MKMoose

Ah, sorry, I misread and thought you meant the current state of the game. This could be an interesting change as well, though it would probably carry huge downstream consequences. Most notably, it would make it extremely difficult to gather up sufficient food before the first winter in the current game balance, and even once new year rolls around it would take a really long time to get the first harvests. And once you go far enough north, it would make it practically impossible to grow anything. While a small reduction to growth time may be beneficial for the game in some capacity, I don't think going quite as far as one crop per year is a good idea without large concurrent changes.

It's really not an intense overhaul, though, at least unless you count all the secondary changes as well (and arguably the plow, I'll touch on it in a moment). In the simplest form it's literally just "reduce base nutrient replenishment rate, but allow to bring it back to current levels by tilling once in a while". It could even be just once in about three harvests if the player uses all three nutrients bit by bit. Either way, the background for my suggestion is that I've really never found farming to be in a meaningful way complex or engaging, and I never had any issues farming despite starting out on low-fertility soil. It might as well have been the same "plant, harvest, repeat" loop as it is in much simpler games and almost nothing about my experience would have changed. Sure, it is a bit more complex than many games, but that never stopped me from practically not caring about that complexity and seemingly not being worse off for it. I still had like three to four times the crops that I needed to survive during my first winter, and three storage vessels full of grain (and that's not counting vegetables) before the second winter rolled around. Maybe I just did everything more quickly than expected, but I really found it to be almost trivial. Food is extremely bountiful compared to all other survival games I've played, especially after the first winter. Or at least more so than in games where survival is actually a significant focus, with something like Don't Starve or Project Zomboid being prime examples. Not that this is a bad thing, but it really surprised me initially and I was genuinely baffled how quickly I was able to collect literally thousands of grains and vegetables. I do agree with this, and I have to admit I kind of overlooked how rare human-powered plows are, as I kind of assumed that a scaled-down version would be fine. There have been some examples of them and similar tools, though, primarily in Asia, and other alternatives between a hoe and a plow have apparently started appearing in meaningful numbers in the 18th century once cast iron and steel became more widely available. I should probably revise this suggestion once I think through the implications. Do keep in mind that this is an even stronger argument from the perspective of realism and historical accuracy than I initially put forth against allowing the player to make almost arbitrarily large crop fields. This would still require more proper weeds to be added, and potentially to have them overtake all fallow farmland over time and not just some of it. It may also be somewhat jarring since the player can just remove grass with their bare hands easily, so why not weeds? I'll also mention on the topic of weeds, I think the game could really use a much greater variety of mosses, grasses, sedges, shrubbery and stuff like that, not just as weeds but also for general plant variety, especially on the gravelly tundra or whatever that is (I don't know of any real biome which only has gravel, very sparse but tall grass, and trees for some reason). In my experience, planting without fertilizers boils down to never planting crops which consume the same nutrient twice in a row, and that's it. Or if that somehow doesn't work, increasing the size of the farm is almost free and there are no consequences for overexpansion, so why not just do that? You can easily sustain yourself from a couple dozen blocks anyways, so even doubling that for convenience takes very little effort. The game even kind of incentivizes the player to expand the farm more than necessary (which in some capacity may be a good thing), since all nutrients replenish (according to the wiki) thrice as fast on fallow farmland. And you also get some free horsetail on the side (not that it's rare in the wild, but from farmland it's infinite). Crops don't have to be something that the player has to babysit all the time. Just check in midway through their growth, get rid of a few weeds. Or if you don't, you're gonna have just slightly increased growth times or a bit lower yields (the latter of which would probably be more realistic). Heavier consequences would only really start appearing after an extended period of time without tilling and weeding, like a whole year or something. Making it slow would also make it so that a neat garden doesn't suddenly become overgrown. It's more about giving the player something to do if they care about having a neat and tidy crop field or a small but highly efficient garden, not something that they would absolutely have to do regularly in order to survive. Kind of like fertilizers are more like an additional option to allow accelerating growth speed or bypassing nutrient replenishment rates, not something that the player has to regularly use on farmland to make it usable. Also, disproportionately affecting worlds with different month length should be trivial to fix, unless I'm missing some nuance. Just keep the rate at which weeds grow or farmland degrades at a constant level per month. Are you sure about this? Or maybe I was lucky? But I'm quite sure I've just ended a year with three harvests from medium-fertility soil with no fertilization and some time to spare. I think it was two times flax and one time onion.

You're good, I was more getting annoyed at the conversation seemingly getting derailed onto the topic of magic despite me never mentioning it personally (though admittedly some things could be quite readily interpreted this way). I appreciate you being so thorough and patient with this, though. And since I don't wanna blabber too much about things you've provided reasonable counterpoints to or agreed with, I want to primarily say that the core of my annoyance with some of the stability and Rot-related content is that for something so alien, unnatural and dangerous, it kind of breaks my immersion that the remaining survivors use no distinct symbols, charms, amulets to ward it off, even if completely ineffectively. The new treasure hunter hut and most if not all of the current trader wagons (and also a camp with three wagons by a small ruin, though just one trader, I didn't even know until a few minutes ago that there was a thing like that) don't have a single item that could without a stretch be considered symbolic or protective. Some don't even have a single item that could be considered decorative. I can't speak with confidence on the village that I've learned about without spoiling myself right now, as I'll soon be on the way there, though they at least have some interesting necklaces and belts that can be found in the handbook (those are still just wearables though). There is a category of items and other stuff which are often referred to as apotropaic - intended to ward off evil, whatever that evil might be. It could be demons, disease, witchcraft, or just general bad luck which may or may not be attributed to something supernatural. It's of course easy to argue that most had no practical effect, but they still carried symbolic meaning or sometimes had practical uses unrelated to the apotropaic purposes. There is, perhaps, a point to be made that the situation was so dire that the more superstitious people inevitably were less prepared, and the ones who remained were the ones who didn't believe in the efficacy of anything other than physical force against rotbeasts, but I find it extremely unlikely that this selection process would be quite this drastic. Although, a small thing: I feel kinda dumb for not noticing other amulets that can be crafted with a rope and usually a tree seed. Frankly I kinda blame the handbook, because it makes finding some more obscure items really difficult sometimes. They're still only amulets, not placeable decorations, but at least that's something. I looked into it a bit, and it seems that this isn't really the case. From what I've read, though of course always take it with a grain of salt, non-Christian apotropaic or symbolic items were also normal or even expected. While there were plenty of practices frowned upon due to being easily seen as superstitious or associated with witchcraft, there was still a lot of socially acceptable items, especially those which had medicinal or decorative functions as well, and some more "magical" charms or amulets could be simply concealed. Apparently, the majority of households typically had at least one or two items with symbolic, apotropaic or decorative purpose (often all three, because they are not in any way exclusive), deliberately placed on display, for example above the hearth, above the door, generally at thresholds and in the main rooms of a building. The most common of those were simple scratched markings and symbols as well as herbs and flowers, the latter of which tended to have practical purposes as well, to repel insects or pests, mask unpleasant smells, and had plenty of use in medicine or in cooking as well. Needless to say I have a lot of hopes for the herbalism system. Plenty of people also had a personal charm, pendant or amulet, or more than one, many of which were deliberately carried visibly on person to signal piety or social status, as well as to ward off evil - that's our temporal gear amulet, basically. They could also be used to carry coins, identity markers and for some other purposes. And here is the probably most important part: there is well-documented correlation between the frequency of apotropaic items and various crises - plagues, wars, witchcraft panics and the like. This is, I believe, the strongest argument for at least a bunch of decorations with distinct theming, if nothing else, to be added to any villages, outposts or wagons. This is also largely why the Order of the Forlorn Hope was formed, would I imagine - people tend to flock to where they feel safer and more in control, especially in times of turmoil. Religion offers this like almost nothing else. I don't want to dwell on this topic too much, but I hope this serves as sufficient explanation for why the lack of almost any charms or anything of the sort kind of bothers me.

I've edited this suggestion to account for feedback and some additional ideas while streamlining the whole thing. The changes primarily include moving some parts around, reducing focus on plowing as I didn't initially realize how heavily reliant on animals it is, and adding the idea for incorporating harvest residue into the soil after collecting crops. TDLR Leave organic remains after harvesting crops and allow tilling farmland for large benefits to nutrient absorption from fertilizers and passive replenishment (and consequently reduce the baseline nutrient replenishment rate), as a way to require more effort to grow food, and reward this effort with higher yields. This suggestion only attempts to put forward a concise improvement to specific parts of the system and to some extent consolidate a few smaller suggestions. I know that there is also a variety of other ideas primarily related to irrigation, obtaining seeds, plant variety, and whatever I may have missed, and that a lot of them may be adjustable through mods, but those are not my focus here. Primary motivation for this suggestion As it stands, farming is highly simplified to the point of requiring almost no investment for high returns, and a farming cycle boils down to a very simplistic "plant seeds => wait => collect" loop with very little added complexity or maintenance. In this way it also allows the player to create unreasonably large farms which have impractically large yields, with no real limit and no detriment to overexpanding due to how fast and easy it is to plant and harvest crops. The main goal is to make farming more engaging and immersive, while incentivizing slighly smaller, but more high-effort gardens instead of large crop fields that require almost no maintenance. Other issues that these changes can address 1. Once a farm is established, hoes become practically useless. 2. Farmland does not drop soil when broken (I know this is very old complaint, but also one that is not the easiest to fix without allowing certain exploits). 3. The player is able to immediately build massive farms almost completely unconstrained instead of starting with a smaller garden patch until better farming implements are unlocked. 4. Historically, farming was made much more efficient with the introduction of better agricultural tools, which constituted a massive improvement to quality of life across the world. There have been some especially important breakthroughs, for example when the introduction of cast iron in Europe made high-quality tools much more available to an unprecedented number of common people. This kind of progression is, as of now, completely absent in the game - a crude stone hoe is absolutely sufficient even after steel is unlocked. 5. Fertilizers make farming even more tivialized by allowing to use plants that consume the same nutrient many times in a row with no problems, but even that doesn't really matter, because it's possible to increase the farming area at practically no cost and keep parts of it inactive to replenish nutrients without added maintenance. Combined with other factors, nutrient levels in my experience have low enough impact that a player could feasibly be unaware of them and still have no issues farming, just get confused sometimes when some crops grow a bit slower. The main proposition 1. As crops grow they consume nutrients from the soil - no major changes to vanilla may be necessary here, but it might be worth to prevent the player from methodically using up all the nutrients one-by-one, for example by reworking nutrient consumption to allow crops to consume multiple of them at the same time, or even produce some nutrients. Base nutrient replenishment rate should be reduced significantly relative to the current rate, and the same goes for the rate of absorption of nutrients from fertilizers. It may also be worth to increase nutrient consumption of crops. 2. Have collected crops leave behind organic remains (kind of like grass does after it is cropped), which the player should generally remove after each harvest. It may or may not be possible to plant crops without removing the remains, but removing them would provide a signifiant boost to nutrients, be it immediate or over-time (it could simply apply the same kind of nutrient bonus as fertilizers do). Removing and incorporating the residue by hand would likely be possible, but it should probably have reduced benefits to properly incentivize better methods. 3. Allow farmland to be tilled using a hoe, potentially in the same way as creating farmland in the first place. This process would increase nutrient replenishment and fertilizer absorbtion rates and absorb nutrients from harvest residue at the same time. Replenishment rate would likely remain significantly reduced while crops are growing on the tile. Tilling could also: temporarily increase maximum nutrient levels, give a small immediate bonus to nutrients, increase yields from crops planted on tilled farmland by the virtue of more seeds surviving, increase the total effect of fertilizers, instead of just increasing how fast they get absorbed. It may be useful to allow to cultivate the soil while crops are already growing, which is not important in this core suggestion but some other features may make it necessary. This change could require to increase the durability of hoes. Better hoes may work faster and apply higher buffs on top of the most obvious durability advantage. Optional changes 1. When not tilled, have farmland very slowly return to its base state (soil) in a few stages, each requiring slightly more effort to convert to usable farmland again, with the goal of disincentivizing overexpansion and leaving farmland unused for extended periods of time. This could be integrated with the presence of weeds in some way, so that regular weeding would prevent this conversion. Crops that were planted but remained unharvested would still remain there indefinitely and could keep growing slowly, perhaps also preventing the final conversion from farmland to soil to allow easier retilling. It may also mean that: farmland wouldn't be immediately usable after winter, and would have to be tilled again before use, farmland could be collected for relocation, but the player would have to wait a fairly long time first. 2. Allow weeds to grow together with the player's crops. They could grow as part of the farmland block and not as separate plants to avoid excessive complexity with another thing in the same block as crops. This could be tied into converting farmland back into soil. The weeds should grow very slowly with at least two growth stages, the first of which would have no effects yet, and would have to be removed either as part of tilling or by hand. They should be implemented in a way so that their effects are less significant if weeds grow shortly before the harvest, for example by incrementing a reduction to yields only when the main crop's growth advances to the next stage. This could be associated with some new plants that grow on farmland and can be found throughtout the world where it makes sense, because the current grass (and rare horsetail) is functional but simplistic. 3. Have tilling also reduce moisture or apply other temporary debuffs, to require the player to maintain a proper balance and avoid overtillage and apply more pressure to either use fertilizers or rotate crops. It could also serve as a way to reduce excessive moisture in wet climates, and could be associated with the addition of different moisture requirements for different plants. 4. Increase the initial cost of creating farmland, either through a direct cost increase or through something like reduced base nutrient levels shortly after creating farmland. It would disincentivize replacing soil after each harvest, to counterbalance the changes to replenishing nutrients potentially amplifying some undesirable incentives. Possible related changes (more long-term) 1. Implement planter boxes or pots (be it ceramic, from wooden boards or whatnot) as a method of small-scale vegetable (and herb) farming, potentially simplified in several ways (no farmland turning back into soil, no weeds or at least less of them, better water retention) but requiring regular use of a watering can or reliance on rain due to lack of irrigation. I'm thinking that something like a trowel could be used to aerate the soil in planter boxes, though that might be getting a bit excessive in detail. Similar planter boxes are also a prime candidate for mushroom growing which is on the roadmap, but that's getting a bit outside the scope of the suggestion. 2. Add plows to the game which would perform the same job as a hoe, but would be faster, more convenient, more durable, and potentially would apply higher or more buffs. However, plows would likely require an animal to pull them, which may easily end up time-inefficient, finnicky to control, or have a variety of other issues. It's a high-potential but high-risk feature. There are some examples of human-powered plows from Asia, as well as other implements in-between a hoe and a plow starting from the 18th century, but they're pretty niche. There's a bunch of different designs and levels of technology at which regular plows could be unlocked (most important are early mould-board plows, later improved with iron ploughshares), but regardless of specifics the goal is to increase efficiency of farming and improve the effort to reward ratio along with progression. It may even be worth to require a plow to create proper farmland, while delegating the hoe to creating simple garden patches. The hoe could likely be used to till both, but the plow would be unsuitable for gardens. A garden patch could be slightly more efficient for growing vegetables (and herbs), while farmland in turn could be better for grains. Some potential problems to discuss 1. Added complexity doesn't necessarily equal more fun and enjoyment. I do not have a good answer to this other than that plenty of other mechanics aren't necessarily fun or enjoyable in the moment, but we expect them in a realistic, uncompromising survival and would probably say the game is better off for having them. For the game that Vintage Story aims to be, farming gives surprisingly high returns for very little effort and has an extremely flat progression curve. 2. These changes may impose tedious, routine maintenance on the player. Do note, however, that in the simplest possible implementation it would only ever require to use a hoe once after every harvest if not less, without the need for regular maintenance, which wouldn't be excessively time-consuming or distracting from other tasks. 3. Some of these changes may make farming less accessible to new players by introducing additional complexity. This is largely why I suggest that tilling should be balanced in a way that it is only really required after the first winter, as similarly that weeds should grow slowly. 4. Requiring regular use of farming tools may create a fast resource sink, in extreme cases forcing the player to return to stone tools if they don't stock up on enough metal, which can be especially risky for new players. A simple solution would just be to give hoes and plows very high durability, but I don't know how good an idea that is. It may also be largely solved with a decent tool maintenance or recasting system, but that's a much bigger topic than I'm willing to dive into for the purpose of these features. 5. The need for maintenance can disrupt the player's long trips and exploration, by requiring them to return and care for crops. This only really applies to weeds, though, and other mechanics can be easily implemented in a way that makes them primarily matter before planting and after a harvest, without requiring excessive maintenance. 6. Anything that can progress independently of crop growth can introduce issues on servers where an individual player is only active for a small part of the server's uptime, by making the farm overgrown during the player's inactivity. This should be easy to fix by modifying a few parameters in server settings, and on the designer's side by avoiding mechanics that require excessive continuous maintenance from the player. 7. As with all changes of this caliber, the resulting balance would have to be monitored closely and additional adjustments may have to be made.

Fair. I'm going off of common sense now and sincerely hope the story locations will be worth it, because I liked what I read in a bunch of lore books and scrolls from ruins. I cannot wait to find out what supernatural material or whatnot Jonas parts use, which cannot be extracted from them or obtained in any other way, and allows them and nothing else to interact with stability. In the meantime, feel free to discard the ideas related to stability, and let's keep the focus on those which have nothing to do with neither stability (except by proxy through rotbeasts) nor any sort of magic, like the upper half of that rough list:

But... that's just exchanging one inaccuracy for another, even if a less glaring one. A realistic implementation of a blast furnace would still require a finery forge to be added either way. I get the reason for this simplification, but realistically a finery forge was just a somewhat more specialized forge - we wouldn't even necessarily need to make it a multi-block structure - which was used to turn pig iron into wrought iron, that still had to be carburized to obtain steel. Apologies if I'm repeating the same things too much, but I personally have pretty high standards for a game focused on realism as much as Vintage Story, which I find difficult to cast aside just for the sake of making steelmaking faster or simpler. I've been working on it slowly, but it feels like I'm constantly sidetracked in a cycle of "this part is unrealistic -> uh this needs to be simpler". I kind of already described it in the previous post, though, so you already have most of the picture: I'm also considering a simple 2x2x2 or 2x3x2 structure made of layers of corner pieces named like "blast furnace base (corner)", "blast furnace top (corner)". I'll see if I can make appropriate mockups in a reasonable amount of time.

The temporal gear amulet, not the Forlorn Hope amulet. They look very similar, admittedly, but the former is effectively an emergency temporal gear which doesn't take up an inventory slot. My apologies if I'm getting annoyed or annoying, but how many times do I have to say that I'm not talking about magic? I'm not familiar with the lore enough to say it with a sufficient level of certainty, but I struggle to believe that temporal stability can somehow only ever be interacted with using specially-designed delicate machinery. The thing with machines tends to be that they are more accurate, more reliable and more efficient replacements for simpler tools and devices, not something that was designed one day by some stroke of genius and had no prior alternative. Put a temporal gear on a string and observe it while you're walking around an area. Does it behave differently in certain places? Maybe those could be the unstable ones. If that works, then try other things. Put it on a stick. Attach it to things. Improvise basic contraptions. Granted, the temporal gear is supposed to "turn a constant level of inertia", I think, so maybe it is not the best choice for this, but surely there are also other things that could be used for a similar purpose. Ultimately, Jonas parts are made from something, and it ought to be possible to achieve various effects when using the same materials, if only by taking these parts apart and studying or reusing them in more improvised contraptions, given that they can interact with stability as seen by the rift ward. And you did say at some point that there is a lore reason for why the seraph knows Jonas tech or something of the sort. I'm thinking of it kind of like electricity - for a medieval setting it's practically magic, and you're not gonna replicate something like a computer (really, you can't even make a single modern electrical component without appropriate tools, so you'd have to improvise heavily in a lot of cases), but it works on simple physical principles that were discovered much earlier and originally used in very simple ways. As for the idea for the ritual to close a rift or reduce instability, the same thought process applies. Find something that seems capable of stabilizing things - a temporal seems like an easy fit - then walk up to a rift or find an unstable area and try do do whatever you can think of to it. Burn it, hit it, add chemicals to it, arrange it with metal scraps and Jonas parts, anything. Something happened? Write down how you did it, including the weird things that might not have actually been necessary necessary, but, well, they worked. Boom, you have a ritual. Are all items equally affected by instability? Could there be something which gets "glitched" for lack of a better word, where it gets dangerously unstable, more so than the surroundings. It may just be a trinket, or it may have an actual purpose. Or maybe something could promote stability in some way (right about the same semi-scientific idea as for the rift ward, just simpler and less controlled), creating a pocket that could offer some protection in a temporal storm. Observe how drifters behave. Do they react to light? Do they react to any symbols? Can they be blinded, stunned, shocked? Do they react to strong aroma? Are they attracted to something or do they prefer to stay away from something? Does their body react with anything, starting from simple chemicals and poisons? Be it something that creates a physical reaction in their bodies, or something that reminds them of something from the past, if they are capable of that. Or are they just completely mindless, boring, "zombies" with no distinguishing features? When I talk about improvised remedies and decoctions with various effects, I'm talking about things that are known to react with the human body in a whole range of ways, or things that could be easily explained to react with the seraph's biology. We have a horsetail poultice and a honey-sulfur poultice already in the game, though their effects are heavily simplified, the same as the effects of bandages. I really don't know how I'm supposed to describe it to avoid you interpreting it as magic, when introducing magic is expressly not my intent.

I have to say, I love the idea, but the more I read about it the less viable it seems. It's one thing to simplify it for the sake of gameplay - I'm all for it if the end result is fun, engaging - and another to completely ignore fundamental principles that allow the furnace to function. What I mean is that I've run into a notable roadblock which may be difficult to account for with any level of realism. A real blast furnace operates continuously, without discrete charges, refilled continuously every hour or even more often, and for weeks or months with no breaks until it has to be very carefully and slowly shut down and repaired. The full column of material has to be maintained consistently, and any imbalances may cause the chemical reaction in the furnace to destabilize in extremely dangerous ways. Both cooling down the furnace too fast or running out of charge mid-operation easily produces catastrophic consequences, in the best case scenario requiring the furnace to be cleaned out of remaining material and repaired. In the worst case, the only option is to basically tear the whole thing down. Early Chinese furnaces are more forgiving in this regard, but still few can be stopped and restarted fully freely like batch furnaces. In order to allow reliable intermittent operation without risk of heavy damage, the furnace has to be simpler than European furnaces and at most about 4 m in height. There is a potential alternative which doesn't need to be run continuously in the cupola furnace as well, though it is a tad more modern and seems to be more intricate in design. I may yet look into it further, but I cannot promise anything. For now, I want to mention that the easiest way to simplify your design with in a way that I would consider fully acceptable in terms of size is to just scale it down to a simple 3x3 structure with 4-5 blocks of height. Empty interior, hearth at the bottom and hopper at the top, one taphole for molten iron, one taphole for slag, and one tuyere (air blast opening for the bellows). And there's a few clarifications and other details below, if you're interested. Realistically, casting molten iron follows two main paths: 1. Pig iron - metal flows from the furnace directly into a large sand bed, and the stream of metal through the main channel (the sow) gets split between a number of molds to form large ingot-like pieces (the pigs). Those can then be broken off once solidified and transported to a finery forge for processing into wrought iron. Most impurities and some other issues are tolerated, because they will be worked out later in the forge anyways. 2. Finished products - metal is directed into a large ceramic-lined ladle, which is then used to carefully pour iron into detailed sand molds while allowing to precisely skim slag from the surface. The reason why they can't be cast directly from the furnace is that the direct stream is turbulent and more contaminated with slag, which causes a variety of issues when the goal is to precisely cast a clean and durable product which has to be practically ready to use right out of the mold. The two can be used interchangeably, or even at the same time, since part of the stream can be directed into the pig bed and another part into ladles with no issues. It feels like you may be overestimating how large a part of steel production is taken up by iron refining. Collecting the raw materials and a large amount of fuel (mainly for the cementation furnace) is already a large time sink, and making iron refining cheap and quick won't affect all those other parts of steelmaking. Let's not forget that a single cementation furnace processes 16 ingots and and consumes 168 pieces of coal every cycle, taking 6.67 days, if I recall correctly. A single bloomery produces 6 iron blooms and consumes 6 pieces of coal over 10 hours, which can be done 16 times in the same 6.67 day span that takes for one cementation furnace to complete its cycle, letting just one continuously-running bloomery supply six continuously-running cementation furnaces. At that point I'm frankly kind of confused as to why the bloomery is the one that needs to have a better alternative. Granted, I get it's not simply about scale but also about iron refining, but with a decent helve hammer setup I've never found to have any problems with that, whereas coal can be really tedious to obtain in this massive quantities (184 per cementation furnace cycle including bloomery but not including refining). It may still be relatively easy and fast to refine pig iron, especially if one pig turns into two, maybe even three or four ingots. Here's a fun fact I've found: the middle step between pig iron and wrought iron obtained partway through the finery forge process is actually an iron bloom, similar to the one obtained from a bloomery, albeit much more consistent and uniform, lower in slag content and overall better quality. I don't want to endlessly reiterate the problems with adding blast furnaces, so I'll start with scalability. I do agree that it is an excellent thing to have, if only to allow easier onboarding of new players into the more complex game mechanics - a windmill with one set of sails can power a quern, but there is so much to improve and expand for a player who wishes to engage with the system deeper and progress. There are some things which aren't scalable without duplication, like the cementation furnace, and if they are too complex they may be very unapproachable for a newer player - that is why my first reaction to the large furnace concept was just to make it smaller, if nothing else. The easiest way to implement scalability is to just allow the player to repeat things many times if one is not enough. The bloomery currently does the job well, and for large-scale smelting there's nothing stopping the player from just making tens or even hundreds of bloomeries if they so desire. Not greatly convenient, yes, but possible, and the blast furnace would need a more meaningful distinction from the bloomery in order to be worth it, especially if implemented in a remotely realistic way. The beehive kiln allows firing different ceramic colors, while scaled-up mechanical power allows to use more demanding machines (the helve hammer) and do it much more consistently without having to wait randomly for wind. One distinguishing factor for the blast furnace could be to allow cast iron to be used directly in the cementation furnace - I've already made it clear that in reality it has to be processed into wrought iron first and only then carburized, you have mentioned its high carbon content yourself, and just putting it without extra carbon will kinda cook it in some way but the output will not be steel. A more realistic way to differentiate them could be different qualities of iron and therefore likely also of steel, but I don't know if that's a good idea. But hey, isn't there a more obvious difference between the two furnaces? Cast iron products are the most important benefit of blast furnaces if scale doesn't provide significant benefits (it could in the future, but that's probably like in 5 years if ever), and for this specific purpose, a much smaller furnace is absolutely sufficient. Early Chinese ones are even much more forgiving on stopping and restarting without catastrophic damage, which is large part of why I would prefer the potential design in VS to be more similar to them (could be even very similar to the OP's concept, just much smaller).

True, but in that case, it should be theming only. Otherwise, if the counter to the monsters is magic charms and rituals, then it's no longer realistic survival and steampunk sci-fi, but generic fantasy. Really not ideal to have that kind of abrupt tone shift. Note: I wrote much of this before your more recent post. Frankly it is unclear to me why you describe it as generic fantasy, because I mean it more in a folk tales and superstitions kind of way. They naturally serve as inspiration for many fantasy settings, but it is only natural that, in a world overrun by rotbeasts and other horrors, people would develop their own explanations and stories about what they see, and try to find ways to combat what they do not understand. Themes of this sort are also not alien to lovecraftian or similar fiction, from what I've seen, which does appear to be a notable inspiration for Vintage Story. Note as well that this doesn't have to be something that everyone engages with - you could even have a split between more superstitious and more pragmatic people in different villages and outposts. We already kind of have one item that could be included in this category - the temporal gear amulet. Extremely simple, yes, but that's also kind of the point. It doesn't have to go into extremes and either be a big solution to something or just a purely decorative bauble. I could list out a range of reasonably simple features that could easily have sufficiently plausible in-universe explanations without employing conventional magic and without particularly drastic gameplay consequences: allow creating a larger variety of containers, stands, racks or just simple rope or cloth which can be used to keep temporal gears and other items, including things like lanterns or jugs, amulets, small things like bones or herbs, and most of the stuff that I'm listing out below, on display and/or ready to use, be it hung from the ceiling, in a decorative box (maybe with dedicated space for gears and a knife), on a display stand, or anything in that vein, add a single-use item which somehow overwhelms or otherwise briefly incapacitates rotbeasts (in a lore-accurate way - I'm thinking of how the shiver curls up occasionally, or how the drifter raises its arms and looks into the sky - it may be possible to somehow bring out the remaining scraps of cognition, emotion or whatever they may have left, at least for the weaker ones; this is also kind of related to the idea for throwing sand or quicklime to blind them, as the effect is similar), make rotbeasts more hesitant to stay near areas with certain symbols or trinkets, or to cross lines made from some sort of loose or powdery substance (basically just adjusted random pathing weight or cost; some items may also have the opposite effect of attracting rotbeasts), have one of the herbs weaken or scare away rotbeasts when it's burned (ideally, it would burn significantly longer when made into proper incense), add various improvised remedies, poisons, and herbal or more unusual decoctions with a variety of effects - courtesy of a status effect system and requiring a bunch of herbs to be added, so I won't delve into this too much here, add a way to coat a weapon with some sort of oil to apply an additional effect when attacking rotbeasts (the exact same system could be used for maintenance of weapons and tools made of ferrous metals to protect against corrosion), make rotbeasts afraid of fire to some extent (as mentioned along with the bonfire suggestion), allow burning or otherwise destroying some temporally affected items for a stability boost (kind of like killing rotbeasts improves stability), add collectible trinkets and baubles which may either increase or reduce stability in an area or have odd, stability-related effects when interacted with (some may also be sold, taken apart or used in a craftable device), allow to take a short nap during temporal storms as long as the player has a protective amulet of sorts nearby (which provides a pocket of relative stability), implement some sort of a ritual to close a rift or to permanently or temporarily increase stability in an area (sacrificing something in the process, presumably a temporal gear and potentially something else), add a small device that allows to gauge the time and duration of temporal storms or to check current rift activity and predict it at least a few hours ahead, add an improvised device which produces a warning when a storm is approaching and about to start (there could also be a more late-game cast bronze bell which could be used for the same purpose, exquisitely fitting for various church, temple or castle builds), add a medallion or amulet that produces a warning of some sort in unstable areas and/or when the player's stability is low. Some of these items (mainly the ones near the bottom of the list) are partially associated with that other suggestion to remove or redesign the player's stability gauge (the spinning gear). Removing an immediate tell in the UI would require the addition of other means to measure an area's and the player's own stability and the theming of the required items is closely associated with this suggestion. Several of these functions could be easily fulfilled by Jonas tech as well, but I don't think it should be the universal answer to everything pertaining to stability. Perhaps, since you know the lore much better than me, you may say that a bunch of these ideas don't fit, but I as of now know no reason to categorically discard any of them on these grounds. And of course, there is always space for purely decorative items like ornaments, charms, drawings, totem poles, garlands and whatever else, and I think they are certainly better than nothing. We do have some already, primarily in the form of a bunch of clothing items and repairable clutter, though almost all of them are only ever looted from somewhere (sometimes purchased as well). There are few actual decorations that can be placed, even fewer still that can be hung on walls or ceilings. Most clutter is dark, desaturated and broken in some way making it unsuitable for most purposes. The biggest advantage of purely decorative items, at the very least, is that they are easier to implement in high quantity. And to keep it remotely related to the topic, I'll mention that, implemented well, some of these items may offer alternative ways out of certain encounters that aren't just focused on head-to-head combat, which largely goes in line with the original suggestion. I don't know if I have to reiterate that these ideas are not supposed to just be some generic magic, and the gameplay functions don't have to take a big focus of the game. There's plenty of ways to integrate much of it neatly into stability, if nothing else. The denizens of this world are not following arbitrary superstitions just because they are superstitious - they are responding to the world around them, and instability along with associated alien horrors is a crucial part of it.

Cork is harvested from the bark of (primarily) cork oak, which is an evergreen oak native to southwest Europe and northwest Africa (source: Wikipedia). It wouldn't be completely unreasonable to make it possible to use regular oak for it, though introducing another type of tree is a great option as well, and it could help distinguish mediterranean regions more. Their practical use cases, however, are extremely limited until barrels and the fruit press are unlocked. Cork availability may be a more significant limiting factor for juice preservation compared to clay, especially if cork oak were limited to a narrow latitude range. Alternatively, glassmaking could introduce proper bottles, allowing fluid preservation methods to be pushed back in progression.

Yeah, no, it would have to be implemented in a way that doesn't restrict creative building. Similar mechanics were discussed in this thread before, and one of the ideas was that we may want to add new threats that aren't just different enemies which ultimately are dealt with in the same ways. Some kind of ghosts, infestations, particularly extreme temporal fractures. Or creatures that can in some way reach inside without destroying blocks. The point about having some way to counter it is a very important one, though. I would actually argue the opposite to a certain extent. People often tend to be superstitious, and if they believe it will benefit them they will surround themselves with endless trinkets and whatnot, and perform little rituals to keep their demons away. Dreamcatchers, candles and similar are far from exclusive with fortifications, and some well-themed amulets, incense, something as little as "put a temporal gear under your pillow" or larger rituals that the player could perform may have a lot of potential to greatly reinforce the feeling of an unfamiliar world haunted by eldritch horrors and the desperate circumstances of the last survivors. Some sort of folk theming might fit villages and outposts quite neatly as well, especially the smaller ones. The bonfire idea I could see being a useful mid-game strategy to keep low tier monsters at bay, but not high tier ones(those should remain incredibly serious threats). I think the heat is also a reasonable excuse for why a bonfire would keep spooks away, but not lanterns, despite both providing lots of light. And of course, bonfires could also be used to keep hostile wildlife away from your camp as well, since that's much more intimidating than a measly little campfire. Though to keep it balanced in terms of resource cost, perhaps it requires the firewood equivalent of a small charcoal pit to actually get started, and then utilizes whole logs as fuel once established(but for a longer burn time in exchange for being unable to cook on said bonfire). I cannot rightly express how much I love this idea. I would also imagine a more late-game metal brazier that could be filled with a larger amount of fuel including with coal and burn for much longer. A small brazier could be used for civilized cooking on a grill, but a larger one, or a proper, maybe 2x2 bonfire? Come closer to the fire, people, let us burn the filth away! The monsters shall not reach us tonight, for the eternal flame protects us! I would really love a status effect system to add that. Long-term injuries would much more meaningfully reinforce the extreme danger of the monsters than making an Egyptian mummy out of yourself with all the bandages in small breaks between fighting sometimes five to ten enemies at a time in a war of attrition.

Okay, my experience does largely align with that, as I have yet to see something spawn literally on top of me, but the issue of spawning in other rooms is still significant. How did the monster get inside, realistically? He claims he phased through the wall, but doesn't want to show it now that I'm recording. I have spent most of my time in my longest-running world in a 3-floor house with 5x7 interiors (the lowest floor is a cellar, two other ones are connected with stairs making a single room in the game's logic), and it doesn't even include anything metalworking-related. I've had something spawn inside once in about two or three storms on average, and a few of those times it walked down from the top floor and jumped me while I was working in the kitchen. And yes, I did check, the game detects all the rooms correctly. The worst part - I've run out of space despite using a bunch of trunks, crates and barrels on the outside as well, in part because I prefer to sort my items neatly and so my chests tend to be at most half-full. Yeah, some people would benefit from learning how to build small. But I can't make it smaller without sacrificing convenience or aesthetics, and in spite of this I still get occasional spawns in a house which I would consider to already be on the smaller side. No remodeling options seem particularly appealing, and expanding the house is even less so if it were to increase spawns on the inside. It feels restrictive and annoying, especially when that occasional monster sometimes has enough damage to outright one-shot a player without armor (speaking from experience). From a game design perspective, if something gets inside, it generally should be the player's fault or at least there should be an otherwise clear "why" and "how" behind it, instead of there just being a small but nontrivial chance to spawn something nearly anywhere it pleases. This may constitute a notable part of why some people are dissatisfied with combat and say it's too common, because they got dumped into encounters with almost no warning a few times more than they would have liked.

I see the argument, but having three separate systems (free gameplay, "partially claimed" and claimed) may introduce unnecessary complexity to the claim system which already isn't exactly simple and intuitive. It may be better to either stick to it as is or make it slightly less restrictive globally. I'm not certain on player claims, though. A very similar solution but approached from a different angle (arguably much better) could be to rework some items (make the scrap bomb an actual throwable) and introduce a small class of "portable" items which could be placed in claimed areas, perhaps with some restrictions. They could be automatically broken if in the way of some machinery or otherwise blocking or obstructing something, and they may get automatically collected back into the player's inventory when they walk too far away (just a thought, but I think with a lot of potential). This category of items may include some light sources like torches and lanterns, bags (i.e. backpacks and so on), the firepit or a portable stove, a sleeping bag, optionally ladders, perhaps bombs and other traps (griefing would have to be addressed). The goal is to allow the player to perform some basic survival activities and implement intuitive problem-solving methods that they're used to from outside of claimed areas, without giving complete crearive freedom. Granted, unless limited to an extremely narrow selection of items, this change may still require adjustments to existing story locations, and I don't know if the devs want to do that.

Maybe I just haven't seen the same discussions, but I recall seeing similar suggestions received pretty positively, with the sentiment that implementing it well would feel much more immersive and engaging than just plopping down that same nightmare shiver directly in the player's house with no warning. The current implementation is extremely random and leaves the player with very little agency due to lacking prevention methods aside from exploiting monster spawn mechanics. Either way, the reason I brought this up is that I have seen a bunch of people comment on those discussions, and so they should be familiar with the mechanism I'm describing. This case aims to accomplish a completely separate goal, though, and what I'm saying is also arguably a simplification of another person's suggestion.

It really doesn't have to apply for all blocks, but primarily for tools and devices like ladders, bombs, traps, light sources, maybe a campfire or some new portable cooking pot for an especially large enclosed location. Some restrictions may be placed and some items might get automatically broken at key moments to prevent cheesing and unintended behaviours when something gets obstructed by placed hitboxes. A simpler way to handle removing placed items and blocks (though not universally applicable to all locations) could be to have them become temporally destabilized or otherwise affected after a short period of time in claimed areas, so that they become partially transparent and lose their hitboxes and functionality. Kind of like it has been suggested for temporal storms to make them more dangerous without just spawning enemies on top of the player. The delay before destabilization or whatnot should be long enough to allow using bombs and the like, but fairly short and well-communicated to make the rules and effects clear. Ideally, it would still be possible to pick up the items and stabilize them in some way, even if just by taking them out of the claimed area.

That's fair, and I did mention it in the next sentence after what you quoted. I don't know how normal that is, but I haven't had any real issues with berry spoilage after the first winter, especially considering that berries can easily fruit twice per year. I just use them up roughly as they appear for pies and juicing (and I have never even found bees for jam yet), and any excess can get juiced regardless to get more rot (for some reason the combined mash and juice rot is almost double that of unprocessed berries). The juice gets mostly fermented into alcohol, while fruit mash fulfills a large part of the need for animal feed in the summer. Flax tends to be more useful for animals than for meals, since they get the same number of portions from the same amount of grain despite flax grain's lower satiety. Pies also give you more satiety per portion of grain than porridge, and they last longer. Maybe I'm hyperoptimizing some things, but I've genuinely never found good reason to use the low-satiety fruit and grain for meals, since I've practically never ran out of better foods. Granted, cranberry's slower spoilage can be really nice before you get a cellar and a complete meal-making setup with sufficient supplies.

I'll see if I can work out a solid concept at some point, but in the meanwhile I have a few quicker comments. Overall I agree with a bunch of your points and a few of my criticisms were a little rash, but I'd argue your suggestion has a big issue with scale. First, a note on this: cast iron and pig iron are almost the same - pig iron takes the name from the way it is cast (a main channel called a sow which "feeds" a series of pigs, which are generally 20-50 kg metal chunks, similar to ingots but larger), and the primary difference between the two is that pig iron is poured quickly and tolerates impurities since it's refined later anyways, while cast iron is the result of careful and precise pouring into a detailed mold to obtain a clean and strong product. I'm also not a big fan of some of the inaccuracies in your concept (i.e. pig/cast iron going directly into cementation furnace without processing into wrought iron, or cast iron not being used for tools), if only because I know that the devs value realism and historical accuracy quite highly as well. Wrought iron, is practically the same as that obtained from bloomeries, and historically the blast furnace has largely superseded the bloomery for most applications. I don't see much reason to restrict it for gameplay reasons. While it does sound very appealing in some respects, keep in mind that you're talking about 17th and 18th century advancements focused largely on large-scale industry and bordering on the Industrial Revolution proper, whereas the current technological level of Vintage Story doesn't generally go beyond the 15th, maybe the 16th century. This would require massive development effort into a wide breadth of new features to keep all areas of the game roughly on par. And that's when we still don't have many simpler machines, devices or systems that would arguably be much more important, like a basic loom, fishing, a woodworking system for simple tools, kitchenware and furniture, a glassmaking system for proper bottles and jars, farming improvements in the form tilling or plowing farmland. All stuff that historically appeared and developed well before metal machinery. Large industrial machinery would also realistically take multiple people to run reliably and would supply entire towns or cities, and it most likely wouldn't have developed the way it did if there wasn't a need for this scale of production. I don't know if that makes much sense to add to a game which, although technically allows large-scale multiplayer, is ultimately designed mostly around solo play or groups of a few friends. In that vein, do you know how massive this furnace actually is? A real blast furnace from around the 17th-18th century Europe apparently had about 8-10 m of height (matches yours pretty well if we were to count from the base to the hopper), designed for continuous operation with tapping multiple times per day, operated by a total of about two dozen people split between shifts in a variety of roles in the furnace complex, and outputting at least about 5 tons of cast iron per day. That is not practical for the current state of the game. Even an early 14th-15th century blast furnace apparently had about 5 m of height and and output of about 1 ton of metal per day over 3-4 casts, which is more reasonable though still quite a lot. I think it would be suitable to design a 3x5x3 furnace (or even shorter) with a hollow core, hearth at the bottom and charging hopper or whatnot at the top, which would be much easier to build for the player and to code for the devs. Also, keep in mind that you can put 64 ingots in the space of one block in ground storage, which would mean that, going by volume, even the smaller furnace could still believably hold the equivalent of a stack of ingots if not more, with the necessary fuel. A fairly cautious but realistic estimate could get you a single charge that yields 200-300 kg of output split into 6-9 pigs or an equivalent quantity of directly cast items (more likely some of both), with one tapping about every 6 to 8 hours. The equivalent of one pig may be two ingots of metal (and that would still arguably be a small pig or large ingots, more realistically it should be at least like 4 ingots). The furnace may have a maximum capacity of about 3 charges to allow more efficient continuous operation. Even scaled down further, it's difficult to keep it remotely realistic without having it output at least 8 ingots per cast. It may be reasonable to consider something like an early Chinese blast furnace 2x2x2 in size as well, to allow less efficient casting of a few pots and simple tools before the player invests into a large structure with refractory bricks and a large quantity of sand molds. Granted, there's a lot of places in the game which have completely unrealistic proportions and other concessions for the sake of gameplay, for example for brickmaking or shingle roofs. Thing with blast furnaces, though, is that a decently sized one should realistically have at least multiple times the bloomery's output per cast, or sometimes a few dozen times. There's a reason I keep harping on about how they're used for large-scale manufacturing. I will also mention quickly that a realistic implementation of a blast furnace would ideally require: 1. Large metal ladles with ceramic lining, instead of the simple crucibles. 2. A way to create sand channels through which metal flows into pigs for later processing into wrought iron (this would be very similar or even simpler than detailed sand molds). This is a fair point, but the same could be said of the beehive kiln, albeit to a lesser extent. It's not so good for small batches, but firing tons of shingles or bricks? it's absolutely worth it. The difference is that the beehive kiln has an early-game alternative in the pit kiln which is easily accessible and absolutely sufficient for the average player until they want to create decorative items en masse or fancy a specific ceramic color. For iron you could at best consider the bloomery an earlier alternative, but it would be unlocked at a much closer point in progression to a blast furnace than pit kiln is to beehive kiln. And perhaps more importantly, the bloomery can't produce cast iron, which is a bigger limitation than purely efficiency and cosmetic benefits of a beehive kiln. This is largely why I was suggesting two different furnaces: one small and accessible shortly after obtaining iron to be more balanced in complexity and size with other structures available at that stage of progression, and only then if needed we can consider a 17th-18th century behemoth. Even if we were to discard the gameplay aspects for a moment, it would just be much more realistic to start with an early blast furnace as it first appeared at scale around the 15th century in Europe, instead of immediately jumping from a late medieval bloomery straight to a blast furnace from near the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

This is a delightfully detailed suggestion, and I'll gladly reply in turn. I'd argue that the best use for cast iron is to provide a greater breadth of late-game improvements, especially with new cookware and furniture, much as suggested. Currently, the majority of important upgrades are unlocked in the Copper Age and a few things are in the Bronze Age, with subsequent progression having limited impact on building, homesteading and other activities unrelated to combat. While this is desirable to a large extent, as it doesn't lock important features behind lengthy progression that may discourage more casual players, it also leads to iron and steel being potentially disappointing, as they mainly provide stat increases which don't matter all that much outside of combat. Cast iron could serve as a new branch of progression after the initial processing of iron, giving the player an additional direction to progress parallel to steel, with a bunch of rewards that increase the efficiency of regular household or manufacturing tasks. Keep in mind that the benefits shouldn't be too drastic (for example, the 24-portion cooking pot might be a bit overkill, unless it has some drawbacks as well) as to avoid making players feel like they have to get cast iron as fast as possible. It's generally better to give the player meaningful choices for what they wish to prioritize and progress towards, and we want to incentivize and reward players for putting in the effort, not make them slog through until they reach the game proper. Ideally, I think it would be best to have endgame alloys be more specialized. Steel could be favored for high-cost high-quality sharp tools, weapons and armor. Cast iron, however, is brittle and so it's generally not useful for anything that needs a sharp edge, carries heavy loads or has to sustain strong impacts. It is more suitable for simpler agricultural tools, household items and furniture, simply by the virtue of requiring less effort to smelt while being almost as good as steel for those basic applications. This specialization between steel and cast iron may also align neatly with the historical introduction of large-scale cast iron production, which provided broad improvements to the quality of life throughout Europe but had little impact in cases where highest-quality metal was necessary. The main benefit of it was that cast iron products could be produced at much lower cost and much more consistently, benefitting both regular households with easier access to tools, cookware and safe stoves, and trades that needed a consistent supply of uniform metal parts. A simliar approach of specializing different items would also work well for other mid-game and late-game upgrades, for example a firewood-fueled brick fireplace might enable quickly cooking large batches of food with a larger pot, a cast iron stove could allow more fuel-efficient cooking in a regular pot, and a brazier of some sort would only allow cookng certain items (which can be placed on a rack) using coal, but faster than with the current one-at-a-time firepit mechanics. Another example would be a candle holder - worse than lanterns in terms of light radius, but easy to cast in large quantities (I'd argue casting should return two or even four of them per 100 units), without requiring relatively expensive metal plates and additional quartz for each light source. Realistically, pig iron obtained from a blast furnace can be processed into wrought iron in finery forges, which can then be used for steel as it has very low carbon content. While I'm no expert on the topic of metallurgy, I think I can say that it wouldn't be difficult to keep it both historically accurate and well-integrated into the game's progression. The biggest challenge would be communicating all the distinct iron products to a new player. I would also say that the blast furnace should not allow to skip iron refining entirely - instead, iron blooms should be replaced by the pig iron to wrought iron processing, which could be easier but still significant. That's in large part because reducing the need for a helve hammer (which is great for plates, but especially needed for iron blooms) would also greatly reduce the need for automation in general and also for the new high-speed machinery. The sheer size and complexity of this blast furnace concept is arguably unsuitable for the current progression - I think it should be reduced to a smaller size and simplified, to make it more achievable before steel. Historically, early European blast furnaces apparently had about 8 m of height and early Chinese ones were even smaller than that (sometimes as little as around 2 m of height), much less than the proposed 12 m. I'd have to double-check how exactly that is supposed to be measured, but regardless I think it would be better for the blast furnace to be somewhat smaller. Additionally, the average player really doesn't need 72 ingots worth of iron until they start getting into industrial production, and building such a massive structure just to fire it at a fraction of the capacity seems very unbalanced and unapproachable, especially for a newer player. Restricting the blast furnace to only be fueled with coke also seems completely unnecessary, even if it gets the player to engage with more game systems. It could be in some way faster or more efficient, but realistically charcoal is absolutely sufficient. Both for gameplay and realism reasons, there isn't much reason to use coke aside from supplementing charcoal shortages or utilizing types of coal which otherwise aren't suitable for smelting. It may actually make sense to create two different blast furnaces: 1. Smaller and simpler one, easily achievable shortly after or even before iron forging. At most about 3x6x3 in size but perhaps as small as 2x3x2, not counting spill chutes. It would be used for more easily casting smaller batches of simple cast iron cookware and farming tools, serving to more naturally introduce the player to cast iron mechanics in a way that integrates with the current progression much more smoothly. Also, it would be easier to implement for the devs more gradually while gauging gameplay balance and community sentiment, instead of beelining for mass production. 2. A huge blast furnace more similar to the OP's concept for creating large quantities of pig iron that can then be turned into a larger variety of more complex products (including machinery, fences and other construction elements) as well as into steel. There are things that I would argue should not be added to the game this late into the progression on the account of being disruptive, i.e. forcing the player to redo or relearn a lot and sometimes practically build a new home to accomodate the quantity and size of some suggested features. This primarily includes large multi-block furniture, albeit the OP's suggestions seem reasonable in this regard. Other items could also pose issues, like mechanical power parts or cookware, which may replace the earlier ones and leave the player with a bunch of stuff that can only be thrown out. I worry that cast iron would make a lot of items, including the increased variety of clay colors unlocked with the beehive kiln (used for both cooking pots and for realistic-looking fireplaces) kind of obsolete in favor of the generic black items from cast iron. We don't want too many things to default to cast iron in the late game due to alternatives being worse, and historically even something like ceramic cookware still had a lot of uses after the widespread introduction of cast iron because they were cleaner, non-reactive, safer and more resistant to high temperatures. Overall, though, I do like the suggestions, and some of them have also been quite frequently requested by the community (especially a better alternative to the firepit and more light sources, from what I've seen). To add to the list of items that could be introduced with cast iron: - braziers of different sizes may be used to cook food, - large cauldrons, if we go for historical accuracy, would have to serve as a replacement or alternative to barrels for some parts of the leathermaking, dyemaking, brewing and similar processes (cast iron was extremely important for large-scale industrial processes like those), - there's a lot of fun that could be had with decorative building elements, especially complex wrought iron fences of different heights, including a variety of gates in 1x1, 1x2, 2x2, 2x3 and perhaps other sizes, - I would love to have metal buckets, if only just to allow them to be stacked in ground storage (5 on one tile, possibly only if empty), - metal gears with different ratios could be useful for more precise speed and torque tuning. I do like the sand molds, as they get the player to keep some of their old items instead of just throwing all of them out, but they contribute to the same complexity concerns as mentioned before - it may be undesirable to lock large improvements behind such a late-game and difficult to set up manufacturing process. I also think that adding durability to them might not be a great idea. Most of the time some of the mold material has to be removed to get the product out of it, and also the mold cracks very easily, and so it's only suitable for a single casting. If we were to go for realism, then both ceramic and sand molds would have to be single-use, or maybe limited to at most 2 or 3 uses in certain cases. If ceramic molds are already indestructible, then I see no reason to add durability mechanic to sand molds, unless we want to specifically make them single-use. Cast iron machinery has the issue of being a replacement for everything, with most large industries starting to use them around the 17th and 18th century (which is notably later than the current tech level of the game, by the way). Small and precise gear systems, high-speed power transmission, machine frames and structural elements, milling, textile machiney, printing, metalworking. Everything got smaller, faster, stronger, and the old wooden machinery became obsolete. It would arguably even require the addition of new variants of helve hammers, pulverizers and a whole lot of other machinery, not just axles and gears, and may invite brand new features to automate like looms, sawmills and so much else. Starting with one thing may require fifty other new features to match the level of technology with an acceptable level of historical accuracy. That said, I especially like the bellows and the more self-enclosed metal parts that may be neatly integrated into the current system, like the flywheel or the gearbox (probably should have just two gears for simplicity). A good middle-ground, though, may lie in wood-metal hybrids - very similar to wooden machinery, but reinforced with metal, or with some high-load parts replaced entirely - which could be used to upgrade the current machinery in place for better speed and torque tolerance.

You're making me want to list out all the little details that make me like this game so much. Granted, I'm taking some of my information from the wiki with limited testing, so take it with a grain of salt. I ain't here to criticize how you play, but cranberries due to their low satiety tend to be most optimal for juicing (be it for drinking, alcohol, fruit mash for animals, or to produce rot) and less useful than the four other types for cooking meals. If you have to eat them raw or preserve to use later then they will last longer, at least. For the other four, though, I don't know of any notable differences aside from appearance and the ability to stack two currant bushes, so you can get quite literally whichever you prefer and I personally just do all of them. Of the temperate fruit trees, all apples and pear don't have any big advantages or disadvantages. Pink apple has a bit higher yield and is arguably best, while pear and yellow apple are general all-rounders, though pear is more resistant to cold and takes longer to bear fruit. Red apple seems to fare best in colder than temperate climates but produces slightly less fruit, and cherry is the standout with half the satiety and very short spoil time but nearly 50% higher yield, pretty bad for cooking but king for juicing. Peach just seems kind of bad, honestly, I don't know why but I don't think it has any notable advantages while having very short spoil time and poor temperature resistance. Among the warm-climate fruit trees there is much more variety, and the most notable mentions are breadfruit which is excellent for meals and lychee which is great for juicing. There's the olive impostor as well, which actually provides vegetable nutrition and therefore can't be juiced, but can be pickled, which gives it a unique niche. I would imagine they might rework berries to be more similar to fruit trees in terms of flowering and fruiting mechanics, with different timings and temperature requirements to differentiate the species between each other. They may serve as an early introduction into the same mechanics that fruit trees follow, similar but slightly reduced in complexity. I'm not sure about other utility, though, since realistically berries are pretty much only used culinarily and sometimes for dyes, both of which we already largely have. At best they could allow drying or freezing food, which would include berries. Maybe also add them to bread dough? Kinda stretches it thin, though, since berries already have plenty of gameplay depth between meals, jam and juicing.

A lot of the new additions seem to be completely optional. Hopefully, this means that while the total complexity of forging will increase, the minimum effort required to obtain a usable product will not change much if at all. Quenching and tempering are also generally only used for ferrous alloys from what I've seen, which means that working with copper and bronze will likely stay mostly unaffected. I do also hope they don't overdo it with the new features, because metalworking is already pretty complex as is and takes a while for a new player to learn and master, but it is undeniable that the current mechanics have a lot of potential for greater variety while forging and for additional refining and maintenance after the initial forging. I think I trust them to balance this quite well to avoid overwhelming newer players.

We kind of already have this in the game, since most class-exclusive items (some of which can be purchased from traders anyways) are designed to be an upgrade over items that can be crafted by everyone. The sling is the only properly unique class-exclusive item, but even that can just be considered an early alternative to the simple bow. In some cases, even partially removing class exclusivity could make one of the items kind of redundant. Say, take the tailored gambeson - its cost is very similar to the regular one, but reduced availability makes it possible to notably increase its strength to give a class-specific advantage to having the Tailor on the server. But if you make it available for everyone, then the weakened one crafted by other classes would have to be very similar to the regular gambeson in order to be balanced (due to very similar cost). And at that point, why do we even need the regular gambeson in the game, if every class can craft something very similar at about the same cost? That is not to say that you can't retain some interesting tradeoffs between similar gear, just that it may be difficult to do so in a meaningful way for items that were originally designed to be class-exclusive improvements over items craftable by everyone. The tuning spear and the Blackguard items have additional lore and theming reasons to be class-exclusive as well.

What do you mean by "most"? Are there any locations that cause the sky to turn sepia at all times? And it better not only be that one lore location that I haven't seen yet but which has been mentioned in every other conversation about instability. Overall, what you say seems like a lore-driven interpretation. Purely in terms of gameplay, ambient surface temporal stability is almost entirely unrelated to rifts and temporal storms, and may even be argued to be separate from ambient underground stability. They are all essentially separate gameplay elements with different purposes that are only notably related through the player's temporal stability. Bundling any of them together, though more accurate in some respects and more useful in some contexts, detracts from both the topic of the original post and the topic that the thread has largely shifted onto, as almost the entirety of this conversation is specifically focused on ambient surface instability.

If the windmill is connected to the large gear in such a way that one rotation of the windmill causes five rotations of the shaft that drives the helve, then you have a 1:5 gear ratio, making the helve hammer able to work five times as fast. However, because the large gear has five times higher radius, it transfers force using a that much longer lever and so has five times lower torque. Every mechanical part has a certain resistance, and the torque on the driving axle has to be high enough to overcome that resistance - otherwise it will not be able to turn (or if it's already turning and higher resistance is applied, it will slow down and stop). By lowering the torque transferred to the helve using the large gear wheel, you're increasing the torque that has to be produced by the windmill to overcome the helve's resistance. You can make it work, but you will need higher power input. You may need something like three full windmills, but the exact value will depend on a bunch of other factors as well, including how much uptime you want. The devs have said they aim to add more mechanical power parts, including a water wheel once they have a good river implementation as well, so perhaps we're gonna have that not too far into the future.

It may be a good thing to consider if only for the sake of realism and immersion, but it also has a few undesirable side effects that would have to be addressed. It may also be useful to make it clear in some way to the player what "underground" is and what "enclosed space, but not counted as underground" is, as well as clarify how cellars fit into all that. Cellars are already a little finnicky as is. Food spoilage currently reaches the minimum rate at -5°C, which would mean that cellars may effectively increase food spoilage rates relative to outside, making them counterproductive in low temperatures and incentivizing finnicky food management. One potential fix here is to reduce food satiety once frozen (and reduce spoilage rate while frozen), which would make cellars and caves useful even in the arctic while allowing to deliberately freeze food to let it last longer. Seraphs can only freeze while the temperature is lower than 0°C, and various plants have their own temperature requirements. With the underground always being no less than 5°C, freezing and crops dying would become much less threatening or even almost a non-issue, even in the arctic, once the player finds a suitable cave - no need to even dig one. The easy solution here may be to add some sort of consequences to staying in positive but close to freezing temperatures, and reworking plant growth to avoid exploits, but that would again have downstream balance implications.

The TLDR of the argument as I understand it is simply that historically hammocks were practically never used on ships of this size and kind. They were primarily seen on larger vessels designed for much longer travel times, with large crews, high cargo capacity, and sufficient space below deck to actually fit those hammocks somewhere without them getting in the way. The same point goes for a crow's nest - the boat is just too small for it. Vikings have used their relatively small vessels (compared to 15th to 17th century transport and military ships) to move horses and other animals, so having a spot for an elk is even quite realistic, wheras sleeping would more likely just be done on the benches. There's also the potential problem that sleeping on the boat while no one is keeping watch is just asking for problems, but I think we can mostly ignore that for the sake of gameplay. Either way, yeah, it would be great to have a way to sleep on the boat. I don't think there's any big argument against it. But specifically a hammock doesn't really fit this specific boat.