cjameshuff

I settle in open plains. In my latest game, several in-game years have gone by with no bears in the immediate vicinity, and a pair of wolves the first year are all I've seen of them in this area, though I get lots of pigs and mouflon sheep. Useful, because in my previous world fat was a post-steel tier material, rarer than gold. Now I have plenty... In my previous world I came across an area where you could not find a location that wasn't within sight of multiple groups of wolves, so their population density seems to be quite variable, and maybe you just need to move...

Why would you even try, though? It's entirely reasonable that you could find some without a map, and they don't contain anything game-breaking, or the maps wouldn't be sold for a couple handfuls of gears...my first one contained a granite spear, the highest-value treasure I've found so far is a resonator. The worst that can happen is that you buy a map to one that's been dug up, and you can fix that by only selling maps to chests that haven't been touched.

I just had an encounter yesterday...a brown bear, a black bear, a wolf, and a bowtorn all going after me while paying no attention to each other. It stuck out as both very unfair and unrealistic. The fact that bears largely aren't a hazard when poking your head into various surface caves has always seemed odd to me. Burrows and dens for raccoons, foxes, wolves, and bears would be an improvement, and would interact nicely with trapping, giving you a location you know the animal will return to. Also, chickens prefer to roost in a protected location off the ground...perhaps they could seek out branchy leaf blocks to roost on for protection against foxes and raccoons at night.

It's not a mod. The maps lead to them, and they exist before the map is purchased. Sometimes they're even exposed at the surface, I've found a couple without maps. Dynamically generating the chests could potentially wreck something already built there. I don't know if anything's done to prevent generating a map that points to something that's already been dug up, but at least that couldn't break anything.

I do think hiding the stacks might be a good idea in some places. Basically, things that are identical (like stacks of stone) would all collapse together, but would take as much inventory space, determined by their max stack size. No change to the actual capacity, just in presentation, maybe even something you could toggle on and off (since I do sometimes care about setting aside stacks of items for specific uses, and it could be unclear what's using up all your inventory space if you're carrying a bunch of temporal gears or something). With the stacks displaying as merged, you could transfer all your stone to a trunk with a single action, and it would make it a lot easier to take inventory or find the needle in the haystack when you have a trunk with a lot of one or two item and a few other stacks.

I've wondered about possible approaches for cold working, work hardening, and annealing for cuprous alloys and silver. Perhaps use something similar to the temperature mechanic, but which builds with each hammer strike until the workpiece gets hard enough that hammer strikes start failing to move voxels, then anneal to return the piece to a soft state. I don't think it'd be overly complicated compared to the unrealistic hot-working that is the current state, and might give some reason to keep a stock of plates, rods, etc instead of working everything from ingots every time. Maybe add a peening hammer with similar effects to the grindstone. A couple other oddities with nonferrous metals: solder is very easy to cold work and can also easily be dribbled into sticks on a flat surface, so the idea of taking a saw to some ingots to make sticks is rather silly. And bismuth is very brittle...you just cast it to shape. And back to ferrous alloys: we have wrought iron, we have steel, but we don't have cast iron?

Like the painterly, organic look of the original and the clockpunk/rust aspects of the new one. New one's a bit too bright, cartoony, and stereotypical of a block game.

I had an accident that somehow burned down half my smithing workshop. A combination of misclicks and full inventory resulted in me accidentally throwing a bunch of lit torches onto a firepit I was trying to ignite. I decided I'd pick them up after I got the thing ignited and kept trying, then started taking damage as the nearby chests started spawning fire particles. I'm still not sure exactly how it happened, I've been unable to deliberately reproduce it...I now wonder if it was related to that "igniting non-flammable objects" issue.

The fact that buckets stack to 5 is a constant annoyance for me. To turn a stack of 64 flour into dough I need 7 buckets of water, meaning either going back to refill two or holding two stacks of buckets, and then I have to dump the excess. More than once I've accidentally created water sources by messing this up somehow. Similarly, while cooking up some potash, I found it most efficient to fill a stack of 5 buckets, plus one additional bucket, so I had a multiple of six liters total, but this meant juggling two stacks of water buckets. If buckets just stacked to 8 (and if dough took a ratio of 8 flour to 10 L water instead of 1:1) this would be significantly less annoying. Also, crushing chunks with the pulverizer gives more material than crushing nuggets produced with a hammer (ilmenite, for example). However, crushing some things with the pulverizer gives you a useless product (iron ore, IIRC). Easy to get wrong and wind up accidentally destroying material.

How often do you actually do that, though? You can't cook a meal big enough for more than a tiny fraction of a stack of fuel. Most often I just throw a brick or a few bricks of peat in. The only other thing that comes to mind is calcining flint, and I only do that to get enough fire clay to build my first bloomery. I have wished for a bloomery recipe for quicklime...

That and building the coffin for a cementation furnace only use a minuscule amount of borax though, and both of these uses are inherently gated behind iron, so gating the borax behind bronze doesn't actually change anything but its application to tanning and its use as a white dye. And in my current world I have a lot more easily accessible borax than I do limestone. That's more an issue with lack of trades or other things to use it on, and applies to a bunch of much more elaborate things. How often do you really need to use a beehive kiln after getting the pottery you need?

Some recipes leave the pot in the output slot, full of food. When emptied, it remains in the output slot, and I constantly find myself failing to shift-click items into it because I forgot to move it back to the input. It would be really convenient if it moved back to the input when emptied. A bigger issue: I very often find shift-clicking sends things to undesired locations. I have unintentionally burned numerous candles, pieces of fat, and torches due to them being sent to the fuel slot. If the firepit is hot, this immediately destroys one item, and it can burn a whole stack if it isn't noticed. Similarly, if multiple firepits are open, I expect shift-clicking something in the pot to send it back to the inventory, as it does when only one firepit is open. However, it instead sends items to one of the other firepits, which can interrupt a cooking cycle in progress and cause wasted fuel and time. I also often end up filling the ingredient slots with torches when trying to move them to my hotbar to light the fire...I'll have put fuel in the fuel slot, and the ingredient slots seem to come next in precedence. In summary: Taking the last food from a pot should reset it for cooking the next meal. Shift-clicking on an item in a cooking pot should send it to either my inventory or my hotbar (or to a chest or other container), not to another pot. The fuel slot should never be the destination of a shift-click...you're basically always going to be adding a measured amount of fuel, not a full stack. Lit torches aren't cooking ingredients and shouldn't be sent to pots at all. Possibly distribute items breadth-first instead of depth-first: instead of a stack of ingredients filling one pot and leaving the other empty, spread it between them. This would make it easier to transfer pre-measured stacks to multiple pots. It would be a break from how containers such as chests operate, but perhaps they shouldn't be expected to operate the same way, as pots are for immediate use, not storage.

Sylvite is simply potassium chloride. It is unaffected by boiling, and is used as a no-sodium salt substitute, so it is a bit odd that it fouls cooking pots. While sylvite is a form of potash (a catch-all term for soluble potassium salts), it historically refers to salts extracted by soaking ashes in a pot. This is a useful alkali for soap making in addition to fertilizer. Borax is a soft evaporite mineral, which makes it odd for it to require a higher tier pickaxe than limestone. This also gates leather behind bronze pickaxes if, but only if you're in an area without limestone, which seems...unlikely to be intentional? Black coal would realistically not work well for blasting powder. In reality, black powder uses charcoal, and works as well as it does largely due to the sulfur and saltpeter being incorporated into the pores of the charcoal. Lime water is made from quicklime/slaked lime, not lime (calcium carbonate), which is practically insoluble. Limewater is also used in food preparation: nixtamalization of maize, for example. Quicklime is rather inefficient to produce in a firepit, a bloomery recipe would be nice. Soil chemistry: lime (as in ground limestone) is often added to soil to raise the pH of acidic soil. Peat is often used to add organic material to soil, but tends to make the soil acidic. This could be a route for upgrading soil. pH in general could be another dimension to soil fertility, with peat or sulfur lowering it and lime raising it, and different crops favoring specific ranges. The sulfuric acid recipe uses realistic ingredients, but you couldn't just cook them in a pot. Perhaps add a lead-lined version of the still to produce it from steam and burning sulfur/saltpetre.

My first world, fat was more precious than gold. My luck was so bad I didn't even realize raccoons and foxes dropped fat for multiple in-game years and had given up on trying to hunt them as a waste of time once I was breeding hares (which provide pelts and meat but no fat), and there simply wasn't much bigger game around. I eventually got a herd of goats, but fat was a post-steel-tier material for me. My main source of light was lanterns built from the few candles I got out of bony soil. My second world, there's pigs everywhere and it was trivial to get them into a pit and then into a fenced enclosure to breed, bighorn sheep keep wandering through and I've got a herd of those going. Pigs breed fast and are a quick way of getting fat and medium hides.

I made a meteoric iron falx my latest time through, but other than that just used iron tools until switching to steel, and just upgraded from gambeson armor to steel chain. The problem with meteoric iron is it for some reason requires an iron anvil, which means you have to have already started using iron and makes very little sense, considering historically it was the first iron humans could work. In VS, it's not a head start, it's a bonus you can't start using until you're mostly to the point of making it obsolete apart from decoration. I get that it's supposed to be a slightly higher tier material, but it should just be a better quality iron that needs less processing, not a material that's somehow more difficult to work. Meanwhile, the labor and materials that go into copper/bronze armor doesn't really seem worthwhile to me when you could instead work on producing steel.

There are no durability benefits for nails/strips, lanterns, etc, which can consume considerable quantities of metal. Meanwhile, I'm clear-cutting distant forests because my tree farm is regrowing and I need more charcoal for my third cementation furnace run. And I don't think I've started a single mine for tin, zinc, or bismuth in my current world, I've come across plenty in looking for ilmenite and olivine for more durable cementation furnace, chromite for my inventory upgrade, and yes, the iron...I ran into both sphalerite and cassiterite while mining iron. (And enough lead that I'm looking at making stuff out of molybdochalkos, despite not being in an area with especially high occurrence of it.) Are you just digging based on the probability reading and hoping to run into the ore? If so, use the node function and you'll find a lot more. I dig down 9 blocks, prospect the tenth, and mark that level for later exploratory probes out to the furthest digging distance in each cardinal direction if I don't find anything interesting in the main hole.

Scholars? With the skill to decipher books/maps/blueprints that other classes can't read, and preexisting map markers representing knowledge from their studies...places where there used to be mines, settlements, etc.

Bronze takes a lot less labor to produce than iron, and given the labor involved in iron I don't like to waste it on anything once I have a cementation furnace to turn it into steel, and even when you have the ingots, bronze has much lower temperature requirements for working. Building and firing bloomeries, processing blooms, running the ingots through a cementation furnace, then processing the blister iron, just to turn two ingots into a plate for a single small lantern is excessive. Yes, you can also make things like lanterns and other hardware with copper, but by the time you are making steel you probably have or can easily get decent amounts of zinc, tin, and bismuth to extend the copper. Also, the traders only take bronze tools/lanterns for trade. So while I go straight from gambeson to steel chainmail armor and only use bronze tools for a short time (and only iron until I can make refractory bricks), bronze is still useful.

Aside from the predator issue, you will want to set up a lightning rod. I had my first chickens and rabbits in simple pits which worked fine until there was a big storm that turned most of them into charred corpses... Also, replace soil with packed dirt or something to prevent predators from spawning in a fenced area.

Bone in general seems underused. Bizarrely, you can make a slightly better stone knife with a bone handle, but you can't make a metal-bladed knife with one at all. Not sure how that's supposed to work.

There's also stunted/immature plants that can grow once you've removed others, germinating seeds, etc. They aren't growing there initially because someone planted a root there, they're growing there because it's a good environment for them to grow in. Expecting them to stop growing there because you dug some of them up is not reasonable.

...no, it doesn't. A deer that's been hacked half to death or had a bunch of spears shoved through it is going to be slowed down by its injuries. You don't need to implement some fine-grained damage model to simulate this.

Adrenaline can't do anything about a severed tendon. The reality is that injured prey will often turn to try to fight or collapse in exhaustion rather than continue trying to flee, and predators strongly prioritize visibly injured or sick prey because they are easier and less risky targets.

The only really bothersome bugs I know of are issues with putting some tools in the forge for quenching/tempering, and buckets sometimes disappearing when you're handling more than one. The former means you can't further upgrade some tools, the latter is annoying enough that I've been making sure to put filled milk buckets down so I'm only ever handling one at a time.

You can sweep a scythe and harvest half a dozen blocks giving multiple vegetables each, or you can spend about the same time to dig up a single root with a shovel. It'd be far more work to try to live off cattail roots. And they give reeds, which you don't have a use for in the quantities you'd be getting if you were using the roots as your main food source. A player could rely exclusively on cattails, but I doubt many would choose to do so, and see no reason to stop it. You could also live off pig fat. It might not be what was intended, but doesn't give an advantage that exceeds its drawbacks.