MKMoose

If you do intend to look for malachite, keep in mind the quirk of the current prospecting system that malachite readings will not be higher than "decent" outside of certain edge cases, and "poor" malachite readings are absolutely good enough to start mining ("very poor" can even be great if you have a 20-thick sedimentary layer, though you're gonna have to look at permille values then - I think more than 1 permille is a good rule of thumb in this specific case, though I'd have to double-check to be sure). As with most other deposits, but especially those that only occur in sedimentary rock, you'll generally want to search in flat, low-lying plains or deserts. Loose surface chunks indicating near-surface deposits are possible and will be sufficient in the early game, but mining will generally be the primary way of finding larger quantities of malachite.

They not gonna post devlogs any time soon:

Should be possible to change through Client Area > Account > Player Name (direct link if you want).

It would be quite trivial to implement, with practically zero added complexity. And I say this having read through the code responsible for alloy recipe matching. It would be as simple as excluding the output alloy from recipe matching and only adding it back in when calculating the output quantity. Allowing to use alloys in other alloys (e.g. brass in bismuth bronze, electrum in black bronze) would be a bit more annoying since alloys don't retain their ratios once smelted, which would allow to manipulate the ingredient ratios somewhat, and if not implemented carefully then also converting some resources into others at a 1:1 ratio and no cost besides time, fuel and some miscellaneous expenses like tongs. Preventing this fully would require to propagate that ratio from the new alloy bits across at least all items that can be crafted and broken back down into bits, and that is probably more effort than it's worth due to the current implementation of item stacks. A simpler implementation would work as well, though. Nuggets of the same metal can be mixed freely in the crucible, because it only depends on the metal in the nugget and not the nugget itself. Iron in the bloomery is a different story, though. The bloomery and iron smelting are currently much simpler in implementation than the crucible and alloy smelting, which means that it's not currently possible to mix different iron nuggets. Still pretty trivial to implement, because it would be enough to give it a few extra inventory slots and add a small bit of logic to manage the slots appropriately, keeping in mind that it would need to check the smelted stack ID against the first item that was added.

Alcohol hasn't seen practically any use as fuel until the 19th century or so, from what I've seen, and even then it tended to be mixed with other stuff and not used by itself. Unless it's some sort of Jonas tech portable stove shenanigans, this particular use doesn't make much sense for VS. And even if you do add something like this, it would have to be absurdly efficient to be worthwhile, considering the investment of time and resources that goes into making aqua vitae in the first place. As for sprinkling alcohol over a fire, that tends to be dangerous. You're gonna cook yourself or your house much easier this way. Now this is a pretty cool use I can get behind, though realistically it's also a pretty modern thing as far as I can tell, and more about spraying produce with ethanol than adding it to food. Regardless, it would make enough sense and serve as a neat gameplay incentive for food preservation - use some of your fruit or grain to extend the shelf life of other stuff. I think I would point to three primary ideas that would be most beneficial for the game and quite sufficient to give alcohol a distinct spot in the game: modify the effects of intoxication to make it in any real way useful to drink alcohol on its own, and make the effects less instant and less annoying, primarily with increased pain tolerance, potentially similar to the SlowTox mod as mentioned by @LadyWYT, and including a couple of its other improvements like smaller serving size and ability to sleep through intoxication, allow adding alcohol to soups and stews in small quantities, potentially instead of water, more for the sake of it than for any specific purpose, and perhaps for longer shelf life, potentially add miscellaneous uses for strong alcohols and aqua vitae in the context of other mechanics like herbalism or combat (as a solvent and due to its flammability respectively).

I would propose a slightly different implementation. Instead of directly implementing manure, add a block like straw bedding (4 pixel thick layer, potentially stackable like snow). It could be used as decoration anywhere, but would have a special function when placed near animals. Over time, when medium to large animals are nearby, they would convert this block into something like dirty bedding, which could then be picked up and used as fertilizer directly or composted, or alternatively used as fuel, perhaps only after drying out. Obtaining compost this way from animals would be more intentional and interactive, and a bit less gross, if somewhat less realistc. The straw bedding by itself would be a neat decoration as well (historically it was more for sleeping, but we have the straw bed already), and animals could also prefer sleeping on bedding over bare ground. I'll also mention that fertilizer obtained this way should ideally provide different nutrients from regular compost, to create an incentive to feeding animals (which would presumably increase production of manure) instead of just composting all crops the normal way. A direct implementation of manure, as mentioned by @LadyWYT, would make a lot of sense when bovids and other large herbivores are implemented. Keep in mind that realistic applications of nitraries were heavily driven by the demand for gunpowder which we don't yet have in the game (at least not counting blasting powder). It would be a cool addition regardless, and it could also go well in line with my suggestion that fertilizer obtained from animals should be different from regular compost. Nitre beds seem to be a relatively modern and slightly more complex thing (here's LeConte's "Instructions for the Manufacture of Saltpetre" from 1862), but a simpler and much easier to implement process lies in simply burying manure in the ground, watering it and waiting until saltpeter comes up to the surface, then also boiling the product collected from the ground to purify and concentrate it (as on the Wikipedia page for saltpetre works).

Aye, cattails have a minimum temperature requirement of 3 C, so elk will almost never spawn anywhere close to them. Pretty useful correlation. On top of that, oak, birch, maple and almost all flowers in the game also only appear around freezing or warmer average yearly temperature, so if you're finding oak, birch, maple or any flowers except ghost pipe, then it's generally too warm. On the other end, when you're finding arctic supplies, or when you can't find most vegetation (no tall grass, as well as no ghost pipe, no eagle fern etc.), then it's usually too cold. If there's no mushrooms and sticks in forests, then it's way too cold. Though, if using any correlations of this kind, always keep in mind that the temperature can vary quite a lot even at just a couple hundred blocks of distance, so it's important to always take it with a grain of salt.

The most common culprit is the temperature range, and elk spawn in cold but not subpolar climates. On top of that: not completely dry, not too much forest or shrubs, and usually in highlands, not near the sea level. Or, if you want the exact conditions:

I can't seem to notice the stated problem in that screenshot, but if it's actually there, then that seems like a bug which you might want to report on the issue tracker. This functionality is being added in 1.22.

I like the idea broadly, though I would focus on some different design goals. The main thing I want to mention is that any towns and settlements will inevitably form at key points of interest, but those points of interest are part of the world and can't really be modified. By which I mean, a mining village might appear where people find an iron deposit, but an iron deposit shouldn't be generated just because the game decided that a mining village should be in the middle of an area where there's no iron otherwise. So I would focus on some of these kinds of relationships, like large towns appearing predominantly near rivers and oceans, farm ruins in fertile fields, hunting lodges and logging sites generating in forests, mining villages appearing in areas rich in ore deposits - intuitive connections that the player could ideally make out by just taking a glance at the ruins. Granted, most ruins are really old lore-wise, so I'm not sure that much would be left of them. Many would still end up as nondescript rubble, regardless of what they were used for before. That's highly dependent on what you mean by "loose conditions", but ore deposits can have pretty specific requirements, and they use ore maps. These ore maps could be utilized during structure generation to influence the frequency of certain types of ruins. There is already a system which takes a couple small ruin structures and places them as small village-like clusters. I think it shouldn't be difficult to expand it to generate a greater variety of bigger village or town ruins and more spread-out buildings connected with roads or whatnot. That said, I wouldn't expect a significant level of detail from them outside of manually constructed story locations, unless they receive a similar level of effort to the in-development procedural dungeons. Might want to include a translocator building in some of these large structures, while at it.

Given the lore, it would be really cool to include man-made tunnels as part of the cave generation algorithm, whenever if ever it gets overhauled (Tyron has said that he would like to revisit it eventually), which would allow to save points of interest at the ends of these tunnels, at junctions or at other key points, that could be later utilized when placing structures. Tying all these systems together in the right ways could result in some very immersive cave and tunnel generation that actually looks like it was made with a purpose and not just plopped in randomly by a random generation algorithm. This kind of also ties into this other thread, with the idea to generate more clustered structures near natural points of interest.

In-game they are already required for bear hide armor and the recurve bow, they can be used in place of sticks for slightly more durable stone knives and axes, and there's also the bone flute. Realistically, broth (first cooked by itself with bones or not, then used in soups instead of water) and bone glue (alternative to pitch glue) could serve as pretty significant uses for bones that would fit quite neatly into the game. On top of that, bone tools and weapons could be significant for the Stone Age, tool handles could be relevant all the way into the endgame (though it would ideally require a tool handle system in the first place). Bones could also be used for some miscellaneous items like buttons and beads for clothing and jewelry as well as decorative figures or ornaments. All of that could eventually be encompassed into bone carving as a properly developed mechanic, which would fit neatly alongside woodcarving, though I wouldn't expect it to be added anytime soon unless some priorities change, since 1.22 and 1.23 already have quite a lot of content planned. Seems to be made in a process very similar to bone glue, but with a bunch of extra refining. Culinarily, it hasn't been significant historically outside of specific meals where it occurs naturally through the use of certain ingredients like fish heads. It apparently only really became more common in the 19th century.

Seems to me like this is a relatively modern thing, potentially unsuitable lore-wise for Vintage Story. At the very least, the Bayer process specifically seems to be a 19th-century invention. As far as I can tell, a bunch of types of clay and feldspar already include an amount of alumina which is sufficient to achieve a decent quality glaze, though feel free to correct me, as I'm not as familiar with ceramics as you. It also appears to me that ash glaze would be a simple and very historically relevant kind of glaze, and would just require wood ash to be introduced in some way. It would likely be a simple and cheap early-game glaze, while the more complex mechanics would potentially be only available when using the beehive kiln or maybe some new intermediate kiln type. Boron oxides seem to fall under the same umbrella as the Bayer process of being relatively modern, as far as I can tell, though maybe borax itself was used earlier. Historically, lead oxides were used quite frequently as well. One or two new felsic rock types like dacite or rhyolite would arguably be a really cool addition to the existing igneous rocks to be used as flux when crushed, though it appears that lime would work perfectly fine as a flux as well, and maybe also potash, though naturally a more pure flux may require additional alumina and silica added on top. Rhodochrosite is already implemented in the game, although currently doesn't have any use. Allowing to pulverize it for use in glazes would be very easy. On top of the colorants you've mentioned, it seems that cassiterite (tin oxide) could potentially be used for a white glaze. Cobalt would be pretty nice and easy to add, though its role as a blue pigment could slightly conflict with lapis lazuli. It could be a child deposit in some copper or nickel deposits, or it could appear as its own ore.

I would like to mention a point which people seem to notoriously disregard anytime butchering comes up, which is that the purpose of butchering is not limited to gory, realistic animal corpses and detailed range of various cuts and offal. Butchering also serves a very specific gameplay function which does not at any point require gruesome visuals. Unless vague knife movements near an animal lying on a butchering table or hanging off a hook count as such, but I think it really doesn't seem that much worse than the same vague movements over a corpse lying in the grass, does it? And there's a lot of ways to mitigate risk further or add simple accessibility options like modified color palettes and textures. Granted, I'd have to double-check if the table and hook itself is a significant trigger, but again, it doesn't have to go anywhere near "detailed butchering and skinning". Even the Butchering mod, if skinning and a couple other details were removed or adjusted, I think would be very much suitable, while delivering the frequently requested gameplay functionality - it makes the player carry hunted animals back home and break them down on a hook and table, instead of just cutting off a couple chunks of meat in the field. It's a much deeper and more rewarding process that significantly changes the hunting dynamics, given that the player can only carry a limited number of animals with them and has to invest a much larger chunk of time and effort into processing the hunted animals, with an appropriately higher reward. With that, I want to suggest a more specific system that could achieve this with limited added mechanical complexity over the base game and easy integration of accessibility features. I'm not making a new thread here to avoid clutter, but I'm also making a post on Discord since that's where the whole discussion started for me. Disclaimer: I do not wish to discuss whether butchering should be detailed and gruesome or not. Feel free to consult Red Ram's explanation. Even if there was no concern about team members, gore can be an accessibility issue - look into something like BII reactions or particularly hemophobia. Also, for many other people gore is simply uncomfortable or undesired in spite of not causing a strong involuntary reaction. I'd be interested to hear if my simplified proposition would be satisfactory relative to something like the Butchering mod. Motivation: Increase mechanical depth of hunting and animal harvesting. Rework animal loot for more realistic meat yield, but require more effort to make the most of them. Features: Implement multistage harvesting, requiring to harvest animals multiple times, each time returning different resources in sequence (antlers, hide, fat, meat etc.), with no loot container, making the process more involved and immersive. Certain harvesting stages may require a different tool, or benefit from a specialized tool with a boost to yield or speed. The animal may change appearance at each stage (at least after skinning), but this could be easily disabled for accessibility or not implemented at all. Slight changes to model scale or color would be sufficient to indicate difference between the harvesting stages without any gruesome visuals beyond the existing animal corpses, and presumably at vastly lower development cost. Allow the player to carry dead animals back home (the Butchering mod implements this quite well). Add a butchering table, on which animals could be placed to harvest them more efficiently. Several harvesting stages would be only possible on a butchering table and not in the field, or have increased yield on the table.

There's a lot of ways to go about music tracks without basically disabling a whole game mechanic. If temporal stability is an important part of the story and several story locations are unique areas where temporal disturbances are supposed to be especially strong, then it might be a very reasonable idea to design temporal stability as an integral threat in these areas. Instead, the devs have realized that in its current state temporal stability would be purely detrimental in certain contexts, and made the decision that it should be paused entirely in all story structures, and in that same vein monster spawns are disabled there. Temporal stability is not integrated into the story areas in any way - even in the place which you might expect to be the single most unstable area in the whole world, temporal stability is entirely random just like in the rest of the world. At the same time, the village could be placed in the middle of a huge unstable region, with just the village's area magically protected from its effects.

Temporal stability is paused in story locations, just so you know.

Keep in mind the confounding factor in this specific discussion that is the hostile attitude of the OP. Insults, overgeneralizations and other bad-faith arguments are no way to give feedback to the devs, because it's pointless noise which distracts from the issues that should be focused on. I can practically guarantee (based on the reactions to other posts on related topics) that rewording several of the OP's points (and a few of your own, for that matter) to be more constructive and respectful would lead plenty of people here to agree with them, but alas. Just everything is fine to you, isn't it.. The whole game is quite fine. Plenty of people have been enjoying it as is, even without mods. And it's ultimately still very much a work-in-progress, so less developed systems are easily seen as simply not improved yet. If the current version is heavily lacking, then going a couple versions back it could as well be a barebones prototype, but it's clearly moving forward ever closer to the devs' vision with plenty of community feedback being addressed along the way as well. Both hunting and combat seem like they will reach critical mass sooner or later and have to be addressed, but they're not a great priority as of now. Tyron has expressed interest in improving hunting, and has said that their current core team doesn't really have the right interests and experience to deliver a deep combat rework. Regarding the falx, in the current balance of the game there's nothing really that wrong with it, ergo, it's fine. It's better than a spear for melee, but spears can still be optimal for hunting or general versatility. Spears will also most likely be buffed back up somewhat before 1.22 hits stable, considering the doubled windup time in pre.2. Enemies having no armor tiers is something of a missed opportunity to introduce deeper tradeoffs between weapon types, and suggestions to do just that have seen positive reactions.

Good to know since I'm about to be at bronze in my world. If the bellows really are needed to work bronze at the forge, that seems a pretty good change to smooth out the early progression a bit more. I don't mind quick progress being an option, provided the player has the knowledge and skill required for that kind of progression speed, but I also agree at least partly with some of the posts I've seen about the early game tech levels not really feeling impactful. Bismuth/tin//black bronze requires the metal to be at a temperature of at least 425/475/510 C for forging (nothing has changed since 1.21 in this regard). The forge can normally go up to 700 C, so bronze doesn't currently require bellows at any point. Spoiler just in case you want to mess with the mechanics further by yourself first: Also, the crude bellows can be crafted with a large or huge pelt, so there's no need for a bear. You can get them from huge boars, sheep, gazelles, moose and some species of goats and deer.

There seems to be nothing preventing rusty gears from spawning as far as I can tell, and in that same vein there doesn't seem to be anything preventing locust nests from spawning. Have you perhaps seen any locust nests in Homo Sapiens as well? Might be worth reporting if it's actually a bug.

You can adjust ore map scale, contrast and add a constant to it, you can change the rock types where deposits appear, adjust the deposit Y level, radius and thickness distribution, change the deposit frequency, and a couple likely less interesting parameters. All of that separately for each deposit as needed. While it's not the same level of control as you would have with an entirely custom solution, it goes much beyond just making deposits smaller. I'm not fully certain what the effect will be when you change these parameters on an already generated world, but I think new or regenerated chunks would follow the new parameters once the world is reloaded, because as far as I know the world generation system is initialized fresh each time the world is started up. It loads whatever is saved in the save file, including the world seed which it then uses to create ore maps and so on, but then generates everything using the current parameters.

Providing a custom, pregenerated ore map doesn't seem to be possible in a simple way, in part because the world is normally impractically large to provide an ore map to cover it in its entirety unless you tile it in some way, though it should be absolutely possible with a code mod if you modify the deposit generation code. But if you just want to make the deposits less common or otherwise adjust ore generation, then you can change a lot of the parameters through a relatively simple JSON mod by modifying the appropriate files in %AppData%/Vintagestory/assets/survival/worldgen/deposits. If you wish to go the modding route, then I can't help much further myself, but there's a bunch of available resources on how to go about it which you might find useful, or even there's some people who take mod requests.

Quoting Redram's clarification in the discord thread on it (I don't think I can find anything going into more detail): While on the topic, there's also this post by Redram from a couple years ago, in a thread about hunting.

There has been a pretty big (2000+ messages) discussion on related topics in the discord server. There are two main suggestions regarding butchering. The first focuses on the realistic process itself, and that could end up being pretty graphic and uncomfortable even if implemented in a less explicit way, not unlike proposed by the OP. The devs have said that detailed butchering and skinning is likely never coming to the vanilla game, because "certain team member(s) have a visceral reaction of nausea to depictions of gore that hew too closely to reality." However, that presumably doesn't exclude less detailed mechanics that achieve the same gameplay goals. And that leads to the second point about the gameplay purpose of butchering, which I think would fit the game very well as a relatively labor-intensive way to obtain more realistic quantities of meat and other resources from animals. Instead of killing six or so boars in a single hunting trip to get a decent supply of protein, you'd be able to kill a single boar, carry it home, set it on a butchering hook, break it down, make a meal from some of the meat and preserve the rest. The reward per amount of time spent could be similar, but the process would be much more involved, sophisticated and satisfying. This doesn't inherently require any graphic visuals, and I'd imagine that it shouldn't cause significant issues if implemented appropriately - if the current vague knife movements and the animal suddenly turning into bones are fine, then doing the same on a butchering table or hook instead of in the middle of a forest should be tolerable. Animal husbandry would then also have to be made more demanding as well to keep it balanced, with the reward being higher.

One thing that Vintage Story excels at which I find people really don't appreciate enough is that there's very little inventory clutter. And when there are any sort of items which don't have any significant uses, they are almost always picked up voluntarily. I can grab a couple specific tools that I need, a bowl of food and some other necessities, run off to do a specific task, and when I come back I just put back those tools and a full inventory of exactly the resources I set out to acquire in the first place. There's almost no additional clutter that I have to choose to either keep or throw away to make space for the stuff I actually initially wanted. One thing that was really annoying me when I tried Hytale was that swinging a weapon would destroy plants and some clutter, which meant a whole bunch of items dropping onto the ground. So I would go somewhere to do something, and while fighting three monsters or animals on the way I would inadvertently collect 3x grass, 1x stick, 2x purple petals, 1x yellow petals, 1x stone rubble and 3x green moss. It was genuinely infuriating after the 10th or 20th time. Vintage Story isn't completely free of similar problems, especially if you start collecting broken vessels, crops and so on, but I find that it's still ahead of most similar games especially considering that I've not felt these problems despite inventory space being more limited that in those other games. As a general rule, if I don't interact with it deliberately, don't shove anything into my inventory - anything that doesn't respect this ends up being annoying and undesirable, and broken toolheads fall squarely into that category. That's, side note, one of the less commonly mentioned reasons why monsters and animals arguably shouldn't have more varied loot (unless butchering gets made into a more developed mechanic, then you'd be carrying whole animals back home anyways). It can already be taxing on inventory space to return from a hunting trip with 2x flax fibers, 2x bone arrow, 10x red meat, 2x poultry, 3x bushmeat, 2x fat, 2x medium hide, 1x raccoon hide, 1x fox hide, 8x bone and 2x small bones, so having a whole bunch of extra variety on top would easily end up difficult to manage. This also tends to be a pretty big high-level design issue with many mods like Wildcraft - having a whole multitude of rock types, wood types, crop species and so on is already sometimes annoying to manage in the vanilla game, and having more things that serve only to create more variety is sometimes just not helpful. This is also why I'm gonna be looking out for the berry bush rework, and making sure to communicate it appropriately that there shouldn't be more than a couple species fruiting at the same time. I would be generally interested in managing used metal in various ways, like recasting, reforging into smaller tools, all of that, but it risks just adding more clutter at practically no benefit besides realism. A related alternative could lie in tool maintenance that is expected to be done in the field or when putting a tool away, primarily in the form of sharpening and oiling. It could be much more engaging to make it so that the player can maintain their weapons, tools and armor with care to improve their effectiveness and lengthen their lifetime, without making the player carry scraps with them. If you've seen a real scythe, then you may have seen it sharpened every couple minutes of mowing. If reforging or recasting is the goal, then I would at the very least look into allowing to break down all metal items into bits before they break and getting variable reward depending on durability, so that the player doesn't feel forced to use them up entirely in order to then reprocess.

That's pretty true in the current state of the game, though I'm not sure if it will continue to be true when any alternatives to flax get added. Cotton, jute, hemp, wool, silk, whatever the devs choose, I'd expect at least one or two to be added sooner or later (though some of them wouldn't be an exact alternative to flax, especially not jute). It would be a bit lame to feel forced into flax in spite of having alternative fibers - you might then end up with the opposite problem of needing a bunch of flax in nearly every single game just for easy oil. Adding some other sources of oil could then serve to make flax more of an optional convenience than a must, but I'd imagine that many people would still default to it just due to how common, universal and simple it is (sure, it has to be ground and boiled for some reason, but that's still nearly free and just takes time). Linen with all its uses, easy animal feed, emergency food if need be, one of the best sources of compost in the game, and add oil to that as well? While linseed oil doesn't have any really inherent issues and I don't really mind its addition, the main worry of sorts that I have is that it could make hunting borderline worthless for many players. Right now it's primarily useful for leather and fat - meat is a thing, of course, but once you get either soybeans or chickens going, then meat from hunting is pocket change in many cases, and it's less reliable. Removing fat as a significant incentive by giving oil nearly for free alongside linen which the player already wants for windmills would only leave leather.