Maethius

"No" is not really helpful, nor does it offer any insight as to your reasoning. Look at the situation from a marketing point of view; I didn't care if I got killed in a world I made specifically as a test for the devs to work on an issue. If this had been my first experience with the game, I would have just dropped $35 USD on a program, installed it, loaded it up, created my first world, created my first character, and then died 5 literal seconds after play began. That is an issue that occurs infrequently but should have a solution. This is especially true in that the game penalizes you with a 50% strike against your hunger bar when you respawn by default. Worse, what if that experience were on a hardcore world? As a new customer, that would probably have a decent chance of earning a flaming review and a demand for a refund... that's not just an unfortunate mechanic, that's bad marketing. Another potential solution would be have a default hostility timer upon player spawn so that no animals would initiate an attack against a player for 15, 30, or 60 seconds. That's enough time for the player to orient in the world and get some space from hostiles before the game really begins. A fourth possibility could be that any creature flagged as potentially hostile doesn't spawn within that time period.

I love the idea of a water pump or mechanical drain system! Perhaps this would be a good case to add rubber trees; to create seals or hoses for moving water?

Well, this last week I was asked by the devs to create a new world and test a few things out on my system, and I played the fastest game EVAR! I created a completely default new world, and the instant I appeared I died! Yes, I popped into existence and was pounced on by a pair of wolves from behind! "Ah, this is a lovely beach.... AAAAAAAAUGH!!!!!" So, I was thinking, perhaps the game can create a bubble of safety of some 50 to 100 blocks, at least for a short time. As a lore concept, depending on how exactly the Seraph were dropped into the world, maybe there could be a "starting ruin" where the player would pop in. Just a tiny thing on the surface with a few stones, perhaps. For a beginner, they could possibly opt for a start with a few essentials to get them going (but I wouldn't want to deprive any players of knapping their first knife!).

Yeah, I've actually started switching to creative mode before I save because after a few botched runs I can be logging into my world in the dead of night with a very high temporal instability event going on! That reminds me about posting another new topic about something that happened to me recently!

This would be VERY helpful. My world has some awful uplift problems; areas of shattered plateaus and canyons and mountains that rise from valley floor to build ceiling in under a dozen blocks! I don't mind the occasional environment obstacle, and they can form some gorgeous scenery, but they are entirely too consistent in my world... so frustrating when your elk is useless because he can't climb straight up all the time... or fly! I had to watch a couple of videos to understand how uplift works... I wish I had known the mechanic before I made my world. Now I am far too invested in this world to leave it and start over, but I wish I could change all future generation to ease up a bit... especially as the game expands in the direction of distant exploration.

I love the idea of the rusting Temporal Gear, as well an audio cues that don't take you out of the world. After all, if you wander around in the dark like an idiot (pointing to myself last night!) suddenly your gear spins like crazy, the "rift" tones sound, and things instantly distort because you were smart enough to back into a rift... all of those features, I should think, can be used as a storm approaches; the rift tone plays as a message is displayed and the gear begins to rust all at the same time. The volume of the tone could increase as the storm nears as the message ticks down how long to the storm and perhaps the message could indicate anything from, "It feels as though a light temporal storm is approaching," to "You feel a sickening terror chilling you to the bone; this storm will be apocalyptic!" I've always found it a difficult thing in games to indicate to a player what a character would sense as opposed to what they can actually see or hear.

Totally agree! One of the difficulties of creating any game is that one cannot please everyone all the time; some people love the survival/exploration of games like VS but they also want a combat engine or an RPG, which VS is clearly not! While I am fully aware that there are many mods to balance parts of the game, I also feel that there can be some base level tweaking of the core product. Besides, I've found that modding is a risky business as the github issue tracker indicates with a constant flow of reports for crashes, freezes, and compromised assets. Every machine is different, of course, but my VS (with about a dozen large and small mods) takes roughly 10 minutes to load and crashes at least once each play. I often have to reload the world 3 times to play it once... at the cost of losing 1-2 in game hours per attempt. The idea that it is unreasonable to expect a risk/reward model is... a unique take in the world of gaming; virtually any game. The entire point of the last VS update was to entice players to strike out vast distances and explore more of the world; for many of those players juicy pieces of lore that help build the ambiance of the game is plenty. I, personally, LOVE finding more about the lore, even if we never get definitive answers. Hell, in many ways I hope that we don't! VS isn't a game about finishing the story with a bang... not that I know of. It is about surviving in the world left behind, with glimpses into that world. However, the idea of traveling 25 kilometers through rugged terrain FEELS like it should carry three kinds or reward; 1) the experience of a new environment that stands apart from the rest of the world (the Archives did a great job of this!), 2) gaining unique insight to the lore of the world, (again, RA was fully designed to do this in spades! There was only one disappointment for me in that I expected to hear some bits and pieces using the Resonator, but it was still an excellent experience!) and 3) something unique to take home as either a memento for one's personal museum or something uniquely useful, even if it were short lived (a piece of armor that protects while maintaining a lesser impact on healing, hunger, aiming, and such... BUT which cannot be repaired or replaced). This is mostly a brain dump for me, but I am hoping some of the ideas can leak into the core game eventually.

I noticed a drastic drop in spawns lately, but didn't know if it was a bug or a feature. Maybe things simply don't spawn around my base like they used to? A few months ago I would hole up in my smithy, pop the door, and hack drifters until my health was dangerously low, "farming" them for flax and the rare gear or Temporal Gear. Recently, even during "heavy rift activity" I don't see almost any monsters unless I purposefully strike out into the dark forest. I've noticed a measurable drop in animal spawns as well: there are always plenty of rabbits, foxes, racoons, chickens, and fish, but my pig population has really dropped off, and rams and ewes have vanished completely. Ironically, there seem to be a decent measure of wolves, but there are many more bears than there used to be (I've had to dash through some pretty nasty forests to keep my elk alive from PAIRS of brown bears!) Is it just me?

I think there is a gamer expectation to experience some kind of higher reward for higher risk. Surviving a horde of enemies that give you enough flax to make a string isn't much incentive to fight the horde. Having to challenge a deadly foe like a nightmare-level drifter, bowtorn, or shiver shouldn't always drop something, but knowing there is a CHANCE of a rarer drop makes it feel worth the fight. I got swarmed in a Better Ruins location (the library is frickin' AMAZING work!) but walked out with flax. Now, the location provided excellent, useful and aesthetic loot that wall well within the exploration/survival/lore seeking theme of the game, but when you have to crush a pair of bell-head shivers amid a half-dozen corrupted and nightmare drifters and tanking a pair of bowtorns at the same time, it would be nice if something dropped... say... an electrum nugget.

Yes, I did search for this, but finding something specific on a search including "block" or "chiseled" kinda comes up with the whole game! SITUATION: I found a huge Better Ruins castle and couldn't help but start to renovate it (I must like pain!) A huge percentage of the blocks of this ruin are chiseled. In removing these blocks they break in their completed form, of course, but this results in HUNDREDS of different blocks gumming up my inventory (literally NINE blocks that, essentially, just look exactly like normal cobblestone stairs). At first I tried to sort them into chests for potential re-use, but I eventually got to the point where I just dig a pit and throw them in to allow them to despawn. While this gets rid of the piles of blocks I carve from the structure, it seems like a massive waste of resources, especially on a huge build like this. So... QUESTION: Is there a way to break chiseled blocks into just stones that I can then use to create cobblestone blocks with? Thanks, Seraphs!

I totally agree that VS is more about survival at first, but then it becomes much more about exploration... being far from home, away from your home resources, and having to to fend off not only Rust creatures but other deadly forces as well. The other day I was caught in a thicker forest and was jumped by a brown bear, and I'm glad I was carrying a triad of meteoric iron spears and had a mod to also carry a steel claymore. As it was, the bear took me down a quarter health through my steel chain armor but knocked my elk down to 10 points! Combat isn't the focus of the game, but you ignore the need for it at the expense of your (or your elk's!) life!

Totally agree. Even if you can obtain some metal scraps, metal parts, chunks of iron, or the like, that would be a great adjustment during storms.

Did the leap of almost death thing, too. I was able to use a stack of poultices on my elk to bring him back from 8hp to 20, and from there it was a matter of time.

Collect the spines and bind them with Bowtorn Sinew! I think it would make a great mid to late game weapon. Perhaps make a version with Spring Steel and Steel Bowtorn Arrows as the holy grail of projectile weapons... extremely effective but requires a LOT of work to build and maintain your projectiles.

I'm not sure if this was a mod thing (Better Ruins) or if this is a functionality in the game already, but is there a way to turn on or re-ignite gas lamps? I was in the underground library from Better Ruins which is full of different kinds of lamps, and I'm sure I managed to turn a few back on (even after trying all of them that I found). Are there some that are simply not ruined that can be reactivated? As a suggestion; you should definitely be able to build, fix, or use gas lamps!

You know, those suckers are annoying but, for me, they are a welcome addition to the game. One thing that I do wish that would be updated would be a more unique loot table for them. Because they create and loose spines at you (which I wish I could harvest, but I totally get why you can't make a bowtorn farm!) I think it would be a good idea to add the ability to randomly collect a spine from the bowtorn that can be used to make a "bowtorn arrow", combining the spine, an arrowhead, and feathers. The advantage would be an arrow that delivers 20% higher accuracy and damage compared to its counterpart (not 20% overall, but a "tin-bronze bowtorn arrow" would deliver a 20% improvement over a standard tin-bronze arrow). Bowtorn Sinew could likewise be added to a bow to improve accuracy and range. Considering how long it would take to randomly collect enough spines and sinew to improve your archery game, I think that a substantial improvement would be worth the price.

So we all know by now (in our frustration) that we can amass steel bits and do nothing with them. They can't be smelted, they can't be bloomed, and they can't be smithed. BUT!!! What if we could sorta smith them? Here's what I was thinking. If you can heat steel enough to smith it, perhaps you could heat a pile of 20 bits into a "bloom" and reshape them into an ingot. OR... ... make rivets out of them! Or nails, and have an option to smith strips separately, then combine 4 strip with 10 nails to produce 1 "nails and strips." Either that or just make it so we can bloom steel, or place piles of 20 bits in place of 1 iron ingot in the refractory furnace. There's gotta be a balanced way to re-use the hardest to obtain material in the game! Currently I have a pile of 100 steel bits in my smithy, and that's enough (in ingots) to finish my suit of steel chain mail armor... that's a real shame to just throw away.

I believe this issue raises its ugly head with primarily with mods (BetterRuins, at least!) but I think I have run into some vanilla ruins that are partially underwater inside. I know I've run into sunken ruins in a lake many times. My question is, is there a way to drain an area of water? As far as I can tell, the nearest answer is to destroy every block to the walls and fill in an entire area with sand or another solid block, which removes the water and then opens up the space once the temporary block is removed. While this works with some locations, it isn't helpful if you are attempting to un-submerge a basement with water 3+ blocks deep. It also won't work with chiseled walls and the like, and it forces you to destroy every decorative block in the area. Is there a system in the works to remove water in any quantities?

Well, I finally dug up about 8 stacks of titanium ore, tossed it in my steel-capped pulverizer... and it kicked out a stack of 24 titanium ore chunks and the rest of the or vanished into thin air. I was at my base the whole time... I know people have had disappearances of product when they are distant (I never have. Last week I dropped a dozen stacks of bauxite, went walkabout, came back and they were all crushed). Any notion what is going on?

Thanks for the replies. I was just playing to see if I noticed any differences far from my base. All mobs seem to spawn and function correctly far away (like 6000 blocks) from foxes to swimming bunnies to surface drifters in caves. I haven't been back to my ilmenite cave yet, since my first steel is at about 93% and I want a steel pickaxe to make the trip worth it! The odd thing about my spinny gear is that it was just fine in the same chunk closer to the surface, but I know it can get bad further down (learned that lesson in my iron mine). Oh, I found the titanium ore! It was only about 30 blocks from the surface, and there's a lot of it!

One thing that threw me upon entering the age of steel was Ilmenite. I could see it was used in refractory bricks, and less than 100 blocks from my base were two caves that prospected as having "More Ilmenite than Boeing." Okay, that's a little tongue in cheek; the highest quantity you can find in the game. When looking for ilmenite, though, you won't find it as an ore; you find titanium. Thing is, this is the opposite of how it works in the real world; you look for ilmenite ore and then you refine it to extract titanium oxide and refine that to produce titanium for alloys. What's the difference? First, without the need to dig into wikis, the refractory brick ingredient should be titanium, sourced through ilmenite. But more importantly to the game's mechanics, you shouldn't require steel to acquire the ore; you are not breaking titanium to acquire ilmenite, you are breaking stone to obtain the ore; you would then require steel to pound/process THAT to get titanium, which would be used in refractory bricks. Since titanium currently isn't used in the game to make weapons and armor (which would be amazing but would require an amazing blast furnace and lathe as well!) it could be used as a late-game replacement for the quern; a machine with grinding plates using titanium oxide that could turn ANYTHING in the game into a powder. Diamonds could be used in a similar fashion. Just a thought or two.

These happened after 1.20.4 dropped, but I'm pretty sure I recall them I can recall happened before then: 1) Insta-dark! I've read someone else running into this, where you descend into a cave and suddenly it becomes so dark you can't see your own light sources around you. Happened to me today, but in a cave I had been searching for ilmenite in for some time. It didn't happen my first two forays into the cave, even when I hit bedrock. This last time it was so dark I would set a torch and it didn't even really matter... and it was a little before noon in the world above. Along with this one... 2) Temporal meter going nuts! Now, I've been in this cave before... and it is 50 blocks from my base. It reads has having Ultra High ilmenite (meaning I haven't find a damn thing) but every time I've been in there the reading has been pretty much neutral. I know the deeper you go the faster your gear declines, but it just seems like something was making it spin much faster than prior explores of the same cave today. 3) Negative surface contacts, cap'n! I really noticed this a few days ago but thought it was a calm night, so no monsters. Then I started paying attention; I do a lot of my smithing at night, and I'm used to popping the door open to put the smack down on some drifters to get a drop or two. This time I was watching the temporal activity: medium, heavy, apocalyptic... NOTHING. No monsters spawning at all... bears, wolves, boars, bunnies... sure... but not a single monster. This has gone on for almost two in game weeks at this point. Happy exploring! (Oh, and if anyone knows how to actually LOCATE ilmenite, that would be great... apparently my base is built on top of a mountain of it!)

I found one, too! I think its supposed to randomly become something else.

I love building castles and estates (well, I have a lot to learn about mansion construction), but in VS something is always missing that was commonplace when I built them in MC... they feel cold and dark. I've tried to simulate large, warm fireplaces with torches and oil lamps, but using camp fires is no good because... well... they burn out so fast and consume huge amounts of fuel. I thought this could be an excellent solution: the Hearth Block. On one hand, I wanted something that was more aesthetic than functional, but on the other hand, VS is also all about function. This block would strike a balance between the two: Aesthetics: The Hearth Block would add a feeling of warmth to a build with animating flames and particles. It could be made to fill larger spaces for larger builds; adjacent Hearth Blocks could blend together just like fences and roof blocks. Function: It would seriously bump up both warmth for larger spaces but also provide light like a lantern or chandelier. I would suggest the Hearth uses a single log for fuel (any kind) with a prolonged burn time; say, up to 8 hours. I know that there are different burn times for different logs, but as an aesthetic aspect, the use of fuel should be prolonged. Chained Hearths would require the player to drop additional logs at a time (3 hearths require dropping a stack of 3 logs), and the burn time will remain 8 hours regardless of how many Hearths are linked. What do you think?

One things I've always found odd about resource games like Vintage Story is that there are resource carrying rules that can seem arbitrary. I can understand some limitations: - You can't stack shovels because each can have variations of durability - You can't stack temporal gears due to lore reasons But there are some limits that don't really make mechanical sense in the game. Especially in lieu of The Journey update, there are other limits that I found to be very restrictive when gathering the loot from locations 25,000 blocks away: - Why can I carry 64 cubic meters of granite in one slot but... - only 16 oak logs? Or only... - 32 pieces of firewood? - only 8 empty bowls or... - only 8 oil lamps, as opposed to 30+ torches? Now, with much longer journeys and so much more to discover, (and with the Better Ruins mod, some INCREDIBLE ruins to fix up!) It would certainly be handy to raise the stack limits to 64 across the board where possible. After all, encumbrance logic really is out the window on games like VS, even if the survival experience is more highly honed.