Rezerkity

I agree that animals need a bit of work as it's fairly irritating they have infinite stamina and don't leave trails for tracking even when bleeding, it's a nice little mechanic that I feel would tie in decently to the game (and help me a lot when I lose animals in shrubbery.) And it would help players outrun and outlast bears and wolves, too. Humans are persistence predators and the game clearly takes a lot of inspiration from paleolithic living and survival after all. Bears and wolves being so aggressive could be alleviated a little by not having infinite stamina. Right now I mainly build 4 pits around my base and run to them when predators catch me before I can deal with them, it gives safety and lets me use traditional pitfall traps as a means for catching food too. Temporal monsters I'm not too fond of. They're fun and add an identity to the game, but are overall unrewarding and frustrating to deal with. The endless chip damage of drifters, not being able to go outside at night due to bowtorn you can't locate whilst being sniped by, temporal storms and sanity mechanics being undercooked and unrewarding. Though I think there's an important balance between realism and gameplay mechanics. A lot of realism is truly just tedium, like a thirst meter being just a second hunger bar really, or dying from nutrition just making the hunger side of the game even more dominating in your survival in a way that is irritating to micro-manage.

I'm not as interested in a combat rework as much as I am interested in the rework of mechanics surrounding it. I feel Vintage Story fails to inform the player about certain mechanics sufficiently, or fails to deliver these mechanics in ways that are fun and rewarding to engage with, as opposed to simply being friction points that detract from gameplay with little potential gain. Temporal Storms are unrewarding and frustrating as I've had multiple experiences with a strong enemy spawning right next to me, and oneshotting me in the second temporal storm of the year, and even if I struggle to kill things, I generally don't get more than perhaps a rusty gear, and a few bits of flax string. They interrupt whatever my plans were, punish me for straying from my base and going on excursions, and are unrewarding for the risk they carry. Temporal Storms just need a rework in general. I can live with having to trek back home when I'm warned of one incoming, you're given plenty of warning for that. But enemies spawning on top of me sucks, and even with the armour I can get on year one, it's not going to help when a Corrupt Drifter spawns in my house on top of me, and going outside means I face about 5 other enemies at once in the dark. Even surviving all this isn't particularly worthwhile due to the best case of loot being a couple of gears, and possibly a temporal gear if you're quite lucky (although it serves little purpose early on anyway). Sanity can designate a surface area as unstable very arbitrarily, which functions as a "hey this area is cursed and if you build here you'll lose sanity over time" but has no purpose - this area isn't any more rewarding than others due to the risk, it's just a random area selected to be uninhabitable. Sanity shouldn't make random patches of low sanity areas, it adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay, and is just an invisible punishment towards newer players learning the mechanics, and players who get bad luck with really pretty areas they want to settle in. Beyond that sanity is overall a feature without much content at all anyway. Damage tiers are explained as "low tier armour is less effective against high tier damage", and there's no mention ingame as far as I know of the fact that enemies can hit different part of your hitboxes. So if you have full Steel Plate armour on your chest and legs, a bear hitting you in the head will deal full damage and possibly kill you from near full health. This is such an important mechanic that isn't explained, and it makes Improvised Armour potentially not protect a new player at all, leaving them confused as to why their armour didn't even take damage when they got attacked. I feel that the guidebook could do a better job of explaining armour only protecting one part of you, whereas in virtually all other games, including ones in the same genre, armour tends to be a general 'take less damage' instead of a 'take less damage ONLY if hit here'. I know it makes sense if you think with real world logic, but this is a videogame.

I think it'd be nice if there was a world gen option for biome 'size' so to speak. But overall I like that things are spread out, it makes travel worth it, and it makes building forward bases and pathways worth it. The distance between resources adds purpose to the things you do in the game, as opposed to just being convenient and easy to get done. I do always turn story distance down to 25% though, because a multiple day hike for something that'll probably kill me isn't very fun.

The biggest part about progression is that at the start you can't do much. Restarting a world won't make your buildings better, since there's not exactly limited space. Perhaps instead of nuking your worlds due to unhappiness about your buildings, try using the resources you have access to and building away from your main base? You could even make little forward bases for travel, and connect them with paths. If it doesn't look pretty, then you can keep trying! My biggest advice is to look at real pictures of architecture you like the look of, and go into Creative mode to try and build them there. After that, you can experiment with block availability. Like what can be a cheap substitute for this block early on? I can't afford stone, so what if I use daub? If I can't gather those resources, maybe just packed dirt will even look similar? Building is very much a knowledge check about what blocks are available to you, and how you can place and position them to your liking. Chiselling also gives you such enormous variety and freedom. So, try sticking to one world, and experiment in creative mode, it helps a lot with the anxiety.

It's best to wait for a Stable release because the Unstable is, well, unstable! It's entirely possible a new unstable patch could completely delete world files for no reason. If you want to play Unstable, best practice is to learn how to backup your saves and do it regularly, and not to get too attached. Perhaps play in creative so you can enjoy messing around with the new features, then when Stable releases, you can play for real in survival. I really like exploring new blocks for building, myself.

Clothing as a whole is a very undercooked part of the game right now that I'd like to see expansion on too. I think it'd be easier to balance things if players realistically had more choices than grass clothing, fur/hide clothing, or more expensive story-specific things. I've survived multiple winters and never really needed more than some common sense and fur clothing. All I can think of beyond adding more, is giving more reason to use different clothing. Like grass clothes not working if you're wet, or furs also giving a tiny bit of armour, etc. I really hope we get a large expansion on this in the future, alongside weaving and rugmaking.

My favourite track is Daylight - it's always felt like the main theme of the game for me. It has the right mood to encapsulate how it feels coming out of your first winter, seeing everything thaw, and seeing all the animals returning. Especially after a temporal storm, it feels like fresh air.

I can confirm that on 1.22.0-rc2 I've found trader huts without traders inside of them, multiple times, on a world generated on this version specifically.