MKMoose

I'm inclined to say that the defective iron blooms are one of the least punishing random mechanics, but are among the most annoying ones. The distinction from other random mechanics lies in where this randomness appears and in the player's agency in interacting with it. The reason why people dislike it, as I see it, is that after the player has gone through the whole process of searching for iron, which itself is riddled with a whole bunch of random factors, the raw ore already feels like a reward. Then they smelt this ore, get the bloom, heat it up if necessary, hammer it to clear the slag. It is so close to the next ingot, and finally... the bloom is missing a voxel for some reason. It feels like a waste of time and resources, there is almost no way to tell if it's defective without getting most of the way through the bloom, and the player can't do anything about it before the helve (but, as already pointed out, it needs to at least be better communicated, because a new player has little reason not to just discard the dud). If we wanted it to be realistic in any way, then the first thing that has to be done is allow to refine the defective blooms into slightly smaller quantities of iron. Alternatively, make the defective blooms actually flawed and not missing a single voxel, and make them unprocessable regardless of tools or producing only some 5 to 10 nuggets when processed in some way. Throwing away entire blooms was historically a very rare occurence, and it would primarily be done with heavily defective blooms that had extremely low metal yield or excessive impurities, not with an ingot that had an ounce of metal less than expected. And while helves have historically greatly improved the ironmaking process, they served primarily to offload most of the heavy work onto a water wheel and to accelerate the speed of production, not to magically fix defective blooms. It would arguably be more realistic to always get an ingot from every bloom, since that's right about what would actually happen barring exceptions. The ingots may just be a different size each time, but we can abstract that away the same way that we abstract away the amount of metal used for a product, they all simply take one ingot. I don't think the realism argument holds water, no matter how you paint it. I'll also add that, purely from a design perspective, I greatly dislike that the helve allows to entirely disregard the problem of defective blooms. It does kind of work as an incentive to set up mechanical power, but also serves as an unnecessary complication which disproportionately affects beginners. It's kind of like, I don't know, adding new soil mechanics or weeds but disabling them for terra preta, or adding an injury system but giving full injury protection to armor, or adding additional penalties to having low nutrition for an extended period of time, or something in that vein. What purpose does trying to make the game deeper or more realistic serve in the long run if it's rendered irrelevant by something that the player will want to reach either way? It would be cool to let all players experience these fun mechanics but allow experienced players to handle them more efficiently to actually reinforce game mastery, instead of removing complexity as the player progresses.

Just for convenience in survival I've liked acacia and oak, since I can use either of them for everything including tannin, and acacia even has resin. I kinda hate the color of acacia, though, while oak's advantage is that (if I recall correctly) it's visually the most similar of all wood types to items which don't have wood type variants, like shelves or tables, and so it can create a more uniform appearance across a build (though it may sometimes end up a bit bland). Because of this, when I was using more than one wood type, oak tended to be one of them. Other than that it's down to aesthetic preference and it largely depends on where and what I'm building. I've found myself often defaulting to pine for its somewhat rich and saturated color, which stands out neatly when using more gray-ish stone or daub. For less standard color palettes I tend to include oak or birch or sometimes larch, since they are perhaps the most neutral and inoffensive wood types which can counterbalance other, more unusual colors. I kind of wish we had some dark, saturated browns, not unlike Minecraft's spruce and dark oak (could also be some mahogany or chestnut), cause the closest we have is either desaturated, off-brown, or oddly striped in the case of ebony. I'd be interested in a rich yellow/golden/honey sort of color as well, some oak or ash probably.

One way to do this could be to borrow the chunk-based accumulation from snow, reducing both RAM and CPU load significantly compared to per-block calculations, albeit potentially sacrificing some of the aesthetics. The game would probably just need to occasionally recalculate the number of leaf blocks in each chunk and build a density map out of it, then reuse it for generating leaves in the same way that snow is generated now. Overall I like the idea for layer-based accumulation similar to snow, as it would be consistent with other features in the game and wouldn't be excessively difficult to implement.

While I like the motivation behind these changes, they bring several risks with them. Besides what others said, I'll mention that a lot of things in the current state of the game are highly forgiving, like domesticated animals never dying of hunger or diseases, or farm crops only ever dying from extreme temperatures in a way which is easily predictable and still gives back the seeds. This invites a rather cozy and casual playstyle, which admittedly somewhat conflicts with the idea of an "uncompromising wilderness survival", but regardless it is a well-liked part of the game's identity at this point. The thing that requires a very careful balance is that both weeds and diseases and punishment for low nutrition would introduce negative consequences for inaction, which is a great incentive in a somewhat more hardcore survival like Don't Starve or Project Zomboid, but I'm not sure that an excess of it would benefit Vintage Story - we already have hunger and food spoilage, and some players already find it pretty difficult. Punishment generally serves as a strong short-term motivator, but may end up discouraging the more casual players over time if they feel like the game requires tedious, routine maintenance or limits their available choices. That said, I do feel like farming could be slightly reworked to require more effort for the full benefits, so that it would land better in-between the easily-available berry bushes and fruit trees which essentially require no maintenance to bear fruit regularly, and animal husbandry which requires significant upfront investment and then works essentially as a nutrition type conversion with a roughly linear relationship of input to output. I made a related suggestion at one point here, if I may plug it, but in short, regarding weeds and diseases, I would prefer a more relaxed implementation, in a sense similar to the way nutrients and temperature work currently. They generally wouldn't be an issue right as the player starts the game and they shouldn't outright ruin entire crops aside from extreme cases, but they would reduce yields if neglected for an extended period of time (i.e. at least ~2 months on average for the first small debuffs to start appearing, and progressing slowly from there).

Have you seen the size of your typical iron vein? What's a lost ingot every now and then? There's plenty, plenty more where it came from. How much iron there is in a vein is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand. But even still, why are we wasting the player's time and resources with occasional blooms unprocessable by hand, which supposedly don't even matter for resource availability due to the sheer size of iron veins? There is already plenty of incentives to build the helve. It could at least be worth to keep in mind that the player has no reason to assume that the helve hammer will solve this problem, as somewhat demonstrated by several posts in this thread. Just adjusting the voxel count is the simplest solution, but if not that, then I would point to two ideas: 1. Inform the player explicitly in some way that the helve hammer can finish refining the bloom. 2. Allow to chisel down the bloom into nuggets, which could be used in the bloomery again (potentially alongside removing the helve's regenerative capability).

The base growth time of flax is 18 days (exactly two months), and that is also affected by moisture and nutrient levels. For medium fertility soil the actual growth rate appears as 88% at first, but will drop to 58% once nutrient levels are low enough, and maybe even dip to 29% for a brief moment. That's assuming 75% moisture, which requires direct proximity to a water source, though it might get increased by rain as well. You're gonna reach something like stage 7 at the end of June, and complete growth in middle to late July. And you're also hoping to have low enough temperatures to avoid getting your crops killed, and ideally with no yield reduction due to heat as well, though maybe that can be circumvented by planting in a colder area. Side note, the size estimation was more about the amount of farmland required to feed a person, though admittedly flax can change things up in sometimes pretty drastic ways. Loaded a new world, planted the flax, and accelerated time (assuming high calendarspeedmul shouldn't disrupt growth rates): I would still genuinely love to know if you are actually using this massive farm for anything other than for the sake of it, though. Let's not get bogged down in stupid details too much, as I admit it doesn't matter that much whether you get stuff on the first or fifth of July, but I just don't see a purpose for a farm this large. In my first world I had a couple dozen leftover linen and almost nothing to do with it in the second winter except healing items and a sailboat, and that was with 200 blocks of farmland. Either way, an increase to the effort required for farming could well end up coming with a small yield increase as well, so I reckon that unless it's completely overdone you might not even see too much of a difference in the total effort you need to put in to make your farms. This applies especially if the farm's importance declines after you get all your flax and large part would be left fallow anyways in subsequent years, so you probably wouldn't care too much if it starts growing weeds.

I am not getting the scale you're talking about. Assuming default world settings, the first "by the end of June" comes in 2 months from the start of the world, which isn't enough time to grow almost anything, so at this point farms are irrelevant. But if you have time for a proper harvest (i.e. the second "by the end of June" at 14 months), then that seems oddly easy to me. If I understand correctly, you're talking a total of 81 linen, which should take 162 flax crops, maybe bump that up to 200 to account for other uses as well. It could be that I'm just misunderstanding something that should be more obvious, but I really don't get what you're using those 1800 blocks for.

I'll try to give you a more proper reply to other points as well sooner or later, but I want to quickly say that I didn't mean increasing the cost of terra preta or something of the sort, I meant increasing the cost of converting dirt to farmland (i.e. creating farmland, from dirt), with the express purpose of making it less appealing to just keep replacing old dirt with new dirt, or repeatedly moving the farm to new places. Same point of making it less appealing to just keep replacing dirt. Also, only after initially converting dirt to farmland, not after every tilling, just so we're clear. Thinking about it from a different perspective, it would reward dedication to a piece of land and the effort put in to make it suitable for farming. Makes quite a bit of logical sense for soil that isn't naturally fertile (especially barren and low-fertility soil), while high-fertility soil and terra preta might not be affected by it.

They lose freshness and spoil, but don't actually turn to rot as long as they're in the pot. They can stay there indefinitely, but once spoiled they effectively can't be used elsewhere or even replanted, as they will rot immediately once removed from the pot. Not quite true. Opportunity cost. The time you spend making them larger you cannot also spend doing other parts of the game. Depends strongly on what you think the game is. I'm not the personality type that enjoys puttering. I vastly prefer hitting it hard, making a homestead appropriate to the needs of the game, finishing, then starting again, applying the lessons I learned from mistakes in the last playthrough. How much do you need to make a farm larger? An extra flint hoe or two, a dozen or two dozen fences, and at most ten to twenty minutes? I have nothing against your kind of playstyle, but I don't feel like making a bigger farm would have any significant opportunity cost unless you're straight up speedrunning the game. And it could potentially also save you some time later on and allow to collect sufficient food and fiber earlier thanks to being able to harvest more crops less frequently. It has been said here and in other threads that realism doesn't necessarily have to make the game explicitly more fun in order to make it arguably better. Either way, while I probably could have phrased it better, the intention for tilling specifically is that it should matter most before planting seeds or right after a harvest, without excessive maintenance in-between. That's also why weeds initially landed in the optional category, though having them only block planting new crops and not affect crop yields would allow them to only ever be removed before seeding as well, at which point there would be basically no maintenance, just slightly more work when planting. I've revised the original suggestion to account for this, but I'll mention it again at the end. There's two potential problems I can immediately point out with this. One is multiplayer servers and long trips - depending on implementation, people may end up getting restricted to only or primarily use grains, since vegetables may go into the seeding phase too quickly to reliably collect them. Weeds and the need for tilling could have the same issue in that they advance while the player isn't active but the server is running, but they have an advantage in that they are primarily an issue when the player has to harvest crops and plant new ones. Tilling and weeds are also arguably much easier to tweak to be less impactful by simply adjusting a few numbers, whereas adjusting the phase that drops more seeds to would likely have to focus on dropping more crops but less seeds, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. The second is related primarily to new players - if some people are already having difficulties managing their food supply, then I don't think reducing the availability of seeds while making it easier for an experienced player to expand the farm quickly would be in any significant way beneficial to the accessibility of the game. I've also seen several beginners walk next to a patch of wild crops completely oblivious, thinking it's just another type of grass or something, which is a fun problem in itself. The reason why I suggest tilling and weeding is that thwy willl kick in only after the player finds seeds and plants them, and can be made much more immediately apparent once they do. Side note, Tyron also spoke of restricting wild crops and plants in general to areas where they would appear naturally, like splitting them between continents with Eurpean crops in certain areas, Asian and American plants in their own regions, or something of the sort. This would create additional incentives for exploration and perhaps seed vessels while allowing to increase seed yields from crops. I've revised the original suggestion quite significantly, if you're interested. I've taken some of the feedback into consideration and added a point on incorporating plant residue after each harvest into the soil through tilling, which I've realized would be a much better, more immediately rewarding incentive. The player would be actually managing the crops through tilling, instead of performing a semi-arbitrary extra step to increase nutrients.

The chisel has a bunch of other issues which make it largely unsuitable for furniture. The voxel grid would make it difficult for the game to assign proper function to items and would much more easily allow creating horrific abominations that still pass as furniture, even more so than with quarter-tile surfaces. Also, chiseling can simply be pretty time-consuming and tedious, even with mods. Yeah, that's the reason why I initially only mentioned quarter-tile surfaces like display cases or bookshelves. Other functions would likely require special components, for example a tabletop covering four horizontal tiles, or a cupboard door two tiles (one block) high and probably requiring empty volume to open. Combining this functionality with chiseling could be interesting, though it feels to me like tacking on a new feature onto a system which was never designed for it. The goal of a more specialized, simpler workflow is to make working with furniture quick and intuitive, without having to account for the quirks of chiseling. Also, a note on building a shell around trunks for a wardrobe: if you wanted one with two trunks, this would effectively increase the volume (purely in block space, not hitboxes) taken up by the chests from 2x2x1 to something like 4x3x2. While it is possible to work around it in some ways and to add other furniture or the next floor's floorboards within that space, it is regardless highly impractical. To get back on topic a bit, I really agree that we need some more furniture. Most of my rooms feel like it's just a bed, table with a flowerpot, and then bookshelves because there's almost nothing else to put there. I like the idea for a separate woodworking workbench, as it is a nice piece of usable "furniture" by itself as well and would make crafting wood products much more hands-on. It may also be used for wooden boards and other intermediate materials, for various wooden items other than furniture like mechanical power parts, as well as for some smaller items and decorations. Even woodcarving and woodturning could be integrated into it in some way, unless they get split into separate systems. Woodworking is ultimately on the roadmap, and I feel like a workbench functinally similar to an anvil would be a really good way to get started with implementing it. A sawmill could also complement a woodworking workshop really well. When powered, it could allow to create boards and perhaps one or two other wood products much quicker. It would be balanced similarly to the helve hammer, primarily serving to reduce workload and save on tool durability.

It may be really nice to allow creating furniture by adding or removing components on each 16x16 pixel face in a 2x2 sub-block grid in each block. Kind of like individually exchanging each face in the largest chisel size, though with each component having actual thickness and detailing. I'm not sure if I'm describing it clearly enough, though I could probably show what I mean with chiseling if needed. Think like the current bookshelves have different variants, which are based on the same hollow vertical half-block frame, but some have an additional shelf or divider added in. In this system you could do the same thing and more - take off the top part to end up with a half-block-high bookshelf, remove one side for an outer corner piece or make an L shape for an inner corner, move the backface to the middle of the block so that the usable side is on the external face of the block, add additional glass panels in front for decoration, and so on. It would not be an easy system to create, but it would allow a lot of freedom of decoration while retaining functional quarter-tile surfaces that could be used just like the four slots of display cases or like bookshelves, or also perhaps for clothes and other stuff. It would primarily use wood, but there's a lot of potential for glass, ceramic tiles, metal plates, maybe some other materials. Ideally, there would even be larger and more complex components (some of which would have to take up a larger volume or have a bunch of constraints to be functional, not just a face or several of them), e.g. cupboard or wardrobe doors, table or counter surfaces, container lids, table legs, diagonal panels, coat racks, bed mattresses. Potentially also edge components like decorative ornaments and lining or metal frames, unless those get covered by a larger variety of panels. The main idea is to allow more functionality and decoration variety, but another benefit is a workflow which would be incomparably faster than chiseling, or at least unmodded chiseling. It would also allow some sub-voxel detailing and oblique angles within the predefined components, and still would arguably fit the blocky style of the game with no issues.

I'll add to this, as there were a few discussions on related topics where I've seen chiseling portrayed as the holy grail of building. Chiseling is often given as the primary way to create decorations, and it is undeniable that it has immense potential. However, chiseling is limited to a strict voxel grid and has extremely limited functional purpose on top of being decorative. This greatly limits the possibilities for the examples you gave of tables, chairs and lecterns, and many other items. I would really love to have something like a vertical display case - it could basically be identical to the existing bookshelves but with a glass panel, as this would add great depth to the freedom of decoration. I could go ham chiseling out all the furniture I can think of, but ultimately it will never serve much of a functional purpose, and that is why chiseling is not sufficient. New furniture should be functional or fill a niche that benefits from the use of oblique angles, like chairs, corner shelves as seen in ruins, or the wardrobe concept that was shown earlier this month. Similarly, new decorative items should put significant focus on small detailing which is difficult to chisel out neatly, like bottles, flowers, books, and so on.

That's fair, and that is also why I was considering to add tillage and weeding as something that the player only has to really worry about if they want to continue using the same soil for an extended period of time. To be more specific about weeds and give more proper context to the rest of this, I mean something like an average of some 20-30 days for weeds to appear on each tile (though it may also depend on proximity to grass in some way). For each of them have a few days with no effects and then something like a slowly increasing yield reduction, up to about -25% after three to four months. Perhaps make the yield reduction lower for existing crops, but significantly higher if the player cares so little as to plant new crops without removing weeds (could be implemented by incrementing the yield reduction only once for each growth stage of the main crop). It may be worth to block planting new crops if the weeds completely overgrow the tile. The scythe could reduce the growth level of weeds to the first stage, potentially also making them faster to remove by hand or while tilling. Removing weeds could also give a small bonus to nutrients to add a positive incentive as well, on the account of plant remains getting absorbed back into the soil. The nutrient bonus could be higher for more grown weeds to slightly offset the consequences of long trips and the like. The hoe could have the advantage of tilling and weeding quickly at the same time, which would matter a lot if regular tilling was added as well or if farmland were to slowly convert back to soil. This is part of the reason for the idea to increase the initial cost of farmland in some way. Right, but the thing is, it's not uncommon for players to lean into the most efficient routes of doing things, or strive to get the best possible yields from things like farming. If the player isn't at the base to pull the weeds(or check to make sure there's no weeds to pull), that's something likely to pester at the back of their mind while they're away. I will note though, that this doesn't really dissuade players from just...ignoring the mechanic entirely, putting up with the weeds, and just making absolutely massive farms to counteract the crop loss from neglect. What the mechanic does do though, is make it more frustrating to maintain farms at a large scale, which isn't really ideal given that it cuts down on player choice(now they're going to feel forced into small gardens). We could even bring out the "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game" quote, and I do agree that it's a risk with this kind of mechanic, though I think the same already exists for a lot of food sources in the game, if to a slightly lesser extent. You need to collect fruit trees in a specific time window, you need to collect berries, crops and I think also beehives to get new ones to start progressing and ideally you need to do it before winter, you have a specific time window for regular milking, not to mention that everything spoils if you don't use it. Tilling and weeds only significantly differ in that they would more explicitly punish excessively long neglect or serve as additional maintenance before seeding, instead of doing it mostly just through opportunity cost. I kind of feel like you're talking about a significantly more restrictive implementation than I have in mind. Maybe my wording is to blame. The purpose is to give the player something to care about, so that they will feel incentivized to put in a bit of extra effort and get rewarded for it, instead of treating farms like something that just churns out food almost for free. I think it should be more of a conversion of effort to reward, rather than free reward with practically no cost. We already have fruit trees and berries, which can more realistically serve as maintenance-free food sources, while animal husbandry is essentially on the opposite end of the scale in that the player gets nothing out if they put nothing in (though it still doesn't really punish the player for neglect in any big way, instead serving more as nutrition type conversion). As for farm size, it would remain absolutely possible to create larger farms without an excessive amount of maintenance, but players would just be more incentivized to plan better for what they actually need. If they decide to maintain an acre of land regardless, then they will be met with an acre of land to care about, instead of being able to leave it fallow with no consequences other than having a bit of grass to remove when they need to plant something once in ten years. The possibility of creating excessively large farms while ignoring weeds is something to be addressed, but to a small extent it's also a good thing - make a larger farm with less regular weeding, or have a smaller one but maintain it with more care. As it stands right now, there is no incentive aside from aesthetics not to make them larger. I think it should be sufficient to just make sure that removing weeds is not excessively tedious, while increasing the debuffs incrementally to the point of disabling the ability to plant new seeds without removing weeds. The nutritent bonus for removing weeds might also be of great benefit here, to better incentivize weeding at least once in a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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