Rainbow Fresh

That bad, eh? I was just curious thinking the risk of cave-ins would give me a reason to build proper, supported, good looking mineshafts over just digging straight until the propick says "you arrived at your destination". But if it's outright non-functionally bugged like that, maybe I should drop that sentiment.

I was curious about the option to enable cave-ins. As my difficulty is derived from slightly modified "standard" difficulty, I have been spending the last 1.5 in-game years all the way up to the break of the iron age with them being disabled. If I were to turn that on now just to see if that makes for a fun challenge: - Does it affect any block existing in the world, or is this a world-gen condition that only applies to newly generated terrain? - How bad/unforgiving is the collapsing? Like, will all my previously mined places just immediately implode on themselves when next updated or does it take some serious excavation to run into any issues? - How exactly does it actually work?

Cool ad. Wrong forum though. https://www.vintagestory.at/forums/forum/21-multiplayer/

Big cats would be a death sentence for any unarmored player. Because speed is everything. If you can outrun it, you can live no matter what. If you can't, you die. It's why only some people struggle with bears or wolves. Don't wear armor (very counter-intuitive) and you can outrun them. Have a nice, big open kiting area and with your inhuman ability to sprint backwards while poking with a spear, they die with no chance to fight back. Other animals like elephants, crocodiles and hippos would be a different interesting story though. As their whole deal is not chasing you, but making it very clear that any trespassing in their "you enter, you die" zone is a bad idea. Which is, you know, a requirement to hunt them. Making them interesting "mini boss"-esque creatures with very rare, valuable loot at the risk of purely how well you can hit them while avoiding to be hit.

I do agree that the current loop around survival's greatest (in a world where water doesn't matter) resource, food, is a bit lacking and scewed. In the early game it might work to achieve the wanted result, in the later game, when you have more food from a single farm harvest than you can reasonably eat before it spoils even with preservation, it just becomes a chore to constantly keep several servings of something on you just so you can slurp it like water. The reason I haven't made any armor in my world yet and instead just got addicted to bandages is because... you can heal damage back without losing too much satiety in the process. Wearing armor to not lose as much health in the first place drains your hunger even faster. I understand armor needs debuffs to balance it and that wearing around with several kilos of heavy metal on your body would make you exercise more, increasing hunger - but still, kinda just discouragingly bothersome. I also agree that it is a shame and an oversight the game has no need for hydration - it's why I consider the "Hydrate or Diedrate" mod a non-negotiable must-have for any world anyone ever wants me to player more than 10 minutes in. Though I guess these things are planned, considering the entire "warm" side of the world is lacking any meaningful content so far. You can freeze to death - but being in 50°C is perfectly fine. That said, I'm not sure your proposed approach to this system is the ideal solution either. You called the current system "fairly in-depth for an arcade-type game", meaning you don't see Vintage Story as a hardcore, no-fun-allowed survival struggle simulator but rather still as a game that game-ifies certain aspects for the sake of fun. Which is the greatest hurdle of balance in any type of game seeing as the innate nature of why games are a fun way to spend your limited free-time is because you can escape the burdens and hardships of reality, even if just temporary. Accusations of "a second full-time job levels of grinding" (not for Vintage Story per-se, just in general) come to mind. And atleast some of the aspects you mentioned feel like dragging things out a bit far. Lemme start with my biggest pain point: Your suggestion to the healing system. While, yes, slapping on a cloth with herbal toothpaste onto your gushing stabwound is overly game-ified, a painstakingly slow healing system would just detract from the game being played. 7 Days 2 Die, a zombie apocalypse block-game(-ish), has such a wound system. Fall a block too far? Have a potentially sprained ankle or even broken leg which now reduces, even with applied healing material (which only lessens effects and speeds up healing a bit) your walkspeed, aswell as damage on sprinting or jumping or (if broken) completely disabling these for up to a real-world hour. This is quite frustrating, and we are talking about a game where you can solve all your hostile, shambling problems with various big guns. Transpose this to Vintage Story and I can't imagine that resulting in a good time. Considering how often you fall down places. You'd spend half the game in a plaster with crutches, a game where you can barely outrun certain common threats to life with no debuffs and where getting things done quick in the available time of day and the remainder of non-winter seasons running all over the place, is the norm. A status effect system is in the works, or atleast planned, which could help add more flavor, danger and meaning to the moment. Like bleeding wounds that need a bandage to stop, infections that need medicine or something like that. But making every single scratch you take a potentially hour long waiting game? No thank you, I can go back to watching people suffer in "Minecrafts HARDEST (for the 5th time) modpack" videos for that experience. At that point, setting temporal gear respawns to infinite uses and just respawning yourself everytime you get handicapped will likely quickly become the new meta to play. Which is not a good meta to have. Now as for the actual rework hunger; a more complex hunger system seems in order. While the level of depth and detail to the tracked metrics like fat vs muscle and such might be a bit too much, having a hunger system that is more complex than "Bar goes down. Eat food. Bar full. Repeat indefinitely." is certainly in order. I like the idea of having gradual starvation aking to games like Rimworld or Project Zomboid. A counter-balance to just normal food consumption. When satiety is empty, starvation builds up which makes you gradually weaker until you die. Eating things then slowly recovers from that. It doesn't necessarily have to track body fat development but just having a slow secondary metric tied to hunger would do wonders. Reaching 0 satiety isn't immediately punished by damage, resulting in more satiety drain for healing in a self-reinforcing spiral towards death, but prolonged lack of sufficient sustenance is penalized harder. Starvation slowly goes away when satiety is kept above, lets say, 75%. Faster if your nutrition categories are balanced, much like your max health increasing with a balanced diet. Or maybe, to lean a bit more into realism, faster starvation recovery drains protein nutrition, much like health recovery drains satiety. And while I think that the imbalance between the eventual overencumbarance with available food versus the constant non-stop consumption of it should be tweaked too - I don't feel like the current food system as a whole supports that. It is theoretically realistic to require one hearty or two normal meals a day as a grown human adult, with some snack as necessary. So having a drain that equals a big meal replenishing about your entire 1500 satiety or two smaller ones with a berry snack inbetween, maybe, seems reasonably already. Food is just that constant of a chore for living creatures. And the non-immediate death when your stomach hits empty could alleviate that by reducing the immediate need to constantly eat non-stop as you can run on empty for a bit and then recover at home with a hearty feast for a couple days. But beyond that the entire balance we currently have would crumble. You said two pieces of bushmeat would realistically sustain you for a day (or atleast make you not starve). If we were to balance stuff around that, prepared meals with multiple ingredients would need a gigantic debuff. Which then removes the incentive, aside from "yummy dish" roleplay, to ever invest into proper meals when you can just kill a rabbit, cook it, eat it and call it a day. That would also mean that your average big gain animal would sustain you for several days, assuming you can preserve the meat that long. And suddenly the need to setup proper farming or animal husbandry is gone, as food is even more, even earlier abundant. So yeah, Tl;dr while I agree the current system feels lacking, I don't see an easy solution that wouldn't have the effect of using an axe fur surgery.

Iirc there was talk about how caves will have more horizontal, "traditional" cave openings later before connecting to any shafts once they figure out a better generation algorithm?

See, that's some informative context someone outside of your friend group couldn't have possibly known. It's why you yourself are best suited to make such decisions. This also seems like it's gonna potentially devolve into psychological guessing games, so not wanting to be eligle for blame I'm just gonna play it safe - the decision is simple: If you gift the game and the person just straight up hates it, never even touches it and the money gone into the gift is going to waste. Would that be a big enough problem to outweigh the chance of the person joining you and your other friend in Vintage Story instead so you don't have to play baby's first block game anymore? If so - don't risk it. If money isn't the problem, just do it. Worst case scenario you'll just find out your interest in block games is not compatible.

Who?

All these answers are based on what I know from other discussions or wiki information, not because I changed the month length myself: 1. Yes 2. Yes - Just look at the currently set value (running the /worldconfig xyz command with out a value after tells you the current value iirc) and do some percentage calculation to even it out. E.g., if you spoil rate is 1 on 9 days, you'd want about 0.67 for 12 days. 3. Don't think so? As for something needing to be tweaked alongside, see 4 4. No. Hunger drain remains the same iirc. Therefor you might also want to adjust the hunger rate multiplier in accordance, much like the spoil rate, to account for slower crop growth.

I personally don't think that strangers on the internet should be anyone's go-to source for advice on solving their personal friendship woes, as you certainly know any involved person better than we do. That said, sounds like typical run-of-the-mill evasive behavior making it a rather small chance they will like the game if they try, and a much larger they can't even be bothered to play more than once for like 15 minutes due to "gift debt". I'd save my money, but I've always been a cheapskate.

Welcome to the game and forums! Can't say much on performance. My game runs mostly smooth, unless the expected lag when generating new terrain at slightly higher than default render distance - had that in TOBG too. And some occasional, seemingly random lag spikes. But I can't say if that is my 60 mods, the game, or my PC. As for what to expect; yes, Vintage Story is a comparatively hard survival game. Comparative to your average vanilla Minecraft, for example. There are certainly modpacks out there that make MC much harder than Vintage Story, but so are there such mods for VS aswell. Prepare to expect falling on your ass when you underestimate challenges, don't think you can always just run in guns blazing into any encounter, take winter *very* seriously and expect to spend a fair bit longer on some things. As for tips for starting out... I think these two threads already cover a few good things to keep in mind. And so does this thread give you an idea or two for what mods you might want to look into: Ultimately though, it depends on you what you want from the game. Terrain generation mods you should certainly look into beforehand, but most other things can be added later if you feel the need for it. Just always keep in mind to backup your world before meddling with the modlist, and make sure to only focus on mods that are compatible with the current major version of the game (1.22.x)

Not quite the type of "veteran" knowledge to pass down as I learned it about 10 minutes later and maybe doesn't even affect most new players - but the game didn't tell me so I am telling you: Yes you can interact with those weird people in the carts/houses, no you cannot hold anything in your hand to do so, and most certainly don't hold a rock when trying to right-click.

For no nefarious IP theft purpose of my own, I am counting from the screenshot on your tavern both the lower stone floor and the middle floor have 3 high walls. Is the basement just a two-high cramped space or did you use some other magic to have a floor between them?

I love chiseling, you love chiseling - we all love chiseling. And what we all love even more is those swanky mods that let us actually chisel in peace. You know, the ones that let you copy and paste designs so we don't get carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking the same 200 chiseling steps over and over and over again. But unless you have the ability to steal ready-made copy'n'paste blueprints from the interwebz, one big problem remains: Actually coming up with the design in the first place. A process that, if done in survival, is a very tedious and unnecessarily resource intensive one. A single chiseled block consuming 20 different block types, just for the end result to only need 3. So I don't blame you if you quickly dip over into creative mode to do that - I sure am doing the same. But that gave me an idea: What if there was a survival friendly way to experiment with chisel block designs? Some sort of workbench table you can craft, that allows you to experiment around with any block you want as if you were in creative; but only to save a chiseled block design for later use, all in otherwise survival mode. The best of both worlds. Integrated into one of the common chiseling mods with blueprint function (like ChiselWiz or Chisel Tools), or even with it's own survival-friendly, non-cheaty blueprint pasting feature. Just an idea. Probably gonna be complex as hell if possible at all. Commision: No. This is a random idea I threw together and wanted to throw out here to see if people think this would be a good idea, and for someone with the necessary skills and interest to potentially try their hands on if they got nothing else to do. I am not looking to commission anyone to create this mod at this time.

*PTSD flashbacks last time I accidentally opened the door during a temporal storm*

I did find actually craftable chains and with a bit of convenient overlapping beam placements, I got the result I wanted.

I don't know about lore implications and I can obviously not speak for the actual developer's reasoning, but I can try argue as to why it makes sense to me and why I do not agree with some points you brought up in order to try and reason as to why this mechanic might be how it is. You mentioned the game's progression requiring going further out being a contradiction to the respawn model that heavily penalizes ever moving more than 1000 blocks from world spawn. I don't see that as a contradiction but rather the chosen attempt at being a challenge. Death should be penalized. Of course there should also be options to make the penalty weaker or remove it alltogether because not everybody likes to play the same level of challenge and not everyone might be capable of dealing with it - which there are in difficulty options and mods - but ultimately, by design, there needs to be some form of penalty to make a challenge. Give people infinite respawns anytime they sleep, turn on keepInventory and boom you have players happily running into a bear on purpose cause it gets them back home faster than walking 5000 blocks back. I know that, because it pisses me off everytime I have to allow this behavior on server I administrate. So following this logic, death needs to be a challenging penalty, as most of the game's challenging elements revolve around... not dying. You start out near spawn, and slowly move your way outwards. As you progress you unlock new means of defense, of travel. You get the ability to set your spawn elsewhere, but only as long as you keep supplying it with temporal gears (or... don't die that often). Deliberately setting your spawn point is a choice of whethere it is worth investing that somewhat rare temporal gear or not. You could carry one around and set spawn when you get to a clearly dangerous location - but is it worth it? Is it worth risking to die elsewhere with your spawnpoint now set here until you return home and reset it? Are you better off marking the location down and coming back later when you are prepared for what lies inside? You also get better gear to survive bigger threats. You get more resources so that losing some of that gear when dying doesn't matter as much as if you run out in your first ever plate armor using up all your remaining ingots. It's a naturally scaling challenge that works the same no matter your phase of the game. It penalizes risky play and incentivises planning, carefulness and preparation. It introduces a passive linear progression system into an otherwise open world sandbox. So seeing that Vintage Story sells itself as an "uncompromising wilderness survival" experience, it makes sense that the default way to play means dying is bad, potentially really bad, and you should avoid it at all cost. Not try and kite a bear with a flint spear just for the fun of trying it and then dying and walking off like nothing happened. Also, I feel like this is a bit of an overreaction. Why would you go and delete the entire world just because you died in the early game? At that point it doesn't sound like you lost much of anything to begin with as you didn't have anything yet. Making it less devestating and more of a learning experience. If course yes, wolves and bears are kinda jank and somewhat frustrating at times right now, but that isn't a fault of the death mechanic imo.

It has officially been 100h that I have spent on this world! (add 3h cause my PC softlocked and so the world was last auto-saved but the playtime did not update when shutting it down) Spanning already 2 major game versions (1.21.6 - 1.22.2), being loaded with an ever-growing (and shifting) modlist of over 50 mods and subjecting it to one or another of my stubborn playstyle decisions I have certainly left my mark on this blocky world - I just hope that my building of a growing village is a positive one. Which is what I want to share today, as I have certainly been inspired by other people's shared builds around here. Image upload space on the VS forums is precious and scarce, so I needed to outsource images and I don't think there is a way to properly embed them. So find the full gallery here. Being settled on the ruins of my predecessors, the location I settled down in was what already seems to once have been the onset of a community. A ruined tower, atleast 2 discernable house ruins and a small plot of farmland next to a pond. Seeing the tragic state of this world, I wanted to fulfil their vision and grow this rather beautiful space of land into a flourishing settlement (maybe with actual NPCs modded in later, if my PC doesn't explode.) https://i.imgur.com/XLL3wUj.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/KFZ52Fe.png https://i.imgur.com/uh308yb.jpeg The first building to get a glowup was the one most salvagably discernible - and became my personal house which is housing me and my hoarder tendencies to this very day. A cozy little cottage with a now unused outside nook, which previously housed my smithing setup. https://i.imgur.com/3mvT3Iw.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/8xwCnI4.png Next up was a, probably way too extravagant, stable area for the one horse that was roaming the area when I arrived and has become my trusty steed on many an exploration so far. There was surely more need for more important things, but this type of stable design is the one thing I know by heart from my many lives in TOBG. (Yes, I still need to finish chiseling the other half but dayum that is repetetive) https://i.imgur.com/VaIY5Tw.jpeg What actually housed me before the main cottage was livable, was the tower ruin as it was most sealably intact. It was very much clear to me from the get-go though that it shall eventually become a windmill tower to get access to mechanical power. Not much of the original ruin is left at this point, but the realization of how much flax a windmill consumes has thrown me back in progress quite a bit. Saw the rapid field expansion at the beginning? Yeah, that's gonna be flax only. https://i.imgur.com/5BGOjtc.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/peXaJGs.png Finally the newest addition to my corner of the world is the new smithy. My first attempts at dipping deeper into the world of chisel magic - not quite 100% sure how well the design turned out but I invested too much time and effort to just scrap it now. Got nothing to show on the inside yet, cause it is empty, cause I learned all the cool decoration stuff is locked behind blueprints with BetterRuins. Atleast that gives me more reasons to explore the new 1.22 terrain now. https://i.imgur.com/Vy9Gqu2.jpeg From here on out, soon having to face winter again and prepping for the third year, I want to add a fishing pier to the lake, a tavern to the village - cause what settlement is complete without a place for weary survivors to rest - a greenhouse and eventually put a big defensive medieval wall around it; plus whatever other building I find the need/inspiration for. I'd also like a harbor for a sailboat but sadly, the ocean is 5000 blocks away and constructing a road there is gonna be the end of me. I have always been bad with choosing material colors that go well together (and am also kinda limited in wood types for now), and I got a ways to go learning about the powerful art of using beams for detailing, so if anyone has suggestions for improvements I can try out, feel free to share them!

...of course, you just need to publicly complain. Update: Rain just hit my base. I repeat, rain just hit my base. For the sake of making this not just a silly display of bad luck and impatience, I still wanna know if there is a way to debug weather in case something someday actually goes wrong?

I know, at the end of the day, this is all RNG and in an RNG-driven system there are no guarantees, ever. I know VS's weather system is a fair bit more complex than TOBG's timer to plunge the entire world into rain. But gambler's fallacy exists for a reason, and I'm losing faith in the odds. I have also carried this world from 1.21 to 1.22 springing a few mods, so while none of those should have touched or altered the weather system I am growing incresingly concerned something is actually broken. My base is in a "Very Common" rainfall area. Throughout my first in-game year this has also proven very accurate - I could count the times it wasn't raining, let alone the one where I could see the sun through the clouds, way easier than the times it just constantly rained. Throughout the first winter, it was as equally frequently snowing. But it is mid-July now. And I haven't seen a singular drop of rain ever since the snow melted. Not once were my crops watered by nature. I recently went out on an exploration trip and wandered through a rain cell. I came back home to a rain cell very close to my base, thinking the curse was finally lifted just for the rain to very conveniently stop about 30 blocks from my home. Last thing I witnessed yesterday before going to bed was another dark cloud cell drifting by, causing rain in the not-so-far distance, but just by looking at the sky I can tell it'll once again miss my actual base and fields by that much. Am I cursed? Cursed by extremly bad luck making any and all "very common" roll just fail to produce rain at my base? Or is something actually wrong with my home chunks? And is there any way to debug something like this?

Lemme see here what I remember from the last 80 hours of the game... - Picking up shiny rocks and not marking it down until later reading the tooltip and going "...oh."? Yep, done that. - Carrying too much shit everywhere and never have space? Well that's what mods are for, right? - Overusing coal to forge? Still do that today, actually! I once wasted like 10 minutes waiting for my ore to smelt, thinking I could squeeze it through with the last possible rest of cooling down buffer just to see that bar plummet back to 0 before I could even react. Never under-fuled anything ever since. - "Keeping every lore book"? Hey, those are decoration! - "Having my smithing area open air"? I want things to cool, today, thank you very much! - "Not planting crops until November"? Lemme go one further. Not planting crops, for the entire first year. "I can prepare a nice big field to use earliest opportunity next spring!". "Berries are too OP, don't need much right now." "Winter is only 3 months, ez pz, this stack of grain and those 5 crockpots of soup and stew will sustain me, maybe I need to hunt the last month a bit". They did, in fact, not sustain past the point where winter officially started. - I guess building up on that - using some of my little winter rations to feed my chickens. - Which, to build up on THAT, I settled too close to my house so for the first 2 generations I had to sneak around the furthest possible wall inside as to not disturb the brooding hen. Did I bother moving them? No! I just sucked it up cause "They'll lose startle range with each sucessful generation!" But hey, atleast I can proudly say I never faced problems with burning anything down! Or being mauled by vicious wildlife.

What type of rock did you use for the tavern? Is that chalk, white marble or the new 1.22 one?

I am outside and was still unroofed at that point in time, but it hasn't rained since winter ended (which I am getting incresingly concerned about). I also made a final 2 more ingots after this post, of which once again reliably the (I think) first I picked up was instantly cold and the second I picked up retained its temperature and didn't stack. Haven't had any issues with smithing those 6 ingots later though.

It is true that any form of ladder becomes a non-investment latest by midgame; chop down one big oak tree with ~10 stacks of logs and you can craft more ladders than you will ever need.The difference here, however, is that midgame mark. As you yourself, too, said that making lots of ropes is hard at the beginning but only becomes trivial later. If all you needed is a singular rope (or even multiple) to free-style climb down any drop this hurdle of entry is removed, making excessive cave diving possible day 1. Why anyone would voluntarily go placed they can't do anything without the proper tool and will get horribly murdered by high-tier enemies I don't know, but assuming respawns are infinite you can freely scout at cost of obtaining a rope or 2 and leaving your corpse behind. Atleast with ladders you still need to actively invest otherwise useful resources in notable quantities, over and over again, and then properly place the ladders and climb them back up without falling (or getting knocked) off.

It might not be "that hard" to implement, but I also don't think it is a good idea to implement it in the first place. Rather, having some more varied cave generation that isn't 90% "vertical shafts directly to hell" would solve the same "issue" rappeling would solve without the need to generally just trivialize any sort of vertical traversal. Caves are generally meant to be dangerous. The deeper you go, the higher the enemy tier that spawns. The faster your temporal stability drains. Locust nests are down there. But besides the hostility of the cave inhabitants, the thing making caves dangerous is exactly how hard they are to traverse for the unprepared. Fall down 2 blocks with no pickaxe? Well, hope you better have enough sticks on you to make ladders. If you could just deploy a rope to get down and then back up, dipping in and out of caves would be trivial. In which case they lose all their meaning, considering there isn't much in them aside from a chance for a more-or-less valueable ruin or the chance for an exposed ore vein.