DarkGold

Would love to see any posts if you do! The only other figurehead I saw shared when I took a brief look was from a player who discovered they could use a gnome they had chiselled as a figurehead

I think I'd probably really like rivers for interior navigation too. I really like to sail around on my sailboat. I've only played on one world (I'm the kind of player to invest a lot of time into 1 world), and I happened to spawn in the middle of a big ocean (roughly 5.5k x 7k blocks), so I've not actually done a large amount of travel that isn't walking distance from the coast. Having such a large coast to explore, only story locations have taken me very far inland, because I've found everything else less than a day's walk from the coast. I've really enjoyed the convenience of that, so more routes inland by boat would be lovely.

I'm pretty happy with the base game; there's not too many things I find myself wanting to modify as I play (and I'm doing a vanilla run at the moment). Some things I've previously posted that I'd be eager to see added to the game that sit at the top of my list: The ability to invest in Trader infrastructure, so the player could earn the ability to view Trader information remotely (I like to trade a lot, this makes the trade experience better). A tool like a spyglass that lets me zoom in on distant things, and tells me what animal or butterfly I am looking at from a distance. If this was a game that magically appeared in my lap without context, I'd eventually discover that the story did not continue after chapter 2, and I'd want to add more chapters to the story. I like to pursue the story type goals set out in the game (gradually uncover answers to the mysteries of the world, conquer challenges set out by the game, rather than purely setting my own build challenges), so more of that would be good. I'd like some more overland travel inventory; I really like the additional inventory on the sailboat. I see people sometimes use cart mods, but I like being able to travel off the beaten path, so I'd personally probably like a beast of burden that could be tied to a mount or other beasts of burden, to form a caravan train. Some birds beyond chickens. Ducks, cranes, gulls, ravens, puffins, more. Given there are 13 types of deer in the game, 10+ different types of bird would fit in easily enough. Different sights and calls depending on the locale. There's some stuff I've previously mentioned wanting to change (rather than complete new additions to the game): Changes to the way Jonas Parts work (to make it easier to pursue building specific machines). Changes to the way Base Return Teleporters work (so that they are useful in a few additional scenarios). Changes to the Rift Ward to create spaces of temporal stability/spaces safe from temporal storms (still powered by gears). Adjacent carpets dynamically connect. Because I just play single player, so I'm not worried about PvP in my personal experience of the game, I'd make bow hunting more skill based and more lethal for larger non-aggressive game. I would like it if the best bow with the best arrow killed a deer in 1 hit if I hit the right spot (say the head, or the heart). What I have seen of some of the expanded chiselling mods in YouTube videos looks really good; I'd probably want some of those abilities in the game (being able to grow or shrink a whole plane, mirror chiselling, copying blocks). They'd really help with larger builds. Generally, I really like the direction the game is actually moving in. It's always exciting to see what the developers are adding to the game over time.

I've since updated the figurehead a little... I swapped the pine plank on the base for debarked pine log (for a more seamless join) and embossed the circles on the side. I also made a copy of the bird (so I had a reference if I wanted to create another bird in the future, without removing the figurehead), so now the Little Dove can fly home to its mate.

I'd been interested in adding a custom figurehead to my sailboat since I learnt that was an option. I finally made one today! I used: pine log for the wing and tail details plaster for the bird's body and the central circle details birch planks for the beak and outer circle details pine planks for the eyes and the base that connects to the sailboat Really pleased with how it turned out.

I've accidentally misclicked more than once before, so I'd appreciate this functionality.

Nice idea! This would support using carpets as something like fancy placemats on a table, or other situations where you might not want them to automatically connect. I'm all for providing players with more ways to express themselves like that. A sewing kit seems like a sensible tool for the job, and given traders sell them (and the only way to get carpet is from traders, so not a homo sapiens game mode issue to rely on them), I don't see a problem with putting this on an item the player might not be able to craft depending on their class.

I put down a couple of carpets next to each other and noticed they don't connect. It would be nice if their textures dynamically connected to adjacent carpets, so you could make larger connected rugs. A rough example of what I am thinking of: Is there a mod that already does this?

Agree, this makes it very hard to design combat. As you say; a fast bear catches and kills players who can't fight, a slow bear is ignored or killed by players who can fight, a bear that moves at the same speed as the player is hard to shake if there are no obstacles to lose it on. I do like the idea of having to dodge an initial charge and then run away as the bear overshoots. That seems learnable and fun. Hopefully the combat update the team is working on at the moment is going to include improvements to bears too.

I think this is a very fair point to raise. The primary way I deal with bears in my game is by wearing leather armor, so when I am caught by surprise by them, I am not killed before I can run away. I have only played 1 world so far (but spent a lot of time in that world), and in that world I found chalk maybe 2,000 blocks away from spawn. So I can't speak from experience of multiple worlds on this, but the scenario you mention seems likely to me based on RNG. Not having leather armor (which is my counter to sneaking bears) would make bears much more of a threat. What @marmarmar34 and @Ravensblade say is true, this is the way I most come into conflict with bears; being got from behind because they have snuck up on me. With leather armor, this doesn't bother me. Without leather armor, this is pretty lethal. I do think an audible warning when a bear targets you, but before it starts chasing, could possibly solve this problem. I would also suggest the shears as a solution to the "I am in dense undergrowth, ah, I can't get away from the bear" problem. Obviously not an option before copper, which does make the early game far riskier, but some strategy available to the player not too late into the game that doesn't involve avoiding forests or completely clearing the landscape/using a mod. I don't personally use that strategy (I tend to retrace my steps instead if I am in dense underbrush, or always have an exit route planned, and the leather armor creates a lot of room for error), but I heard someone mention this is how they navigate forests on elk the other day and filed it away in my mental drawer of good ideas. Credit to KyoShinda, I think.

Agree, it's odd that there is no interaction between monsters and animals. I heard someone mention in another thread it could be because of the consequence of corpses being left lying around if they were regularly killing each other. I think monsters attacking livestock during temporal storms would be untenable with current temporal storm spawning mechanics. The whole player-owned spaces problem again. I think it would be more compelling if animals and monsters did interact, but even seeing "monsters and animals ignore each other" is interesting in some ways. Because the player is not a human, maybe the animals just hate seraphs for some reason? Maybe seraphs have incredibly bad vibes? The lack of an answer doesn't really bother me, because I don't assume the world should be simulating reality. I see the world not obeying the same laws as reality in various ways as reasons that all sorts of things we take for granted in reality should not be taken for granted in this world. My thought process is more like "huh, things are different here. I wonder why? What an interesting mystery. I wonder if the game will ever explain that?" rather than "this is not like real life, the devs have done a poor job representing real life." Because the world is clearly operating under different rules, I experience little ludonarrative dissonance. I agree; I think telegraphing the location of bears better, so players have a better chance of avoiding them could be helpful, but I think it would be odd if bears made a lot of noise while sleeping, and they spend a lot of time sleeping. Ultimately, I think the speed players want to move through the world vs a bear emitting sounds at a reasonable frequency will still lead to players stumbling into bears (though the odds could be reduced). I find bears relatively fair at the moment because you can outrun them. When you say they could be significantly faster than they are now if they just gave up the chase sooner, I think that would force combat, because if they were faster they would catch fleeing players? They can do so much damage if they hit you, that as a new player, running is really your best choice until you are better equipped and more experienced with combat? Do you suppose they should be faster in a straight line, so players must zigzag as a strategy? If so, I think that would still allow skilled players to succeed in combat, while not really changing the current strategy of avoiding bears (run away). Could you explain a little more how player behaviour changes based on the new bear behaviour you suggest?

I think keeping bears realistic is not the goal of the game. The Artisan traders sometimes sell tapestries. One of the tapestries, "Ambush", mentions the behaviour of animals being unusual. This leads me to believe that the goal of the game is to have bears be a real threat and challenge to players on the surface, while backing that up with lore to hint that the behaviour is intentional. Agree, we hear many players say they would like bears to be less sneaky or control animal vs monster hostility separately. I personally like the challenge, but know not everyone does. Something that gets brought up during these discussions, that I will reiterate here for reference, is that VS is supporting more than 1 game mode. In the Homo Sapiens mode, temporal threats are turned off, as is lore. So there, there would be no explanation for the behaviour of bears. At the same time, since monsters aren't spawning, there would be no dangerous creatures to kill you if bears and wolves weren't unusually out to kill you. This would lessen the "unforgiving survival" challenge of the mode. Balancing all these concerns must lead to some compromise on realism vs challenging gameplay.

Correct. To be clear, because the standard game mode with default settings has aggressive creatures wandering around on the surface, and predators will currently spawn in your base and kill your livestock without adequate precautions taken, the default standard game mode already encourages the player to build both lights (to stop spawning) and fences (to stop undesirable things wandering into your base). So LadyWYT isn't suggesting big changes to default gameplay by pitching palisades instead of fences. They just look a little more in line with a defensive perimeter; a strategy the game encourages with default settings something we see at trader locations something we might see in other places in the game, like tapestries Instead of building fences (which don't necessarily look like they were made for defense) to keep things out, build palisades (or stakes or spikes, I add) to keep things out (because they look like they are made to keep things out). Of course, not everyone wants to play the standard game mode with default settings. We're just discussing how the game could look when players don't want to set the animals and monsters to passive (so there is an element of danger to ignoring them), and what options the player has and could have to deal with threats.

The idea is to replace the functionality that fences currently offer (protection from shivers entering your base) with stakes and palisades. So the need for something to stop a shiver entering your base already exists, we are just changing which item you would build to address the issue. This doesn't make the game into a different type of game, as the need for and availability of an item to stop shivers is already present in the game. A tower defense game also usually requires you to kill the enemy to stop them destroying your base, and defenses are designed to either soak damage while you deal with the threat, or actively damage the enemy. The suggestion does not propose either; it just proposes a different aesthetic for the walls the game already requires, that matches the aesthetic we see in structures that already exist in the world. My suggestion to ensure the inclusion of stakes as an alternative option to palisades increases the aesthetic choices available to players; instead of only being able to build palisades to block shivers, the player would be able to build stakes and spikes (which functionally behave the same as stakes) to block shivers instead if they wanted to. LadyWYT proposes that palisades would offer both cover and the ability to stop climbers (like fences in the game currently do). Stakes and spikes would not offer as much cover, but could be paired with other blocks that do (walls/fences). If you just built fences or walls to provide cover, shivers would be able to climb them (like they can climb walls now), but if you put stakes or spikes at the base or on top, that would block their path.

Agree, there's definitely things I could do to make my life easier. This is a bit of temporary measure while I only have 1 iron trapdoor (I have so many other things to spend iron plates on at the moment), but it did make me think that it would be nice to be able to look through the door.

I see you've thought about this before! And I'm not the first to want a system where we can get information from traders remotely.

Yesterday I was listening to an interview with Tyron from October last year and I heard him discuss some thoughts on improvements to the trading system. https://youtu.be/5uvFrR9ZtV4?t=2677 44:37, Tyron said: This was exciting to me, since this aligned with one of the pieces of feedback I had when I first started playing the game. https://www.vintagestory.at/forums/topic/20317-v121-a-new-players-thoughts/?&_rid=941726#findComment-106624 I said: And in a reply... So I wanted to make the improvements to the trading system I was eager to see a little more visible, rather than another thought among many in a thread about my impressions as a new player in version 1.21. I know 1.23 is supposed to be focused on combat, and beyond that, work is focusing on chapter 3, so I'm not sure when the trading system is next likely to be a priority, but here are my thoughts for when that day eventually arrives... I'm a player who is already relatively invested in the trading part of the game and I use a spreadsheet to manage information about the traders in my game. It looks like this (but much longer): Explanation for various things in the image: I've got trader types color coded by the color of the map icons I'm using for that trader type. Names in pink are traders who are living with other traders (I found a group of 3 traders living together, marked their group in pink). Because I have several of the same types of traders on the map, I also record trader coordinates, so I can remember which trader is which and easily find them on the map. I have a second spreadsheet that has the trader info from the wiki and populates the drop down lists on this spreadsheet, and uses the drop down selection to retrieve the price range (PR) an item can sell at, so I can see at a glance where the current price sits compared to its range. I keep a bunch of the items I am interested in buying or selling listed, then when I visit a trader, I fill in the price ($) and number (#) of any of those items that trader is currently buying or selling. I also track how much money the trader currently has in their wallet (Wallet) and when their next delivery of stock (Delivery) is. I might clear the info out when the Delivery expires, or keep the Delivery and Wallet there for reference, if I am going to need to wait for the trader to save up more money before I try and sell to them again. Item color coding just makes it easier to pick circular trades or specific items (like temporal gears, things I can't make because of my class) out of a list. I'm not looking to completely replace my spreadsheet; it works for me. What I am looking to do is remotely check the info that I am filling in manually, so what is currently being bought and sold, Wallet, $, #, Delivery. I want to skip traveling to the trader to get this info IF I have invested in a way to get this info remotely. I want to earn the ability to skip the information gathering leg work, then am happy to still travel to make all the trades I want to make before Delivery changes. I see the travel problem as something that can be solved separately (because there are things like base return teleporters in the game and I see travel infrastructure as a separate system I could invest in that could compliment this system). I see 2 ways I could earn the ability to skip the information gathering leg work of traveling around and visiting traders in person: Do quests for traders to help them improve their bases. Then they will grant me this ability now that they have the working infrastructure and as thanks. Their factions could come into this (you could advance a factional relationship) or it could be a process for each individual base/trader. I could see this being something you could achieve without being further along than iron progression. If traders fundamentally lack the technology to communicate at distance, then we could use Jonas technology to craft items that would allow this, and gift those items to specific traders to gain this ability. We would have a piece of Jonas tech that we can use to contact any of the gifted items (and therefore the trader at the other end). There could even be some kind of combination of the 2; we could get a blueprint for the tech by sufficiently raising our standing with a trader/faction. This is my biggest desire for the trading system. All other desires are secondary to the earned ability to remotely check trader info, because I find the system relatively engaging and useful already, the information gathering is just a little tedious. One other thought I have had that relates to communicating at a distance, but I don't think is necessarily going to work for the trading system, is homing pigeons (or other birds that could be used to deliver information, like ravens). I don't think they serve the kind of instantaneous communication the player would be looking for, but they are something that relate to the communication problem that I thought was interesting. Maybe birds aren't even able to navigate in this world full of rifts?

I have built a little place to fire my charcoal next to my coke ovens. Something I like about my current set up is that I have a glass slab that lets me easily see when charcoal production is finished. I do have to break it every time I finish firing my charcoal to get in, but it's not terribly inconvenient. I was thinking it would be nice if there was a version of an iron door or trapdoor that could have a glass window in it, so that I would be able to look through the door, rather than a separate glass block. Apparently quartz glass can have a continuous use temperature limit of 900°C to 1,100°C, whereas charcoal kilns typically operate at 400°C to 600°C. So it seems plausible that an iron door could support both a glass window and function in a high temperature environment. We do have windowed iron doors, but they do not seal rooms (they use iron rods, not glass), so it's not possible to use them for charcoal making. Would a third iron door recipe that uses a glass slab be possible? Or a version of the iron trapdoor that uses a glass slab?

I generally like this solution, as long as stakes also stop monsters climbing, so players have a few options. They can choose between stakes + fences/walls or palisades. The addition of some metal spikes (that behave like stakes, stop climbing) that can sit on top of fences/walls later in the game would be nice too, so you could do something like build a glass wall around your base (with all that quartz you have lying around) and just top it with spikes.

I have heard the saying "If it's black, fight back; if it's brown, lie down". I've never seen either in real life, but my understanding is that an actual brown bear could be a real force to be reckoned with. A simple fence would do little to protect your bee hives from a hungry bear! So it's nice the game is a little more generous with how effective your fences are, rather than letting supernatural monsters or even hungry bears ignore them.

I was thinking about this. I have a couple of thoughts. First thought... when I was at a traders and a bear climbed over the stakes to attack me, I found that quite distressing. It felt immersion breaking and like the stakes were not behaving as expected. So regarding their need to be functional, I would like more functionality than currently exists. However, I do see the ability for players to abuse stakes if they did damage, for example. Make kill boxes, etc. What I expect from stakes is basically how I use fences right now; shivers can't climb them, you can't just jump over them. This is the functionality I would like to see implemented. Second thought... I would like to see the option for palisades and stakes in the game, but I think they would mostly be an alternative aesthetic choice to fences, because wattle fences are just so cheap. We assume a palisade would be made of logs, not sticks, and is therefore going to be more resource intensive than wattle fences, so less immediately useful for the player to build when they are trying to set up a defensive perimeter in the early game. They are also just less functional; being able to see through a fence is very useful, a palisade blocks your vision. So while I like the cosmetic option for players who want to build a thematic defensive encampment, I don't see the game actually encouraging the choice of palisades over fences for any other reason. My final impression is that monsters appear very unintelligent and incredibly hostile. Drifters will run at your door, but they can't figure out how to open it. They really want to kill you, but they just can't figure out how to get at you. They also seem to disperse when it's bright enough outside. Their priority goes from desperately trying and failing to murder you, to seeking less bright places to lurk? But if you happen to be somewhere they can attack you when it's bright outside, their bloodlust outweighs their discomfort and killing you becomes their number 1 priority again. So having a fence instead of a palisade seems less secure, but it's enough to deal with the low intelligence of your opponents. Palisades look sturdier, but we don't need to be stronger than the enemy, just smarter. Edit: If the game made monsters make choices based on line of sight and made them able to climb fences (only if they saw you were on the other side), then palisades could become more useful, as blocking line of sight would be a meaningful advantage they had that wooden fences didn't (stone fences block line of sight too). But then palisades wouldn't be much better than a 2 high wall of dirt blocks either. I guess nothing could spawn on top of them? There could be something done with enemy logic here I feel, but it seems unlikely the game will go that route. It seems like that road leads to stakes on top of fences/walls, like the equivalent of modern razor wire.

Depending on the game mode you are playing, the consequences of death can be more or less severe. Death has an interesting interaction with the system that lets you change your respawn point in the Standard game mode. Besides reducing your nutrition and making you drop what you are carrying on default settings, once you start changing your spawn point, dying will reduce the number of respawns you have at that new spawn point. This will become significant if you want to travel away from world spawn, and there are many reasons you may be motivated to do that.

This is also the case for me. I was surprised to find out they did nothing to stop temporal storms, which is what I expected them to do since, as you say, lighting is cheaper than rift wards, and that control of player-spaces is necessary far earlier in the game. I am not certain when they are more useful than lights. I thought perhaps underground, but if monsters can still spawn in darkness without a rift, then you would need light anyway, yes? I agree that rift wards being repurposed as a source of stability would be good. This would allow the player a tool to stay underground mining longer, rather than have to come up or spend a temporal gear to refresh their stability. Or settle unstable areas if they really wanted to pay the upkeep. This could have narrative purpose in later chapters (if you need to make a base near or explore a story location in an unstable area). These would be valid purposes that are not "negate the effects of a temporal storm within an area". I see people have discussed some possibilities here:

Agree, for the most part. Fire is temporary and comes at cost in the early game (you might feed it fuel, regularly maintain torches), or requires some investment to get an ineffective (when it comes to preventing spawns) permanent light source (fat or beeswax, oil lamps and candles). As soon as one invests metal (torch holders or lanterns), the cost is paid in perpetuity. I think the challenge with removing perpetual light sources is that maintaining torches simply isn't that fun for the player, at least at the frequency it is currently required, and it is not intuitive that light sources would last longer (their fuel reserves are not large). So making them last several months would seem strange, but making them last less time would be frustrating. I think a temporal gear powered light source would be less strange to last in perpetuity though. If lanterns were to remain waterproof, and last a long but finite amount of time before needing refueling, I could see a perpetual tier of light above them being added, but it sounds like many people already struggle to invest in lanterns, so adding yet another tier might not be fun, even if it made more sense? It would also be a problem for game modes like Homo Sapiens to put perpetual light behind temporal gears. I agree, it would be thematically satisfying if monsters were scared of fire, but because players need to be able to make torches easily to be able to see anything in the dark, they must be very accessible. However, an extremely accessible deterrent would make it very easy to use to ignore the monster threat. It would change the game from one where combat is relatively necessary on occasion to one where you would just place torches instead of fight anything that isn't a boss (more than one is already encouraged to do this). This is the major issue I see with making fire a more thematic deterrent. One is already carrying a light source when one is most likely to encounter monsters (at night or underground). I agree, fire is the easiest way to solve the player-owned spaces problem, else it would be limited to too late in the game if it relied on any more advanced tech. I can see "rooms" either having a far too restrictive definition, or else players just filling mines with doors to make everything a room. I can't see a better way than light to solve the problem in the early game.

I'd like to explain why I find the current system satisfying, not overly expensive, and not immersion breaking. I found it really enjoyable to go from having a little 6x6 (4x4 inside) building that was only lit by a torch, to gradually increasing the size of my base as I found candles by panning bony soil and crafting copper lanterns. I started playing in 1.21, where the 1.22 small lanterns were basically the best light source available. Copper is pretty plentiful, and candles were rare, but it felt really satisfying every time I was able to make a lantern and replace the torches I was using and expand the footprint of my base. Going from replacing torches every day to now having a permanent source of light that was even more powerful felt like great progress. I happened to have a treasure hunter and commodities trader on the next island over. This made trade very viable; I could sell longbows to the treasure hunter for 4 or more gears, and sell cracked vessels for a profit to the commodities trader that I'd bought from the treasure hunter. This made it very rewarding to save up a couple of trades worth of profit, then head to a furniture trader and buy a lantern with my hard earned gears. This meant I had a more reliable source of lanterns than waiting for a candle to drop from panning. It took me in-game years to actually find a bee hive and start making my own candles. I find the idea of rifts not spawning in high enough levels of artificial light to be reasonable. Light pushing back darkness, civilization pushing back wilderness, is very thematic. Artificial light being something that interferes with rifts spawning seems plausible given what little we know about rifts. The lore of the game involving alchemy (which has concepts like opposed elements) further bolsters the potential of light to interact with the supernatural. I don't light up a radius of 500 blocks, I merely keep my base light. My base started out small and grew over time, but from the very start it included fences, to prevent wolves and bears attacking me if I stepped outside. After winter and snow, the fences became 2 high because snow drifts would let bears jump a 1 high fence. After being shot often enough by bowtorn who just happened to be standing somewhere they could clear 2 fences, the fences became 3 high. Now I am very safe inside my compound (outside temporal storms), and everything I need is inside it. It did not require much more materials or planning to make this happen. I understand not everyone loves the aesthetic of fences, but the cost of making wattle fences is low, you can still see through them, and the idea of having a somewhat fortified base seems very in keeping with the themes of the game and what we see with traders. I understand deciding to set monsters to passive as a desired play style, but as the standard setting, I think encouraging the player to be thoughtful about how they build a defensive base makes sense for the game?