MKMoose

Copper drops at a rate of 1.2 per 1 sand or gravel block on average. It isn't even all that useful at the start of the game, esecially given that exploring for nuggets also allows to find food and other resources whereas panning consumes satiety and doesn't tend to produce resources valuable for immediate survival. Gold drops at a rate of 1 per 31.25 sand or gravel blocks on average, or 1 per 12.5 bony soil. Silver is also 1 per 12.5 bony soil, but can't be obtained from sand and gravel. If you're lucky enough to obtain a couple dozen bony soil early into the game, it can allow you to get a bit of black bronze, but you need a whole bronze anvil for iron anyways, so I don't think that a little bit of bronze is particularly worthwhile in the long run. Rusty gears drop at a rate of 1 per ~20.83 sand or gravel blocks on average, or 1 per 5 bony soil. Some gears can also be obtained by selling other panned items, most notably gemstones from bony soil. It can be a useful way to get some gears. Temporal gears drop at a rate of 1 per 250 sand or gravel blocks on average, or 1 per 125 bony soil. It is very nearly worthless, if you ask me - you'll usually be better off getting your temporal gears from surface drifters. There are two other notable items that can be potentially useful, especially in the early game: Blue clay at a rate of 1 per ~ 4.17 sand or gravel. Could be used in the early game to get a cooking pot (4 clay) and a bowl (1 clay) if struggling to otherwise find clay, though it's not especially efficient and it's not viable as a primary source of clay. Candles at a rate of 1 per ~8.33 bony soil. Can be used to make a couple lanterns prior to finding bees or obtaining wax in other ways. You can also get clear quartz at a rate of 1 per 5 sand and gravel for this purpose. And there's naturally a bunch of other miscellaneous items that can be obtained from panning. I find that the most value comes out of it in the early game, where the large variety of normally unimportant stuff can still hold fairly significant value. But its practical value drops off a cliff in the late game. I'm not confident that this would work as well as you're suggesting. It would certainly be convenient, but it could also end up really quite boring, because it would largely just be a passive resource income or a conversion from bulk resources into a large variety of items. If it's cheap, it's a no-brainer, while if it's expensive, it may easily end up tedious. Copper, clay, quartz, clear quartz, sphalerite, gold, lapis lazuli, rusty gears, temporal gears, metal parts, metal scraps and a couple other things from sand and gravel. Flax, rusty gears, temporal gears, candles, gemstones, gold, silver, miscellaneous copper items and a couple other things from bony soil. Add a couple other items to the mix, and you could skip huge parts of the game by just auto-panning mountains of gravel. I've actually seen suggestions that a mechanical panning machine should have a reduced drop table, so that automatic panning can be used to get some resources but not to automate away the acquisition of an excessively large variety of items. This can become an important optional technology, likely designed to be most suitable for obtaining a narrow selection of resources, but without risk of circumventing other progression or reducing gameplay variety to an excessive degree.

Besides small animals like chicken or foxes, it is not normally possible for them to drop no meat at all when killed with a spear regardless of weight and regardless of class. Are you using any mods?

Tyron has posted an official statement regarding the situation. Sharing it here myself as official communication hasn't reached the Forums yet.

Tsu is a code contributor with access to Anego's private repositories, but even that barely matters in this case as virtually everything they have said is publicly available information. Maltiez' role of the dev team is listed on Discord as "Mod API Programmer" and in game credits as "Bug fixing, Mod API". Tyron has stated that Maltiez advises them on the combat rework. Anything beyond that about his specific contributions is generally information private to Anego which they are under no obligation to share - they know what he contributed to and can investigate it themselves if they deem it as necessary. Although, inspecting his activity on GitHub would allow you to at least get an idea about which bugs he worked on. There is no reason to paint a small extra crumb of information from another contributor about what Maltiez has worked on as "falsified", "muddying the water" or "fearmongering". Code going through review prior to merging is a practice fundamental to modern software development. The core mods and modding API (which are also what most bugfixing is centered on) are publicly visible, so all changes to it made for the public releases can be inspected freely. The remaining code which is not in the public repositories can be decompiled and inspected easily as well, as it is not obfuscated.

Can't be linked, it doesn't have a public home. It's excluded from Git. You know this, I know this. For accessing it, I recommend a decompiler. I like Rider, ILSpy is also cool. It's hiding in the "SettingsBuilder" class in the Yaml decoder's namespace. Accessing it through a decompiler can be difficult in that the mod versions which contain it have been removed from ModDB. Maltiez has also shared it here, if that is of interest. Confirmed to be the same as the decompiled code, as far as I know.

The code is significantly older than his employment at Anego, and it was explocitly confirmed by other developers that similar code would have never made it into the game through their vetting process.

There is a chance you won't even need decompiling anything, as a large portion of the code is publicly visible in Anego's GitHub repositories. Worldgen specifically is in https://github.com/anegostudios/vsessentialsmod. Do note, also, that it ought to be possible to directly call existing worldgen functions from the game's DLLs without the need for duplicating any code - the most important ones for this purpose do have PDBs attached for the sake of modding, so it's relatively easy to make use of them. From that repository's license: If you're looking for a more concrete answer, then your best course of action might be to directly ask a developer.

The conversation @Zaldaryon is referencing may be this: It's not crystal clear exactly what Balduranne meant here, but my guess is that Maltiez might be working on combat broadly, but not on the armor overhaul specifically.

As much as realism is naturally not the be-all end-all here, it has always somewhat grated me that meteoric iron is implemented the way it is. Real meteoric iron is confirmed to have been used at least as early as at the start of the Bronze Age (~3000 BC), and was one of the two only sources of iron metal prior to iron smelting - the other source is telluric (native) iron, of which only one major deposit was found in Greenland. The availability and practical value of meteoric iron is highly regional: in the Arctic, it was somewhat common and a lot of it was obtained from the Cape York meteorite, frequently used for small tools, knives, spears, harpoons and so on, in other regions including Ancient Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, very scarce, rare enough that it could be very valuable and potentially more frequently used for various cultural items more than ordinary tools. In terms of ease of obtaining or processing, it can be more accessible than even copper, albeit generally available in very small quantities. Because it consists of native metal and not reducible ore, it can't be smelted in the strict of the sense of the word, and it doesn't need to be - it was generally cold-worked or hot-worked into shape, but not melted. As a tool metal, it was as far as I can tell roughly similar in value to bronze (better for small cutting tools and points, but can be brittle and can't be cast easily) or to early low-quality iron. One of its primary flaws is that it's very heterogenous - two different meteorites could be completely different in composition and significantly different in physical properties, and they often contained inclusions, cracks and other flaws. An interesting question about the implementation of meteoric iron is whether its availability should be reasonably closely dictated by its real-world distribution. A meteorite could have theoretically fallen nearly anywhere, and it's not technically necessary to reflect real history in the VS world. That said, I think it could be interesting if meteoric iron served as a way to bring an interesting distinction to cold climates, as it's one of the few instances where a metal could be justifiably restricted climatically to a significant extent. A lot depends on luck here, naturally, but I've found that the meteorites are actually somewhat common once you know what to look for, and as such can be quite reliably used for tools. In flat areas it can get up to approximately one meteorite impact for every 500x500 area on average (as far as I was able to find). I tend to use it over regular iron whenever possible, though its value naturally dwindles once steel becomes available. Since it processes directly into ingots and not into blooms, I've found it very useful if I happen to obtain iron prior to setting up a helve (which is frankly pretty trivial to do if you know what you're doing, because a helve requires a windmill and that in turn takes a lot of waiting for flax to grow). Processing the blooms for the anvil without a helve can be a bit of a pain, but once you have the anvil then meteoric iron is significantly more convenient to use compared to regular iron, and it's a tiny bit better at that. It could be a pretty good fit in terms of gameplay, as it naturally gives meteoric iron a more significant use after steel becomes part of the equation, though it can also be easily argued that being easy to process is already a sufficient niche - meteoric iron is faster to process and costs several times less fuel to make than steel, and is also better than ordinary iron, so it can be considered better in scenarios where superior durability or slightly higher stats of steel are not paramount. It is also not unreasonable in terms of realism, as meteoric iron could theoretically be made into steel through carburization (or cementation), though it can have a couple issues: Nickel content and various impurities greatly affect the quality of the final product - it could theoretically be diluted in standard iron (there is some archaeological evidence for mixing meteoric iron with ordinary iron in some capacity, but it's nowhere close to being a well-established metallurgical practice, and especially not for the purposes or producing steel). Due to heterogeneity between different meteorites, without modern analysis, using a new batch of meteoric iron would be largely shooting in the dark, and it would require a whole trial-and-error process just to arrive at a high-quality product. Even small inclusions which don't greatly affect the steel initially can cause heat treatment to behave differently, sometimes with effects largely nullified or even potentially opposite to what would be expected for standard steel. The main issue, though, may be that this has never been done in real life at any meaningful scale (or at least there is no evidence thereof), most likely simply because there was not enough meteoric iron to allow freely experimenting with it to attempt steelmaking, not to mention making any larger endeavors reasonably cost-effective. Ordinary iron is right there as a perfectly viable and quite abundant resource with a more easily standardized production process. Granted, the meteoric iron we have in the game is already unrealistic, so stretching it further wouldn't be too bad, but still I'm not sure that it makes much sense to deliberately add a feature which in real life simply wasn't viable and lacks any historical evidence, even if it is theoretically possible.

Obfuscation in software has a very specific meaning, and the controversial code does not meet the definition. I would expect you to respect that when trying to argue about technical details, especially in a context where actual obfuscation is a critical part of the equation as that is what Maltiez' code was detecting.

Yes, it's entirely safe. It has always been safe* if you weren't also using a select few mods that had obfuscated code (most notably VS Radio and Caves and Caverns, apparently). *Note that the current version is 1.13.2 (September 2nd release). If you haven't updated to it and are running a multiplayer server, then it is strongly recommended to do so, as it includes an important security fix. There is no practical reason to stop using it as of now, as it remains fully functional and safe. There is no substantiated reason to believe it will either stop working or become unsafe anytime in the near future, but if it does, it will be the result of an update, so you might simply want to be a bit more careful about updating it past 1.13.2.

That you have no knowledge of it working correctly does not make it ineffective. Its purpose, design, successful effects and reason for false positives were all confirmed by multiple other devs. The controversial code was only active on multiplayer clients, possibly also on self-hosted servers in certain cases. Painted as an anti-cheat or not, every game that facilitates play on a public server requires protection from griefers and cheaters. Different methods can be better or worse, but having that protection is a basic necessity, not some kind of shady corporate move. VS has plentiful protections of this kind built into the game, and they are ensured to be as unintrusive as possible. The controversial code did not tamper with the system outside of the game in absolutely any way, and all the misinformation and fearmongering is causing unnecessary unrest and panic. The problem is being discussed quite fine in the Discord as well, minus the inevitable confusion, lies, misinformation, insults, overreactions, trolling - all par for the course, it would seem, so some people naturally get banned for breaking the rules and a couple people probably got caught in the crossfire. Some things were mismanaged and one moderator especially received flack for it, but there is no large-scale banning for daring to bring up the topic. It is, on a side note, kind of sad that the Forums get somewhat neglected. I've seen many different forum sites for games, and almost invariably the players' participation in those forums is proportional to the devs' involvement in it. When most devs virtually never comment on the Forums and a large portion of news except development updates and changelogs is available in the Discord only, that just kind of begs the question of "why even use the Forums at all?" I find this place generally calmer and more pleasant than alternatives but for keeping up with the game and interaction with devs the official Forums tend to feel neglected.

The code was never obfuscated - it could be viewed freely in the decompiled code, and was omitted from the public source repository. Its purpose was to detect obfuscated code, and that's why it triggered on the few mods that used it aside from the targeted cheat client. I do want to stress that banning obfuscated code, which a nontrivial number of people have been calling for, would also affect the mods that Maltiez' code unintentionally affected as well. By saying that obfuscated code is "bad enough", it can be assumed that you're effectively admitting that the anti-cheat feature did target suspicious code which should not have been obfuscated and possibly should not have been allowed on ModDB at all. One of the mod devs who obfuscated their code claims to have done so to protect their intellectual property (a fine-tuned cave generation algorithm), but I don't know what the situation is with other obfuscated mods.

As per Michaloid's (moderator's) words: Otherwise, refrain from posting inflammatory content on the Forums. Long story short for those not up to date below. If you need sources, you can look at the Discord server, but I frankly don't want to dig this up now. Maltiez (author of several popular mods, recently joined the dev team) added code to Config Lib back in 2025 which detected usage of obfuscated DLLs and made the user client crash in various ways while obscuring the cause for the crash. This only affected multiplayer clients. The intended target was a cheat client by a user that shall not be named, and the method reportedly worked, as the cheat developer reportedly announced that they stopped working on the tampered client as they were unable to resolve the issues. Since the targeting was done by checking for obfuscated DLLs, any mod that was also doing so would get detected as a false positive and its user's game would crash. This, according to Maltiez, only affected three mods, and the one that sparked most discussion as of 01.09.2026 was Caves and Caverns, whose developer found the cause ahead of Maltiez contacting them. The code that was causing the issue was since removed from Config Lib, so it is entirely safe to use with Caves and Caverns. An additional source of contention was Maltiez' conduct following the incident, including briefly reintroducing the controversial code into the mod and dismissing some crash reports or genuine complaints as spam or deleting them from the mod's page due to being mixed in with spam. Select discord moderators have also caught some flack for behavior which I would personally refer to as unproffesional. As of writing this most of the staff is out of office, and an official statement may be made after the next staff meeting.

I've fixed this in a PR, and it was a pretty trivial fix, but whether or when it makes into the game is another matter for a number of reasons. The funny thing about this is the recently-introduced fishing. I've been converting bushmeat into fish fillets at an ~1:4 ratio lately, which translates to a ~1:15 satiety ratio. One piece of bushmeat into 1500 meal satiety for practically free. Getting your meat from wolves and bears can genuinely just be better than hunting animals for red meat if you have a good fishing spot. Breaking bricks only occurs once at the end of the process. That seems like a very odd way to put it. The first two quenchings are for most purposes always beneficial on average. Maybe a bit less when considering the miscellaneous added costs. I could potentially see this argument for recycling broken tool heads. It still doesn't hold up all that well, because a significant portion of metal (in some cases the vast majority) goes into infrastructure and building in general. But for quenching? Quenching was added in 1.22, and everything had been fine before that. Unless you're going for large power buffs in the range of ~5+ quenchings, the material loss isn't even all that significant on a scale that would matter for this context - for a smaller number like for example 3 quenchings with no tempering (which is already a significant ~25% power buff), you'll on average spend ~1.4 metal per tool. I find that returning material wouldn't really change much here, frankly. You're still losing the tool, so you need to resmelt the bits and forge a new one. Not to mention that for iron you currently need to accumulate multiples of 20 bits to smelt them at all (since you can't mix them like you can mix nuggets in a crucible) or 120 bits for optimal resmelting (at the minimum fire clay cost), and steel bits are currently unusable - unless that changes, I don't think returning bits makes much sense at all. Personally, I believe that the theoretically ideal way to go about it would be to make quenching skill-based, non-stacking and retryable. Any kind of quenching failure would just result in a weak or sometimes unusable tool, and simply heating it up again (or potentially a more elaborate process in certain cases) would allow to bring the tool back to the base state and reattempt quenching. I don't see material loss as necessary for any reason except perhaps as a consequence of gross mistakes, and maybe an opt-in risk of quenching in brine.

Note that distilled fruit alcohols do have fruit nutrition. Dunno where I got that idea. Either way, realistically, alcohol shouldn't really have any meaningful nutrition, not even beer and wine. The fact that in-game lighter drinks do have nutrition is already a stretch, so letting distilled alcohol have it as well arguably wouldn't be unreasonable - it's distilled at a 10:1 or 20:1 ratio anyways, so it's a very poor investment in that regard. Granted, there's concerns about unspoilable nutrition, but I'm honestly not sure that I even care - if you're able to make alcohol in meaningful quantities, you're not having food problems either way. This one is actually a great example of how not to add things for the sake of it. It harms the game due to photosensitivity concerns, which VS has been routinely ignoring and which have to then be fixed by mods. If the visual effects were at least interesting or fun, ideally with hallucinogenic effects making the player see things which aren't there - but no, it's just nauseating distortion and a hideous overlay. What I would personally love to see for alcohol is: proper kegs, barrels and glass bottles, fancy glassware and mugs, benefits for aging. Even if it doesn't have much practical purpose, an interesting and fun vanity can still be a great gameplay addition - this is largely a parallel to cheese, which is fairly expensive and for most purposes kind of useless but its production process is perhaps the coolest of all foods in the game. That said, I do think that it's generally preferable to push for various features to be more useful and distinctive in their own ways. Food variety is somewhat incentivized through nutrition, but still you can easily get full benefits with only four food items and milk. Mushrooms are just worse than vegetables, with no meaningful quality that makes them interesting - they can't even be processed or used for any unique dishes. Fruiting bushes are currently pretty much just worse than fruit trees, and generally foods in the same food category often have these imbalances which leave one strictly optimal. Cheese is nice, but it's also very inefficient, and fresh milk can be obtained year-round. Fruit alcohol can at least be argued to be a method of fruit preservation (though not an exceptionally useful one), whereas grain alcohol is impressively inefficient and not useful for preservation.

It's a 3% chance for blue clay, so on average 0.24 blue clay per block of sand or gravel. Will do in a pinch to get the absolute basics like a pot (4 clay), bowl (1 clay) and crucible (2 clay), but will be a problem once you're looking to make tool molds which require 11-13 clay each depending on the tool. If you wanted to make a pot, a bowl, a crucible and molds for a hammer, a pickaxe and a prospecting pick, you'd need 44 clay which requires panning through ~183 blocks of sand and gravel on average. Not what I would consider practical. If we're talking alternatives, then it may be worth mentioning that: cracked vessels can sometimes have blue or fire clay (specifically forage vessels and arctic supplies), the commodities trader can sell fire clay (16 clay for 2 gears on average, 5x16 stock on average). Granted, neither is particularly accessible to new players. I'm not certain how much that contributes to new players' problems, but yes, clay does not usually spawn in gravel and sand. Red clay spawns more or less uniformly, only in soil. Blue clay spawns rarely, only roughly at sea level or a bit below, only in soil. Fire clay spawns very rarely, only in bauxite sand and gravel. All of the above doesn't apply to very cold climates (< -10 °C), where only small deposits of red clay can appear in soil or even less commonly in gravel. Fire clay can also be found underlying bituminous coal and anthracite deposits (only under some deposits). Additional limitations are as follows: Clay is a bit less likely to generate in rough areas with a lot of elevation changes. Forest soil replaces clay when it generates, so clay can spawn in forests but will be hidden under the top layer. Even where clay can spawn, whether it does is ultimately just random.

While I broadly agree with the premise, I think there's a lot that could be improved about clay generation, and circumventing it instead doesn't seem like a good solution. And especially not circumventing it by mixing something else with water, because clay is just... clay. Very fine-grained (< 5 ɥm grain size) natural soil containing a high proportion of clay minerals, to be specific. It can't be substituted with another material (there are certain caveats, but they're generally modern substitutes), because it has unique properties that very few other materials have. Even somehow grinding sand to the right grain size wouldn't necessarily make clay, because sand is often more rich in silica and it's not common for it to have enough clay minerals. You could get something usable out of shale and claystone or possibly some other clay-rich rocks, but that may require thoroughly pulverizing that rock, which may not be viable in the early game. What I would do is just make clay more intuitive and less RNG-dependent to find. I happen to have just mentioned what I see as significant problems with clay in another thread here - for the most part, it boils down to the fact that in-game clay is found very uniformly throughout the world with almost nothing that may indicate its presence. Finding clay often boils down to running about, looking at hillsides and hoping to stumble upon something, and it doesn't have particularly much to do with how clay is found realistically. The easiest, most intuitive association with clay is rivers and lakes. While realistic clay deposition is naturally quite complex and just generating blobs of it doesn't do it justice, I think making it spawn much more frequently near water would be a very simple first step at least.

The general idea that the game is realistic and using real-world knowledge is necessary to learn is not abundantly common in the community, but it doesn't seem too rare either. Personally, I think that it would be beneficial for the game to lean into it in certain areas, mainly just because utilizing players' preexisting knowledge can help tremendously to familiarize them with the game. So while I don't think too many players are confused or misled or whatnot because they're trying to apply real-world logic where it doesn't work, I do think that creating that association would be very beneficial for the game. If clay spawned in a more focused and reasonably realistic way - primarily near water, though naturally there is a lot of nuance - then searching for it could be much more satisfying and learnable. Tell a new player "you need to just run around until you come across a side of dirt with a red tint" - that's kind of boring and disappointing. Tell a new player "find a river or another water body and inspect its banks for clay" - that makes intuitive sense and is much more actionable. Additionally, on the point of learnability - if a player comes across a clay blob on the side of a hill as it is currently implemented, what are they supposed to conclude? But if a player comes across a large amount of clay next to a river or on a riverbank, that will easily impart a natural association between water and clay. Importantly, searching for water first is also a great intermediate goal. Instead of the resource being the sole endpoint and the method to find it being nebulous, it is generally preferable to create multiple more approachable individual steps. Having to find water first would be a concrete and well-defined goal, then searching nearby for clay would be separate, much more focused task. I do want to also note that realistically, sources of clay are naturally much more complex than just water bodies. Weathered rock formations (that's how kaolin forms), colluvial deposits, coastal plains, bedrock (claystone and shale can be clay-rich), sometimes volcanic regions. Water bodies are just a very simple and easy-to-implement association which would also be easy to teach to a new player. While that's largely true, it doesn't quite point at the the underlying problem, I think. The issue, as far as I can tell, is largely that people struggle to see it because they don't know to expect it. Looking for clay all over the world in't very specific, whereas limiting the search area to rivers and lakes would let people focus their attention much better where it matters and have much greater chances at noticing differences between different soil types. As a side note, another potential way to make finding clay more intuitive may be something akin to indicator plants. Different plants prefer different types of soil, so it would stand to reason that some plants which generate primarily if not only on clay could be added.

I can't quite agree with this, because where you say "hardcore", I see design problems. My experience on the Forums and on the Discord server suggests that the reason new players struggle is overwhelmingly that the game simply doesn't do a great job of introducing its own mechanics and utilizing the player's preexisting associations, to say it lightly. Let's say that a new player gets through the tutorial and figures out that it might be useful to find clay. Well... what are they supposed to do now? What does clay look like? Where can it be found? The game doesn't explain anything - literally just "find and dig up some clay". Rivers don't exist, so riverbanks are out of the question. You might think to search near water bodies, because that is the obvious way to find clay realistically, but searching at sea level only increases the total spawn rate of clay by ~20% at most, because it only has any impact on blue clay. And even that 20% increase doesn't matter that much, because where there's water, there's less land surface for the clay to spawn. If not near water, then one might think that it would be reasonable to search in low-altitude plains and basins which is where clay is naturally more common in real life. It can be more effective, but sometimes can also be detrimental because it's generally more difficult to notice clay when looking from the top, for new players especially. You might also think that clay could be more common in forests, as realistically it gets a bit more readily exposed to the surface in forests - but nope, that doesn't work at all, because clay gets completely covered by forest soil in the game so for most purposes it could as well be nonexistent in forests. The end result? Looking for clay is a game of chance, driven by largely arbitrary, unintuitive mechanics which have very little to do with how clay is realistically found. To me, that's not hardcore - it's just wrong. It would be more reasonably hardcore if the reason for clay being as difficult to find for new players as it is was realism, but that's clearly not the case. Dying has very nearly zero penalties in the early game if you manage to retrieve your items or it can even sometimes be beneficial (primarily in terms of satiety). The game offers a basic tutorial and extensive handbook with guides for many mechanics. Resources can be hit-or-miss but in terms of actual survival challenge they only provide much of anything before the player establishes a half-decent food supply. I can absolutely see how it partially ticks the boxes, but I don't think it's nearly close enough to be considered hardcore by that definition. Even "uncompromising" arguably isn't supported by the actual gameplay mechanics all that well. And frankly, I find that "uncompromising" is an odd word to use in the first place either way, because it's defined as something akin to "inflexible and unwilling to make concessions". If I were to interpret it literally, my first assumption would be limited world customization options and a focus on a specific intended experience - and that clearly doesn't fit VS either. Or it could maybe mean that the game doesn't make accomodations for new players to onboard them onto the experience, which is kind of true and kind of not, but it would also be a pretty odd way to advertise the game. I tend to disagree with this rather fundamentally. Truly unfair mechanics are, to me, universally and invariably unfun as well. When a mechanic is considered unfair, it suggests to me that the game does something that it shouldn't do, often for the sake of overwhelming or tricking the player to artificially jack up the difficulty. Or more generally, the game doesn't provide the player with reasonable means to meet its demands. Used in moderation, it can sometimes be an effective storytelling tool or a source of tension in gameplay (my favorite example is the fourth boss of Nine Sols), but in excess it just doesn't make for good games. Even the most hardcore survival games (as well as soulslikes, or rage games, or other kinds of difficult games) are designed with a level of fairness in mind, because it is really a basic design rule. Hardcore games are naturally difficult and they don't hesitate to throw challenges at the player without giving an easy way out, but good hardcore games make sure that the player has the means to succed. Challenge needs to be clear and legible - unfair mechanics are often those which punish the player without giving sufficient information about what is affecting them. Mistakes need to be a learning opportunity - unfair mechanics are often those which don't have any clear counterplay or remedy, or don't provide the player with reasonable means to learn of it. The player needs to have agency, and good decisions need to result in meaningful benefits - unfair mechanics are often those which punish the player largely irrespective of their actions and decisions. And this way, I've arrived more or less at your definition of "uncompromising survival". Your definition of "hardcore" is what I would call "hostile" and for most purposes just poor game design. Hardcore games, as I know them, tend to be primarily those which require great dedication and sustained commitment from the player to build up significant knowledge and skill, rewarding it with relatively slow progress. This maps very intuitively onto games like hardcore MMOs, while in the context of survival games it frequently manifests in the form of high difficulty, permadeath mechanics and no handholding, as that is a very natural fit for the genre and functions almost like a roguelike - play, inevitably die, try again from scratch with newfound experience. But although some people describe VS roughly that way, it is not at all what I personally found VS to be like even though I would immediately label several other survival games I've played as hardcore based on the same definition. I genuinely can't find any reasonable sense of the word "hardcore" which would allow me to apply it to VS based on my own experience. A lot of it may come down to the fact that descriptors like this often just come down to vibes. I wouldn't want to get bogged down in definitions, so what I will end at is that the kind of gameplay VS is designed around and whether it's supposed to be difficult or not isn't closely relevant to whether a specific mechanic is tedious, frustrating or unfun, or the opposite of any of these. If we are to discuss quenching, then I don't think that this discussion is particularly productive, and we ought to actually discuss quenching itself as a mechanic. This discussion is, however, an interesting topic in its own right, so if you're interested in that then I would love to hear examples of clearly unfair mechanics in hardcore games.

It's a somewhat common idea that I've seen tossed around, and yet it's incorrect. Going for damage first and then finishing with a durability quenching is a net loss, because durability quenching is always a net loss if the total number of iterations, both for power and for durability, exceeds 2. As an example, the fourth quenching for durability assuming tempering in-between can provide an 8.3% relative durability buff, and has a 12.7% chance of breaking the tool. You lose metal this way, on top of spending extra time, fuel and fire clay, just for a chance to get a slightly better tool (e.g. for a steel pickaxe it's 3774 => 4086 durability, just 312 more). And I strongly doubt that having to worry a tiny bit less about your tool breaking is particularly meaningful. It's not like that ~300 extra durability solves some kind of problem - it just makes the problem ~8% less frequent, at best. While the third or fourth durability quenching is not all that bad, it only gets worse each time - the 6th quenching, for example, provides a ~5.7% relative durability buff at a ~16.4% shatter chance. And remember that this is on top of all the previous material losses. Once you get into ~4+ quenchings, a smaller number of iterations with less tempering can end up having greater power (and vice versa), so the optimal number of quenchings is not always straightforward. But that aside, I was talking about how many times and at which point in the sequence it's optimal to temper for a given number of quenchings, which is not always clear-cut either. Most of the time, "do whatever, it barely matters anyways" is the most practical answer, though there are still some objective mistakes that people make. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I find the system poorly designed, because outright removing tempering out of the equation would change almost nothing in terms of the practical results you can achieve, while making the system more intuitive and removing a large portion of the potential for the player to shoot themselves in the foot. And at that point, maybe just redesign the whole thing somewhat to keep tempering relevant. Alas, the skill of civil discussion is not universal either. Don't escalate this further than you already have.

The maximum average effective durability gain (controlling for material loss due to shattering) is ~19.4%. Hard dissagree, I go for 3 or 4 at least. One of the main reasons why I believe the current system is flawed is that it is frequently unclear or even misleading, and individual decisions barely matter in it. Whether you should or shouldn't do something or the order in which you should do it cannot be determined intuitively based on the information exposed to the player - it can only be determined mathematically, and most people won't bother. It's largely the same issue that prospecting has, where the average player simply has no reasonable means to stop themselves from shooting their own foot without a guide. Do you know, for example, how many times and at which point in the sequence it's optimal to temper when going for power? No, you probably have no clue, because most people haven't run the simulations. The biggest mistake you can make in the system is quench too many times with at least one durability quench, and people do it all the time just because the game never prevents them from it and even rewards them with a cute durability buff which seems like it should be beneficial. What trips you up, it would seem, is that the objective state of mechanics is borderline irrelevant in many cases. How people feel about them is a different matter, and understanding why people feel the way they do is absolutely critical to designing enjoyable mechanics. So, what is this risk? When a player makes a tool head, they tend to operate on an implicit assumption: the forging process is done, and the item is practically complete. This is partly influenced by the fact that it used to be always true prior to quenching being added. Shattering the tool head, especially on the early quenching iterations where the chance is low, breaks the expectation that the player will obtain the tool shortly, and forces them to go back to the beginning - hence the frustration. Standard hardcore survival as it is most commonly defined requires or at least is strongly associated with: permadeath or other heavily punishing death penalty, no handholding, no tutorials, no guidebooks, no conveniences like a minimap, severe resource scarcity, often remaining a significant concern all the way into the endgame. On standard settings, Vintage Story doesn't meet any of these criteria. Even on Wilderness Survival it is rather debatable. It is, as far as survival games go, a pretty easy game - most "difficulty" in VS tends to come down to issues with accessibility, approachability, mechanical clarity and randomness-driven scarcity. I've personally found it much easier than all classic survival games I've played like Project Zomboid, Don't Starve or The Long Dark. The idea of an "uncompromising wilderness survival" is on the website and is all too often used to dismiss criticism, but it is not actually supported all that well by the existing game mechanics - the jump from that to "hardcore" is even less justifiable. For most purposes, I've come to describe VS as an "immersive homesteading sandbox", as that seems to be what the devs increasingly support and what a large portion of the playerbase is here for.

As much as it could be cool and actually somewhat realistic, I largely agree with @LadyWYT's sentiment in that it doesn't seem appropriate to allow the player to excessively circumvent seasonal or climatic limitations for crop growth. The current system is already very lenient, allowing to grow a couple crops in "icy" climates in low fertility soil with no fertilizer and no greenhouse (and a lot more crops with additional investment). I don't personally think this would end up working very well, and the same goes for heated greenhouses. Tweaking the nutritional value of some crops could be fine. I feel like some problems here are a consequence of the current farming and general food mechanics more than any flaws inherent to your suggestion, though. Frankly, I don't like farming as it is now as a whole to the point where half of my suggestions on these forums touch on related mechanics, but that's another matter. Giving the player a way to invest significant additional time and effort into cold-climate agriculture just to get at best similar yields to what they would get in warmer climates just seems largely kind of pointless from a design perspective, unless there is something else to counterbalance it - I don't think it's interesting to make farming almost the same in every climate and just more tedious and time-consuming in cooler climates. In part just because what kind of "uncompromising wilderness survival" is this if I can just build a nice greenhouse and grow crops in a climate which realistically has essentially zero agriculture? I would love to see cold climates designed with a unique gameplay flavor and focus of their own, which could also end up much more immersive and realistic. Cold and especially subarctic climates are a great opportunity to incentivize an alternative playstyle focused heavily on hunting land and marine mammals or birds, as well as on fishing and foraging. In terms of farming in cooler climates, I would like to see animal husbandry highlighted, with some reasonably cold-resistant crops (or ideally hay meadows) strongly favoring usage as fodder. Herding, especially reindeer herding, may be of particular interest as well.

Though it is late for new ideas for the armor rework wishlist, I still wanted to share a link to a channel which is an absolute gold mine of references for historically accurate armor, including also a lot of details about individual components, weapons, armor functionality and the broader historical context: Alex The History Guy. For a while now this has been my first recommendation for anyone interested in historical armor or reenactment. Something like this is a very nice example of relatively heavy armor suitable for an archer, using a brigandine and plate leg harness (endgame, since it's late 15th century) - it would certainly slow down movement somewhat, but it indeed would not interfere significantly with shooting the bow: I generally would like to see this, though I'm not necessarily confident that it would work well. Excessively particular per-piece stats generally have the potential to enable extreme hyperoptimization. If the effective number of armor variations due to the upcoming customization becomes too high and differences between pieces not sufficient, then people could just get bogged down in a balancing hell instead of properly enjoying the variety that the system provides. Even something that is not mathematically advantageous can be seen that way if it's misinterpreted or just weighed with different priorities. If the devs manage to prevent that, then by all means, but I'll need to see it before I believe it. I would certainly be very interested, either way, in armor which more meaningfully differs in its function to match the theming. As it stands, almost all armor could pretty much be approximated with two values - protection and debuff severity - which tends to make armor selection very uninteresting in practice when you just know that one stat should be high and the other should be low. We know that the visual and crafting side of it ought to be improved greatly, so we'll see if the gameplay side of it is up to par.

Opening a support request seems like your best bet.