MKMoose

Do note that the spear changes go beyond simply making space for iron and steel. The new steel spears have notably lower thrown damage than bronze in the current stable. Even Stone Age spears were significantly nerfed (arguably even more so than copper and bronze). Ergo, making iron and steel balanced is not the only motivation behind these changes. And even once we settle on spears being nerfed, I believe that the specific way they've been changed is detrimental to the game and reinforces complaints about the combat being spammy and weightless. Making them slower but retaining damage from the current stable or even increasing it would make them much more enjoyable to use. Was thinking the same. Game balancing seems like a fairly reasonable explanation, though, because otherwise there could be no reason not to quench everything as many times as possible besides initial setup time and then fuel costs (and maybe quenching medium costs if it's not water). Also, first quenching doesn't seem to have any shatter chance.

There is already a wireframe colors setting in the Accessibility tab, albeit there's only three presets and not free selection. There's also wireframe thickness next to it. If you need further accessibility tweaks, you can also try checking out the Accessibility wiki page, which you can also access through the Accessiblity tab in the settings. That said, certainly wouldn't mind some mroe settings added to vanilla. Smithing: left - preset 1; middle - preset 2; right - preset 3 (there is some added color difference due to different item temperatures on different screenshots). Clayforming: left - preset 1; middle - preset 2; right - preset 3. Wireframe thickness on preset 1: left - 1x; middle - 2x; right - 4x.

Thrown spears were kind of gutted. Here's a couple notes (edited to account for health changes to small animals): flint spears at 3.25 damage (down from 5) can still one-tap chickens and hares just like on stable, but struggle with medium and larger fish that tend to have 4 or 6 HP, tin bronze at 5.25 damage (down from 7.5) achieves very strong breakpoints for common targets with multiples of 5 HP (foxes, raccoons, surface bowtorn, wolves and pigs) making it unexpectedly powerful compared to copper, though for these specific targets the breakpoints are actually the same as on the current stable; adjusting this might be done by tweaking the health of some of these targets, and not necessarily through further changes to spears, steel spears at 6.2 damage have lower damage than a bow with steel arrows, and significantly lower damage than bronze spears on the current stable, overall, breakpoints for small and medium targets haven't changed too much, but the nerf can be felt when fighting high-tier rotbeasts and larger animals like bears, you can still easily throw more than two spears per second, spears have also had their accuracy adjusted to focus the projectile spread slower, so you'll have to charge them longer for accurate long distance throws (~0.59 s for optimal accuracy, up from 0.35 s), though it's less significant for short-range use, steel spear melee damage is roughly as expected at 4.4, with a very similar damage increase over bronze to what falxes get, durablity has already been already much lower than falxes for bronze, and increases slower with iron and steel (steel spears only have 700, compared to steel falx's 2125); while I'm not sure that this should be changed unless something like more advanced tool handles get added, it is nonetheless a notable balance factor, note: the damage of erel, ruined, hacking and ornate spears seems to not have been touched yet. Spears are now weaker than they used to be despite the addition of new metal tiers. Their breakpoints against small targets remain similar and raw DPS in cases where aiming doesn't matter can still be decent, but I think overall the changes took the wrong direction in some capacity. I think the spears' charge time could be increased to a second or higher, but instead their damage should be kept at least as it used to be. As it stands, this further reinforces one of the most common complaints about VS combat - that it feels spammy and weightless. The long claws and antlers of sorts honestly make me think of a Leshy. If it's a rotbeast or other monster, then I would love if it could stalk the player. That said, I could see it just being a regular shiver mid-transformation, or something like that. Tyron has said in Elvas' most recent devstream that something related to combat will be coming "soon". Dunno if he meant the changes to spears and other adjustments in this prerelease, or something bigger on the horizon.

Well, and would you look at the 1.22.0-pre.1 changelog: Dunno what that was caused by since there don't seem to be any reports for them except a fairly vague one in the discord with no responses. Might wanna do a diff on the files to see exactly what was changed. Either way, would be pretty lame to keep searching for them on current stable.

If you're using node search (short-range mode) in each of these vertical shafts (roughly the way I described in the second paragraph), then you will find most of the deposits and only miss some small ones. It's pretty rare for that to happen, as long as you search efficiently enough in reasonably rich areas. Even if you actually dig a 110-block shaft, it's literally just 110 blocks, which is less than half the durability of a copper pickaxe, and may allow you to find multiple deposits within a single shaft. It's preferable to keep some spare resources just in case, but usually it's pretty easy to get more ore than you use up on mining. If you still use up all of your tools without finding anything, then you'll have to resort to panning and/or locate some surface copper deposits again. True, although when a single surface copper deposit easily yields some 5-10 ingots of metal, and underground ones yield much more, it will be pretty rare to lose or use up all of it after a decent mining session. And that's still talking about copper, while bronze and iron will allow you to get a higher quantity of more durable gear.

If you're interested, then the general strategy is to perform a density search every ~80-200 blocks, and once you scan a nearby area this way, then sink vertical shafts in areas with decently high readings for the ores you're after. It's generally not necessary to dig the shafts more frequently than every ~20-25 blocks. Ladders are often favored for vertical movement, especially rope ladders since they are more easily reusable. If you're not familiar with the exact generation mechanisms, then it's often optimal to sink the shafts nearly all the way down to the mantle (~110 blocks deep), and repeat until you get what you're after. While digging a shaft, take a node search (short-range) reading every ~5-10 blocks (assuming you're using the default range of 6). This allows you to determine the approximate depth of deposits, e.g. if you take readings at 8-block intervals and get a result two times in a row, then it's quite likely that the deposit is near the middle depth between these samples. Once you have an approximate depth, dig horizontal side tunnels at that depth in different directions to attempt to locate higher short-range readings at ~5-block intervals, and dig a couple blocks up and down when you find higher readings to see if the deposit is slightly above or below. Be careful about temporal stability while underground - if you notice the cyan gear in the middle of the hotbar rotating counterclockwise and turning more gray, then you may want to return back up to the surface after a couple of minutes and regenerate your stability back up before it drops too low (sometimes even the surface is unstable, then you need to move elsewhere to regenerate stability). There's a lot of complexity beyond this which you can feel free to read up on or ask about, but the above should get you started with a good baseline.

True, I've seen some suggestions regarding the camera drift myself. I would expect that camera drift would work best as a penalty for holding the bow for too long, whereas for other purposes (especially while moving) crosshair drift would be much more reasonable as it should involve pretty quick and periodic movements. Using crosshair drift instead of camera drift would avoid the accessibility issue, as far as I'm aware.

Fair enough, there is a small window within which a shot is realistically practically random, but for a skilled archer it's much less than the current ~50 cm at 20 m (with no accuracy modifiers). Shot drift could also be less purely random and instead influenced by actual effects like wind strength, making it possible to partially counteract it. There isn't, though, as far as I know? You could hold a bow for as long as your muscles don't start giving out, I think, within reason, with little to no practical difference in terms of power or accuracy within a pretty respectable time window. And even if there is a relatively short optimal firing point, the current implementation only relies on a simplistic threshold after which the arrow can be launched with no further increase to neither power nor accuracy, and also doesn't have an upper limit for how long the bow can be held, which is hardly realistic. Really not a fan of this one. I prefer the current style, where there's a indicator of the area the shot could go and that's it. Better quality bows have a very small window in which the shot can potentially go, and thus produce more consistent shots. This seems to be almost entirely unrelated to what you quoted and more to the previous point, or I'm misunderstanding something. Just in case, I'll note that by "camera or crosshair drift" I mean the actual camera rotating slightly or the crosshair moving across the screen, by "accuracy" or "spread" I typically mean what you seem to be referring to as "shot drift" (shot drift is typically less random and more due to wind as far as I know). Either way, I can briefly explain the intent behind both parts of the suggestion: random camera or crosshair drift when moving or holding a weapon for too long - primarily intended as a more involved and interesting mechanic than just random spread, to impose a penalty for improper shooting but still allow to hit the shot with some skill, instead of purely with luck, partially predictable camera or crosshair drift when initially drawing the bow - expressly intended only to force the player to readjust their aim after each shot in a way that can be mitigated with experience for faster consecutive shots (admittedly, I would have to try playing with it to know if it's not too annoying). Regardless of exact implementation, a crossbow should be easier to use effectively than a bow at the cost of primarily reload time. Reduced shot drift seems like a fairly reasonable way to do it, though I would be careful not to make the crossbow preferable at long distances due to better accuracy. More intuitive advantages for the crossbow would probably include a much longer or indefinite optimal window to take a shot, due to the ability to keep it drawn and ready for long periods of time.

Motivation When I say the ranged weapons are simplistic, I mean it. Throwing a spear or shooting a bow only requires to hold the appropriate button for a minimum length of time, after which the weapon can be fired with, as far as I can tell, no other complications. No aiming mechanics, no charge-up, no focus or exhaustion mechanics, nothing of the sort. Momentary accuracy seems to only be influenced by some factors external to the bow like player movement, but otherwise it's constant. This causes a number of design-level issues: most of the time, ranged weapons heavily reward timing and robotic consistency - the faster the player presses their mouse button without undershooting the minimum hold time, the better, even in cases where aiming matters more, timing and accuracy are completely independent - firing recklessly does not mechanically apply any disadvantages as long as the player is able to keep the cursor on target, barring external factors, accuracy is constant, and exact shot placement is ultimately random - it just isn't rewarding to line up a shot neatly, only to have it miss through no fault of the player, there is no reward for aiming carefully beyond placing the cursor on target, and there is no penalty for holding the bow for too long besides opportunity cost, the only penalty for using bows and spears while sprinting is poor accuracy, but that barely matters when shooting at short distances, leading to the cheesy strategy of sprinting backwards and shooting at whatever is chasing the player. There's also a couple of additional issues which are specific to the current balancing: bows require to hold for 0.65 s, which is both completely unrealistic and arguably greatly detrimental from a gameplay perspective, as it further encourages rapid, haphazard shooting, spears require to hold for just 0.35 s, which is even more absurd in several ways, and I'd go as far as to say that combined with high alpha damage it is the single biggest cause behind all balancing problems of spear damage - the spears have vastly higher short-term DPS than both the bow and the falx, so while it's somewhat inconvenient to lug multiple of them around and collect them after throwing, it's nonetheless disproportionately powerful compared to other available options, the sling requires to hold for 0.75 s, somehow the longest, and is further made largely irrelevant by only being able to use weak stone projectiles, as it stands, high fire rate necessitates fairly low damage, which means that individual shots feel extremely unsatisfying and combat is has a "spammy" feel as a result. Goal I think a lot of this ultimately boils down to realism and immersion. And once we know we want to make it more realistic and immersive, then we can create an engaging and rewarding system while making concessions for the sake of fun where necessary. If I were to point to a more specific direction, it would go roughly like this: Broadly, reward deliberate shot placement - as a general rule, hitting one or two difficult but highly damaging shots is incomparably more rewarding than many hits which individually barely matter. Make aiming a skill in itself - shot placement should be influenced by factors that the player can learn to counteract, not just randomness. Focus on making moment-to-moment ranged combat more engaging and enjoyable. Improve hunting to be more focused on stalking a target, a single careful shot, and then pursuing the now weakened target if necessary (hunting in general is something that Tyron has said they would like to work on at some point, and it would arguably be great as well if animals were more difficult to kill and process but yielded more resources). Suggestion There is a number of fairly small changes that would arguably be beneficial and may be implemented with relatively minimal changes, largely but not entirely independent of each other: Increase hold times and damage across the board; could also be done through increasing damage with charge time to also allow for fairly quick but weaker shots and reduce the need for mechanical consistency. Add a brief delay after shooting during which the weapon cannot be charged again to reduce the need for mechanical consistency (can also allow extending the time between uses without making the first use take too long). Reduce or remove randomness after holding for an extra second or so, to allow for more precise long-range shots. Add random camera or crosshair drift primarily or only when holding a weapon for too long and while moving. Add partially predictable camera or crosshair drift while initially drawing the bow, which could be counteracted with experience, to require aim adjustments between consecutive shots, Increase arrow and sling projectile speed, to make them more suitable against fast-moving targets and at greater distances. Add sling projectiles made from lead, and optionally from clay. A full ranged weapon overhaul could be useful as a way to consolidate several of these changes and introduce more complex mechanics, but it's not necessary. It may also allow to unify the system across many weapons, as they currently duplicate a lot of the code for practically the same functionality. Additionally, while I would prefer to stay focused on the basics here, there are also related systems and changes like improved animal AI, improved hitboxes (ideally with weakpoints), status effects (bleed, crippling, etc.), line of sight and hearing, and increased ranged weapon variety, which could all contribute to improving ranged combat and hunting. They could go in tandem to reshape combat as a whole into something more methodical, skillful, dangerous and rewarding.

Forestation doesn't affect initial clay generation in any way, but forest floor replaces the top block in the later stages of world generation, so while clay can spawn in forests, the deposits will be completely covered by soil from above. Even if you see it on sloped terrain or find it in some other way, it will be smaller than typical clay deposits due to the top layer getting replaced, so it's doubly preferable to look elsewhere.

I've found myself with the same problem at one point, but couldn't find a solution. That said, the links only ever lead to the "Game Mechanic: Prospecting" guide or to the pages for specific ore nuggets, while links for ungraded ore and halite currently don't even lead anywhere. You can look up the ore names in the handbook manually.

Overall, @LadyWYT's advice should get you far. There are two other things I want to mention which I've personally found tremendously helpful, the first being that you should travel far and often. Travelling will typically let you find more berries than you can eat (as long as you don't travel around dry areas), and some of those berry bushes you can pick up and plant near wherever you want to set up a home. You can also find a whole lot of crops to plant as well. The main difficulty is finding the right areas (generally any grasslands should be fine for most purposes) and actually noticing the berries or crops in the landscape. I've seen some new players walk right through berries and crops without noticing them, though I'm not sure if I can give any concrete tips for this other than to familiarize yourself with their appearance (you can also check out what they look like in the handbook or in external sources). Travelling will also let you notice a lot of things which you will be able to use later if you mark them on the map, like clay, surface copper or other deposits, spots where pigs or goats or chickens spawn, bees, and any other useful places - you don't need to mark down absolutely every tiny detail, but having a good idea of what's in your immediate proximity will make searching for these things so much easier later on. The second thing that helped me was fish, but only in meals (made in a cooking pot). While some of this is quite likely to change with the nearest major update, currently fish are extremely easy to kill with any spear. Raw or cooked they are kind of worthless, but putting them in meals for some reason increases their satiety all the way to 375, 7.5 times the raw fish, very competitive with red meat. If you have a cooking pot and find a pond with a couple fish, you've got dinner for a day or two at least. I remember I had 4 ponds near my house on my first world, and that allowed me to just go out and collect some 10 to 20 fish whenever I was running low on food.

As per the FAQ:

If you can read code, the entire logic related to rooms seems to be here. While I'm not certain about the exact way it scales with room size, I doubt that computational cost is an especially significant factor in the current limits, and stylistic choice seems like a viable explanation. But either way, if you think it could be beneficial to the game, feel free to make a suggestion regardless. People here aren't typically familiar with the code at a low enough level to explain whether a suggestion is technically viable outside of relatively obvious cases, and they tend to care more about matters like gameplay enjoyment and thematic identity.

It shouldn't normally do that, unless you're in the middle of a temporal storm, in which case it should return back to normal after ~5 minutes on default settings. If you didn't have problems before but are now noticing that the area is unstable, then a common culprit is that you're in an area of patchy stability - some spots stable, some unstable - and just didn't notice that earlier as you were moving around in nearby more stable areas. If it's not a temporal storm and not an area with patchy stability, then the only reasonably probable causes that I can think of are mods or a bug. If you're using mods, then you may have to check which of them causes the problem and disable it (make sure to test things on a backup world). If it's not caused by a mod, then you may want to try reporting a bug on the issue tracker. Either way, there's a couple things you can also do if you don't want to just entirely abandon your current house: use the house as a storage building or for any other function that doesn't require you to stay there too long, and make sure you spend most of your time in more stable areas (only feasible if there actually are sufficiently stable areas nearby), use the /worldconfig temporalStability false command to disable temporal stability as a whole (will disable the entire mechanic, including underground instability; needs a world reload to take effect), try a mod like Stable Surface to disable instability on the surface only (best make a backup of your world beforehand).

A new player doesn't need to hyperoptimize, but they also don't need to spend time and resources on a denser search pattern that doesn't help them in any way. For iron specifically, sinking a shaft every 12 blocks takes 16 times more effort than at 50-block intervals, while providing maybe 10% more iron per unit of area on average. Even if you don't consider the average over a large area, then searching more sparsely will still allow you to find the first deposit much faster, because using 12-block intervals means that a much larger portion of the area where you could detect a deposit has already been verified with the previous shaft. Hence the 50-block interval recomendation for iron. Even at 25-block intervals in a generic case for all ores, the maximum deposit radius that can be missed is ~9, barring partially obstructed deposits and stuff. It's trading a small amount of missed resources from the smaller deposits for a large increase in time efficiency. It's covering the same area with a quarter of the effort for ~60-100% of the total return in most cases (60% for very small deposits, and close to or exactly 100% for larger ones, especially iron). Hence the 25-block interval recommendation for most ores. There are a couple of relatively common ores for which I could potentially recommend mining at intervals below 25, including for cassiterite, bismuthinite and sphalerite, but even then you're generally not trying to precisely strip the area of every single deposit either. Still, an interval of ~18-20 is perfectly fine with fairly low or near-zero resource loss for almost all ores, while still being significantly more efficient than 12-15. Gemstones are probably the only notable exception for which an interval of ~12-15 could be optimal, but that's irrelevant for most players. Child deposits are also different, but that's a completely separate search pattern.

The average radius of iron deposits is 26, and I'd have to double-check the exact distribution. Add the node search radius to that, and you'd have to dig every 2 * (6 + 26 / sqrt(2)) = ~49 blocks to make it ever possible to miss the average deposit in optimal conditions. It is still possible with a 50-block interval to miss deposits which are smaller than average, but the risk remains low at ~30% for the minimum possible radius of 16, if I recall correctly. Any obstructions like cracked rock might sometimes cause issues with this strategy. Uneven and patchy deposit edges also make missing a deposit a bit more likely, but not by much. I think it was 0.85 of sea level, last I checked.

That just means the density, though, nothing to do with area. The numbers correspond to the expected density at the exact location of the reading. For example, your 2.13 permille hematite reading means that this general vicinity is expected to contain about 2.13 blocks of iron ore per 1000 blocks of rock (it is only calculated based on a 1x1 rock column, to be specific, but I'm probably not gonna explain the exact code behind it).

The devstreaming channel on the discord, or directly Elvas' Twitch for the building streams specifically.

Skipping only 12 blocks makes a very dense pattern. For most ores, you can generally dig shafts at 25 block intervals, while for iron you'll be fine with 50 block intervals. Additionally, iron ores (and most other ores) only generate in a specific depth range. You can expect to dig ~15-40 blocks down (depending on your surface level) before any iron can spawn, and then it can generate practically all the way down to the mantle. I tend to dig shafts to the mantle for many ores, just to be sure. The density search returns the expected density at the exact point where you take your reading, at the location of the first of the three blocks. I don't know what guide you might have gotten this "1000 blocks" from, but it's not correct and I don't think it ever has been. There's a lot of more or less misleading information floating around about some mechanics, to be honest. It only corresponds to the internal chance that the game uses to generate the deposits. However, for many ores that chance can exceed 1. For example, if the chance in a specific chunk comes out to be 4.5 (it's just an internal number, you can't see it in-game anywhere), then the game is guaranteed to attempt spawning 4 deposits, and has a 50% chance of attempting another. Attempting to spawn does not equate actually generating a deposit, because most deposits can only appear in a number of specific rock types. Either way, for many ores, a high enough reading is practically a guarantee that you're gonna find something in every chunk where there is enough of the appropriate rock types (iron can have this problem in low-density areas, and I could give you the exact ores for which it's especially random). For hematite specifically that internal chance will never exceed 0.5 if I recally correctly, but the sheer size of the deposits largely makes up for it. It has caused a few discussions in the past, where people felt like the system was wasting their time. Mostly nothing came out of them. While the system has some theoretical edge cases, it ends up working out perfectly fine for most people. It could always use some improvements, but it doesn't seem to be a pressing matter.

I think in most cases it's less "hate parkour" and more "can't be bothered to suffer through this particular course". On my first run through the tower most of my frustration stemmed from issues that weren't even directly related to the parkour itself. The glider has a different activation condition from a regular jump for some reason, which caused me to plummet to the ground a couple times where I expected to jump normally, after which I just ditched it and didn't bother bringing it to the tower, which then made falling a much greater risk. The elevator's functionality wasn't particularly clear, and I initially thought it was just decorative because nothing I did would get it to work (could just be user error, but I tried a whole number of things initially and didn't pay too much attantion to it after I started ascending the tower, leading to not noticing until after two or three deaths that I have to set the height manually). It also didn't help that the earlier sections took me more time than I would have liked, which was partly a consequence of not having brought a lantern with me, and caused me to have to choose between rushing some parts of the tower and going the 15k blocks or so back home empty-handed. On the whole, I died I think 4 or 5 times then, every single one to gravity, and the biggest threat besides gravity turned out to be hunger. I'll also note that the player has little way to know what they are even supposed to look for in the platforming sections. Personally, I ended up skipping the last floor, because I just couldn't find a way to do it and was already kinda rushing due to multiple deaths and depleting supplies. One of the biggest issues for me was unironically that I was expecting to have to climb the rubble of the tower walls more, and not random pipes, boilers, machinery, chests or whatnot. If I were to point to one issue with the tower, it's that there are too many sources of pressure on the player that compound into an experience which tends to be more frustrating than it arguably should be, especially in the first and currently only major platforming section in the game. It's a long distance away, takes a fair bit of effort to get to initially and it's an unfamiliar environment unlike practically anything in the game which needs getting used to, the land claim is pretty inconvenient, there's hunger, other sources of time pressure like incoming storms or winter with all the preparation for it, high risk of fall damage or death (especially fun if you don't set your returning point near the tower and have to run back the whole way), and the bird constantly screaming doesn't help either. When I returned to it later in creative to analyze it more, I speedran the tower itself in 3 minutes on the first attempt using the intended route which I was figuring out easily on the fly, simply because I didn't have nearly the same pressure on me. I actually think the platforming itself is really easy in isolation, but it's quite challenging to figure out the correct route under stress. One thing I'm unsure about is how to communicate the alternative option to the player and balance the two between each other. A clearly broken or deactivated part is not necessarily a bad idea, but then 1) why is it broken in the past and 2) how do I know what to do to fix it? A diegetic "requires power from external generator" or some similar sign would probably be suitable, or tracing power cables or something could also be a thing. It may then be difficult, though, to make anyone ever attempt the parkour if the game practically tells them to use the elevator. A common strategy in game design is to introduce a mechanic in a risk-free environment first, before progressively adding more complexity, more dangers, iterating on the mechanic and combining it with others, and finally coming to a conclusion with some sort of final level or boss. The tower has been designed really quite well with this in mind for the most part, but the added pressure from multiple sources can easily make it feel like the "learning" portion is practically nonexistent and it goes almost immediately for an extended final challenge. If I were to give a single suggestion for it, it would be to actually keep the tower itself mostly or entirely unchanged, but add a similar platforming section earlier into the game (potentially also making use of the time switch mechanic or something similar), in a way that would get the player more familiar with what they need to do in a lower-stress context. It could be an earlier part of the second story quest, or it might be entirely unrelated. I thought about giving the player a random platforming or puzzle room to solve each time they die, or a static pocket world which contains some optional challenges, but that may or may not be a good idea. If not something too out-there, then it might be a good idea to revise the section under the tower, to more naturally introduce the platforming mechanics before adding the threat of fall damage and the bird. This might be associated with increasing the threat from the bird to make it more central to the challenge.

One of the things I really don't like about these new huts is that they throw the idea of being reasonably replicable by the player completely out the window. They are almost entirely made using complex chiseling, with many items which are outright unavailable outside of creative mode, and using techniques which are quite difficult for the average player to figure out even in creative. I find that most if not all features of the VS Roofing Mod could be integrated into the game. Or if not that, then simplify the system by adding a couple roof frame blocks similar to current roof blocks, on top of which any types of shingles and stuff could be placed. A couple of shingle position and type presets could defined by the frame, while the shingle model could be independent and defined by the material. This would make the system much more expandable, as well as get rid of the solid undersides in favor of a more reasonable stick or timber frame, which would keep the roofing material entirely or mostly invisible from below and could be matched to the build much more freely using different wood colors. Adding some dynamic elements would be great, including potentially automatic corner pieces and different slopes, but it doesn't need to be particularly complex to be a massive improvement.

I think introducing more complexity to the farming system through new or revamped mechanics like moisture, nutrients, soil pH, seeding, weeds, plant diseases and pests, different growth systems, complex processing methods, and player nutrition, all could do a lot of good for crop variety, with one condition: the properties of various crops would have to be different enough to produce tangible gameplay differences in how these crops are cultivated, and to introduce more meaningful factors into the player's decision-making. If need be, some mechanics, especially diseases and pests, could be made only relevant for a small subset of plants, to make them stand out as more difficult ot risky without impacting the rest of the farming experience. Oats, for example, grow thick enough to outcompete many weeds, are fairly resistant to diseases, and tolerate low-nutrient and acidic soils - this could give you a reliable, low-maintenance crop which can be set up quickly at the start of the game as the player is rushing to get things done before winter, and later on still can be useful to guarantee a safe harvest even if the player leaves on a long expedition. To counterbalance the ease of farming, oat could have reduced yield or be in some way restricted in its uses, potentially even going as far as to make it exclusively usable for porridge (and probably animal feed as well). And for a couple more examples: wheat is much more demanding on soil and relatively vulnerable to diseases and pests (at least nowadays, I would need to double-check if that also applied to spelt in the Middle Ages), which could make it a high-maintenance, high-risk, high-yield late-game crop, rice requires a lot of water to grow and would likely end up as a crop with special requirements (if only just extremely high moisture), which would likely only grow on paddy fields (a specialized type of farmland, or a condition applied to farmland by flooding it in some way), potatoes could provide low nutrition but high satiation, to serve as a good early-game subsistence crop but ending up less desirable when optimizing for full nutrition bonuses, soybeans and other legumes can improve soil fertility by fixing nitrogen, which could make them valuable for optimizing crop rotation and maintaining good soil quality without using fertilizers. The potential issue of overloading the player with all the variables in a complex system could be largely addressed by making several mechanics only really relevant for specific crops and potentially even entirely disabled for others. Ideally, simpler plants like oat and several common vegetables should still allow the player to quickly understand the basics of farming and sustain themselves easily enough, but a larger variety of more demanding and rewarding crops would allow not just to fill out the cellar with more stuff and make more colors of food, but also to produce more meaningful gameplay variety depending on player choice and a number of other factors. It could also be beneficial to make several crops or even entire mechanics opt-in to reduce the number of choices thrown onto the player, e.g. by restricting certain species to only be purchased from traders or domesticated over multiple years from less demanding but low-yield wild plants. Especially applies to something like cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, which all originate from the same feral plants. Looting from ruins is largely fine as well, but still risks throwing these plants onto a new player quite quickly.

Titanium was first discovered well after the time period that Vintage Story is set in. The Kroll process is a 20th-century industrial process - if anything, expect something closer to the Hunter process. Titanium's real-life applications are almost exclusively a consequence of modern technological advancements and it wouldn't be feasible to use it for late medieval or early modern armor or weapons even if it was known and available in appropriate quantity. If we ever see significant applications for titanium beyond the current use of ilmenite in refractory bricks, it will almost certainly be Jonas tech or some highly specialized applications, not as the next generic metal tier. Tyron has said in an interview a while back that there is no plan for any more metal tiers beyond steel, except perhaps stainless steel and some specialized types of steel for specific purposes. Titanium could feasibly be used as an alloying element then. Why 100k? There were already complaints that the structures are too far, at which point they were adjusted and are now a more reasonable distance away. There is zero reason to move them completely out of proportion again, and they will stay a couple thousand blocks apart. If that doesn't satisfy you, the distance between story structures can be adjusted in world configuration. Cast iron is a pretty common but also a pretty big request, and it's very likely to be implemented sooner or later. A number of mid-game items could be produced from it, like cookware, stove, fences, gates, lanterns, decorations, pipes or chutes, certain tools. I think it would have to be a primary feature of one of the major updates. While it would be technically possible to just add crucible cast iron, I would consider it more likely to come with a blast furnace, potentially pulling with it a separate setup for non-ferrous smelting and sand casting, as well as a finery forge for wrought iron. Additionally, I wouldn't expect significant new features related to metalworking until the temperature system is overhauled, which will hopefully be the next major update.

A lot of this could actually be done in a neat, believable way, without some fantasy ruins and contrived lore explanations, because the sea level does not need to have been historically constant. It could serve as a really interesting plot point that the sea levels have increased after certain events, leading to many ruins of the old world (especially larger towns near rivers and oceans) getting submerged underwater. Would require a bunch of changes to world generation to do it well, but I think it's nonetheless a pretty cool possibility.