MKMoose

The general idea has appeared a couple times in various places. The consensus from what I've seen seems to be that it would be great for the game but should be at most two blocks if added at all (Hytale allows to mantle even higher, up to 4 blocks, too high for VS), but some sort of climbing gear could also be introduced as an alternative to carrying ladders everywhere. I don't know if I'm a fan of painting realism and fun as somewhat exclusive. People don't really know what caves should look like, they have some level of suspension of disbelief, and there is precedent with other elements of the game which are somewhat unrealistic for the sake of fun while remaining believable. I think it's entirely justified to take caves informed by real speleology and adjust their size or potential rewards to tailor them better to gameplay conditions. I think an overhaul is in order sooner or later, because the current caves are both unrealistic and unfun for many people. And my personal diagnosis for that lack of fun is that they're for the most part just boring and pointless. The vast majority of caves you'll ever see is just roughly circular tunnels snaking around and sometimes intersecting in annoying ways with little justification or purpose. Once you go into a cave, you're usually much more likely to run into a dead end than to find anything particularly interesting, neither visually nor for gameplay reasons. That's my experience, anyway. Tyron has talked in the past about making caves better and more realistic, and said he would like them to be more messy, moist and geologically varied, or something in that vein. "Richer caves" are also on the roadmap, so I have pretty high hopes for it. As for ledges, I would first consider creating them with full blocks. They're a pretty neat idea, but I don't think it's necessary to add special blocks for it, especially not as long as a potential larger overhaul is likely at some point. Birds are a really cool idea. On the topic of Hytale, though, I think their birds are honestly pretty awful. Not even counting their appearance and just looking at behaviour, many of them, including ducks for some reason, literally just fly around pointlessly high up in the sky and never seem to land. With that off my mind, yeah, I think birds with appropriately varied and ideally context-dependent calls are one of the most effective elements for natural ambience. This kind of scenario is pretty much how signature moves end up working in Hytale for several weapons, but particularly for the Battleaxe. It has a whirlwind-like signature, which practically guarantees that you're gonna have to heal afterwards, if you even survive, especially if you try to use it in a group of enemies to optimize the damage. At least that's the impression I'm getting in the early game. Either way, I do agree that Vintage Story should stay more grounded. There's still a lot of cool alternative actions that could be added to various weapons while remaining realistic enough, like a generic shove, a versatile polearm buttstroke, risky consecutive strikes with the falx that reward careful but commited attacks, something of the sort.

There are also some items (one that I've noticed was the forgotten noble mask) which aren't even disabled correctly under armor, which causes them to clip through it. It can be a tricky matter on a technical level, because sometimes it's really just a case-by-case issue. In many cases you might want one part of a larger item visible, but a different part hidden. In some cases you might ideally even want two items to appear in different order based on context, e.g. a shirt could be tucked into the pants while you're wearing a coat (it's probably not relevant to armor, but nonetheless part of the same general system). Another issue on a technical level would also be that some items may need multiple models (or at least slight changes to scale) depending on what they're worn on top of. A hat might look good on your head, but could be too small to appear over a helmet without clipping. Those issues are all fixable, of course, if time-consuming. I do agree that a lot more variety would be great on top of armor. Even if not something particularly large, then at least some more smaller items and symbols that would allow to identify a person in armor based on anything other than their nametag. To keep things simple, I wouldn't mind to keep it to items that are intended to exclusively be placed on top of armor (especially a surcoat, tabard etc.), but a more comprehensive overhaul of the clothing system could be beneficial in the long term as well. That said, I think that the existence of armor types which can be worn at little to no detriment could be considered to be the primary issue. It's convenient, but it removes all the incentive to ever take that armor off, except when putting on heavier armor when expecting combat. Whether that's addressed by adding more debuffs to armor or adding some buffs to regular clothing, the player should have more reason to wear regular clothing and not armor while outside of combat. Of course, that doesn't come without its own issues, but it's genuinely detrimental to the game's outfit variety to wear armor literally non-stop. One of the things that could be done to address this to some extent as well could be to localize surface threats to specific areas, making combat encounters more voluntary and letting players feel safer without armor. Adding more creature sounds is a simple improvement as well, and limiting aggression alongside adding more warnings before enemies commit to an attack could also reduce the deaths due to unexpected attacks.

I'm not sure if less than 21 peat is possible. While I haven't tested it personally, I've looked it up recently as I had the same question and found this Reddit post which states that 21 is the minimum. I don't think that the entire post is up to date (the piles ignite each other much more easily), but at least the minimum required fuel should be correct. What's interesting is that the JSON definition for peat says burnHoursPerItem: 0.5 (equal to 60 s), which would suggest that 22 peat is the minimum. Clearly, you've managed to only use 21, which requires an average burn time of ~63-66 s and ends up consistent with that Reddit post. I wasn't able to find the cause for this discrepancy. Oddly enough, the temperature of the items inside the beehive kiln is for all practical purposes entirely irrelevant. As fuel burns, an internal progress value gets incremented linearly based only on burn time. If the fuel stops burning or the kiln door is opened, progress is simply retained. Redram has mentioned that they may revise the beehive kiln's mechanics whenever a larger temperature overhaul comes around: Generally, it's not possible to optimize the fuel consumption in "normal" ways, because the "normal" minimum is simply dictated by the burn time necessary to complete the process. If you want to optimize it further, it requires to basically exploit some flaws in the code. The simplest thing that should work is to pull out the remaining fuel as soon as the process finishes, before the last unit of fuel is consumed, saving you one item of fuel per tile. There's even a horribly named bug report for it. Or, if you're interested in this kind of exploit, it seems to me based on the code that it's possible to fire the kiln while spending zero fuel by simply removing the fuel (all of the full piles) before an individual item of fuel gets consumed, then readding and reigniting it. It should be easy enough to test in creative (I might do just that at some point later), and it would warrant a bug report if it ends up working.

The total loot is the same for all falxes. Anything that the falx rips out is taken away from the main loot pool. That's why monsters killed with a falx are sometimes already harvested. That said, having a slightly higher looting chance with damage or depending on the target's maximum health could be pretty useful regardless, since currently it's pretty common to still have to harvest weaker enemies despite having killed them with the falx.

Is it on the same device that you used before the break? Normally it should only require you to log in once, after which you're free to play offline. If I recall correctly, it's more like verifying a device than proof of purchase. It caches data on the device, so a different device would need to be authenticated separately.

I would be inclined to agree with this if we didn't have fruit trees, Mediterranean cypress and fern trees already in the game. Fair enough, though I feel like gameplay balance, visual appearance and technical implementation can be separated, even though they aren't entirely independent. While any changes to how they grow will inevitably affect balance in some ways, I mainly dislike fruit trees being 1) very similar to each other and 2) completely separate from regular trees in multiple aspects.

Switching to creative may have just been to place the torches. Would be really annoying to light that up otherwise. I'm not sure, but as far as I can tell based on skimming over the cave generation code, it could generate naturally, because: caves are generated in a recursive function, one segment one after another, the width of each next segment is determined by the previous segment, size changes are applied purely based on chance, and it's theoretically possible for several of them to stack over a couple subsequent segments, large caverns are generated by multiplying the previous segment's sizes by a large number, the algorithm does some things to roughly keeps cave sizes in check, but there doesn't seem to be a hard limit (unless it's asymptotic). So it seems to me possible that the cave size was increased very quickly over a couple segments, leading to this monstrosity. As for it looking artificial, I'd argue that applies to almost all caves in VS. The caves are generated just by carving ellipsoids (stretched spheres) in rock. While they do get deformed somewhat with random noise, it's ultimately just ellipsoids. Some deformation is also visible in the screenshots, which, when using something like World Edit, would have to be added in separately from simply carving a ball. There's also basalt with a bunch of pretty believable stones and even flint on the floor as well as speleothems, which would have to be added in as well. If it's artificial, then there was some pretty good effort to keep it really quite in line with the actual cave generation. They are really not that uncommon. I mean, you might have to be pretty lucky to find an actual near-perfect half-sphere, but roughly a blob with a flat basalt bottom can appear anytime a cave generates near Y = 12.

There's a couple other 2x2 tree variants, though they can only be found rarely in the wild. I think oak and two variants of kapok. I feel like trees overall deserve an overhaul. Hytale's trees are arguably better in some ways, but have a few problems as well. There's so many things that could be improved about them in Vintage Story: they should grow more gradually (not necessarily block-by-block, but at the very least with one or two extra stages between sapling and fully grown), there should be something between full logs and branchy leaves, and it would be much better to have actual branches, not unlike on fruit trees (at least some larger branches, not necessarily a branch for every leaf block) small trees should have thinner trunks, because a young 5 m tree has no business having a 1 m diameter, seeds should fall from trees in the appropriate season in large quantity, instead of just having a small chance to drop from leaves, deciduous trees should lose leaves in winter, all trees should ideally have proper stumps and roots, which could potentially be dug up with a shovel without destroying the dirt, as well aa deteriorate naturally over a long period of time when the tree is chopped down. My hot take of sorts is that fruit trees were a mistake. They are too complex for their own good and create an unnecessary divide between regular and fruit trees, while also somehow ending up very samey. Instead of making fruit trees the way they did, I think they should have gone for a simpler system that could be used for all trees universally. Trees are a really fundamental part of the game, and I think they deserve all the attention they can get from the devs. I'm so glad you're mentioning the feel of the combat, and not the specifics like fantasy weapons and special attacks. It's one of the more common pieces of feedback about the game, and a few other discussions seem to have landed on hitboxes as well as a line of sight and hearing mechanic as pretty important areas to improve first and foremost, alongside the status effect system which is planned for the nearest major update. Adding animations and hit feedback to that seems like a very good idea. Honestly, though, I think a much closer analogue to Hytale over Minecraft or Vintage Story is Terraria. Much more similar gameplay style. Having the same first-person and third-person animations can be pretty difficult, because then both tend to have to make concessions so that both look decent. Many multiplayer games which are designed to use the same animations in both perspectives but prioritize good first-person animations end up janky and unnatural when viewed in third-person. Unless they want to entirely switch to the immersive first-person camera (which doesn't seem good enough at the moment), I would say it's fine enough to keep third-person as the secondary focus for multiplayer and the occasional screenshot or something. It's entirely possible to improve the current first-person animations separately. If the third-person camera were to be improved, then the first order of business is to make it over-the-shoulder and not coaxial, because currently I feel like it's borderline unusable for anything except exploration. It would also need to have some sort of zoom function (e.g. bringing the camera slightly in front the shoulder) to allow the precision required for clayforming, smithing and so on.

You're good, different preference is a perfectly fine justification. At most it's just something to keep in mind when people suggest changes that you're not a fan of. I'm interpreting the temporal mechanics in some sense as postapocalyptic or horror elements, while trying to stay in line with the current game direction as much as possible. It's supposed to be a world haunted by eldritch horrors, after all. If balanced well, a properly dangerous area could easily have clear enough signs (environmental indicators, or if not that then maybe just permanent negative stability), so that you wouldn't have to worry about an area that seems good actually being bad. You may have to double-check an area if it's initially unstable but might actually be fine on average, but you wouldn't get kicked in the balls just because you entered an unstable area at the wrong time when there were no signs of it (except when the player simply doesn't notice inditators which are actually there, that is, but the same can be said about the current unstable areas). Whether the environmental changes are purely cosmetic or more functional, I think it misses the point to liken them to fire from lightning. They are generally supposed to add more flavor to world generation or serve as a mostly audio or visual effect, not be in any way destructive. I personally turn off fire from lightning as well, because it's just not a good mechanic by itself. It would be a bit better if plants or trees could regrow naturally. Effects in unstable areas also shouldn't be accumulative, because they've already had a couple hundred years to accumulate. That accumulation over a long timeframe is why I'm talking about soil composition and different flora and fauna. I would say that environmental effects of instability should in many regards be likened more to something like strong winds during natural storms in the case of momentary instability spikes, or to something like climate indicators (different climates have different fauna and flora irrespective of temporary conditions) in the case of unstable areas. I can't help but keep getting the impression that you're looking at my pancakes and saying you don't want waffles. Or at least saying that you don't want the pankaces spicy for some reason. I might try explaining it better at some point, but for now I think I'll let it marinate. If not this, there's other ideas to improve surface instability which don't get the same pushback.

To be honest, I've never needed any of these myself. That is not to say that nobody has, of course. Maybe I was just lucky enough to never have any particularly large unstable areas in vicinity. I would appreciate a diegetic way to measure stability either way, even if it's entirely optional, and I just think it would be much more worthwhile if added together with other concurrent changes. Even convenient mapping or scanning would probably be quite fine for late-game gear, though, as a natural progression reward. I know. I've myself mentioned the idea to move the UI indicator's funtionality to diegetic devices here and here, which at the time was met with mixed reactions, though it may have been significantly influenced by other context around it. But the fact is that a measurement device, unless it has some advanced functionality like automatic mapping or large-scale scanning, would be almost entirely redundant with the gear. This is primarily because a dedicated device would presumably take some resources to craft and potentially operate, and would have to be carried around and potentially taken out and used regularly, unlike the gear which is completely free and accessible at all times. And even with more advanced functionality, many players like myself wouldn't really need it either way.

I'm of a quite different opinion, as I think the UI indicator provides too much information. While it only allows to inspect stability at the player's current location and doesn't allow to as easily check whether an area is only slightly positive or strongly positive, it nonetheless exactly shows whether the player is in an area with negative stability (anywhere the gear turns counterclockwise) and even allows to roughly gauge how unstable it is (based on how fast the gear turns). You could technically map out an entire unstable area on the map using that gear, though it would admittedly be tedious and would probably clutter your map with way too many waypoints. Creating waypoints with one press of a button using macros could make it much faster, though I don't remember exactly how to set that up. I overall like the idea quite a lot, though I feel like it's largely missing a purpose at this moment, except if an optional setting to disable the gear indicator were added. More in the vein of a geiger counter and less a dubious dowsing device, some tech to allow measuring instability could be thematically very fitting and serve a cool gameplay purpose. However, as long as unstable areas are just permanent zones to avoid and the gear exactly shows whether you're standing in an unstable area, I can't quite think of a good reason for the average player to bother with anything more. I'm not entirely sure about mapping as well, as unlike in prospecting there is almost no hidden information that it could provide. While it's a bit slow and annoying, you can do almost the same with your own waypoints and the gear. Automatic or fast large-area mapping would be convenient and I wouldn't necessarily oppose it, though I'm not sure if it wouldn't be too convenient. Alongside an optional setting to disable the UI indicator or as part of some sort of larger stability rework, I think it would generally be a great addition.

If you get the impression that your base has become unstable when it previously wasn't, then that's likely caused by it being in an area with patchy stability, stable in some places and unstable in others, which may have caused you to not notice any issues earlier as you were walking around nearby stable areas more. Temporal storms normally last at most ~10 minutes (~5 in-game hours), and I think by default you can't sleep through them. Assuming it's not actually a bug, then your gear in the middle of the screen should turn counterclockwise while you're in an unstable area, and progressively become more gray. Cyan gear means you yourself are stable, gray means you're unstable (you can hover your mouse over it to see a percentage). Clockwise rotation means you are in a stable area and your stability is going up, counterclockwise means it's an unstable area and you're getting more unstable. If your stability is very low, then it causes effects visually very similar to storms. More things you can check: make sure you leave the world and load in again after changing the configuration through the commands, as they won't take effect until the world is reloaded, you can use the command /nexttempstorm to check the current storm status (it should say something like "the next temporal storm is in _ days" if storms are enabled but a storm is not active). From there your primary options are probably: disable temporal stability, making sure to reload the world, and continue playing in your current base (this will also disable underground stability), put up with the instability and relocate your base to a more stable area, start a fresh world with this newfound knowledge for a smoother early experience. This is very much what world config implies if not states. If it ever works differently, then it's most likely a bug.

@LadyWYT I kind of get you, but I also kind of don't get you at all. The current implementation of surface instability gives a sense of uncertainty? It's unnerving, creepy, unnatural? Whatever you're getting out of surface instability, I just don't really see it. I can see most of the concerns and can absolutely agree that they would have to be considered when making changes to stability, even if I don't see them as particularly significant issues. However, for surface instability to be in any real way engaging and memorable for most people, I think it simply cannot stay in its current state. Right now it's not problematic, because it's simple and generally inoffensive, but I would say that it goes to the point of being simplistic, as well as annoying when it occasionally matters and practically pointless otherwise. I can't really predict and don't really have a preference for whether it gets a more comprehensive overhaul or just some of subtler changes including those that you haven't criticized, but I do believe that even introducing all of the suggestions I've mentioned in this thread (here) could still retain almost all of the current feel and impact of temporal instability while improving the game with very limited negative side effects. Everything would simply have to be designed, tweaked and balanced with the right goals in mind. I've noticed that when I think up a complex, intertwined system, then I'm sometimes surprised when people predictably don't share the same thought process and underlying assumptions. Feel free to try reevaluating dynamic instability as an extension of rift activity and temporal storms, and not as a direct evolution of unstable surface regions. Dynamic instability would still have a purpose closely tied to the current function of rift activity and storms even if it was a global effect with no local variation. At the same time, dynamic instability could also be tailored to improve upon the areas which currently are just permanently unstable. If that distinction doesn't do anything, then we're probably gonna have to let this topic rest, if only because I'm running out of arguments. Also, there's another small thing, though you can mostly ignore it unless you want to pivot the discussion onto it: I would entirely permit only small fluctuations that would have little effect beyond making existing unstable areas pulse or wobble in a sense, slightly changing size and intensity. It would make them less permanent and allow to stay in intermittently unstable areas without eventually dropping to zero stability. I can understand this quite well based on my experience with some more hostile games, Don't Starve especially. I don't really know how to take it seriously, though, because it's the point of dynamic instability to avoid applying pressure on the player either all the time or not at all, and instead to pace it out better. As long as it doesn't impose routine maintenance or end up with some other major issues, the risk seems quite minimal to me, compared to other similar mechanics. Granted, dynamic instability may sometimes force itself onto the player instead of allowing to voluntarily face the threat, and I would say that's largely just a matter of balancing exactly how much pressure it applies so as to land neatly between being irrelevant and overwhelming for most players, not unlike wildlife, rifts and storms already have to be balanced. Additionally regarding the pacing, whether that comes from UI, environmental clues or measurement and warning devices, you may quite regularly see indicators of instability fluctuations that point to an upcoming spike (or a storm) and keep you on edge, but equally you would be able to breathe for a time if you don't see any signs to worry about. There could even be some relatively clear signs of positive stability, which would let you know that you're in the clear for some period of time. I think it would be a really cool detail to have unique bird calls that indicate incoming storms or something of the sort, or that indicate safety. Real birds relay information using various calls, and even other animals recognize and listen for them (e.g. squirrels will hide when birds indicate that there's a hawk nearby, or something in that vein), so it could be fun to learn and listen for specific calls as part of the environmental clues about stability. I feel like this one goes right back to information availability to an extent, though perhaps diverges more onto a matter of predictability and mental effort. I personally don't like knowing that a wolf or bear is pretty much guaranteed to attack me once I'm within a certain radius of it, and I don't like knowing that it won't relent unless I mechanically force it to. It's generally not as exciting or engaging, plus it doesn't match realistic expectations. I would go as far as to say that it's again more suitable for action-packed games where dispatching individually weak enemies can't take up too much of the player's time and attention. I think Vintage Story would benefit greatly from an approach slightly closer to something like horror games, where the goal is often to avoid or potentially outsmart the more dangerous enemies, and calculated risk is a much more prominent element of combat. This especially applies to bears, which would arguably work much better if they weren't as threatening at all times, but potentially even more dangerous than they are now when provoked. It would encourage the player to be more careful and to respect their space, but without the threat of immediate aggression. If not make animals more aggressive in unstable areas, then at least more alert and more hostile or defensive, with growls or other warnings, but overt aggressiveness remaining the same or even decreased until provoked. Besides matters of aggressiveness, erratic behavior could also refer to more audiovisual aspects with less impact on gameplay, something like: more frequent and more distressed animal calls, frequently looking to the sides and changing direction when walking, generally restless movement - walking more and stopping for grazing or whatnot less often, occasionally running around with no clear reason, and so on. Certain indicators, including most changes related to soil and plants, would work well when purely tied to average stability, as a way to more easily tell whether an area is generally and not momentarily unstable. Certain other indicators, like particle effects in the air, unsettling ambient sounds, and perhaps erratic animal behavior, would serve better as signs of incoming spikes of instability. It kind of goes back to the two different purposes of dynamic instability - one closely tied to rifts and storms, and one related to unstable areas. For the most part they should be easy to program by just adjusting a few parameters based on current stablity - the main difficulty comes from the fact that, ideally, every single animal in the game (or at least most of them) would have to be tweaked. I know, but I see it as an extension of rifts, which are described in the handbook as "portals to the rust world". And either way, if monsters can come out of rifts, then why not something much smaller that would affect soil composition or have other downstream effects?

I'd say that, ideally, even terra preta should only be most optimal for a quite limited range of crops. It should probably be the most universal type of soil, good enough for pretty much all crops, but I think it would be a shame to introduce a bunch of new soil types only for terra preta to remove most of the reason to search for less common ones, making farming generally devolve to the same common denominator once the player invests into compost. Realistically, terra preta is apparently most suitable for cassava and fruit trees, but I'd have to look into it further to be sure and to find more details. A pretty cool addition for farming could lie in Mollisols (the most agriculturally productive soils in the world), which would require the player to travel to steppes or prairies to obtain them but which would likely be the best soil type for most grains and legumes. There's also a bunch of options like Fluvisols (near rivers) or Andosols (volcanic ash soils), which seem like they could be most suitable for vegetables, and so many other soil types. Of course, all that slowly and carefully, maybe starting simply with sandy and clay-rich soils. I think it would fit Vintage Story quite well to require some travelling to obtain the best, specialized soils for various crops, but there's a lot of added depth that could come from relatively simple changes as well, especially if we were to also consider pH, moisture requirements and ore deposit indicators. I think it would make sense to just have large areas of clay-rich soils which drop some clay outright as well as are more likely to house proper clay deposits. Realistically, clay can absolutely be obtained from random clay-rich soils, and while it may be lower quality if it has a lot of silt, sand and other contents, it's not too difficult to find something very much usable. This may mean a practically endless supply of clay the moment you find a decent river or some other clay-rich area, but that's also kind of the goal - it's not like we have to restrict the availability of clay as some especially valuable resource. It may also end up highly beneficial for new players to have a clearer goal like "find a river, clay will be there" instead of "find a small red patch on the side of a hill". Same goes for peat. I think it would be perfectly fine to add larger, more biologically accurate peatlands and other wetlands, instead of just spawning these random deposits which realistically just make no sense. If nothing else, I think peat should appear more commonly but only near the sea level, though that's a bit of a separate matter.

Slime molds are so weird. Could certainly be pretty cool to add some extra detail, though their typically tiny size makes it diffuclt to see them as a priority. They would likely work at much smaller scale, spicing up leaf litter, tree trunks or other decaying plant matter with colorful dots. Mosses and lichens can sometimes cover dozens if not hundreds of square meters or more in a neat carpet, which is why they are especially useful to add variety to regions with otherwise limited vegetation - in cold or shaded areas they can cover the ground in a similar way to how grasses often do in other regions. And there's more examples to better show what I mean. I've edited the original post slightly to mention some of this from a more gameplay-focused perspective. While I don't know nearly enough about soil pH and mineral contents and whatnot to really speak about it, I do know that it has potential for gameplay benefits with indicator plants and stuff like that, which is already enough to get me on board. I love this idea, and there's just one issue that would have to be solved. Even in the current state of the game, running around and digging up a few spots (e.g. when prospecting) can quite easily net you three or four block types including sand and gravel. I've seen people already sometimes complain that there's so many different different kinds of plants, rocks, and other stuff which largely end up as annoying clutter. Adding a couple new soil types, or even some dozen or two if you include all the combinations with different fertility levels, certainly wouldn't help it. Though it might be going pretty out-there, I would personally think about separating soil and certain other blocks into a two-component system of sorts (could also be more, but I'm trying to keep everything sufficiently simple and intuitive): breaking any block like stone, sand, gravel, soil, forest floor and so on would drop exactly two items that the block is made of (it may be necessary to have some items appear in higher quantities for balancing, but there would generally be at most two unique components), the main soil components would likely include something like rocks, gravel, sand, clay, soil, forest soil and organic matter, optionally, more components could provide even more variety and flexibility, like silt, peat, lime, humus, perhaps some specific soil types (e.g. iron-rich soil, podzol), maybe water in some way to create mud, but those would have to be added very carefully once the baseline system is working to avoid overdoing it with the complexity, placing these components as a block would involve putting either of the materials on the ground (creating a roughly half-block-high pile of that material), and then using the second component on it to convert it into a full block (alternatively they could probably be combined in the crafting grid as well, but it shouldn't be the default), any blocks that contain at least one soil component (and optionally some that contain certain other materials, like organic matter) would be named "soil blocks" or various subtypes of it, whereas other combinations would make different materials as appropriate, ideally, it should be possible to make arbitrary combinations of any two components, though it may be difficult - in many cases multiple combinations would probably make the same block (and they would save what they were made of, to drop the same components if destroyed again), and to give a couple of simple, example combinations, though highly subject to change in various ways depending on a lot of factors: sand x2 => sand, soil x2 => soil (the most average soil), soil + organic matter => high-fertility soil, soil + clay => clay-rich soil, soil + gravel => gravelly soil (lower fertility), soil + rock => rocky soil (very low fertility, could appear between soil and stone layers to make for a smoother transistion), forest soil + soil OR forest soil x2 => forest floor, forest soil + sand => sandy forest floor (lower fertility). One of the additional difficulties here is that a comprehensive overhaul would pull quite a number of concurrent changes with it. A bunch of potential adjustments to farming due to different soil types and potentially pH, a revision to world generation parameters for practically all plants in the game. I feel like a lot of these systems could use an overhaul eventually, but I wouldn't want to get too far ahead of the game's development either. While this idea is not without potential flaws and isn't really usable without ironing out all the details, I think it could offer a suitable compromise between much greater soil variety and simplified item management. It may also let VS stand out with a more material-based approach (as an extension of what it already does with stone or boards, for example) in place of the block-based approach that similar games often default to.

My experimental results suggest that both copying a world and generating a new world with the same seed doesn't seem to change any deposit positions. In both cases there may be differences that I would still have to look into further in the noise used to distort the shape of the deposits (which in rare cases can affect whether they appear at all), but generally they still generate in the same places within a small tolerance. Maybe they could generate differently if you could cause random generators to somehow desynchronize between the worlds, but I have no clue if that's even possible, because the game uses separate generators for many different tasks.

I don't see how this would be significantly more of a problem than rift activity and temporal storms. Sure, if it changed so slow as to force the player to leave the area for an extended period of time, then it would be annoying, but nowhere did I say I would want that. I think it should in most cases on the surface be similar to rift activity in most regards or outright merged with it into a single mechanic. Ideally, low instability could be generally ignored but serve as a warning of sorts of a potential upcoming spike, while such a spike of higher instability could require some combat or to stay at home during the night. If any drawn-out periods of instability were added, they should be balanced in such a way as to keep the player on edge, but not actually dump them into zero stability for an unknown amount of time. Areas with higher average instability would be characterized by slower stability recovery alongside more intense and potentially more frequent instability spikes, but could still usually be used for building perfectly fine, just with increased risks. I see this more as a problem to fix than as a significant counterargument, frankly. The mechanic should apply survival pressure and influence high-level choices, but shouldn't cause the player to wait for an extended period of time, and especially shouldn't make the player search for the most optimal place to wait. I think that the simplest ways to change it would be to: simply accelerate stability drain and recovery rates (or maybe mostly just recovery rate, to avoid excessively reducing the time you can stay underground before hitting zero stability), in order to make encounters with unstable areas more localized to those areas and not delayed on entry and then drawn out after leaving, or introduce more continuous stability effects to allow staying at partial stability in slightly unstable areas (related to the third point of the original list of suggestions), so that waiting wouldn't be necessary in relatively shallow mines and would roughly scale with depth. I think that reliance on the UI gauge is to a large extent a matter of preference for information availability. Besides a general dislike for UI indicators which often are detrimental to immersion, I just find it more interesting and exciting when I don't quite know everything about the situation I'm in and what to expect. I'm coming at it largely from the perspective of games that care a lot about player knowledge and organic discovery, where information is rather scarce and a large point of the game is for the player to familiarize themselves with the mechanics and learn how the world works (which would be very fitting for the unfamiliar, unnatural part of the world that is temporal stability). Games naturally limit the availability of information to make the player learn through experimentation and piece together a complete image of the system, but that is cut extremely short when the UI just tells you almost everything you need to know at any given moment. Having all the information readily available at all times is generally more characteristic of games that focus on action, where the player can't afford to be uncertain about what they can do at any given moment. Games that focus more on strategy, on the other hand, deliberately hide information to make the game more engaging and unpredictable by requiring the player to weigh risks and opportunities when making choices. I think that Vintage Story should (and in some other areas already does) lean towards the more strategic side.

One thing that I find these mods tend to fail at is introducing a tailored set of plants with purpose in world generation. They don't seem to me like they make world generation better, just more varied with a whole bunch new plants dotting the landscape for the sake of it. Large trees, functional plants (functional for the player, not for the world generation) and colorful flowers almost always take the focus, while mosses, lichens, short grasses grasses and the like are often almost completely ignored. A lot of the plants also arguably simply stand out too much. Among my favorites is the Floral Zones: Cosmopolitan Region one, which actually adds crowberry, reindeer lichen and a few other low-growing plants. But I'm very dissatisfied with how they spawn. A patch of a couple berries or ferns in the middle of a gray gravel surface is not that much more interesting than a block of tall grass in the middle of a gray gravel surface. Ideally, it needs a large area covered with multiple types of overlapping but not uniformly mixed patches of mosses, grasses, shrubs, lichens and so on in order to not only look good, but also look realistic. If you look at tundra, deserts and similar biomes, then you can see that even some of the most barren areas on Earth have at least a couple distinct species which cover the landscape, and almost none of them are nearly as empty as many of Vintage Story's temperate or cold gravelly and sandy areas. In a similar vein, I would also like to emphasize the point about larger variety of grasses in plains, savannas and similar biomes. While plenty of mods add a few decorative sedges or something of the sort, almost none attempt to make them remotely competitive with the everpresent tall grass. The current tall grass is functional, but extremely simplistic, so I think it would be beneficial to mix in large areas, not just small patches, of different dominant grass species, to create more natural variety on medium and large scale, which is lacking as of now both in the vanilla game and in practically all mods. I'll also touch on something that I didn't really mention in the original post: soil blocks are extremely samey. Forest floor provides a neat amount of variation in forests, but all other areas just have some nondescript uniformly-colored grass, or nothing at all in the case of areas covered with sand or gravel (which are largely unrealistic, by the way - gravelly and sandy soils are normal, but just gravel or sand by itself is not really a thing outside of very specific environments). Several mosses and lichens could actually be implemented as variations on soil blocks, and not as actual plants. I don't want to say that these mods are bad or something, don't get me wrong, but I just don't feel like they actually change much of anything about how the world looks besides throwing a bunch of new plant stuff on top of the vanilla game, which in some cases can even make the world look arguably worse when there's too many small patches of completely different plants in your vision range. And for a couple of extra examples to show what I mean, which I feel like are nowhere to be found in the current game and in mods. Notice how the lowest layers of plants, even in that rather barren-looking middle image, actually consist of many different species that each contribute to making the ground look more varied, yet without anything standing out excessively:

See, I'm annoyed, as I really don't feel like this has much to do with the suggestions I've made. I mean, fair enough, introducing changes with not a care in the world for how they fit into the game would inevitably have horrible results. It's a fair point that the unnatural shouldn't really become the common. It's also perfectly reasonable that the most unusual of the effects should be limited to special places. But I'm not asking for random crap to be added with no justification. I've specifically said regarding reducing reliance on UI and the environmental changes that it should be subtle and inexplicit, in order to make instability more pervasive and unnerving, promote a sense of uncertainty and keep the player on their toes. I don't think that's far from what you've said you like about the mechanic, but as I see it, all of that uncertainty and unnaturalness is as of now practically absent from surface instability, almost exclusively because of that gear in the UI. How am I supposed to see surface instability as unnatural if I just know the current stability through a perfectly reliable and always accessible indicator in the UI? Wouldn't it be more unnatural if I didn't always know whether a place is unstable and what to expect, but it affected the world in unpredictable and creepy ways, causing animals to behave in strange ways and plants to grow in unusal patterns? Do note as well that animals are unnaturally aggressive supposedly because of something related to lore. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that temporal disturbances are to blame (if not that, then what else?), and I think it would make a lot of sense for animals to be more aggressive and erratic in unstable areas, while behaving more realistically in stable regions. And for both flora and fauna, it can also be a matter of a simple question: does temporal stability and the rust world affect this one in any physical way? If it does, then it will unavoidably have an effect on how the stuff that lives there is affected by it, and by extension the flora and fauna that lives there. And we know it does at least to some extent, as evidenced by story locations. If nothing else, subtle red coloration throughout unstable areas, alongside something akin to iron toxicity in plants, would seem quite fitting. Also, I do think that temporal stability only affecting a certain class of entities is an interesting concept, but then I would say that it shouldn't be arbitrarily dictated by location, because it doesn't make any sort of intuitive sense for it to have been caused by a past catastrophe that changed the world. At this point it's practically identical to sanity mechanics from many other games.

Primary motivation The current assortment of plants is heavily lacking in the area of mosses, sedges, bushes and other small plants. Existing shrubs are implemented in a disappointing way, as they are technically trees so small that they only spawn leaves, ending up strange in appearance and obstructive during traversal. What this causes is that in many regions of the world the trees are the only notable plants that break up the landscape, alongside perhaps patches of flowers, but those only help in grassy areas and forests. The actual ground-level foliage is extremely basic, with there just being grassy soil, gravel and sand, where in reality grasslands, steppes, tundras, deserts and similar biomes have much greater biodiversity than people tend to give them credit for. The main goal of this suggestion is to point to the lacking biodiversity in the current state of the game and list several example species which could be added in high quantity to certain regions of the game to make them significantly more visually unique, diverse and appealing. The suggested species are generally very specific with the intent to more explicitly communicate the intended purpose, but could be broadened into more generalized genera or families or whatnot. Additional possibilities The simplest consequence is that the added plant variety would lend itself naturally to create distinct regions of more unique flora and fauna like shrublands, peatlands, arctic tundras, and many others. This is largely related to the "regions of distinct flora and fauna" category in the roadmap. Any extra variety would also be greatly beneficial for the goal of separating plant species into regions according to their real-life geographical occurence, as Tyron has expressed the intent to do so eventually. Additionally, certain plants may be used as indicators for certain features of the world or for the presence of certain deposits. It would be quite reasonable to adjust the generation of certain plants based on rock types like limestone or based on the density of certain ores like sulfur, as well as on soil types if more ever get added. Some deposits like clay, peat, high fertility soil or surface copper could have specific indicator plants growing above or near them, to help players locate them more easily (not exclusively growing above these deposits, but often enough to be reasonably reliable). This can be greatly beneficial for the main gamplay loops, as it can get the player to pay more attention to the environment and learn about what to look for in the world, instead of simply running around and hoping for a find. It may also introduce a neat alternative to the prospecting pick when looking for certain ores. Finding desired resources using indicator plants would be more satisfying than pure chance and would naturally reward game knowledge. Mosses, lichens, tiny creeping shrubs and similar The primary in-game purpose of these low-growing plants, generally at most ~20 cm in height but may be much lower or somewhat higher, is to increase the biological variety and visual interest in areas with otherwise uninteresting or limited vegetation, like gravelly plains, tundra bogs, boreal forests and the like. The main benefit is that they can create small and medium overlapping patches of varied color, which could cover large areas and are highly effective at breaking up monotonous landscapes and flat surfaces in almost any environment. This is very important to keep landscapes visually interesting, because, as it stands currently, there is very little color variation in terms of soil and grass. Example species include: any bog moss (Sphagnum) - this one can also be a diegetic tell that there's peat nearby, reindeer lichen (Cladonia rangiferina), common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha), dwarf willow (Salix herbacea), black crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) - can also be a source of fruit, white clover (Trifolium repens), alpine fescue (Festuca brachyphylla) - technically a grass, but I'm including it here due to its intended purpose. Left - sphagnum bog; middle - reindeer lichen and black crowberry; right - alpine fescue. Grasses, sedges, rushes and similar The purpose of grasses, sedges and rushes is primarily increasing the variety of default tall grass in expansive plateaus, plains and savannas, with the goal of introducing medium and large-scale patterns to these otherwise flat and uniform areas. All of these would likely drop dry grass or thatch, and several species may provide edible roots. Certain shorter grasses would also serve well to provide more natural grass coverage to sandy and gravelly areas. Additionally, some species may work well as decorative grasses. Example species include: alpine bluegrass (Poa alpina), Sandberg bluegrass (Poa secunda), cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica) - a great source of thatch, could be used as an indicator for clay, nut grass (Cyperus rotundus), common rush (Juncus effusus) - could be used for actual rush mats, including tatami, as well as potentially for rushlights, Chinese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis), copper flower (Ocimum centraliafricanum) - not particularly significant, but can serve as an indicator of surface copper deposits in warm climates. Left - common rush; middle - alpine bluegrass; right - Sandberg bluegrass. Shrubs Shrubs are mostly present roughly where they should be. We have an entire climate parameter for shrubbery, but the actual shrubs are just trees that generate so small that they don't have trunks. This is kind of appropriate, as many real shrubs are closely related to trees and can grow into trees given the right conditions, but it also causes a number of issues: random leaf blocks can be pretty confusing - a tree is a tree, a bush is a bush, but a leaf block is expected to be part of a larger tree, the shrubs tend to look pretty ugly, because they lack identifiable, distinct shapes, the variety of the shrubs is ultimately very poor, with just 5 species across all climates, all the shrubs use the leaves of some larger trees and so can't even be identified more properly without looking into their codes, certain shrubs (most notably dwarf birch) simply aren't remotely accurate to their real-life counterparts, larger shrubs impede traversal, and make for a highly unpleasant experience when riding an elk. Some of the same issues apply to berries to some extent, but those get a pass mainly because they don't borrow leaves from larger trees, and don't impede traversal nearly as much, plus they're likely getting reworked soon. Overall, shrubs in-game should arguably have two main subtypes that determine function, depending on size: either as greater variety or dominant plant for areas with relatively low vegetation with generally ~0.5-2 m of height, or as larger bushes with upwards of 4 m of height to constitute large, primary plants in rare shrublands, that is areas with very high shrubbery but very low forestation. The reason for this is that shrubs are limited by two different kinds of requirements for traversal: small shrubs should not impede movement too much, can be very dense, and should be used mostly for visual interest and in areas like tundras, deserts or mountains, large shrubs would have to be relatively sparse as to avoid making areas completely impassable and impossible to see through, and should only appear in relatively fertile places, in-between shrubs like those we have now don't fulfill either role particularly well. Most small shrubs can easily be implemented as regular single blocks, while larger shrubs should arguably be implemented in a way similar to fruit trees, though not necessarily with the full block-by-block growth system. Example shrub species include: sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) - among the most well-known shrubs in deserts, steppes and mountains, dwarf birch (Betula nana) - already sort of in the game, but it should only be ~1 m high, gray willow (Salix glauca), dwarf mountain pine (Pinus mugo), any rhododendron (Rhododendron), and potentially similar flowering shrubs - would serve well as decorative plants, including for garlands and stuff. Left - dwarf mountain pine; middle - primarily gray willow; right - sagebrush.

In that case, I would probably make them a rare "new" ruin; that is, rather than ruins of the Old World, it's clearly the ruins of a trader camp or survivor settlement that got overrun years ago. There could probably be a better item or two to find, but the instability would definitely prevent players from just turning such a ruin into a convenient base. I actually really like this idea. It's a bit jarring that there's so many traders, and every single one of them is alive and healthy. Wouldn't be unreasonable to just automatically replace every trader with a ruined hut if they're in an unstable area, if not something more complex. That sounds pretty interesting to spice up a next playthrough. Would likely require a bunch of rebalancing and other tweaks to not be a pain to play, but it creates a pretty novel approach to instability. Kind of unrelated to everything else, though. I'll see if I can answer some other points as well, but for now I just want to say that I genuinely don't understand why you're opposed to changes to the environment. As I see it, they are close to necessary in order to adequately communicate the risk associated with an area, in a way not dissimilar from something like temperature-related risks being closely tied to the climate you're in and time of day. Even if something like dynamic instability fluctuations were added, reducing that need for clues in the environment somewhat, it would still simply constitute good game design to give the player environmental hints and diegetic instruments to gauge instability instead of just telling them through UI. This applies doubly if your goal for the mechanic is remotely related to keeping the player on edge and biting them if they get complacent, because having immediate and fully reliable access to the information largely just nullifies that goal. Environmental clues for things are in the vast majority of cases more immersive and engaging. It's good game design in this context because the player doesn't need (and arguably shouldn't have) on-demand access to information about stability. It's expected for the player to have immediate access to information about the character's health, hunger or oxygen and so on, because they are properties internal to the character which are necessary for the player to access quickly when making moment-to-moment decisions. Ambient stability, however, and extending partially to character stability through drain/recovery rate, does not have almost any of the same design factors, because it's a property of the world and not the character, and it is primarily significant in more strategic, high-level choices where information scarcity is a significant design lever.

You can remove temporal stability as a whole, but that also hits underground instability and removes this effect from rifts and storms. If there was a way to disable surface instability specifically, then Stable Surface wouldn't have a reason to exist. One thing that I personally find quite disappointing given the lore significance of temporal mechanics is that both temporal storms and temporal stability were introduced back in 1.12 (Q1 2020), and saw practically no meanigful changes since then besides the introduction of bowtorn and shivers. While I'm not sure if I want to entirely recap a few other discussions on the topic, I would like to point out a few things: I absolutely agree that in-your-face effects like an immediately noticeable overlay would be terrible, for a number of reasons - a much more common suggestion in this vein (which we've also discussed a few weeks back) is to add some sort of environmental clues, I don't actually remember ever seeing a suggestion for increasing stability drain rate, and I think it would fix practically nothing as a standalone change - drain rate is mostly just a matter of balancing and not a significant design factor, it would arguably be much better to create an interesting threat by removing the gear from the UI entirely or in some other way adjusting the mechanic, not by making it so irrelevant most of the time that you end up forgetting about it, personally, I have yet to have temporal stability catch me off-guard in any way, while surface instability specifically could as well not exist and it would change practically nothing about my experience with the game. If I were to recommend a set of slightly more specific changes (mostly but not entirely independent of each other), it would probably go something like this: Remove the UI indicator or reduce its reliability, and introduce environmental indicators of instability - this would make for a much more believable and immersive tell of past catastrophe, and could have a number of beneficial effects, primarily requiring the player to pay attention to their surroundings instead of just looking at the UI. It doesn't even have to be in any way explicit, because it may be limited to modified animal frequency and behaviour, different ambient sounds, less common plant growth overall and more sand and rocks, more scattered stones, sticks and other clutter, adjusted relative frequency of different plant species (e.g. less flowers, more thorny bushes), and other changes like that. Only in very low stability it would begin getting anywhere close to proper rust world effects, which would primarily occur underground. Some of those new or changed things in the environment could be in some ways valuable, e.g. certain plants for herbalism. Overall, it would do wonders for immersion and create an unnerving sense of uncertainty about the player's and the region's stability, requiring to actually face the world and think critically instead of being able to immediately nope out of an area the moment the gear starts turning wrong. Some measurement devices could be added to allow testing a spot for instability or measuring the player's own stability, but they shouldn't be necessary for anything either. Make ambient stability change over time - it's among the most common suggestions that I've seen, and it would greatly reduce the risk of new players getting thrown into an indefinite period of 0% stability for no apparent reason, as well as allow to address the complaints about good spots being unsuitable for building. This way, instability would be able to catch every player off-guard occasionally, even if they decide to just stay back home forever, but would naturally ease off after a period of time. It could be implemented as a global modifier that fluctuates like rift activity, or it could be a dynamic system like rain or something of the sort which evolves randomly over time in more complex ways but still depends on average stability in every spot. It would likely have to be implemented in such a way that even the most unstable areas would remain stable for some time semi-regularly, and even the most stable areas would face occasional spikes of instability. Some measurement devices could be added to gauge the current stability and predict it in advance to some extent. Reduce the effects of slightly unstable areas, and increase the effects of heavily unstable areas - as it is now, for most practical purposes, ambient stability could as well be a binary value and very little would actually change, because all areas have either of two possible end effects, and just progress towards them at different rates. Making stablity effects more gradual would also allow the player to better familiarize themselves with them before getting thrown into deep water. It may also be worth to just make specifically surface instability never naturally exceed a certain threshold, to keep the most dangerous effects to the underground and to storms. Increase total coverage of unstable areas - again, this would really reinforce that the world is no longer what it used to be, and make surface instability an integral part of the world that the player has to contend with instead of a rare inconvenience. It could make the player less avoidant of unstable areas by making them a frequent and expected occurence. This is largely reliant on the previous two points (dynamic instability and more continuous instability effects) to make sure that the world doesn't feel inaccessible and excessively punishing, and to allow the players to hang out in less stable areas while keeping relatively small added risks in mind (generally smaller than indefinite 0% stability). Make rift frequency more tied to surface stability to keep the mechanics more cohesive, and introduce instability spikes lasting at least a couple hours before and after storms, likely replacing the current fixed stability drain during storms. Storms could even be removed as a distinct mechanic, and instead occasional extreme stability spikes integrated naturally into random stability fluctuations would serve the same purpose. Make ruins more likely to spawn in unstable areas, kind of as part of the environmental clues as well. Ruins are a very intuitive way to signal that it may not be a good idea to stay there in the long term, even if there are some valuables, which would also add a small risk-reward pattern to looting ruins. Do note that my point here is expressly not to kick the player in the balls for daring to play the game, at least not significantly more than rift activity and temporal storms already do. The point is to make temporal stability more immersive and more integral to the world and gameplay without making it a pain to deal with. There were also some ideas for features that are in no way critical to improving temporal stability, but which I think could potentially work very well for the game if implemented with the right goals in mind and justified appropriately through lore: Add temporal anomalies that appear occasionally throughout the world but primarily in the most heavily unstable areas, which cause small to medium-sized localized disruptions in a plethora of possible ways, like fog, particle effects, devastation, barren ground, scarred and torn apart soil, rust spikes and thorns, floating stuff, repeated terrain geometry (like in some rooms in RA), pockets of completely altered climate conditions, pockets where time flows differently. Also, they could just be large rifts, active permanently though growing in size and strength as rift activity increases. They may or may not be interactive or valuable in some ways. Overall inspired by the anomalies found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, but should probably be adapted to the temporal flavors of Vintage Story. Add some sort of rare trinkets, devices, or just corpses to some ruins which would cause the nearby area to be more unstable, or cause some other issues. They could also briefly flash into existence during temporal storms in some manner. Primarily related to Jonas tech. A bunch of these could perhaps be looted and some may even be quite valuable and useful, but then they would apply the same detrimental effects on the player holding them or in the area where the player puts them away. They could usually be destroyed, disassembled, in some way purified or at least contained to remove those detrimental effects, generally losing any useful functionality in the process as well. Introduce some sort of immaterial ghosts, visions, illusions or something of the sort to unstable areas (as part of the environmental clues as well), which would also appear during temporal storms and some lore locations. Think visages of people and perhaps of animals or rotbeasts, which briefly appear wandering aimlessly or doing something specific near ruins. The player may be able to interact with them in some limited ways, and maybe even talk to them or obtain something from them using a Jonas device. Inspired by the ghosts of Fyke Isle, if you've played The Witcher 3. Alternatively, it could be really cool to have ruins that appear like a mirage but fade out when the player gets close to them, and could potentially even be accessed in some cases using the dimension system. Adjust the properties of the world in temporally unstable areas in some ways (not unlike mentioned by the OP), e.g. change the temperature by a couple degrees, adjust other climate parameters in various ways, influence terrain generation, slightly adjust the speed at which certain processes progress. This would again also function as one of these environmental clues of instability.

How does adjusting capacity to be less focused on arbitrary slots and stack sizes imply a reduction to the amount of things the player can carry? Sure, any changes would probably reduce the capacity for some items, but they could very well also increase the capacity for other things. Also, if any significant reduction to capacity of this sort were introduced, I would expect to see bulk transport methods like frame packs or carts to come alongside them as a way to offset that capacity reduction. The main goal that I have in mind when suggesting something more akin to a weight or size system is to dictate capacity more by the total amount of items, and less by the number of unique items. As an example, I currently have three chests for random looted clothing, one of which has more than a dozen butterfly pins and more than a dozen items of jewellry, while all my building materials fit in just one chest simply by the virtue of stacking. The problem is not that the building materials take too little space (though I wouldn't mind small changes to it). The problem is that the clothes take a comparatively absurd amount of space because they don't stack.

If you search for something like "surface instability" (searching with quotation marks matches the full phrase), you should be able to find quite a few posts. A large portion of them (including mine) arguing that surface instability should be adjusted (or removed if nothing else). If you find yourself wanting to turn off surface instablility specifically, you may want to try a mod like Stable Surface, though I'm not certain if it works on the current version. This is among the most common and most frustrating arguments I tend to see in favor of surface instability. It can seem like no matter how people try to explain the issues with the mechanic, there's always someone that will go "well, I personally don't mind it" and optionally proceed to describe the ideal design goals that the mechanic aims to accomplish instead of looking at what it actually accomplishes in practice. I do agree wholeheartedly with those design goals and that's why I would prefer surface instability changed and not removed entirely. I think surface instability should be more prevalent and visible to actually show how the new world is changed, more disruptive to require the player to pay attention and keep track of it (potentially replacing paying attention to rift activity in the UI (why is it even in the UI?), more challenging to actually apply survival pressure and not just be a minor annoyance, more dynamic to catch players off-guard but relent after a period of time, more integral to the world and connected to storms and rifts to promote a sense of cohesion and immersion. What it should not be is forever unchanging, entirely uninteractive, completely invisible, and yet altogether inconsequential in nearly every single case.

I do think the game could benefit from an approach to capacity that is less tied to stacks and more to size, weight or whatnot. While the current approach is simple and functional, it's also kind of silly that two different items effectively take up twice as much space as a full stack of identicals items. Or instead of reworking capacity, something like the other block game's bundles could be a neat addition. The new displayable system is also a massive step in the right direction. That said, making every object visible in storage containers would likely be a massive pain to implement and it will only get worse the more different storage options are added to the game. The reduced capacity coming with it would be a pain to deal with as well, because realistically it would make even dedicated storage (chests, crates and so on) actually really quite bad at storing things. Visualizing the contents of containers and perhaps limiting the capacity of some of them may be a good idea, but taking it to the extreme is not. Broadly, I would say that immersive storage options should be made more practical and varied. Improve ground storage for bulk items to be more practical (why only 12 ore nuggets, why only 10 grass or cattails, why only 6 thatch?), add dedicated liquid storage methods (casks, barrels, tubs etc.), potentially reduce the overreliance on chests and crates by adding some different containers more suited for different things, like actual barrels that can be picked up, sacks for produce or flour or dirt or other stuff, free-standing shelves, racks for stacking long and thin items, open containers for grains or grass and the like, more gameified wardrobe sections as a way to store a larger quantity of unused clothing. And one of the most stupid things, arguably, is that you can actually get stacks of two temporal gears. Dropped from the first boss. I would love to be able to hang the gears on rope from the ceiling, or something like that. Would make sense since they provide light and lore-wise it would be quite reasonable to keep them easily accessible.