redram

Nice job of covering all the current liabilities of the system @heptagonrus! I'm not voting in the poll because I basically don't think the honey system is at all fleshed out right now. I think we just got the basic mechanics. My suggestions: CONTAINERS - I definitely agree the bowls right now are very cumbersome. I don't get hurt near enough to actually need all the honey so I mostly harvest and immediately eat it regardless of whether or not I'm damaged. I'm after the wax. There should be a larger holding container for honey (and other liquids/materials). This could be a crock, or the standard barrel. A barrel could hold perhaps scores of bowls of honey. Just a simple right click of a bowl on the barrel either fills or empties the bowl. Such a concentration possibly attracts wild animals though, so keep it secure. CATTAILS - Agreed that cattails are a bit cumbersome to harvest, in large part because of their annoying offset, but I think that's only really an issue if they're in large masses, rather than rows. It does seem like it'd make sense for a scythe to work on them, but that would make them a lot easier to harvest, and they're easy to move and don't even require water or fertilizer. I kind of wonder if - if a scythe is allowed to harvest them - players should only be able to re-plant them in water. Another fun fact: cattails don't require light. Visit my hacienda to see my subterranean cattail farm. Probably should be changed to require light, like crops. HONEY USE - My impression was that the current mechanic is a stopgap. I think honey should be an ingredient in a healing poultice, which can be made with reeds or linen, and perhaps a couple other ingredients. Consumed on use, so none of the bowl issues as far as the portable healing useage. Presumably honey will also eventually have use in baking and other foodstuffs. Might also be interesting to have an option to distill the honey into sugar. This would give maybe three sugar options - honey, sugar beets, sugarcane. The rarer ones could give better yield. I think it's very good for the game to have things that have multiple sources, but some are better than others. it helps avoid the feast/famine problem (TFC flux or salt), but still gives a thrill if you find the better/easier to extract/rarer source. LANTERNS - I remain of the personal opinion that good permanent lights should not be cheap. Drifters on your roads; so what? They're easy to dodge if you're just passing by. I'm sure there'll be other light sources to come, so you'll have other options. For SMP play, I'd leave it up to the server admins if they want to make lanterns super-cheap for road purposes. There's a lot of ways to skin that cat.

I think we're actually going to get at some point a vanilla way to cook fat to make lard for candles. That's my impression anyway. Maybe it'll arrive with general leather working and other animal related update?

In the recipes you give, maybe also give the output? If they're all 1, then cob seems pretty expensive (for the stone age) at 12 sticks. Sticks aren't near as fast to get in the stone age as they are after shears. I think a wicker fence would be cool. Pretty expensive for sticks again, in the stoneage, (though at least attainable) but I'd see it more as an aesthetic choice than practical. Also a tall wicker basket chest, so they're not all short ones?

So as far as hunting goes, from a practical standpoint, and my own personal playstyle, I'm not going to use a fire for mob safety. That requires me to carry fire components, or the tools, which is two inventory slots, and I have to maintain the fire. Instead, I can just carry 1 stack of cobble (as I always do anyway) and completely enclose myself and the kill. Unless the scavengers start appearing basically immediately. As long as cobble is as fast to take down as it is currently, it'll be easier, and cobble is also useful for caving and getting places, unlike fire components or the tools. So I'm just kind of saying, I'm not sure it'll be the best solution. But I guess that depends on playstyle. Also, not all mobs are going to be of a nature that they would be afraid of fire, so that mechanic should only be a thing for *animal* mobs.

Ya, making hunting and killing more of an event would probably help balance the food situation. In the current state of the game, I much prefer meat to crops, because meat gives so much more satiation. Of course we also used to be drowning in animals, that's getting less and less so, but wolves are still a great source of meat and I actively seek them out for that, preferring them over sheep and boar. I do think the hunting experience could used improvement in several ways. I think it would be a good idea if there were at least two kinds of meat: 'meat', and 'bush meat'. Bush meat would be gotten from any animal that's not an 'intended' meat source. So wolves for instance, would just drop bush meat. This meat might not be as filling as normal meat. Or, it would not be a valid ingredient in any cooking recipes (at least, none of the good ones). Now, maybe there could even be one or two further kinds of meat. 'choice' and 'excellent' or something like that. Those might be meats gotten from rare non-farmable animals, or, animals that have been bred to have meat above and beyond the norm. That would depend on having a compelling food system though, with quality that matters. Another suggestion I would make, is that the manner of killing the animal affects the meat drop. So if you kill the animal with a sword, you get very little meat. You tore it all to pieces and contaminated it with hair and viscera. Similarly, a blunt weapon reduces the meat yield due to massive bruising and trauma to the muscle. If we can get organs from animals, then the chance of getting various organs would also be reduced by these kill methods, as the organs are sliced or smashed. Piercing weapons should be the preferred method of getting good amounts of meat. This would encourage spear and arrow use, as opposed to right now where I just run after chickens and everything else madly hacking with my sword. I could even see poultry having a special execution method involving a log and an axe, but maybe that's a bit much... Eventually I feel like it'd be good if wild animals would run away from the player, so that it's not so easy to get at them with a melee weapon. This would also encourage spear and arrow use. I don't even use arrows currently - there's just no need. It might be interesting if the player could make camouflage clothing for themselves, to help them get a little bit closer. Also moving slower would help. I had been planning to make a butchering suggestion at some point, so I won't go too much into that here, but suffice to say I would love to see corpse drops, and the player actually having to dress the animal. I would make meat a more involved process, and if it required specialty tools, it might make the 'incidental' accumulation of meat not so easy, and raise the profile of crops for food. As far as fires to scare animals, it could be interesting, but I don't see it as a vital part of the hunting experience. Predators attracted by blood makes sense, but if all you have to do is go click on some water, I guess i'm not that excited about the mechanic. And especially in the current system it'd be more a feature than a deterrent, since the wolves will drop even more meat! What I do like about predators attracted by blood is it might encourage domestication of animals for food, so that they could be slaughtered in a safe environment. But I think it requires making wolf and other predator meat a third-rate food source.

To reiterate what copy said, for common and simple stuff there'd be no 'intellectual rights' issue. The guy who made the waterskin mod for TFC did not invent the notion of a waterskin. Any more than VS invented the notions of logs, pickaxes, or wolves. It would not be at all problematic for VS to subsume such things (albeit with their own assets and code). But for truly custom experiences on the level of Thaumcraft, well, that's a different matter, from a PR standpoint at least, if not legal.

I'd point out that there is always the option (and I'd say it's in fact likely) that *if* this gets implemented, it will only be in the Survival playstyle, as opposed to survive and build. And, it needs to be easily adjustable by the player/server admin, so they can make container durability be higher or lower than 'default', or even infinite (no wear). Players will have drastically different preferences for this kind of mechanic, and the default should appeal to the largest player base, but be adjustable. That said, within this mechanic, from the top I don't like the slot-by-slot wear. I want the entire bag to be available, or not. My reason for this is that it's just a bit-by-bit annoyance to do it slot by slot. I don't want to be constantly annoyed by repairs. If it's all or nothing, I can still watch the durability, keep spares, swap them out when needed, and not be hassled by having to repair my bag every time I go get an inventory full of chalk. I'd rather spend 4 leather once to get a whole new bag, than have to spend 1 leather 4 separate times to repair it. Also, like Milo, I have certain areas of inventory I put certain things, and I'd rather not have that messed with every trip or two. Instantly dropping items from inventory (whether 1 slot at a time or the entire) is bad. If it happens in dangerous combat or parkour, you're just going to tick off the player. I'd much rather see the slot(s) greyed out, the player can take the item(s) out, but not place new ones in. This lets the player determine when to deal with the issue. As far as durability damage, I lean towards item-moving, but movement based would work too, or even damage. I think for item-moving, it's per individual item, not stack. That avoids the quantity question. Overburdening I don't like. I don't like summed weight limits in general (whole 'nother topic), and this relies on that. I also am not particularly interested in 'load shifting'. Another annoyance for me. The good thing about this method would be that weight capacity would be another container stat that could be altered by skilled craft, and altered at a very fine scale.

I guess when Tyron said "I would make river water infinitely extendable with aqueduct blocks crafted from planks." I assumed he meant that water in aquaducts would not power water wheels. Only naturally occurring....fast water?....blocks? The aquaducts would be just kind of cosmetic? I mean, wood isn't exactly a high tier item. You've got a copper saw you've got wood. I guess water wheels themselves aren't exactly high tier though. The thing is, as far as crops go, it's not hard to find water to put them near. I think you can barely go 100 blocks on flat non-desert land without having water. Moreover, a logical aquaduct requires higher water source, to go downward. I wouldn't call that common in VS. Now there have been specific cases in-game where I've wanted to redirect water to cool off a magma lake. Water physics is kind of wonky though, and the very short natural drop rate makes it fairly impractical. So I could see using aquaducts for that. But otherwise I'm not sure what practical use they'd have in the current system. FWIW I'd vote with Tony for not allowing source blocks to be moved, except with pumps.

I take it then, that water buckets will not work the way they do in the future? We won't have any way to move water source blocks? As a mechanic it's definitely fine to allow a single rivulet to work, but it'd be much more picturesque it there were a wider river. Also in order to encourage these kinds of rivulets maybe allow water to flow further? I think right now it only goes 5 squares, which is not very many at all. Even minecraft allowed 7 didn't it? Would 10 be outrageous?

Ya, it's definitely not realistic. But as always, there's so many other aspects of the game that aren't either. But I can guarantee players would love it.

But don't discount more mundane loot. Right now there's a dungeon with a lot of firewood. I'm always happy to find that dungeon as it saves me a bunch of work. I feel like VS is a very fuel-intensive game, so finding fuel also feels very good to me.

Useful behaviors aside from attack? - Flush - can command the wolf to hunt up game from thin air. If successful a rabbit or pheasant or even boar, maybe deer, appears nearby. - fetch - they'll go and grab items in areas the player doesn't want to go, going through 1-high openings so the player doesn't have to. - guard - They stay in place and attack animals or mobs that come close. Useful in guarding crops. - truffle - If truffles were ever a thing, the dog could got indicate an area in a certain radius where truffles are (if pigs became trainable they'd be much better at it, having a larger radius) - herd - Targets a group of animals. causes them to follow the wolf, who is presumably following the player. Obviously this is the reverse of how it should be, but for code purposes I would assume easier. I think a tamable wolf mob would be much better if it also included the ability to get specific breeds of dog. It could operate off a simple recessive gene scenario (with maybe 1 in 10 wolves carrying a breed gene), so the player has to do a bit of breeding to successfully get a recessive gene to manifest. It could have 'tech trees' of breeds, so wolves would only carry the genes for certain near-wolf breeds (husky, german shepherd, whatever) but those sub-breeds, once created, would have a chance to have a different sub-breed gene. Some breeds would be better at some tasks, and also better at swimming, or faster, or do more damage. Some would be better at nothing, just 'for the hell of it' breeds (bulldog, pug, chihuahua). I could see such breeds being very valuable on SMP servers, purely as prestige/rp mobs.

Well, when Tyron made VintageCraft (the minecraft mod) he made a specific construct that was the windmill hub. I'm assuming he'll do the same for Vintage Story. As for travelling rivers, ya, that'd be nice. But I think he'd probably need to change world generation a ton.

I think it's worth the $12.50 and that's what I voted for, though I can also see logic in trying to keep it low to attract more players. I think the game still has a ways to go to demand more than this. There's no armor system, no animal husbandry, crops are pretty unrewarding, biomes are patchwork. It looks at first glance like it's on par with TFC but it's really not there yet. I'd say once feature parity with TFC is reach maybe 15. Then beyond 20? I don't buy games hardly at all anymore though, so I don't exactly have a lot to compare with. At the same time, I wonder how broad the audience is? There's just started to be some lets-play videos, and its caused a spike in interest for sure. I'd hate to see most of the 'natural' player base buy it too early on the cheap. But maybe that base is much broader than I think...

They could be given as an absolute, followed by parenthetical relative values for a normal start(around Y113 absolute I think?) in a normal world. It would definitely be more user-friendly for most users.

Did your propick detect them Tony? In that erroneous previous version, they were generating in large quantity, but not being detected by the propick. Now the propick properly detects them (that is, their density map), but I wonder if they're spawning outside their ore map density locations, and at incorrect heights?

There was a version of the game where gold and silver were spawning all over the place, but I am almost certain that that was before the public server. Nevertheless, I just recently spent a ton of time mining an extensive quartz layer with gold and silver throughout, at around Y -40. So maybe that didn't get fixed the way Tyron wanted if they're only supposed to spawn below 100. And ya, the cass and other veins I've seen are more like what Milo mentioned. I think I did once find a tiny case vein of like 5 blocks, but mostly I think they're 40+ ores. The thing I've noticed about gold and silver is that yes, they spawn in relatively small clusters of something like 10-20 ores, but they can be fairly densely spaced within the quartz pocket. So once you find a quartz vein containing them, it's often not too hard to find more clusters in the same vein.

I can't help but wonder if, once we have weather, windmills will only run when the wind is blowing? Historically windmills were, I think, mostly used for pumping water. In Holland, those windmills were largely used to pump water out of the lowlands, back over the dikes. This is a function that can occur without a person having to be present, and that is what windmills are best suited for. Similar to how ranchers in the midwest used windmills to draw up water for their livestock - again, a process that does not need to be continuous, and does not need a person present. For any attended commercial activity (like grinding grain) windmills are not great, because you can only do your activity when the wind is blowing. That is not ideal for any commerce. Since pumping water is far less useful in VS though, I think, I can understand if wind intermittence were not implemented, so that windmills could be more useful. I would hope they would deliver less power than a water wheel though (assuming power is a factor in VS)

@heptagonrus That's what Tyron says, but in practice you can get results different from block to block. It's usually not a lot. .1 to .2 variance within a 'chunk' (I've been assuming chunks are 16x16 but I don't actually know). But I've seen much steeper dropoffs as well. I don't know if such a small variance makes any real difference in actually finding the ores. I've spent the last several versions experimenting, trying to figure out what works best. The weirdest part is, it seems like you can actually get a different reading at the surface, compared to exactly below it like 12 blocks. Which should not occur but I've seen multiple instances of it. It would be an excellent idea to discuss techniques and experiences and opinions on the mechanic. Finding ores is the core of the game, so I think this will make or break a lot of peoples' opinions on whether they want to get the game or not, and I think the devs will want to tune the system so it appeals to a lot of people, and not just mining masochists like me. @Stroam If you're exploring caves, narrowing in may or may not help, because caves can wander a lot and may leave the zone with your target ores. Nevertheless, I do usually survey at a cave opening if it looks promising, and will enter or not based on what shows up. I do feel like right now, all three bronzes have a rare component that makes them tough to complete. Cass, gold, and bismuth are all pretty rare, hitting 'high' density around 4%, or 1% for gold. I honestly think that since bismuth bronze takes two components, it would not be unreasonable to make bismuth similar in occurrence to sphalerite. I will say that I just spent the last couple irl days exploring an insane cave network that has occurences of cass, sphalerite, and bismuth all in the same network. That can occur. I think I've seen up to nine minerals in one propick result. Right now the game basically tests the player's tolerance for exploring and doing a lot of propicking. It really is about perseverance. It's interesting because a lot of people want an extended stone age, and we do have an extended copper age, in a way, so missed it by one age! If copper were as hard to find the player would spend a lot of time in the stone age. I'm assuming that maybe down the road, there might be more variety of loot in dungeon chests - perhaps the odd piece of bronze constituents - to alleviate the search somewhat. You can already find sphalerite and cass in ruin urns, iirc. But another problem with the ore situation is that geography can work heavily against you. When I was looking for iron in a SP game, I did a ton of searching within about a 1k radius of my base. I found about 4 iron zones, however, of those zone 1 was under a gigantic mountain range that made it impractical to find the center. Another was under a large ocean - which isn't the worst thing right now because the player does not drown. But down the road it'll be a non-starter I think. And then another zone topped out at around 5% iron near as I could tell, which is not great - even when you do find a zone, it seems like sometimes the max density center is not all that dense. Now add to these factors a presumed greater danger in caves down the road, and we might be increasing the difficulty yet further. So ya, I think people very much need to share their thoughts and experiences. I might also mention that there's been several suggestions for higher tech ore finding methods, up the tech tree. For instance a core drill that sample only a single block column, but tells you exactly what and where the ores actually occur. A little later, perhaps a larger version that actually makes 1 block shaft. I've suggested that compasses have a use mode where they will search the immediate vicinity of the player for magnetic ores, and point in their direction if present (iron cobalt and nickel). So eventually the player should have access to different methods.

I just wanted to suggest that if VS is to have water wheels at some point (and why wouldn't it?!) that the groundwork and some rules be laid in the form of rivers. You could add actual rivers to world gen, rather than just random water source blocks that go wherever. These rivers would follow a path through multiple chunks. And water wheels would function better inside a chunk that the world gen has flagged as a river. Or even if we don't want to be that restrictive, I think rivers would still be a nice thing to have.

Have you read the propick section of the Starter Guide of the wiki? As is mentioned in that explanation, the propick in VS does not detect actual ores present. VS generates ore density maps, at a 1 chunk resolution. It is these maps that the propick reads. You could clear all the ore out of a chunk and every chunk around it, and the propick would read the same, because the density map does not change. What you are detecting is effectively the *probability* of finding ore in a given area. The density maps have a center, and get less dense as you move away (from what i can tell) so it is possible to find the highest probability by surveying in different directions, and following the direction in which the permille increases. When exploring I generally propick exposed rock, rather than dig down below the dirt. In some areas (like swamps) that limits your opportunities. Currently you can also place raw stone blocks yourself, and then use those, but this is a known exploit and will be phased out (the game will distinguish natural blocks from player-placed). I generally consider every 100 blocks to be a good general survey. I think that gives you a good chance of catching most occurrences. But then once you find the occurrence of what you want, you have to do much closer surveys to find the center of the density. Once I've got a general fix on the center, I sometimes get as detailed as 5 blocks between survey points. But that's probably excessive.

Ya, those would also be good disadvantages. Maybe if there were locked loot chests, and you could pick the lock (but not in heavy armor) and if you simply break the chest you only get like, half the stuff inside. Ya, I agree there could be all kinds of disadvantages that don't depend on a speed nerf.

Well, depending on how the crafting works exactly, in theory the heavier armors could take dramatically more material and time. As long as they eventually wear out, it will add up over time, and be a possible deterrent. Speed reductions are possibly the worst penalty in a game like this. It doesn't take much to make a thing totally undesirable. The could implement a rule that you cannot sleep while wearing heavy armor. That's make it more an inconvenience. Possibly reduce the number of containers the player can carry, or limit the types. But inventory is another penalty one has to be very careful about.

bony soil is useless - I think it should be able to be combined with medium soil to produce rich soil (btw did you know there is rich soil? It's *extremely* rare, usually in swamps or jungles) Most crops are just food right now. No alcohol or cooking system yet. Flax produces both edible grain, and flax twine, which is used to make string, which is used to make bows and cloth. Cloth is used to make ore bombs (<--you want these!) and sacks (an incredible costly version of a backpack) as well as maybe a bed type? Basically flax is by far the most valuable crop in the game. You'll want as much of it as you can possible farm, because of ore bombs. Food crops are honestly not worth the effort because berry bushes are better in every way right now. But I'm sure this will change down the road.

Ya, if they catch you in a container or writing on a sign it's pretty much curtains. I was wrong on the rock throwing btw, it's control and right click, not shift. Another fun fact, you can place rocks back on the ground after you've picked them up. That one is probably shift-right-click. Can't do it with ores or flint though, sadly. You also can't throw ores and and flint as weapons.