MKMoose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's... not really true, though (though they indeed don't need fertilizer). Wild bushes might not be too much worse, but they're definitely significantly different. The average yield is ~6% lower, variance is much higher, and the fruiting cycle changes mean that the total ripe time for a single bush in much shorter, as well as that in most climates it's only possible to harvest one or two times per year, with the minimum temperature for two harvests landing somewhere in the temperate zone (variable due to multiple sources of randomness). There are more species of berries, which brings the average yield per unit of area back up a fair bit, though the availability time is still short. I think this is roughly the right direction and is actually surprisingly close to a proper seasonal fruiting system, and proper seasonal fruiting could actually allow to fix some issues with the current system, e.g. bushes being initially completely random and then synchronized after the first winter. Pizza has said that seasonal fruiting can't be added due to berries being one of the primary foraging foods, though I personally don't see how that is an issue, as the current changes are arguably much more detrimental for early-game foraging than a seasonal cycle would be. What many people including the person you're replying to seem to be taking issue with is that the bushes require fertilizer at all, not how much they require exactly. This gets mixed in with people who are overreacting or misinterpreting the changes, and it makes a right mess out of the average discussion on the rework. While communicating the changes a bit better would have helped with the initial partially unwarranted pushback, there is still a large portion of more reasonable criticism which is essentially impossible to significantly address without just redesigning the bush health system, because what is being criticized is in many cases the design and not the balance. Keep in mind that the largest portion of pushback is specifically about the fertilizer requirement and bush health in general, as shown by my poll if nothing else. Other parts of the rework are generally welcome, even if not exactly what some people including myself would like. New visuals, new species and cuttings are especially well-received and seem to be quite clearly net positive for the game. There's been a lot of discussion on it, though I wouldn't blame you if you're not intimately familiar with all of them, especially the almost 17k message long thread.

This really feels like it should be updated, and not just copied from when the rework was initially revealed. Most notably to add more complete information about traits and the fruiting cycle, which have already been implemented. Also, it could be nice to explicitly mention that replanted/cultivated bushes require fertilizer, to avoid the confusion with wild bushes which don't. It feels quite appropriate to plug my poll on the berry bush rework, with a detailed description of the changes and some feedback as well: Absolute unit, this update. Really enjoyed the unstable cycle.

Now that we have the stable 1.22 release, I wanted to kind of summarize this poll, with 85 votes up until this point. I’ll be defining the score for each part of the rework as the average of the votes on a topic, interpreting the first (positive) option as 100%, the middle (mixed) option as 50%, and the last (negative) option as 0%. Funnily enough, the middle category could be completely ignored and it would make very little difference. I’ve considered tweaking the scores in a couple ways, but ultimately I think that simpler metrics with the appropriate caveats will work better. Keep in mind that the absolute value of the score doesn’t say that much about the mechanic, mainly due to a fairly small sample size of largely unknown origin. What I think is most important here are the relations between different scores. If one mechanic gets 60% and another gets 80%, then the meaning of those scores is really pretty nebulous. What we can say quite confidently, though, is that people like the second mechanic more than the first one. Interestingly, if we define participation as the number of votes on a topic as a percentage of total votes, then we will notice that participation ended up being quite closely correlated with the score (r^2 = 0.69 despite certain outliers). Combined with the caveat that it's possible to vote multiple times on the same mechanic, it is nearly useless as a metric in this case, but also it may suggest that people who like the changes are significantly more likely to vote on them. The only really notable exception is the fertilizer requirement, which got quite high participation for reasons which I think are fairly obvious. 1. Reworked visuals. Score: 78%. Some complaints here seem to focus on the visibility of berries and the clarity of which stage the bush is in. My personal take is that the lack of visual consistency with other parts of the game should be addressed in some way, and it could also help with the visibility issues. I was personally really surprised that berry clusters are not implemented as 3D models the way the fruit on fruit trees are. 2. New species. Score: 96%. By far the single most unanimously praised change. I don’t think there’s much to comment on here, beyond a note on variety and inventory clutter: as it stands currently, the species barely differ between each other in anything besides visuals, there is great overlap in their temperature ranges, and you can find 8 out of 10 currently available species in temperate climates. It could be nice to reduce the overlap between the temperature ranges a bit (both in terms of spawning and growing) to enhance the distinction between different climates and to avoid cluttering the inventory with too many functionally identical but visually different berries. 3. Cuttings. Score: 83%. I think most of the negative sentiment on cuttings seems to be related to the limitations on taking cuttings (just once per year, although can be largely circumvented by taking cuttings from newly grown young bushes) and to the very long growth time of new bushes (currently 8.5 months on average and paused when it’s too cold, which in some contexts makes them arguably just worse than fruit trees). Alongside reworked visuals and new species, cuttings belong to the trio of most supported changes which are getting very little pushback. 4. Adjusted growth cycle. Score: 57%. The first option here which can be considered quite mixed in terms of community sentiment, though frankly I’m unsure what the cause for it is. There’s a range of issues that I could point to, but those will be my own opinion much more than a summary of community opinion in this case: berries start off in a random state in new chunks, and effectively also when planted due to high randomness, which can make them ripen unpredictably, however, once the bushes get "reset" by becoming dormant, they follow a strict fruiting cycle which is almost identical for all species - pretty unimmersive and unrealistic by itself, balance notwithstanding, as it stands, in warmer temperate regions (closer to ~10 C yearly average), berries can ripen twice per year (around July and October), meaning a bush is available during two out of 12 months, and that’s assuming the ripe state doesn’t get cut short by the bush going dormant; there is some variation and some randomness, so ~3 months will be a pretty good (and fairly optimistic) estimate, but it’s still not nearly enough for a beginner to feed themselves reliably, in slightly colder temperate regions (closer to 0 C yearly average) berries will generally only ripen once (around August), at least if not harvested immediately as they ripen, which halves their availability, being on this edge between one and two harvests causes a “ripening” bush with just a few days until ripe to suddenly go dormant, which just feels bad (and it’s kind of realistic, but works out poorly in practice), the most that you'll usually get over a larger area is around 4-5 months total availability (not considering a greenhouse in the context of early-game foraging), a proper seasonal fruiting system would make it easy to stagger different species between each other in a controlled way, to ripen as early as in May, more likely in June (e.g. strawberries, currants), through July, August and September (e.g. blueberries, blackberries), and the last berries ending around October or even extending into November (e.g. cranberries); the ripening times would be much more natural with a good seasonal system, and the player would be encouraged to find and plant multiple species to cover a longer time period (a similar effect can be achieved by adjusting dormancy temperatures, but it could still have several of the other flaws like random initial state). 5. Bush health and fertilizer usage. Score: 45%. As expected, this part of the rework does not get much appreciation. Many people will actually be largely unaffected by this change, but I think the low score really speaks for itself either way. Seemingly the most common argument from the start has been that it would be fine if fertilizer was just a purely optional boost to yield, and in certain regards that’s very close to what we effectively got after they very quickly implemented slow decay in nutrient uptake over time. I don’t know if I can recommend any concrete changes here, but the least that I can recommend is to be more intentional in design and communication: if continuous maintenance was not the intent, then I genuinely don’t know why the initial implementation and description of the changes made it seem like that was the case, only back off quickly (though it's still not difficult to make that assumption based on the changelog) - the majority of the initial reaction after the rework was first revealed was caused by the initial state being seen by many people as practically abandoning the existing design philosophy of Vintage Story, and that kind of irreversibly tainted many people’s impression of the rework, merely phrasing the change as “requiring fertilizer” is an easy trigger for backlash, and anyone with a decent idea of how game communities work could have predicted the reaction just based on a few words of the changelog, the current state is more like up-front cost, but it’s spread-out over a few years, so instead of actually being an effective up-front cost, it can instead incentivize breaking and replanting bushes repeatedly, there is also the whole fiasco with people thinking that wild bushes require fertilizer, which was not an unreasonable inference from the prerelease changelog and yet it wasn’t made clearer since then besides some unofficial clarifications, lastly, as it stands, bush health is so far removed from fertilizing crops that sharing the nutrient system with it can genuinely be more confusing than helpful for understanding it, especially if the player is going by with what realistic bush health actually requires. 6. Fertilizer requirement specifically (the “barren” state). Score: 32%. While I’m not sure how much of this is a knee-jerk reaction more than anything, this is the lowest-scoring part of the rework, justifiably and unsurprisingly. The simplest argument against it is just that it’s unrealistic. A lot of people have said that it would be fine if the bushes stayed as they are, just with the “barren” state removed so that a bush will always keep producing some berries. I think that removing the “barren” state and changing nothing else would make for a rather inelegant system, and I think it would need a few more concurrent adjustments if it were to have the “barren” state removed, though frankly it arguably needs rebalancing even if the “barren” state is to stay. High fertility soil and terra preta are virtually useless for berry bushes, since the difference between medium fertility and terra preta is equivalent to roughly two portions of fertilizer, which is massively less than terra preta costs to make. 7. Medium soil fertility requirement. Score: 43%. Since it was removed, I don’t think there’s much to be discussed here. The score was low, and I'd argue it’s a good thing that it was removed, though I wonder how people would now vote on something like “fertilizer requirement in low-quality soils”. 8. Traits. Score: 75%. Traits are roughly in the middle in terms of score, with the dominant feedback about them being seemingly that there should be a way to crossbreed bushes or in some other way produce new traits instead of just having to find wild bushes with them. It’s also been quite common to see the idea that fruit trees should get traits as well, which kind of just comes back to the issue of berry bushes being inconsistent with the rest of the game. I also stand by my arguments that cuttings with different traits being unstackable is a sacrilege against the player’s inventory space and that the traits introduce unnecessary clutter for what is arguably the most basic and accessible food source, but other than that I think there is not much to say - a pretty good system with a lot of potential which is currently rather shallow. 9. General balance as a food source. Score: 57%. A mixed score again. To this day I don’t think we have seen any official stance on what the intended balance of the bushes is, but as it stands they have been kind of butchered in the early game, with fewer ripe wild bushes that have slightly reduced yield, inconvenient transport, extremely long growth time, short availability window, and the fertilizer requirement. Cultivated bushes can be in certain regards more efficient than the old bushes, especially when considering traits, but it takes much more time and effort to get them up to that state in the long term. Seemingly the most common argument in favor of the rework is that changes were necessary due to berries being OP, but that is actually quite debatable and clearly isn’t the only reason for the changes. They were easy to replant, but many people didn’t bother after the first or second year anyways due to other options being plainly better, both as a food source and also for rot production. Cuttings have now made them more time-consuming to replant and too slow to benefit from in Year 0, but they’ve also made it possible to propagate the bushes at an exponential rate without decimating wild bushes. I’ve personally argued that berries should be much more common in the wild, but take more time to harvest, to lean into them being a reliable food source for the early game and for emergencies, but not viable late-game due to inefficiency more than scarcity - cultivated bushes, then, could be made several times more efficient than wild ones with a bit of maintenance.