redram

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?

The biomes that have a more brown color are indicitive of a low moisture level, rather than season. We'll be getting seasons as part of the next update, though how soon we might get foliage variance, I couldn't guess, since that's not a functional feature, per se.

Mistake in the trader list. I think they'll be withdrawn as options one of these days hopefully.

That or the discord bug reports channel (see right column on home page for link)

Were the loot vessels dropping stuff? I don't see any chests in that picture. Crates don't ever drop anything aside from the crate itself.

And this was not a trader wagon? Trader wagons are 'claimed', which mean if you break anything in the claim area it doesn't drop, it immediately is replaced back where it was. If you were on a public server, players can also claim their area for the same effect. If these were just ruins on a single player world, that would be very odd. Post a screenshot of the place, perhaps?

If you find delapidated chests in ruins, those are meant merely to hold loot. They're specifically designed to not drop, so that you don't get 'early' chests. Sometimes they do spawn empty in certain ruin templates, which is a bug. It sounds like you know about the in-game help guide accessed by pressing 'H', but you can also look at any block and hold shift-H, and you will get a pop-up about that specific block. This is very useful to see what ores *can* spawn in a specific stone block.

@KIEROK Don't worry, 'soon' we will have the seasons and preservation update, it seems like. So then not only will berries spoil, they'll probably also only produce at a certain time of year, similar to TFC. Berries actually used to heal quite a bit more than they do now. Over time that has been ratcheted down. They've been very nice to have so that other aspects of the game could be focused on - such as caving and ore finding, but the early days training wheels are slowly coming off.

If you make a bucket, you can pick up water, and use it to create infinite source blocks. Create one in that spot and it should calm it. Buckets won't be able to do that forever I think. But it should work for now.

I doubt the model will change, unless there's a good reason. There's a lot of animations and textures made for this model. Did you have a specific concern, or just don't like it?

They can also be purchased from traders. There is a clothing trader who specifically focuses on clothing, but others do sell certain types.

There are no 'biomes' in the minecraft sense. Like TFC, Vintage Story use basically 3 factors to determine what an area looks like: landform, moisture, and latitude(temperature). Landform is the closest thing to biome. You have flat landforms, hilly, mountainous, as the basics. There's several detailed permutations of these such as tons of tiny ponds (swamp), stepped plateau hills, and some other stuff. Landform determines what the terrain looks like. moisture and temperature govern the plants and animals that appear. Hot and wet? Jungle. Hot and dry? Desert or savanna. Middle latitude is temperate, and northern will be lots of snow, ice, and pines. Basically it's a big sliding scale. If you use the 'patchy' world-gen, then the rainfall and temperature maps are in illogical blobs next to one another, so you can have desert next to arctic. If you use 'realistic climate bands', then you'll spawn in the temperate zone. You'll have to travel 10-12k south to find true desert or tropics in that case, and so yes, the temperate zone will be more uniform, vs a patchy climate game. hope that explains it well enough. Hopefully the variety of results this system produces will evolve and improve over time.

Having watched like 16 hours of Dakphan's series so far, I can say that at least certain people are also impressed when they see the multiple container thing, how easy it is to load mods, and just generally the very well thought out nature of the game. Small details like skipping stones attract notice. Longer streams like Darkphan's allow people to see the very large amount of small qol things that make the game superior. It also gets better as Dark learns all the little tricks like waypoints. Personally I think that perhaps the most bang for the buck in terms of near term updates would be getting an animal-powered automation system going for the early game. People love animals, and love automation. A non-redstone automation system will help set us apart a lot. My other choice would be an immersive armor/clothes construction system. I don't see 'getting rid of the grid' as a pressing goal. it's very tricky for mass-made things like building materials. As long as we create immersive methods where it makes sense, I think people will remember those, and forget about the simpler grid stuff. I don't think the game is ever going to get past the first impression minecraft clone thing because it's a blocky game. It just looks the same at first glance, period. But the more other cool features, the quicker people will be able to recognize that it's not the same. Edit: As for hytale, it's just not the same game. Hytale has dozens of people on staff. That's hard to compete with directly. Hytale also fully embraces fantasy in a way VS probably never will. Between these things, they're always going to have more mobs. The weakness of both minecraft and Hytale is that they have to appeal to the hugest, dullest common denominator. VS can choose to appeal to more detail oriented crowd. The details are what will shine. So more details is I think better than going back and trying to re-work old stuff.

The game already has a cooking pot that you can use to make soup, two kinds of stew (vegetable or meaty) and porridge. The cooking wiki is here: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Cooking . You'll need to scroll down to the "advanced cooking" section. Beyond the pot, suffice to say there are several more methods planned. The next of which will probably be the clay oven.

Ya when flint knapping and clay forming you need to have flint/stone or clay in your hands respectively. My problems always happened if I tried to do it with empty hand, or a torch or something else. Related, I also get freezes still when I'm mining a block and it breaks and behind it is something like a flint knapping grid or a stack of firewood and I haven't let up yet and so I guess the game trys to do the same interaction (block breaking) with the thing behind, which doesn't use left click in that way. It happens to me in a particular ruin once in awhile, because there's firewood behind the cobble. Exact same type of freeze. I've basically just learned to avoid the trigger scenarios in both cases.

Tossing things in a pit to despawn isn't sufficient?