MKMoose

Ironically, more creatures that require the player to vary their strategy is what we got in 1.20...and there are still complaints about it. In regards to variety, I think the reason why it's such a common complaint is that people don't really know what they want. They want something to get them more interested in combat again, and "variety" seems like the thing, because what they already know has become stale. And it's quite natural for a person to say that, because they aren't generally going on a deep introspective journey to consider what actually bothers them about the system. The job of a game designer is sometimes to find the nature of the frustrations and address them at their origin instead of directly implementing community suggestions - and not an easy task, it is. More creatures are certainly helpful, though I worry that what we got with bowtorns and shivers isn't sufficiently different from drifters to make a meaningful long-term difference for complaints about combat, because they appear in all the same places and ultimately both their behaviour and methods of dispatching them aren't particularly innovative. Thing runs at you or throws stuff at you, so you either get a bow and shoot it or get a stick and run at it. I'm oversimplifying of course, but, aside from some adjustments to basic strategies, kinda nothing has changed in terms of how the player approaches combat, and it becomes stale again once they get used to the new stuff. All too often, "variety" is actually much better achieved by increasing depth and moment-to-moment enjoyment, because they are far from independent. Hitboxes have been mentioned a few times, and that seems like a quite fine place to start to improve enjoyment from combat. I've had plenty of cases where me attacking and an opponent receiving damage felt kind of completely uncorrelated, with weird delays and whiffs that just felt wrong and clunky, and that was on singleplayer. Of course, we don't want it to be perfectly snappy and smooth either since we want to retain the survival horror spirit of the game. The line between "clunky in a good way" and simply annoying and tedious is pretty thin and pretty subjective, and I believe there are some improvements that could be made in this area. Enemy behavior seems to be in a fine place to me, aside from line of sight being arguably long overdue. Perhaps bowtorns could use some minor improvements to feel more interactive and maybe a bit less oppressive (they seem to me to kind of either stand in place or run away with no inbetween most of the time, but when they start throwing it's like Malevelon Creek), while shivers seem erratic enough to me and drifters don't really need anything aside from LoS. The status effect system would also open up a lot of possibilities, including different damage types (could be fun to choose between sharp and blunt weapons) and attacks that aren't just focused on damage, more elaborate wounds and healing, a variety of utility and buff/debuff items and so on, though that's all individual ideas which have to be evaluated separately and introduced gradually. The above three are, in my view, the three most important combat-related improvements and features that would benefit the game greatly. Things like new weapons (especially crossbows and polearms, arguably) are also cool and interesting, but new content needs a stable and expandable baseline to build up from. A better foundation would also make it easier to implement new threats more localized to specific areas or events that significantly mix up the gameplay, for example turrets that put more focus on stealth gameplay and problem-solving to give a quick example. I would argue strongly in favor of a heavy steel-prod crossbow with no less than ~12 damage with steel bolts (not counting traits), and of course different variants earlier in the progression. It still wouldn't one-shot anything more than the surface monsters, maybe a pig or some deep monsters for the hunter, which as you say should be fine if in balance with other weapons. Range, accuracy and reload time should be good enough drawbacks in most cases. High-damage weapons generally are finnicky to balance because breakpoints start to matter a lot with them, which can cause problems if not thought through well. Some targets might have 1 or 2 HP left after a shot or two shots, which would require a secondary weapon to finish them off efficiently (a good incentive if you ask me), and then get much easier once the player gets an upgrade (a motivator to progress), but in some cases it can easily start to feel arbitrary and annoying ("why does an iron bolt one-shot it, but a bronze bolt doesn't?"). The good part is that the game is already fairly well set-up to handle something like this thanks to a large variety of different HP pools across the different animal and monster variants, which mostly eliminates excessively drastic jumps in effectiveness and requires the player to observe the threat, think on their feet and adjust to the gear they're using more often. Weapons even stronger than that, i.e. around 20+ damage, are usually completely unfitting for Vintage Story. Maybe they could err on the side of power fantasy a little bit with simple firearms or Jonas tech, but even that shouldn't go above ~20 damage and needs appropriate drawbacks in other departments, most likely accuracy, reload time and ammo cost. I think headshots could work for both melee and ranged weapons. Another thing, which is frankly a bit rare in games: weakpoints, be it head, legs or anything else, don't need to just increase damage - they could in some way stagger, stun, weaken or cripple the enemy, perhaps courtesy of a status effect system. Bleeding is also an important possibility, which would make them technically a one-shot, but not an instant one, retaining some level of threat from the target. This could go a long way to improve hunting if nothing else (ideally along with LoS and potentially aiming changes) by allowing more skill expression through optionally waiting for the perfect moment or moving to the side for the perfect angle. As for rotbeasts, the shiver could have an exceptionally vulnerable weakpoint that is only briefly visible when it opens the mouth (or whatever that is) to bite the player, making for a much more engaging enemy to fight in melee. Bowtorns could have a weakpoint on the back, which could create some interesting incentives in multiplayer, though admittedly may be somewhat annoying in singleplayer, and it does also mean they would be much easier to kill while they're running away. Perhaps a way to scare them off briefly could be cool, even as simple as throwing a fistful of sand at them, or quicklime for a longer-lasting effect.

Well, both could be pretty reasonable and would have their own caveats. Backpack slot quiver would have to be unreasonably massive to be viable by itself, so if anything I think it could make sense to combine it with a hunting bag or something of the sort to make a container that can hold all hunting loot on top of arrows, and potentially also knives and bows. A quiver as a distinct piece of equipment could be much cooler, but may introduce some unnecessary complexity and may require simultaneous introduction of other items in the same slot to create some sort of opportunity cost, as otherwise there might be no reason not to carry a quiver at all times.

If I recall correctly, Tyron recently said in an interview that they would be adding iron spears, but he had personally made sure that it would also come with a rebalance to other spears. Presumably that means making the others slightly weaker, though that's only my speculation. I don't think he mentioned steel spears, so I wouldn't necessarily expect those. Pikes could be a bit odd because they were designed for formation fighting as far as I remember, and were generally two-handed and very unwieldy in close combat due to their sheer length, I think somewhere around 5 m typically. Regardless of that, though, I love the idea of introducing any more advanced polearms at higher metal tiers, as this would allow for much more flexible balancing as well as better weapon variety without requiring a bunch of extra dev time for completely new and unique weapon designs. And, unfortunately, way OP. You can't come close to having the same firepower with spears that you do with just a single stack of arrows. How is this any more OP that just putting arrows in your 6-slot leather backpack? Or maybe I'm just forgetting or misunderstanding something? Sure, it could tip the balance further towards the bow, but if a quiver is implemented as a bag, then it has the opportunity cost of 6 generic inventory slots (less in early game, two more if you get chromite), which can be used to hold that number of stacks of arrows just as well as other items. Even if a quiver allows to carry enough arrows to make it sometimes better than a backpack, the loss of versatility seems to me like a fine enough balancing factor.

Having it take up a bag slot and give so little seems rather underwhelming to me. I'm thinking have a "hunting bag/pouch/satchel with quiver" or something of the sort, attached on a single belt or shoulder strap, or just "hunting gear belt". It would work very similarly to a mining bag and justify a much larger number of slots than just a quiver by itself, which would have to be implemented in a different way to avoid killing it with opportunity cost. Would be able to store all the conventional hunting loot like meats, hides, fat, feathers and whatnot as well as arrows and potentially knives and even bows. It also does have historical backing. Something like a "farmer's basket" could work in a similar fashion for seeds and crops, or "gatherer's/herbalist's pouch" for berries and mushrooms, and herbs if they ever add them (Tyron said he wanted to).

Tyron has recently said in an interview that they generally prefer to never destroy player-built structures (or something in that vein) in response to a question about natural disasters, and I'd imagine that they aren't gonna make an exception for doors and windows. Maybe crude doors and simple gravity-affected blocks (sand, gravel, soil if enabled) could be argued to be destructible, but not better doors and not any other blocks or items. At most monsters could open doors, but then there's still the mentioned undesirable incentives, so I don't think this is enough for a standalone solution to anything. Weathering and wearing down with ways to mitigate it instead of breaking outright does seem like an interesting idea, but it would still cause similar issues and would require a lot of dev time to create all the block variants or whatnot for a system that ultimately would probably be really annoying if it damages your stuff and very restrictive on building styles. Love it for very specific features (a bit like we have for beehive kilns), but absolutely not for a large portion of building materials. Here's a suggestion, though: remove player structures temporarily. We already have the whole temporal instability stuff and rifts, so we could have huge fractures that sometimes open during temporal storms, modifying a slice of the world for a few moments, then return it right back. There would be a bunch of things to sort out like how exactly they should change the world, how to handle collisions with terrain when things get removed or added, how to handle things larger than one block (e.g. a lot of mechanical components) or things that rely on other things (e.g. plants or any items stored on the ground). There's also plenty of options to choose from for the exact size, frequency, duration and spawn conditions of those fractures, but generally I think something like this would have a lot of potential and thematic appeal with little impact on other existing systems. Spawn rates and enemy stats may need to be looked at, though, if the player's shelter were to be rendered temporarily open for anything outside. Also, there's a significant use for the rift ward to be found here as well. One thing that Darkwood does quite well and Vintage Story does very little of is tension, and I think lack thereof is the primary reason why people find temporal storms underwhelming. There's a lot of ways to increase tension, and new monsters or other threats is one of those ways, though not an easy one for the devs. Things that seep inside, things that reach inside, ghosts, shadows, infestations, generally much less frequent but more dangerous monsters prowling about. Ideally, tie them to temporal instability and temporal storms to keep to the theming, though some small mechanical worms digging through the ground (without damaging anything) could also be fun. Anything more interesting than entire swarms which don't pose a threat as long as the door is closed, plus the regular monsters spawning inside if I don't light up my house like a christmas tree (I think they shouldn't spawn within a 2- or 3-block radius of any sufficiently lit block). This is generally the biggest flaw of niche gameplay styles in many games, especially RPGs where the player has to invest a lot into a build - if it's useless in one part of the game, then many players will just decide not to use it at all. It's not the easiest thing to balance, because having to ensure that everything is always viable can also significantly limit the variety of challenges you can throw at players and lead to people using the same strategies throughout the entire game, quickly making it stale and boring. As a general rule it's enough that players always have a multiple comvenient choices. If there's enough available strategies that can be used by practically any character (and some just implement certain strategies a bit better - classes already do this fairly well), then a tiny bit of creativity and problem solving is usually enough to get things done efficiently even if one or two of those strategies become temporarily unavailable. Problems appear most often when players are funneled down a select few optimal paths or heavily discouraged from certain suboptimal paths at key points in the game (story locations certainly have the latter risk, though I'm not very familiar with them at the moment), and I think there's plenty of things that can be done to make roughly stealth-oriented characters interesting to play even in a boss arena, including traps, throwables like various bombs or poison darts (could have a variety of different effects), stealth kills (and crippling or just high-damage hits against enemies which can't be one-shot), and mobility options that get much more practical with light armor. Items and tools that build on basic systems, not complex interweaving features. If nothing else, though, a basic line of sight mechanic would go a long way, especially for hunting. It's really annoying when an animal notices you through terrain or while it's turned away from you. Granted, there's smell and hearing on top of sight, but it's too consistent to chalk it up to those. Also, there's drifters walking in place into doors after they see the player inside despite no LoS - it can be really quite immersion-breaking on the first nights.

It's pretty difficult to require a person do do something creative, because how are you gonna judge whether they've completed the task? Building is out of the question unless it's for a functional purpose, e.g. protect a site during a temporal storm, but even then you'll probably be watching people build horrific abominations to cheese the defense. Combat is by far the easiest challenge to implement in many respects. Some other systems could work in some ways. Granted, take what I say with a grain of salt, as I haven't looked at the story chapters much yet. Maybe have the player forge a few blueprinted pieces to repair a mechanism (already in the game to some extent), or just deliver materials to some device. Potentially chisel out a few replicas of a statue or forge a bunch of decorations or equipment to restore greatness to a lore location. Have them comb through an area and dig up ruins to find some artifact or blueprint. Get them to grow some unusual plants that require nonstandard fertilizers or raise an animal that requires a lot of care and protection. Perhaps have them provide food and supplies for a group of NPCs in some way. There's a lot of things that could be done, and for each of them a bunch of reasons why they might not work. One universal issue is that requiring a person to just keep doing largely the same tasks that they've been doing for the past dozen hours to gear up risks being fairly repetitive and tedious. What combat-oriented dungeons do well is that they require the player to engage with other systems first in order to tackle the challenge, but are themselves somewhat different in nature, which can provide great gameplay variety. There's a catch, though - if dungeons are the end goal, then other systems are often just the means to an end, and I don't think we want the survival aspects of the game to fall to the wayside. I think combat should still be a part of most quests in moderation, even if it's only for the purpose of basic self-protection and not as a way to progress, because it applies strong pressure on the player to engage more deeply with other systems. Arguably the best thing that a broad "combat overhaul" could provide in my eyes would be depth and variety to make combat and preparation for it more engaging, not just because currently it's pretty simple (which can also be beneficial) and maybe a bit clunky. Thing is, the majority of weapons, armor, other combat-related items and enemies are direct upgrades to something unlocked slightly earlier in progression, and offer no added mechanical complexity over the stuff available in the first couple hours of the game. This makes for a heavily frontloaded system which inherently struggles to be deep and accessible at the same time, and doesn't really support meaningful progression beyond making numbers bigger. If combat were to be a focus, it should be polished and developed to keep the player wanting to try different gear and different strategies for different encounters, and actually enjoying the moment-to-moment combat experience rather than slogging through a war of attrition. Granted, we don't want to compromise the vision of the game. Enemies that are hazards more than active opponents do have potential, as well as storms as dangerous unnatural phenomena more than a challenge. There is a balance to be maintained and it's fair to argue that we are close to it, and I do think as well that any drastic redesigns are probably unnecessary.

That would be part of animal pathfinding/behavior improvements, so I don't think it's likely to happen in the near future. Would be great though, because their current behavior is sometimes a bit simplistic. Trapping pits have apparently been used for hunting for a couple thousand years at least and have been highly effective, remaining in use all the way into modern times to some extent, so I would love to see them expanded somewhat. Placing sharpened sticks into the ground pointing upward and covering the hole with branches, and maybe even leaving bait inside, could be a cool alternative to conventional hunting with bows or spears. The related items could offer quite a lot of other possibilities as well in terms of decoration and protection.

1. The main issue The Immersive Mouse Mode is a cool idea, but it causes a massive problem from a UX standpoint: the player is forced to hold down a key to unlock the cursor to move items in/out of hotbar, inventory or crafting grid, which happens very often. It largely conflicts with the whole aim of IMM and just gets tiring, plus it's an accessibility issue. One way to largely address this issue is to allow to toggle cursor lock/unlock instead of having to hold down the key, which has been first requested in threads like this one a long time ago and I'm genuinely baffled that it's still not in the game, not that I've seen at least. And yes, there's the roundabout solution using macros, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a good solution. And even with a toggle, the player would still likely have to press it once when opening the inventory window and then once again when closing it, which is not great either - you can easily imagine pressing it a dozen times in a couple seconds when sorting loot or whatnot into a bunch of containers. With that, I see two possible short-term solutions for the issue, neither particularly complicated: - unlock the cursor when opening the inventory, just like with IMM disabled - since in most situations it's necessary to unlock the cursor when opening the inventory, then I see no reason not just consolidate them into one, even if it somewhat goes against the idea of IMM (admittedly this solution could be disruptive for some people who are used to the current state of IMM), - add a key to toggle cursor lock/unlock (or a switch similar to "toggle sprint" in accessibility settings) and remember it separately for when inventory is open and closed, which would also greatly improve accessibility for those who need it and generally allow for more detailed customization of mouse control without having to open the settings menu. 2. The hotbar and quick transfer Notice that though the above could be greatly beneficial, it doesn't address the issue with transferring items between the hotbar and containers, unless the inventory is open. When playing with IMM I have actually found myself instinctively trying to use RMB (or crouch/sprint + RMB) to put items into containers while having them selected in the hotbar, without holding them in the cursor. And if someone's trying to do something intuitively and it doesn't work, then simply making it work can be a good course of action to reduce friction: while not holding any items in the cursor, use the same or similar functionality for transferring items between hotbar and container slots as for ground storage, to allow easily putting items away using RMB. Crouch + RMB could take items from the targeted container slot, while modifying it with sprint would transfer full or partial stacks. In order to make it work better, it may be useful to also allow switching hotbar slots with the mouse wheel while hovering over a container's UI, as it doesn't work at the moment for some reason. The current functionality would likely remain as is while the inventory is open, though there's still things to consider as it could cause inconcistencies between the two states. At the very least, placing items into empty container slots could be implemented without conflicts, and then the the remaining issue would be how to transfer items from the cursor into a hotbar slot without unlocking the cursor (or vice versa while at it), which could be done with a hotkey (maybe X, the same as swapping items between hands). I'm pretty sure that this whole feature could also work with IMM disabled with no issues. Granted, it could make item transfer faster and less "hands-on" in certain cases, but I think it's fine if it allows IMM to be massively better and not reliant on unlocking the cursor constantly. I've also had thoughts to potentially completely remove the cursor with IMM enabled (at least while inventory is closed), so that LMB on a container slot would automatically swap it with the active hotbar slot. It might be a step too far and end up unintuitive and confusing, though, even if it could also be convenient and fast for those who take a moment to get used to it. 3. Inventory/crafting UI A secondary point about Immersive Mouse Mode, though somewhat tangential to the main topic, is that the default position of the inventory/crafting window is highly impractical, with the crafting grid specifically being extremely far off to the side. Just moving it doesn't help all that much just because there's very limited space on the screen to put it once the center is no-go. There's two things to consider here: - separate out individual inventory and crafting windows to allow more detailed customization of the layout, - allow resizing the inventory window (or resize it permanently) to let it fit neatly above the hotbar but under the cursor, where it is much more convenient and arguably kind of immersive as well (think like you open the backpack and hold it in front of yourself or put it on the ground). 4. Placeable inventory? Now that I've mentioned "opening the backpack and putting it on the ground" in the above section, why not implement that for the ultimate Immersive Mouse Mode? When the player opens their inventory, a special block is placed on a flat surface under the cursor, which works like any other container. There are a couple considerations with this: - we don't want players using these special blocks like large chests - the bags should still normally occupy their bag slots when the inventory is opened; they are also automatically returned to the player if they close their inventory, walk away or if something destroys the special block (water, falling sand or gravel, maybe another player), - should other players be able to access the special container? - it would be pretty cool and convenient, but it should be possible to disable it to prevent stealing, - should the player only be able to open their inventory while aiming at a suitable surface? - otherwise the game would have to find the nearest surface or something, but the player would still have to point at wherever it gets spawned to access the items (at least with IMM enabled), - should it be possible to place the special container on anything other than a flat surface? - hanging it on a wall might make sense as well, - the visual appearance of the special block would have to depend on the bags the player is using, - should this special container also include the crafting grid? - the block could visually include something like a crafting surface on a piece of cloth or a small workbench (potentially upgradeable in some way), which could also be used to perform crafting in a more immersive way, though it would also massively increase the complexity of the whole thing, - items like Skeps likely wouldn't be affected by this change in any way. Feel free to let me know if I had missed something that addresses some of the issues or if you've managed to make IMM work for you, as I simply wasn't able to get used to it even though I really like some of what it does.

I have to echo the sentiment that having freezing in the game and at the same time not getting any consequences for staying in extremely high temperatures can be quite immersion-breaking. The goal of adding overheating isn't just making hot climates more difficult, it's also to make them more engaging, more immersive, and more accurate to what one might expect from an "uncompromising wilderness survival". If someone wants easy-mode, somewhere between temperate and hot climates could still be space for a pleasantly warm mediterranean region. How would it make the game more fun, one might ask. And how does freezing make the game more fun? How does hunger make the game more fun? How does temporal stability make the game more fun? How do rifts or temporal storms make the game more fun? In a couple days with the game I've already seen complaints about each of these systems, some think they are tedious, some think they are uninteresting, some think they are not engaging, some think they lack depth. Overheating has the advantage of having very clear and easily accessible solutions which naturally guide the player to behaviors which make intuitive sense for the climate they're in, similar to preserving food and preparing warm clothes for winter. It's not as annoyingly persistent as regions of temporal instability due to the day-night and seasonal cycles. It is deeply ingrained into the game's core systems, unlike rifts and temporal storms which can feels tacked-on. It's always engaging, because it can't just be solved forever (if implemented well) - it can only be partially mitigated to extend the time that can be spent in direct sunlight during the day and accelerate recovery. I would be in favor of simply extending the temperature system to allow increasing body temperature above the current limit and adding cooling benefits to loose clothing and light hats and perhaps penalties to warm clothing. With the goal of keeping cold and hot climates distinct, I think that overheating should be a more frequent but momentary threat (not unlike wild animals and rifts), to contrast with winter being more focused on sufficient preparation for an extended resource-dry period. If the temperature is high enough, body temperature would increase, causing exhaustion, dizziness and eventually fainting, in part to amplify the threat of carnivores in the tropics - and you would generally be guaranteed to wake up in the evening as it gets colder if you're not killed. Perceived temperature would naturally be greatly affected by fire and sunlight, incentivizing open-air but shaded homes and workspaces while in hot climates - matching the expectation for these regions. And to avoid making it an excessive threat, the values would have to be tuned to only pose a significant threat near the equator during the day, while in other regions usually being at most a minor inconvenience unless using an excess of interior heat sources or wearing an excess of warm clothes. This could also create an interesting balance where the player may be more incentivized to travel or work at night when it's colder. On the topic of thirst, instead of being a constantly ticking timer in all climates, it would arguably be much better to make it a nutrition-like hydration bar which instead of (or on top of) increasing health would improve heat resistance, incentivizing but not outright requiring the player to stay near a source of drinking water. It would also be partially filled by soups, juices and some raw foods. Ideally, it would deplete much slower, if at all, in colder temperatures. This approach largely eliminates the issue of just being another bar to keep filling, especially outside of the tropics, since it serves as a reward for extra effort integrated together with the hunger system instead of as just another layer of constant pressure which adds nothing to the fun of the game.

A simple charge mechanic would be fitting and work well for bows as well. You could shoot three arrows per second, but at the cost of accuracy, range and power, with the only benefit being maybe raw DPS, at least against targets with a low protection tier. Alternatively, wait up to about a second (less for lighter bows, longer for heavier ones) for the aim to stabilize and to achieve full draw with higher damage, longer range and better accuracy. Then, if you keep holding the draw too long (more than ~2-4 s), you start losing not only accuracy but some of the range and damage as well. This along with potentially adjusted aiming would allow for much more skill expression with the bow while also achieving much more interesting tradeoffs with crossbows other than just the matter of damage and rate of fire. Crossbows could have higher alpha damage and would be easier to use by allowing much longer window for an accurate shot and more consistent range and damage at the cost of long reloads as well as much lower maximum range and lower accuracy than a well-timed arrow. If storing drawn crossbows is a problem, then it can be easily addressed by requiring to load the bolt again if it is stowed, or by having the crossbow slowly lose string tension (this could be fixed by replacing the string) and/or durability if cocked for too long. I love the idea for a blueprinted or Jonas tech weapon as well. Simple firearms could offer a massive-damage but low-accuracy endgame gimmick, and something more exotic could fill a gameplay niche that can't be easily filled with a period-accurate weapon.