Mushroomancer

To be fair I don't think the models are meant to be masculine, I think they're supposed to be ambiguous so that only one simple model is required for everyone and the use of actual customization choices is meant to imply more nuances, primarily voice options, but I understand what you mean.

Combat has never been a core feature I cared about heavily, besides aiming, on Vintage Story. I think there's so much else to do and worry about that the basic minecraft-swing is all I really need. But given how many people love the idea of larger servers with CivSim, I think it's not a bad idea. Fortunately that seems to be what they're working on as far as the next major overhaul. Who knows, maybe it will become something more pertinent to my play as it improves, though! And it would be nice to be able to hit something that had moved close enough to hit you without weird hitbox and clipping issues.

Maining hunter and malefactor, this would be pretty interesting to me. The idea of being able to hit prey in a specific body part and deal more meaningful damage feels like it would be good, but I also feel like it would have to come with an aiming overhaul for arrows so making them more skill based would definitely be ideal. On the topic of classes: As much as I like the classes thematically (and as somewhat sure I am that this particularly system wouldn't be vanilla), I'd love to see a Project Zomboid style trait system where you pick a baseline class that provides some small/specific traits/boons/debuffs, and then have a field of traits to pick from with both negative and positive values. I also think a quality system for crafting could be interesting, though perhaps gamified too much. We've gotten a taste of it with quenching and tempering, so having other methods to improve the durability and effectiveness of tools through integrated gampelay would be great. Playing Vintage story to me (especially multiplayer) feels like being one dwarf in Dwarf Fortress a lot of the time. Let the Fey Mood take me. More than anything I would love to see a middle ground between rafts and sailing ships. I would also love to see more ocean and tidal biomes - saltmarshes, mudflats, coves, mangroves, kelp forests, seagrass meadows, oystering, clamming, crabbing, palm groves, seabird colonies as a potential source of eggs pre-domestication etc. I know that actually making a tidal system is probably a bit too advanced (or at least a bit too RAM hungry for the general user) but I'm someone who's always been drawn to coastlines and oceans and feel that they're rarely done proper justice in survival games. Generally a revamp on world generation, as well. Although I'm sure that's something that's planned down the line and isn't a huge priority, I'd just quite like vanilla rivers that make interior navigation easier by boat. Edit: Oh and we should be able to eat tree nuts.

Honestly cheaters should probably be in quotation marks for the opposite reason. The way everyone says 'Cheaters' implies that these were some goofy little guys gaming the system on servers when in reality the cheats had the potential to be tools for massive griefing and to damage server economies while 'Malware' seems to be being used to conflate the severity of this situation with ransomware or keylogging. "How do we know Maltiez isn't going to put something worse into the code?" Why didn't he smuggle it in instead of this code? His motivations weren't to prey on the community and if he had the desire to do that he already would have used his mods as vehicles for it. This is someone who clearly thought through the logic of how to best target the 'cheat mod' without being caught by it. Was it his place? No. Should he have done it this way? No. Is there any evidence he was scraping data or doing long term damage to the systems of victims? Also no. But yes, these are not things 'The Devs' did, these are things Maltiez did. Pretending that Anego is now going to start pushing malware into the main branch of the game is hysterics and melodrama.

I definitely know the struggle of quicklime. Was with friends on a server and the goal of building a castle that required a metric desert of limestone that had to be processed. It was very much a whole deal, keeping the lime cooking.

I'm not saying it's ideal, just that if I was on the other side of this, I could see how easy it would be to take that route and choose colder professionalism over the potential risk of this situation repeating. Maybe the training pays off and that doesn't need to happen, though.

I'm kind of sick of seeing this. Maltiez's goal was not to provide protection to servers, absolutely correct. But there are multiple ways to read this statement. This reads, to me, like a justification for not making a stand-alone mod that servers could install on an individual basis especially because it would not protect vanilla only servers. The goal was not to put a bubble around any one server, it was to make the cheat author give up on cheating. Which, whether the purpose of that was to protect servers or the community or just to inconvenience and piss off one modder, the end result - the final goal, was that the cheating would stop and go away. Edit for language clarity.

It can be good, I had to take a step back and reassess early on and my conclusions changed, and I now find myself falling somewhere in the middle of the arguing groups here, and for it a lot less charged. Usually. There are still moments.

I wasn't aware, that's not bad at all! That definitely beats as many fully stocked campfires as I can manage.

I'm curious if there are modern methods used for drying peat faster. I know that peat cutting isn't as prolific as it used to be, but I'm wondering if industrialization resulted in things like kiln drying that can be done for firewood. Edit: On that note, I'm wondering if it would be too redundant to introduce a system for kiln seasoning/drying firewood.

The fact that we can't determine the scope of the issue is probably a big part of the reason that Anego isn't making a statement. Tyron is not just a member of the community and Anego is not working on some obscure bespoke software project, they're a legal entity and have to use language that reflects that. Of course, that's speculation. It's also speculation to say Anego supports malware and is going to turn Vintage Story into a smokescreen for malware. It's also speculation to say they rushed a statement and didn't cover their bases under the community pressure they were feeling. It's also speculation to say that they're carefully picking their language for legal reasons until they have consulted with counsel and have a clear path forward. We can read in whatever level of charity we want all day.

My criticism is that an overbearing emotional response that borders on toxicity and abuse does not make anyone want to communicate. Considering this situation blew up five or so days ago, I'm somewhat impressed we got any response that wasn't 'We have ensured that the offending mods on our databse are reviewed and are further investigating, please wait for our official response, than you for your patience.' for a week first. Working in an already tense environment with a tight expectation of time and a horde of frothing mouths around you does not make for particularly candid nor well thought out PR moves. Especially considering that it seems like Anego doesn't have much in the way of formal PR and Community Management training. This is probably, more than anything, a sign that it's time for that to end. I'm loathe to say it but whatever happens to Maltiez, I think the lesson that gets taken from this is to separate from the community and discourage any direct emotional contact or parasocial bonding as best as you can. It's not worth it to thread the needle between professional corporate conduct and leading community members especially when you're going to be criticized for being too corporate or too emotionally invested either way. Anego has not reacted perfectly, probably not even 'well', but the community has also showed no patience or understanding even now that the immediate threat of compromised software is gone. Tyron and by extension Anego have spent a decade not just leading the community and developing the game but being involved in the community as well, and they're repaid for that with what is probably one of the least charitable and least courteous outrages I've seen in a good while. I'm sure it hurts to know your community will not afford you the opportunity to navigate forward.

No this is my fault, I should not have used 'Bad Faith' and stuck to 'uncharitable'. Although I'm sure there are bad-faith actors, I do not think they're the majority here at all on either side of the discussion and notably the most vitriolic bad faith actor we've seen on the forums yet was a defender of Maltiez. The reality is that emotions are high and everyone still engaged with this discourse is feeling raw from all that's happened and that can lead to a lack of willingness to hear out the other side on their terms. A couple days ago I was in the same boat. I do think Anego and their community moderators have a higher standard that they should be adhering to in this regard, as they are in the professional position and should be acting that part, but I also understand that's easier said than done when you're on the receiving end of community outrage. Especially for a community that hasn't had the same traditional buffers between the developers and customer base you'd see in larger operations. I think the speed with which this all happened has also only aggravated things.

I suppose I also contradicted myself a little by saying it 'does matter' and it 'doesn't matter'. The reality is that the details of technicality are an important discussion to have as far as discerning the scope and morality of the actions taken, but not the ethics or professional regard for the actions taken. What Maltiez did was obfuscation in the literal sense even if it wasn't in the technical sense and it's the best word for Maltiez's actions regarding how he delayed detection. My other points is that linguistic nitpicking is pointless as a means of defending Maltiez, not necessarily deconstructing those defenses just because whether or not Maltiez's actions meet a criminal threshold for 'malware' or the technical definition of 'obfuscation' in regards to programming doesn't really change the fact that the principle actions taken were unethical. The question then becomes what is the justified recourse for that lack of ethics and regard for users? I wouldn't say I'm satisfied with what's been done, but I also have faith that Anego is doing what they believe is best and that they aren't willing to risk their project being used to smuggle malware. My trust is harmed, but it isn't broken, and I am willing to take on faith that things will continue to improve and that they can handle Maltiez if they believe they can and will part ways with him if they believe they can't.

Apologies, I wasn't meaning to imply that a specific mod wasn't being targeted, only that Maltiez's code wasn't identifying it because of anything unique to that mod. Which is why it was an incredibly sloppy and short-sighted method to use for an already unethical act of what seems to be ego or spite driven vigilantism.

I honestly don't have too many issues with crucibles themselves, although I think it would be a good quality-of-life change to have either larger ones or more efficient ones. Using the forge for heating seems like the ideal. I also wouldn't mind seeing early game crucibles have their maximum capacity limited to make room for more advanced, faster smelting late game crucibles with more capacity. The real issue with campfires is flint smelting. Please let us smelt flint a faster way.

Of course! And welcome to the forums!

You can lean most tools against complete blocks, but not fences, I'm pretty sure. I think the real issue is actually the length of days.I feel like you would want to have more realistic day lengths to properly use this mechanic, but by default with such short days it would not be especially useful to the majority of players. I do think simulating the natural motion of a night sky could be very neat, though I'm curious how such a simulation would play on a flat world. We already have day lengths that are tied to latitude. It might not be that much of a stretch. Or it might be an absolute nightmare.

Caves and Caverns was the mod affected that caused the issue to be discovered in the first place. The problem was that Maltiez's code did not target the cheat mod because of anything specific it was doing or a specific way it was acting, but because it had code that was obfuscated on a readability level. Maltiez's code was designed to target any mod that obfuscated its code (by the strict definition of obfuscation in technical language) over a certain threshold, which some other mods were doing. These mods became bycatch as a result. The main issue of potential misinformation is that it's hard to know exactly how many mods or people were affected directly due to the way that logs and crash reporting were handled by Maltiez's code. Especially before all details were clear, there was a lot of fervor and finger pointing for potentially unrelated incompatibilities and crashes and attributions of effects that, as far as anyone can tell yet, the code could not have been responsible for. It all resulted in a very muddied and emotionally heightened discussion.

It's possible that butchering changed a setting that alters animal drops and simply toggling it didn't reset the issue. I would definitely attempt to run a fully vanilla world and see if the issue persists. If I can ask, what class are you playing? I know a few have traits that reduce animal drops, but it shouldn't be to absolutely nothing. The worst case scenario is you may have to backup your worlds and mod folders and reinstall vintage story if the issue does persist across multiple worlds.

I don't think that retaining him was the right thing to do and I don't think their statement was perfect, but I also think that parts of the community are intentionally engaging with their public statement in bad faith, or at least letting the emotional height of the entire controversy leave them with the least charitable interpretation. Given the closing section of the statement, I think it's clear that Anego recognizes that wrong was done and they carry a portion of the burden for that fact. I also think that they could have been clearer with laying out the reality of the situation but I suspect that they were attempting to strike a diplomatic tone and explain their reasoning for what they believed were mitigating factors to Malt's actions (I.E. not believing he is a further threat to the community because the intended targets of the code were themselves malicious actors). That diplomatic tone has clearly backfired, but I suspect the team is in a very heightened state of their own. The community has not exactly struck a reasonable and constructive tone of criticism over this and it has been a lot of fervor and fury on both sides.

The issue is that technicalities do matter in regards to the exact behavior of the code and are relevant to the discussion so using the two interchangeably is another factor muddying the waters. Obfuscation is the perfect word to describe the code's behaviors of misdirection and tampering, true, but given how much confused information is already swirling around and being nitpicked over, I can understand the argument for precise language. I don't think it's actually particularly relevant, personally. The exact details of how the poison pill behaved as far as hiding itself aren't actually the issue for me because the real question is WHY it was using deceit and if that reasoning is mitigating or aggravating to the situation at hand.I think the only mitigating factor is what kind of damage and to who the code did, but even that is an argument of personal morality and not professional ethics.

You do not need to disable mods on your side, the game will keep catalogued mods for any and all multiplayer servers you join in their own folders separate from your personal, local mods. Any time you join a server, you will be prompted to download the mods for that server and they will automatically be installed in their own partition within the modding folders of Vintage Story! Makes things very easy and allows mostly-painless server hopping.

It very likely won't lead anywhere unless there's a very large concerted effort from an actual journal or influencer doing it. Legally speaking, things like libel and slander are difficult to pursue already, and outside of some specific places where it can be used as a cudgel by those with enough money to wield it that way, things like 'potential damages' are often deciding factors on if such cases even see the light of day. A few random users of Bluesky and Twitter are not likely to be at risk of that.

This is already becoming a line used throughout social media in some places by people who either don't understand the complexities of what is going on or are intentionally spreading that message out of spite and/or genuine belief.