MKMoose

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

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

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

Leaving a corpse can be quite easily argued to be more lore-accurate based on the "Ghosts" story excerpt, primarily the penultimate paragraph: I genuinely don't know where you're getting the notion that the old body should disappear. And even if we assume that the old body should disappear, the game isn't consistent with itself in terms of what gets dropped and what remains on the player after death. Keep inventory would then likely be the more logical, lore-accurate and internally consistent option.

The short of it is that bronze is for the most part a stepping stone to iron. It's easier to obtain and process than iron, but past that it's superseded by it in practically every way. It can have its uses, especially when modded, but you won't lose out by switching to iron as fast as possible. Keep in mind that at least a small amount of bronze is necessary in order to process iron in the first place - most notably for an anvil. Many people don't even make a copper anvil - just cast a hammer, pickaxe and prospecting pick, then beeline for bronze to get set up with higher-quality tools right out of the gate. It's permille, not percentile. Cassiterite readings are bugged - the actual density should be up to ~12 times higher than the permille number would suggest. If I did the math right, the game's internal estimate gives ~81 ingots from a typical cassiterite deposit, more in granite, and the actual average should be even higher. That number has a lot of variance, so you've likely just got one on the lower side despite getting a bountiful deposit in granite. If you had found a couple more deposits near the first one, then your impression would be less skewed. At 0.2 permille, you're generally guaranteed 3 deposits per chunk (under an especially thick layer of sedimentary rock, which is what you seem to have gotten, it will be more random). Also, assuming you switch to iron reasonably fast and unless you're using bronze for armor or some other large project, even 40 ingots of bronze is quite likely more than you're ever gonna need in a typical game. Bismuth bronze should generally be treated as an alternative option for when you don't have any cassiterite but happen to find sphalerite and bismuthinite. Black bronze is generally only useful in small quantities for when you want a small extra edge in combat before you find iron, but it's generally not very worthwhile. Keep in mind, also, that bismuth bronze is not weaker than tin bronze, and it's more of a less common sidegrade. It has lower mining speed and damage, but it also has higher durability on everything besides armor if I recall correctly. For tools like hammers, chisels or saws, bismuth bronze is in isolation strictly better than tin bronze due to mining speed and damage being practically irrelevant.

If you want to be extra certain and don't mind using commands, you can also toggle liquid block targeting with .debug liquidselectable or through the World Edit menu, which will allow you to see the name of the block easily.

Technically, this is what the game kind of already does, because the power and durability effects applied by quenching don't do anything by themselves and are only used to then apply damage and other buffs which actually affect the tool's stats. At a basic level, this change could boil down to just renaming a few things, not necessarily significant changes to the underlying functionality. "Power" and "durability" have one advantage over "hardness" and "brittleness" or "toughness", and it is that they more directly tell the player what they actually do in-game. That said, even for players completely unfamiliar with material properties, I think it shouldn't be difficult to remember the rough meaning and in-game effects of two or three words, and it might actually be more of a cool learning opportunity of sorts. One thing I would be careful to avoid is excessive imbalance between the complexity of different areas of gameplay. If crafting with metal is given a bunch of constraints regarding hardness or toughness, then it would seem natural that crafting with wood, bone, stone, sand, leather or other materials should also be given some constraints to prevent the player from using materials which wouldn't realistically be suitable for a given purpose. Certain mechanical parts technically already require harder wood types, but the current implementation doesn't make that requirement very clear. But that said, I think it would at the very least make a lot of sense to apply the bonuses of heat treatment to anything that can benefit from them. If an item or something crafted from it has durability, then it should likely be possible to increase that durability by increasing toughness. While currently very few items can benefit from this, I think it could be possible to treat plates to craft them into better armor. Item stackability concerns would have to be addressed for this to work well, though. Aye, I like both of those. Would help a lot to make the effects clearer and nudge the player towards the optimal treatment order.

This is practically already implemented in the form of seeking ranges. The one thing we don't have is proper LoS, but LoS is far from necessary to implement everything else, and we also seem to have a decent MVP implemented for the bowtorn. Animals already have a stressLevel attribute which can do a lot of work and would likely be more informative. Otherwise, small additions to EntityBehaviorEmotionStates (especially the aggressivearoundentities code) would more than likely be sufficient to create varied state triggers depending on the threat level of nearby entities. Already implemented, alongside some related functionality. My suggestion didn't even mention this. There is a myriad ways to implement retreat and flight. Unless we somehow decide to rework a large portion of animal movement, we basically already have both - one is practically just wandering biased away from nearby entities, the other can be done with the PoI system or without pathfinding at all and just with better obstacle and pit/water avoidance. One thing that could be iffy is retreating while still looking at the threat. Considering that we don't really have procedural animations in the game as far as I remember, just reusing the regular look task would be quite sufficient, and it's trivial to effectively give it higher priority when the animal is alert. We already have a lot of logic related to emotion states and tasks which would cover this easily with few if any new features. Doesn't seem to me that this is necessary for any reason, unless we somehow decide to rework a large portion of entity emotion state and task logic. The actual constraints are caused primarily by animation and sound requirements as well as systemic extent of changes, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm aware, I read through most of the gameplay changes in JSON and code. They have a 70% chance to become aggressive after taking damage from the player. The possible causes for them to cease aggression and go back to fleeing are as follows: the player getting out of their seeking range (equal to bears' seeking range), finding the target (i.e. touching the player, I think, but it doesn't seem to normally get triggered if the player is moving away from the raccoon), getting stopped by an obstacle, the maximum follow time of 60 s being exceeded (I'd need to verify this, actually, cause it's a really long time to be chased by an animal). Heatseeking missiles are one of the most comedically dumb mechanics in the game, and it seems to me that they are not really brought up too often just because they're sometimes just amusing and annoying more than they are harmful. They're simply caused by aggressive animals lacking proper limits to how long they can chase the target. What I honestly don't get is that, if the cheer is simply about raccoons not being defenseless anymore, then how do we feel about them being randomly borderline suicidal now? I don't think that's much of an improvement. What I personally am quite happy about, which was not mentioned in the changelog, is that the distance at which raccoons flee players, wolves and bears is now 33% higher. This still isn't always enough to avoid bears (and I think it's bears that should be slightly adjusted now to be more similar to wolves), but it's an improvement. And here's the fun part: the devs have quite literally solved the "capable of protecting themselves" problem with the bowtorn already, which will flee, but retaliate if the player gets too close. It shouldn't be difficult to do the same for raccoons, and several other animals as well. An even simpler solution, though possibly a bit less practical, probably lies in just reducing the maximum follow time (which for some reason isn't adjusted from the default 60 s on any animals except foxes chasing chickens and hares). The changes to foxes and pigs, as a side note, are arguably actually really quite good, now that I've looked at them in more detail. The seeking range for pigs actually got reduced, and what was increased is just the range at which they flee the player after being hit, if I'm reading it correctly. Both now also flee quite a lot faster, not just chase the player faster, which might actually cause some difficulties when hunting.

Animal husbandry as a mechanic doesn't strictly require the animal to be fenced-in, however, you'll generally want to have a contiguous fence to protect the animals from predators and prevent them from wandering away (or jumping off the cliff), especially for when they start running from you or from a predator. Fish can keep respawning even if you completely deplete an lake.

The purpose of defensive threat display is less to warn the player not to attack, and more to warn the player before the animal attacks. But if the player attacks the animal or just approaches too quickly, then they will still be met with a fast and dangerous response, especially from animals like boars, moose or bears. Even a raccoon or a deer might sometimes defend themselves with an opportune attack first before fleeing if you manage to run straight into it (though especially deer would practically always run away before you can do that). Being able to avoid dangerous creatures is, in large part, exactly the point, though they will easily still give you a scare or outright attack if you don't make distance quickly enough after initially getting too close. With the exception of wolves and hyenas in certain regards, I would argue that animals should be easy to avoid, but more dangerous when not respected. Even if the player is confident in their skill, they would still be easily put in their place once they get too cocky and disregard one warning too many or forget to keep their guard up. As things stand, the best way to cross a forest is just to keep running since animals are for the most part just too slow, and I think it would be much better if instead it was preferable to move more carefully to avoid disturbing the wildlife. And at the same time, moving slowly should be greatly rewarded when hunting with the ability to get much closer to the target for a better chance at an accurate hit with arrows or spears. Wolves, hyenas, and to some extent brown and polar bears, are exceptions from the above, because they can function as more active predators and would be much more tricky to avoid completely unless the player simply doesn't even approach their territory. Fair enough, I do certainly agree that there's a lot of things that would require a bunch of new mechanics to be introduced. That said, there's good reason I've put injuries and bleeding in "additional notes". I think that even just very basic gradation of reactions to the player (simply one extra state between calm and scared/aggressive), ideally with vocal warnings where appropriate and some adjustments to animal stats, could do wonders for the animals' behavior in practially all contexts - exploring, hunting and husbandry - all while almost exclusively using already existing mechanics.

The problem is that if the player backs off, the raccoon will keep chasing them. That is the single part which I took issue with, even if I didn't initially word it particularly well. There you go. Behavioral responses for animals, inspired by real wildlife. Nothing like getting hit by a bit of inspiration on a weekend.

Motivation Animal behavior in Vintage Story is largely unimmersive and unintuitive, because animals respond in gamified and highly simplified ways. Most animals exhibit survival strategies which could realistically be easily considered pathological, i.e. caused by disease or injury. Goals Improve animal behavior to be more engaging when hunting. Make animal behavior more believable and realistic. Give the player fair warning before an animal attacks. Reduce early-game frustration with overly aggressive wildlife. Improve the behavior of domesticated animals to be less erratic. Stay reasonably close to the vanilla experience and mechanical constraints. Primary behavioral patterns In science it's not uncommon to distinguish many different kinds of distinct behavioral responses that animals exhibit when approached or threatened. I'm going to simplify the system into three generalized patterns which, with some variation within each group, can cover every single animal in the game and provide plenty of gameplay depth. The borders between categories are naturally fluid and some animals may exhibit behaviors typical of more than one group (especially since behavior can vary due to various factors), but this is intended more as general guideline than rigid categorization. Evasive animals, prey and small game. Relevant animals include smaller species like foxes, raccoons, hares, as well as several larger herbivores like deer, sheep and goats. The primary response for these animals is flight - fast escape, preferably to pre-selected advantageous terrain, like high ground in the case of goats or trees in the case of raccoons. Some animals like raccoons often employ threat display - hissing, bluffing, fur standing up, and many animals like deer, sheep or again raccoons, especially if cornered or immobilized in some way, may engage in more defensive combat - ramming, kicking and thrashing, clawing and biting. It is important to remember that for these animals even more so than others, combat is about survival - if they engage in it at all, they generally only do it opportunistically to protect themselves and their young or to create an escape opportunity. They are not aggressive and their first response is almost always retreat. Those are also the animals which a hunter will often focus on for meat and pelts. Defensive and territorial animals, large game. This category includes boars, bears, moose and similar large animals. Due to their size, they can be unexpectedly dangerous even if they don't seem immediately threatening. Typical response often involves territorial defense and threat display - repeated approach and retreat, vocal warnings, guarding boundaries. Under some circumstances like guarding their territory or food, protecting offspring, or getting surprised at close distance, they may resort to managed but decisive aggression to neutralize a perceived threat, though they still remain defensive above all else - deliberately seeking out a target or pursuing a threat is rare. Some species like black bears may be more avoidant and prefer to disengage as quickly as possible. Simply avoiding approaching too close and leaving the area once warned is generally sufficient to avoid danger. This category, from a gameplay perspective, should include animals balanced as "hunting challenges" - large game that will fiercely fight back when hunted, but may provide relatively lucrative rewards in the form of heavy hides, fat and large bones. Predators. In the current state of the game, this only includes wolves and hyenas. Predators are generally much less aggressive than many people seem to think, and their behavior is driven by well-developed risk assessment abilities. Wolves and hyenas often move in packs or small groups, though many other predators hunt individually. Their typical response when threatened is keeping distance, careful observation, tracking and similar behaviors. If they encounter larger animals or groups, then the decision-making process is simple: high risk => retreat. If they deem that the target is worth the risk - primarily when a pack of predators locates lone prey - they will circle the target and close in, then attack. In part to protect lone players from somewhat unfair attacks, larger packs of predators should arguably only target large enough groups of targets. They don't just outright attack anything that comes into their vicinity, and instead they choose their prey carefully. Implementation details Animal awareness. Each animal should have certain distances (much as they do currently, though it's pretty shallow as of now) at which they enter specific behavioral states. Ideally, this would be done not with strict distances, but based on some simulated aspects of hearing, sight and maybe even smell. Some delays, lingering states and other details would make them more believable. Keep in mind that distances may vary greatly between different animals, and the examples I'm giving are very rough and generally much lower than realistic for the sake of gameplay. The primary states which should be generally shared by almost all animals are: calm (no threat in vicinity, resting, eating, drinking), alert (~20-50 m or closer, prey animals will raise their head and start scanning for threats, while territorial or predatory animals may move to investigate the potential threat or target), cautious (~10-20 m, all relevant animals may engage in defensive threat display at this distance, prey animals will freeze or retreat depending on species, while other animals will either retreat cautiously or turn towards the threat depending on intention), threatened (~2-10 m, prey animals flee quickly, defensive and territorial animals may attack, predators retreat unless confident), attacked (after getting hit, behavior is more erratic and unpredictable, for most species the primary reaction is flight, especially if hit at range and not from up-close, while defensive behaviour similar to when threatened is less common, though more aggressive if present). Animal speed. Flight (escape) and pursuit speed should generally be higher than the player's sprinting speed, unless injured. I believe that hunting should be about strategy, element of surprise, careful shot placement, and fast action, not about pumping half a dozen arrows into a single target. The best way to do this is to make sure that prey animals escape quickly when hunted carelessly, while larger animals should be avoidable if warnings are respected, but extraordinarily dangerous when aggressive (it's genuinely kind of pathetic that a Seraph can outrun a bear in many contexts, even a brown or polar bear with effective use of terrain). Defensive attacks. When threatened or attacked, many animals will attempt a quick and decisive attack, and then disengage and retreat if unsuccessful - largely the same as the current "attack and pursue", except switched back to "flee" after the first attack, whether successful or not. If the threat pursues the animal in turn, they may opportunistically attack again. Exceptions may include boars as well as brown or polar bears, especially when protecting their offspring, but even those should often relent after a short sprint - if they don't manage to catch the threat within that time, they should retreat back to roughly where they started (especially if the initial reason for the aggression was protecting their young). Predator attacks. When travelling through the wilderness, predators shouldn't generally be a jumpscare, or at least it should be the presence of the predator or vocal warning that jumpscares the player, not immediately taking damage. Animals like wolves practically never attack right the moment they notice a target. The default wolf encounter should be noticing them some two dozen blocks away, looking at the player and following them. In many cases, they would disengage naturally. In some cases, if the risk is not too high, they would circle the target, close in gradually (often with vocal warnings) and then attack suddenly. Domesticated animals. The "threatened" radius in which animals initiate flight or attack should be very quickly reduced to zero for domesticated animals, and the thresholds for other states should also be relaxed fairly quickly. The key here is gradation (important everywhere, but here especially) - it's only natural for a domesticated animal to be hesitant and careful around humans if it's not habituated, but the current behavior of either being completely oblivious or full-speed sprinting away with nothing in-between is exceptionally unimmersive and annoying. Additional factors affecting behavior. The most relevant factor is likely having offspring to protect, and the mating season also causes increased aggression in many species. These could be implemented in various, simple or complex ways, but the most important detail is that when an animal is protecting their young, they should actually protect them, not forget about their existence once out of range. Animals that don't generally fit these categories Animals like aurochs, elephants or horses, as herd animals, would ideally need more complex herd behavior to be simulated or at least approximated. They are in many regards similar to other larger animals like moose or boars, but herd dynamics shape their behaviors is very distinct ways. Some predators, though we don't have them currently in the game, may silently ambush the target. A big cat or two could really spice up the tropics. Additional notes AI improvements are borderline necessary to really bring a rework like this to a more complete state. The least that should be eventually done is: prevent animals from constantly falling down pits or into water, introduce more variation to animals' direction of movement, instead of having them always move either directly towards or directly away from the target or threat. Injuries, bleeding and similar effects would allow to make hunting (and being hunted) much more dynamic, engaging and realistic in a whole range of ways, mainly by greatly reducing the number of hits required to bring down a target but increasing their threat level and adding on additional complexity of tracking injured animals. Animal yields would have to be increased if animals are made more difficult to kill. Arguably, animal yields should be adjusted regardless by implementing simple butchering. It would require more effort per animal while retaining a similar level of effort for the same yields, changing very little about balance while greatly increasing mechanical depth and reducing the need to kill dozens or hundreds of animals over a single playthrough.

If you want to bring up realism, then I regret to inform you that raccoons are, in fact, not aggressive. Their typical response is a defensive threat display, with bluffing, hissing, fur standing up, and all that. Neglecting diseased or highly stressed individuals, any sort of aggression is generally limited to last-resort attacks when protecting young or cornered. When attacked, flight is generally the first response, then defensive combat if grabbed or cornered. Compared to animals' real-life behavior, the thing that VS and many other games tend to default to of "pursue the attacker" is borderline absurd for almost all animals, but especially for small ones like raccoons, just because it would be a largely pathological survival strategy. It can make some sense for megafauna and large predators, but even in those cases defensive behaviors tend to be more common than aggression and pursuit. In an open field or forest, they have all the escape routes in the world. They can run some 20 km/h over short distances and climb trees. But even disregarding that, my point is about aggression and pursuing the player, which they simply should not do. Raccoons being capable of protecting themselves and being aggressive when attacked are two entirely different things.

Them's got hands now, but for what? Except messing with a beginner who doesn't know that they can fight back, raccoons are equally as trivial to kill as they used to be, if not easier since they may come back right up to the player after the first hit instead of running away. Unlike foxes which have now been buffed considerably (though while seeking they are still slower than the player's sprint, just like black bears), raccoons aren't even a significant threat mainly because they are barely faster than the Seraph's walking speed (well, technically, they are about as fast as foxes used to be). I would expect wildlife to be much more skittish and defensive, not more aggressive. Granted, at least the animals affected in this RC are now ever so slightly less anemic when fleeing as well, not just when seeking.

Aye, I remember making a similar point in a different place entirely. I was actually asked in the Discord whether I would be fine with this post being used as the basis for a mod, though whether anything will come out of it I can't say. It would naturally be quite interesting to see how the mechanics work out in practice - there's nothing quite like having an actual working example to verify whether what I've thought up actually makes sense. The mythical 5% shatter chance on first quenching strikes again, it seems. It's not communicated in the tooltip, but that's what it does in the code, and I don't remember whether the devs confirmed what the intention was. As for the shattering bug, I might have just glossed over a mention of the watering can. To hopefully clarify what I mean a bit: handbook inconsistency => the handbook states that a piece can only be tempered at most as many times as it has been quenched, but there is simply no such limit in the game, debuffs of tempering outweigh its benefits => due to the way it is balanced, the effects of tempering are minimal or even purely detrimental (especially on a piece which has already been quenched a few times due to the reduction to power acting on the cumulative effect of previous quenchings and the reduction to shatter chance acting on the subsequent ones); the math for it is a bit complex and would require proper optimization to find optimal sequences (people have messed with it in this thread), but either way the actual material savings you can get from it are very minuscule, and are also counterweighed by the time and fuel costs - a newer player would probably be better off if tempering just didn't exist in the current balance, costs and risks of quenching for durability outweigh its benefits => the first quenching for durability gives 1.2 / 1 * 0.95 - 1 = 14% more expected durability per unit of metal, the second one gives 1.3(6) / 1.2 * 0.9 - 1 = 2.5% more expected durability per unit of metal, then after that it's net negative (especially if you also consider clay, fuel and time costs); tempering trades time and fuel for lower shatter chance but the difference is again minuscule - a player who looks at the math will just realize that it's practically not worth it past the first iteration, but someone will inevitably try going for higher durability and realize too late that they're wasting time and resources. As for quenching for power giving sometimes absurd results, I do agree that most players will not really be reaching them, but consider this: the damage increase from copper to tin bronze for a falx is 4.5 / 3.75 - 1 = 20%, the default damage increase from tin bronze to iron for a falx is 5 / 4.5 - 1 = ~11%, even a very achievable 25.48% damage buff (quenched three times with no tempering, on average making one piece out of ~1.4 ingots), from tin bronze to quenched iron makes for a (5 * 1.2548) / 4.5 - 1 = ~39% damage increase, from iron to meteoric iron or steel (which deal the same damage), it's just 5.25 / 5 = 5%. One of these is not like the other, so to speak. While I overall do agree that going past 3, maybe 4 quenchings is neither practical nor particularly impactful for the average player, even the 25% buff causes a really drastic jump over bronze, and a very significant balance shift relative to 1.21. Keep in mind as well that the damage bonus currently doesn't work on spears when thrown, and can't be applied at all to arrows, which significantly shifts late-game balance in favor of melee weapons (and that is also on top of sharpening currently only being possible on swords and falxes). Is all of that intentional? Maybe. Quenching gets counterbalanced somewhat by the changes to the forge. It kind of annoys me that we just don't really have any official information on what the long-term goals are here, but that jump over bronze (combined with a durability increase) is really kind of questionable balance-wise, especially given that it currently only affects melee weapons. The system ultimately isn't as terrible as I might sometimes make it come off as, and the least that I can give to you that it will most likely work fairly well for a more casual player. Frankly, linking this suggestion in the RC post and on the Discord (at least three times if you also count when it was brought up by other people without me asking) has got me a number of reactions from people who aren't normally active on these forums, and there's always a chance that a few of these reactions are knee-jerk over the RNG more than supportive of the suggestion, so I prefer to take that number with a grain of salt when compared to posts which get the majority of interactions from people more active in the forums. Still, the amount of positive feedback was genuinely kind of shocking.

Generally you will need to cool the piece in air for tempering. On a technical level, the game requires that there is sufficient delay between the piece reaching the tempering temperature and cooling to the settled state, which may mean (I haven't verified it to be certain) that you would be able to wait until that time passes and then cool in water the rest of the way through, but either way you won't be able to cool quickly in water right away. In the real process, slow cooling is required to more effectively relieve internal stresses in the metal and form a finer microstructure through carbon attoms diffusing more evenly throughout - cooling quickly introduces internal stresses and uneven grain (just like it does when quenching, but in that case it's considered a side effect of a desirable process), causing the piece to become more brittle. Tempering or annealing can be done in a furnace so that it's even slower than in air, often done overnight in a medieval or home forge, or sometimes taking up to a few dozen hours in some highly specialized processes.

The advice mentioned by other people here is solid, but I do want to mention as well that cassiterite (the tin ore you're looking for) is one of the two ores alongside native copper which spawn in a slightly different way than other ores. There are two different deposit types for native copper and cassiterite (all other ores only have one deposit type, barring some caveats): surface deposits - they only appear a couple blocks under the surface and are best found by digging a few blocks down under loose surface ore chunks, as you have likely been doing, since there is always a deposit under them; those specific deposits are entirely separate from the prospecting system; they are there to get you started with some easily-accessible resources and are not intended as your main source of those metals, at least not in the case of tin, deep deposits - they only form deeper underground (several dozen blocks deep, broadly speaking), and the most consistent method to find them is prospecting (caving is also an option, but it can also be highly dangerous if you're playing on standard settings); finding a few deep deposits this way will provide you with practically all the copper and tin you're ever gonna need outside perhaps of some particularly large projects.

I don't know if it was confirmed by a dev, but it's almost certainly a bug, and I think it started in rc.1. It's part of one of the two major bugs I was mentioning, because you might also notice that the damage buff is actually double that of the power increase from quenching, while it's supposed to be 1:1. The other major bug is that shattering appraently just doesn't happen at all, though I haven't tested that one personally.

A bit of a problem here is that, arguably, the stated vision is not even fulfilled in the current state of the mechanic. The developer behind the mechanic seems to be Tyron, based on this message in the Discord: To which my response at the time was: Whether my suggestion could make a better system, I cannot predict with certainty, but the core issue for me has been from the start that the current system has a bunch of problems and doesn't achieve its own stated goals, which I've tried to achieve better in a more realistic design. To be honest, I've specifically kind of avoided getting too far into details, and even still had to write the more approachable handbook-style guide at request (which I should have probably done much earlier, to be honest). I don't really have any numbers on hand, because I think that balancing them at the design stage is largely a fool's errand. There's simply too many moving pieces, different ways to apply absolute or relative modifiers, implement limits, weigh benefits with costs and time investment. I've analyzed a couple options and even had some mock numbers somewhere which had a few problems that I was considering how to solve, but any number being balanced is heavily dependent on a set of other numbers. As things stand, I don't even really know much about what the devs' intention is for quenching, which makes it difficult to propose anything more specific than I've already done. The handbook guide is still inconsistent with in-game behavior, and there are at least two major bugs with the system. In terms of balance, tempering (at least after one or two iterations) and durability quenching (except arguably the first iteration) apply risks and debuffs that outweigh the benefits, while power quenching can get to borderline absurd numbers after a few iterations, even if at steeply rising cost.

Personally, I've very quickly learned to only eat pies when I can eat an entire slice with no leftover, and I've been unaffected by the issue ever since. That said, I think an even better way to solve this (though significantly more complex code-wise) would be to allow to have a stack of multiple full slices and a partial slice in one slot. The same could apply to liquid containers with different amounts of liquid in them.

I've personally always found that water should be moveable and obtainable, but not easily duplicated, i.e. there should be some natural sources (oceans, underground aquifers, rain) which don't deplete when drawn from, while regular surface sources should be finite. Either way, to your questions. Though I play with moveable water sources, I can say that terrace farms are by far the most efficient type of farm in terms of the amount of farmland blocks per water block, because a single water source would be able to supply infinite farmland if it wasn't limited by world height. It's just much more flexible to let the water flow just the way you want instead of having to build around existing water sources, and terraces can also be very aesthetic in certain cases if you build them in such a way that the water is hidden under the next layer. It can take quite a lot of work to pull off without moveable sources. Covering a lake is the best way to achieve a large, flat farm that doesn't require watering or rely on rain. You can also build a farm around a lake, not necessarily into it, if you don't have the soil or time in the early game or if you prefer the aesthetics of it. Even just a single isolated block of water can supply: 8x 75% moisture tiles (~97% growth speed), 16x 50% moisture tiles (~82% growth speed), 24x 25% moisture tiles (~58% growth speed). And you can increase these numbers if you create channels for the water to flow through to cover a larger area. Naturally, the effective farmland count per water source will be much lower for a larger lake due to overlap, though the total for the entire lake can be very high regardless. Especially if you're willing to accept the lower growth rates, it means that you could just create a ring around a large lake, maybe with a couple extra channels, and be set for the entire game. Watering and rain increase the moisture of a farmland block to 100%, which results in a 110% growth rate (~13.4% higher than a regular 75% moisture block), which means that watering the farmland or settling in a rainy area can be useful in almost any context, not just with moveable water sources disabled. After watering or rain, farmland moisture should decrease to zero over four days (haven't verified it experimentally yet), so you can water it every ~3 days if you're fine with slightly slower growth or daily if not more often if you want slightly faster growth. It takes a bit of maintenance, but especially in a rainy area it is absolutely a viable choice to just skip irrigation altogether.

Am I correct to say that the water is ~80 blocks deep at that reading? Mining underwater and at this kind of depth is certainly a choice, but if you need bronze then it may take a long time to find a better spot than this, because, for many ores, deposits are much more common underwater than on land. If you can dive there safely, then I say go for it.

And yet it is completely untrue that multiple discs can spawn at the same depth close-by for any reason other than pure chance. I've been entirely unsuccessful at replicating what you're claiming in my many hours experimenting with the ore generation and prospecting system, and I can guarantee that you will be unsuccessful at replicating it as well as long as you use an actually robust testing method. Deposit depth is randomized in DiscGeneratorBase.beforeGenDeposit() independently for every deposit using a shared random generator, meaning that the only thing other than chance which could cause multiple deposits to spawn at the same level would be a bug.

It seems to be intentional. Currently, huge boars can only be found in the wild. The huge gray boar is just an elder eurasian wild pig (gray boar). The new species are the red river hog and the warthog, both of which prefer warm climates.