redram

Yes, patches of sand and gravel appear in all biomes, so that you should be able to find something to pan anywhere.

Just fyi, because it wasn't clear to me if you know about it already, but there is a cooking pot in the game that allows you to make soup, stew, and porridge. I think this feature came in after Stroam's suggestion. This system will be expanded upon over time, to be sure. But it's pretty labor intensive for each new system, so it's slow going.

You'll need a bronze anvil. There is no iron anvil in the game yet. I don't think the hammer type matters.

The upset only moving in one direction thing was part of my original suggestion. The one effect of that that perhaps is not ideal is that the anvil will need to be spaced away from everything around it, instead of the player being able to place it against a wall, or even in niche. May or may not be a significant annoyance, idk. Probably moreso in the beginning when you're maybe in a small rebuilt ruin or something and don't have tons of room. I do in general support the notion of getting rid of the long string of techniques, even if it were just to reduce the number to a point where you could have a single icon down low by the meters, like how TFC did chisel modes, where that single icon changes every time you press F. Just a bit less intrusive. The hold mouse button for force idea is interesting, and I would not be opposed to trying it out. It does make the system harder, so might turn some people off, idk. And at the same time, it doesn't create a 'secret code' like tfc had, which felt like an accomplishment if you could decipher it. Different pauses for different metals I feel like that would be too much. The metals are too many, and the acceptable range of pause to small I think. However I could see the effect possibly varying with metal heat. But again, that'd make it harder (probably more so than the force mechanic in general) and so idk if it'd be a net benefit or not... Quality based on strikes, idk. I think it only really gains meaning with the timing thing, because it's possible to mis-time and make the wrong move. For people who do not have very good personal skill at the timing, I'm sure it would be frustrating. It'd be interesting to try but also depends on mow much harder (if at all) the devs want the system to be. I do agree the heating system could stand to be tightened up a bit. Currently I can pretty easily do 4 pick heads using only 1 lignite chunk. Tongs I like, quenching to finish, there would need to be better communication of when you have pixels left to remove. Some recipes - the pick I think is one - have corner pixels that need to be cut off, but it's sometimes hard to notice because they're on the corner so the wireframe lack is not as obvious. As for the voxel count, I can kind of agree on removing that, in the current scope. It servers as a sort of loose punishment for being sloppy currently, in certain recipes that take a lot of pixels (spear and arrowheads I think?). But some recipes have tons extra so it doesn't matter so much. And only one recipe - the sheet - takes two ingots currently iirc? At that rate I'd probably just rather have it take two ingots to begin with. If the most ingots the anvil will ever take is 2, then it's probably just as well to get rid of it because I've seen it confuse newbs when they ran out of pixels and couldn't do anymore work. They'll try to re-heat it, still won't work, etc. Seems to me like it's not particularly great in it's current incarnation.

That's like saying there's nothing illogical about math. No, there is nothing illogical about math. But applying math in certain ways to certain situations can be. Food is not uranium. It doesn't decay like that. So you say that one of the strong points about this system is that the math is simple but when it's pointed out it's not simple past the first iteration, you hand-wave away the non-simple part? The rate of the tick-down changes over time. There's a real potential there for the player to feel mislead and confused. That's because it's a logical system with respect to food. irl if you pick 100 fruits, they're all probably going to rot around the same time. Each fruit is individually spoiling the moment it's picked. Not half at X time and a few at 7X. It's made quite clear in the cliff system, and the player doesn't have to question it. In this half-life system, the more work you do, the more you lose after the first iteration. In the cliff system all that food is available for you to use right up till near the end (I'm presuming, I don't know what the ratio will actually be). But one of your criticisms of a time-stamp system is that is clutters inventory in early game. If the player eats all of it in a short timeframe, then that is also not a problem. As for your last several points, I'm not sure what you're getting at. It seems like you're criticizing the cliff system at times, but you also refer to halving, which is not a thing in the cliff system. If you're talking about a half-life system with time stamps, then ya I agree that's probably the worst of both worlds. Tyron stated in discord that current plan is indeed to simply weighted average combined cliff stacks. And that does indeed effectively 'extend' the life of the lower stack. I would perhaps have went with an average that weights the 'more rotten' stack more heavily. Perhaps as if it was double it's weight or something. But, a straight up average is only going to benefit the player, not punish them. So it's not the worst thing in the world. I'll say this additional thing for the cliff system - it's easy to balance. You know exactly how long that food is going to be fresh. The half-life system, you gotta do the maths.

I was exaggerating when I said infinity. I didn't think it would be actually programmed as infinite; obviously we'd cut it off, but it would create a - what, logarithmic? - distortion. Cutting off at .1 doesn't change the fact that those first 20 apples lasted only four days, but that last apple went for 28 days before it was entirely gone. And I realize you'd eat it before then most likely, but this is not a logical system, and I think players would not enjoy it. I feel like saying it's easy to understand is oversimplifying. It's easy to know how much food you'll have in four days. But 20 days? Not so easy. Not only is this system illogical, and a constant needling of the player with continual food loss, but it scales in a deeply unfair manner. No player is going to enjoy that they lose 20 apples over the first four days, and 10 the next. That's a communist system of decay - you produce more we take more. I don't think this system would be intuitive to a player. Why did those first 20 apples decay faster than the next 10? At best it would be disguised from the player to a degree by the constant rate change. I think any reasonable person upon first seeing the tooltip or whatever that the stack would decay by half in X days would reasonably assume they'd have nothing in 2X days. At least the surprise would be on the pleasant side I guess. I think you're overly concerned about minimizing exploitation of stack management, at the expense of the fundamental system. This system will penalize the early game most, when you have less than 1 stack of a given food. And it will always penalize in that fashion, for the entire game, and even for preserved foods (that aren't infinitely preserved). Compare that to the cliff system - you have all the food for a long time, and then it decays quickly at the end. You allow the player to combine stacks manually if they want. Don't just average, weight the rottener portion. Exploits handled. No needling of constant food loss. Logical. And I would argue that a system that is logical will rarely be considered unfair. I do agree that it may be an annoyance in the early game, for those who can't stand to combine stacks and lose a bit. Though I could also see it being annoying in the frame of not automatically picking up a food item because your inventory is full and the game won't auto-combine. That would possibly be confusing and annoying. But again, probably more an early game thing. In the later game, you'll likely mostly be harvesting your own crops at your base with plenty of storage, so it should not be a problem. Nevertheless the early game is indeed the first impression and you don't want it to go badly. But I think it's worth trying. That's my take on it.

These statements seem a bit contradictory? Or are you talking player's inventory vs in a container? But so ok, I've never claimed to be good at math, but are you saying that the per-piece decay time is dynamically adjusted for any given stack based on the size of the stack, such that the decay of half the stack at that time would take X days? How does this stack of Zeno's apples not end up stretching into infinity? I see what you're doing keeping two separate stacks with the same result in X days as you would if they were in one stack, that seems to be the issue you're focused on. But ok now your 40 stack is down to 20 after 4 days. Well now your 20 will be 10 after 4 days won't it? Losing 10 apples in 4 days is clearly better than losing 20. And losing 5 in 4 days is better yet. That seems to me like you'd be penalizing the player at the front end; the larger the stack the larger the penalty. All this assuming you're not tracking an initial start time, which it seemed like you said you were not. Forget about multiple stacks issue, can you just explain what happens to the single stack of 40 apples at 4-day intervals?

In the context of Tony's expiration date method, I'm not sure why you say they can't be combined. As I recall, Tyron said that the game would *automatically* stack them within a range, but you could still manually combine stacks of very different dates. This would alleviate much of the problem. How that combination affects the expiration is an issue. Averaging effectively allow the player to 'refresh' old stacks, it would at least need to be weighted. Possibly with bias. The stricter way of having everything go to the worse decay value would probably raise cries of being unfair. As for the half life idea, I'm not clear how that's not just a different form of expiration date. You're still tracking the date when the stack starts decaying aren't you? If your stack is already 2 days into it's decay and you pick up more items and the timer is the same, then you are strictly disadvantaging the subsequent pickups. If instead you're averaging new pickups into the pile, so they increase the half-life on a weighted average, well that's just like manually combining the expiration date stacks and weighted averaging them. Either way, you're still creating a situation where the player is losing food over time at a rate. It's just not smooth, but stepped. Also your graphics confuse me, as they make it look like just an ark system. Ark system is workable, but not realistic. Also, I don't see a case of 40 small stacks at a problem. Players naturally want food to stack. I can't even think why they would ever want a bunch of tiny stacks, quite aside from any decay issues. The advantage to the all-then-nothing expiration system (cliff system?) is the player has all their food for that a long time. As I understand it, the current plan is the decay would occur relatively quickly at the end. This is pretty similar to how a lot of foods - especially fruits and vegetables - decay irl in my experience. Once that banana starts to go bad, it goes bad pretty fast. I think generally the softer the flesh the quicker that last stage of decay happens. Other food like bread and cheese takes longer, but still, relative to the time it is good, once that mold starts being visible, it spreads really fast. And I could even see that final decay stag being of variable time based on the food, or maybe proportional to the initial good time. Some foods might have an advantage like that (preferably certain cooked ones). The other think I like about a more a more cliff-like expiration is that it would make the possiblity of food poisoning more tolerable I think. You'd get the vast majority of the time risk-free, but if you must eat that food in the last decaying stage, maybe there could be a chance for some kind of adverse effect (not without herbs to counter it though).

@xhodan I think you'll see many things progress in ways you'll like as we go along. Many shortcuts must be taken in these early stages, until better systems are in place. Brick making is going to be changed eventually for instance. But until then we have the mechanic we have, which above all else is easy for Tyron to code, being just a grid recipe and a firepit cook time. A couple years ago when I first started following VS Tyron had just introduced the ability to make ingots, iirc, and at that time tools were crafted in the grid just like in minecraft. There was no smithing yet. I don't recall if there were animals back then, or if they simply didn't drop anything, but you couldn't get meat. I don't think you could farm either. So food was basically impossible to find. You simply started the game and explored till you died of starvation. Later, after it was possible to survive for more than a couple days, Tyron actually did try out a fat reserve mechanic. I think the general consensus was that it didn't really add much to the game so it was removed. Of course there were just a handful of people playing the game regularly back then. I think that with the upcoming seasons update, we might be able to finally start balancing crops and food in general in a good and challenging way (get off the berry crutch). I don't know if automation of farming will ever truly be a thing or not. It is intended that eventually there will be a 'survive and automate' mode for the game, and it's my understanding that that mode will go whole-hog on automation. But the default survival game mode, it would not surprise me if farming could never be truly automated in the way minecraft does. I guess what I'm saying is that it's process of refinement of mechanics. The bad part about the detailed and custom crafting mechanics in VS is that they take a lot of Tyron's time to code. And you have to have certain frameworks in place before the next can come in really. That said, some design decisions are intentional, such as the lack of need to drink water, as I understand it. It makes sense; in TFC water drinking was just a nuisance. It added nothing to gameplay or the tech tree. You could drink with your hand, or with a water jug. That was it (without mods). It didn't encourage any use of metal, or other resources or tech aside from clay. That's not worth putting in the game imo. I would want to see a much more considered mechanic, and the world would need to support it, by drinkable water being far less common (again, imo), so that it had meaning. As for RPG and skills, not sure what the plan on that stuff is. If the game does delve into rpg territory in terms of npcs and interaction, I would expect it to be very light, or very far in the future.

If you're doing single player, you can always jump into creative mode ("gamemode creative") and place a trader. They're a searchable 'object' in the creative inventory. I just wish there was randomized one, so it doesn't feel as much like cheating picking your own specific one. Some are more desirable than others imo.

@Stephan OrtolfI thougth someone more knowledgeable than me might have responded to this. I know that the game creates one or more 'texture atlases' that are a composite image containing a large set of textures. These atlases have a defined size. If you're making a resource pack using individual textures that are larger than default, you will quickly outgrow the defined texture atlas size. I'm guessing you need to increase the allowed size of the atlases. Unfortunately I couldn't tell you how. Perhaps try asking in the mod topic on the discord forums - people are more active day-to-day there.

It's not the quern I'm concerned with. I think people mostly want raw stone to make polished stone. It seems like this is intended as an easier method to get raw stone. So if you replace the current method with an easier one, you shorten any possibility for tech progression to make it easier. I think it'd be better if there was more room for progression in that regard, by keeping the current somewhat tedious and wasteful method. All depends on exactly how the new method works though.

Does that advance tech progression? You already have to have metal to get raw stone currently. Would this only work with iron+ or something? Do the stakes wear out?

It'd be easy enough to add a section to the handbook about it, and a link from quern or other relevant entries. I do think there should be an easier way, but it should be much higher tech imo. Basically a diamond blade steam powered saw.

This happens while you're watching? Or while you're gone? It sure seems like hares. Even though you have the walls, I wonder if it's possibly you unluckily built your garden where a hare 'spawner' exists? I know something like that exists for wolves. I once took over a tower ruin for my house, only to repeatedly find it full of wolves when I came back from trips. Apparently it had a wolf spawner inside the tower. Might try moving the garden a chunk away and see if same thing still happens?