MKMoose

There's a couple points here. To make wrought iron or steel using a blast furnace, you first cast pig iron (a pig is a large ingot-like piece cast from the blast furnace), then you hammer the impurities and excess carbon out of it (that's the finery forge process). Besides cast iron, which is a careful cast directly into a desired shape, it's not possible make ready-to-use iron or steel with the blast furnace (even cast iron should realistically be touched up after casting, but that can be abstracted away with no issues). Steel from the cementation furnace realistically requires incomparably more work than just "shave off a few impurities off the blister steel". It is referred to as shear steel, because its production involves shearing blister steel rods and welding them back together, repeated several times. Steel from the cementation furnace realistically is of signficantly higher quality than earlier types of steel - that's why it was useful in spite of the process being slow and inefficient. Cast iron is a practically separate product of the blast furnace. Cast steel essentially didn't exist until much later. Crucible steel is a separate topic. You can just make it work, it's greatly simplified in the game anyways. It would be quite reasonable to make it only possible to produce regular wrought iron (via pig iron) and cast iron with the blast furnace, keeping steel restricted to the cementation furnace - that's what I was alluding to when saying that the blast furnace and cementation furnace could be independent features that the player could build in either order. Alternatively, shear steel from the cementation process could be better than regular steel. Kind of like you've said yourself, though with no need for any alloys. The cementation process and subsequent processing could be made more advanced and expensive as well if there's need to make more space in progression for the blast furnace.

Wootz steel (a type of crucible steel first made in the 1st milenium BC in Southern India) is very noteworthy here, because it does technically allow iron smelting (but not straight-up melting) into a very high quality steel in relatively small batches. Interestingly enough, the wootz process was almost entirely unknown in Europe until the 17th century, but it didn't catch on once it was introduced in spite of its high quality due to industrial-scale shear steel production being already established in Europe by that point. I'm not certain that it necessarily makes sense to introduce it to the game, because realistically it would effectively be an endgame steel unlocked in the Bronze Age, but it is very interesting nonetheless. I do generally tend to agree, but I'm not sure why it should be after the cementation furnace. Note that, realistically, the chronology of iron and steel production in Europe can generally be simplified to the following (other regions complicate it a bit): Bloomery - onset of the Iron Age, c. 1200 BC - simple iron production through blooms. Steel can be made in small quantities by cutting off high-quality parts off of blooms. Can be improved with bellows. Some significant intermediate designs start popping up around the 10th century. Blast furnace - ~12th century in Europe - a nearly direct successor to the bloomery, which allows to produce (1) cast iron and (2) higher quality iron and steel through the finery forge process, more quickly and and more efficiently than ever before. Since its introduction, it has been continuously improved and upscaled, though the fundamental working principle remains the same. Cementation furnace - ~16th century - more of a post-p and its primary benefit is higher quality shear steel, though it's slow and inefficient. It typically relied on higher-quality wrought iron production from blast furnaces to supply the steel production. The next major categorical changes would only come in the 18th century with the crucible furnace and puddling furnace. For the game's purposes, though some inaccuracies and simplifications are naturally permissible, I think it would be quite odd to add something after the cementation furnace. If not introduce a blast furnace as a fixed middle step to make cementation the expensive end goal, then making them independent of each other wouldn't seem unreasonable - this would allow the player to choose whether they want to prioritize cast iron and more efficient wrought iron production, or more directly go for higher-quality steel. Fair. Besides the above note on why for historical reasons I don't think just adding a step after the cementation furnace is a good idea, I would absolutely be in favor of the addition of a blast furnace for high-volume ironmaking. I would argue that making it a parallel unlock with the cementation furnace could even be the better choice, as it would open up player freedom instead of kind of just lengthening a fixed progression line. A blast furnace could primarily improve efficiency and speed of processing as well as unlock a few things like a cast iron stove, whereas a cementation furnace could be the preferred choice for high-quality but expensive tools, weapons and armor - ultimately both would be necessary to get the full combined benefits either way. I might have told you this already so apologies if I'm repeating it, but learning about real-life meteoritic iron has made it very difficult for me to take the in-game implementation seriously. Jewellry and other religious or cultural items. Sometimes small tools, but primarily in Greenland where the Cape York meteorite provided relatively easy access to meteoritic iron, in contrast with most regions of the world where its status was often similar to precious metals and gemstones. Meteoritic iron can't be smelted because it's already metallic, so it was mostly cold-worked into a desired shape, sometimes hot-worked - which is technologically less sophisticated than copper casting. And it's unsuitable for large-scale processing because meteorite composition is very inconsistent. On cast iron, instead of discussing where it would fall between the main progression metals, I think it would make more sense to make it most useful outside of toolmaking - primarily used for things like cookware and mechanical components. For tools, it is realistically only useful for a narrow selection of them, especially agricultural tools, which could actually be a nice way to reduce maintenance costs of farming or broadly homesteading in the mid to late game, and it would also contrast with steel which is particularly suited to more progression-critical tools as well as weapons and armor.

Didn't miss anything. If you have an Instagram account, at least some of the stuff posted on #devlog in the Discord server can also be found there. You can find it through the link at the top of the page next to the Anego logo. Frankly, I was considering to make a kind of "miscellanous dev posts" topic to share various things that the devs post outside of the Forums, but the thought of maintaining it regularly is not very encouraging. Really would like an official channel for this. This will very much be the case based on the second point in the teaser, key part put in bold: Not sure about the idea for different damage types depending on attack animation. More universal weapons are always a risk, because weapons which are good enough against everything often overshadow specialized weapons, similar to what you've mentioned on a different point. Certainly could be very interesting either way. A lot also depends on whether the different attaks can be used at will or are just part of some kind of fixed attack patterns - the former tends to be better for this purpose, I think. This is generally what I mean when I say that I can only really see it working well to narrow down weapon selection for animal hunting, because reducing yield from mangled animals is a relatively natural and understandable penalty for using improper hunting methods. As long as it's not too restrictive, I think this could be very useful to create a better tuned hunting balance which fulfills a more particular fantasy, without all the other weapons disrupting it. This, though, I have doubts about. Affecting only some types of loot is certainly an option, as you say. But I don't really see how it would be possible to reasonably make it interesting and not feel restrictive at the same time. At least for myself, given that I tend to optimize a lot of things. Unlike in hunting, where the concept of a clean kill is quite important and tissue damage is strongly undesirable so having a narrower but still ideally somewhat varied selection of weapons is understandable, monsters are generally where I would expect maximum combat variety which a loot multiplier is arguably not conducive to at all. While I certainly wouldn't argue that it's impossible, I'm gonna need to see it to believe it. A number of people in the Discord have already expressed dislike for Combat Overhaul's damage types and a wish for vanilla to implement a better system. What I think is very important here to mention is that making the player use different weapons for different enemies is quite fundamentally not good variety, at least in certain contexts - it risks just making people carry multiple weapons at all times or suffer if they don't have a weapon appropriate to the enemy, which effectively reduces the variety because there's just a couple mroe similar weapons in each category that the player needs to cover. Loot modifiers may also run into almost the same problem - always carry a high-damage and high-loot weapon, or suffer if you don't have one of them when you really need it. Proper variety always comes first from facilitating different kinds of player expression, e.g. through allowing several different but similarly viable combat strategies which meaningfully change the flow of combat. Even cosmetic variety can be just fine. I think that damage types would be best done, for better or worse, with a status effect system. Blunt weapons could briefly disorient and stun enemies, slashing weapons could potentially cripple enemies (i.e. slow them down permanently, disable specific attacks), piercing weapons could get partial armor bypass against immobilized enemies or hemorrhage when hitting animal lungs (potentially especially important for hunting). While the details are naturally up in the air, I do believe that something of the sort would provide incomparably better long-term gameplay variety than simple modifiers, though of course it is significantly more complex to implement as well.

A regular crucible, even with coke, isn't sufficient to reliably smelt iron - that's related to why bloomeries were such an important historical milestone. You could potentially melt scrap iron, but that will usually require a better crucible and a furnace, not a clay crucible and a firepit as far as I can find. It would be entirely plausible and historically accurate make crucible steel in a crucible, which relies on diffusion more than melting if I recall correctly. As for cast iron, my thought is that a proper blast furnace really should be the way to go. Development of the blast furnace (as well as the finery forge process closely related to it) is among the most important technological advancements of the Renaissance, so I don't see much reason to shy away from it and continue making iron in simple bloomeries while we already have roughly 17th-century cementation furnaces for steelmaking. It would certainly be a complex feature, but I don't feel like that should be a justification to avoid it - just a reason to put in extra effort to keep the process reasonably streamlined and intuitive. Cast iron is brittle. It has a number of advantages which make it comparable or better than wrought iron for some applications (e.g. scythe, cooking pot, stove, some intricate shapes), but as a general rule it is strongly suboptimal for anything which takes impact (e.g. chisel, hammer, pickaxe, any weapons or armor). Simplifying the comparison to better-worse isn't really productive in this case, much less so than for most other metals. Do keep in mind that real blast furnaces were first built several centuries before cementation furnaces. And that's considering Europe, but it was much earlier still in China. I don't think I've ever seen any mention of this other than a fairly simplistic WIP implementation from many years ago. Regardless, if they are not on the devs' to-do list, then I certainly hope they make their way onto it.

Instead of flint, primarily quartz and chert could be used, and many other hard, non-porous rocks are viable as well - that much would be fairly trivial to implement, though flint is already easily accessible either way. Instead of steel (or iron, though it's less effective), you'd seemingly need pyrite or marcasite, if we want to keep it relatively grounded - iron minerals which are not currently in the game. Making them reasonably accessible in the early game without greatly devaluing other sources of iron may not be exactly straightforward. Many nonstandard options could be feasible, though they inch into the territory of alchemy and not simple firestarters. While I broadly really like the idea, it will not serve much purpose besides vanity as long as lit torches can be carried conveniently and indefinitely. None of this is really a justification not to implement more proper firestarters, but the game may need to change in a couple places to accommodate them properly and give them a distinct role.

Looks a bit like a Watersheds feature if you ask me, and the collapsed chest may just be regular buried treasure. Either way, I will note that, while the other methods are fine, if you want to be absolutely certain whether you're looking at rapids, you can also: Build a flat platform for the water to flow onto, or redirect the water onto flat terrain - if the water spreads out, it's normal water, since rapids can't split (this method may be impractical for your large waterfall thing). Check the block code in creative mode: /gm 2, enable World Edit menu with the ` key, enable "liquid blocks selectable" in the top right menu, and look at the water block - if the code in block info at the top of the screen says something with "rapid", then it's absolutely a rapid.

New teaser from Tyron in #devlog on Discord, for y'all's viewing pleasure on the Forums and very relevant to this discussion. Emphasis added. With this teaser out, a prerelease by the end of the year seems ever so slighlty more likely, though a lot at this point probably depends on whether there are any other tasks to complete and when the team can comfortably release the new features - not sure what to really expect based on statements like "is being fine tuned" or "still a work in progress". As for the actual contents of the rework, I like what I'm seeing quite a lot. Three things I'm mildly worried about are: Physical hit detection - the idea is cool, but tends to be quite janky and difficult to really get right. It seems like it may also cause weapon range to be reduced by roughly one block for both falx and spear unless animations change significantly, which is not necessarily a bad thing (especially if hitboxes effectively get wider as well) but it will have a lot of second-order effects that need to be accounted for. Having more proper attack hitboxes and not just a single point (which is still sometimes buggy in spite of its simplicity, by the way) is practically bound to be a great change either way. I wonder if similar changes will be applied to enemy attacks, and whether this is associated with changes to entity hitboxes. Damage type affecting mob drops - if it's a simple multiplier, then it might not end too well, because this kind of thing tends to be pretty miserable to make it reasonably balanced. When loot is valuable then the player is incentivized to always use high-loot weapons largely irrespective of all other factors, and when loot is forgettable then the modifier ends up completely worthless relative to other advantages. Unless it's in some way more interesting than a blanket loot multiplier, I can only really see this working well as a way to narrow down weapon selection for hunting animals. Wouldn't mind to be proven wrong, though. Essentially no mention of ranged combat, and no mention of shields or any other potential off-hand items. Practically the whole focus is on simple melee combat, and even two-handed weapons are a "maybe". One step at a time, naturally, so there's a lot of lee way I can give, but it seems quite odd.

The temperature can vary between different places and not just with latitude, so if you didn't move far then this is quite normal. Might be that this place is in a cold spot. Chopping down a tree destroys all behives that might be in it.

I would be careful about this. A lot of people already dislike temporal storms because they are a somewhat arbitrary "you can't do much of anything for some ten minutes now" - adding blizzards or similar features which last several in-game days (with one day being by default 48 real-life minutes), on top of winters already restricting what the player can do somewhat, could be quite demotivating. Not that it can't be done well, and certainly may work just fine as an optional difficulty option, but it would be strongly advisable to somehow make sure that it feels natural and engaging, not just something which is there to make everything inconvenient. I think what should be emphasized here is that merely making the player stay indoors could be kind of miserable, but it would be more enjoyable if the player is given more to do during winter - then not being able travel as freely could be a switch-up more than just a restriction (though I will also mention that realistically, travel and transport can be easier in certain aspects in winter due to lakes and muddy ground becoming frozen). This could involve any of a huge selection of mechanics, for example: Threshing and generally more complex grain processing - especially if grain harvests are made seasonal, this could be a very nice feature. Metalworking, toolmaking, woodworking, weaving - many players already do more forging in winter, so simply adding more related or similar mechanics, ideally in a way which allows the player to conveniently stock up (i.e. restricted by time investment more than resource availability), could give players more interesting things to do in winter. Like I said above, this is already a feature of the current winters, and a challenge that's fairly easy to account for but will hurt if you fail to respect it. Do keep in mind too that if the player has to spend their entire summer/fall scraping together enough supplies just to get them through the winter, they're not going to have the time to go off on adventures to find resources or complete story content. I don't really see this as a meaningful feature. Plus, if the player has to "spend their entire summer/fall scraping together enough supplies just to get them through the winter", then the problem is that food takes too much effort, not that they have to rely on food preservation. I personally think that there are two main problems in the vanilla game, assuming standard world configuration: Cellars - They easily extend the spoilage time of many foods in every nutritional category to well beyond the time needed to acquire more of that food, which largely trivializes food preservation. Meals and pies - Nearly every food in the game can be preserved by making it into a meal or pie for an additional ~4-8 days by default (~15-30 days in a cellar), potentially much longer when temperatures fall below 5 °C. Meals made at the beginning of winter can last for most of winter and into spring. These two factors make it so that: There is very little urgency when processing food - even things like red meat last several days in a cellar (and are generally obtained in small portions which makes processing easier). Food with short spoilage time kind of doesn't exist - meals or pies stored in a cellar extend everything by at least about two months. Many foods don't need to be preserved at all besides putting them in a cellar - e.g. vegetables and several fruit species last well over a year, not to mention grains and legumes which can potentially last over a year even without a cellar. Combine this with many preservation methods being very inefficient and mostly delegated to vanity - of which the biggest offender has always been alcohol, e.g. making wine reduces the effective satiety of standard 80-satiety fruit by more than 98% relative to fruit used in a meal if I did the math right - and you have a system which provides a number of methods to preserve food but does little to actually incentivize the player to use them. Some of that is desirable to keep the game more casual and reduce the constant pressure on the player, but just for the purpose of incentivizing more variety it would be useful to make unprocessed food less ubiquitous, and allow more preservation methods to be closer to lossless so that people actually want to use them. At the same time, I think there is an important other point here: winter can favor certain food sources of its own, instead of just restricting any and all food sources, which can provide plenty of variety and perceived challenge even if the actual difficulty remains similar. I would point to three broad ideas in particular: Fishing, marine mammals - especially in the subarctic regions, this was historically important to subsistence during winter in many cultures. Hunting - animals may behave differently, snow can make tracking easier, cold temperatures slow down spoilage making carcass handling easier, animals tend to have more fat (at least around autumn and start of winter) and higher-quality fur. Brewing and potentially some other food processing - cold temperatures help with spoilage, which is why brewing was concentrated in the colder seasons in some regions. Personally, I would be interested to play around with improved sleeping mechanics as well as more limited lighting, to add more tension at night and make light more valuable but also allow to sleep through the night more conveniently to compensate. It is kind of an immersion-breaker that I can do pretty much whatever I feel like at night and almost never have to significantly worry about light except as protection from monster spawns.

Not possible, at least not in the vanilla game but also I'm not aware of any mods which explicitly change it. Even breaking the block doesn't return anything. You can probably just break it if you actually don't need it, or finish making it if you may use it at some point. Some mods like Fitting and Sharding or Some Disassembly Required allow recycling unwanted pottery, if that is of interest, though they also do more than just that.

The layer of sticks has no unique practical function that I know of. It is possible to cover a hole with the sticks kind of like this, which allows to walk over it but doesn't block light: Cover an entire hole this way, and the animals inside won't get out but also won't despawn due to lack of access to sunlight. If this is not what the handbook is alluding to, then I don't know what.

Four days is very little time for a fruit tree, even with mods that accelerate growth. The most likely answer is that you just have to equip yourself with a little bit of patience. Do note, also, that deciduous fruit trees need to vernalize before they can bear fruit. Unless a mod breaks that behavior, you will only be able to get fruit once after each winter regardless of growth speed. If there is an issue with the tree actually not growing, then mods are always first to suspect. You could test it like this: Start a new world. Go into creative mode with /gm 2. Get a few fruit tree cuttings of the appropriate species from the creative inventory and plant them. Advance time with commands like /time add 1 day or /time add 1 month and see how the trees behave over time. You can do so both in the vanilla game to check if any issues occur there, and with mods to check if your mods are causing issues.

Kind of depends on how far you go with "historically", but if it's not too far then you could say that we're both wrong in some capacity. The dates and intervals for the last 9 updates. Release dates based on update post dates, may sometimes be +/- one day due to time zones. Prerelease Stable Prerelease duration [months] Prerel. after previous stable [months] Stable after previous stable [months] v1.22 Feb 5 Apr 21 2.5 5.4 7.8 v1.21 June 16 2025 Aug 25 2025 2.3 4.9 7.2 v1.20 Sep 18 2024 Jan 17 2025 4.0 8.0 12.0 v1.19 Oct 28 2023 Jan 17 2024 2.7 6.3 9.0 v1.18 Feb 24 2023 Apr 19 2023 1.8 5.8 7.6 v1.17 June 14 2022 Aug 31 2022 2.6 5.1 7.6 v1.16 Dec 1 2021 Jan 10 2022 1.3 4.5 5.8 v1.15 May 23 2021 July 16 2021 1.8 5.5 7.3 v1.14 Oct 21 2020 Dec 5 2020 1.5 v1.19+ Average 2.8 6.2 9.0 Std. deviation 0.8 1.4 2.1 v1.15+ Average 2.3 5.7 8.0 Std. deviation 0.8 1.1 1.8 Versions 1.16 and especially 1.20 seem like outliers, but the rest has quite consistently kept within the 7-8 months range in the last few years. Based on this, predicting a new prerelease before the end of 2026 is very reasonable, though frankly I might still hazard a guess and say that the 1.23 prerelease will probably only come in 2027, given the large variety of new features and systems that are likely to be included. We'll see how it goes. We've got a genetics API feature mentioned today in the #devlog Discord channel, by the way. As much as I get your point, I will say that with Tyron having emphasized in the past that he doesn't normally actually promise anything in roadmaps (which I think is contradictory with the definition of a roadmap, but anyways), it would be very odd to now say "the team has decided that combat should be a focus for the next big update" while also describing multiple features to look into and new tech from the Glint team and mentioning two new hires in relation to the combat changes, and then for some reason neglect it regardless - combat has gotten a level of emphasis orders of magnitude higher than most teased features get. To add on to that, Red Ram has explicitly confirmed that new weapons are planned for 1.23. A number of things in the same development update post are marked with the "we don't know yet which of this stuff will be in the next major update" disclaimer (just like status effects in the 1.22 "aspirational roadmap"), but combat is I think very clearly not one of them.

Animals don't need light in almost all cases. They need to have access to the sky (technically, sunlight prior to multiplication by current brightness), or alternatively artificial light if they're somewhere underground or in an enclosed room where sunlight can't reach. It's not just about having to search for something. It's about being spawned in a low-value area which is lacking in important resources with no way to tell as a new player, and being given practically zero hints as to where those resources might actually be found. The most common advice is literally just to run around until you stumble upon what you need, because that's in certain cases literally the only option - and because it's purely random, you may get unlucky and find no limestone/chalk, bauxite or whatnot after walking dozens of thousands of blocks. Some of those issues can naturally be mitigated by just approaching the game with different expectations as well as finding other things to do while exploring, but ultimately frustrating the player to the point of resorting to effectively cheating if not quitting the game is not the game's design goal - and there are almost always methods to minimize it without compromising the game's actual design goals. As far as I'm aware, it's not normally possible to alter the geologic province size. Some mods change things up by allowing sedimentary rocks to spawn in the shield province, which is what you've spawned on. My preference for this kind of issue tends to be that wherever the player is, they should as a default rule be able to either obtain all resources available at the stage of the game within a relatively small amount of effort, or to find a clue regarding where a missing resource can be found. Breaking this rule is naturally allowed, and it may be preferable to break or difficult not to break in certain cases, but leaving the player with no information to go off of should generally be a justified decision and not a common pattern. Broadly in the context of rock strata, this is difficult to do, because even rock types which only form in specific environments can move elsewhere because of plate tectonics, and there's not much that can be done which isn't completely gamified - probably the most defensible option I've come across is to allow obtaining some information about nearby rock strata from traders. Increasing sedimentary rock coverage to a more realistic ~75% if not more from the current ~60% could also be justified, especially as long as igneous stones are always present under sedimentary ones regardless. Specifically for lime, I would strongly consider adding it to some caves and making lime from seashells more viable. Or just making limestone more common, because realistically it seems to be considered the third most common sedimentary rock covering ~10% of exposed or near-surface continental bedrock if not more. And particularly well this applies to everyone's favorite clay, which really ought to be easy to find near water, often in river floodplains or on riverbanks. There would still be ample uncertainty and effort involved, but it would give the player a clearer goal to work towards instead of leaving them almost entirely directionless.

A different kind of steel from a particular ore might be odd, although Tyron has said that specialized types of steel may be on the table for the future. Though it's currently unimplemented, there is barebones stainless steel in game files, which would be made using chromite - I think it's way too modern (start of the 19th century), and actually the current (simplified) shear steel is even arguably too modern (apparently end of the 16th century at the earliest), but we'll see. There's a lot of stuff between crude wrought iron and shear steel which could be added - crucible steel, cast iron and wrought iron from pig iron most notably. As far as more involved processes go, ores could primarily see crushing, sorting, washing and roasting among other things, depending on the specific ore. The general purpose of this is to concentrate the ore and remove impurities, which then improves the efficiency of smelting and potentially the quality of the final product. For many ores these could be entirely optional, but there's a few ores for which more complex procesing could be justifiably made necessary if it's not too prohibitive in gameplay - sulfides (e.g. galena, sphalerite, pentlandite) and carbonates (e.g. malachite) most notably. Zinc in particular is also interesting, because in real metallurgy it is quite tricky to manage due to its low boiling point (~900 °C) which means that conventional smelting can cause it to boil out of the alloy. Here's what I find almost amusing, because it seems like it's quite consistently neglected as a possible benefit: more advanced ore processing can effectively make prospecting easier, since when the player has to spend more time on processing, then it's reasonable to make the ore more accessible to balance things out. Multi-step processes can generally be useful in that they tend to feel relatively complex and satisfying even if the individual steps are actually very simple. More broadly, early chemistry or alchemy, and under that umbrella metallurgy, dyes and pigments, soap, leather and textiles, and a whole bunch of other stuff, are also very interesting in terms of the new mechanics which could be introduced through them.

If you're open to modding and want similar functionality in the meantime, alongside the already-mentioned QP's Chisel Tools (largest and most popular, potentially risky to remove from a world once used) or Chisel Wiz (client-side, rich chisel mode selection), you can also consider Chisel Tools Lite which is a much lighter alternative. Generally agreed, though I will say it's a shame in some capacity that the vanilla chiseling is currently so simplistic. At least one or two tools like the hand planer and hand wedge from Chisel Tools Lite would be amazing to have, even if not easy copy-paste, as they would make the repetitive work much more enjoyable. I've also seen ideas for a blueprint of sorts which would create a preview of the desired shape - still need to chisel it by hand, but without having to constantly double-check complex works for any errors.

There are no known bugs related to the shatter chance or its display. In all likelihood you're just experiencing the wonders of uncontrolled randomness. Breaking a toolhead on QTQ is a 12.6% chance, so breaking 5+/9 (not counting the QQTTQ) is a delightful 0.0022% chance if my math is still right.

While I wouldn't expect a huge overhaul, Tyron's June 2026 Development Update clearly describes plans that go well beyond an armor rework: Also, based on this Discord message from Red Ram, it seems likely that we will see two-handed weapons: So far, starting from the armor rework post, we've had ~11 teasers for 1.23 in #devlog since (counting multiple posts on the same feature as one teaser). For reference, 1.22 saw ~25-30 of them, although individually smaller. Granted, 1.21 had 5, I think, so it's not exactly a reliable metric. Tsu has been working on mechanical power and new colliders other than AABBs, and the development update post mentions a number of other things which may or may not make it into 1.23, including several new plants, pets, inventory sound, and other stuff. Lore planned for 1.23 and possible changes to temporal storms have been mentioned in a relatively recent interview. The main reason why I'm saying that there's relatively few teasers, though, is that we've seen almost nothing related to combat so far, beyond the armor rework survey which was explicitly focused on stylistic options and not gameplay. For an update focused on combat, it would seem natural to post at least a couple teasers related to combat prior to the prerelease, if only to build up anticipation for what is supposed to be the focus of the update. Ultimately this is mostly just a guess, but a simple estimate between time passed and features planned tells me that a prerelease closer to the high end of ~10 months after the last stable seems more likely. October-November are not implausible but seem too early to me unless they're planning a long testing phase, and December seems highly unlikely due to winter holidays.

With no official date, we can only estimate. The typical release cadence has been about 8-12 months between stable releases, with prerelease cycles lasting about 2-4 months, based on the last four major updates. We are currently about 6 months after the release of 1.22 stable, and we have seen relatively few teasers for 1.23, which leads me to believe that the prerelease is likely still several months away, especially since the winter holiday season is getting close and it naturally tends to create delays. I would start anticipating the first 1.23 prerelease no earlier than late January, with a prerelease window closer to 2 months similar to 1.22 since it would be unimpeded by winter holidays.

The game is trying to load two mods with the same assembly name, suggesting that you have both the new and the old version enabled. The first thing to do would be to clear out the cache (%AppData%\VintagestoryData\Cache if on Windows), and make sure that the older version is correctly disabled or removed from the Mods folder.

Why is this a problem? High-tier pickaxes are vastly more efficient for regular mining and have greater durability, so "waste of time" is an exaggeration at best, since you'll still generally want the better pickaxes even though they're not strictly required. I would say continuing to use copper is actually a waste of time in the current balance - while iron and steel can be occasionally debatable due to higher upfront and processing cost, bronze (tin bronze specifically for the sake of an example) provides a huge 50% stone mining speed and durability increase over copper at very little additional cost. Bombs are largely just an alternative tool, not a replacement for better pickaxes. As far as progression goes, you're already limited by: anvil tiers - you can't forge iron without a bronze anvil and you can't forge meteoric iron and steel without an iron anvil, pounder caps - crushing olivine and iron ores requires iron caps, crushing ilmenite and chromite requires steel caps. This means that bombs don't actually allow you to circumvent almost anything of note. If anything, I would actually argue that the pickaxe tier requirements for mining ores are currently almost entirely pointless and should likely be removed. Using bombs is also not exactly a simple "just get all the materials after copper" either - it takes linen, sulfur, saltpeter and black coal (charcoal would be more realistic for the most part, but anyways), of which coal has to be mined or potentially looted and other materials can also be purchased. Not to mention stone blasting bombs, which need powdered iron oxide, so they need iron pounder caps. Bombs are an optional, more complex option which can reward the player for going the extra length to get them. Most people don't use them regardless as far as I can tell, possibly in part because they have a 10% base yield reduction relative to mining and prevent you from obtaining crystallized ores. If your specific server needs bombs to be more restricred, then by all means, but I feel like you're going to have to make a much stronger case if you want to argue for a vanilla change. This still allows you to completely skip pickaxes better than copper, just with more steps. I could easily see it becoming excessively gamified, cluttered or unrealistic, for the following reasons: The existing tier requirements are already a huge simplification and have little justification besides gating progression, so I currently see no meaningful reason to make bombs or hammers conform to this as well given that they don't allow to skip any steps in progression. It would be reasonable and would change almost nothing for hammers, but bombs are a significantly taller ask. Many players already practically never use bombs, and the current separation into ore-blasting and stone-blasting has practically zero basis in reality as far as I can tell - adding multiple more types just seems to me like it would add an excess of clutter for people to bother with when looking into bombs. There are almost no realistic types or variants of bombs besides black powder, at least for the purpose of ore/stone blasting - it's just gunpowder in a bag. There are technically four potentially notable subtypes which could be introduced (serpentine, wet-ground gunpowder, corned gunpowder, glazed gunpowder - they could give new purpose to alcohol and graphite), but that again reaches into excessive granularity - I would maybe just rename the current blasting powder to serpentine and add proper late-game gunpowder, not unlike the coarse/fine distinction that @LadyWYT has suggested. The most important improvements after the introduction of black powder in the 17th century to mining with explosives were centered on the blast holes and rock drilling, while the explosive itself remained practically the same at that point. Any more categorical improvements only came about in the 19th century with improved fuses, nitroglycerine and dynamite, and I would consider that to be too modern for the game (even though we already have some 19th-century technology in the game for some reason). For several late-game ores we effectively already have this. Doing it at least for iron as well would be reasonable, but I would be careful to avoid forcing the player to use mechanical power too early. Asphyxiation due to methane gas as well as exploding your entire self with it or with coal dust seem to be significantly greater concerns in coal mining than directly setting the coal on fire. I do agree, though, that blasting valuable ores may be a good thing to disincentivize - the entire concept of an ore-blasting bomb can be easily argued to be very odd in that destroying or contaminating the ore is most often undesirable. As much as I can understand the gameplay motivation, I personally get thrown for a loop whenever unrealistic improvements to unrealistic mechanics are discussed, because my preferred course of action would be to make them more realistic while keeping them interesting and engaging as well as addressing as many issues as possible. For mining, this is a pretty big challenge, as the system is in certain ways completely unrealistic at a very fundamental level and strongly tied to a number of world parameters and other mechanics. I would strongly consider to make explosives (and possibly also fire-setting, for the early game) the dedicated tool for mining in igneous or otherwise hard rock, especially that which has no fractures which could be exploited. But as you can probably tell, this has a huge number of implications and may require a large revision of many parts of the system for satisfactory implementation.

A number of ruins can have it, though the chance is low - buried slightly below surface ruins, in underground structures, in procedural dungeons, in some story locations. I think procedural dungeons are your best bet, underground ruins second.

Realistically, it is generally preferable for cellars to be relatively small and square-ish, as that reportedly allows to maintain more stable moisture and maximizes the available space relative to the surface area for thermal exchange. I do tend to agree, naturally, that having strict cutoff points and a separate long-cellar case like this can be a bit odd regardless. If you do want a lot of space in your cellar, my recommendation currently tends to be to just create multiple cellars right next to each other. They can have a shared wall and doors in-between, and you can even keep the doors open with no negative effects. Doors do technically reduce cellar effectiveness whether open or not, but the difference tends to be minimal. There is the Configurable Room Size mod which allows you to configure room sizes, though it reportedly has soft incompatibilities with some other mods. There is also a mod which is supposed to allow larger cellars (BiggerCellarsRebuilt), but it is bugged in a hilariously obvious way and the author seems to be completely clueless about what the code in their own mod does.

Given that 126 < 150, 9x7x2 should count as a cellar just fine. The default maximum size is 7, but there is no explicit volume limit. The maximum volume is only a necessary consequence of maximum dimensions - as long as the cellar fits within the default 7x7x7 dimensions, its volume naturally cannot exceed 7 * 7 * 7 = 343. If any side exceeds 7, the room can still classify as a cellar if: the longest side doesn't exceed 9, the other two sides don't exceed 7, the total volume doesn't exceed 150. If you ask me, the current cellar size limits are a bit odd (it's a pretty common suggestion to make them purely volume-based, as that has no performance concerns as long as default room size limits apply), but the alternative limit is useful in that it does allow creating longer corridor-like cellars like 9x3x5 - there's usually no need for more than 150 volume if making a long cellar, so I think it ends up working out fine.

Don't expect that ignoring well-established genre definitions will contribute positively to what you're arguing for. Base defense? Maybe? That still doesn't describe "nearly every single building game"... whatever "building game" is supposed to mean. We already have a feature similar to Wurm's Settlements in the form of land claims, utilized extensively on servers. Not unlike in Wurm, their primary purpose is multiplayer management and utility. Adding an option to have claims block spawns certainly wouldn't be unreasonable, but I feel like a large part of this community would dislike how gamified it is. And you'd also need some way to create those claims naturally in survival, preferably. The primary method for blocking spawns which is already in the game is light. Alternatives for blocking spawns or keeping monsters away have been discussed, including fire and various ideas for changes to temporal stability, rifts and related systems. Given that a lot of people including myself have historically discussed at least the second and third of your suggestions as presented here fairly extensively, with no single dominant opinion on either that I could pick out, and with your personal participation in some of these discussions no less, I find this framing somewhat hilarious. The closest thing to a consensus that I'm aware of is that: Adding an option to specifically disable monsters would be quite fine, alongside an option for making animals passive while retaining hostile monsters - there are a couple design considerations here and improving the base game could be better than just waving issues away with an option, but ultimately it's just an option. Saraty and Tyron themselves have said that temporal storms are due for improvements, mainly to give players to go out into the storms instead of just hiding. You might also recall this from when I told you directly that Saraty and Tyron themselves have said that temporal storms are due for improvements. Maybe that's just because I know what I'm doing, but I find polar bears quite trivial to kill in direct melee combat, without even sprinting - you just need to be mindful to keep moving away from it nearly at all times, and it will be just incapable of attacking properly. This may or may not be a consequence of the changes made in 1.22.