MKMoose

I think you mean currently there is only one direction the axles spin in. Toggles are clearly direction dependent. I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but the point seems to be that reversing the rotation doesn't actually change anything. The quern, the helve and the pulverizer work perfectly fine regardless of which way the input spins, even if one direction causes something to look wrong. This seems like a pretty good reason not to bother with a reverser until it gets a functional purpose. Restricting machines to one specific direction is probably a bad idea, as there would inevitably be a whole lot of questions asking why a setup doesn't work. A reverser is a perfect fit for something that actually changes function when spinning the other way, and I can't really think of anything that fits the bill. Maybe something that can move in two directions, like an elevator? Would be pretty cool thematically, though might lack significant use cases for how complex it would be.

It’s not a single component, it still requires a transmission to work. But I get that. To elaborate a bit on this, I'll mention that I would have nothing strictly against the idea, and implementing it in a way similar to the clutch and not as a completely standalone component is probably the best suggestion for a reverser that I've seen so far. The reason why I'm saying it seems "a bit too convenient" is mainly that the devs seem to prefer to push players to create more complex machinery for more advanced functionality (as evidenced by small gears only ever connecting in pairs, though that might also be to simplify implementation), so simplifying a large contraption down to a single added component seems like a pretty drastic jump. Now that I think about it, though, reversing doesn't have much of a functional purpose, because most if not all machines can be powered in either direction. Since reversing is already possible (albeit it requires a bit of space), and doesn't seem to serve an important gameplay function, it has much lower priority than new functional components. However, the fact that it wouldn't heavily impact balance while removing the need for a niche but unnecessarily large construction does work strongly in its favor.

It would be possible to do it much more efficiently than in the devlog, since the large gear is completely unnecessary. I would prefer a more distinct name to avoid confusion. Either way, a single-component reverser seems almost a bit too convenient and I wouldn't necessarily put my hopes up. I've seen another suggestion which would allow to reverse directions a bit easier by allowing the clutch to alternate between two gear trains instead of only being an on/off switch. From this discord message:

While this may be a concern in some cases, most of the time bark would only be either a suboptimal early-game alternative to another resource (e.g. rope, clothing, food) or an exclusive source for a special item (e.g. cork), plus it may have decorative uses. As long as it isn't allowed to fully substitute a resource which is normally unlocked later, I think the risk is minimal. I'll also mention that realistically, many uses of wood absolutely require debarking first (or bark just gets removed as part of processing), especially for anything that is meant to last a long time. For fuel, I think an appropriate solution may be to simply reduce the burn duration of debarked logs by an amount corresponding to bark's burn time or slightly more. And by a quarter of that for debarked firewood if we do make this distinction, and we might ever so slightly reduce its charcoal yield while at it.

Bear pelt with head. Combined in the crafting grid with a knife produces a bear pelt and a bear pelt head. I'd say just right-click a log with an axe (and perhaps a hammer in offhand) to debark it. A double-output recipe is possible, but it could also be removed altogether, as I think it benefits the game when things are moved out of the UI and into the world. Personally, after cotton I would turn to wool, silk, jute and hemp. Barkcloth is an interesting but rather niche choice, and it was historically replaced by other textiles. I'm not sure if it would actually have the desirable properties of linen and similar cloth. It's also worth mentioning that it is primarily produced from one specific family of trees generally native to Asia, most significant of which is paper mulberry but breadfruit and fig have been used as well. It does work in favor of the suggestion that bark has a large variety of uses besides clothing, which makes it more likely that it gets added to the game eventially. Of these uses I can list out a few I've looked into recently, and it's frankly a pretty short list compared to what you might find elsewhere: a bunch of uses in construction, for roofing, canoes, shoes, bags and other useful items (primarily birch, but some cases are more generic and could be made from barkcloth as well), rope (important historically in northern Europe, often from one specific species but a lot of different ones could be used), birch bark tar (an early adhesive used for hafting, I think), food (pine bark is a staple for the Sami people, apparently, and they're mentioned a few times in item descriptions), cork (from cork oak, primarily for sealing bottles, though an oil-soaked rag could serve the same purpose), mulch (for farming, as fertilizer if nothing else but can also have some special uses), cinnamon (from a few specific trees, would be nice if we ever get any spices added to the cooking system), aspirin (from willow, kind of an odd fit for the current state of the game but willow extract might be a cool thing to add along with herbalism). Alongside all these other ideas, barkcloth could add a lot of functional purpose to different trees, and in this way it could greatly enhance the variety of the early and mid game depending on starting climate. It would also create further incentives for exploration and promote planting a larger variety of trees beyond purely aesthetic reasons. Honestly, this is starting to look like a separate suggestion in the making. But either way, if we do end up with bark at some point, then I like the idea of barkcloth as one of its uses. Barkcloth doesn't use looms from what I've read, I think it's just strips of inner bark beaten into thin sheets. The long-term goal seems to be to introduce a proper weaving system, so it's not clear how the balance of all that is gonna look in the future. Realistically, barkcloth should be cheap and easily available (at least in the right climate), but less useful for late-game recipes, and I think that would fit the game's progression quite well.

Honestly, that's fine. I'm pretty much the opposite--if the lore is presented one way, and the game mechanics directly oppose it, then it's usually highly annoying since it's not really possible to get immersed in a world that doesn't even attempt to follow its own rules. I don't see this as the opposite. I dislike the classic ludonarrative dissonance as much as the next guy, though I see lore and realism as very similar in some regards. Both tend to get used to argue for mechanics in a way that doesn't focus on gameplay enjoyment (I seem to prefer realism, you've often made arguments through lore), and both greatly enhance immersion when used well. If the mechanic you're justifying with lore or realism is fun, then all's good, but the moment that this mechanic becomes detrimental to the enjoyment of the game I start questioning whether the original reasoning is still relevant. And keep in mind, changing the mechanic can perfectly retain its lore accuracy or even improve it. Okay, before I get into other things too far, I'm gonna focus on explaining better what I actually mean by integrating temporal mechanics into the weather system, as it admittedly comes with a lot of implied baggage that probably isn't as obvious as it is in my own head. When I say "the weather system", I mean a continuous simulation of (usually 2D) distributions for each of various parameters throughout the game world. In a purely realistic game this would just be different weather components, but there is nothing that prevents the system from being used for other things, like the temporal mechanics. They don't have to interact with weather at all, though it wouldn't be unreasonable to, for example, make dry areas more unstable on average. With that, temporal mechanics would simply be one component of the system that slowly evolves over time, mostly or entirely independent of weather. Dynamic hotspots or fronts of instability would intermittently move over the player's home, bringing with them negative stability and elevated rift activity, in extreme cases perhaps similar to temporal storms. Ideally, this would come with actual moving rifts, be it small cracks (similar to current rifts) or massive fissures (potentially dozens of blocks across), and other indications that can be seen across the landscape and used to gauge the current and upcoming temporal state of the area. And I will note that signs of surface instability were a big point in a different discussion, so I don't want to bring too much of it here, but more so just mention it because any attempt at reducing reliance on UI has to bring equivalent information into the game world. I'm not sure how underground stability is implemented currently, but I don't think anything would really change with it. In the simplest case, it would be decided by an equation that combines the player's elevation with the current surface stability, even as simple as a sum, e.g. current stability at the player's position is 0.2, they are 0.7 of world depth below the sea level, so stability at that depth is 0.2 - 0.7 = -0.5. As for the building argument, a dynamic system like this could make it so that all areas of the world are suitable for building, but would once in a few days to weeks face a period of instability. This would mean that even areas which are more unstable on average could still be habitable, but the player would just have to face a bit more instability and rifts instead of having a limit on how long they can stay there before storm-like effects kick in. As long as even the most unstable areas are balanced in a way that makes them still reasonably habitable, the complaint would be addressed. It would also have the other benefit of making instability into something that can actually catch a player off-guard anywhere on the surface, instead of it being completely irrelevant unless it happens to cover an important spot. Regarding the "not everywhere is habitable" point, I really don't feel like arguing much about it, because from a design perspective risks and consequences always have to be communicated, whereas surface instability offers random encounters, delayed punishment, no tells outside of UI, extremely limited learning opportunities, and no way to counteract it. It's objectively not a good mechanic, and lore-driven reasoning is the only saving grace that makes it tolerable. It's fine to make some areas unwelcoming and inhospitable, but then you'd do well to justify that to the player in a more satisfying way. Nobody is confused that, say, the polar regions are not conducive to creative building, because they clearly can see that it's the polar regions and they know what that means. But surface instability feels arbitrary and annoying. Temporal storms are somewhat separate from the weather system suggestion, because making them dependent on player location wouldn't play well on servers with sleeping disabled during storms. However, I think they can still be improved by slowly increasing instabilty and rift activity for a few hours before the storm properly starts and letting them fade out slowly instead of getting cut off immediately. This would arguably integrate them much better into the world, and it would also reduce reliance on chat messages. The player would be able to see the world change and would be attacked by a few weaker threats before having T4 rotbeasts spawned at their feet. Side note, there should be more proper difference between light, medium and heavy temporal storms. I'll mention, also, that given the player's low temporal stability having effects very similar to temporal storms, it wouldn't be unreasonable to just remove temporal storms as a distinct mechanic and instead make it so that occasional instability spikes are the cause of "storms" through lowering the player's stability. It would be much easier to integrate naturally into the weather system, though storms disabling sleeping would have to be worked around in some way or just ditched. I feel the opposite, really. The storms and rift activity feel as dangerous as the world makes them out to be, so it's rather easy to get immersed and take them seriously, rather than treat them like a quick-time loot event. It's also quite clearly something that does permeate the entire world, since it doesn't matter where you go, you'll end up needing to deal with temporal mechanics unless you turn them off entirely. I don't feel like what you say here addresses what you quoted in any meaningful way, and it seems largely related to other points. Just in case, though, I want to clarify what I meant under the "disjointed and tacked-on" umbrella: surface instability, although technically is a continuous value, mostly ends up boiling down to the positive/negative binary - this creates distinct regions of instability, and doesn't really feel like something that permeates the whole world to me, because it is irrelevant most of the time or practically in full effect on those less common occasions; it also doesn't help that it's static, which reinforces the barrier between stable and unstable areas, and it's completely invisible, which easily makes it seem arbitrarily tacked on, rift activity doesn't really matter for the most part, because what actually matters is rifts themselves which pop up wherever they want, and for many players a single rift is already too much to keep dealing with for several in-game hours - I've spent many nights in low and medium stability without any combat (at least once I've even had a high-activity night with no encounters, at least for a couple hours), and I've had to retreat back home during many nights in low and medium activity due to seemingly endless monster spawns that were impractical to fight, temporal storms are almost entirely self-contained and poorly integrated into the world - they start immediately with no warning aside from the chat messages and end just as suddenly, which makes them feel extremely artificial; there is no variation or in-between events - either it's a storm, or stability is completely normal and unchanging, different mechanics barely interact and aren't consistent with each other - one is static, one is completely random, one is cyclical, storms have no relation whatsoever to rift activity and rifts themselves, ambient instability has little to no effect on rifts; it often also feels like there's three separate monster spawning systems that follow different rules and only one of them relies on rifts. Just so you know, I do realize that I might be kind of splitting hairs with some of those criticisms, but given how integral temporal mechanics are to the game and how unique they are compared to some other games, they kind of deserve every level of scrutiny. And I'm also just trying to explain my line of thought in a sufficiently detailed way. Heavily disagree here, because that essentially turns the storms from disasters that need to be planned around, to quick-time loot gathering events. Likewise, if the unique resource in question does not come from enemies, then how does a player obtain it whilst being assaulted from every direction during a storm? Does the player need specific gear quality to obtain said resource? I will also note that this doesn't solve the complaint about hiding in one's base during early storms, when one lacks the proper equipment to fight through them. Rather, it's probably going to make such complaints worse, since there's actually something to miss out on. I'm gonna leave this one and the rest for myself to think through further (and to avoid making this post even longer), but I'll just mention that the loot gathering doesn't necessarily have to occur in the middle of a storm. It could be just before a storm, to have the player hurry while the world is changing but rotbeasts aren't appearing in droves yet, or it could be right after a storm, to let the player salvage the aftermath of it before everything fades back into how it was before the storm.

My take is that all or almost all lighting should be expendable even while kept in containers, though this change would probably only be suitable for Wilderness Survival and Homo Sapiens. Actual pre-industrial households and towns tended to be extremely dark at night, with work and social life generally limited to daylight. Rushlights and oil lamps (actual oil lamps using vegetable or seed oils, especially olive oil; what we have currently is more of a fat lamp) would then proabbly have to be added as cheap light sources accessible in the early to mid game, though they could serve as a perfectly fine addition on their own as well. Anything that reduces unnecessary UI interaction is a win in my book, though it may be more natural if this required a stick and grass (since when the torch burns out the fire consumes a lot of the stick as well), at which point we end up with a way to craft a torch on the ground, kind of like the current campfires. Place a stick on a wall or stick it into the ground (which by itself could serve other decorative or functional purposes), and then place grass or other materials on that stick to complete a torch. Regardless of specifics of implementation, I do like this idea. Torches that use resin or other stuff would have to still be very cheap or much better than the regular torch to be worth it, at which point it might be simpler to just default to oil lamps. It's not easy to beat something that only takes sticks and grass to keep replacing, while also remaining competitive with a piece of fat in a bowl that lasts forever. That said, generally a greater variety of lighting and reduced reliance on beeswax candles (which historically were a luxury) would arguably benefit the game greatly, with the one caveat that a new player shouldn't have to choose between multiple different but very similar items. I think it might be fine to limit ourselves to just one new type of torch which could be made interchangeably with resin, wax, and maybe something new as well (tar, bitumen, etc.). Some additional variety or flexibility may come with with substituting grass (which can currently be replaced with cattails and papyrus already) with twine or other materials like burlap. And that might come with renaming the current torch to a crude torch.

I'll probably never not be mildly annoyed to see lore reasons as justification for mechanics and disabling them as solution for players who don't like the mechanics. I've been thinking about integrating all three temporal mechanics (ambient stability, storms, rift activity) into the weather system, alongside potentially other changes that are too plentiful to describe in detail here but that I may eventually assemble into a standalone suggestion. I reckon that something like this could solve a bunch of fairly common complaints and criticisms, especially the one about temporal stability making areas unsuitable for building. It would also make surface instability a more integral part to the experience that everyone would have to face semi-regularly (not unlike the current storms), instead of it being almost entirely predicated on whether there happens to be instability near the player's home. I think the least that a rework of temporal mechanics could achieve would be to address how disjointed and tacked-on these mechanics can feel. They don't give the impression of something that permeates the entire world and exists as part of it, and instead they come and go in very obvious, binary ways. Either it's stable or it's unstable, either there is a rift which will continue spitting out monsters or there is no rift and it's safe, either the storm is ongoing at full force or there's no hint of it ever being there. And the temporal mechanics barely interact and aren't really cohesive with one another, with the most confusing case being that you can be in the middle of a storm with "calm" rift activity, which just feels wrong. I would lean towards the idea that temporal storms could offer a brief opportunity to obtain a rare resource. It probably shouldn't simply be loot from enemies - this may easily be detrimental to the health of the game if not implemented well - but there is a lot of other options as well, primarily revolving around snatching something that briefly crosses the boundary between worlds or in some way exploiting the altered state and properties of the world, even if only using Jonas tech. And by that I mean, do whatever doesn't conflict with the lore, but with that general goal in mind. The issue here is that while an important overarching goal of the design of temporal storms is undeniably that they should be an uncontrollable supernatural disaster, leaning too hard into this predictably results in storms largely being seen as a tedious disruption. Quite often I would straight up just alt-tab out of the game for a few minutes during a storm if I don't have anything important to do at the moment, and that's the dangerous and immersive storm for you. I think it is entirely possible to retain the supernatural feel of the storm while creating this one special occasion in the game where the player has a time window to, if they so desire, put in the extra effort to obtain a rare resource, likely while having to defend themselves from monsters. It could get people more excited or nervous about storms rather than just annoyed at the disruption. We do kind of have a bit of that with the highest tier rotbeasts, but as mentioned, combat should probably stand in the way of what the player is aiming towards, and not be something that the player actively seeks out. Even if it's combat, then it may be better to create something that the player has to put effort into beyond hitting the monster a few times. Maybe, and I'm mostly spitballing here, some sort of a neutral beast that wanders through the world and has to be hunted down, or an incorporeal monster that the player has to lure or trap and only then kill. There is, as usual, a balance to be maintaned here between different design goals, but I think it's unavoidable that something has to be done about the temporal mechanics eventually, as they create too many undesirable incentives and too many gameplay disruptions in their current state. It's not, but that is the price one pays for safety. In order to be completely safe from a temporal storm, the player needs to build a small bunker to hide in. A good game mechanic is designed in such a way that it encourages the player to interact with it or with other parts of the system. Nearly all temporal mechanics in the game, but temporal storms most offensively, do the exact opposite, at least in early to mid game - limit player agency and offer little to nothing in return - which reflects in the related complaints and suggestions. While there's plenty of mechanics which could be seen as time-wasters but are ultimately well-integrated into the game loop and easily justifiable for various reasons, storms are exceptional in how disruptive and restrictive they are, and temporal mechanics overall suffer from lack of almost any player interaction aside from combat or hiding. Quite literally the only thing that works in their favor is that they don't take up too much time in the long run, but then why are we adding annoying mechanics and making them rare and predictable to compensate? In practice you usually do need to return to the surface, unless you are confident that you can handle the combat (which plenty of people avoid, especially before they have good armor) or have an ample supply of temporal gears and some currently on hand (which generally also requires combat). Keep in mind that, especially if you're not experienced enough to know well what works and what doesn't, you'll often be inclined to take the simple, safe and cheap route, instead of risky combat or an expense of health and valuable temporal gears.

Maybe, but why would a player sink resources into crafting high fertility soil, when they can just craft terra preta, which is better? Likewise, if terra preta cannot be crafted, then how does one obtain it? Assuming the problem of soil not dropping itself when broken is directly removed or circumvented, then it would arguably be more natural to gradually upgrade soil tier-by-tier, i.e. remove direct crafting of terra preta and require the player to create it from high fertility soil. It would at least make for a smoother farming progression, though perhaps not fully realistic for terra preta specifically. But the idea for removing direct crafting of terra preta is more of a side note, it's not a crucial part of the overall suggestion. Dare I say, terra preta is already kind of not worth it, because a slightly larger area with medium fertility soil is almost free, at least outside of cold climates, and can provide identical average returns at almost no additonal effort (or may even end up better for players who don't check on the crops regularly). People do often craft terra preta eventually, but I feel like it has more to do with how easy it is to slowly accumulate the necessary resources as byproducts of regular gameplay, and less with it being a truly worthwhile improvement. If balanced well, terra preta could have reduced material cost but some added time expenditure and opportunity cost, ending up with a similar or even smaller perceived cost. That said, yeah, it's a valid concern, and as always there has to be a balance between effort and payoff. I think it could be interesting to add something beyond just faster growth rate to make high fertility soils (including terra preta, or specifically terra preta) more enticing, instead of this "might as well" thing that seems to often occur now.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to allow crafting high fertility soil using half the resources required for terra preta, or to remove direct crafting of terra preta and give some other recipe to high fertility soil. I also recall an idea that bounced around the forums to create higher-tier farmland by adding fertilizer to lower fertility soil and placing mulch on top, or something similar, which would increment soil fertility after a period of time. It would certainly feel much more engaging than just crafting it, alongside other benefits: implementing a more incremental and time-consuming process also has the potential to make the soil progression more gradual and satisfying, especially for cold starting climates, adding a waiting period for the soil to convert could introduce a nice early-game strategic decision to make, between improving soil quality and planting more crops, allowing to upgrade farmland in place would partially circumvent the problem of farmland not dropping itself when broken. Right now it often feels like farming on random dirt that cannot be improved in any way, then one day whipping up top-tier fertile soil out of a pile of compost and replacing the farmland overnight. It's a very sudden jump, especially if starting out on low fertility for lack of anything better. That works for all soils, though, no? And it only matches maximum potassium levels, but other nutrients are still worse than high fertility, so it's hardly a variant of it. Either way, it is quite useful and might point to some ideas for upgrading soil more properly.

But that's precisely the point! Sure the randomness shows up late in the process, but that's also exactly why it works! Most of the smithing and bloom processing in this game is extremely deterministic once you learn the steps. Heat ingot, select template, pound metal, get product. Tedious... Having one small moment of uncertainty ("Am I gonna have this bloom fail??") preserves the tension of a system that otherwise becomes braindead and fully rote memorization of the process. If the result were guaranteed every time, the entire bloom-to-ingot loop would lose one of the only points that still feels dynamic within the whole smithing process. But the resource loss IS trivial. The iron ore deposits underground are often huge, with each ore guaranteed to produce at least 3 nuggets (worth 5 units each). But it doesn't meaningfully slow progression, it just paces it. The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances. Defective blooms fall into the same category of momentary setback, not a punishment. Removing it would shave away one more piece of pacing that the game has to prevent players from just blasting their way through the iron age without a care in the world. Apologies for taking this long. Those are decent arguments, but I'm not sure what you're arguing for or against. I do agree that the metalworking mechanics could use a bit of uncertainty for better moment-to-moment engagement, and I take issue with the way that this uncertainty is currently implemented, not with it being there in the first place. The resource loss being mostly insignificant in the long run is also the reason why I specifically said that the defective blooms are among the least punishing random mechanics in the game, and instead focused on the more subjective aspect of why people find it annoying. And that was in response to you going off in the vein of "if remove this randomness, then why not other randomness as well", so I'm explaining why this randomness specifically is much more annoying than many other examples. This is where your argument really starts to get under my skin. Vintage Story borrows realism where it's fun, not where it becomes administratively heavy. I suppose if you're saying that realism should have an effect on the end product, then we should have variable ingot sizes, variable impurities and metal qualities, variable carbon levels, different bloom grades, and tools that require more or less metal to craft depending on quality and the size of the wielder. For that matter, we might as well add a height slider to the character creation process so that the player characters aren't all the same size, too! The game abstracts all of that because excessive granularity creates more complexity than it does benefits. Having a bloom missing a voxel doesn't do that. It doesn't create complexity, rather it encourages the player to make use of the helve hammer to extract a usable ingot from an otherwise failed part of an historically imperfect process as you yourself pointed out. Holding the bloom mechanic to a realism standard that the rest of the game and the metallurgic processes don't follow creates an inconsistency in the game. Removing the mechanic altogether deadens the impact of the thematic journey of loss and recovery that the game promotes throughout it's story and lore. I didn't phrase myself especially well here, but the bottom line is that the current defective bloom mechanics are less realistic than just always getting one ingot per bloom. It would be fine to just disregard the randomness in the amount of metal, because it's not a thing in all other parts of the game. If I was told about blooms sometimes having insufficient iron for an ingot before I learned about this mechanic, my immediate assumption would be that they could still be processed using the same methods as full blooms into a bunch of smaller pieces. That would be realistic, would retain a dose of uncertainty, and may even point to a new progression step associated with building a more advanced hearth for welding smaller pieces into ingots, among other potential uses. But instead we have blooms that have a small percentage of metal below an arbitrary threshold required for an ingot, which can't be processed in any way except using a bigger hammer that magically repairs them. But this is how progression works in the rest of the game. Querns are slow to operate; windmills solve it Panning for copper nuggets is slow; making tools solves it Pit kilns are slow; beehive kilns solve it Early-game friction (the loss of a bloom) gives way to late-game convenience (I can just repair it on the helve) and is a core part of the dynamics within the Vintage Story ecosystem of mechanics. It doesn't trivialize the mechanic, it integrates it naturally into the tech curve. If the helve could no longer repair defective blooms, then it's only use would be to hammer out plates from ingots... which if you know what you're doing, can actually be slower than doing it by hand. The helve would just be a useless bit of tech at that point. No use at all to the skilled player. Not every game mechanic needs to scale upwards. Some exist specifically to give weight to later-game progression (panning -> mining as an example). I'm sorry but I have no clue what you're getting at here. The examples of mechanized querns, panning getting replaced by mining and the pit kiln being replaced by the beehive kiln all have vastly different purposes in the game's progression. They are quite representative of a lot of the game's design, but the helve fixing defective blooms absolutely is not. My point here was primarily that if you're using realism and fun as an argument for the defective blooms, then realism and fun should persist throughout the game and not be thrown out the window once the player gets a helve. But now you've largely ditched all other arguments and focused on justifying the existence of bloom defects as a source of early-game friction, and I absolutely can agree with that line of thought in isolation, with a few caveats. But I never questioned that line of thought, so what were you arguing against? The reason why I don't think it's beneficial that the helve completely eliminates the problem of defective blooms (aside from it being unrealistic and the helve already offering several other incentives) is that complexity in game design tends to work best either as a progression ladder (see especially the ever-increasing complexity of metalworking processes) or as an opt-in challenge with additional rewards (see automation and the variety of tasks non-integral to progression like animal husbandry or cheesemaking). Defective blooms, as it stands, increase complexity of manual ironworking, which already is significantly more advanced than bronze processing, only to immediately be made irrelevant by the optional helve, which simplifies ironworking back down closer to bronze. So you have a feature which intentionally raises the barrier to entry, but can be trivially circumvented by a more experienced player, especially since the helve is actually a Bronze Age unlock. The defective blooms also cannot reinforce mastery, since the better player interacts with them much less often if at all. It is an annoying inconvenience which primarily affects beginners who don't have a good mechanical power setup, don't have a developed resource supply, and naturally start off small and put more value on individual ingots. Now, I can see the argument that this is largely intentional as a way of giving more value to the helve, but I believe this would be much better served by making the helve faster or more versatile, and not by making the manual process more annoying. Ideally, I'd argue that the helve should be more difficult to operate correctly (i.e. not entirely automatic), and when used skillfully it should allow significantly faster forging than it currently does. It could be a pretty big rework and may require a larger pass across the metalworking system, but it's something to consider. I don't really know if I'm making much sense at this point, but I hope this at least clarifies my previous points, because it didn't seem like they came through well enough.

One question that immediately comes to my mind is whether it's possible to fire wet pottery, and if so then what happens if you do (I know you addressed it, but it might have a big impact on the new or forgetful player). Dry and wet pottery would inevitably end up very similar in appearance, so they might be easy to confuse, which could be annoying for different reasons regardless of whether wet pottery can be fired. Ideally, they would have to be clearly described in the tooltip, in block info and in the handbook all at once. It's also important to make sure that it's explained sufficiently well that drying is 4x slower in containers, assuming we intend to include this part of the mechanic. I'd also somewhat agree with the counterpoint that it could delay early-game advancement quite a bit, which might be especially undesirable considering that pottery is the first significant progression milestone in the game and as of now it's entirely plausible even for a beginner to start small-scale firing on day 1 if they find clay nearby. It could also drive a new player to obsessively check on the drying process and to get discouraged when they have to wait so long only to have to wait again for firing. It may also be annoying to have to wait more than twice as long as now if the player needs an item quickly, say, a tool mold that they'd just realized they need for progression. But I think it would be quite fine, ultimately, as long as everything is neatly explained and the drying time is not too long (I think 20-24 hours is fine and doesn't stretch realism too much), since the player tends to have quite a lot to deal with either way, especially at the start of the game. It certainly works in its favor that the process would be realistic and mechanically very simple. It might also make for a subjectively greater payoff once the fired pottery starts coming in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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