Ratbatboo

I would've been far more inclined to enter into a dialog with you if you hadn't used an unnecessary and offensive ad hominem attacks of this type. Other people have already said most of what I'd add to you specifically in any case. A few of your ideas have merit, but most of them are predicated on an assumption about 'what the game should be' that I don't see evidence of. Not every game should be Pokemon or PalWorld. There's a rich diversity of other things out there, and trying to take those two as models is missing the point that a large part of the market craves something that's niche and isn't 'for everyone,' but instead fits what they want. In every such case, there will be some percentage of players who play, mod extensively, and complain that it's not quite what they want...Even though it's close enough for them to spend time on and write essays about. I would disagree emphatically here. Some of the best games out there are those where the player realizes that their choices matter, and that no matter what choice they make, the outcome won't be good for all involved and sacrifices will have to be made. And most of us are well aware of the opposite end, the so-called 'railroad' where all choices are false ones which lead you to the same conclusion regardless, just with slightly different dialog boxes. Now, perhaps you enjoy such railroad games, but your own enjoyment is far from a universal enjoyment by all. ========================= The majority of the rest of these really do come down to 'this doesn't play the way I think it should,' with the example of taking extreme mobility-limiting equipment into a high-mobility requirement dungeon being exemplary. It's clear that not everyone is happy with the way the storms work. The devs would have to be well aware of that, given how frequent complaints about it are. I will agree that they can be frightening for a new player on their initial playthrough (personally, like one of the other commenters, I found that fear exhilirating). If I was going to suggest anything, I'd suggest that perhaps the area around the starting zone perhaps have the remnants of some decaying ruin whose toppling due to erosion marks the beginning of the player's adventure...As it sets off a timer for when the bubble of peace it was generating would fade. Have the floating rifts and the advent of the storm be hallmarks of 'Now you're in the world as everyone else has experienced it.' This satisfies the desire some players are expressing for 'less punishing at the beginning' while still maintaining the story that these rifts and storms destroyed prior civilization and have prevented new civilization from forming. Set it as a big, obvious toggle during world creation.

I suppose! But honestly, grass is everywhere? I'm in the middle of an immense plain surrounded by cliffs on one side and forest on the other, and by 'immense' I mean it's an all-day venture to get to the forest, and another day back, so I've built little 'hunting lodges' here and there on the periphery of the plain for overnighting, so perhaps I just have immense grass resources making up for the earlier sparseness of clay.

Oh! I see the rest of the square now, it wasn't that distinct in the uncompressed image on my screen. XD

Seriously, any idea what this is to the left of my crosshairs? I haven't seen it before (admittedly, I seem to have settled in prehistoric Seattle, rain-wise), and it seems to be moving slowly. I haven't read anything about it, or is that a will-o-wisp? Swamp gas? The light from Venus reflecting off of a weather balloon?

Looking good! I've just discovered the wonders of mud brick so I'm pretty mine up a bit, but I'm about as far along as yours looks, overall...Minimum crockery, some torches, a campfire, and slabbed slit-windows.

That's looking downright cozy.

So, rather than start a new topic, I've decided to expand a bit on this one. The clay struggle is VERY real. I've been trying to find a nice seed for my wife and I to poke out, because our first seed was clayless, low on early berry bushes and the like, and just turned into a real nightmare struggle with trying to share resources between two players. I have tried eleven different randomized seeds now all with 'normal' rainfall, and perhaps my luck is just awful, but it's very frustrating to invest an hour or so in a seed trying to get reeds and tools and stay alive with berries-not-bears (that should totally be a mod name) only to learn that there's no clay anywhere in your vicinity. And by 'in your vicinity' I mean several thousand blocks. How do I know? Because I became frustrated enough at this to load up a mod which gave a particle effect for clay (among other things) and went into creative mode and just flew back and forth executing a simple search pattern once I'd established the distance at which I could see the particles. I found more meteoric iron than I would've expected, but only three of those seeds had clay anywhere within a few thousand blocks of spawn, and I mostly spotted it in hillsides. REDACTED, please see last paragraph. Given what a bottleneck clay is, that's problematic...And the fact that a new player might invest those hours into a seed without realizing their dilemma repeatedly is no bueno. I came to this game via That Other Game, and one of my favorite things several years ago was a mod called TerraFirmaCraft. Sound familiar? Yep. So I know how a lot of this stuff works. Many of the changes are absolutely breathtaking: the new voxel minigames for knapping and 3d clayforming in particular are certainly delightful upgrades, but I guess what I'm saying is that I'm quite familiar with a lot of the concepts behind Vintage Story, and this isn't exactly my first rodeo. The red clay in this game uses a very distinctive and not that dissimilar (other than color) texture to what I remember, and I'm 99% certain that the blue clay is exactly the texture from TFC. TFC had one thing I don't see here that was an absolute lifesaver. It had types of flowers that very specifically grew only over clay deposits. Pillar up. No yellow flowers? Have a think about whether you want to continue. I would like to suggest that the game (or an enterprising modder) reinstate those flowers, AND add a check for surface clay within a given distance of spawn (heck, maybe put it on a slider so newbies could go down to 100 blocks and the more daring could kick it up to 1000). If that check failed, either roll a new seed, or (if the seed was provided by the player) inform the player that the resulting world will not have easily accessible clay within 1000 blocks of the start, and did they wish to choose a new seed or continue? Just my two palan. EDIT: You know EXACTLY what happened right after I posted this. EXACTLY. Except not quite in the expected way. I was doing one last fly-over of an island and noted that on the map there was a very faintly off-color patch, so I dove down and checked it. Clay. On flat soil with no sides of blocks visible. Amazing. NO PARTICLES. Oops. So Particles Plus is performing just fine on cracked urns, meteoric iron, Pretay soil, and resinous trees but apparently not so much on clay. Odd. I don't remember seeing particles on the clay in the three seeds where I did find it, but those were cliffsides and I may've just assumed the particles were hidden. Which means that any or all of the seeds whose maps I extensively gridded over the course of the last several hours might've had clay, too. I can no longer make my plaint from the same foundation of data (limited though it was in any case) but I do believe that having better clay indicators and a 'No clay is nearby, do you wish to continue?' helper would save future players some frustration.

I very much appreciate everyone putting in the effort here, and hopefully it will be useful to other players with similar concerns. In the end, we tried (just to see if it would work and have low enough latency to be fun) Hamachi, and turns out that is a very good solution for us. Thank you all again!

Oh, there's a golden truth of hosting games on the internet. Never allow open logins. I'll poke around and see what I can learn about it. Thanks for all of your help!

Thank you! I've played TFC in the past, so a lot of this feels familiar, but OH MY GOSH when darkness fell and I was just huddled up with a spear with my back to the fire. This game has some vibes, it truly does. Is that a fairly normal server setting or something that would require a fair bit of tweaking/knowledge to achieve? Thanks!

Related question: My fiancee and I are looking to play on a server with just the two of us, and since we're currently not living in the same state (woe!) we'll be using a hosted server from the list. Is it reasonable/possible to manually start/stop the server just when we want to play together on most hosting services? Would this be complicated for someone who was a unix admin two decades ago? XD Frankly, it looks like most of them have web-front UI systems now, so my rusty command line skills shouldn't matter. Thanks!