Rainbow Fresh

Tin Bronze. Got tons of since iron replaced it all and looks well enough with most wood-based lamp post designs I have.

That is, luckily, not my business. If you want a more secure experience with less angles of attack, everything that can be server-side authoritative is server-side authoritative. If you want a more performant experience, more things get outsourced to the client authority. If things are server authoritative people will complain about bad performance on anything but the beefiest servers. If it's client authoritative, people will complain about more cheaters and griefers as they will have a feast. Someone always loses so I am happy to not be responsible for making that decision. But considering how all this drama started in the first place and recently developments, clearly VS could use some more server authority on things.

By all means that is how any multiplayer game *should* work. Server-side authority. The client displays and gives client inputs. The server is the game. RNG should be rolled on the server so the client cannot just say "Actually, my 0.1% to win the jackpot always fires". And that is just a really silly statement. "If cheating doesn't bother you, fine. If it does, go somewhere else." If it was that simple cheating wouldn't be a problem. Sadly, there are plenty people out there who specifically enjoy games playing with others and if someone is in there who does bad stuff and makes the game unfun for those others, it is no longer fun.

The requirements for a chiseled block to count as insulating is that it - Has at least 50% of voxels remaining (value of a slab) - Has either the front or back most (looking from the side where the room is to be) pane missing a maximum of 32 voxels (1/8) missing - The root block (the one you right-clicked with the chisel) was made from an insulating material (not wood) If we were to get a better system I'd say a block counts as insulating when any pane in the two-face direction is solid (i.e. vertical left-to-right counts for front/back insulation, vertical front-to-back counts for left/right insulation and horizontal counts as top/bottom insulation) with the total voxel count dictating the insulating value - a single 1 voxel pane is barely counting as a room while a solid 50+% block retains the usual amount. With the current way the code is setup, calculating this would be basically no extra cost - you just track more situations. Of course this still does not allow corners but making a truly connection-based insulation system would require a rework of the entire room logic that can only get exponentially more taxing.

The saddest part about all of this is that all of this is and was very pointless in the grand scheme of things. Quoting OBAMFSpike "In 2026 IVE GROWN RATHER SICK OF CHEATS" - much like most anything else bad and questionable, it will not end. It never will because there is no way to stop it. Not cheating, not hacking, not piracy or anything similar. It comes and goes a small bit with the goodwill of the people behind it but some can simply never be changed. Maltiez said his little stunt "Fulfilled its purpose" because the cheat distributor in question "gave up on it" (even though the only proof of that I personally saw so far was a screenshot of a Discord message from - supposedly - the cheat creator stating they will "invest less" into the development of the VS cheat to focus on other game's cheats and "not guarantee function on heavily modded games"). But as Maltiez said aswell when lashing out at first about being found out - this "win" was solely built on the fact all this was hidden. It is no longer. And it would eventually have been discovered by someone regardless. If the old cheat developer will not return, a new one will appear. They always do. At best it's an infinite arms race between cheats bypassing anti-cheat and anti-cheats adapting to newer cheats - at worst we get TF2's public matchmaking because the anti-cheat developers gave up. The most thorough, waive all rights, Kernel-level memory scan anti-cheat was still bypassed in a matter of weeks (I remember this being Valorant when it became big.) So even if we ignore the mishandling on all sides - Maltiez's chosen course of action, Anego's chose course of inaction - at the end this was just a blip in history and tomorrow we go back to normal operations with normal cheaters that get combated by normal means.

Granted if you are blessed with finding surface tin immediately going for tin bronze is a good idea. Other than that though, you get the materials of the copper anvil back if you spend a copper+ chisel after upgrading to bronze and, if need be, you can further break down the ingots you get back into bits to resmelt into bronze. So I wouldn't consider it that big of a waste when getting that anvil and making a saw unlocks so much more of the game.

Crop growth is about the only thing natively tied to the days per month as it's calculated in month it takes to grow. Most everything else is based on a fixed time in days/hours. So increasing the length of month means crops grow slower (the same amount of months as before but months are more days) while hunger drains and food spoils "faster" (the same amount of fixed hours meaning food lasts shorter in terms of years). You might want to adjust the spoil rate in accordance. To my knowledge, the time recipes take (e.g. the amount of hours it takes to seal leather in a barrel) is not changeable without mods overwriting the recipe data. So without mods you won't be able to get leather "faster", and "earlier" would make not much sense as all you need for leather is hunting (doable in stone age), lime (based on worldgen RNG, not time) and copper (which is not the mid way point of the game by any metric).

In case some of our fellow forum dwellers do not know yet, there has been the "official response" by Tyron to whole situation. It's over here, on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageStory/comments/1w6iuqm/official_statement_regarding_the_configlib This has already sparked plenty new threads talking about it already, as this response clearly failed to put out the wildfire but seeing as most threads have or are already turning back into back-and-forth bickering between "defenders" and "witchhunters" I feel like rather opening my own to say my opinion on this. Tyron officially invited criticism as long as it doesn't break the rules, so here I am. And I see several problems with this statement that make it seems like it's still just a panicked flail more than a collected response (at best, or something much worse at worst.) EDIT: This post was apparently merged by a moderator with an older, existing thread without notice. I take no responsibility for things being in the wrong context now. 1. Communication A response was necessary. It is the only thing that could possibly try and do any meaningful amount of damage control at this point and the only thing with a chance to calm things down properly. Yet it is kinda ironic that the response itself is still not really well communicated. Part of the reasonable complaints during the time of prime escalation was the lack of organization in responses and more precisely, that the forums got the short end of the stick. The party happened in Discord, including all somewhat meaningful attempts by moderation to explain and calm things down while reddit turned into an unmoderatable warzone. While the forums were completely ignored. People here, who neither use Reddit (good choice) nor the Discord (can understand that), essentially lived a happy life until all the people banned on Discord moved over to voice their complaints here instead and the only thing, bar more or less out-of-context quoted screenshots of cherry-picked messages from the Discord, we saw from Anego is locking and even temporarily hiding threads talking about this entirely. If you already know the shitshow that was unfolding in real time those actions could make sense, if you just live a happy, ignorant life until someone comes barreling down the door screaming about a big government conspiracy before said government publicly executes that person before you - not a good impression. And now look at the statement again. It was solely posted on Reddit. Merely linked on Discord. And the official Vintage Story forums run by Anegos Studios themselves? Ignored once more. We don't even get an official post in News that link to the darn thing. I understand that Anegos is a small, inexperienced Indie studio currently at their wits end on how to deal with all this. I appreciate one of the conclusions drawn is that the entire handling of this situation was a colossal PR disaster and that literal "significant" funding is being devoted for better training of the team to prepare for things like this in the future. But future good intentions only go so far when the here and now is important too. The road ahead is long but that doesn't justify ignoring the bread crumbs in front of you right now. Posting the whole thing on Discord and the forums aswell, in full not linked, would have been the extra work of all of a whopping 30 seconds. If funding goes into better PR and crisis management training, the little extra effort of maintaining all three posts simultaneously should they actually need updating should be the least of your investments. Putting information out there to only one part of your community is not helping the image here, at all. 2. The structure Or in more plain terms, how this response nearly failed to even be read by me. I understand that completely firing Maltiez might not be the best course of action just because the internet wants to see blood. Or might not even be legally feasible and that no one wants a long, drawn out court fight over this. However the circumstances though, the fact still remains that damage was done and this needs to be a damage control and cleanup job. This response reads more like a "Yeah, something might be going on we'll look at it don't worry". Not to mention how tone deaf the opening paragraph reads. Like I said, I am aware that taking the action the people want might not be the right choice. However, one thing should have been pretty much clear: That Maltiez did something wrong is not up to discussion. That something needs to be done about the whole situation is not debatable. Most people who don't belong to one of the two most vocal factions of crusaders who were waiting for an official response to finalize their own judgement of Anegos Studios in this whole regard were not waiting to hear if something will be done - just for what will be done, as doing nothing would have been the death sentence. So the whole official response opening with a big paragraph that tl;dr reads as "There was a bad guy selling cheats, and Maltiez took it upon himself to mess with that guy, the end" is basically an insult. It is downplaying at best and defending at worst what was done, making the whole "steps taken" later feel just as much as an empty "I am sorry because people demand me to say it" response as Maltiez' own apology. It is, at this time of writing, still missing crucial information that shows the actual scale of damage done and conveniently just highlights the good intentions of Maltiez while claiming not being involved with the whole ordeal on sides of Anegos, apologizing for not being more involved to stop it. If people don't atleast force themselves to continue reading in hopes there is more to it, this part alone could very well be "all I needed to hear", and not in the good kind of way. I hope the reason here is that this response was attempted to be written objectively, without judgement or feeling, stating facts - but even then, like many, many people already pointed out, it is missing rather important facts. 3. The conclusion As I said above, steps needed to be taken. We just wanted to hear what these steps are. And the steps Anegos Studio is officially promising to take? Are a good first step in the right direction, but ain't it. I'm not talking about "Boo, they are keeping Maltiez". Once more, the whole employment situation is likely to be much more tricky than that. Him being banned from modding and his rather impactful work taken over by Anegos themselves until someone else can take over for good is, for all I care, good enough. I have enough base trust in Anegos left to believe that their code review process for official additions to the game is solid and Maltiez couldn't sneak random hidden malware into the game even if he wanted. After all, in any half decent build pipeline some lower employee like Maltiez wouldn't even get near the build process so sneaking things not mentioned in the pull requests in is not going to happen. However, this isn't about that. The actions against Maltiez are as reasonable as I can legally judge it (which is not at all, I am not a lawyer) and the promise to invest in better PR and crisis management is direly necessary. No, this is about what wasn't mentioned as part of the steps moving forward at, the actual true elephant in the room. What happens to ensure something like this cannot happen again. "We will write clearer rules/disclosure standards for mods maintained by Anego team members." This bullet point might not even exist that's how useless it is. There were already rules in place. As of time of this writing, the official ModDB ToS, point 2 of claims to mod uploading, states "You warrant that the mod contains no harmful or malicious code, no material which is defamatory, bullying, offensive, obscene, or pornographic, and no breach of copyright of any other person." Even if we were to argue this doesn't count as "harmful" (which it does for innocent false-positive users) or malicious (because of his good, good intentions), there is also point 5 "A mod must have a clear explanation of its function in the English description." This pretty much excludes smuggling in not document out-of-scope features. I checked with the Wayback machine on a snapshot of the ToS from August in case it was already updated. So yes, there were rules that are reasonably clear enough. And by all means, "...for mods maintained by Anego team members" is equally as pointless - Anegos team members should abide by the same quality and integrity standards as everyone else. It shouldn't be a bigger deal worth mentioning separately of how "Anegos team members" should behave versus "the common mod developer". They all should follow the same rules. This shitshow only escalated so badly fueled by the fact that "even an Anegos team member" broke the rules so blatantly and questionably. No, what really is missing here is lack of any plan on protecting the ModDB from this in the future. Because for all the personal opinion one can have about Maltiez and what he did now, there is one objective goal he most certainly achieved even if involuntarily: He opened the public's eyes, the hard way, on how much of a mere honor system the ModDB is and how scaringly easy it is for anyone to add actually destructive malware and distribute it. Today Maltiez added crashcode targeting cheaters. Tomorrow someone uploads a real sleeper trojan bundled in an inconspicuous food mod. And there are no mentions about any improvement to ModDB security and integrity of uploads. No checks, no automations no nothing that could prevent this from happening again but in worse, no that people know how easy it is to pull of. So in summary, this official response was necessary. And I appreciate it happening sooner rather than later. I also appreciate some positive lessons being learned from this and that Anegos is investing into a more prepared future. That said, however, the rest of this is falling way short of I expected to a degree that is borderline harmful again. I am not going to request a refund out of spite. I am not going to demonstratively deinstall the game from my PC. I was already out of motivation to continue playing before due to 250+ hour burnout and will hence not touch the game for a couple years, just like it always happens with Minecraft. I am, however, not sure if I want to invest the time and effort into further making mods myself seeing as the new world created by this blast will be one of distrust and I have too little knowledge to apply this "provenance" stuff myself without official guidelines or requirements on how. And I'll go see about how bearable these forums become when things maybe, hopefully, calm down for good.

Source? I re-read this entire supposed "ground truth mega thread" and didn't find any mention of this yet. It wasn't obfuscated, just hidden, which is your previous point.

Such is the way of the internet, things will always be taken too far on all sides. I, for one, am very angry and in favor of a stern resolution. But that doesn't mean I have to go post it 200 times in a row under every other person's reply. Some people do not follow this reasoning.

He added it to three of his most wide-spread mods, silently at some point in the past. In two of which, according to himself, also silently removed in the past aswell. Supposedly he pitched adding it to the base game but was shot down. The uproar is mostly around the fact adding malware to mods with debatable "malicious" intent is against the ModDB's ToS and general common sense, aswell as a major breach of trust that only escalates further considering he is, by now, official member of the VS dev team and as such representative for the game as a whole - to a degree.

*me, burning through +37% durability steel chisels like they are still made out of copper*

What mods is the server running? I feel like remembering there is a mod that lets monsters phase through walls during storms.

I think you might need to read the whole thing in context again then. The original point was discussing if alcohol, fruit OR grain with focus on fruit because it is the easier, more likely used version, has any purpose/is worth making in light of whether grain alcohol being so much worse statistically is actually a big problem that needs immediate solving or not. So analyzing the example on trial, fruit alcohol, my point was that it is equally just a "nice to have" optional vanity item. Fermented fruit alcohol still has fruit nutrition, but doesn't last forever. Distilled fruit alcohol lasts forever but has no longer has nutrition. Honey combines both without any additional preparation steps. Yes, you *can* preserve fruit longer by turning it into alcohol - losing satiety in the process regardless. Which is opposite to grain, which loses shelf life when turned into a liquid. But that is because your average local berries lasts a whopping 2 days. 4 if it's Cranberry. Grain lasts nearly a year. And turning it into jam and sealing it in a crock pot is an alternative to preservation within the realm of necessity for which my gut feeling tells me it preserves, if not (like any other meal) enriches, the satiety. So fermented fruit alcohol isn't really a great storage option all things considered. Alcohol, currently, is a nice to have for people who want to have it - for roleplay/immersion purposes or whatnot. And even if my Flax argument doesn't hold up, because grain lasts so incredibly long a player will eventually rack up unmanageable amounts of it which they might want to get rid of; and could turn into alcohol, either for a drink or to make aqua vitae. Is fruit better if you NEED a drink or aqua vitae? Yes. Is farming endless quantities of grain perceived easier than getting a big fruit farm going? I'd say also yes. Will people likely munch away on berries as they go because they are lazy and does this make them end up with even more grain to process? I sure am. So, still - I agree grain alcohol's numbers could use a little tweaking. But it is also not a gamebreaking issue.

I do get your point of view. I also got it before - and you are certainly not wrong. On a fundamental level, taking everything away and forcing the player through the entirety of the acquisition process again is, in a way, getting them to "interact with the world more". And yes, quenching is completely optional. But I hope you can equally see how there is value in our counter-arguments as well. Focusing on *just* one thing is usually not a good idea. A game that solely argues with "this is realistic" is gonna be a boring and frustrating as one that solely goes "this is balanced" - because in a truly, fully balanced game every single thing has the exact same stats so that imbalances cannot possibly happen. Yes the current quenching loop forces the player to do more which results in "more game being played" but simultaneously it doesn't make quenching any better, RNG any less frustrating and the question of if it is worth it any less debatable. Because if you consider that the player *has* to go out and 1: find more bauxite and quartz, 2: get more fireclay, 3: make bricks, 4: fire bricks, 5: make steel and finally 6: try again at an RNG roll every* time an item shatters; both when they go for min-maxing and when they just try it out once for fun but get unlucky - In turn it just drives players to not bother quenching at all. At some point you'll burn through entire tools in the process of just getting repeat materials to try and get a single "best" tool that is still just... a normal tool, that will eventually break. It's not like we're quenching for Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending Netherite here. We're just adding less than another, guaranteed tool worth of durability (unless someone actually goes for power, which I personally deem unworthy and any min-maxer would likely agree) at the cost of the entire process of a full new tool from scratch everytime RNG strikes - and when *truly* min-maxing it WILL strike countless of times before you reach the theoretical max. (* people would obviously fire more than a single steel ingot at once so the process does not have to be repeated every single time.) So while yes, the "Oops, sorry lad go digging again" quenching system we currently have is theoretically incentivizing "playing the game" over "sitting and throwing dice" - it is still throwing dice, just with a much more disincentivizing cost to the point the system can easily be considered "not worth it" and ignored entirely. And if you have to make a mechanic so unwanted just to follow the game design principle of "make the player do stuff", was the mechanic worth it to boot? That's why voices asking for a better quenching system frequently arise. How does a better quenching system look like? I can't really say. Luckily it is, however, also not my job to decide on that. Getting some material back sounds nice but agreeably, that would just feed the min-maxing as everyone can now easily spend x amount of time and y amount of renewable resources to get the best tools, so why wouldn't they. Long winter nights need to be passed somehow anyway. Not that it would break the economy as, as mentioned previously, the few ingots to make steel tools are nothing compared to anything else requiring metal. A waterwheel costs more than an entire set of tools. That's why I threw in my idea of an overall less impactful quenching system. The upper limit is heavily capped so it is, at best, "a nice buff" to make min-maxing less alluring and less impactful while simultaneously reducing the perceived loss and subsequent frustration if it does go wrong. I still think the RNG component should be replaced by a skill-based one but I have no idea how that would look like. This idea is also a very good suggestion in my opinion. Sure, it would require changing a small little something about how smithing as a whole works internally - but the game is constantly evolving anyway with many mechanics changing. This would atleast be the most indepth and immersive approach to the lossy philosophy. The ability to salvage the cracked item directly into something else, or deciding to scrap it fully and start over properly once having smelted enough of the bits into fresh steel again. It incentivizes creativity and making something better out of a "bad" situation. It still takes away the feeling of unnecessarily costly loss for something not necessarily incredible while also not simply incentivizing wasting endless amounts of time waiting and hoping min-maxing tools. Leading into this... I don't think there is more the game needs to take responsibility for. As you said, people will always try to min-max to a degree - some will go to any length. But a game should never be balanced solely around a specific edge. If people want to rather waste their time rolling dice than playing, even the most enticing game won't convince them otherwise. Meanwhile designing everything to be a costly loss just so the player cannot min-max without playing and those who don't care about that will feel frustrated about all the stones thrown into their path for no reason. There should be another way that does its best to accommodate both unless, of course, the developers want to specifically say "Fuck them" to a specific type player. Which would also be fair, can't make everyone happy and otherwise it leads to feature creep and washed down content. But yeah, new players getting frustrated and potentially quitting is not the game's fault? When it specifically introduced a mechanic that, albeit "optional", cannot be ignored as you said yourself people will always min-max to a degree? I think there is a fair amount of responsibility in there. I just think quenching could be better and the immediate thorn in most complaining people's side is the immediate atomar vaporization of hours of work producing steel due to a mechanic that is just RNG and nothing more. Either make it *feel* less lossy or make it less RNG to make it a better mechanic.

Why Anegos decided to keep the forum account separate from the game account? No idea. But the game account and the forum account are two different accounts. In order to have bought the game you needed to make a game account, so you should have that one. Maybe you just created it with a different email/password. You should atleast be able to check where the purchase confirmation came in. Another way to download I don't think so, but even if you get the client elsewhere you will still need to log in with your valid game account in-game to play.

There has been another thread with a very heated, very pointless endless discussion about the difference between "basically forever" and "forever". For some people, having something last 20 in-game years is still not enough and only something that doesn't even have a perish timer is. Distilled alcohol is the only version that does not have a perish timer at all and is, as such, truly long term storable. No matter that most people will not even reach year 20. But it loses the nutrition buff so it's a choice of one or the other whereas honey outclasses fruit wine in both - having no perish timer and counting as fruit nutrition. Not with new fruiting bush system in 1.22 as many people complained that they are just worse fruit trees now. So unless you always run around picking wild berry bushes it will take a year to grow a patch and then you only get one harvest per year. Meanwhile you can propagate several skeps from a single source in the first year and then harvest plenty of honey. Personal preference on what you'd rather prefer doing, for sure, but certainly not "harder" by any standard. Aqua Vitae is an end game resource so end game metrics apply. Especially since you can do just fine - so far in the game - without ever producing it as honey sulfur poultices are much more efficient. So if someone wants to specifically make Aqua Vitae for the sole sake of having made it they likely don't care about costs. If nothing else, the average player will also have a giant flax field much larger than their berry bush/tree plantation and since flax is such a bad grain, they're sitting on alot of the stuff unused to either feed their animals or process into something more useful like beer/Aqua Vitae. Still not disagreeing that the number for grain based alcohol could be a tad lower, just saying that it still doesn't end the world.

Does that mean every time you let the coal go out the RNG roll for breaking refractory bricks is done? Then hell nah that stuff needs to be babysat, otherwise constantly getting and pulverizing more stuff to replace the bricks just comes on top of the bill. The risk of losing the material is essential to how the mechanic works and that is the biggest pain point as to why people don't like it, mod it differently or just outright ignore it. And what is the point of a mechanic designed to be ignored? Consider the following: How high is the chance for an item to break with maximum tempering to reduce the odds before you hit a +100% durability? How much easier would it be to just... not bother to use this mechanic at all, ever, and just make a guaranteed second pickaxe/axe/whatever with the second ingot? It's gambling for diminishing returns. If at least the process was any more skill than luck based it could atleast feel like achieving something yourself, or failing because of something you did. If the cost wasn't a full 100% loss of everything maybe it would be more interesting to use. And to drag in your earlier response with the examples of how food values are balanced - yes, those are tweaked numbers to incentivize gameplay and it works; food is essential, quick and options a-plenty. You can eat predators in a pinch because bushmeat sucks but unless necessary people will just ignore them. Why bother if redmeat usually doesn't fight back and is much better. Fishing is a new contender and kinda nice for viable variety. Chickens are the easiest to domesticate so they give the least. Makes sense. Quenching is fully optional and just a dice roll. With the cost statistically always outweighing the benefit. A second ingot is worth a +100% durability quench, but by the time you get a +100% durability quench on an item, it is essentially guaranteed to break. And losing the whole thing to a 5% base roll for a base - what, 15%? 20%? increase feels bad. It disincentivizes using the entire mechanic to boot. I know this thread isn't about the quenching system - there have been others for this before - but if you could just realistically apply a *single* non-stacking quench buff depending on how you quench and the risk of failure was to instead get a debuff, that would be a more enticing system. Having a failed quench give you 20% less durability is still better than giving you hot air. And as mentioned otherwise, the loss of 1 ingot due to a broken (or not broken) tool during quenching is not gonna change anything about the balance of resource management or the need to interact with the world more. It worked fine before quenching became a thing where tools never broke unless you used them up fully and people still had reasons to go out and dig up entire ore veins to turn into big projects. That is correct. However, intentions of game design and balancing or not, the current system isn't incentivizing anything other than not interacting with it. Incentive comes from better results. You want to domesticate pigs over chickens despite it being harder, taking longer and costing more food because pigs give you better results. You want to cook meals over eating raw food because it gives better results. The whole food balancing you mentioned is about making options hierarchical as to incentivize to get higher "tiers" of food instead of the easy and cheap options. Quenching just loses more than it gives, guaranteed, depending how lucky you are - the shittiest "stat" to balance around. The OP's suggestion was to give some, if not all, material back when the quenching shatters. To which your counter-arguments were that it would disincentivize "playing the game" (going out, interact with the world more, get more resources) but incentivizes boringly sitting and waiting until the best quench result is achieved across many, many RNG tries. That isn't wrong per se as the notion is surely there, however the de facto result, as discussed in the rest of the thread there so far, speaks of a different outcome - the consideration of the cost of a single ingot isn't able to skew the "playing the game" part, getting bits back instead of just being able to immediately re-forge the tool for basically free still requires - in the case of steel, which everyone eventually gets to once having iron as it is just one additional step for much higher durability gear - a lot of time and resource investment and the sheer amount of time and resources needed to keep rerolling for a single tool that has notably better stats is so pointless noone who actually *wants* to play the game would do it. So much like following "realism" doesn't necessarily make for a good game, neither does solely designing things for balance. Because currently quenching feels neither balanced, nor worth interacting with on a larger scale. As such, the discussion naturally brought up the topic of how alternative ways to implement quenching could look like to try and find a middle ground between your complaints about the negative effects of changing quenching like the OP stated and still changing quenching in a way that is actually a good gameplay element.

A volumetric water model would be cool and allow for some real novelty in the blockgame department with true permanence. However I can only imagine the not-so-nice things it would do to the performance. Only two approaches I could think of are completely block-independent approach (something akin to entities as the Real Smoke mode does) or something that very heavily averages out water height across all connected blocks. Which would be a near-impossible nightmare with actual oceans. That said, however I understand where OP comes from and would agree. If the only two options are "spawn infinite water" or "be unable to influence water at all", the Minecraft middleground sounds like a good compromise. To my knowledge water CAN already propagate by itself into new source blocks (it just needs 3 instead of 2 sources around a target block and doesn't propagate vertically) so having a system where picking up water removes the block could be the best balance we get with the current implementation.

Compare the cost of making one steel pickaxe with the cost of making enough lanterns to light up a base, assuming you only have precious steel available. Even just a single small lantern costs twice as much as the pickaxe. That is without you gambling on making the pickaxe last for the entire rest of the game by quenching it to 3x durability. The argument that making quenching a *fun mechanic* that doesn't piss the player off through RNG-induced loss of material (which also entirely removes a QoL feature as you *always* risk shattering even if you just want to quickly cool down the workpiece as you can do with *any* other non-quenchable metal piece for free) is bad game design doesn't hold up, neither does the argument that fun quenching would "disincentivize the player from interacting more with the rest of the world." Again, even without quenching a single iron vein would produce enough steel that a normal player during a normal length playthrough would never burn through it all in steel tools alone. The majority of your resources gets gobbled up by anything BUT tools, quenching or not. And if nothing else, the tedium of acquiring high-tier metals (aka. making steel) already innately incentivize the player to go look for cheaper materials to make non-durability things that wouldn't benefit at all from steel. Also mind you, the game loop was working fine before quenching was ever introduced. What does it matter if they can return or not? Steel is incredibly boring and expensive to make on top of taking forever. The loss of even a single ingot due to an unavoidable baseline 5% chance feels shit. It doesn't matter the person can go back to their iron ore vein and mine a couple more blocks to get the necessary 20 bits to replace the ingot when the nearly 7 days process of burning all your charcoal is still in the way. Something you have to actively babysit as you cannot put all the coal in at once and do other things, so you are stuck to your base for those 7 days. This, mentally, is a much much higher price and detriment than *not* having to go back for that one ingot because you can retry the quenching. The solution is simple. Put an upper cap on it. Try and make quenching skill-based instead of RNG-based. Make it fun. The gameplay loop doesn't change.

When put into raw numbers like it really does sound bad. To be honest I didn't even know nor bother checking if grain alcohols existed though it does make sense they do. So I do agree that some part of this formula should probably be tweaked atleast a little bit. As you mentioned probably at point 1, 3 or 4. That said, however, I don't think it's that world ending-ly bad or critical for a few reasons you inadvertently brought up in passing along with other realism-based considerations. First off, the gameplay implications. The question is what is the point of alcohol? No matter if fruit wine or grain beer, it's not a good food source. Trying to survive solely off of that is an unnecessary hardcore challenge. And considering there is no need to drink in the game yet, alcohol brings nothing to the table that isn't cosmetic/for immersion purposes. If the first-best counter-argument is going to be "But it's the only way to store fruit long-term"; No, it isn't. As you said, alcohol has no nutrition. So your long-term stored fruit does nothing for your fruit nutrition in winter. Yes, non-distilled alcohol still lasts basically forever while retaining it's fruit origin but: Secondly, you already brought up honey. Honey is native forever fruit nutrition with no extra effort required. So storing fruit as wine is not actually achieving anything unique or new. And one can argue for personal preference on what is easier - mass cultivation of fruiting bushes for endless wine or mass cultivation of bees for infinite honey. You also said honey mead, despite falling in the same category of an abysmal 20:1 distillation ratio, is fine solely because "nobody would ever bother" as honey itself is already a forever food. Wouldn't the same argument then be true for all alcohol? Honey is forever fruit so why would you bother with fruit wine? Grain lasts basically forever by itself stored properly due to the lowest spoilage rate in clay vessels, so why would anyone bother making beer? The singular remaining purpose could be Aqua Vitae for the best healing item in the game; at which point the effort and lost nutrition value doesn't matter as you just process leftover scraps into non-perishable healing items. Also consider that horrible rate of grain-to-alcohol nutrition doesn't matter because by the time a player considers making especially grain-based alcohol they get an entire cellar full of grain per harvest; stuff they could never eat all before it spoils. So if there is no immediate gameplay reason to ever make alcohol, at all, the reason why people might still want to do it is the immersion and variety side of things. Many other discussions already talked about the lack of food options, in general and especially when talking about which food is "good" because the house pie always wins. Variety itself just exists and doesn't care about what is easier or harder to make and the immersion aspect is usually fueled by things being realistic/believable. Most points here are - don't know about the input requirement though, am no brewer. Spoilage: Makes sense. Grains are so long-lasting because they are dry and hardy. Soak them, ground, in water and let them "rot control-ably" and they will spoil sooner. Only further distillation which removes the water content (hotpot for any form of unwanted life) and leaves more heavily concentrated alcohol makes it last longer. Distillation: Realistically grain-based beers have a lower alcohol content than fruit-based wines. Therefor it takes alot more to distill out the same amount of alcohol with the same concentration. Nutrition: Also makes sense as the origin of the alcohol is distilled away with pure, high concentration alcohol remaining. Satiety: While frequent beer consumption is something to consider when trying to diet as beer does have notable calories which only go away when going with alcohol-free beers instead, living off of beer alone for your daily requirements is a bad idea for several reasons - liver failure being certainly up there. So it makes sense that alcohol would be a bad food compared to the meals you could have easily made out of the ingredients. So tl;dr alcohol is nothing more than a vanity item for people interested in it, as such it doesn't matter too badly that it is unbalanced in a "bad, useless" way in terms of food discussion. Especially since most of these limitations are atleast grounded in believable realism far enough to make sense. However, it should still be tweaked a bit if only to make these vanity options truly equally appealing and accessible.

Which is the goal for any discussion of building blocks. The person wanting nothing but a "effectively functional" "room" to do the bare minimum will never consider anything but the cheapest block to obtain that fulfills this purpose. In which case they'd not even use rammed earth cause it costs more than normal earth and both blocks have the exact same effect if you don't deliberately turn on block instability. Everyone else is left with the eternal struggle of obtaining ashlar bricks vs. cobblestone, weighing the tradeoffs of daub vs. clay bricks and so on.

Leaving aside Rammed Earth, cause I do not think that dried, crusty dirt is a valid comparison in building material cause anyone actually wanting to build nice, lasting buildings will have to move past the dirt cube, I think the imbalance would somewhat sort itself out once the developers push closer to their intended goal of removing grid crafting. Currently, the only influential factor for weighing options beyond raw material is that metal-based things require smithing, ceramic-based things require forming and baking a bunch of clay and ashlar bricks require tediously extracting whole-grain rocks. The rest is solely determined by how many resources you need to shove into the crafting grid and Daub is certainly on the "oof, that's alotta stuff" side. If other options would take more involved, multi-step in-world processes then maybe mixing the daub and just right clicking it on the wattle like before would be a nicer, quicker alternative to having to mortar and place every individual brick or something.

The game doesn't even exist for 25 years nor have I thought about cocoa or its lack thereof before now, but I do agree that an aquarium would be a cool addition.

While certainly a nice-to-have suggestion you also have to consider that the reason *why* there is a zoo of different configuration formats and styles is because any mod can define it's own config from custom values that then get simply somehow serialized. You could have a complex data format made from a custom class/struct backing it that would break if you turned a 0 into 1 without another 2 being a 3. Catch-all mapping that would be neigh impossible and enforcing one go-to style would break a fair share of mods until updated; some of which may never will.