chk1

People have mentioned the rainbow colors, but if you look at it from a bit further away, it actually looks a bit closer to weathered copper or some other type of metal like that, at least to my eyes. None of the other lantern metals really come close to filling that role. But also, I think another reason is that bismuth is pretty common in worldgen, but also has next to no other uses (besides lanterns), once you get past the bronze age. Most of the other lantern metals require copper, which still has some other uses at least. This is perhaps obvious, but the low melting point also makes it cheaper and easier to smelt, since you don't even need any type of coal and it melts fast.

Although I also turn off storms, and am seriously considering turning off rifts, both for similar reasons as others have mentioned, I do not think the concept is entirely invalid. I actually remember finding it quite cool when it was first announced, it's just the current implementation that sucks. I think the crux of the issue is that this mechanic amounts to interrupting the player's "cozy homesteading time" at arbitrary times and forcing the player to participate in "eldritch horror fighting time", with little option in the way of preventing/postponing/ignoring it. Off the top of my head, I can't really think of any similar games that would do this kind of thing successfully, usually sandbox games like this give you decent wiggle room to engage with different gameplay loops on your own time, this aspect of it just seems like bad game design. If they just made it so that it is something that is triggered as a result of player action (eg. by interacting with some story structure underground, or it triggers when your stability has been low for too long, ...). This would give the player a degree of freedom to effectively customize their experience on the fly in an immersive way. People who really do not like the storms and rifts on principle could conceivably take actions to avoid them altogether, or at least mostly, without needing them to be turned off globally. It kinda reminds me of how people used to complain about the phantom implementation in minecraft - it interrupted their building time at certain intervals and forced them to participate in some activity, when they just wanted to build. As far as I know, this particular matter was effectively put to rest when the devs added an option to disable them, at which point most people stopped complaining about it actively and the devs never got around to improving the implementation after that - I'm hoping that history won't repeat itself here. All that said, there is definitely also room for improvement along other fronts here (as others have said), eg. the fact that they can spawn anywhere in storms, making any complex defence ineffective, or the fact that a large chunk of it is more of an annoyance than a challange, with minimal rewards etc.

I have also thought about this, since I've enjoyed this kind of weight-based system in other survival games in the past (I'm thinking of The Long Dark, specifically). I think the issue is that since VS is also a sandbox game, it would be hard to keep a system like this consistent. For example, I think it's pretty normal for most players to carry around a whole stack of dirt or planks or whatever (i.e. a superhuman weight to carry). These are probably the most reasonable ways to resolve that, that I could think of, at least: Things are made (somewhat) realistically heavy => player can only carry few blocks at a time => mining, building etc. are made much more difficult. I'm not sure if you could square this - it would completely upset the balance of the game and would require a big rework of other systems. Things are made heavy according to game balance rather than realism => Kinda ruins the immersion, since it draws attention to the inconsistencies. You would also (almost inevitably) have a situation where items suddenly gain/lose weight as they are crafted into different forms, further ruining immersion. In my opinion, it would be better to mostly keep the system as-is, but implement something like "fuzzy item slots". i.e. the same slot could store some set of similar items - right now, they only accept the exact same item. For example, buckets with the same type of liquid could now stack, even if they do not have the same amount of fluid in them - so 46L of water in buckets would no longer take up twice the space of 50L of water in buckets, and 4/5 of a pie would no longer take up twice the space of a whole pie. Regular stack limits would still apply for the sum of the numbers of items in the slot. I imagine it working a bit like the item bag in MC, where you can "scroll" within the slot to select a specific item, but this is a secondary issue. It could also be implemented as an actual bag (separate from the bags we have now), eg. you'd have a mushroom basket that would store 64 of any combination of mushroom types. I think this is a good idea independent of the thirst system, As I for one find it very annoying when (for example) a partially eaten pie slice suddenly becomes unstackable with the others. At the same time, any thirst system would likely be a pain without at least a partial implementation of something like this (see the bucket problem). Beyond that, I agree that thirst as a typical status bar would be hard to implement without making it a chore. Having fluids as (one of the) methods of temperature management, or delivering other status effects, seems more sensible. This might seem radical, but I wouldn't even mind adding a spoilage meter to water, to give some more utility to ales and other alcohol (this would also be in line with historical reality, if that matters). And with this, it goes without saying that getting potable water shouldn't be as easy as reaching into a lake. You shouldn't drink standing water, afterall. I will also say that I've been playing on a 50% ocean world lately, and aside from making it more fun overall (you can make proper use of the sailboat now), it makes freshwater much less of an afterthought, depending on where you decide to set up. Maybe something to keep in mind, since I'm guessing the devs will revamp the worldgen sooner or later to have more ocean by default.

Respectfully, you are the one who appears to be arguing in a pretty logically inconsistent manner, and even if I don't believe you entered this conversation in bad faith, I have to take issue with the whole "I don't need to explain why I'm right because I'm right" tone. You start off by implying that they somehow only care about this situation because they have it out for the particular person who was accused, or something to that effect. Sorry, but I can't see how this is anything but a strawman. How did you come the conclusion that they "care about the names"? Why make a point of this otherwise? Further, you framed this as a philosophical discussion, where you (by your own account) arrived to an opinion about this discussion from your base (utilitarian or similar) philosophical principles (i.e. "whether it benefits more people than it hurts"). However, you later clarify that "what the action is" is also one of your base principles, and it apparently implies that stealing is bad. You did say "illegal" instead of "bad", which is quite strange, since the accusation being made here is "spreading malware", which is also illegal pretty much everywhere. If this was your concern, why even bring up utilitarianism and all that other stuff? Why make suddenly conditional on an innocent person being negatively impacted? If we disregard that interpretation, from an outside perspective, "what the action is" is so vague in the way that you have defined it, to the point that it can seemingly mean literally anything depending on your actual underlying opinion of the matter. I.e. it seems like your utilitarian-like principle actually doesn't have much bearing on your decisions or opinions, since it can always be trumped by the earlier clause. At least that looks to have been the result for every example listed in this discussion. What other conclusion is anyone supposed to make here? The slippery slope fallacy doesn't really apply here. They're just taking your self-declared code of ethics and deriving possible moral decisions from it that match your criteria. This is literally the singular point of having a code of ethics. If you aren't willing to take the decisions that flow from it, you aren't really conforming to the code of ethics, are you now? Meanwhile, a slippery slope fallacy is when you use the fact that someone took a certain small decision to assert that they must also necessarily take some series of increasingly extreme decisions that are in a similar vein. An important distinction is that you are, in effect, assuming their code of ethics based on one decision, and using that to infer what further decisions they will make. In the first case, no one had to assume what your ethics were, since you told everyone your code of ethics (or at least, an outline of it), they just took it to its logical conclusion.