MKMoose

Often the most difficult part is not to actually create a system, but to make sure that the system makes sense in a broader context of the game, not just in isolation. Can't say I get that down consistently, and I do agree that some components of this suggestion could be a bit much. That's a very valid concern, and the problem I've run into is that any attempt to make the maintenance required for different crops much more varied will practically inevitably end up increasing the average level of reqiured maintenance as well, simply because everything that we have in the game is currently clustered quite tightly on the set-and-forget side and can't really be made less maintenance-heavy when there's no maintenance in the first place. I do agree that having to babysit crops wouldn't feel great, and I think that it would just have to be appropriately balanced. The basic rule is that any issues should progress at most about as often as you'd be expected to check up on the plants if you were unaware of the potential problem. Grains and similar crops wouldn't significantly change according to what I've suggested, with just one sowing and tilling, then one harvesting and tilling per year (and possibly one extra tilling to get rid of weeds at the end of the fallow period), and little to no work besides that - more effort per harvest than in the current balance, but a single harvest could also be larger to counterbalance it. Pruning bushes and trees, if added, should probably be done just once per year. For vegetables and herbs, I would expect likely about one weed growth stage per month (stacking up to ~4 stages) at most - but keep in mind that this is for continuously harvested plants, which you might want to visit every other day either way to put fresh vegetables on the plate. For plants which don't outcompete weeds but are harvested less frequently, weed growth could be even several times slower. And for crop fields where weeds don't grow at all unless the field is fallow, you'd just till the field to incorporate those weeds into the soil which would give an extra boost to nutrients. The more nebulous factors are nutrient levels and moisture, primarily for vegetables and bushes (and optionally pH for specific plants), which are a bit more difficult to estimate but I think it wouldn't impose too much maintenance, if any at all. Moisture should probably mostly focus on initial preparation to have a irrigation or drainage setup that matches the climate, and have little impact unless in dry or extremely wet areas. Even then, it would reduce yield rather than kill, so obfuscating the theoretical maximum possible value and current debuff to allow players to shift their mindset away from pure optimization could help a lot. Nutrient levels should be mostly a matter of maximizing yields (and maybe resistance to disease, only relevant in the low ranges like ~0-30%), and they generally wouldn't be something that you have to keep an eye on more often than one or two times per year, maybe three times for specific, extremely demanding crops (and no fertilizer at all would be necessary for a large portion of crops, naturally, as long as fields are left fallow regularly). Animal husbandry would be a bit more effort-intensive with increased fodder consumption and the added effort in collecting manure, though if I recall correctly you've also said in the past as well that something like this would be a pretty good change. I got that part of the idea from you initially, so it's the one thing I was certain you would like. The reason for the addition of specific crops much more vulnerable to disease or pests is separate from that variety driver. The primary purposes of it are (1) to make crop disease actually relevant in regular gameplay, not just when playing "incorrectly", and (2) to give players an optional risk that they could engage in. Plant a better crop, say with 50% higher yield per successful harvest or perhaps some other benefits, but at a 20% risk that it all goes to waste - it's still 20% higher yield on average, providing an avenue for optimization as well as added depth and variety in crop selection, but it's not something that you'd want to try in the early game when food security is a winter away. And ideally, if that is introduced, then there should be some method of reducing those risks. It's ultimately not a necessary feature, though, and punishing repeated planting of the same crops is indeed the more important part. Manure certainly shouldn't be special enough to outright replace other fertilizers, and the reason for placing manure on the pedestal is that it would tie multiple systems together quite naturally. Vegetables and fruits need manure for good yields, which drives the player to invest in livestock. Animals consume food, which drives the player to create meadows. If external sources of fertilizer play the primary role, you lose the first link in that chain, so animals and meadows would be largely disconnected from the rest of the system. Granted, just the fact that animal husbandry provides a lot of other products can make manure useful just as a byproduct of something more valuable. There's quite a number of arguments that I could make in favor of making manure either more or less important, and I'm not entirely sure which way to go, which is a case where I tend to lean towards realism and historical accuracy, which in this case both strongly support manure being a highly valuable resource central to any farm where it is available.

Motivation Farming in Vintage Story is currently a rather old and simple system, certainly functional, but arguably underdeveloped. There is a number of things which can be considered to be problems from a design perspective: almost all land use is nearly set-and-forget - this is expected for some plants, but it can get samey when that's all there is, there is little meaningful difference between many food sources - grains and vegetables are both produced in the exact same way through farming, berry bushes and fruit trees provide the same nutrition, and are cultivated in a very similar way, animal fodder and Seraph food are almost all the same items, many components of the system like moisture, fertilizer and crop rotation don't tend to play a meaningful role in practical gameplay, at least for most playstyles (including arguably the most optimal ones which many people will naturally gravitate towards), different plants are very inconsistent between each other - nutrients work completely differently for crops and bushes and are irrelevant for trees, fertilizer serves a completely different purpose for crops and bushes, water is only relevant for crops but nothing else, soil preparation is necessary for farming but irrelevant for everything else, growth systems are implemented differently for all plants that can be cultivated, replanting methods are distinct between everything, the bush trait system is completely distinct from everything else (frankly, I really hope that when herbs are implemented, it's not gonna just be new mechanics again). As I've been reading through some historical works like De Re Rustica and Liber Ruralium Commodorum, I've been noticing just how much interesting and realistic depth could be added to agriculture. These historical texts as well as some other sources are what I'm taking most of my inspiration for this suggestion from (for a quick reference, relatively high-level summary on some of these topics can be found in something like Wikipedia's Agriculture in the Middle Ages article, as well as the History section from the Kitchen garden article). I'm focusing primarily on European agriculture, but similar patterns can be found in almost all regions of the world. Goal Introduce meaningful differences to the variety of cultivated plants, in the method, scale and intensity of cultivation - though risks and maintenance have to be added carefully and only where it really matters, while most food sources should still remain mostly maintenance-free and multiplayer-safe. Add more depth and complexity to the overall farming system without making it unintuitive or tedious. Focus on historically accurate methods of land use. Context The medieval agricultural system has naturally evolved to produce a number of key land types, where various plants were cultivated at different scale and intensity: Gardens - small-scale plots located near houses, used primarily for growing vegetables, as well as herbs and fruiting shrubs (primarily the smaller ones, like strawberries or raspberries). They have very varied plant species, and they were themselves also zoned into segments with different plants. They were characterized by relatively high input (added organic matter, including fertilizer), continuous maintenance (tilling, weeding, pruning, watering, replanting, propagating). Their purpose was maintaining a steady supply of high-value food and medicinal plants, but they naturally provided little to no bulk foods. The plants which were grown in these gardens were selected as a natural consequence of their higher sensitivity to environmental conditions, soil quality, nutrient levels and moisture, as well as often relatively poor resistance to weeds and diseases, all making them unreliable for large-scale cultivation. Small scale and stronger reaction to fertilizer made gardens them a more valuable avenue of utilizing the limited manure, since it provided much better return when concentrated in a small, high-value plot than when spread out over large fields. As an extra note: in richer households, the decorative purpose of gardens was very important, even overtaking the practical uses in some cases, and it would be cool to have a good selection of ornamental plants (though with little to no maintenance, if their purpose is purely decorative). Orchards - larger-scale areas characterized, naturally, by fruit trees, as well as nuts, certain shrubs (primarily the larger ones, like currants or gooseberries), and grapes (with some caveats). Established orchards are very stable and can produce reliable yields over many years. They can receive maintenance and organic matter input concentrated on the trees, but it's less than gardens, and making this difference a bit more extreme could be valuable for gameplay. It can be viable to plant them on lower fertility soil due to trees' root systems being much deeper than smaller plants. Fields - large plots of farmland, used primarily for bulk grains (wheat, spelt, rye, oat, barley, etc.), as well as legumes and certain vegetables (peas, beans, potato, turnip) and in certain regions industrial crops like flax and hemp. The main requirement for a crop to be grown at this large scale is that it has to be low-maintenance and low-risk, which makes this the most set-and-forget area with concentrated seasonal labor (plowing, sowing, harvesting). Using fertilizer on massive fields wasn't generally practical, so crop rotation and fallowing were the primary means that allowed the land to recover. Pastures - mostly covered in grasses with interspersed legumes and forbs, used for grazing to feed animals during the warmer months. Meadows - similar to pastures in that they are primarily used to grow grasses, legumes (especially clover) and forbs to an extent, but different in that they're not grazed continuously - their primary purpose is producing hay to feed animals during the winter. Naturally, the boundaries between those types of plots are somewhat fluid: orchards, with all their space under the trees, were often also used as pastures, meadows, or for growing vegetables, some plants like potatoes, legumes (e.g. clovers, peas, beans) and root crops (e.g. turnips and beets) share certain traits of both vegetables and bulk grains, making them viable to cultivate both at higher intensity in small gardens and at lower intensity in large fields, and they also reduce some aspects of reliance on meadows for fodder, there are some fairly distinct, nonstandard systems, like grape vineyards which are similar to orchards but need more intensive pruning and training, or rice paddies where water is an especially important constraint and larger fields may require more maintenance, different climates will naturally influence the dominant crops and the farming methods, although the general pattern tends to remain similar. What allows this to take proper shape is manure - the single most important fertilizer. It was highly valuable for improving crop yields, but constrained by limited supply. Where manure was limited, secondary sources of fertilizer and other methods of renewing weary soil gained value, primarily natural nutrient cycling with plant debris, compost and nitrogen-fixing legumes, but manure was always in high demand. Since animals need to eat to produce manure, this creates a natural chain of connected systems - pasture and meadows sustain animals throughout the year to achieve a steady supply of manure, which is used to maintain gardens (frequently for medicinal and culinary purposes) and to a lesser extent orchards (for larger quantities of fruit and nuts). With fields being the primary source of satiating foods, this requires careful balance between all types of plots and offers quite a lot of potential for gameplay depth in the overarching system and options for meaningful distinctions between various plants. Gameplay changes Historical reality is one thing, and in-game implementation another. While there's a million changes that could be made, here's a loose selection that I would propose: Greater dependence on environment and soil => overhaul the soil nutrition system, in a way that would encompass all cultivated plants in an intuitive way, and vary between plants more significantly: different plants should be planted in different areas due to varied requirements beyond just temperature, and factors like the amount of rain or the type of soil may make certain plants suboptimal or impossible to grow in some areas, both as a result of deficiency and excess of various parameters including moisture (soil could then be less about fertility which can be amended with fertilizer, and more about soil types which are more or less suitable for different plants), soil types may primarily involve sandy and clay-rich soils, reacting differently to moisture and fertilizer, and potentially even with different pH levels assigned to them, maybe modified in some ways, relying entirely on rain should be more viable (in the appropriate conditions), and it should also be relatively safe without risk of waterlogging, unless it's quite extreme rainfall in warm climates, irrigation, as well as potentially drainage and raised garden beds, could be implemented to allow more precise control over moisture levels, especially near water bodies and rivers which would normally easily cause waterlogging, as a general rule, fertilizer should primarily serve to greatly boost yields from crops (with bulk crops generally having much lower return per portion of fertilizer, and vegetables having the highest return) and allow to improve the soil nutrient levels to make it more suitable for demanding plants, partially circumventing the climate and soil restrictions instead of just accelerating growth. Require regular maintenance for certain plants => implement weeds and potentially pests, which would compete with garden crops and herbs (but pose little to no threat to bulk crops and larger plants). They would grow in the same block as the crop or as part of the farmland block and reduce yield of the main crop over a long time, until eventually overtaking it entirely unless removed. This could also allow collecting farmland blocks once they are overgrown with weeds, though there are some other easy solutions to this. Implement a seasonal labor cycle for bulk crops => revise growth to be properly seasonal and add tillage of harvest residue, so that maintaining a field would primarily involve two stages: sowing and tilling (autumn for winter crops, spring for spring crops) - tilling serves to remove weeds, improve soil quality and increase the survival chance of planted crops (and also gives a real purpose to the hoe), harvesting and tilling (summer for winter crops, late summer for spring crops) - harvesting the crop, incorporating the harvest residue back into the soil, and leaving the field fallow to recover nutrients, additionally, fallow fields could be tilled up to several times during the season, as well as weeded, grazed and manured, but this isn't really necessary to implement in-game and could in certain cases be excessive. Add a risk factor to some crops => implement crop diseases or pests, which would normally pose little risk except when planting the same crops in the same area multiple times consecutively, and pose much greater risks to certain higher-yield crop varieties, where low reliability due to vulnerability to disease would be an important balancing factor. Wild animals should also have more interest in some of the garden crops, and generally less interest in grains, encouraging the player to fence off their garden but not necessarily entire fields. Implement meadows => see the dedicated post for meadows. Constrain the system with fertilizer availability => reduce access to fertilizer (potentially remove bone meal), implement manure, increase livestock maintenance cost but increase continuous products. I believe that the best way to implement manure is through something akin to straw bedding, which would get dirty over time near domesticated animals, to keep the system more intentional, controllable and tidy. Note: maintenance requirement is borderline necessary for fertilizer to be relevant, because if there is no driver for space efficiency, then fertilizer requirement can be circumvented entirely by just planting more. Practical plant categories Looking at it from the angle of "and what am I gonna actually do with this in the game?" (purely from a gameplay perspective and taking a few small liberties relative to what would be most realistic), this is roughly what would be most relevant to the player: Bulk grains and industrial crops - simple staple: low yield per unit of area, but good yield per time investment, safe and reliable with practically no need for maintenance, can be planted in low or high fertility soils without much difference, with low benefit from fertilizer, no need for watering in areas with half-decent rainfall or near water bodies with some irrigation channels, good tolerance to temperature and moisture variations. Clover, peas, beans, potatoes, turnips, beets - fodder and special crops: also lower yield per unit of area and good yield per time investment, harvest times are less constrained by time of year and may in some cases be more frequent than once per year, can be planted instead of leaving fields fallow in certain cases to maximize yields, more risky, may require some maintenance, more benefit from higher fertility soils and from fertilizer, additional complications over simple bulk grains, but also additional benefits - legumes improve soil by fixing nitrogen, root crops make very good fodder. Vegetables - high yield, high effort: very high yield per unit of area (as much as 3-5x the yield of bulk grains, per unit of area per year), characterized by more continuous harvests, not periodic or fully seasonal like other plants, high maintenance requirement to prevent fast decline, mainly due to weeds and potentially pests, the greatest benefits among all plants received from fertilizer and planting in fertile soil (easily 100-200% higher yields when fertilized sufficiently), more sensitive to temperature, moisture, and nutrient level changes (temperature sensitivity would encourage using greenhouses, which should ideally actually stabilize the temperature and not just increase it). Herbs and spices - medicinal and special uses: cultivation similar to vegetables, although maintenance and fertilizer requirement can be lower (they're generally needed in low quantity, so there's an argument for making them especially expensive and valuable, but it could also be easily overblown - it may be better for the most part to just have relatively easy benefits over challenges which nobody will bother to repeat after the first world). Fruiting shrubs - higher-maintenance, versatile fruit: high yield per unit of area when maintained well, and high benefits from fertilizer, requires more attention in the form of pruning and moisture control which tends to be less important if present at all for other plants, and may include some of the only plants (especially blueberries) which get damaged by an excess of fertilizer, not overtaken by weeds like vegetables and herbs, the primary early-game challenge lies in soil preparation, as they require very specific conditions to reliably take root (may require forest soil and/or mulch in some ways), but other than that they can be set up much faster than fruit trees, they can be planted in larger quantities, but, when maintained less intensively, their yields will be no better than wild bushes, and then may potentially die off due to diseases or pests if planted in less suitable soil, many berries are more nutrient-dense than other fruit, and they may also have medicinal uses or other niche properties (e.g. poison). Fruit and nut trees - long-term stability: low yield per unit of area (but naturally can be mixed with meadows or gardens), soil preparation and maintenance requirement to establish a cutting and during initial growth, little to no maintenance and risk once the tree grows up enough, good return from fertilizer, though lower than berries, compared to berries, they require much less long-term maintenance, but take a long time to initially set up and have little to no use outside of food supply - even late into the game when trees can provide plenty of fruit nutrition, maintaining a few berry bushes would remain valuable due to their special uses. Meadows (grass, legumes, forbs) - fodder and aesthetics: absolutely zero maintenance requirement, so they can be easily created at massive scale for aesthetic purposes, provides hay and/or fodder, depending on how it's implemented, which is practically the single best source of animal feed (could be second after certain root crops like turnips, but those require nonzero maintenance and are less reliable). Note on the area taken up by each type of land: most medieval households with some 5 people and one or two cows would need some 10 ha or more of combined land area on top of a shared pasture (the practical reality was still less in many areas), of which the majority would be fields, a smaller part would be meadows, and a very small part (less than 1% in many cases) would be a garden and orchard, so the majority of nutrition would still typically come from grains. Naturally, there were exceptions or nonstandard systems (e.g. olive groves or vineyards may shift the balance a lot), and there were people who didn't own any fields and maybe only owned a small garden (especially those who had other jobs). This is obviously way too much to require in-game from 5 players (10 ha is equivalent to 100 000 blocks, or a 100x1000 area), but the ratio between different categories of land is what's more important here. As a general rule: very small garden, similar or slightly larger orchard, an order of magnitude larger meadows, and even larger fields. Adjusting them a bit for the game would be absolutely acceptable. Closing thought Of course, implementing something like this would be a massive undertaking, likely spanning over multiple updates, and even a small part of what I've described here could make for a much more complex and involved system than what we currently have. There's also no way that I could describe all the changes in detail and account for every possible complication in an amount of text that remains remotely digestible. Any given suggestion could have a variety of details added, adjusted or removed depending on the preference of the next person, so I prefer to avoid an excess of detail and focus more on the general direction. I would be quite interested to discuss it further either way. At least one question will inevitably focus on crop maintenance, on which I have two notes: the required maintenance and effects of proper maintenance or lack thereof can be adjusted a lot in many directions, and different plants can have completely different maintenance requirements, some requiring almost none and some requiring regular attention - that's what meaningful variety implies. It's not like all farming would suddenly require much more maintenance, because implementing realistic features does not necessitate scaling and balancing them in a perfectly realistic way.

And this "y'all" is... who? One person under this topic saying that they want one specific part of the rework to be reverted? A reference to older requests to roll back soil degradation and the medium fertility requirement, which have been already granted by the devs? Porting over the vanilla changes would require a lot of added work, because the Wildcraft bushes are fairly large rework as well, if not larger. They would basically need to reimplement the new vanilla mechanics in their own code and assets, as well as potentially rework many of their textures as well if they were to match current vanilla mechanics exactly. It's an ungrateful thing to revert, because plainly reverting it also loses out on a whole number of good changes. Just setting nutrient uptake to 0 is a very easy option, but that's really inelegant. Ignoring the berry bushes is an even easier option.

Given that mushroom farming has been chilling on the roadmap for a while, I'd imagine that some more attention may be given to mushrooms once obtaining them can be less about "find them randomly in the wild" and more about "target a specific species of mushroom and grow it deliberately". I'm quite interested in what they might do for mushroom farming, since it can in some cases be the epitome of "tricky to set up, but easy to maintain". Very good idea, and I would just note that it would be best not to go too overboard with satiety variation, because having a predictable baseline "mushrooms give 80" is very convenient and simplifies a lot. The properties of a single mushroom can also be balanced by their availability, both in the wild and in farming. I'd personally rather see just a few protein-only species, not mixed nutrition, because if mix here, then why not mix everywhere? Unless maybe as part of a larger nutrition rework, which could separate nutrition categories into something like energy type (e.g. protein, fat, sugar) and culinary category or micronutrient group (the current categories except protein). Not that it's necessarily a bad idea to mix things, but I think keeping the groups separate is an important component which contributes to VS nutrition being quite uniquely effective at encouraging varied diets while remaining simple and intuitive. That said, I do think that it could be beneficial in the long term to have some way of differentiating foods within a single category to make mushrooms more distinct from vegetables, for example: adjusting the satiety to nutrition ratio for some items (or just removing it entirely, like for bamboo shoots) - bulk foods like grains could have relatively low nutrition but high satiety, whereas nutrient-rich items like most fruit and vegetables could have higher nutrition but lower satiety, some manner of micronutrients, as a single extra nutrition bar, obtained from some specific foods from various primary categories, could allow to directly add a special use to some foods which otherwise can be overshadowed by different options - meat could have more micronutrients than other sources of protein, mushrooms could have little to no regular nutrients, but more micronutrients than other foods (not perfectly realistic, but serves as a fine gameplay incentive), alternatively, a larger rework with something like fat and sugar (nutrition-like bars, applying appropriate minor buffs, consumed at variable rate depending on some factors, forming a distinct trio with protein) could help with adding much more meaningful distinctions to foods, as well as help introduce differences between food requirements in different climates. As much as I can agree with this and like the suggestion, I can't help but feel like there's a lot of other changes which would help this even more (if at more dev time), including: partially or fully hiding the information on how much health poisonous mushrooms reduce, allowing to cook the poison out where realistic, concentrating some mushroom foraging spots to smaller but denser areas to encourage the player to return to them, and implementing more proper seasonal growth. Then, some or most mushrooms would be less a free early-game food source whenever moving through a forest, and more a reward for a diligent gatherer who learns about which mushrooms are edible, seeks out viable growing locations, records valuable mushroom spots, and returns to them when they are in season - a pretty unique design direction compared to sources of food like farming or animal husbandry, which could be more focused on regular upkeep and don't have much space to add knowledge-based progression.

That's a good one, classified as a pretty unique ridge-and-swale system, but it's the exact same problem again - too high vertical variation and too steep slopes. The Great Lakes region has a lot of ridges that can occasionally go up to some 10 m in height, but the spacing between them tends to be in the hundreds of meters, producing slopes which don't generally tend to exceed ~10% (1 m rise over 10 m run), except maybe right at the edge of water. In other regions like string fens, while the spacing between ridges is smaller, their height is also very low, again producing < 10% slopes, and these shallow slopes are necessary for slow water runoff. I don't know if maybe I'm just not explaining what I'm saying sufficiently again, but I feel like I've said almost the same thing in my first post in this thread that you just said here. I completely agree with this. My point about small-scale vertical variation focuses mainly on two factors: realism - slopes steeper than ~30-35%, equivalent to 1 m rise over ~3 m run, are the practical limit in most contexts where soil is the surface material, and many areas tend to fall under certain characteristic slopes, mainly due to angle of repose and erosion processes (exceptions include features like riverbanks or cliffs, and some regions like arid badlands), traversability - I think it's annoying and unsatisfying to constantly go up and down steep bumps and ridges, and, if I recall correctly, that has been one of the most common complaints about terrain - sure, endless flatlands would be pretty boring, but equally it's entirely possible to go overboard in the other direction, and I think many landforms including almost all mountains do go too far. I could maybe try to whip up some examples with World Edit or in a terrain generator when I have the time.

Near 100% peat coverage is a matter of observation more than definition, and applies to raised, valley and blanket bogs roughly equally. The layer just on the surface is acrotelm, a transitional peat layer which could be considered somewhat separate from peat, but it is certainly not regular soil. A typical bog is a mosaic of drier hummocks usually at most ~1 m above water level, and wetter hollows. Peat is found both under the water, and above water in the hummocks, because the peat is the bog. This is just a natural consequence of how the bog forms, because once the system is ombrotrophic (receives water nutrients from precipitation only, or as close to it as possible, which is the primary factor that tends to differentiate bogs from fens), it means that the system is hydrologically disconnected from the soil, so practically the entire surface has to be peat or peat-forming material. As far as I can tell, the only cases where the peat coverage is more patchy will occur near the edges of bogs (especially blanket bogs), where it generally transitions through the lagg, into fens and regular upland soil. Regardless, I think that the least that we should be able to agree on is that any significant peat in the first place would be ideal for that in-game landscape to actually be reasonably considered a bog. The current way that peat generates in completely random deposits is functional enough for gameplay, but has practically nothing realistic about it. That said, it's classified as a "bumpy marsh" in-game, as far as I can tell, which just oozes with realism, though at least in terms of soil and vegetation is a bit more agreeable than a bog. But the matter of peat aside, my primary issue with world generation itself has always been excessive small-scale vertical terrain variation, which in the case of that landform doesn't match neither a bog nor a marsh.

You can also skip straight to copper or bronze from nothing by buying tools from traders or finding them in ruins, and you can produce steel while completely ignoring pickaxe tier requirements if you get sulfur for bombs (or even without ever using a pickaxe if you buy sulfur from traders), but none of these are game-breaking, because theoretical possibility isn't relevant to natural and practical progression. Not everything has to revolve around the core technological succession chain, and knives are still required for harvesting animals, collecting cattails, scraping leather, and some crafting recipes. It doesn't really matter that the player can break a preconceived mandatory progression chain while handicapping themselves by refusing to craft what is arguably the most basic tool in the game.

The classic "rub two sticks together" bit is exactly what we already have in the game in the form of the firestarter. Gating the firepit behind tools is only a consequence of the Seraph being incapable of setting up the firepit without using firewood. What's better, they're perfectly capable of removing that firewood without actually burning any of it right after building the firepit. And to top it off, whether tools came before or after fire is only relevant to Homo Sapiens. Matter of playstyle. I tend to predominantly use sticks for fuel with zero issues, because most of my firewood goes straight into the charcoal pit and the clay oven. Adding more ways to obtain sticks in bulk besides breaking branches off of trees also seems like a perfectly fine method to alleviate any early association issues that allowing to use sticks for the firepit might cause.

While I don't know about that specific place, bogs typically have very close to 100% peat coverage. Both under and above the water.

And for reference: The water distribution is actually kind of close, but I don't see how a supposed bog can be reasonably considered a bog if it doesn't have peat and moss, arguably the single most important defining characteristic of bogs, despite peat being already in the game. Even disregarding moss, vegetation doesn't match a bog at all. The local vertical terrain variation is way too high for a bog as well. I've seen places in the game that were at least flat, which made them resemble swamps or marches pretty well, but this ain't a bog. Even if we disregard soil and vegetation, then the point about overblown vertical variation remains. I've looked into it a bit more. Feel free to have a look at Mima mounds and patterned ground. Both are kind of right, but not really, for similar reasons - incorrect small-scale vertical terrain variation and mismatched vegetation, among others.

As of now that is correct. You have to keep two main factors in mind: different areas have different fish, and different fish have different climate requirements, so if you're unlucky, an area might have no fish at all, which can't be tested without commands until you actually try fishing - your chances are high that it will work, but if it doesn't, then you can just try again in a different spot (at minimum ~100 blocks apart, ideally more like ~300+ to have higher chances for meaningful change in fish distribution), the body of water should ideally be at least 1200 blocks in volume to ensure that the fish bite faster and that there's more adult fish. Note: I didn't end up finding when checking it earlier whether the altitude matters for fishing, so I can't say anything on that component specifically.

That's intended. There were problems with handling liquid fat due to the pot's shortcomings, so that behavior was removed for now.

Yeah, I've just tested it and it turns out upgraded regions don't have animal maps. One way that I know you can fix this is by using /wgen regen 0 while standing 32+ blocks away from anything that you don't want deleted, which will regenerate the chunk you're in, as well as the map region. Remember to backup the world if you want to be safe. Unfortunately, you will have to do it in each region (512x512 area) separately when you want to fish there. There is a related bug report on GitHub, where I've chimed in already.

Having looked through the code for the fish recently, I do think it should work with no issues when updating to newer versions. If it doesn't, that would be a bug. Keep in mind that while the fishing pole allows to obtain fish from even where no fish are actually visible (most of the time), seeing the fish spawn in bodies of water as entities seems to be a luxury in 1.22.

The amusing quirk of the fish fillet is that it gives: raw, 50 satiety, cooked, 100 satiety, in meals, 375 satiety. Their value in meals skyrockets so high that I''ve been questioning whether that's even intentional, since most food items only give 1.5x satiety in meals compared to the best alternative, not 3.75x. Until you have a cooking pot, you can cook the fish whole on the fire and might even come out slightly net positive over fillets. But, once you have a cooking pot, it is absolutely crucial to use all of your fish as fillets in meals, if you care at all about maximizing the satiety you obtain from them.

I think this screenshot is a good example of where a terrain feature in the game just doesn't make any sense. It's too large and too repetitive, and doesn't even have a good real-life analogue. I genuinely don't know what this is supposed to represent, and the closest I can think of is either a marsh or prairie potholes, but it's just not even close to anything, mainly due to excessive vertical terrain variation and way too small scale. I would take a completely flat grassland with a lake in the middle over whatever this is, and it would at least be easier to traverse. My thought is to an extent the opposite - many areas of the VS world feel too small to me. While I wouldn't want to necessarily call for plain realism here because improper application of it can easily end up unfun, the VS world is already really, really small-scale compared to the real world, while also missing many details from the real world which would arguably help it greatly, including more natural altitude variation and large-scale highlands and mountains. This could also alleviate some of your issues regarding navigation despite increasing the scale of some elements of the world, because instead of navigating based on distinct, smaller landmarks, you could still navigate along large landforms, even those that stretch across a dozen kilometers or more. Just as a quick example, "travel until you see a mountain range and continue through the montane plains while keeping a swamp to your right". While I don't think making any of these even close to to-scale is a good idea, I think there is a lot of real places to be inspired from, instead of making "realistic" devolve into "boring". I also don't want realistic scale, but I think everybody can agree that realistic features would naturally improve the game a lot. Of course, in the case of mountains, we probably wouldn't want any massive ranges like these Alps (on the left/top), but something more like these mountains in the Southern Carpathians (right/bottom) could make a lot more sense than anything we currently have in the game. Both images taken from Google Maps, about 50 km or so in height. The Southern Carpathian ones in that image are roughly 1400 m in height from the base at 600 m, so even scaling those down 20x to easily fit within the default height limit would leave you with a ~2 km long range - normally you won't get even close to that in-game, and you're more likely to find a massive potato, 250 m in diameter, in the middle of flatlands. Flat areas are a bit more difficult to improve, because a lot of them are inherently large, expansive and samey like this savanna in Tanzania (left/top), but I think there's still a lot we could do with some mosaics and other ways to break up the landscape like in this other savanna in Angola (middle) with mixed woodlands, grasslands, shrubbery and barren riverbanks in varied proportions, or these deserts of Saudi Arabia (right/bottom) eroded by wind and water. All three images about 10 km in height. Overall, I think there's a lot that could be improved about world generation while remaining "inspired by the natural processes of the real world", as the VS home page puts it, with logical regionality, large-scale features like drainage basins and tectonics, improved noise algorithms, climate condition and world parameter interaction, smoother layer transitions, smoother slopes, vegetation mosaics and paths, and a whole lot of stuff like that. World generation is a serious undertaking that a person could feasibly spend their life perfecting, so I wouldn't expect the devs to just keep working on it forever, but I think there's few things that would benefit the game more in the long term.

Head and heart are in most contexts not practical targets. It would be an arguably much better and more realistic gameplay incentive to only add a weakspot for lungs, because that is what hunters typically aim for. I do think that bows should be reworked as well. I don't think a damage threshold is a good idea here. Bleeding has two primary purposes: tracking, ensuring a kill through bleeding out. For the purpose of tracking, bleeding should apply on every single hit, but by itself be unlikely to kill the animal unless the initial hit leaves it only on a sliver of health. For the purpose of bleedout, hitting lungs or other key areas should apply a much stronger bleeding effect which could kill the animal within ~10 s or less on a good hit, and up to around a minute if not more for weaker hits. Even when two weapons both can kill the animal in one hit consistently, a better weapon would have the advantage of faster bleedout and thereby shorter tracking distance. I do generally like the suggestion here, but keep in mind that the contents of the Butchering mod are not likely to be directly implemented due to concerns around gore. If we get anything, it will almost certainly be a simpler and less gory system. I personally think that most mods and suggestions tend to overcomplicate it, as it would be pretty simple to add multistage harvesting, alongside animal carry and a butchering table, in a highly flexible way with very little added complexity over the current system. Feel free to take a look at this post of mine, among others, for both an explanation of the reasons to avoid gore, and more details of my take on how butchering could be implemented. Also, extra mention: snares for small game and pit traps for medium game could be great, especially as a easier alternative to hunting. A lot of these changes would require serious improvements to animal AI, though. While I find the balance of taking a couple days to process and lasting several days to be somewhat questionable, this is absolutely the key design idea that current hunting is missing. It just isn't involved and rewarding enough.

The most likely option is that you happened to be in a place where there are no fish, as fish follow fish distributions similar to ores, although they're binary and not based on density - either there is fish, or there is no fish. More specifically, there's 10 groups of fish, each with a shared animal map, I think randomly assigned to different species, so you'll find some different species in different spots. Worms should generally work as bait in any region, since juvenile fish bite worms. Then, once you fish out a juvenile of a larger species, then you can try meat for a chance at adults, or you can use small and tiny fish to specifically target larger adults. Stinkmeat and meat are generally the most universal type of bait, but they can be expensive, so it can be better to first check for fish with worms or stinkdough, and then target the larger ones (if present at all) with meat or with the small fish fished out in the process. That said, I could be wrong, but there's also a chance that juvenile fish don't currently spawn at all, based on what I'm seeing in the assets. If you do find any juvenile fish, I would be greatly interested. Here's the fishing guide text, for your convenience, since it's bugged in-game:

I think it can be said, though, that there is quite a lot of interest in improvements to beekeeping, as evidenced by the popularity of From Golden Combs if nothing else. And you could even say that the fact that FGC leads to some disagreements also works well with the fact that mods generally don't get integrated straight into the game, and instead the devs tend to work out their own implementation of similar functionality. It gives the devs a lot more interesting feedback to work with than just "this should be vanilla". Frankly, I think a lot of discussion on mods focuses too much on a sort of "is this suitable for vanilla" back-and-forth and not enough on "how can we make this more suitable for vanilla". What I would mention is that Langstroth hives are relatively modern designs which are multiple steps ahead of skeps, and FGC's clay hives are really weird and I can't seem to find anything similar in neither historical or modern sources. While going straight to the 19th century or fictional designs might not be a great idea, there are some interesting historical beehives which could at least function as an alternative to skeps, if not an upgrade, and the single best option for that lies in cylindrical clay hives. There's a lot of complexities which may or may not be realized in-game, but the short of it is (skipping some factors which aren't really relevant to gameplay): higher up-front cost, clay cylinders are reusable, more difficult harvesting, though I'm not sure if there's a good way to reflect that in-game, higher chance of colony survival after harvesting (though that depends heavily on specific type of beehive, harvesting method, and harvesting skill), which could significantly reduce the delay between harvests, clay is a poor insulator, which makes it inadequate in areas with too cold winters, which is why it was most popular in regions like North Africa, especially Egypt or Levant - entire colonies of bees can easily just die in cold temperatures in a poorly insulated hive, so this is pretty important (even if we don't want to kill colonies, further reducing their efficiency in cold weather relative to the penalty suffered by skeps would make a lot of sense), easily scalable through stacking on racks or just on top of each other. Quick mockup of how that could roughly look in practice: Or if we're looking for improvements, then a direct improvement over the skep is the addition of a cap or eke (FGC's clay hives seem to be inspired by this), which is basically a secondary removable container serving as an extension of the hive connected with the main skep through a small hole (cap is on the top, eke is on the bottom, though not both at the same time), which allows partial honey harvesting without destroying the hive. Similarly, the cylindrical clay hives could be split into two tiers, one simplistic with nothing but clay closed on both ends except a small entry hole (kind of a clay skep, for all practical purposes), and a more advanced clay beehive made with a slightly tapered cylinder, internal supports and a removable rear end cap for non-destructive harvesting. And even if we were to go for more modern wooden box hives, there were intermediate designs as early as a century before Langstroth hives which were already much better than skeps. There's also a lot of improvements which could be made to the harvesting mechanics (including the usage of smoke, which could be very important for cylindrical clay hives), the pollination, scouting and swarming mechanics, and a lot of other stuff, some of which FGC implements quite well.

Didn't miss anything. Linseed oil currently doesn't have any use.

You're gonna be amused when you find, if you haven't already, that fish provide 3.75x the satiety when in meals compared to when cooked. Borderline absurd compared to other foods which tend to provide 1.5x in meals, and while I don't know whether it's intentional, I think it's already been like this for a long time before 1.22. It does feel pretty odd to me as well. While there are some fishing methods that don't use hooks, they aren't nearly as universal and they tend to use something instead of a hook rather than just tie a piece of bait at the end of the string. Flint hooks are actually not much of a thing from what I can find, but other options include wood, bone and some plants with thorns. I'm not sure whether that wouldn't be too much upfront complexity for newer player, but I feel like it would be fine enough to just include the hook or some alternative in the fishing pole crafting recipe. If we're talking about the same thing, then you have to right-click first to get the rod back from the cast position (sticking out in front) to the default position (on the side). I also feel like there should be a way to put the bait on the rod without opening the inventory. By default I think you can get almost 1 fish per day per 8x8 area, on average. The effect seems to be binary as far as I can find, i.e. either fish bite normally, or an area is overfished, with no in-between. If that is correct, then you may be able to get potentially upwards of a hundred fish per week from a larger lake. It does feel to me that they've set a pretty nice foundation in place, but a lot of work is still needed to make it actually good. To avoid overcomplicating things, maybe just require to press RMB multiple times per fish, each time bringing the bobber with the fish a bit closer, where pressing too fast would cause you to lose the fish. Then actually pulling the fish out of water and having it hang on the pole in front, or something of the sort, instead of it just materializing in inventory. I don't think that making a pond impossible to replenish is a good idea, though, at least as long as there is no clear warning that you're approaching depletion.

A few creatures got changed, but the only significant speed tweaks I can find are: pig - slightly (~14%) higher seeking speed (when they chase the player, that is), slower movement speed when passive, fox - significantly faster when seeking (~33%) and fleeing (50%). There were also quite a few behavioral changes, especially to sheep, and also to pigs and raccoons. Additionally, bears have had their attack range reduced, which I think made it a bit easier to escape them.

I'm getting some issues there as well, though it seems to be less that they don't eat at all and more that they eat rarely and the number of portions that they've eaten displays inconsistently. My male goat also seems to have a similar problem, though the female goat is eating normally, it would seem. Probably a good candidate for a bug report. Seems to be a 1.21.2 change. Absolutely nothing was changed about the loose ores in 1.22. Nothing that I can find changed in game files and code at least.

One thing that I think people don't appreciate nearly enough is the word "detailed". Redram has said at least on three separate occasions (this one on Discord is the most recent) that they aren't going to be implementing detailed butchering and skinning, but it doesn't mean that more involved mechanics and gameplay are off the table as well. I've argued before that the existing system could be improved with very little time investment while adding nearly zero gore over the current visuals, while leaving components of the system easily modifiable to allow modders to easily add detailed visuals themselves: If I were to point to any mods that the vanilla game would benefit from greatly which haven't been mentioned already, first and foremost I would have to pick and choose from some world generation mods like Watersheds and some of the Floral Zones mods, and maybe even Terrain Slabs. As much as the current world generation has its charms, it produces often extremely repetitive landscapes with samey vegetation and easily noticeable noise octaves, and even putting realism aside I think it kind of just looks bad and boring in too many cases. There's also smaller mods, even something like Sun Gaze, though there's way too many to reasonably remember and list out. What I don't like is that many mods tend to hyperfocus on specific features and add minor details and variations that don't mesh well with existing vanilla features. It's often very difficult to keep the game feeling cohesive as a whole when using them. For example, take something like the the Adventurer's Walking Stick mod - it would be a cool thing to add to the base game, but do we really need 14 variants of a walking stick? Two, maybe three, would be absolutely sufficient to get the neat functionality in without creating a large imbalance between the level of detail and depth of different features. The same goes for the Butchering mod to some extent - the mechanic itself is neat, but I can't help but feel like we could do with less than 5 variants of a butchering hook, 3 variants of a butchering table, and 4 different butchering bags, not even counting all the new food items which would arguably also need some streamlining for vanilla integration. A lot of mods are created because they are cool, not because they have a specific gameplay goal to accomplish, and while that's not inherently wrong, it often leads to mods being simply infitting for vanilla integration without cutting a lot of their features back out.

Based on the code, it should be storyStructuresDistScaling. If it's not in serverconfig.json, then you'd need to add it to WorldConfiguration in that file: "WorldConfiguration": { "gameMode": "survival", "startingClimate": "temperate", ... "storyStructuresDistScaling": "0.5", ... } Keep in mind that this value can't be changed after the world has been created. The value is just a multiplier, e.g. 0.5 gives you 50% of the default distance, and the normally available options are in the range of 0.15 to 3.