DarkGold

My experience has been that monsters never spawn in my base, except during temporal storms, but I believe that is because I have placed big lanterns within at least 12 block of each other, and my base is not enormous (so lighting it all isn't hard). Pictures attached of my base (blue stars on map are the radius of the lightning rod on my windmill roof). I would like it if powered rift wards kept an area safe from a temporal storm, but besides that, I have very little problem with the existing system, because the 3 high fences and lights keep me safe when I am at base at all other times. This set up was working for me before the 1.22 lantern update, where large lanterns became even better. I also always run around in leather armor, since there is no down side to wearing it (besides style), unless I am preparing to actually fight something (in which case I gear up to the best armor I have). That's also done a lot to keep me safe, since the leather basically prevents me from getting killed in 1 hit, and after taking 1 surprise hit, I can run away.

The silver bit was definitely hard to distinguish from the quartz bits. I figured gold (being a more distinct color) might be a little easier to spot though. Nonetheless, I certainly pay a lot more attention to the quartz bits I see on the surface now, since finding silver on the surface. Edit: According to this image I found on Reddit, no, gold bits are not much easier to spot. Alas.

Congratulations on your progress! I've still not set out on my chapter 2 journey, between breaks from the game and adventures searching for pentlandite and cinnabar (both finally discovered this week). Finding gold is now at the top of my to do list too. I had the same question about the elk and teleporting: The answers I received were very helpful. I also read somewhere (I forget where) that using the 2nd mode of the prospecting pick (checking the immediate radius) on quartz veins you find (especially on or near the surface, since you don't have to dig to find the vein first) can be helpful for finding gold and silver. Edit: So far I've only found silver by luck; I happened to see silver bits on the surface (like how one might see copper bits on the surface) amongst an area of quartz bits. It's only happened to me once, so I can't recommend it as a reliable strategy, but maybe also keep an eye out for areas with quartz bits on the surface and see if there is anything else mixed in amongst them?

I had a problem similar to this a while ago, but my hens weren't eating at all. Your issue sounds different, as your hens are eating, but you could try killing, recreating your birds and resetting their generation using creative mode like I did and see if that works? Good luck!

I've also found soybeans to be extremely good, both raw and preserved, if you can find them. There was some discussion around travel rations in this thread too, though pemmican and hardtack come up on the forums many times independently.

I like the idea of having clocks and thermometers in game, but as a player, I need the information a clock and a thermometer provide very early in the game (to know when and where to plant things). I imagine a clock would need at least bronze technology to make, and mercury was apparently historically extracted from cinnabar. I have yet to find cinnabar in my game, despite actively looking for it, and I have long since made steel. I think not having this information available to the player early in the game could be detrimental to the farming experience, and it seems like it would be difficult to acquire it early due to the technology and resources required. Relying on traders to get these tools sooner would not be reliable under the current trader system, as players would need to find the correct trader, which might take some time, and when found, they may not have the tools in stock. Changing the way trader stock works could help solve this, but unless Treasure Hunters stocked these tools (doesn't seem likely, seems more likely a different trader would have them), the first issue of finding the trader in a timely manner would still be a challenge. If the easiest way to get the tools early game is to trade for them, it would disincentivize crafting them too, so making them very accessible via trader, in order to solve their early game accessibility, doesn't seem like a good solution for the game overall. I'm not sure how the game could both balance having this information available to the player when they need it in the early game, and still have these tools be useful.

If I don't have a few temporal gears, I'm going to prioritise getting some before I prioritise setting up outposts that are a long way from world spawn. I like to do this by trading with Treasure Hunters. Some people like to do this by hunting drifters. If you've got lots of gravel near you, it's also easy to go out, grab a pile of gravel, then sit comfortably indoors panning it, if you have a bucket and can make yourself a little indoor water source to stand in. I'll chisel something nice to hold the water too.

Depends what my goals are in world and what my food supplies are like. If I had enough food to deal with the hunger penalty, and I needed warm clothes, I'd be out there hunting for pelts. Short trips where I can come back to base and warm up easy. After I have some warmer clothes, I'd be prospecting for the next major minerals I need. In my game, I've got steel, but I am looking for pentlandite (so I can make cupronickel) and cinnabar (so I can make even better warm clothes). If the prospecting by my base isn't great, I check what kind of rocks the minerals I'm looking for are likely to be found in, look for an area with lots of those rocks, and set up an outpost I can fill with necessities (shelter, bed, firewood, cooking pot, bowl, storage vessel full of food) out that way, and use it as a base of operations for prospecting.

I find the first time I make a journey quite compelling. It's quick trips back and forth that I think it would be difficult, even with mods, to make more compelling. Why? I've seen what there is to see on the way there. The goal of going back and forth is usually just to move resources, so I don't have a lot of inventory space to stop on the journey back and acquire more resources if my inventory is already full. I am also trying to minimize risk. It takes a lot of time to travel there and back, and I might have to do this several times. Cutting down this time is my goal. If I was journeying on a road, in a self driving wagon, and I could be crafting in the back of the wagon while I was moving, so I could accomplish 2 things at once, there might be a way to address point 3, but I assume most mods aren't addressing points 1 and 2? Curious if they are!

I didn't really consider that you could use the terminus teleporter multiple times without dying in between. That makes a lot of sense. I would still like it if the utility of base return teleporters was extended so I could do return visits to locations I had been to before without making the journey out there again with sufficient planning. Example We have three locations: Base, L1, L2. I place an anchor at Base, set my respawn point at base, tune a base return teleporter (BRT) to Base. I travel to L1 with 2 untuned BRTs and 2 anchors. I place an anchor at L1, tune a BRT to the L1 anchor. I travel to L2 with 1 untuned BRT, a BRT tuned to L1, and 1 anchor. I place an anchor at L2, tune a BRT to the L2 anchor. Now that I am at L2, I can either: Die, return to Base. Use my BRT tuned to L1. This is more options than if I could only die and return to base or die and return to L1 (if I chose to set my spawn point there instead), based on previous choices. I can have both choices available to me at the same time at a later moment, rather than locking in my choice ahead of time. This is good if I don't know what choice I will want to make at L1 or L2 when I leave Base. This also means I am safe to change my spawn point to locations I think might be really dangerous to get the benefit of up to 20 respawns (by default), rather than 1 temporal gear per respawn (via terminus teleporter), if I carry a Base tuned BRT with me.

The terminus teleporter requires you to die to get back to base. If you aren't using the setting that lets you keep items on death, this means you can't use this strategy to haul loot too and from base? Actually, let me confirm I understand. You would: set spawn at base, build terminus there. travel to destination. loot stuff? die, respawn at base. use terminus teleporter, back to destination. loot stuff, return to base with base teleporter. repeat 4 and 5, until looting is done? So you intentionally die to set a point, then can reuse the terminus teleporter without dying again, because the point persists?

In this discussion on long distance travel and story locations, the challenge of returning to base (for various reasons, but notably to haul loot) came up. The game currently grants a tool to return to base (the base return teleporter), but there's a choice to be made when using it at a story location currently; if you reset your spawn point at the story location (because you anticipate danger) you can't use your base return teleporter to get back to base anymore. 1 proposal came up in the discussion; have a different checkpoint system at story locations, so players don't have to change their respawn point there. This is one way to solve the problem. I have another proposal: a system like lodestones and compasses in Minecraft. It would be nice to be able to craft and construct base anchors in the world (similar to lodestones in Minecraft) and then tune a base return teleporter to a base anchor either during or after construction (similar to how compasses in Minecraft can be set to point to a lodestone). I think this still allows base return teleporters to be single use items, but allows for greater flexibility. Some problems I see: What happens if the base anchor is removed after the base return teleporter is tuned to it? I imagine it stops working (no longer has a set reference point to point to). This would mean you can't just have one base anchor you move (without consequence) and would mean tuning a base return teleporter would probably happen after construction, not during. Some clear benefits: I can tune a base return teleporter to an anchor at my base, bring that teleporter and an untuned base return teleporter and an anchor with me on a journey, place an anchor at my destination, use the untuned teleporter on the new anchor, and now I can go back to base with all my loot, then back to destination again after. This is still costing me lots of Jonas parts, and still requires lots of planning ahead. I don't see this messing with the lore, because we already have translocators that move the player independent from their spawn point. This would just mean base return teleporters are working more like translocators than terminus teleporters (looking at other fixed locations in the world rather than locations related to the seraph). Or base return teleporters may be able to do both; their untuned behavior may target the player's current spawn point, but their tuned behavior could target base anchors. --- That proposal aside, I would love the combat update to change the way I pursue Jonas parts to enable me to better hunt for parts I may be missing. Rather than the current wide drop pool, specific parts from specific enemies, or multiple smaller drop tables from specific sources, would be better for allowing the player to pursue constructing any given Jonas machine. I would hope that would mean parts for machines like base return teleporters are more accessible than parts for machines like terminus teleporters (since a single use machine would need to be recreated more often). Alternatively, the parts system could be reworked to be a little more generic, and then specific parts could be constructed with specific other materials (eg, maybe you need a high quality gem and a generic Jonas part to make a terminus teleporter part, but only glass and a generic Jonas part to make a base return teleporter part). This would be another way to make some machines easier to make while still making Jonas parts rare in general. Presumably all parts would still require cupronickel. --- I'd like to hear what others think. Do you agree? Do you have other ideas? Do you see flaws in the proposal? Do you love the current system? Please share

Another way roots and stumps are handled would be in a game like Valheim. Stumps have to be separately removed, but they aren't a bunch of blocks changing the terrain, just something left behind that shows a tree was once there, and take a little more time to remove (and grant a little more resource for the trouble) before you can replant a seed. I don't think the extra time would add too much to the Vintage Story experience, so keeping it streamlined might be more enjoyable for players, unless the stump could provide a unique resource, or the ability for a tree to grow back faster without replanting it from seed maybe? Something that has the stump contibute more than a time and tool durability sink to the game.

Hytale currently works like this. It does feel more realistic, but the downside is that as trees grow, their roots replace dirt. When you chop a tree down, you have to dig those roots out and replace them with dirt you've gathered from somewhere else before you can replant another tree in the same place. This can end up feeling tedious, and is more resource heavy than simply replanting a seed. For a game where you may be burning firewood more regularly for cooking, charcoal, and staying warm, and therefore farming trees more often, this could be an undesirable complication. Or it might be a good use for all the extra dirt people dig up when prospecting. Not inherently good or bad, just depends on what people like.

Potential solution was: Kill all hens that came from a previous version of the game. Other animals from previous versions can be ignored. Spawn in new hens using creative mode. /gamemode 2 Set new hens to gen 10 using /entity cmd l[] setgen 10 to set the generation of the creature you're looking at to 10. Close and reopen the game. Maybe. That's a rough approximation of what happened before things started working.

I closed the game and reopened it and the 3rd chicken started eating like normal. I would like to reiterated that I have previously closed and reopened the game (and rebooted my computer; this was persisting for weeks) many, many times before this without any of the chickens deciding to eat. You can see some flax in the corner of the screenshot. I broke the small trough, threw some flax on the ground, so they would be motivated to eat it, not whatever was in the trough, and the white chicken (which was a new gen 9 chicken that I set to gen 10 after confirming one of the new gen 10 chickens would eat) ate it in relatively short order. So now all the chickens are eating for the moment, no idea what fixed the issue. Nothing I tried before worked. Now it suddenly works. Will it continue to work? Who can say.

I cleared out the chickens, keeping only the gen 9 one that would eat, then spawned in 2 new chickens and set them to gen 10. Now we have a new gen 10 hen who will eat... ...and another chicken who won't eat regardless of what their gen is set to (tried 8, 9, 10, just in case it was a bug where only one of each gen would eat). So the issue seems to be generation independent and specific to individual chickens? All I can say, is something is deeply wrong with the hens in my game at the moment. Is anyone else seeing issues like this?

The chicken that is eating also seems to have graphical issues every now and then... My game is unmodded, by the way. Windows 11.

I tried both suggestions today (setting to 9, then setting to 11). Neither initially seemed to work, but then one of the new chickens I set to gen 9 did eat 2 portions (eventually 3). The other new chickens I set to gen 9 have not eaten anything in the same amount of time though. The old chickens that were set to gen 9 have not eaten anything either, so it seems inconsistent? I have considered removing the old chickens, so I might do that and see if that and rebooting the game help. Given the chickens from 1.21 were initially working without issue after coming over to 1.22, I figured it wasn't a version thing, but my new world was made in 1.22.1, and it may have been 1.22.3 that they stopped working. The rooster and the elk are still working fine, that wasn't my initial suspicion. Poor chickens.

Agree, if these got moved forward, this wouldn't be a problem either, but I imagine part of putting them after the first journey is to get the player to experience it on foot. And so the player has time to afford it. Big design change if brought forward, but possible.

But do you know how persistent bears can be?! If their stamina also runs out, as long as I don't round the corner on a fresh one, it should be ok though. Visions of rounding the corner, completely out of breath, seeing a fresh bear, the horror. Sure this happens too often for comfort.

Agree, overpowered at the moment. But it really raises the question; if sprinting is how the player currently chooses to engage or disengage with combat, do we want that taken away? I like being able to just decide "nope, I don't want to fight right now" and leave. I agree that it's very hard to design combat around that though. But putting a limit on sprint means getting to chapter 1 story location will be harder. Such far reaching impact! Do we need some sort of difference in movement between drawing/sheathing weapons, so the player is slow with them out, fast with them sheathed?

I like this idea in principle, but there are 2 troubles with weapon or armor strategy in the game at the moment: Inventory space: carrying multiple armor and weapons eats it up. In games where you are making these choices, you are usually tailoring it to the areas/enemies you are fighting. At the moment, the enemy variety in VS isn't so high that you aren't often fighting all possible enemies at once (besides choosing between hunting animals and fighting monsters). I don't think either of these problems are unsolvable, but they'll require looking at other systems to really make everything work together nicely. It's great that the whole next update will be tackling combat, because the implications of the changes will likely be far reaching if they want to make bigger changes like this.

A video on slow combat design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZHeexEa5ok Something I didn't consider is that I don't think we currently have a dodge or back step in Vintage Story. Something we do see in most action combat games, I think (Valheim, Zelda, most that come to mind).

What I said about servers and responsiveness makes me think about games like Final Fantasy 14. I think the kind of mechanics that they are employing to make combat interesting, but still allow the player time to react, rely on clearly telegraphed attacks with lots of time to move out of the way or letting players interrupt when an enemy is charging something up. The combat system is different, but the ideas might still work across genres. I'm sure there would be other games with more applicable systems to draw inspiration from, this was just the first that came to mind when I thought about how other games solve the problem.