balancing problems of spear damage - the spears have vastly higher short-term DPS than both the bow and the falx, so while it's somewhat inconvenient to lug multiple of them around and collect them after throwing, it's nonetheless disproportionately powerful compared to other available options, the sling requires to hold for 0.75 s, somehow the longest, and is further made largely irrelevant by only being able to use weak stone projectiles, as it stands, high fire rate necessitates fairly low damage, which means that individual shots feel extremely unsatisfying and combat is has a "spammy" feel as a result. Goal I think a lot of this ultimately boils down to realism and immersion. And once we know we want to make it more realistic and immersive, then we can create an engaging and rewarding system while making concessions for the sake of fun where necessary. If I were to point to a more specific direction, it would go roughly like this: Broadly, reward deliberate shot placement - as a general rule, hitting one or two difficult but highly damaging shots is incomparably more rewarding than many hits which individually barely matter. Make aiming a skill in itself - shot placement should be influenced by factors that the player can learn to counteract, not just randomness. Focus on making moment-to-moment ranged combat more engaging and enjoyable. Improve hunting to be more focused on stalking a target, a single careful shot, and then pursuing the now weakened target if necessary (hunting in general is something that Tyron has said they would like to work on at some point, and it would arguably be great as well if animals were more difficult to kill and process but yielded more resources). Suggestion There is a number of fairly small changes that would arguably be beneficial and may be implemented with relatively minimal changes, largely but not entirely independent of each other: Increase hold times and damage across the board; could also be done through increasing damage with charge time to also allow for fairly quick but weaker shots and reduce the need for mechanical consistency. Add a brief delay after shooting during which the weapon cannot be charged again to reduce the need for mechanical consistency (can also allow extending the time between uses without making the first use take too long). Reduce or remove randomness after holding for an extra second or so, to allow for more precise long-range shots. Add random camera or crosshair drift primarily or only when holding a weapon for too long and while moving. Add partially predictable camera or crosshair drift while initially drawing the bow, which could be counteracted with experience, to require aim adjustments between consecutive shots, Increase arrow and sling projectile speed, to make them more suitable against fast-moving targets and at greater distances. Add sling projectiles made from lead, and optionally from clay. A full ranged weapon overhaul could be useful as a way to consolidate several of these changes and introduce more complex mechanics, but it's not necessary. It may also allow to unify the system across many weapons, as they currently duplicate a lot of the code for practically the same functionality. Additionally, while I would prefer to stay focused on the basics here, there are also related systems and changes like improved animal AI, improved hitboxes (ideally with weakpoints), status effects (bleed, crippling, etc.), line of sight and hearing, and increased ranged weapon variety, which could all contribute to improving ranged combat and hunting. They could go in tandem to reshape combat as a whole into something more methodical, skillful, dangerous and rewarding.