Yggdrasil Burnes

So in the Malefactor's Mask's description, it is said to be made out of "Whitewood" and that any discoloration would mean permanent exile. Now, I haven't touched any of the story content yet, so no spoilers if you can help it, but compared to Larch, Bald Cyprus, and Birch, none of them are the truly Chalk White color of the Mask. I was wondering if this implies that there is a "Whitewood" tree, and if such trees might, if only rarely, be available as lumber in the game down the road? "Real Whitewood" is white pine, a cheap softwood used for a bunch of stuff, and is more of the light beige color the background you are looking at is right now. The Malefactor's mask is almost true white. I think having such a pure white lumber would look pristine next to chalk stone.

IMO, Fishing is the early game meta IF you have a large enough body of water nearby AND IF you can rush cookware, but otherwise might be about as inconvenient as any other early food source. If I'm playing Hunter, or there just is not any large bodies of water nearby, I'll just make a 2x3 pit or make a hollow moat around a my farm plots and lure a bunch of meat into it before pelting them all at once with rocks when I'm hungry. Red Meat saves for 5 days in Temperate weather once cooked and has a solid 280 Satiety all by itself, so it's much higher bang for your buck than fishing as Hunter, even after you get cookware. (This is also a good way to get livestock set aside for when you want to properly corral them.) Anyone else, though, if you have a large lake or ocean, I would actually focus on fishing, even into mid-game, because tiny and small fish make excellent bait, a large fish normally makes 4 fillets, and those 4 fillets turned into Hefty Fish Meat Stew is almost as good as Hefty Red Meat Stew (1500 Satiety vs 1650 Satiety). If you don't have any livestock you want to cull, or just don't have a bazillion chicken eggs on hand, it's an excellent source of protein. With that said: Cooking whole fish, at least, the ones worth cooking (Medium-400, Large-700, Huge-900) takes a super long time to cook, and quite a lot of fuel, while filleting and cooking the fish slices individually will only net you 100 Satiety a piece- and sometimes not enough fillets to be equivalent to the fish's whole value- but seemingly cooks faster. You'll have to rush at least 1 cooking pot and one bowl from clay or ruins if you want to get the most out of fish, but if you know what you are doing and are lucky, a single pit kiln can happen day one, peat moss can get you there faster, and if you find enough surface Brown Coal can get you there by nighttime if you are really speed running civilization. Bushes are now a lot more awkward and more time reliant to cultivate, which I do not hate. They are the only forage that really benefits from Malefactor's yield bonus, but they are now much less easy to hoard at base early game. (Being able to cultivate them from cuttings, however, gives them a good shot at being mid game sources of food, or even just a great late game thematic additive to cooking. Once you start getting cuttings down, you can double your entire berry bush count every single year exponentially.) Mushrooms are still more often than not collected only 1 at a time and not much more nutritious than a single berry harvest, and I end up going through knives a lot trying to gather them. Grunting sticks are just much cheaper, especially in areas where hard stone for tools is rare, but if you are desperate or have the spare stones/flint, go nuts. They seem to grow all over forests and respawn naturally fairly regularly. If you're nearby woods, it can be good source of food. I don't know how long most mushrooms keep once cut, though. Additionally, you do not need to continue grunting the same block for the entire animation. Two grunts seems to be enough to coax worms out of the soil, and you can sometimes get 2 or 3 worms from the same block if you grunt it a second or third time. This makes early game bait harvesting super fast, though I wonder if that is intentional or an oversight. Edit: I forgot to mention that it's actually super easy to bait a fishing pole in your hotbar. You don't have to drag and craft it in the menu with your bait, you can pick up your stack of bait with left click in your inventory and just left click on the un-baited rod. This lets you get into a really good rhythm where you reel in a fish, quickly bait the rod again, and go back to fishing. If you bait the rod with juvenile fish or small fish, you'll end up like me hooking a whole Sheetfish every other reel in less than a minute each, but this could result in you overfishing a spot if it's not big enough to handle your insatiable gluttony.

If you up-gear it, it starts going like this- Inhaling Guy Cut.mp4

I actually do mean less valuable, considering every single piece of resin is currently worth trekking thousands of blocks for. It might be more useful, but this would put it more at the value of Cooper's Reeds.

I agree too, and I believe other posts have talked about this. I would love to have syrups as an alternative to honey, but I think the current concern is that Resin is sort of a high value, high rarity resource, when in reality is just isn't. I think the problem balance wise is that Resin doesn't have enough uses to justify having measurable quantities or being able to cultivate it, and it's important in Mechanical Energy, so I have a few thoughts. Taps could have their production be balanced by being attached to the temperature system and producing more resin, more efficiently, but getting to metal, especially Bronze, already produces a lot of Quality of Life additions, and the economic balance to that is simply having enough metal and wanting to spend it on anything but taps. Meanwhile, there's been times where I've only found a single leaky pine in thousands of blocks. I would also like to suggest a much more primitive tapping, which isn't tapping, but really just tying a bowl to the pine or placing one at the bottom and scraping off it's bark so it bleeds into it over time. This could be used as a much more primitive way to make Resin sources from your resin trees. Wikipedia has a few examples of what I'm talking about. Note how much of the bark they often have to strip to effectively produce resin, often going the entire length of the tree. This could be balanced a few ways. Not only would it probably eat through tool durability in the Stone Age, but you'd still need to get to clay to make bowls, which probably couldn't hold much at their size and still be incredibly slow to fill. Buckets would be a much more efficient container, but you'd need to get to a metal saw first, and I have thoughts on buckets too. I will say that being able to produce your own resin inherently makes it's rarity null and void, but my suggestion to that would be to make resin less valuable by giving it more uses and needing more of it as well to balance around the resource economy. I have a few concrete suggestions. Pine Sap is flammable, and would easily work as an alternative to Fat in making oil lamps, but would require a double boiler to safely liquefy, perhaps using both a crucible and cooking pot at the same time? I will also note that this would require some moss as perpetuating kindling, so a combination of Peat and Pine Sap would be necessary to properly make a Resin Lamp. They're value is in how they burn forever in-game, but this would make Fat less valuable for lighting. I will note that Pine Sap can NOT be used to seal things like crocks, as it hardens and would shatter the crock on unsealing, potentially contaminating the food with clay shards and toxic resin too, nor can it be used to preserve hides. This doesn't make Fat redundant, nor will the following suggestion. Pine Sap is an Antiseptic, and could be mixed with bees wax over a fire in a crucible or cooking pot to simulate a double boiler to create a salve, maybe for poultices, though I will note this would normally require an oil of some kind too to reduce thickness. (Incredibly Off Topic, but maybe salves could be another use for Fat, and to append to this, the Juice Press could theoretically be used to create oils by using them on theoretical Olives from Olive Fruit Trees for Olive Oil or Rapeseed Flowers for Canola Oil. You could also field the flowers as your beekeeping flowers, to acquire the wax and oil for the poultices in the same system like we do with Horsetail, but I admit I don't understand how flower cultivation works, or if it a thing in VS. I know plants like Horsetail sometimes just spawn while you're away. Such oils would also obviously have cooking uses, such as adding pure Satiety to an item via frying, perhaps through proper copper or iron Cookware.) Pine Resin is a great waterproofing agent, and I think could be added to the recipes for the many wooden roofs. There are alternative materials as it stands for roofing which already justifiably reduce moisture penetration, such as the Thatch, Sod, and Tiled roofs, but the wooden roof recipes as they stand wouldn't prevent moisture leaking, even if I think they look nice on my patios. Consider this for a detail for realism, and while you are at it, consider it for the recipe for Buckets as well. (I will mention on a related note that most barrels do not need resin, they get cut to shape, charred, and pinched closed for a seal.) I don't think there's any plans for a disease system, but it also has a good use as soap if sanitation is ever an issue, as do animal fat/oils and lye, but potash is not currently in the game or currently useful in game, and again, I don't think there are any plans for diseases. (Edit: Potash is actually in the game, but only as a fertilizer currently. It can be bought from traders or made with Sylvite and Water in a cooking pot. IRL, it can also be made by soaking plant and wood ashes in water for periods of time, and has multiple primitive uses itself.) TL;DR, I absolutely believe that even just letting us tap Pines currently would open up some alternative tech trees and allow you to give resin more uses than it currently has as a result of it's rarity, but that it should take a lot of effort and a lot of time to properly tap and extract resin, at least if doing so primitively.