MKMoose

There's only one hitbox, and the hit location is purely chance-based. It's 20% head, 50% torso and 30% legs, verified in current game code.

The crafting grid recipe for sealing a crock was removed in favor of the in-world method. You should be able to place the crock somewhere and right-click it with fat in hand to seal it.

Motivation There have been numerous cultures all over the world, like the Sami or the Scythians, which often lived a more mobile lifestyle, moving seasonally between different pastures and relied heavily on a herd of animals for sustenance, resources and trade. Some tradition of shepherds and similar roles also appears in many other cultures which were otherwise less mobile. As of now, anything remotely resembling this kind of gameplay style is borderline impossible in Vintage Story, as animal husbandry practically requires a secure enclosure. But, there are mechanics in place which can be developed to implement a more flexible system relatively easily. Goal Create a simple system that allows safely and reliably herding a group of animals, even while traveling over long distances. Implement mechanics to enable the player to subsist primarily if not only on the herded animals, and ideally also reward seasonal travel with the herd. Mechanics 1. Animal herds - a number of animals which is recognized by the game as belonging to one group. A simple form of herds is already in the game, and some new functionality around it would have to be added. The primary realistically herded animals from among those that we already have in the game include goats, sheep and reindeer. For the purpose of increasing meaningful distinctions between animals, it would make sense to include goats, sheep and reindeer in the more complex herding mechanics, while restricting pigs to enclosed pens. 2. Herding staff (or herding crook, alternatively abstracted to just a walking stick, potentially alongside some related items) - allows to group animals into a herd assigned to this staff (e.g. assign by clicking on an animal with RMB, remove from the herd with Shift + RMB; a staff without an assigned herd could automatically take on an existing herd on the first RMB). The simplest possible implementation would have all animals assigned to the same herd loosely follow the person holding the staff and stay in the vicinity of the last position where the staff was held in hand. Some features could then be added or adjusted (especially some way to force a herd stay in a location and to call back lost animals would be useful) to allow more intuitive or more complex herd management and avoid mistakes like accidentally holding the staff for a moment and causing the herd to move. The staff (especially if named a crook) may also allow to "pick up" and move animals in a way similar to the entity mover tool available in the creative mode, although it would likely be less effective and potentially restricted to baby animals. 3. Grazing and pasture - the herded animals, in part to naturally reward travel and avoid some of the maintenance normally associated with animal husbandry, should be able to graze on most terrain with vegetation, especially natural meadows - this would mean that they would not have to be fed to multiply, and thereby could effectively serve as a mobile food source. The only restriction is that there would likely have to be some mechanism similar in some aspects to the fish depletion mechanic, potentially based on the travelled distance, which would limit the amount of food that a herd can obtain from an area and incentivize the player to travel with the herd instead of staying stationary. Additionally, making different biomes optimal for grazing at different times of year would incentivize seasonal movement. Important considerations 1. Reliability - for a herding system to be remotely worthwhile, it has to be safe, reliable and practical, and frankly it would probably be the biggest implementation challenge here: no unannounced and nearly unstoppable predator attacks decimating half the herd or running off with it into the sunset, no random jumping into pits or drowning in water, no sprinting off the moment the player approaches, no having to individually bring back animals that move too far away, no having to babysit the animals to make sure that they don't hurt themselves or run off. Some level of risk and complication is fine, but it has to be low enough to avoid making herding, which already starts off on the back foot by leaning into a mobile gameplay style, into a tedious, annoying and unfun gimmick that nobody wants to interact with. The goal really should be the opposite - something simple and reliable that the player can do without an excess of maintenance and worry. 2. Early-game accessibility - while it might be more realistic to require animals to be domesticated for a few generations before they can be herded, it would also render herding largely useless. It has to be relatively easy and quick in the early game, because (1) why move to herding when the player has already domesticated the animals for an extended period of time, and (2) late-game features like ironmaking and steelmaking require a more stationary gameplay style, so herding has to be introduced early to avoid a conflict of incentives. Additional or future features Chickens could use a related mechanic to make them stay near henboxes without the need for a fence, though that could be easily done without any herd mechanics. Several new species of animals could make for excellent herds, especially some kind of cattle or yaks, which may also see use in transport, farming and mechanical power. Additional seasonal mechanics that would make the player want to visit different regions at different times of year regardless of whether they are managing a herd or not would make herding fit more naturally with the regular gameplay cycle. Mobile storage, portable shelters, less restrictive progression gating, less restrictive respawning mechanics and other changes to enable more nomadic playstyles would go a long way to make herding less one-dimensional, into something that actually functions within the broader range of mechanics instead of fighting against them.

Bronze actually unlocks quite a lot of things, but most of them are either an efficiency upgrade, or a prerequisite for iron and steel, or both - almost none actually unlock properly new things the way copper unlocks stuff like the fruit press, the bucket and many tools: tool tier 3, allowing to mine: quartz - not particularly important for most players unless using a lot of glass for building; some quartz can be obtained from panning and loose ore chunks before that, bituminous coal and anthracite - mostly irrelevant before iron processing, at least for my playstyle, gold and silver - purely optional or endgame uses, borax - mostly just an alternative to lime, only required later for steel processing, helve hammer - just an efficiency upgrade, pulverizer, and by extension: cloth mordant and crushed cinnabar - specific dyes are required for certain warm clothes, otherwise it's purely cosmetic, bombs - optional, refractory bricks - mostly irrelevant before iron, shields better than crude - not particularly meaningful, mining bag - just a storage space upgrade, reinforced wooden crate trap - mostly irrelevant, just doesn't have almost any meaningful uses, elk medallions - you need bronze to progress the story in the first place, and most people will have iron by the time they get around to it either way, so this is mostly irrelevant. But that said, I think we generally also want bronze to not be too impactful, no? Too many things being locked behing copper has been, as mentioned here already, a fairly common complaint. Progression gating should generally be limited to the early game, while higher metal tiers doing the same would feel very provibitive - locking important features can easily make the player feel like they have to rush through progression just for basic quality of life. The benefits of bronze, iron and steel involve improved tools, improved combat effectiveness, automated or more scalable production or processing of certain resources, and general efficiency improvements, so experiencing all that can already make the player rush to it on subsequent playthroughs. I'd imagine that adding sawmills (supposed to come in 1.23), elevators (seemingly put on hold indefinitely for now), steam engines (eventually), rail transport (eventually) and stuff like cast iron stoves, cookware and cauldrons (I don't remember if it was even teased, but it really should be added at some point) will not contribute positively to community sentiment on the early game, especially pre-Copper Age which has always been quite underdeveloped. I think this is a very good thing to do where it makes sense. Restricting torch holders to brass is completely arbitrary and has no reasonable justification that I can think of other than that it's just an old feature that was never updated. The bug net being copper-only is pretty odd, and so are chutes, though the latter can at least serve as a copper sink in the late game where copper is often nearly useless unless for lanterns or something. Some things that are restricted to bronze or iron and not copper (e.g. the crate trap or the mining bag) can also be confusing due to how arbitrary they are. But there is a number of applications where copper, bronze, brass and some similar metals are often simply superior to iron and steel, primarily stuff like: bells and musical instruments, bearings and some other mechanical parts, some precision devices and tools, e.g. astrolabes, certain boat/ship components (or generally anything exposed to saltwater), cannons and firearms, cookware, roofs, statues and ornamentation, and maybe something that I've missed. Those arguably should be only craftable from copper, bronze, brass or adjacent metals where appropriate, or at the very least there is a strong realistic argument to be made for most if not all of them, due to corrosion and wear resistance, easy casting of complex shapes, and some other properties. Iron and steel were the dominant metals for weapons, tools, armor and machinery, but copper and bronze have retained several applications well after iron and steel became relatively cheap and widely available. Some things like more advanced armor (brigandine, chain and plate) could also justifiably be restricted to iron and steel only, and it might even end up changing nothing about how the majority of people play the game. Personally, I really hope that we get some more meaningful means of progression outside of simplistic metal tiers. Carving, woodworking, pottery, textile production and weaving (maybe also wickerwork), glassmaking, leather crafting, agriculture (including herbalism), pastoralism, trapping and hunting, and more - there's so many systems which could be developed greatly and provide alternative means of progression, and I think that just focusing on the metals tends to neglect a lot of potential depth that the game could have. Many of those other progression chains would naturally benefit from or occasionally require some metals, but equally, the power and durability of tools, weapons, armor and other stuff shouldn't be just based on which metal you put on a stick. As it stands, the game also heavily favors having a single base location, which I think partially contribures to people feeling kind of pressured into fast vertical progression. No mobile storage, no portable food preservation methods remotely competitive with cellars, no tents or other portable shelters, restrictive respawning system, and a couple related factors - the game really feels like it loses out on a lot of variety that it could have. Some features like steelmaking being restricted to stationary locations makes sense, but something like animal husbandry ideally really should be perfectly viable with a more mobile lifestyle as well.

Running mixed armor can be argued to be a very realistic incentive. Granted, helmet being lighter is a bit questionable, and it can look odd and arguably ugly with what we currently have in the game, so we would need to get more historical armor with more deliberate balancing to reach what I would consider a decently historically accurate armor system, and I don't know if the devs have any interest in that. If you go by real, historical armor, then you get something like this: early medieval (not later than around the 10th century) - typically just wool, sometimes padded textile with a metal helmet at best; more expensive armor could involve a mail shirt, in certain regions lamellar, scale or something of the sort (antiquity also saw some interesting metal breastplates, greaves and the like, but we're generally in the medieval period in VS), high medieval (~11th-13th century) - more mail in sleeves, leggings and a hood, and some small plate components, though poorer troops still often relied primarily on gambeson (other regions of the world saw some similar and some different developments, but we don't really have armor of those other regions in the game either way, except for lamellar which is arbitrarily unavailable in iron and steel), late medieval (starting in the 14th century and more properly in the 15th century) - high-coverage rigid plate armor actually appearing in meaningful quantity; some metal pieces often put on elbows, forearms, shins and knees, but full articulated plate still quite rare and expensive, so most common soldiers would rely at best on brigandine or mail and mixed, often partial limb armor. Compared to the actual historical armor development, VS armor is really strange in that almost all improvement comes from the metal progression, and almost none comes from iterating on the basics, improving the technological processes, designing new armor, and a whole lot of physical labor required to make that armor to higher and higher standards. Real lamellar and brigandine was often superior to simple chainmail and scale, but in-game they are just worse but cheaper - scale especially tends to be given too much credit in media, where in reality it was often the cheap alternative to lamellar or mail. In most historical contexts, the type of armor worn by a soldier was dictated by their status and wealth as much as by balancing practicality with survivability, if not more, and level of protection for more influenced by the armor's general quality and layering of different components than by the selection of armor type and metal tier. VS, as a game, inherently doesn't have the same balance levers as real life, the progression has its quirks, some things have to be simplified, and you can't just tell the player that they're too poor to ever afford plate armor, but I do think that there's a lot that can be gained by designing a system that actually tries to emulate real armor in some capacity, instead of taking a few terms for types of armor, repeating them across the metal tiers with no respect to historical acuracy, and assigning almost arbitrary stats to them. As much as I agree with this, I would say that the current system does already introduce too much complexity despite being actually rather shallow - it's very wide and may seem deep at first glance, but within the at least ~27 armor sets (more if you count same-tier metal variants and stuff) there is very little in the way of meaningful differences. Everything can be pretty much boiled down to three debuff tiers - armor with few or no downsides to wear at all times, small penalties for regular usage without sacrificing mobility, and heavy debuffs for maximum protection in combat-heavy situations. Add on the matter of time and cost to craft, which is what gives lamellar a small niche, and that's basically all there is to it. You could easily achieve nearly the same level of depth with about a third of the armor options, while ideally also making sure that none of the options end up practically useless like now happens with pretty much all copper and bronze armor except situationally lamellar.

You have a residue-covered pot on the firepit. You need to use a clean one to make food. Granted, the game should probably be clearer about what the issue is.

It's a known issue. It's nothing unique to berry bushes, but they exacerbate the issue much more than other plants due to a large number of partially transparent textures.

Does the resulting tool have a Buffable behavior? If not, then you need to add it for the buffs to apply.

When a henbox says that a brooding hen is required, it means that you need to feed the chickens to have the hens incubate the eggs over several days. You can see this post for which animals can be caught with each type of trap - it is quite restrictive, and unfortunately there's no easy in-game way to figure that out. Chickens should get caught in a basket trap quite reliably, with a 50% chance, while in the case of goats it is impossible to catch adults - only baby goats can be caught in a trap. If you want to get goats for the purpose of husbandry, you'll often have to either chase them or get them to chase you into a pen, pit, or whatever you prepare for them.

Modern statistics for deer hunting using bows place the kill-to-hit ratio at around 80% (see this study). For traditional equipment it may be less, but data is more sparse (this study reported 65% at 20 hits, but cited a few reports that indicated a much more favorable ratio). Spears and javelins are a bit different, because they were less frequently used for hunting deer-sized game in the "conventional" way. Their accuracy and effective range are much lower than for bows unless you're using a very light spear or specialized throwing devices (certainly not what we have in the game), which points to the actual reason why spear hunting was often done in groups - to reduce risk and maximize the chance of a successful hit on a driven animal. Their goal was often to wound and weaken the animal (including groups of animals and game many times larger than deer, where group hunting becomes actually important), which would allow to get up close and finish it off. Experimental archaeology has demonstrated that many primitive weapons can quite easily reach over 20 cm of penetration in animals or animal analogues, which is considered lethal depth for large mammals (mostly taken from this study, where the "Background" section contains a lot of references to other works). The primary killing mechanism of a bow, as well as a spear or javelin, is exsanguination. Its effectiveness primarily depends on hit location, most favorably a pierced heart, lungs or important blood vessels, which can quite often cause collapse due to blood loss within less than 30 s, while other locations don't tend to produce nearly as deadly bleeding. And that applies to rifles as well - if you're struggling to hit a vital organ, then I can see why you'd hit something multiple times and not kill it, but you really should be hitting vital organs - if you're missing, then I think that counts as user error and not weapon inefficiency. And that's completely separate from cars, which kill primarily through bone fractures and other blunt trauma. As I see it, the primary balancing lever here is bleedout time. If a crude arrow requires you to track the animal over several hundred blocks but a steel arrow causes it to drop within 10 s, then I think you'd have plenty of reason to invest in better gear - it would just need to be adequately communicated in-game to make the benefit clear. Or if you don't hit a vital organ, then a better weapon would likely weaken the animal more effectively, probably further reducing mobility, making it easier to chase or track to finish off.

FYI, a moose has 21 health and will die in 6 melee hits or 4 ranged hits with an iron spear. Which, oddly enough, is actually the same as most deer, and less than the elk which has 30 health - if we were to take the deer as a reference, then the moose should have its health roughly doubled. But I do think that the point seems to be also about lack of reaction to wounds and blood loss, not just about immediate damage. As of 1.22, the hare had its health reduced to 3, making it possible to one-shot it using a longbow with any arrows or a crude bow with 0+ damage arrows. I would not expect the status effect system to introduce any significant changes, at least not within the same major update in which the system is added. Both because it is more sensible to introduce a large system step-by-step, and because it doesn't seem to me that the devs even have any significant interest in overhauling large parts of the game. That said, killing animals with a single shot, which in isolation would absolutely trivialize parts of the game, can be easily balanced with two main factors: better animal AI - more aware of the player, fleeing easily, requiring skill to approach, tracking after the shot - a one-hit-kill doesn't have to make the animal drop on the spot, and having to track the animal could easily take the same amount of time that chasing it frantically through the bushes takes currently - realistically, larger animals like deer will nearly always run at least a couple dozen meters after getting their lungs pierced (even with modern compound bows), while a suboptimal hit, if it's even fatal, often leaves them running for hundreds of meters before collapsing. This would also mean that animal husbandry would retain its benefits, because you naturally wouldn't need to carefully approach a domesticated animal and then track it after a difficult shot - just walk up to it with a knife and kill nearly on the spot (which shouldn't be done with a cleaver, but that's another matter). In order to make hunting take up a more appropriate amount of time, it would be easy enough to increase animal yields to be more realistic - and doubly so if harvesting and preserving animals is made more time-consuming, instead of a simplistic "pick up, throw in the cellar". If there are any concerns about it being too complex or anything of that sort, then I offer you: trapping. Primarily snare and deadfall traps, for rabbits, squirrels and birds, to provide the player with an accessible source of meat and small hides in the early game. Trapping pits for larger animals are an option and improvised solutions will always be possible, but keeping hunting as the primary method for killing the larger animals is desirable from a design standpoint. To create a natural progression system - as the player acquires better gear, they would become increasingly better suited at hunting large game - and to facilitate a greater level of satisfaction from a successful hunt, which could be easily lost if trapping pits are too efficient.

I'll always say that glue will not be a complete mechanic until it's possible to tap trees for relatively large-scale resin extraction (with an intermediate step if need be; sap could also could be used for some kinds of syrup) or make bone glue as a simpler alternative, or ideally both. But as it stands, as long as almost all clutter items are purely decorative, I do think that the current repair cost is excessive, because there's no shot a small decorative item is reasonably worth 6 resin and 6 charcoal. Some of the larger ones, maybe, but a few candlestubs, a pile of scraps, a small toy, a couple bottles, a stack of books? And it's trivially easy to modify by adjusting reparability in the assets.

I do think that, ideally, both casual and combat-oriented players should be able to have plenty of fun during storms on default settings. Painting a safe hideout as "the least fun option" kind of neglects the fact that one of the biggest reasons why a player might be disinterested in fighting through the storm is just that they don't find intense combat enjoyable, so only allowing the player to remain in safety in a way that is seemingly deliberately ensured to be less fun is exactly what makes people turn the storms off. It can easily end up feeling like combat is the only "correct" way to engage with them. Focusing on "how to make it better without making it easier" seems like an odd way to approach it to me, because making it easier is inherently nearly the only way to make it more fun for the people who find that it's too difficult. Doesn't mean that the peak difficulty has to be lowered (special, extreme challenges could even be added for experienced players), but more interesting low-risk routes should be viable as well. A level of risk should be retained, naturally, but getting chased around by T3+ monsters is not just risky - it's downright oppressive when the player doesn't have late-game equipment and ample supplies. I would argue that the best way to go about this would be to focus on temporal storms being an atmospheric environmental anomaly first, then combat challenge second - not the other way around. I think that the storms should be safe for the most part, and only dangerous within more localized, brief phenomena that the player could seek out and take on for some sort of reward (or sometimes, but rarely, be surprised by), instead of it being a "monsters are now everywhere and you can't do anything about it" event. Simply give the player a couple varied options for what they want to do, and if they want to just chill while admiring the temporal disturbances, then why not let them? I would expect this to backfire very easily. As it stands, the players who stay in hiding tend to already be on the back foot - those who don't have the equipment or skill for it, or just don't feel like fighting at the moment - so I don't think it's a good idea to further push those players to engage with the storms. Granted, something of this manner could potentially be a good way to encourage the player to try fighitng bit-by-bit and see that it's not too bad instead of avoiding combat altogether, but I'd personally anticipate more problems than solutions to come out of this specific idea. It could be much more worthwhile to give the player any reason to venture out into the storm besides combat, so that monsters would be an obstacle and not the goal.

New species do a lot to offset the yield and fruiting cycle changes, because they've been added on top without reducing the frequency of other bushes. Ultimately, food is fairly plentiful, and even if bushes are now a bit less viable, it's still fairly easy to collect a couple dozen to a hundred berries over a fairly short run and subsist on them for much longer than they took to collect. I've personally found that while it can be more difficult to tell whether a bush is ripe, it tends to be very easy to notice bushes from a distance due to some sort of graphical issue that causes them to become oddly bright from farther away - I'm not sure whether that's a common experience or whether the old bushes used to be similar, but it looks kind of wrong and kind of trivializes finding berries. Each of the bright green spots (more yellow near the desert) is a berry bush or a couple of them - there's at least ~50 of them visible here. Do keep in mind that this is caused by their initial state being randomized. They will start ripening at much more similar times after the first winter when they get synchronized by going into the dormant state.

I would say that the lack of meaningful differences between bushes is among the weakest points of the rework, at least out of those that have seen near unanimity. A couple species have halved yield and halved nutrient uptake (can be a bit better or worse, but ultimately changes little). Currants have very slightly adjusted temperature thresholds (close to irrelevant in practice). Select bushes slow down the player when moving through them. The system is already set up to easily handle a massive breadth of differences, so it's kind of disappointing to see many bushes being functionally identical and the global mechanical variety still much lower than fruit trees. I'd imagine that part of the reason for it might be that the devs still have plans for the bushes, but quite frankly I don't care much about plans that we know next to nothing about - not design direction, not details on the planned features, and not any ETA. While I don't know what you might have learned from some videos, keep in mind that content made early into the release tends to be colored by speculation and rushed or flawed testing methods. It's just what tends to happen anytime new content is released and the devs don't describe the changes in detail. Fertilizer is currently required eventually in some scenarios if you want to keep the bush producing fruit at all, and in almost all contexts if you want to keep the bush healthy, but it's mostly irrelevant in a typical short singleplayer game, roughly up to ~2-3 in-game years (in large part due to the long initial growth time). Fertilizer can be used to increase the yield of bushes to 150% as well, which results in somewhat better efficiency in terms of space and harvesting time, but isn't ultimately particularly impactful. It's basically a bit of up-front investment in return for slightly faster harvesting. I personally think that the fertilizer requirement is pretty pointless. I would much rather see the effects of fertilizer be purely optional, but significantly more meaningful and functional instead of just increasing yield.

This is the new procedural dungeon. Currently there's just one, with frankly quite repetitive contents and layout. I'm not aware of significant changes from 1.22.0 to 1.22.2 in regards to the dungeons. They can be very easy to find sometimes, but a lot depends on whether you get a lot of flat areas - veryflat is the only landform where they can generate, and it takes up about 6% of world surface if I recall correctly. To be honest, I have no idea what loot should be considered appropriate and have no clue what the dev stance on it might be, but it does seem like it can allow to skip some parts of early progression while posing little to no threat. And it's not claimed, so you can pick up a few interesting things. I wouldn't mind if it was even maybe slightly more valuable, if it was actually risky to explore, because as it stands it's almost incomparably more worthwhile than regular ruins tend to be.

This is not a concern, at least not until you try regenerating the world using commands. As a general rule, new versions are compatible with older worlds, though the already generated parts of the world might not have some new features (e.g. rapids, new berry bushes, missing animal maps for fish), so you'll have to move to new chunks to find them or backup the world and try using something like /db prune 1 drop confirm to regenerate the world in areas where you haven't modified it (only if it's created on 1.18.0+; also, this one won't fix the fish) or something like /wgen regen <radius> (radius is in chunks, so the radius in blocks is 32x that number) to regenerate a specific area (be mindful to do it at least 32 * (radius + 1) blocks away from anything you don't want deleted to use the latter). Remember to backup the world if you want to be safe, especially if you intend to run any commands to regenerate the world. A fresh start can certainly make for a more cohesive experience and reduce risk of bugs, so it's probably the more attractive option if you've started this world relatively recently and aren't particularly attached to it. Otherwise, the risks are small enough that it's more a matter of preference than necessity, and you should generally be fine to upgrade.

Baby goats and sheep can be caught in both traps, though crate traps have a significantly higher chance of success (70% > 30%). Baby pigs can only be caught in basket traps, interestingly enough. More generally, the basket trap can catch: chicken, hare, fox (baby), hyena (baby), raccoon (baby), wolf (baby), pudu deer (baby), goat (baby), sheep (baby), pig (baby). And the crate trap can catch: fox (adult), pudu deer (adult), water deer (adult), all deer except pudu (baby), gazelle (baby), goat (baby; higher chance than basket trap), sheep (baby; higher chance than basket trap). That's based on the JSON assets, so it's fully accurate assuming no bugs or other odd behavior. Also, keep in mind that many animals (especially adult animals) can eat the bait from the trap but can't be caught.

The thing with cinnabar is that it's not even really a dye, because it's an insoluble mineral. Technically, cinnabar was used for pigments, primarily in art, lacquerware, and cosmetics, but it's generally not useful for dyeing leather, cloth and stuff, because it doesn't bind in the way that dyes do. Red dye was primarily obtained from madder (brick red, usually more common, lower-quality and lower-class) and insects like kermes and cochineal (carmine and crimson red respectively, more luxurious generally, although common in some regions as well). Beetroot could also be used, but it tends to be more violet or pink. Similar issues can be found with a few other in-game dyes as well. Though the current dye sources are arguably a matter of balance as well, so there's a chance that some clothing recipes would have to be changed if we were to preserve their balance.

It's roughly under 60% of bituminous coal and anthracite deposits, though partial coverage is also possible. It's only tied to location in the horizontal plane, so close-by deposits will tend to either all have fireclay or all have no fireclay. No relation to deposit size.

It doesn't work in regions generated prior to 1.22, reported in #9158/#9234. The temporary workaround that I've found is to use the command /wgen regen 0, which regenerates the animal maps for the region (512x512 area) that you're currently in. When using /wgen regen 0, make sure you're not standing near any player-built structures that you don't want deleted (at least 32 blocks away, to keep it simple), as the command actually regenerates the chunk you're in, and regenerating the region is a side effect in a sense. Backup the world to be extra safe. Keep in mind that this only regenerates the region you're in, so you're gonna have to run the command again if you want to fish in different regions generated prior to 1.22.

Both from the perspective of immersion and gameplay, this should probably just depend on a lot on the specific trader and specific goods in question, and many if not all traders should probably be exclusive to either the populated or the less populated areas. As a general rule, I think the main goals here are (1) drive a clear direction of trade and (2) prevent short-distance or next-door trading. Any resource that can be purchased from traders should have a sink in a different part of the world (or no sink at all), and I think it would make sense for those closer to civilization to sell ready-to-use items and buy raw resources to be processed as well as some rare trinkets, but be disinterested in common items that other nearby traders might have already provided them with. Those in the wilderness, on the other hand, would buy many of those processed items (things like tools and clothes especially, essentially the universal needs I've described earlier here), and sell ready-to-process raw materials they've obtained or rare valuables. Something of the sort. Like this, maybe: an agricultural trader out in the wilds should probably have a large variety of regional and gathered foods in smaller quantities, potentially some very valuable ones; near other traders, they will sell large quantities of a limited selection of common foods, as well as trade more exotic plants from other regions of the world for a high price, a survival goods trader living in the wilderness may fit under a label like "hunter" better (I know that this would conflict with the class, but not sure what else to use), selling some immediately useful survival items and stuff like meat and hides in fairly large quantities, whereas closer to other traders they should primarily sell items that a person might reasonably need when preparing for travel like long-lasting food, warm clothes, lanterns and tools, and they could actually buy the meat and hides that the ones in the wilderness sell to turn it into that long-lasting food and warm clothes, a commodities trader, while in the wild, could probably be renamed to a "prospector" or something of the sort, selling many raw materials, whereas the ones in more populated areas would buy raw materials and sell more complex products like nails and strips, fertilizer, blasting powder, parchment, a building materials trader could receive similar treatment and focus on obtaining the wood, stone, clay and other materials that the traders in larger settlements could turn into furniture and actual building blocks, an artisan, furniture or luxury trader should primarily if not only live in highly populated areas, and their in-game purpose (alongside the building materials trader) should be supplying the player and functioning as rusty gear sinks (important for multiplayer economy) more than particularly meaningful interaction with the traders in the wilderness, a treasure hunter only really makes sense in the wilderness for the most part, and should sell a lot of items that luxury traders look for. Those would probably need to be tweaked a lot, still, to make them properly make sense, and you might notice that I've even come to some different solutions from those suggested by @ifoz despite talking about the same topic from a similar perspective.

On the topic of trade more than just traders, one thing that I've been thinking about in relation to Tyron saying at some point that he would like a merchant to be a more viable player job in-game, is that traders shouldn't just sell a semi-random assortment of items with no clear rhyme or reason besides all centering around a mostly cohesive theme. One possible way to implement this is through giving traders more distinctive categories of items that they sell or buy, related to a specific trader job: Bulk exports - the items which a trader could reasonably produce (or otherwise obtain) in large quantites, which would be the primary materials that the player would be interested in for trading - pottery from the artisan, food from the farmer, clothing from the tailor, and so on. These trades wouldn't rotate nearly as often, could be fulfilled over a long time, and could even be seasonal. Also, keep in mind the key word: "bulk". This wouldn't be just half a stack of bread or a single pickaxe - it could potentially go into dozens of stacks at a time, albeit naturally with appropriate delay between each delivery. Ideally, a trader should know roughly where traders who want these bulk exports might be, tying into the "traders know each other" idea. Bulk requests - the mirror or complementary half of bulk exports - the artisan needs clay and rare minerals, the farmer needs fertilizer, the tailor needs cloth, and they are willing to pay handsomely for it. Crucially, once a request is fulfilled, then the trader could have the next bulk export ready much faster or at reduced price. Similarly to bulk exports, traders should have some sort of an idea where these items could be sourced. High-value items - some things like tailor-exclusive clothing, the recurve bow, and other relatively difficult-to-obtain items, should be possible to sell at significantly higher price than most items, simply to reward the player for putting in the effort to put together a more complex product from multiple ingredients. Universal needs - a trader shouldn't really be in a position to just refuse everything except a very narrow selection of specific items. Sure, they probably wouldn't offer particularly high prices for most items, and they shouldn't accept bulk materials or random scraps, but it feels really annoying when careful analysis of what I can sell to nearby traders ends up giving me something like 3 possible items which I can produce in reasonable quantity. And similar to bulk requests, there could be situations where a trader finds themselves in need of some more common items like food, clothing, building materials or tools, at which point the normally low prices could increase for a time - ideally only at a time when it makes sense, e.g. food in the winter, tools in the summer, and only in locations where it makes sense, e.g. fuel only in areas where trees are scarce. And keep in mind that these shouldn't be specific like "flax bread" or "tin bronze axe" - these should be more like "food" or "axe", or sometimes more specific like "food which will take more than a month to spoil" or "bronze or better axe". A special balancing factor for bulk exports/requests could be that they would be sold in enclosed merchandise crates, which would have especially high sell value and could only be carried in limited quantity (possibly in the backpack slots). These would be among the primary goods that the player could move between trader outposts. They could also be opened to get the goods inside, but an intact crate would have much higher sell value than the items themselves, balanced in such a way that it would be generally preferable to sell them (unless maybe when looking for bulk items). And all of that would require some changes to the restocking mechanics and traders' gear supply. The same system, naturally, could be integrated into any larger settlements and story locations, with the caveat that each settlement would have to be treated as a single entity in some way, because it wouldn't make sense to buy things from one trader and sell it to their neighbor. It would be really cool to actually have tiny villages with clear purpose that implies specific needs and exports, e.g. these guys living in a forest produce a lot of lumber, but need tools, meanwhile those guys produce tools but need fuel for metalworking. This hunter sells meat to supply the two other camps, and that trader imports ore to sell to the metalworkers. Granted, I know that there's a line somewhere there that the devs probably don't want to cross with larger villages, but the general idea could be implemented well even with one-trader huts. Can't really reference every other post on this topic, but generally I'm always wary of ideas for any sort of bandits, because nearly every single game that tries to implement them inevitably ends up with a simplistic system that kind of works, easily tweaks out and produces unexpected results, often creates strange ways to maximize return from bandit interactions, and it's overall nothing to write home about. And the reason for that is pretty simple - it's very difficult to create a believable human AI system (both in terms of moment-to-moment behavior and long-term relations) which is neutral, but not exploitable, and threatening, but not hostile. It's incomparably more complex than regular trader or animal systems. Many games, when implementing a human enemy, tend to default to something like cultists or cannibals, in large part just because many behaviors which would be considered erratic, unpredictable or immersion-breaking for bandits, suddenly become natural for these guys. While bandits could be cool, I think that it would be fine to stop at elusive thieves that only steal from traders, some shady traders, tricksters, and the like, while leaving more hostile behavior to appropriately more extreme factions.

Realistically, some types of fertilizer should be incorporated into the soil through tilling, and some don't really need it. Gameplay-wise, fertilizer already imposes some manner of work to obtain it in the first place, and being quick to apply could contrast it neatly with tilling crop fields presumably at least twice per year, weeding, or whatever might be implemented, so I'm not sure that having the player also work the fields when adding fertilizer adds much of interest. As long as it's optional, I see no significant issue, but also I don't see much purpose besides perhaps the upgrading part. On this part specifically, I think a lot would depend on what happens with soil fertility. If no significant changes are made and soil upgrading is implemented, then incorporating the fertilizer into soil in-place is certainly a much more attractive option than crafting the better soil and replacing the farmland. Terra preta, due to its special status, would have to either still remain craftable-only or receive an ever so slightly more sophisticated process to match the current cost and allow using charcoal. But in the long term, I don't generally think that tilling fertilizer into the farmland should be a way of "upgrading" farmland (though that can also depend on what "upgrading" is supposed to exactly mean). Adding fertilizer raises the nutrient levels, but usually doesn't really change anything fundamental about the soil, unless done repeatedly over a long time or very intensively. It seems like I can't help but think up brand new ways to overhaul the game, but I think it could be valuable to remove the idea of soil fertility tiers (barren, low, etc.), and instead implement continuous fertility (basically just soil nutrients as they are now, but with visual impact on the soil). This would allow implementing distinct soil types like sandy soil or clay-rich soil without an excess of soil sub-variants. The differences between types of soil could be much more interesting than just quality tiers (though some would still be better or worse for agriculture), with properties like water retention, nutrient retention, maybe even pH or soil compactness or other stuff depending on how deep we would want to go. Once soil type is determined by its base material of sorts (sand, clay, loam, gravel for barren soil, potentially charcoal for terra preta, maybe some more specific soil types - there's a lot of freedom here), its quality would be determined by the amount of nutrients, which could be raised fluidly by adding fertilizer, without distinct fertility tiers. We could even basically remove soil as a block (or keep it just as a simple baseline) and implement soil mechanics for sand, gravel, clay and similar blocks, to produce a smooth gradient which could look really good in arid or very cold climates. Some of the soil properties could also be influenced by tilling and by amendments like ash, biochar (charcoal), lime or leaf litter to better match the requirements of some more picky plants. The one big question with that approach is how to preserve some of the properties from higher-quality soil if dug up, because resetting it to some sort of low baseline likely would not work. I think that literally just saving the soil properties when dug up and allowing them to average in a stack the same way that temperature or spoil time can be averaged would make sense, and it would just require that potential cheesy strategies and hyperoptimization are prevented (could be largely done with a penalty to nutrients when dug up or something of the sort, still disincentivizing relocation but not outright resetting the soil). It's always seemed to me like saltpeter is the stand-in for guano, but it's always been pretty underwhelming. Adding birds has always been a frequent suggestion and a little bit of work has actually been done on that, I think, though it seems to be on hold indefinitely as of now - maybe we'll see something in 1.23, but I wouldn't really put my hopes up. It also has a lot of potential due to bird eggs and the birds themselves being a potentially valuable source of food, especially in the early game and in cold climates.

I do agree that not all the changes I've listed out are necessary and simplifying some things more like you've described could be in certain regards better. The main reason why I've mentioned reworking soil nutrition is that I think growth speed being variable and yield being constant is kind of backwards. Variable growth speed leads to issues with planning out crop growth times and can cause different parts of a crop field to desynchronize (especially annoying when planting crops further than directly adjacent to water). I think it would be better if growth times were something more universal and predictable once the bare minimum fertility and moisture requirements are met, especially for the crops with more seasonal growth, like bulk grains (it could have a bit more effect on the frequency of harvesting faster-growing or continuously-producing plants, but there's no need for it either). Optimization can be focused more on just increasing yields and better matching some stricter requirements, less on reducing inconsistencies and frustration. Those two are interesting and quite reasonable, and I'm just not certain that the benefits would outweigh some potential problems: if weed growth is constant irrespective of soil quality, then that's a strong incentive to plant the crops less resistant to weeds (vegetables, herbs) in small gardens with high quality soil, to maximize the ratio of output over maintenance effort - making weed growth increase with soil quality would at least partially remove this benefit, and in the extreme it could inadvertently incentivize making gardens in low fertility soil (even if it was still suboptimal, the perceived benefit of less frequent weeding could nudge players in the wrong direction), if weed growth is constant for all farmland blocks regardless of location and only affected by the crop growing on the block, then maintenance effort is a very predictable part of the system that can be easily balanced with positive and negative effects - tying it to proximity to grass and weeds could encourage some potentially cheesy strategies (isolating gardens from all nearby grass) and interfere with the added reward for removing weeds (preferably a small boost to nutrients for the soil block, alternatively a plant debris item) which is intended to make weeding less a purely detrimental chore and more an integral part of the farming cycle. My thought is that manure really doesn't have to be complicated. Put straw bedding near domesticated animals, pick it up after some time, and spread it in the garden soil. Some added steps could be added for the sake of realism if nothing else, but taking some liberties for the sake of gameplay is perfectly fine as well, and I think this is a good example of a feature where added complexity has little purpose and doesn't solve any problems, and may easily even be detrimental for the purpose of manure being the superior type of fertilizer.