ApacheTech

+1. This is fast becoming an essential addition. Also... an option to sleep until dawn. It's pitch black at 6PM in game, and too dark to play. Even with the best beds in the game, that only takes you to 2AM, and it doesn't get light enough to play again until at least 6AM. Either that, or the ability to change the daylight hours on a server, so that it's light until 10PM, and dawn comes at 4AM, so that a crafted bed can actually do the job it's supposed to.

This should be a fairly common thing though. Repellents and deterrents have been used for millennia, and temporal gears would play better in the Lovecraftian side of the game, rather than stuff that is purely based within reality, like repellents. Maybe the temporal gears could be used to create a personal talisman that wards predators away from the player. That's more in keeping with the Lovecraftian lore of the game. Something like a natural animal repellent should be available early in the game. One use I'd love to see Temporal Gears used for is with a Chest, to create a Temporal Chest; essentially an Ender Chest.

Another option would be to be able to (carefully) collect urine from Wolves and Cayotes, as an animal/drifter deterrent. It could make the player queazy when around it, so the heal over time rate could decrease as a result.

I'm in favour of anything that makes the game more playable, and something like this would be good. But, I don't think it should use temporal gears. There's no need. There is plenty of flora that could act as a deterrent. You just have to come up with a Lore friendly way of working it. Scented candles have been around for millennia for this exact purpose. Crushing 16x of a certain flower in a Quern (A mortar and pestle would be better, if added) gives 1x "Floral Powder", so "Floral Powder (Catmint)", or "Floral Powder (Eidelwiess)". These could then be used in a recipe with beeswax to make Scented Candles or with animal fat and a bowl to make Scented Oil Lamps. Catmint might ward off animals, where other flowers may ward off Drifters. It just depends on the Lore. Not much has been made of the so-called "Lovecraftian" side of the game yet. When I first saw the premise of the game, I thought, "An entire game built around Abyssalcraft, that sounds amazing", but there's nothing really Lovecraftian in the game at all. Developing that side of the game, even as a mod, you could introduce talismen, and totems, as personal and area-effect (respectively) wards.

I think you're still misunderstanding what a shingle is. It's like a sign outside a pub that says the name of the pub on both sides of it. Usually kite-sheild shaped. It doesn't only have uses in multiplayer either. If you want to build a really immersive single player world, it would add a huge amount of detail there as well. Any use it has in multiplayer is replicated in single-player. Exactly in the same way that Plaster is a thing. There's no need to build out of anything other than dirt in a single-player game, but the options are there to make it pretty if you want to. Writable Paper, and Writable Books are still my main concern though. They are fast becoming essential.

I'd say it's easier to find 20 nuggets of surface copper for a pickaxe than it is to find 30 flax fibre in a number of regions. Or at least, you'd have to travel just as far for either. To make this as intuitive as possible, I'd stick closely to Ex Nihilo, and not try to re-invent the wheel. Ex Nihilo works, and is scalable to the mid-game, and early late game. The loot tables for various items could be tweaked to allow for more scalable uses, and as the hopper network items in the game expand, more automation will be possible. A sluice would be an interesting way to do it, but that would be later on, I think. I'd set that up as a block that is placed in the water, with an internal inventory, underneath a water-wheel. The water wheel could then power the shaking mechanism within the sluice. That would work better for sifting soil, and the by-product would be Silt. Silt could be added to Low Fertility Soil to create Medium Fertility Soil, or to Barren Soil, to create Low Fertility Soil.

Just remember that if you don't have flax growing where you start, getting fibre in that quantity will be a real pain, due to the poor mob drop rates. If the point of this is that you don't have to travel hundreds of blocks, that may be a limiting factor. Nine, for a 3x3 is doable, over time, while still collecting for a bed, and for sacks. For yours, you'd need 20-30 fibre per muslin sheet. That's pretty steep, when a sheet of linen is only 16, and muslin is a finer fabric than linen.

Yes, the meshes would have the durability, but the differences between them is mainly about the density of the mesh. Think of the fine mesh as Muslin... you could even call it that. And the Coarse mesh as Sackcloth or Hessian. If you wanted to make this a bit more generic, you have Muslin and Hessian as base crafting components in Tailoring, and one of their multi-purpose uses is that you can sift through them. The granularity of the two materials is different enough to mean that Muslin is too fine a material to allow gravel to be sifted, but will be ok with sand. Later on, you could have a metal mesh recipe, which would be cast, or forged, which would be much more coarse, and have much more durability, allowing it to be used in semi-automated or fully-automated environments. I don't know if it would need a piston-like mechanical component to push slowly down on the top of it, or whether you could use the components already there. Then you could add sand into a chest, through a hopper, into the sifting table, and the results flow through a hopper, and into an output chest. While loaded, and powered, the contraption should just work. Durability wise, I think the Muslin and Hessian would need at least enough durability to allow a full stack of sand/gravel to pass through before breaking. Any less than that, and you'd lose the entire point of the project.

My interpretation would be much more like Ex Nihilo: Flax Fibre in a 3x3 gives a "Fine Mesh" that can be used to sift sand. Flax Twine in a 3x3 give a "Coarse Mesh" that can be used to sift gravel. Sticks in a "H" with a hand basket on top creates a "Sifting Table Frame". These meshes can then be Shift-RightClicked into the frame. Hold RMB with sand/gravel in hand to sift, like operating a Quern. A single block from your hand is placed on the table, and slowly gets chewed up as you keep holding RMB down. All items get deposited on the floor. I say that last bit so that it can later be used with a hopper and chute, and into a chest, allowing sifting to be used as a legitimate method later in the game.

The best camera mod I've ever used for any game is BauerCam. It had some really nice features that would work very well here. I've used my experience with that MC mod to come up with this list of potential features for the camera that would make recording third person timelapse footage really seamless. • When in spectator mode, you can use "Q" and "E" to manipulate the Roll of the camera, in addition to the normal "WASD" controls for Pitch, and Yaw. "X" will reset the Roll back to 0°. • .nv <on/off> - [Spectator/Creative Mode Only] Enables or disables Night Vision, to allow for recording more than 20 minutes of footage at a time. • .cam start <time> <starting-point> - Additional optional argument to allow the camera to start at a specific point along it's route. Very useful for fine-tuning paths, and making sure that corners are handled properly. Default starting point is 0. • .cam target - Adds the block the player is standing on as a target for the camera. The camera will face the block, regardless of it's xyz position, or it's roll. • .cam target clear - Clears the current target, reverting to manual facing. - .cam vw <p1> <p2> [0.1 - 9999] - Adds velocity weighting along the path between the two specified nodes. This will speed up, or slow down the camera along this path, but the overall time of the scene will remain the same. Default weighting along all paths is 1. • .cam pb <X> - Add a point to the path before the nth point. • .cam circle <radius> <revolutions> <direction> - Creates a circular path of <radius> blocks around the player's current position, with a set number of <revolutions>. The points increment in the chosen <direction> around the circle. Example: ".cam circle 100 1 right". Example of use: If I want the camera to swoop down through the clouds, and then circle around my build as I'm building, I'd need to define the circle first, as a 100 radius circle focussed on the centre of the build. Wherever point 0 is, is now the end point of the swoop. I'd want to add a new point 0 somewhere in the clouds. Also, if I set the time to be 20 minutes (record-able daylight hours), I'd want to add a weighting to path between the first two points, so that it doesn't spend 8 minutes swooping, and only 12 minutes circling. Bird swooping, gliding on the wind, and other effects could then be added over time as extra pre-defined paths, like the circle, so that it creates a pseudo-random path mixing roll, pitch, yaw, velocity weighting, and targeting, between two points to make it look like a bird flying overhead.

EDIT: I've expanded this post into a thread in Suggestions, with potential commands, and implementation.

Thank you. It would be great to have some pre-defined paths like circles, bird swoops, etc. that can be used to create really seamless timelapse footage. Essentially like macros for the camera. And the ability to focus the camera on a specific block, regardless of it's xyz position would mean that you can make tracking panning shots that look amazing.

After defining a path for the camera, and running `.cam start <X>` to record the scene, the game forces the GUI to be visible, regardless of your manual settings. This makes it impossible to move a camera into position for a scene, and keep the camera rolling in a single take. The cinematic camera should respect manual display settings, and not force the GUI to be visible.

Also, once a cinematic camera path has finished, it forces the GUI back to being visible, even if it was disabled beforehand. How do I stop this? It's infuriating. It makes it impossible to create fluid scenes, where you move a camera into position, and then freeze it for a while. If I've manually disabled the GUI, it should stay disabled, until I manually enable it again.

Apologies. Was logged in with my camera account.

I used to use Nexus Mod Manager for Skyrim, but it wasn't updated for donkeys years, and so fell out of favour. For modpack makers on CurseForge, it was ridiculously easy to manage the packs. Create the pack exactly how you want it in the Twitch Launcher, and then just export it to CurseForge, and you're done. Then, CurseForge automatically takes care of versioning for all the mods in the pack, and whenever you update a new version of your pack, everything is linked automatically. I haven't used this new Vortex thing from Nexus, but it's good to see they've finally got round to replacing NMM. Again, the biggest thing is footfall. Steam Workshop is obviously the ultimate for footfall, but Curse is definitely second, with Nexus being a distant third.

It's interesting, and definitely something I'll look into. We're running a private whitelisted server for Content Creators, and the economy works on an honour system, similar to you'd see on the large-scale content creator MC servers, like SourceBlock, or HermitCraft. To give an example, I'd like to open a shop offering my services with Chisel and Bits. Ideally, I'd write a book with instructions, and place that in a chest, with another book, and a quill, so people can write their orders. It's also invaluable for creating mini-games, running events, thanking patrons/subscribers, and for generally writing down information on-screen; future plans for base building, etc. Writable books have so many purposes in game that without them, it's massively difficult to interact with other server members in any meaningful way, when we're not online together. We have time zone issues, with people being in different countries. Even in a single-player world, I'd use it for writing down information about the area, with map co-ords to future base plans, or just a journal of my game so far. It's a massively important part of the game.

Playing on a multiplayer server, writable books are notably missing from the game. With no easy way to rename items (without chiselling them), and even then, they don't show as the renamed item in an inventory. For product based player shops, we can write prices on signs, but it quickly ends up as sign-spam. There's currently no way of implementing a service-based player shop, other than just writing on lots of signs to contact on Discord or other 3rd party software to negotiate the job, and price. Has anyone worked on a writable books mod yet? Paper made from papyrus, a quill whittled from a feather with a knife... that kind of thing.

My point with that is that right now, the world is in a unique position. The market for new users has just opened up massively. The next few months will see a huge rise in online gaming, as people are forced, sometimes by law, to stay at home. Quality of life mods for new games will be the first thing to see an up-surgence. Consumer business logic dictates that the game should follow the path of least resistance. In a normal world, yes this could be a decision that we could ponder for another two years after the thread was initially started, but this is not a normal time. As for monetary restrictions, the Capex costs of joining CurseForge and Twitch Launcher are far lower than developing a fully featured mod manager, and website from scratch, and the Opex costs are more fully covered by the ROI of joining. You can. If this is added to CurseForge, and the Twitch Launcher, nothing stops anyone from manually downloading mods from anywhere online, and adding them to the correct folder. Nothing even stops any modder, or team of modders creating a MultiVS style mod manager.

As with so many things at the moment, the best thing to do is... Don't do one thing, do it all. Twitch Launcher is the big point of sale. CurseForge is the fully integrated mod hub, and a bespoke mod launcher will satisfy the die-hards. But again, from a business management point of view, if you have to coerce the die-hards to use efficient means of mod management in the same way that average users do, in order to cut down the maintenance of disparate first-party apps, then so be it. Just ship the first-party app as open source, and let the community take it over. If the few users that demand manual control take it up, then brilliant, but if it falls by the wayside, it was superfluous anyway.

If this were my company, I'd want to invest some time and money into research on this. And I'd want to do it FAST. Over the next few months, a lot of gamers are going to have a lot of time on their hands, and online gaming is going to sky rocket. I'd hire a financial adviser who's well versed in the gaming industry, to run the numbers on market forecasts in different scenarios. Looking at potential user bases of various platforms. Steam, CurseForge, GOG, Nexus, in-house, community driven. This is, first and foremost, and business management decision, and right now, over the next couple of weeks, is the best time to jump on it as hard as possible, and push the game as far as it can go.

A lot of it is down to business strategy. If the developers want to keep it as a largely indie project then fine. The biggest thing you get with CurseForge is instant access to tens of millions of avid gamers. Millions of dedicated MC players looking for something different, but intuitive. Millions of Blizzard Games players looking for new experiences, new games, and new challenges. Tens of millions of potential sales. So much so that even if you looked at a 0.5% resolution into actual sales, the game would overtake many major releases in terms of new users. With CurseForge, you stand shoulder to shoulder with not only the game's largest competitor, but also one of the largest gaming markets, on the world's largest gaming livestreaming platform, at the very time where Twitch are taking over from YouTube as a general social gaming platform. Especially for early access games. Allowing manual modding, but also integrating into CurseForge would be possible. Launch the game onto the world stage, and reap the rewards in terms of sales, popularity, and interest, but those who still want to unzip files into folders can also do their thing. Twitch allows for this, for instance, Optifine wasn't included in any packs, and wasn't available on CurseForge, and yet it was, and still is, an absolute essential mod for the game. You manually downloaded it from their site, and stick the file in the correct folder. Before that, you had to rename the jar, unzip it, patch it, repack it, rename it back to jar, and cross your fingers. And yet it was still an essential mod. You could create a bespoke mod manager, that looks and feels almost exactly like the Twitch Launcher, but without the ridiculously huge benefits to business management, and add it into the patch notes for the next release of the game. Those who read the patch notes and announcements on this forum would know, but beyond that, the game hasn't grown, and from a business management point of view, you've lost a massive opportunity to expand your user base. The potential ROI alone is enough to make this a no-brainer. There's also nothing stopping you doing both. Twitch exists. MultiMC exists. CurseForge exists. Optifine.net exists. Drama aside, there's plenty of choice, and if players want to manually add files to folders, and keep checking websites for potential updates that they have to manually download and place in the correct folder... let them. However, for the vast majority of the user base, including the millions of potential customers you'd get from joining CurseForge, being able to search for, install, and launch packs from Twitch is the absolute minimum they'd expect, and the game will suffer as it grows without it. The launcher would essentially just give command line arguments to the game as it loads, to tell it which world to load. Once you're in the game, there's nothing stopping you from logging out of that world, and into another that uses the same version of the game. Twitch doesn't care what you do once the game is open. If the game allows you to log out of one world and into another, than brilliant. Nothing will change with that regard. What will change though, is the mod and modpack discovery, version control, and management. I don't know how load order is currently handled within VS, but if it is handled at runtime, by the game, nothing will change with that either. At the moment, I can see no real downside about joining CurseForge. It doesn't lock you in, you get instant access to tens of millions of potential customers, and it pushes first line tech support off site. At the same time, the devteam could work on a "MultiVS" clone for anyone who wants to do things manually.

Just checked online, and Twitch Desktop App does seem to work with Wine, and is used widely by the World of Warcraft community for modding and managing WoW on Linux.

The "Import from Zip" is all fully manual, and you could do that with Twitch as well. You could fully flesh out your own modpack manually, and then export to CurseForge. You'd then have access to all the version controlling for all the mods you'd chosen to use in your modpack integrated into the pack as standard. You could "Import from zip", just by unzipping the pack into the profile folder, then clicking update. The manual stuff isn't the issue. It's the lack of one-click-installs. If VS created a bespoke mod manager and launcher that worked very much like Twitch, with version control for individual mods, as well as modpacks, in-built search functions, with one-click installs for mods, modpacks, resource packs, and moving forwards, different shaders, skins, and pre-genned maps, it'd be good. You'd also need to be able to use multiple instances of the game as standard, be able to use multiple accounts as standard, and be able to seamlessly use different versions of the game in each instance, without it asking to uninstall other versions. To me, creating a MultiMC-esque clone would be largely pointless. So much of it is manual that we might as well just copy zip files into folders, and call it all done. Creating a Twitch Launcher clone, however, would add huge playability to the game. You shouldn't need to manually download any file, open any browser window, or open Windows Explorer at all, ever, to be able to mod the game, and run multiple instances, over multiple versions, on multiple accounts. Comparing to MC isn't fair, in this case. There's a lot of variables there, and it is all run by the modding community, not by Mojang. Different modding groups tearing the community is different ways. Up until 1.12.2, it was largely harmonious, with Linux lagging behind, doing their own thing. After 1.13, it all changed, but that was nothing to do with Twitch, or with MultiMC, it was all down to the developers of the modloaders. With VS, modloading is fully integrated into the game as standard, so these deviations wouldn't affect it. Do it right, once, and it only ever needs to be refined, not overhauled. It's a perfect fit for the Twitch Launcher, and creating anything bespoke would only ever be an imitation of what Twitch and CurseForge currently offer.

"What everyone should do", and "what everyone does do" are two very different things. "What people does do", regardless of the atrocious grammatical consequences of such a phrase, is much closer to "what people will do" than what they should do. MultiMC is terrible compared to Twitch Laucher for Minecraft. With Twitch, it's an all-in-one. One click install, one click updates, and each mod is available to search for right there. Until Fabric came along, at least. I'm now forced to use MultiMC, and I miss almost everything about the Twitch Launcher because of it. With Twitch Launcher, I could just browse through the modpacks, install as many as I like, in the background, while I browse for more. Each would be loaded into it's own profile, and everything is set up for me. No browser, no websites, no other installs, everything in one place, as it should be. The only thing it lacked was the ability to easily create desktop shortcuts for different packs. You say that MultiMC does everything Twitch Launcher does... but it doesn't. The only packs you can install are legacy packs. There's no options to install maps, resource packs, or individual mods from a list. There's no version control for individual packs. All of that is manual, and there's no indication that manual version control is needed when a new version is released. It's nothing like Twitch Launcher. MultiMC also doesn't support Forge for the last 3 updates of the game. I use it because I'm forced to, because Schematica is no longer being maintained, and Litematica is only available for Fabric. Working in-house, within a nice bubble of self-control is fine. It works for small indie games that have no real ambition to grow. If Vintage Story wants to stay as a small enterprise, and remain fairly hidden then more power to it. Fight the system! But fighting the system comes at a huge penalty. Places like Steam may take 30%, but that is 30% of the millions upon millions of new customers it opens the game up to. If the game used MEF for plugins and mods, you'd have full support for adding and taking them away without restarting the game, regardless of what platform you get the mods from. You can build a very robust and secure modding API around MEF that seamlessly integrates into the existing architecture, because it revolves purely around the strategy pattern, to create a strongly typed base for reflection. A lot of Unity projects are moving to MEF for that reason. It's massively powerful in what it can do. For a long time, it was just seen as an IOC container, but it's perfect for game modding.