Rainbow Fresh

That's what I'd call fair

This is about the fact that disk storage space - especially in these trying times - doesn't grow on trees and every user of the Vintage Story forums gets a fixed 50MB of disk space allotted for the uploading of files therein. Everytime you drag and drop (or copy and paste) an image into a post, you upload that very file in its entire size to the Vintage Story forums CDN, stored on Anegos Studio's servers, taking up space. So that they themselves can serve and display that picture anywhere you embed it into a post, not being reliant on external sources not being down to show content. Would theoretically work for any file shared, though I am not sure if Anego's allows uploading anything other than .png/.jpg/.gif/.bmp. Once you reached your attachments limit by using up all 50MB (or enough that the new image to try to upload would go over that), they won't let you. You first have to go, as LadyWYT explained above, into your profile's attachments section and remove already existing file uploads to make space, removing them entirely from the forums. On a side note, none of this would be a problem if Anegos would let us use the existing feature of this forum software to soft embed externally linked content (so we can upload our stuff to e.g. imgur or gyazo however much we want) but they blacklisted every URL that isn't coming from the vintagestory.at domain itself. Which means, if you wanted to experimentally poke the bear, your best bet would be to create draft-only mods on the ModDB, upload your showcase images there and link to them in a post here - though I am sure sooner or later someone would figure that out and not be too happy about it.

As other big creature mods kindly warn, the more animals you add the more clogged the spawn pool becomes. There is a limit for how many animals the game spawns in general per area, but the more options there are to spawn from the less likely each individual one is to appear. And depending on how well balanced the spawn conditions for modded creatures are, they might effectively make vanilla animals go extinct. I have so far only used one (still outdated smh) FotSA mod alongside horses and felt them big meatslabs on legs spawning a fair bit too often/plentiful for how much loot they drop so I'd be careful ore go meddle with the configs to tweak things if you plan on ramming your game choke full of new animals. I don't have any actual experience with this as I do not play on public servers, so someone else with more knowledge may step in here - but afaik VS has no mod blacklisting feature (which people have lamented and discussed regarding client side cheats like that X-Ray one before). So if a mod runs just fine solely on the client, nothing should be stopping you from using it; except for potentially the server owners prohibiting such in the server rules and banning you. Usually that should be fine though, as the game is mostly server-side authorative (except for where cheats matter) and client-only mods can't do much by themselves so the options are safely limited.

Because unless we dive into steel alloys or something to give the cementation furnace an edge - it becomes immediately obsolete to the point where there is no reason reason to ever make one. Gameplay-wise the progression right now is to make iron ingots from iron blooms in a bloomery - batch size of 6, needs post-processing. Steel in the cementation furnace, batch size of 16, requires pre-processing, post-processing and a shitton of time. If we now add means to cast iron/steel akin to a crucible (+- pre-processing of resources), you can easily mass produce iron and steel without having to deal with the post-processing. If that is available before the cementation furnace, why would you downgrade to one, ever?

Leaving the discussion for iron and steel variants/alloys as additional metallurgy content aside for another discussion, I'm all for a processing tier after the cementation furnace; something that allows us to produce iron or steel in bulk without all the painstaking intermediary steps. If it requires having made some steel first in said cementation furnace to build, makes sense. If it requires tier 3 refractory bricks, makes sense. Hell, even if it is technically more expensive to run than the bloomery + smithing or cementation furnace + smithing equivalent, so be it; the ability to just feed the beast and then pour 10 ready-to-use ingots is worth it.

While I do agree that oceans are currently incredibly underdeveloped and that some form of notable, potentially even actively hostile life in it is sorely missing - generally just adding danger for the sake of it makes for a weak argument. The player "feeling adrenaline and being on high alert" isn't so much the core to VS's gameplay loop as it is a reasonable, natural consequence to how the world is built. Not to mention that you can easily turn many parts of that off - passive hostiles, no rift spawns, no temporal storms. Isn't the official Homo Sapiens gamemode completely without lore content and as such monsters? The tension exists because the elements that are reasonably in the game - wolves and bears inhabit the forests, monsters roam the resource-rich depths and, while enabled, the sky can decide to poop out 100 drifters at any point in time. On top of all the passive hazards like otherwise passive/fleeing animals deciding to defend themselves when approached, pits straight to bedrock opening up in the ground and kudos if you actually turn on cave-ins and soil instability. These mechanics by themselves serve a purpose (or atleast the potential of one, if further refined as a mechanic). Animals having more than "run away while in x distance to player" behavior makes for a better, more immersive experience. Having natural predators (who themselves hunt prey), too, makes for a more diverse, immersive world. The monsters are part of the lore content and it is explained why they are. Fix temporal storms and they could even potentially be considered a great feature. And, while natively optional due to highly debatable results, cave-ins/soil instability also makes sense; soil isn't the most robust building material and cave-ins are a genuine threat in mining. None of the features are (or atleast seem like they are) added because a dev thought "The world is too peaceful, time to dump more hazards everywhere". So coming back to your suggestion: Effectively saying "The ocean is too boring and peaceful so we should add monsters that make ocean travel a pain" is the wrong approach. Sharks? Make sense. Not just sharks, more rich and diverse aquatic wildlife in general. We have physical fish and actual fishing already. How about more? Sharks as the wolves of the sea. Maybe puffer fish or other poisonous fish much like eating every mushroom is a risky move. Jellyfish that sting and poison if touched, to add that "swimming on foot is suicide" feeling. None of which are added because "oceans are too safe", but because "oceans are lacking any meaningful content to bring them up to speed with the land-based content". Which shows specifically in the underwater bowtorns you suggested - why would they be there? Granted, I am not quite fully in the clear as to how the rot and the rust play together in the lore so I am not sure if the rust monsters are solely interdimensional beings or if they are primarily underground because all the people in their bunkers got infected and turned into them. If the latter though, where would the underwater monsters come from, if people sought shelter in the ground, not the sea? Gameplay-wise, what would there be that needs guarding by clearly artificial means (think guardians in Minecraft ocean monuments)? There would need to be some kind of incentive, some kind of resource to gain from the ocean that is worth defending? Caves crawl with high tier monsters because down there is where the good ore veins are. What is at the sea floor for big, boat-sinking ballista bowtorns to defend it? And if the answer is solely "the right of easy travel" because, yes, if given the right world generation traveling via fully decked out sailboat is one of the nicest things possible - that however shows the greater problem with water in current VS itself though; there just isn't any to speak of. In the default world gen settings you'll barely find a big lake worth of ocean on your thousands of blocks travels. We have no rivers to effectively connect bodies of water and make boat travel long-term viable. Even if you do find an ocean, chances are you can rather easily just ride around it; certainly more easily than bringing all the materials to build a full sailboat all the way out here just to cross this one oversized pond. So before we can truly think about adding meaning to the seven seas, we would need seven seas to begin with.

I was about to suggest Better Ruins too. I do agree that the world of Vintage Story as it currently is is empty and that makes it certainly more boring than Minecraft's; but as you mentioned at the beginning, there are two ways to try and remedy this and the "shortcut" option that just tells you where everything is so you can minimize interacting with the world isn't it so we ought to rather make it more interesting by itself. Rivers will be nice and once we get content to go along the procedural dungeon mechanic there might be more interesting things to find. I'd also love for slightly more variety in intra-climate-zone "biomes"; not just forest of up to 4 kinds of trees, plains, gravel deserts, lakes and mountains. And atleast Better Ruins does add things to find, alongside a fair share of more story locations maps tell you to go to which are usually about 10-15k blocks away. Better Ruins is by no means a fix-all solution as it does drastically change exploration and will eventually become dull too; in my singleplayer world of 200h I have traveled around in a ~6-10k block radius from my home base. It's nice to have things to find, constantly scanning the horizon and uncolored map to find traces of something out of the ordinary. But then the biggest problem becomes needing 3 trips to even reach my original destination as every second ruin my inventory will be full of loot that I need to haul back. And by the time you run across the third giant identical cathedral ruin you might even start considering to skip that one as it's not worth the effort anymore.

Yeah, I agree with the responses before me. Vintage Story isn't Minecraft, it's supposed to be more challenging, less forgiving and a whole lot more complex than that. I didn't know Minecraft is now adding random ass maps for biomes but, while it doesn't surprise me in the slightest, that is just another step of lobotimization. It works for the chill sandbox building simulator kids game that Minecraft is and may alleviate some of the frustration you mentioned having - but it also even further kills any sense of exploration. In Minecraft that is bad because exploration is nice; the world generator is amazing and everytime I played that game I spent the vast majority of the beginning just running around until I find "The Spot" to build my base. But then you have easily obtainable maps that tell you where everything is. Woodland mansion? Back in my days *cough cough* they were that really special, really rare find you come across. These days, they spawn what feels like every 500 blocks of dark oak forest and you can abduct a villager to sell you a map for free(tm) - more effort than the building with its lack of loot and content is even worth. Trial chambers spawn one per region iirc (aka 16x16 chunks) and yet you can still get a map if finding the giant structure in a minisculy larger search radius is too much work. Ocean monuments spawn what feels like every 500 blocks making ocean travel more of a nuisance; but even then you can get a map telling you where one is. Ironically enough the one map you'd need, treasure maps, are usually useless because they point to a place you have already been to. What about just going around exploring, looking at the world, drawing your own atlas map grid? You get Elytra aprox. 20 minutes in and at that point your only limitation is your gunpowder production and how fast your PC can generate new chunks. And if you really need to find something very specific and you need it NOW - "/locate biome/structure/poi xyz" exists. No external tools required. So making that available to even the survival player feels like yet another step down. Granted, traveling in Vintage Story is different. The world isn't nice. It is empty and samey. You don't travel to find beautiful scenery because the big, flat, green area next to a lake you built your base on is probably the nicest you will find outside of going 20k blocks north or south to see "change". But instead, traveling is a logistical challenge incentivized through exactly that need for resources you don't have with no clue where to get them. You need lime? You can search for a trader. Then, once you found one or more selling lime on rotation plan and establish a trader route network to earn gears and buy lime with them every so often. Or you can explore to find the necessary rock strata to get it for free and in notable quantities. Plan for a longer expedition. Invest into an elk to speed things up. Invest a sailboat if there is enough ocean(s) in your world. Invest into translocators. Then, once you found what you need far away, establish an outpost(s). Having maps to specific things outside of the story locations (which are fully optional) and the treasure maps? negates that challenge. You just know where things are and can do the minimal effort required; and then what's left to do? Your map with your own waypoints after you went exploring is what tells you where everything is.

I, too, would like a way to copy existing designs but I also do think that it is fair enough reasoning for the game to not have it and leave it to mods. Chiseling is hard and repetitive work and bringing in the dreaded "realism" argument, people back then surely did not have precision machines that could mass-produce things. Giving builds and ornaments that were hand-crafted like that a real value and status. Which plays nicely into Multiplayer. So I'd rather leave that option to mods, of which there exist a few - and I would personally recommend ChiselWiz because it's the most "fair" in my opinion, allowing you to copy a design while still taking (less) time per block and taking the full durability of the chisel as it's a mere client mod that automatically sends the commands for each chisel operation needed to recreate your design to the server in quick succession; effectively auto-chiseling based on an existing design.

To focus a bit more on this rather small side node - I could see a quality system existing in theory, one that works for vintage story. It would naturally not be based on arbitrary numbers that outweigh a player's every move. They would also not apply to materials or simple crafted results from such materials like blocks. The only place I could see this fitting is also the only place currently in the game requiring a semblence of skill to achieve while currently having a rather frustrating "mere number" (RNG) system attached to it: Smithing equipment. I have recently been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 alot and rather like the smithing system of the game; it is simple enough (and get rather repetitive once you know what you are doing) but tl;dr the point is that the quality of the smithed blade/axe/weapon is based off of how well you did during the smithing process, tracking whether or not you overheated the metal, whether or not you hammered it while it was too cold and how well spaced out and balanced on all parts/both sides of the workpiece your swings were. Granted this only works because of the game-ified overall approach to smithing where you just heat 3 sections of the workpiece and essentially magically hammer a metal stick into a sword and wouldn't apply to VS's 3D voxel system; but something along those lines could be added alongside more forgiving failure in quenching - doing things fast and right gives a pristine result with best stats, making mistakes or it taking damage during quenching give degraded quality.

It does a few things these days, for better or worse. The changed music during storms is, iirc, addon based to begin with. The funky effects, the spoopy dave, the 12x monster spawns on apocalyptic, the violent "I can't see shit" shaking all the time, new monster sounds and bellhead shiver bell behavior are part of the base though.

Reading the title alone I thought you meant actual nightmares as a random chance when you sleep Putting LadyWYT's interpretation aside for a moment, I think those locusts would be innately funny rather than nightmare. I know I am spoiled by temporal symphony actually turning bellhead shivers into fast as fuck bells on legs (aka. actually functional as bell AND shiver) but imagine a tiny, normal locust with a tiny bell. They already make funny but annoying enough sounds, now imagine a walking bike bell following you going "Ding ding ding" every step. And putting a second head on it (bonus points if it's at the ass to just make it look/able to walk both directions) could never be scary. Of course if they get the same ridiculous damage stats as a sawblade locust that might quickly turn less "haha" - but the concept is there!

...I really don't see how that would change anything. You'd still have to memorize previous results in some way or form, otherwise you just go back and forth between spots you have already been in getting the same measurements over and over again while wasting away your propick. There are more than enough way to deal with this - chatlog has the last results so if you follow a linear pattern you can count back how many measurements you took to read the old result; for when you e.g. dig a hole into the wall every 6 blocks in a tunnel. You can bring charcoal, chalk or other pigments and draw symbols on the wall representing if you have a small, medium or large amount measured. You can bring a book and write notes. You can make a waypoint on the map that you name accordingly. None of this has anything to do with the propick destroying the block in the measurement process and none of this changes if it wouldn't.

All the world settings are essentially difficulty settings as they directly affect gameplay. Even world generation "landform" settings could be considered that because adding more water than usual could make the game harder as boat travel becomes required and boats are very expensive to make. Normal settings would be akin to the graphics and audio settings. Granted, the display of names being in the same category as e.g. subtitles would be and something that globally affects the game as a whole could be seen as a potential general setting but the original gripe was that it is "hard" to have prospecting results that don't tell you anything unless you figure out what the rock type names equate to (which you can find out in-game through studying the handbook). This makes it a "difficulty" (albeit one that makes sense) and changing would equate to a difficulty setting.

...well, if you still want to mess with bombs for any reason, feel free to reach out. I already worked on a function library that allows a few more things to be done without breaking vanilla.