MKMoose

Large gameplay benefits are not the primary purpose of endgame progression, and they generally shoudn't be. But even still, steel plate for example reduces your damage recieved from highest-tier threats by about 25% relative to iron armor (less against lower-tier monsters), and that's on top of a humongous durablity increase. I'd say that's plenty incentive to make steel. Ferrous tools and weapons have just been buffed with the addition of quenching, which allows to apply a small buff to all iron or steel weapons and tools practically for free or a larger buff with a bit more effort and risk. Armor hasn't been changed in this update so far and I would be interested to see heat treatment extended to it as well. Generally, I think it's one of the many systems which would benefit from an overhaul sooner or later, but it isn't too much of a priority as the current state of it is functional enough. People tend to use gambeson most of the time, and metal armor is usually reserved for high-risk situations like story locations and storms. And also, if you're "constantly being attacked", then consider caring more about durability, because your armor will be worn down quickly. At the same time, if you expect the game to suddenly get easy when you get iron armor, then you might want to adjust your expectations, because temporal storms are supposed to be by far the greatest threat in the game besides perhaps story locations or caving near the mantle. While better armor and gear will let you get away with more mistakes, you shouldn't expect not to die quickly when facing the most dangerous enemies in the game. If you intend to fight during storms, having a safe space to retreat to and some spare healing items is a must.

Sent me hunting through the code, but I think those are referred to as summer air particles, spawning in warm and rainy areas while it's not raining, wind speed is low and primarily in daylight. Got my hopes up there.

First quenching increases damage by 10%, which means that steel spears get 6.82 for free (not sure about rounding). Spear durability is already better than arrows, but ultimately doesn't matter much. Keep in mind you can do the same to a falx. It is a significant balance factor that I did admittedly kinda neglect, though it can only be done on ferrous metals, while spear balance discussions often focus on flint and early metals which is where spears will likely continue to see by far the most use. Only blades can be sharpened at the moment, that is swords and falxes, but I'd expect the mechanic to be more developed in the future, so I wouldn't want to say too much about it specifically. I'd argue it should be possible to quench and temper arrowheads, but if not then it will make them effectively a bit weaker, true.

Well, in pre.1 melee has barely changed for most targets, while ranged is only really notably worse for some rotbeasts and large animals. Once it turned out that they had also reduced the health of small animals, the changes haven't been too bad anymore. One potential issue now is that bronze offers an arguably excessively large effective damage boost over copper as it hits better breakpoints on five common targets that have a multiple of 5 HP. That said, here's a fun thing: they've doubled the spear's windup time in pre.2, so they are now slower than bows. I'd argue it's a good change in terms of design, but it's nonetheless a pretty large nerf. I don't doubt that spears' balance will be evaluated and further tweaked as needed before 1.22 hits stable, and I'm somewhat wondering if they're nerfing them further now to see how much is too much and whether there's actually a need to bring the damage back up. That's a pretty good way to look at it, and, coincidentally or not, it's even quite realistic with the caveat of range in which spears excel. In melee, spears are rather well-designed in that they have low damage and poor durability, which makes the falx outright better whenever range doesn't matter. Ranged combat is a bit more finnicky to balance in its current state, though. My personal thought is that spears should be capable of dealing ~8 damage, maybe even ~10 on the steel tier, but in exchange for being more difficult to throw effectively. In the current stable throwing is basically the default choice in many contexts (and is also made unreasonably good due to a double-hit issue that greatly increases damage), and while a ranged damage nerf has made melee more viable, it may also easily make throwing very unrewarding against anything that doesn't die in at most three hits due to the need to carry a large number of spears to achieve reasonable total damage before having to retrieve all of them. For related reasons (make throwing less universally good, even if it has high damage) spears should ideally also be more risky to throw at short range, potentially done through further penalties to drawing a ranged weapon while running. It would allow to further differentiate melee and throwing between each other and potentially make throwing into a high-risk high-reward play even more so than it is now. Increased windup time largely seems to achieve that, but I'll have to play with it more to see how it feels. For balance against bows, spears could be made more sluggish and heavy to make throwing them more optimal at close-to-mid-range (while keeping in mind that throwing shouldn't be preferable at point-blank), while bows could have increased projectile velocity to be preferable at longer ranges, especially for the bowtorn and for hunting more easily spooked animals like deer. All that said, these are general ideas and suggestions and not concrete recommendations, so I'll be especially interested to hear more opinions on the doubled windup time and on where spears should go from there.

Both issues should be fixed in 1.22.0-pre.2. You can update by running the installer for the new update from the 1.22 page.

They're in the changelog and implemented in the game, but not craftable at the moment due to a bug.

They switched up animation speed with movement speed. Now fixed in pre.2.

Just a small note: that quote of mine isn't fully accurate, because I initially neglected that the HP of some small animals was reduced (foxes and raccoons from 6 down to 5, hares from 5 to 3, chickens from 3 to 2.5). As a whole, breakpoints for most of the small animals are the same or very similar, and the changes overall have the most impact on fighting high-tier rotbeasts and large animals, especially bears, which can now take many more thrown spears. While this doesn't change my conclusions too much as I still think making spear throws powerful but less frequent should be the way to go, I would correct that quote to something more like this: While it's not tightly related to spear balancing, the reduction to small animals' health does also mean that spear melee damage and weapons other than spears have been buffed indirectly, though the change doesn't seem particularly significant to me. It mostly means that: bows with iron or better arrows, as well as meteoric iron and steel falxes, can now one-tap raccoons and foxes, a large number of weapons can now pretty easily one-tap hares (which spears could do with a single throw anyways, now they can also do it in melee starting from bronze).

It may be worth noting that mountains similar to this are already sometimes possible to find, though they don't end with rocky peaks that look this good. Some mountains should ideally be closer to your suggestion, but some should remain steeper, because both are realistic in their own ways. Realistically, the slope you're suggesting may still be steeper near the peaks, and the transition from soil and trees to rock should be much more patchy and gradual, and there should generally be more shrubs like dwarf mountain pine and similar. But I do think this would largely be a change for the better. Overall, I would enjoy some world generation changes aimed at mountains and highlands, though it's actually quite tricky to implement in the current system and I wouldn't expect any big changes until a larger overhaul, if such ever comes. A proper overhaul would also serve as a better cutoff point, instead of making people wonder whether they should update now or later if every update were to change world generation bit by bit.

I get being annoyed about RNG, but one iron bar will last you on average 90 shots. I could as well say that due to the RNG mechanic, one iron bar can last you forever, and focusing on that too much is just as pointless as focusing on the minimum. Granted, the average is still much less than one iron spear. First two only problem being additional resource costs (clay and what have u) sounds reasonable, and the more u tempt fate, the more chance to get shafted, that also sounds good. Hope devs will come with reasonable numbers for all that. Literally just reading the changelog will tell you more or less everything you need to know. If not that, then reading the handbook will. Or if even that's not enough, you can test it in creative. Here's a few details: tempering never shatters the work piece, quenching starts off at 0% shatter chance, then increases with each next quenching (so it's always risk-free and worthwhile to quench once), you can quench a piece as many times as you wish, and you can temper a piece at most as many times as you've quenched it (and ideally you generally probably should temper before each subsequent quenching after the first one, unless you're short on time or fuel, though in the current balance it seems like it barely makes a difference anyways unless you're going for durability and not power), both tempering and quenching only apply their effect once the temperature of the piece decreases to below 100 C (when the piece is considered cooled down and the character takes the item off the tongs into their hand), both tempering and quenching have a specific temperature range that the piece has to reach for the treatment to take effect, the piece saves its maximum temperature that it has reached since last being cooled down completely - if the maximum temperature that the piece has reached is not within the temperature range of either tempering or quenching, then no effect will be applied (I'm not sure if there's other ways to mess up, but whatever you do, you should be fine to just let it cool and try again), if you heat the piece up above the quenching temperature range, you have to cool it down completely and heat it back up (with not shatter chance, interestingly). What is bugged? Are you trying to use regular clay instead of fire clay? It currently doesn't use a different model or at least texture, but you can see it in the tooltip and it should work perfectly fine. The durability boost is twice as high and doesn't decrease with tempering (or at least shouldn't).

It doesn't even generate as of now, just so you know.

It's a null reference when the game tries to get the melting point of the contents of a crucible.Maybe the game doesn't check whether an item slot is empty before trying to access its contents, or tries to use the crucible's properites to determine the melting point of its contents, I can't be certain, but it doesn't seem to be a key change that would make it into the changelog. At least that's one of the crucible-related crashes, maybe there's more. Both this crash and a bunch of other issues (including a crash related to the water wheel) seem to be already resolved and coming in pre.2.

The logic behind this is that a wooden pan is made by woodcarving, hence the knife. There's good chance that woodworking or more specifically woodcarving will be a more developed mechanic at some point in the future, since it's listed on the roadmap. If you need the bucket for your farming needs, then keep in mind that you can set up farmland near natural water, or alternatively (though it can be a bit tedious) keep the crops watered with natural rain supplemented with a watering can. The advantage of the current design is that it creates a clear progression milestone and spaces out unlocking various items without throwing all of them at the same time at a beginner. Making boards craftable without a saw would effectively throw a wrench into the current progression system, because many of the important progression motivators like doors, buckets, chests, barrels and henboxes would be unlocked significantly earlier. Having one specific way to obtain boards also prevents new players from getting bogged down in a slow and inefficient early-game process when trying to craft larger quantities of boards instead of finding a clear and obvious goal to progress towards. I wouldn't expect this to ever get added to vanilla, but that said, I could see a way to craft specific items a bit earlier. It could either be done with more basic woodcarving and woodworking processes, or with alternative item variants and alternatives like clay amphorae or leaden vessels to allow more efficient liquid storage and transport before buckets and barrels.

That's fair. I've learned to pay a lot more attention while mining for silver and gold, which can be a bit difficult to first notice in quartz, and I actually got a good laugh out of noticing weird dots on granite and struggling to figure out for a moment that it was sphalerite. While I've personally never found almost any significant issues with it and would say that the current state is good for me (maybe besides this one specific case of sphalerite in granite), it's an understandable issue. It seems to mostly be caused by ore textures just being overlaid on top of rock textures, which is bound to be fairly difficult to make out when the rock and ore colors happen to be similar. It's sometimes difficult to make changes without making the textures unrealistc, but for sphalerite specifically I would be in favor of some texture adjustments to make the black dots more prominent and maybe add some weakly colored accents for further visual interest. The color of granite could also be changed (potentially to make it more realistic as well), but that would require reevaluation against all other ores as well and could mess up the visuals of some builds.

Something like Shift-RMB an axle while holding a wrench in the off-hand and desired block in the main hand. If it differs due to remapping or something, the tooltip should inform you how to do it.

As mentioned before me, it is referred to simply as borax everywhere, and it should be available under the same name in the handbook. A few extra tips on finding borax, some of which people tend to neglect or just aren't familiar with: it is only found in sedimentary rock, so it won't even show up in density readings if your top layer is igneous, it only generates near sea level or below, so you'll generally want to look in low-lying areas, you may be able to find loose borax chunks on the surface in those areas, identified by white intrusions in the rocks (you can see what they look like if you look up borax in the handbook); loose chunks indicate a deposit below them, and it may be preferable to first search on the surface once you find relatively high readings before putting time and resources into mining, the density readings for borax are somewhat out of whack, so you will never find any readings higher than "decent", and in this specific case a "poor" reading is generally enough to find plenty of borax. All surface deposits that can show up on prospecting readings except copper, cassiterite and salt beds are indicated by density readings, because they are spawned with the same mechanism as deeper deposits. If you find a surface deposit, then outside of obscenely rare edge cases and the mentioned exceptions, you will always find a reading at that location. You do you, but I'd argue that this mod greatly takes away from the uniqueness of each ore texture, because it uses the same arbitrary near-cubes for every single ore. The block textures try to be more varied and in some capacity respect how the ore forms in real life, and the mod kind of throws that out the window. Not that it's bad, but I really wish it was better.

Man, that's what I was thinking, honestly. Granted, many things on here are completely optional and have little to no gameplay benefit. They only really serve for additional variety, depth, immersion and endgame improvements (and the game is arguably better off for it): animal husbandry offers very little except feathers and milk; once you get chickens, goats or sheep you already have protein, so there is nearly zero benefit to hares and pigs (I'm hoping for rabbit pelts soon, at least), milk is just a bit of extra HP, while cheese is nearly useless in gameplay terms (although it's very satisfying to make), steel and meteoric iron don't actually unlock practically anything, they only really offer numerical upgrades at the moment, coke is only useful for cupronickel for Jonas tech (though there's a chance that something may change with the 1.22 forge changes), chromium, titanium, and lapis lazuli are currently mostly one-trick ponies with little use, and lapis lazuli can be purchased for dirt cheap, lantern lining is expensive, but it's also possible to just make another lantern, pulverizer isn't useful for much besides refractory bricks, hoppers and chutes are only really useful for automating the pulverizer as of now, maybe also the quern but it's more finnicky and expensive, beehive kiln only offers quick bulk ceramic firing and new ceramic colors, alcohol is near-useless besides for alcohol-soaked bandages, the sturdy mining bag is a minuscule improvement over the regular one, and the regular mining bag isn't particularly amazing either, metallic armor isn't really that useful, and gambeson is much better for general-purpose protection outside of deep caving, temporal storms and boss fights. Personally, I have some 200 hours in survival and have done almost everything in the game besides the sailboat, though admittedly I did rush through some things a bit. One of my notable achievements is finding nearly every single type of ore deposit in the game on a single save, almost all of them on the first attempt, only missing lapis lazuli (its generation parameters are kind of absurd), alum and salt beds (I've not gone to hot climates besides for crops), and gemstones (there's practically zero reason to get them besides as a flex). I don't really have a to-do list, just because I no longer have much to do that I haven't done. The main thing I would like to do over the next playthrough is build and decorate something akin to a small village with multiple functional buildings tailored for regular gameplay. Maybe also make a butterfly collection.

Foxes, raccoons, hares and chicken have had their health reduced: foxes and raccoons have 5 health down from 6, chickens have 2.5 health down from 3, hares have 3 health down from 5. This makes the thrown spears not as bad as they would be otherwise, but is also an indirect buff for all other weapons in that damage range. Assuming no damage modifiers, pigs now take 5 thrown flint spears, up from 4. Both surface drifters and bowtorn take 4 thrown flint spears, up from 3. In order to two-tap a surface bowtorn, you need at least a tin bronze spear, where previously you could do it with a copper spear. I haven't noticed any JSON changes to bears' spawn conditions, besides panda bears which were mentioned in patch notes. If something was changed, it was somewhere in the underlying code. Do note, though, that spawning during chunk generation is different from runtime spawning, and can sometimes cause an unexpectedly large concentration of animals if you get lucky or unlucky. For bears specifically, I think there's a 0.7% chance to spawn a bear in every chunk with matching conditions when it's first generated. You're not the first to say that, but while bears were adjusted slightly, wolves don't seem to have any behavior changes, unless it's somewhere in the source code and not JSON assets. Not sure. You would need to directly create the lamp using clayforming, but the raw oil lamp recipe seems to be entirely missing from the assets folder as of now (already reported as a bug). Once you have a fired oil lamp, you can just combine it with a piece od rendered fat, no need for flax. I'm thinking that both changes will be very good for new players, especially considering how much of a progression barrier early food and flax can be. Cooking increases satiety from grain four times (slightly less for rice), so being unable to eat grain outright will force new players to look for more uses for it and likely stumble upon the highly beneficial porridge. Larger patches are also more difficult to miss. That said, I do agree that not being able to eat grain to clean up the inventory is a little annoying.

I would imagine that this is the goal, though I can only guess whether it will come in 1.22 or at some point in the future. Making sheep more accessible to the average player is basically a requirement for the addition of wool processing to be actually worthwhile. Small update on this: I've found a related bug. Dunno how they may choose to resolve it.

I forgot about about Blackguard's damage buff again. Melee damage of spears hasn't been changed in the prerelease, so it's not that. But I did a diff on the asset folders to be sure and found that several animals have less health than they used to have (which wasn't mentioned in the changelog as far as I can tell): foxes have 5 health down from 6, which checks out with your experience, raccoons have 5 health down from 6, chickens have 2.5 health down from 3, hares have 3 health down from 5. These changes to smaller critters constitute a notable indirect buff to all weapons in this damage range, and it makes the changes to spears much more difficult to evaluate accurately. Likely less detrimental to the game than I thought, though still very much not ideal. Also, a lot of fish have more than 2 health now, it seems - small fish have 2 health, medium fish have 4 (including salmon), larger fish have 6-8, and there's a couple of exceptions with even higher health (e.g. greater arapaima at a whopping 24 health). One thing that I can tell you is that huge boars seem to have much smaller hitboxes than they should have. As for behaviour, though, there are very few JSON changes, so if there's actually significant differences, they're likely caused by changes to the underlying code. A whole bunch of things have changes with pigs' visuals, but I'm not seeing any logic changes. Bears have seen a couple small changes: their meleeattack task priority is now higher than seekentity, though I have no idea what practical effect it might have, their meleeattack range has been increased (by 100% for brown and polar bears, by 50% for other types), which may mean that they will attack from further away and consequently be easier to dodge, brown and polar bears will no longer chase hare and chicken babies (?), brown bears now drop 3 fat, up from 2. They don't seem to have almost any JSON changes except new footstep sounds and some animation adjustments, so if there actually are differences, it will be somewhere in the source code.

The mouflon is a variant of sheep which can spawn: at lower elevations, in temperate to warm (not hot) climates, in areas with at least some rain and not too much shrubs or trees. The real mouflon "is thought to be the ancestor of all modern domestic sheep breeds" (as per Wikipedia), which alone makes it pretty cool that it has been added. Other than their appearance and spawn conditions, they are practically identical to bighorn sheep, which makes them similar to goats except that they don't flee on sight (but will attack you if you get too close). No more having to search across mountaintops for your animal husbandry needs! The mouflons aren't especially common, but they can appear in a lot of areas typically desirable for settling and hunting, unlike bighorn sheep and most goat species which tend to spawn in dry areas and otherwise have more restrictive spawn conditions. At the very least, there is now an accessible alternative to valais goats in temperate climates for areas with limited mountains. But that said, bighorn sheep have also had their spawn conditions adjusted (which was actually mentioned in the patch notes, unlike the mouflons) - they will now spawn in drier areas with not too much shrubs or forestation at slightly higher elevations. Note: this image might be a bit misleading since it's 100% forest, but that's where I happened to find them (I'm thinking whether it might be a bug, unless the maxForestOrShrubs property only cares that both aren't too high at the same time; I might have to double-check it). For those interested, these are the exact spawn conditions for mouflons: minTemp: 3, maxTemp: 20, minRain: 0.3, maxForestOrShrubs: 0.5, minY: 1.1, maxY: 1.4 and these are the updated conditions for bighorn sheep: minTemp: -10, maxTemp: 17, minRain: 0.05, maxRain: 0.5, maxForestOrShrubs: 0.4, minY: 1.4

It's not a thing as far as I can tell, but I got a different crash with the same stack trace. Shouldn't happen, unless the fox was damaged by something else, since a flint spear has 2 damage and the fox has 5 HP. If it actually died in two hits from full health, then you've got another bug to report.

Note that sharpening using the grinding wheel pretty much does this, currently only for the falxes and swords as far as I can tell but hopefully more in near future. Sharpening the weapons increases critical hit chance (chance to deal double damage) at the cost of a small amount of durability. The difference is too small to make any big impact in most cases (I think it's capped at +10% critical hit chance, equivalent to +10% DPS even assuming no overflow damage). The durability loss means (as far as I can tell) that you will generally be dealing very slightly less total damage per amount of metal used, though it seems to be a bit more worthwhile on higher weapon tiers due to smaller relative durability loss. Well, throwing is less effective, and some larger fish might be difficult or impossible to one-shot. They now also try to escape more quickly when you scare them. An additional limiting factor might be simply the quantity of fish, because I actually couldn't find any in the wild and had to spawn some for testing. It's technically possible, but I don't yet know if it will be practically viable.

They've actually done quite a lot of what you're recommending, besides the matter of Stone Age spears. Overall kind of makes me hopeful that they know what they are doing, even if I would prefer them to take a different direction with higher damage and lower frequency of attacks. In terms of raw damage, the progression is now much smoother than it used to be, with gaps of 1 damage point between flint, copper and bronze. That said, tin or black bronze is still extremely valuable due to the breakpoints on common 5 HP and 15 HP targets, so copper spears remain mostly a waste of material. damageByType: { "*-granite": 2.5 (4 on the current stable), // only one-taps chickens and small fish "*-flint": 3.25 (5), // one-taps hares "*-copper": 4.25 (5.75), // one-taps some medium fish "*-tinbronze": 5.25 (7.5), // one-taps foxes and raccoons, 3-taps pigs and wolves "*-iron": 6 (8.25), // one-taps pudu deer and some medium-large fish "*-meteoriciron": 6.1, // two-taps T0 drifters "*-steel": 6.2 // no notable breakpoints },

Right now the fat overhaul can be boiled down to two main changes from what I've seen, though some more is probably on the way: using fat now requires to render it first in a cooking pot, allow it to solidify, and dump it out, oil lamps can be crafted using olive oil as well (requires a fruit press to juice olives). Linseed oil can be made by boiling three portions of flax flour with one liter of water in a cooking pot. It seems a bit odd to me, as I would imagine that it would be obtained by pressing seeds. And it doesn't look like it's useful for anything at the moment. That's what the teal gear in the middle of the hotbar is for. That's not what the teal gear is for. The UI gauge is primarily designed to communicate player stability, and while it does also allow to tell the ambient stability, it's not a visual, in-world indicator which was, dare I say, quite clearly the topic of the question. I really want to smack you with the "you can just turn it off if you don't like it". Tough to say how similar functionality would be implemented into the base game, but the config should allow you to turn down the mist intensity to nowhere near a "bright glow", disable it entirely (leaving only particles, if that's preferable), toggle it with a hotkey, or make it so that it's only visible while wearing a rusty or temporal gear amulet. The mod literally doesn't make it any easier to notice unstable areas as long as you're not forgetting about the UI gauge, and only gives a small added indication of particularly stable ones. I want to ask you, what kind of effect wouldn't be in-your-face? Everything that can be noticed in the world can be seen this way, especially when you are familiar with it and know what to look for. At a point, muscle memeory will take over the moment you notice tiny signs in the corner of your eye. It feels like every single suggestion to add diegetic indications of stability is met with what largely boils down to "it would be too easily noticeable" from you. Which is especially annoying because making it more obvious is almost never the goal of these suggestions - making it more intuitive and immersive is the goal. Personally, I would say that the UI gauge is already in-your-face quite enough and I would prefer something that requires more intentionality or agency from the player.