MKMoose

I would like to mention the different design factors for salt extraction, which would allow multiple salt extraction methods to exist simultaneously in balance. To give some context to it, the methods for sea salt that I would consider are: 1. Simple seawater boiling. May need a secondary step (seawater -> brine -> salt). Would require the most fuel, with about 10 l of seawater required for each 1-3 l of brine, which then converts at some rate into salt (realistically it's about 300 g per 1 kg of brine or a bit more, but the game's ratios are not realistic). The first step of concentrating seawater into brine may dirty the pots with other salts and sediments. 2. Obtaining brine from crystallizations in shallow depressions near the coastline, or alternatively, from salt lakes or brine springs, but that would be rare. This fully or partially skips the initial boiling of seawater to concentrate salts, but is extremely slow as it typically requires to wait for natural salt crystallization near oceans in dry regions. Those crystallizations are scraped to obtain wet salt cake, which is washed to obtain brine. 3. Proper salterns with multiple large ponds. The most sophisticated and difficult to set up process, but allows to obtain relatively large quantities of salt purely through evaporation over several weeks. The ponds would probably be made with clay and could be actually really large, like upwards of 100 blocks each, though probably with some upper limit. In the first pond sediments are separated, in the second one I think calcium salts separate, and in the third pond clean sodium chloride crystallizes and can be raked. Evaporation requires dry and warm climates with low rainfall. May be tough to implement without significant simplifications from the real process. It may be useful to add shallow evaporation pans to the game, allowing to boil seawater more efficiently than in a pot. All of these methods could benefit from simulation of salt concentration, but that's not easy to implement and far from necessary for gameplay purposes. With that, the balancing factors are: 1. Time. Both boiling and evaporation are long processes, in the case of boiling also generally requiring regular refueling, meaning the player would have to stay nearby throughout the process. 2. Fuel. People often overlook this, where in reality it's perhaps the most important factor why sea salt is rarely extracted in colder climates despite seawater obviously having about the same amount salt concentration. Boiling away 1 t of water (yielding 35 kg of salt directly from seawater or something like 300 kg from brine) apparently takes about 6 t of dry firewood, last I looked it up. Obtaining salt through boiling seawater would therefore not be a free process - it would effectively be a fuel to salt conversion. 3. Startup and scaling cost. Efficient methods of obtaining sea salt require larger setups and a lot of preparation to get significant returns. 4. Climate requirements. The best methods of obtaining sea salt only work in hot and dry areas with a period of very low rainfall. And let's not forget you actually need seawater, which may be very far away depending on where the player decides to settle. Relative to halite, which once found is nearly free until exhausted but may take a while to locate, these factors offer plenty flexibility to balance different salt sources between each other.

I don't see how that helps in the slightest. Not only would you need to know the mechanic exists, but then you need to obtain a tool to check? Is this tool likely to have prerequisites involving building a base, just to tell you if you if that base (already under construction) is in a good area? It's like noticing there's a problem with players getting confused with a certain tutorial, and then proposing the handbook need to be crafted first to get to that tutorial. This suggestion was never meant to address the issue of building in unstable areas. The point here was (though phrasing wasn't ideal) that if we decide to remove the spinning gear for the sake of immersion or a more horror-like feel, then we don't have to entirely rely on environmental clues and the like to detect instability, because similar functionality to the spinning gear can be moved to in-world items or devices. If implemented this way, then environmental cues would serve a fundamentally different gameplay purpose from measurement devices. I also specifically said a bit earlier when initially bringing up these tools or devices that it would require additional effort put into adjusting surface instability in such a way that it doesn't feel unfair before the player can reliably detect it. Frankly, I don't fault you for not connecting the two in these walls of text.

Thank you for such a detailed response! Being able to simply disable surface instability indeed seems like the simplest option and I certainly wouldn't oppose it, but do keep in mind that my suggestions stem largely from the question of "how could we change surface stability so that people don't just ask for it to be removed". A mechanic that some people want gone may just need to be adjusted for them to enjoy it instead, and it may benefit all other players as well. I should say, this will be a really long post, though the TLDR is that I agree with the counterpoints that feel like address what I said well, and there seem to be a few things that didn't quite land that I want to explain better. Maybe, but that can also teach the player to start ignoring the stability mechanic, instead of paying attention. I think the current system is fine, as the drain to 0 will teach the player that stability loss is bad, and they should be careful how long they hang around in unstable areas. Most unstable areas on the surface, however, are also a slow drain, so the player will still be able to spend a decent amount of time there before they need to leave. The counter suggestion I have to this idea is to restore a good chunk of stability should the player die with low stability(as far as I know, currently the gauge remains at whatever it was on death). Mechanically, it gives the player a brief grace period to improve their situation before they potentially die again, while also helping to alert them to the cause(the meter was empty, they took damage and things got weird, but now it's somewhat full and they're fine). From a lore standpoint, it makes some sense too, in that if the player is able to respawn, that indicates they have at least some stable grasp on the present timeline. I don't know how common that really is, but I've seen a bunch of people start ignoring the stability mechanic because it didn't seem like it was doing anything, so I was thinking that making it do things more often as the player moves between areas of different stability would let people notice the gear earlier and pay more attention to what it does without the threat of going all the way to 0% stability. I guess it may be difficult to come to any reliable conclusion on whether stability closer to binary or more continuous is better, because even with a statistical advantage on either side there will always be a portion of people who start ignoring the mechanic. A larger partially unstable area would essentially serve as a warning around a potentially fully unstable area inside of it (if those even appear on the surface - we could limit surface instability to solve a part of the "can't build here" problem). I also don't see restoring a portion of stability after death as a counter-suggestion. I mean, it seems like a good suggestion that aims to achieve somewhat related goals, but they could work in tandem perfectly fine as well. Incidentally, the other thing I have against distorting sounds or applying weird overlays in unstable areas, is not just that that kind of detail is reserved for majorly messed up areas/events, but also that...it would get very old, very fast. Imagine building your base in a stable chunk, with lots of unstable areas nearby. Now instead of just occasionally hearing distant Rust ambience when out hunting/foraging, you have to put up with "temporal storm light" each and every time. Oh, but I hate the effects of temporal storms, at least the visual ones. I had to turn them down in accessibility settings. And that's totally not what I'm suggesting. This point largely revolves around the issue that temporal stability is almost entirely disconnected from the world (aside from lore reasons), and it only really has an effect on a meter in the UI, which only then causes a second-order interaction with the player. This is largely why some people have said that it feels arbitrary and tacked-on. And yes, it could be argued from a lore standpoint, but that really doesn't make the gamplay side of it better. The way to solve this is not to introduce immediate visual distortions or something of the sort, because that's still focused on the player. Instead, make instability affect the world in subtle ways. Not drastic like a deadly disease hit the place or something, but just enough to get the player to think "there's something odd about this area, let me check if it's unstable". Side note: stability could also be used when generating the density distributions for various berry bushes, wild crops and other useful items, to avoid attracting newer players into unstable areas that just happen to be bountiful in surface resources. In the same vein, areas like deserts and the like could have lower average stability than forests, since they're inherently less appealing to the player. It could easily even be argued through lore or through basic intuition. This is also part of the reason why I'm suggesting to make animals less common in unstable areas. Granted, these generation changes could have the effect of not exposing the player to enough unstable areas to get them to learn about instability, so there's a balance to be struck here. It's not necessarily about replacing the gear with audio or visual cues, because the spinning gear functionality can also be moved to in-world items that the player could craft or otherwise obtain. Either way, it would shift interaction with game systems away from the UI and into the game world, which is incomparably more immersive and engaging, and not because it's "realistic". It involves psychological factors that make the player feel like they are interacting with the game at a deeper level, and realism has little to do with this, even if it's helpful. Granted, it could risk obscuring crucial information as you described, which is why it has to be done well (in conjunction with other changes) and shouldn't be carelessly extended to things like health and satiety. Do note, though, that the game already greatly benefits from this approach of putting things in the world instead of abstracting them away in several other areas, primarily in the various crafting systems. Also, health and hunger are currently much better placed in the game world than instability, because as the player gets hit, uses healing items, prepares and eats food, these are clear interactions between the character and their surroundings. Isn't having to figure out what's stable and what isn't kind of the point? If the goal is something like a creeping unsettling feeling as you mentioned at some point, then removing all direct and reliable indicators of instability seems like a necessity to me. I can't really be anxious or uneasy if the game outright tells me when I'm in an unstable area with absolute certainty and even allows to easily gauge roughly how much time I have before I need to leave. The two are largely just incompatible and favor completely different gameplay styles. If we want a more cautious, horror-like approach to instability, then I say the spinning gear goes out the window (or at least gets adjusted significantly in some ways), while in-world indicators (be it environmental or from devices and tools) have to be imprecise enough to retain a certain unknown element, or expensive or slow enough to make it impossible to accurately map out large areas. The problem of wasting time building in unstable areas, I believe, cannot be addressed without adjusting how stability itself works in some fashion (or making those areas unappealing for other reasons, but we're on the same page that making unstable areas stick out is not what we want). No external change will magically make it possible to stay in an area which is designed to heavily punish the player for staying in it for too long. I do like this idea, though rather than change the range of instability I would simply keep things as-is and perhaps just ramp up stability loss significantly in unstable chunks during temporal storms. I also think something like this would be critical if you're going to stop unstable chunks from draining stability entirely, as that way if the player gets complacent enough to build in one they're in for a very rude awakening later once a temporal storm hits. My point here primarily aims to address the complaint that surface instability kind of just renders certain areas of the world unusable, by simply making it so that practically all areas of the world would face instability at least once in a while, though not excessively often. This necessarily means that not only would the range of instability change, but ideally the entire distribution would evolve over time. Each area would still probably have a constant component to represent the average stability in that place, but even the most unstable areas shouldn't be always unstable and should see periods of safety once in a while. This shifting instability would allow much more building flexibility, since while some areas may still be less optimal on average, none or at least much fewer would be outright unusable. It would also put more focus on instability as a mechanic that everyone has to watch out for lest it catch them off-guard, instead of it being nearly irrelevant unless it happens to be close to an important spot. And I will mention again that shifting surface instability implemented in this way would likely have to be tied to rift activity and temporal storms in some way (especially to the storms), because it would be plain stupid to have three mechanics which seem to be very closely related in lore but barely related at all in gameplay. As for the second point, temporal storms already drain stability very quickly and I'm assuming that it's additive, so I was frankly taking it as a given that less stable areas should be more dangerous during temporal storms regardless of whatever other changes we might make to them, since in those areas the player would be able to stay in the storm for a shorter amount of time before their stability drops below the safe threshold. Granted, maybe it would require some balancing to land at the right numbers. Either way, the original goal is that the player can still stay there if they choose to in spite of the added risk, with hopefully clear enough consequences but without getting messed up by indefinite 0% stability.

It's possible to prevent spawns within a certain radius of any sufficiently illuminated block, instead of directly reducing the light threshold. It would have a bit different side effects, but the core effect of increasing coverage of light sources is the same.

Personally, I don't like this solution, because it ruins the unsettling element of the mechanic entirely. Yes, it's more obvious, sure, but it's also practically a neon sign in the player's face that SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE! The current implementation is more subtle and can be easily missed, yes, but that also helps keep the player immersed in the creeping horror and more unsettling elements of the world. At a glance, everything is fine on the surface, aside from certain events that a total trainwreck(like temporal storms), but that lulls the player into a false sense of security. Spend too long in the wrong spot, and they may quickly find the distant ambience of the "other reality" filtering in. This take frankly surprises me, because I would say that the current implementation is much more of a neon sign than diegetic clues (signs present in the game world). A kind of easy to miss neon sign, yes, but also kinda simplistic and unimmersive. Recognizing unstable areas basically boils down to "oh the gear it turning the other way". I think I would much prefer if it was more in the vein of "this place seems a bit odd, let me check if I can find any indications of instability". But that is almost completely squandered once the player realizes that the turning gear is practically the only indication of instability in the entire game (aside from sky turning to sepia and so on, but that's player instability and not world instability), and it is also immediate and completely reliable. One thing that I really don't like about the current implementation, though admittedly it could be by design, is that the trigger and effect are not well correlated, because the effects of instability take a while to kick in and stay active for some time after leaving the area, which makes the spinning gear a necessity to recognize instability with any level of accuracy. Combined with the randomness in the stability distribution itself, this creates a system with unclear causality and poor feedback to player actions (except the gear which turns immediately but may be easily missed). Such a system provides very limited learning opportunities, meaning that a new player will often struggle to understand it without a tutorial - and at that point, a large part of the mysterious and unsettling vibe vanishes in a paragraph of explanatory text. This is a very cool ideal, but I cannot say I've ever experienced anything close to it while playing myself. To actually get this unsettling feeling in the best way possible, the player needs diegetic clues, not UI. That's the same issue as chat messages for temporal storms, which do their job sufficiently well but have nothing immersive about them. Instead of making the player focus more on their surroundings, they take the player out of the game by making them pay more attention to the UI. And by the way - what is there to investigate? If I search an unstable area, will I find an explanation or an answer? Nope, it's just a random 3-dimensional distribution that only really affects a meter in the UI. If I ever find an answer to anything, it's gonna be somewhere in the lore, but that still doesn't answer why a specific area is unstable. I do agree with the idea of what temporal instability should aim to achieve from a design perspective and with how it should be approached by the player because of this, but it just ain't doing it for me very well, at least not on the surface. I wouldn't claim it's terrible and in urgent need of a rework as some have said, but I think there is plenty of space for improvement. With that, here's a few independent ideas on how it could be changed: 1. Player stability shouldn't fall all the way to 0% in every unstable area. Presumably implemented by restoring stability faster while it's low, this would make the mechanic less binary and allow to increase surface instability while making it easier to stay in "partially unstable" areas indefinitely if you can deal with the effects. Limiting "fully unstable" areas to below ground would also prevent new players from getting messed up if they don't notice that an area is unstable, because they won't get stuck in endless full-on storm-like effects. 2. The functionality of the spinning gear could be moved to an actual item or device (or a few of them with distinct purposes or different qualities) to make it so that precise evaluation of an area's instability is only possible when the player deliberately investigates it. These could be a variety of "measurement devices", starting from simple temporal gears and ending at sophisticated Jonas tech. At the very least, only show the spinning gear in UI if the player has a temporal gear in inventory. Note that this suggestion is probably the largest of these five and would also require additional effort to make sure that unstable areas don't feel unfair before the player can detect them reliably. 3. Subtle clues could be added to the environment, like rust particles, slight dark fog, a bit sparser or discolored vegetation, reduced animal and insect density or just reduced commonness and volume of their sounds. The purpose of these is primarily to avoid pulling the the player's attention to the UI (especially if implemented alongside suggestion 2.) and instead encourage to analyze the environment critically. That said, it shouldn't be a fully consistent and reliable way of gauging instability. 4. Actual sources of (additional) instability, presumably in ruins, would do wonders for player agency. They would increase instability in an area around them and ideally it would be possible to destroy, disable or weaken them. Granted, they shouldn't be the only source of surface instability and in some cases they may effectively just increase existing ambient instability and not create a distinct unstable pocket, because we don't want the player to feel like they can completely cleanse an area and control stability - it should still be an everpresent risk that can catch the player off-guard. 5. Slow instability fluctuations would be able to really, properly catch the player off-guard. Ideally, they should be tied to rift activity and temporal storms in some way, peaking during temporal storms. The fluctuations should change the shape of the instability distribution and not just reduce or increase it uniformly, and would have to be tuned appropriately to avoid kicking the player out of their home for an extended period of time. In a more extreme and sophisticated implementation, it could cause unstable areas to effectively move through the world in a way that can be observed and tracked. Overall, it would require more regular stability checks and on-the-fly adaptation from the player. They could also be cyclical, repeating around once a year or so. I'm not suggesting that all of these be implemented, and some may be found to cause downstream issues or just be unfit for the vision of the game, but I believe they have a lot of potential to improve the overall experience.

Simple, functional, avoids clutter. Provides gameplay incentives to encourage searching for more resource deposits. This is arguably the best suggestion I've seen for more complex tool or weapon mechanics, especially if you also consider some interesting tradeoffs and not just ways to increase durability. Sharpening is the big thing for any blades and it could offer plenty of depth by consuming durability to grant increased work speed or damage. It could also involve a minigame of sorts in the style of various crafting mechanics to enable more skill expression. Oiling or greasing seems like an interesting way to increase maintenance complexity for iron and steel items specifically in the late game, though to make it remotely realistic it would also be necessary to add rusting (prevent rust with oiling or remove it afterwards with other methods; reduced durability loss while clean), and I don't know if we want to go this route. Reducing the rate of regular durability loss while oiled seems like a fine enough simplification, if necessary. It could be interesting to implement it in a way that ideally encourages oiling after each use, though may also end up tedious. Handle replacement could be a thing, but it would have to be sufficiently unobtrusive and simple, so that advancing through the ages actually yields a notable increase to tool lifetime, because exchanging "replace the tool every 10 minutes" for "replace the handle every 10 minutes, and the toolhead every hour" basically doesn't change anything. Alternatively, just allow using better handles in place of sticks to slightly increase the base tool durability. The above three, alongside cleaning which probably isn't a great fit for the game, were historically the most important parts of regular tool maintenance. Not all of them are necessarily crucial to be implemented, but all of them arguably stay within a suitable complexity balance and have a lot to offer to improve the overall experience. More miscellaneous features like bowstring durability, bowstring tension or armor deformation can be implemented as well for things other than metal tools. Reclaiming material from used tools is a fine idea as well and again very common historically. For copper and bronze tools it's typically done though recasting and for iron and steel tools through reforging into smaller tools of similar shape, both of which would have notable implementation issues in the current smelting and forging systems. There's also problems with reduced metal consumption rate and item clutter, as has been brought up in this thread. It's something I would be interested to see, but I worry it would require heavy balance changes and could end up causing many more issues than it solves . More complex systems could be cool and realistic, but the gameplay goals that are to be achieved here are very important to keep in mind. Mods sometimes take a great feature and develop it in a highly unbalanced way, ending up with an overcomplicated, sometimes outright bloated feature that feels like it wants to take over an excessively large chunk of the core gameplay loop. The way I see it, we primarily want three things from more complex tool durability and associated mechanics: 1. The new options should facilitate player agency and mastery by allowing to prioritize different goals and exchange resources for different ones or for various benefits, be it time, oil, metal, durability, work speed or anything of the sort. Resource tradeoffs and conversions are crucial for the game as it is currently designed and it should stay that way. Things like recasting don't do that - they just return clutter that can be reprocessed for new things at very little additional cost. 2. The system should improve interaction with tools, to treat them more as important items that the player can care for so that they give back in turn in a more dynamic way, and not as a fixed-rate resource expenditure. A small amount of extra effort should give substantial benefits to reward deeper engagement with the game, but without punishing the player if they skip it. Toolsmith apparently puts this as the main goal for its mechanics, and it seems fairly well-implemented in that regard. 3. The system has to be entirely or mostly optional and shouldn't increase the baseline complexity of the game, so as to avoid overwhelming new players with excessively complex features or tacking on extra maintenance effort on those who don't want to engage with it. This is primarily where Toolsmith ends up pretty much completely unfit for the vanilla game, and that's why it should stay as a mod for those who want the extra flavor. Stone tools should remain entirely as they currently are, and further as the player advances through the game complexity should be added progressively and slowly, only significantly increasing towards the end of progression for the highest potential gains with iron and steel tools. As a side note, my one pet peeve is that hammers seem to get used up way too fast. On my current world I've already used more metal on hammers than on pickaxes at the beginning of the Iron Age, and I still have close to a thousand various ore nuggets left to process, two dozen ingots in storage, and multiple unfinished deposits. Maybe I've just been lucky or haven't experienced enough late-game prospecting, but it feels kinda wrong how the most blunt tool in the game seems to get used up by far the fastest for me.

I'd be fine with that, but wouldn't look forward to all the complaints about not being able to craft bronze knives or copper axes. And we'd be linking those people to mods that add the old way back in. I feel like a simple solution to this issue is kind of already in the game - make it so that you can keep using sticks, but using a better haft slightly increases the durability of the item, the same way bones do for stone knives and axes. Alternatively, though at higher dev time cost, make it so that a handle has its own durability independent of the tool, returning a toolhead with reduced durability when broken. A better handle would last longer or even all the way through the tool's lifespan and beyond. This would be arguably much more realistic and immersive, and could also open up a bunch of adjacent possibilities like bowstring durability, separate armor layer durability and so on. Granted, it might get complicated and annoying, but the first solution is always a possibility as well.

It's at the top of the screen, to the right of block info. In most cases you have to point at a relevant block (e.g. at an anvil if holding a hammer) for it to be visible. If Sprint + F or Crouch + F to cycle tool modes were to be added (I would prefer Crouch + F), then I would want that indicator, maybe along with the mode's name, to show up next to the cursor for a moment when switching modes. Perhaps it could also appear briefly when switching tools or when the cursor is moved over a relevant block. Maybe have an option to just keep it there at all times as well, though it would have to be mostly transparent or otherwise less obtrusive.

An alternative way to obtain salt would be nice. I would imagine, though, that if sea salt is ever added to the game, it would be a more lengthy and involved process than just boiling seawater in a pot. That's just the balancing approach in Vintage Story, from what I've seen - it can't be too easy to obtain in large amounts, so that food preservation isn't trivialized early into the progression and seeking out salt deposits retains most of its attractiveness. Perhaps something like this, after a relatively quick search: salt very slowly deposits in shallow depressions very close to coastline in areas with low rainfall and decently high temperature, scrape the accumulated salt to obtain wet salt cake, wash the cake clean to obtain concentrated salt brine (pretty much the same mechanic as panning), pour the brine onto shallow ceramic evaporation pans (pans made from lead or iron could contain more brine and increase evaporation speed), put the pans over a fire to evaporate (could be done on a firepit, would take a fairly long time), finally, scrape a small amount of salt out of the pans (I'm not sure about exact conversion ratios). The above process has the advantage of being easy to build from existing mechanics despite being fairly complex. More advanced saltworks could be added as well, but it would be a larger and more challenging to implement feature, and the level of complexity may be a bit excessive even for Vintage Story unless significant simplifications from the real process are made. I mean, they could reuse barrel mechanics and have the player use a single pond for evaporation, but I'm not sure if that's particularly exciting compared to the real setup which takes in seawater with the tide into a large pond, and then requires small gates to be opened to move the brine into a series of similar ponds at appropriate times over days or even weeks until salt crystallizes in the last one and can be raked. Starting with a simpler setup, easier to implement or mod in, would allow to gauge the balance and community sentiment before putting a lot of time and effort into the big thing.

Focusing on this group (humongous sample size of 3, since your previous post) seems like a very basic logical error to me. Remind me what it was? Selection...? Survival something? Every single game has a target audience, and the games with widest appeal tend to be shallow and generic. If a mechanic is not to your liking, then mods are your friend, not a way to wave you off for the people who don't see the need for it to be changed. If a mod becomes popular, then devs have more reason to implement something similar into the base experience, and also have a working example of the functionality which reduces uncertainty that would come with implementing a completely new and untested feature. You'd be more likely to be listened to if you actually listened to others yourself. But I don't know if you want to engage with it, since there's no guarantee that it will work. You're clinging to the idea that prospecting is being replaced by mods while ignoring two explanations of what the most popular prospecting mod actually does, seemingly unable to check it yourself as well. And you're maintaining that people who don't want the system changed (aside from Thorfinn) use mods that "fix" prospecting, despite multiple explicit statements to the contrary. Other mods tend to be gamey or bloat the prospecting pick with multiple largely redundant modes, but the most significant ones from what I've seen at a glance are: - depth-independent (usually high-range) Node Search variant - also suggested in this thread, - proximity to nearest ore block - seemingly the most common suggestion, and probably the least creative as well, - long-range search for rock types instead of ores. I think there's also a mod which overrides the permille value to correspond to the actual amount of ore blocks in an area. There are some ideas for various, minor or major, ore generation changes. Some ores could have surface-level signs, like discolored vegetation near sulfide deposits. Veins could be larger (but low-yield) to reduce the frequency of shafts that have to be sunk. Lastly, there are other suggestions which focus on adding less random alternatives to prospecting, primarily through processing large amounts of low-grade ore. And I probably missed a whole lot, still. Any of those strike your fancy?

Fair enough, and I'm now also thinking that cases where a player would specifically want one of the effects and not the other are rare enough that a common strategy could likely be to just place both devices next to each other. If anything, there's still an option to make it configurable with a checkbox or two, or diegetic levers. It would also probably just be easier for the devs to add a second effect to something that already exists.

I disagree here. The stability gauge already keeps the player informed of their own stability level, as well as whether or not the local area is stable or unstable. I will note that the sky does already turn sepia in unstable areas, however, it takes a massive amount of instability to cause that effect. I have to agree with the take that some in-world feedback would be arguably much better than having to look at the spinning gear. Sky turning to sepia in unstable areas isn't really a proper thing, in the sense that it's caused by the player's low temporal stability and not unstable areas directly. Here's a suggestion, though: sparse and warped vegetation. Also lack of regular animals and erratic animal behavior if brought into the area. Doesn't have to be a drastic effect like a deadly disease hit the place, but just enough to slightly change the vibe and make the player feel like something's off. Perhaps also some dark mist and smoke or strange stone intrusions, maybe some mutated or glitchy insects, or anything in that vein, to enhance the unnaturalness in the areas and also introduce some underground indications of especially unstable places, not just surface ones. I don't know how many people actually refer to it as "sanity", but I've never once felt like it would be more intuitive myself. Either way, even if it's a large portion of people, I don't think that's a good reason to just rebrand it to sanity. If anything, I'd prefer that the feature be expanded to be more distinct from typical sanity mechanics and have more impact on the world, rather than just on the player. Granted, the current effects of low temporal stability - glitchiness and waveyness, texture overlay, massive gears turning, nightmarish monsters - do kind of give sanity vibes and arguably are not very good visually (I had to turn some of them down in accessibility settings, just couldn't really play with them normally). Full support on that, I was personally kind of surprised that the rift ward doesn't already just increase players' temporal stability slowly to counterbalance temporal storms and low-stability areas. The exact balancing is up for debate. Big changes kind of feel like they could justify a name change as well, although even a very surface-level glance makes me feel like blocking rifts and improving temporal stability are probably a pretty similar thing lore-wise. Still, a separate device could be a bit better gameplay-wise, mainly because it should arguably last longer than a rift ward and act in a larger area.

Ironically, more creatures that require the player to vary their strategy is what we got in 1.20...and there are still complaints about it. In regards to variety, I think the reason why it's such a common complaint is that people don't really know what they want. They want something to get them more interested in combat again, and "variety" seems like the thing, because what they already know has become stale. And it's quite natural for a person to say that, because they aren't generally going on a deep introspective journey to consider what actually bothers them about the system. The job of a game designer is sometimes to find the nature of the frustrations and address them at their origin instead of directly implementing community suggestions - and not an easy task, it is. More creatures are certainly helpful, though I worry that what we got with bowtorns and shivers isn't sufficiently different from drifters to make a meaningful long-term difference for complaints about combat, because they appear in all the same places and ultimately both their behaviour and methods of dispatching them aren't particularly innovative. Thing runs at you or throws stuff at you, so you either get a bow and shoot it or get a stick and run at it. I'm oversimplifying of course, but, aside from some adjustments to basic strategies, kinda nothing has changed in terms of how the player approaches combat, and it becomes stale again once they get used to the new stuff. All too often, "variety" is actually much better achieved by increasing depth and moment-to-moment enjoyment, because they are far from independent. Hitboxes have been mentioned a few times, and that seems like a quite fine place to start to improve enjoyment from combat. I've had plenty of cases where me attacking and an opponent receiving damage felt kind of completely uncorrelated, with weird delays and whiffs that just felt wrong and clunky, and that was on singleplayer. Of course, we don't want it to be perfectly snappy and smooth either since we want to retain the survival horror spirit of the game. The line between "clunky in a good way" and simply annoying and tedious is pretty thin and pretty subjective, and I believe there are some improvements that could be made in this area. Enemy behavior seems to be in a fine place to me, aside from line of sight being arguably long overdue. Perhaps bowtorns could use some minor improvements to feel more interactive and maybe a bit less oppressive (they seem to me to kind of either stand in place or run away with no inbetween most of the time, but when they start throwing it's like Malevelon Creek), while shivers seem erratic enough to me and drifters don't really need anything aside from LoS. The status effect system would also open up a lot of possibilities, including different damage types (could be fun to choose between sharp and blunt weapons) and attacks that aren't just focused on damage, more elaborate wounds and healing, a variety of utility and buff/debuff items and so on, though that's all individual ideas which have to be evaluated separately and introduced gradually. The above three are, in my view, the three most important combat-related improvements and features that would benefit the game greatly. Things like new weapons (especially crossbows and polearms, arguably) are also cool and interesting, but new content needs a stable and expandable baseline to build up from. A better foundation would also make it easier to implement new threats more localized to specific areas or events that significantly mix up the gameplay, for example turrets that put more focus on stealth gameplay and problem-solving to give a quick example. I would argue strongly in favor of a heavy steel-prod crossbow with no less than ~12 damage with steel bolts (not counting traits), and of course different variants earlier in the progression. It still wouldn't one-shot anything more than the surface monsters, maybe a pig or some deep monsters for the hunter, which as you say should be fine if in balance with other weapons. Range, accuracy and reload time should be good enough drawbacks in most cases. High-damage weapons generally are finnicky to balance because breakpoints start to matter a lot with them, which can cause problems if not thought through well. Some targets might have 1 or 2 HP left after a shot or two shots, which would require a secondary weapon to finish them off efficiently (a good incentive if you ask me), and then get much easier once the player gets an upgrade (a motivator to progress), but in some cases it can easily start to feel arbitrary and annoying ("why does an iron bolt one-shot it, but a bronze bolt doesn't?"). The good part is that the game is already fairly well set-up to handle something like this thanks to a large variety of different HP pools across the different animal and monster variants, which mostly eliminates excessively drastic jumps in effectiveness and requires the player to observe the threat, think on their feet and adjust to the gear they're using more often. Weapons even stronger than that, i.e. around 20+ damage, are usually completely unfitting for Vintage Story. Maybe they could err on the side of power fantasy a little bit with simple firearms or Jonas tech, but even that shouldn't go above ~20 damage and needs appropriate drawbacks in other departments, most likely accuracy, reload time and ammo cost. I think headshots could work for both melee and ranged weapons. Another thing, which is frankly a bit rare in games: weakpoints, be it head, legs or anything else, don't need to just increase damage - they could in some way stagger, stun, weaken or cripple the enemy, perhaps courtesy of a status effect system. Bleeding is also an important possibility, which would make them technically a one-shot, but not an instant one, retaining some level of threat from the target. This could go a long way to improve hunting if nothing else (ideally along with LoS and potentially aiming changes) by allowing more skill expression through optionally waiting for the perfect moment or moving to the side for the perfect angle. As for rotbeasts, the shiver could have an exceptionally vulnerable weakpoint that is only briefly visible when it opens the mouth (or whatever that is) to bite the player, making for a much more engaging enemy to fight in melee. Bowtorns could have a weakpoint on the back, which could create some interesting incentives in multiplayer, though admittedly may be somewhat annoying in singleplayer, and it does also mean they would be much easier to kill while they're running away. Perhaps a way to scare them off briefly could be cool, even as simple as throwing a fistful of sand at them, or quicklime for a longer-lasting effect.

Well, both could be pretty reasonable and would have their own caveats. Backpack slot quiver would have to be unreasonably massive to be viable by itself, so if anything I think it could make sense to combine it with a hunting bag or something of the sort to make a container that can hold all hunting loot on top of arrows, and potentially also knives and bows. A quiver as a distinct piece of equipment could be much cooler, but may introduce some unnecessary complexity and may require simultaneous introduction of other items in the same slot to create some sort of opportunity cost, as otherwise there might be no reason not to carry a quiver at all times.

If I recall correctly, Tyron recently said in an interview that they would be adding iron spears, but he had personally made sure that it would also come with a rebalance to other spears. Presumably that means making the others slightly weaker, though that's only my speculation. I don't think he mentioned steel spears, so I wouldn't necessarily expect those. Pikes could be a bit odd because they were designed for formation fighting as far as I remember, and were generally two-handed and very unwieldy in close combat due to their sheer length, I think somewhere around 5 m typically. Regardless of that, though, I love the idea of introducing any more advanced polearms at higher metal tiers, as this would allow for much more flexible balancing as well as better weapon variety without requiring a bunch of extra dev time for completely new and unique weapon designs. And, unfortunately, way OP. You can't come close to having the same firepower with spears that you do with just a single stack of arrows. How is this any more OP that just putting arrows in your 6-slot leather backpack? Or maybe I'm just forgetting or misunderstanding something? Sure, it could tip the balance further towards the bow, but if a quiver is implemented as a bag, then it has the opportunity cost of 6 generic inventory slots (less in early game, two more if you get chromite), which can be used to hold that number of stacks of arrows just as well as other items. Even if a quiver allows to carry enough arrows to make it sometimes better than a backpack, the loss of versatility seems to me like a fine enough balancing factor.

Having it take up a bag slot and give so little seems rather underwhelming to me. I'm thinking have a "hunting bag/pouch/satchel with quiver" or something of the sort, attached on a single belt or shoulder strap, or just "hunting gear belt". It would work very similarly to a mining bag and justify a much larger number of slots than just a quiver by itself, which would have to be implemented in a different way to avoid killing it with opportunity cost. Would be able to store all the conventional hunting loot like meats, hides, fat, feathers and whatnot as well as arrows and potentially knives and even bows. It also does have historical backing. Something like a "farmer's basket" could work in a similar fashion for seeds and crops, or "gatherer's/herbalist's pouch" for berries and mushrooms, and herbs if they ever add them (Tyron said he wanted to).

Tyron has recently said in an interview that they generally prefer to never destroy player-built structures (or something in that vein) in response to a question about natural disasters, and I'd imagine that they aren't gonna make an exception for doors and windows. Maybe crude doors and simple gravity-affected blocks (sand, gravel, soil if enabled) could be argued to be destructible, but not better doors and not any other blocks or items. At most monsters could open doors, but then there's still the mentioned undesirable incentives, so I don't think this is enough for a standalone solution to anything. Weathering and wearing down with ways to mitigate it instead of breaking outright does seem like an interesting idea, but it would still cause similar issues and would require a lot of dev time to create all the block variants or whatnot for a system that ultimately would probably be really annoying if it damages your stuff and very restrictive on building styles. Love it for very specific features (a bit like we have for beehive kilns), but absolutely not for a large portion of building materials. Here's a suggestion, though: remove player structures temporarily. We already have the whole temporal instability stuff and rifts, so we could have huge fractures that sometimes open during temporal storms, modifying a slice of the world for a few moments, then return it right back. There would be a bunch of things to sort out like how exactly they should change the world, how to handle collisions with terrain when things get removed or added, how to handle things larger than one block (e.g. a lot of mechanical components) or things that rely on other things (e.g. plants or any items stored on the ground). There's also plenty of options to choose from for the exact size, frequency, duration and spawn conditions of those fractures, but generally I think something like this would have a lot of potential and thematic appeal with little impact on other existing systems. Spawn rates and enemy stats may need to be looked at, though, if the player's shelter were to be rendered temporarily open for anything outside. Also, there's a significant use for the rift ward to be found here as well. One thing that Darkwood does quite well and Vintage Story does very little of is tension, and I think lack thereof is the primary reason why people find temporal storms underwhelming. There's a lot of ways to increase tension, and new monsters or other threats is one of those ways, though not an easy one for the devs. Things that seep inside, things that reach inside, ghosts, shadows, infestations, generally much less frequent but more dangerous monsters prowling about. Ideally, tie them to temporal instability and temporal storms to keep to the theming, though some small mechanical worms digging through the ground (without damaging anything) could also be fun. Anything more interesting than entire swarms which don't pose a threat as long as the door is closed, plus the regular monsters spawning inside if I don't light up my house like a christmas tree (I think they shouldn't spawn within a 2- or 3-block radius of any sufficiently lit block). This is generally the biggest flaw of niche gameplay styles in many games, especially RPGs where the player has to invest a lot into a build - if it's useless in one part of the game, then many players will just decide not to use it at all. It's not the easiest thing to balance, because having to ensure that everything is always viable can also significantly limit the variety of challenges you can throw at players and lead to people using the same strategies throughout the entire game, quickly making it stale and boring. As a general rule it's enough that players always have a multiple comvenient choices. If there's enough available strategies that can be used by practically any character (and some just implement certain strategies a bit better - classes already do this fairly well), then a tiny bit of creativity and problem solving is usually enough to get things done efficiently even if one or two of those strategies become temporarily unavailable. Problems appear most often when players are funneled down a select few optimal paths or heavily discouraged from certain suboptimal paths at key points in the game (story locations certainly have the latter risk, though I'm not very familiar with them at the moment), and I think there's plenty of things that can be done to make roughly stealth-oriented characters interesting to play even in a boss arena, including traps, throwables like various bombs or poison darts (could have a variety of different effects), stealth kills (and crippling or just high-damage hits against enemies which can't be one-shot), and mobility options that get much more practical with light armor. Items and tools that build on basic systems, not complex interweaving features. If nothing else, though, a basic line of sight mechanic would go a long way, especially for hunting. It's really annoying when an animal notices you through terrain or while it's turned away from you. Granted, there's smell and hearing on top of sight, but it's too consistent to chalk it up to those. Also, there's drifters walking in place into doors after they see the player inside despite no LoS - it can be really quite immersion-breaking on the first nights.

It's pretty difficult to require a person do do something creative, because how are you gonna judge whether they've completed the task? Building is out of the question unless it's for a functional purpose, e.g. protect a site during a temporal storm, but even then you'll probably be watching people build horrific abominations to cheese the defense. Combat is by far the easiest challenge to implement in many respects. Some other systems could work in some ways. Granted, take what I say with a grain of salt, as I haven't looked at the story chapters much yet. Maybe have the player forge a few blueprinted pieces to repair a mechanism (already in the game to some extent), or just deliver materials to some device. Potentially chisel out a few replicas of a statue or forge a bunch of decorations or equipment to restore greatness to a lore location. Have them comb through an area and dig up ruins to find some artifact or blueprint. Get them to grow some unusual plants that require nonstandard fertilizers or raise an animal that requires a lot of care and protection. Perhaps have them provide food and supplies for a group of NPCs in some way. There's a lot of things that could be done, and for each of them a bunch of reasons why they might not work. One universal issue is that requiring a person to just keep doing largely the same tasks that they've been doing for the past dozen hours to gear up risks being fairly repetitive and tedious. What combat-oriented dungeons do well is that they require the player to engage with other systems first in order to tackle the challenge, but are themselves somewhat different in nature, which can provide great gameplay variety. There's a catch, though - if dungeons are the end goal, then other systems are often just the means to an end, and I don't think we want the survival aspects of the game to fall to the wayside. I think combat should still be a part of most quests in moderation, even if it's only for the purpose of basic self-protection and not as a way to progress, because it applies strong pressure on the player to engage more deeply with other systems. Arguably the best thing that a broad "combat overhaul" could provide in my eyes would be depth and variety to make combat and preparation for it more engaging, not just because currently it's pretty simple (which can also be beneficial) and maybe a bit clunky. Thing is, the majority of weapons, armor, other combat-related items and enemies are direct upgrades to something unlocked slightly earlier in progression, and offer no added mechanical complexity over the stuff available in the first couple hours of the game. This makes for a heavily frontloaded system which inherently struggles to be deep and accessible at the same time, and doesn't really support meaningful progression beyond making numbers bigger. If combat were to be a focus, it should be polished and developed to keep the player wanting to try different gear and different strategies for different encounters, and actually enjoying the moment-to-moment combat experience rather than slogging through a war of attrition. Granted, we don't want to compromise the vision of the game. Enemies that are hazards more than active opponents do have potential, as well as storms as dangerous unnatural phenomena more than a challenge. There is a balance to be maintained and it's fair to argue that we are close to it, and I do think as well that any drastic redesigns are probably unnecessary.

That would be part of animal pathfinding/behavior improvements, so I don't think it's likely to happen in the near future. Would be great though, because their current behavior is sometimes a bit simplistic. Trapping pits have apparently been used for hunting for a couple thousand years at least and have been highly effective, remaining in use all the way into modern times to some extent, so I would love to see them expanded somewhat. Placing sharpened sticks into the ground pointing upward and covering the hole with branches, and maybe even leaving bait inside, could be a cool alternative to conventional hunting with bows or spears. The related items could offer quite a lot of other possibilities as well in terms of decoration and protection.

1. The main issue The Immersive Mouse Mode is a cool idea, but it causes a massive problem from a UX standpoint: the player is forced to hold down a key to unlock the cursor to move items in/out of hotbar, inventory or crafting grid, which happens very often. It largely conflicts with the whole aim of IMM and just gets tiring, plus it's an accessibility issue. One way to largely address this issue is to allow to toggle cursor lock/unlock instead of having to hold down the key, which has been first requested in threads like this one a long time ago and I'm genuinely baffled that it's still not in the game, not that I've seen at least. And yes, there's the roundabout solution using macros, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a good solution. And even with a toggle, the player would still likely have to press it once when opening the inventory window and then once again when closing it, which is not great either - you can easily imagine pressing it a dozen times in a couple seconds when sorting loot or whatnot into a bunch of containers. With that, I see two possible short-term solutions for the issue, neither particularly complicated: - unlock the cursor when opening the inventory, just like with IMM disabled - since in most situations it's necessary to unlock the cursor when opening the inventory, then I see no reason not just consolidate them into one, even if it somewhat goes against the idea of IMM (admittedly this solution could be disruptive for some people who are used to the current state of IMM), - add a key to toggle cursor lock/unlock (or a switch similar to "toggle sprint" in accessibility settings) and remember it separately for when inventory is open and closed, which would also greatly improve accessibility for those who need it and generally allow for more detailed customization of mouse control without having to open the settings menu. 2. The hotbar and quick transfer Notice that though the above could be greatly beneficial, it doesn't address the issue with transferring items between the hotbar and containers, unless the inventory is open. When playing with IMM I have actually found myself instinctively trying to use RMB (or crouch/sprint + RMB) to put items into containers while having them selected in the hotbar, without holding them in the cursor. And if someone's trying to do something intuitively and it doesn't work, then simply making it work can be a good course of action to reduce friction: while not holding any items in the cursor, use the same or similar functionality for transferring items between hotbar and container slots as for ground storage, to allow easily putting items away using RMB. Crouch + RMB could take items from the targeted container slot, while modifying it with sprint would transfer full or partial stacks. In order to make it work better, it may be useful to also allow switching hotbar slots with the mouse wheel while hovering over a container's UI, as it doesn't work at the moment for some reason. The current functionality would likely remain as is while the inventory is open, though there's still things to consider as it could cause inconcistencies between the two states. At the very least, placing items into empty container slots could be implemented without conflicts, and then the the remaining issue would be how to transfer items from the cursor into a hotbar slot without unlocking the cursor (or vice versa while at it), which could be done with a hotkey (maybe X, the same as swapping items between hands). I'm pretty sure that this whole feature could also work with IMM disabled with no issues. Granted, it could make item transfer faster and less "hands-on" in certain cases, but I think it's fine if it allows IMM to be massively better and not reliant on unlocking the cursor constantly. I've also had thoughts to potentially completely remove the cursor with IMM enabled (at least while inventory is closed), so that LMB on a container slot would automatically swap it with the active hotbar slot. It might be a step too far and end up unintuitive and confusing, though, even if it could also be convenient and fast for those who take a moment to get used to it. 3. Inventory/crafting UI A secondary point about Immersive Mouse Mode, though somewhat tangential to the main topic, is that the default position of the inventory/crafting window is highly impractical, with the crafting grid specifically being extremely far off to the side. Just moving it doesn't help all that much just because there's very limited space on the screen to put it once the center is no-go. There's two things to consider here: - separate out individual inventory and crafting windows to allow more detailed customization of the layout, - allow resizing the inventory window (or resize it permanently) to let it fit neatly above the hotbar but under the cursor, where it is much more convenient and arguably kind of immersive as well (think like you open the backpack and hold it in front of yourself or put it on the ground). 4. Placeable inventory? Now that I've mentioned "opening the backpack and putting it on the ground" in the above section, why not implement that for the ultimate Immersive Mouse Mode? When the player opens their inventory, a special block is placed on a flat surface under the cursor, which works like any other container. There are a couple considerations with this: - we don't want players using these special blocks like large chests - the bags should still normally occupy their bag slots when the inventory is opened; they are also automatically returned to the player if they close their inventory, walk away or if something destroys the special block (water, falling sand or gravel, maybe another player), - should other players be able to access the special container? - it would be pretty cool and convenient, but it should be possible to disable it to prevent stealing, - should the player only be able to open their inventory while aiming at a suitable surface? - otherwise the game would have to find the nearest surface or something, but the player would still have to point at wherever it gets spawned to access the items (at least with IMM enabled), - should it be possible to place the special container on anything other than a flat surface? - hanging it on a wall might make sense as well, - the visual appearance of the special block would have to depend on the bags the player is using, - should this special container also include the crafting grid? - the block could visually include something like a crafting surface on a piece of cloth or a small workbench (potentially upgradeable in some way), which could also be used to perform crafting in a more immersive way, though it would also massively increase the complexity of the whole thing, - items like Skeps likely wouldn't be affected by this change in any way. Feel free to let me know if I had missed something that addresses some of the issues or if you've managed to make IMM work for you, as I simply wasn't able to get used to it even though I really like some of what it does.

I have to echo the sentiment that having freezing in the game and at the same time not getting any consequences for staying in extremely high temperatures can be quite immersion-breaking. The goal of adding overheating isn't just making hot climates more difficult, it's also to make them more engaging, more immersive, and more accurate to what one might expect from an "uncompromising wilderness survival". If someone wants easy-mode, somewhere between temperate and hot climates could still be space for a pleasantly warm mediterranean region. How would it make the game more fun, one might ask. And how does freezing make the game more fun? How does hunger make the game more fun? How does temporal stability make the game more fun? How do rifts or temporal storms make the game more fun? In a couple days with the game I've already seen complaints about each of these systems, some think they are tedious, some think they are uninteresting, some think they are not engaging, some think they lack depth. Overheating has the advantage of having very clear and easily accessible solutions which naturally guide the player to behaviors which make intuitive sense for the climate they're in, similar to preserving food and preparing warm clothes for winter. It's not as annoyingly persistent as regions of temporal instability due to the day-night and seasonal cycles. It is deeply ingrained into the game's core systems, unlike rifts and temporal storms which can feels tacked-on. It's always engaging, because it can't just be solved forever (if implemented well) - it can only be partially mitigated to extend the time that can be spent in direct sunlight during the day and accelerate recovery. I would be in favor of simply extending the temperature system to allow increasing body temperature above the current limit and adding cooling benefits to loose clothing and light hats and perhaps penalties to warm clothing. With the goal of keeping cold and hot climates distinct, I think that overheating should be a more frequent but momentary threat (not unlike wild animals and rifts), to contrast with winter being more focused on sufficient preparation for an extended resource-dry period. If the temperature is high enough, body temperature would increase, causing exhaustion, dizziness and eventually fainting, in part to amplify the threat of carnivores in the tropics - and you would generally be guaranteed to wake up in the evening as it gets colder if you're not killed. Perceived temperature would naturally be greatly affected by fire and sunlight, incentivizing open-air but shaded homes and workspaces while in hot climates - matching the expectation for these regions. And to avoid making it an excessive threat, the values would have to be tuned to only pose a significant threat near the equator during the day, while in other regions usually being at most a minor inconvenience unless using an excess of interior heat sources or wearing an excess of warm clothes. This could also create an interesting balance where the player may be more incentivized to travel or work at night when it's colder. On the topic of thirst, instead of being a constantly ticking timer in all climates, it would arguably be much better to make it a nutrition-like hydration bar which instead of (or on top of) increasing health would improve heat resistance, incentivizing but not outright requiring the player to stay near a source of drinking water. It would also be partially filled by soups, juices and some raw foods. Ideally, it would deplete much slower, if at all, in colder temperatures. This approach largely eliminates the issue of just being another bar to keep filling, especially outside of the tropics, since it serves as a reward for extra effort integrated together with the hunger system instead of as just another layer of constant pressure which adds nothing to the fun of the game.

A simple charge mechanic would be fitting and work well for bows as well. You could shoot three arrows per second, but at the cost of accuracy, range and power, with the only benefit being maybe raw DPS, at least against targets with a low protection tier. Alternatively, wait up to about a second (less for lighter bows, longer for heavier ones) for the aim to stabilize and to achieve full draw with higher damage, longer range and better accuracy. Then, if you keep holding the draw too long (more than ~2-4 s), you start losing not only accuracy but some of the range and damage as well. This along with potentially adjusted aiming would allow for much more skill expression with the bow while also achieving much more interesting tradeoffs with crossbows other than just the matter of damage and rate of fire. Crossbows could have higher alpha damage and would be easier to use by allowing much longer window for an accurate shot and more consistent range and damage at the cost of long reloads as well as much lower maximum range and lower accuracy than a well-timed arrow. If storing drawn crossbows is a problem, then it can be easily addressed by requiring to load the bolt again if it is stowed, or by having the crossbow slowly lose string tension (this could be fixed by replacing the string) and/or durability if cocked for too long. I love the idea for a blueprinted or Jonas tech weapon as well. Simple firearms could offer a massive-damage but low-accuracy endgame gimmick, and something more exotic could fill a gameplay niche that can't be easily filled with a period-accurate weapon.