Rainbow Fresh

I agree that the entirety of "temporal" stuff, in its current form, is rather short-lived and lackluster. Spawning fresh into the game for the first time and finding your first temporal rifts is a spooky moment, until you start ignoring them popping up every 5 meters on a high/apocalyptic rift activity day while out exploring and just get utterly annoyed anytime one spawns at home. Your first temporal storm will be a moment of awe about the funky effects and the dangers until you realize that is literally all there is to them, turning into just a wasted day everytime another storm approaches. And temporal stability is this looming mechanic that, to a beginner player, seems like a scary thing you need to always keep an eye on and making mining trips very dangerous and time limited - unless you realize how easy and basically consequence free it is to forget it even exists and accidentally getting to <25% stability or even to the damage dealing ranges. Flashy gimmicks that work once but still accompany you all game all the same. That being said, I don't necessarily think making low temporal stability strictly more deadly (as in more deadly types of enemies spawn, you take more damage, ...) is the best fix. As has been discussed over in another thread specifically talking about temporal storms, I think a more mechanically in-depth approach to bringing meaning and variety to this entire side of mechanics could be better. As the wiki said something (probably implied through lore but not yet implemented?) about low temporal stability bringing the player "closer to the rust world", what I can only assume to be the world at the other end of the rifts that spawns the rust into our world. That could be acted upon more. Instead of bringing more rust specifically to a player with "low sanity", the player could be brought to the rust instead. I already suggested something along the lines of temporal storms introducing unique, temporary dungeons/structures from the rust world overlapping with our reality - high risk high reward unique opportunities to give storms meaning beyond "stay at home, kids". In the same way, the player could upon reaching low/0% tmeporal stability be teleported into a rust world type dungeon they need to escape from (or horribly die in). A salvagable situation, with additional late-game "voluntarily taking on the challenge for fancy loot" type potential; to the unprepared/early-game player, however, basically just a surefire way to lose all their items though.

As I settled in the first set of ruins I came across in big, grassy plains next to a lake near spawn, I don't really have wolves or bears near me. As such, my strategy for dealing with wolves is just to... not deal with them. Most I've come across is 1, rarely 2 in an area and usually they seem to run away like normal animals? And the times they don't - seeing has how little useful stuff they drop I feel to bad to hurt the puppy so I just keep on walking at a slighly more sprinting pace. Seeing as wolf and bear spawnpoints are apparently fixed per world, I have a wolf spawn on the other side of the big lake next to my base. But that hasn't been a problem the entire first year I played so far. As for bears. We don't deal with bears. We don't talk about bears. We don't acknowledge bears exist. Forests are just haunted and that's why I am overly cautious everytime I have to travel through one. If anyone tells you I got audibly startled one night out by a ninja bear materializing behind me (despite me constantly looking around in a not-even-forest area) they are a liar. ...I have lured one into a pond and ran circles around him on horseback trying to pelter him with arrows one desperate winter day, though.

Yep. Got nothing better to do than update the ModDB's "recently updated" page on 1.22 filter every 5 minutes and hope and cope. Personally am currently down to 6 non-negotiable mods that don't even have 1.22 RC compatibility.

What I am currently doing, spending my days stalking the ModDB "recently updated" list every 5 minutes, is essentially what you suggested. I initially cross-referenced every mod in my mods folder, manually, with the actual mod on the ModDB, keeping their full, searchable name together with the currently highest supported version number and if I could find any warning about "WARNING UPDATING THIS MOD WILL EXPLODE YOUR PC YOU NEED TO FIRST WIPE EVERYTHING" in either the mod description, comments or patchnotes in a .txt file. Now I can occasionally come back and check only the ones that didn't already support 1.22 (or a release candidate because if I wait for official 1.22 stable compat I will never be allowed to play again) and see if they updated.

You see, for as far as I have come in this game so far I really see no specific reason to gate honey production. It has too few uses (that I am aware of) to be any more or less game-changing whether you need one nice-looking, well build Langstroth hive or about 10 skeps on rotation to get a "decent honey production going". You can use the material as substitue for fat in pelt making (I think?) which from my experience is less useful as you usually get the fat you need to treat the hide from the animal that gives you the hide in the first place (and there is little use for pelts, let alone anything under large/huge, past the early game where you will have no bees). You can use the wax to seal crockpots; but if that's all you need you only really need sealing levels of preservation for cooked food for winter preparation (which means all year to collect wax) or in winter (where bees do not produce neither vanilla nor in From Golden Combs.) And finally, you can make candles out of it. Which isn't that incredibly impactful either. Candles aren't notable on their own (worse effects than an oil lamp which is made with fat, more/as easily obtainable, worse light than a torch) and their extended use (lanterns) is gated behind smithing. So worst case you sit on a bunch on non-perishable honey that doesn't really qualify as food and is mostly just used to make jam (which isn merely to keep fruit nutrition up in winter) and a bunch of wax to seal crock pots and make candles that you probably won't spam all over the place. So in tl;dr speaking from personal experience, the hardest part was to find and then acquire the inital set of bees (unchanged by From Golden Combs). The mileage of bee products is so limited that even having it "too easily available" in terms of needed resources/effort nothing bad happens long term. For the parts of the game where it might still matter (aka. the earlier stages) getting to your first setup Langstroth hive is a conscious effort. Yet in the end, this effort goes mostly into less repetetive tedium (crafting skeps forever) at no changed cost (both skeps and Langstroth hives are build solely from inifitely farmable resources) and, atleast to me personally, feels like the "nicer solution". Cause a langstroth hive just looks like a much nicer home for our buzzy friends than just some cattail slapped together. But alas, at the end of the day the mere existence of this level of discussion about the topic means that for the original topic of this thread - mods that should be vanilla - this mod has already failed as vanilla mechanics should fit nicely enough that most everyone agrees with em. So I guess it will better stay a mod for people to install at their leisure - or alternatively the "make candles from fat" mod if people don't like bees at all.

And that is exactly why I am opening discussion to ask for opinions. It makes absolute logical sense that the world keeps turning when you log out. In the same vein, however, if sticking with what makes "logical sense", it doesn't make sense that you just blip out of existence for a certain amount of time. On the one hand I wouldn't want to force everyone to adjust to my playtime schedule. On the other hand, constantly being pressurend into playing as much as possible when others do aswell (which would be hard across global timezones) sounds like no long term fun time. My conclusion would be that Vintage Story is simply no Multiplayer Game (organized Coop at best). But considering there seems to be 24/7 dedicated public/official? servers people seem to disagree. That's what I'm curios about.

I know it says question in the title and is still not in the "Questions" forum but that is because I am more asking for opinions than actual right answers to a question about the game. No, my question is on an abstract level - how is public multiplayer supposed to work? Granted, this question is coming from Mr. "Only played Singleplayer" so if the answer is something very obvious that was thought of in the game's development already I'll excuse myself. But the story is that this Mr. Singleplayer has some friends who are considering to host a small little community server for us (and some interested others) to play together on. Community server meaning it's not the typical "Hey, anyone got time? I'mma boot the server then" but your average 24/7 dedicated server. And that got me thinking. How is that supposed to work on an increasing scale? If you got a friend, maybe two, to play with and some decency/coordination in when to play even on a 24/7 server (considering time is stopped when nobody is connected afaik) there is no issue. You usually all play together at the same time. Even with more friends and some less "all together or not at all" playing rules, as long as you stick together as one in-game community everything is fine; whoever wasn't on for a bit gets the resources (food) prepared by the ones that were. But all of this falls apart when thinking about a big server with split communites, where not everyone lives/works together. Time is a very, very crucial resource in Vintage Story. Crops grow - and die, food rots. Seasons change making the acquisition for more food potentially harder to "impossible". So if a server is on 24/7 and people mostly always play somewhere on it (global timezones baby), even just having to go to bed for the day and getting a comfortable 8h of snooze before the next gaming session can mean that months have passed in-game. Now you come back and your less preserved food have rotted. Nobody tended to your crops so they dipped past their ripe stage and into damaging weather, reducing the harvest. And this potentially every day. How is one supposed to play like that? And while this is under the half-knowing assumption that most things in-game process their time even when unloaded in-between, even if that wasn't the case and a logged out player's area was unloaded and hence untouched (a very exploitable mechanic), unless you building your base 200k blocks away from other players surely one will walk into simulation distance every now and then - with more or less friendly intentions.

While I partially agree that some things could be expanded on in usability (from what I read on the wiki, the only reason bowl contents cannot be put into any other container anymore is indeed a discussable code limitation), I also want to share my personal favorite easy fix for most any issue in the game where a missing mechanic results in unnecessary losses: /time stop /gm c Delete mis-crafted/mis-placed item Spawn in OG source materials /gm s /time resume

Considering the unique re-spawning mechanics of mushrooms I am not 100% sure, but generally speaking, having vastly explored is a disadvantage for you here as all the new world generation stuff (new structures, new rock strata, new terrain, new berry bushes and plants) only spawn in newly generated terrain, so you will have to walk further out than those 10k blocks you already explored. EDIT: Well, or you could always world edit re-generated terrain outside of a save radius from your home...

Having a much more limited stone age tier of pickaxe could be an interesting idea, even though I personally don't see any immediate use. However if you are saying it requires antler - as in, the stuff grown bucks drop when hunted? - that kinda negates the path of progression. Hunting fast game like deer is basically tied to having access to bows and arrows of decent quality. Lest you play as Hunter class or with disabled class-only recipes, getting a bow takes a while; depending on luck and priorities, longer than it takes to get your first copper pickaxe. So by the time you may even get the "stone age" pickaxe you already made it obsolete.

I do agree with LadyWYT that generally just making every single block in the game a time consuming process and tool challenge to place would be overkill. It could make for a fun extra hardcore challenge and hence could be an interesting overhaul mod concept but certainly not a base game mechanic. There already are some blocks, as mentioned, that have involved multi-step processes to place/finish and having some more of those would be nice (the VS Roofing mod I use also turns playing roof blocks into atleast a three-step process with the reward of much, much nicer looking roofs) but replacing the iconic block game mechanics would most likely be a case of "realism over enjoyable gameplay". The game is already hard, time consuming and unforgiving enough in many other aspects that I want to atleast be able to build like a normal Minecraft player in the calm moments I get to enjoy. However, I can also see merit in the complaints you brought up which warrant their own discussion. Mainly, being able to solve your (probably monster or hostile animal-based) problems by just placing blocks. As in, pillaring up to escape any situation or walling off cave sections full of enemies. While not an easy fix like this what I think could be an easy enough approach to mitigate this would be two simple difficulty options; For one, the inability to place blocks while in the air, disallowing pillaring up. Voluntarily combine that with enabled gravity even for soil and now you are forced to staircase up (which monsters can follow you with) with atleast stone materials, which are harder and more deliberate to obtain or limited to just building up natural walls that only need you to gap a block here and there. The second one being the dreaded mechanic of monster being able to break blocks. In this case, I'd say specifically player-placed blocks of below copper tier, meaning you need to deliberately obtain and bring placeable blocks of higher quality to protect yourself instead of just placing dirt. That would also have big challenge implications for building a base.

You mean, like, taking dye you created in a barrel and being able to pour it out into the world (assuming creating water sources from buckets is enabled)?

I disagree, at least for the earlier game stages (that I am currently in) and especially considering that animal spawns in winter have now been fixed to be lower(/disabled?) during winter in 1.22. Further more, the Buthery mod does not necessarily make it more efficient (bar the potential, small 20% increase in potential drops in later stages, though at that point you probably have enough crops to last 3 winters on them alone per harvest), it adds extra steps to even get to the meat. Instead of killing, chopping and then immediately cooking the animal you have to haul it all the way back home, put it on the hook, skin it, wait for it to bleed out, then haul it to the butchering table and chop it up. Extra steps that don't feel wrong imo but are certainly not making things more efficient; in fact, they can be a dangerous game-changer when you are on on your last hunger bar segment and waiting for the darn pig to finish bleeding out so you can harvst it's, like, 3 pieces of meat to last another day in winter. And Blood Trails; granted, as I said before, as much of a nice mechanic I think it is (and hence using the mod) it doesn't do nearly enough right now. Living in very grassy plains, even with a blood trail barely visible between all the grass spotting the deer lying down in tall grass to be virtually invisible before spooking it away by getting too close is not any more possible and in my experience the trail always stops spawning particles (darn magically healing wounds) before the animal even stops running. I don't think (but also don't know for sure as I skipped vanilla skeps immediately for the "From Golden Combs" re-usable alternative) bee stuff is getting increased. You just get nicer looking, less tedious and more realistic alternatives. In the case of From Golden Combs you still need the normal reed skep to acquire your first bees. And as you said even by vanilla standards, crafting skeps is not a limiting factor. But then instead of constantly having to break the entire darn thing and piss off the bees like a peasant while waiting in-between for them to migrate to a new skep, you can just harvest the honey and leave the hive intact. With the high tier La-something apiary being the good looking modern variant of it that is scalable. More expensively scalable than just plopping a million skeps everywhere. So I think it's not affecting the bee economy much, it just offers something more to do and some more QoL scalability than constantly crafting skeps and running for your life after each harvest. Though tying the whole honey production to flower stats would also be a nice touch. I would love to see a more free-style cooking system. I get the implementation ease of just having four slots with the balanced amount of ingridients being a cleanly scaled version of the recipe, which is defined by one driving ingredient - but it would be much nicer if you could just throw things in the pot and see what happens. Servings amount is then determined by the combined "value"/mass of ingredients, just like resulting nutrition values can be relatively scaled.

While your walking stick argument may seem convincing (don't have the mod in question to judge), for butchering the variety of tools makes sense. There are three components to the mechanics of the mod, which are the hook for skinning (step 1), the butchering table for butchering (step 2) and the smoking rack for preservation (optional step 3). More detailed and realistic than vanilla currently is while not being bloated by any means. These then come in three tiers of gear - three "variants"; primitive, normal (copper age), advanced (bronze/iron? age) changing the amount of results gotten from "less than intended" in the primitive stages and "more than intended" in the latest stage. This adds worthwhile progression as you unlock the right to gain more for less work by progressing the game and investing more valuable resources. Essentially the same smithing a bronze falx over a copper one does, which is an unnecessary (technically) but rewarding upgrade to a plain wooden club. You can live with just the club just fine, but it's much easier and comfortable to have a proper high tier sword. The remaining "5 variants of hooks" would guaranteed remain in any vanilla implementation of something like this, because vanilla has variants of all metal object for all supported metal variants. So despite the bronze hook giving 120% drops despite the base material, it will still have visually distinct "variants" for tin bronze, black bronze and bismuth bronze to be made out of. And as for the variety of additional items added; while I do not, personally, see any real reason for the prime meat to exist (it always drops too few to consider using in soups/stews/whatever), too few and too unnecessary to turn into fat and not that much more satiating to be worth cooking individually (hey, free rot for compost I guess!), the rest does make sense. As I happily agree with others' opinions that the game "needs more food variety". So having at least properly made sausages makes sense. Being able to make more stuff out of bone makes sense. The sinew as alternative for some flax recipes makes sense for harsher, more plant-unfriendly areas where hunting hyenas is the primary source of food. Do we specifically need blood as a resource? No. That I agree with. But it's equally not as if the Butchering mod is too bloated either. See, and that's why the discussion of "mods that should be vanilla" is such a complex one. It could very well be that the mod is great - again, don't have it and don't know how exactly it works as it has no explanations outside of the game. But I equally never saw the need for it - and I, too, have a couple mods I wouldn't want to play without anymore. That I deliberately did not mention here, because a cool mod is not equal to something the vanilla game needs. Player's needs vary from person to person, and that's why mods are great to customize that experience to your personal needs. I, personally, do not see the need for the stone quarry mod and hence disagree with you saying it's a game changer and necessary. The vanilla game has a sufficiently functioning and logical way to get stones and rocks. It creates a sense of value where stone path roads are not only beneficial but also something you earn by mining lots of rocks. In my world I built my first house using some cobble, some ashlar bricks for fancy accents and mostly wood and clay shingle roofing. It looks nice (to me) and didn't take tens of hours. It took until the copper age for saws just like I'd heavily expect the quarry mod to require copper age for metal tools. But after that, easy enough. And what few ashlar bricks I decided to use so far for subsequent builds gave me enough pebbles to expand my roads in tandem. And while 4k block roads might sound nice as a long term goal, by that point you literally got nothing better to do and don't need even faster mining mods. So while it might be a great mod for people who think like you, I don't see it being a necessity to add to the game anytime soon. It has a system that works, and having a vanilla-friendly quarry system would certainly require a ton of work and deviations from how the mod solves things.

It did not go yet, and probably won't for a while, cause about 95% of my mods aren't adapted for 1.22 stable.

New, very technical question I got while reading around other random topics: I haven't used one yet but considering being sent thousands of blocks away via translocator without a way to go back would be a death sentence and people had no real reason to use them, so I'm gonna assume translocators come in linked pairs. The question would then be - assuming I use a translocator but then, once updating to 1.22 wipe all generated chunk data outside of a specific radius (to keep new 1.22 world gen close-ish), which would wipe only the destination area of a translocator I have wandered through (I haven't yet, been holding back on using one for this very reason), would that break things? EDIT: Welp, no need to find out anymore. Just gotta hope for... 21 mods to update and wait for about another 30 to stabilize on 1.22 stable.

I am pretty sure they are lamenting the loss of a world with various different stones (potentially including the more useful ones) and complaining about their current world being like mine - Granite, all the way, all the time. Not the other way around.

As much as I, an avid singleplayer enjoyer, love me an alive world with mindless NPC minions to command (and am now, thanks to LadyWYT's comment, looking ever forward to VS Village once updated for stable 1.22) - that sounds like a completely different game. Both to what Vintage Story is now, and what I see as the direction it is further trying to go. So good for mods like VS Village showcasing that it is possible, even with current tech, but really not something I see fitting for the base game itself neither as content nor as horrendous workload for the devs.

I may not be affected by this as I am neither making content out of the game, nor consuming the content other streamers make out of it (and I am also well-versed and quick on the draw when it comes to "fixing" things via commands) and as such have a more blunt opinion on it, but I really don't see a point to limit a mostly asthetic, partially helpful and fully RNG mechanic for the sake of some content creator's video not looking nicer. Logically speaking, monsters are dangerous and hindering. They spawn in early when you have literally nothing to defend yourself, let alone fight back, you are pretty much barred from making any positive game progress. Hence, having a grace period on monster spawns (afaik extended in 1.22 to hostile animals aswell?) makes sense. Rain is a weather effect. It does not harm you, it does not kill you, it does not stop you from doing anything. Worst it can do is make the beautiful environment and lighting shaders look not as nice. On the other hand, rain helps greatly growing earliest game crops, before you can even afford to make a watering can. Limiting rainfall to only be allowed to start after, say, day 5 means you have 5 days in which you are physically unable to grow food, which you need sooner rather than later, lest you already found, formed and cooked clay. Which I don't necessarily expect the average first time player to do, or if they do, not spend it on a watering can. (I sure underestimated farming and food prep in my first year...) I, too, in my first year of the game living near spawn in a temperate, "very common rainfall" area has nearly constant rain. Couldn't see the sun to judge the time of the day for most parts, got annoyed when the 5 minutes of clear skies turned into downfall again. But it never stopped me from doing anything. And I knew that it is also partially my fault for living in a "very common rainfall" area. If it really bothered me that much, I could just move to more arid regions. Head south not care about the harshness of winter. My base wasn't really far developed back then. But the area was nice so the rain couldn't bother me enough to move. Now I am in my second year and all I want is some rain, which hasn't fallen since the snow melted, so I don't have to water my crops every second day and can afford to go venture out a bit further again.

Now you've got me curious. The three clearly identifiable Better Ruins ruins I have come across in my world so far were a ruined cathedral-esque building with lots of nice clutter and a locust spawner, what looks like a random collapsed bridge segment (granted, that might be unfitting in the middle of nowhere) and a small village type collection of a big tavern, probably blacksmith and two small houses. None of them had any notable amount of loot, just like vanilla underground "dwarf huts". Would that village type thing be an overpowered start compared to me patching up the generic vanilla mill/tower in the vanilla village ruin? Pretty much. Would it have been cool though, absolutely. Meanwhile my experience with clearly identifiable vanilla ruins has been your average collection of various shapes of cobblestones vaguely hinting at the shape a small building, stoney bricks with a random shaft with bony soil in the middle, the bigger village-esque strcuture with the ruined tower, crop field and two houses, all with their maybe, maybe not loot vessels, and the various forms of underground dwarf hut full of indiscernible clutter and the occasional odd collapsed chest that may or may not be openable with loot and the occasional odd crate with items in it. Is there anything else to either ruins that makes you go "Better Ruins is definitely too much" and "Vanilla ruins are perfectly nice and fitting"?

Excuse me for not reading all 12 pages of this thread and potentially echoing into the wind here. But to answer the initial question of Yes and no, in the same way the topic is phrased - a "good idea, badly implemented". I like the concept and atmosphere of temporal storms enough to not turn them off entirely. Especially with the "Temporal Symphony" mod which, by all means, should be how the base game treats temporal storms; immersive, spooky, not an in-game chat SMS of "your wasted day is arriving in 6h". Wandering out of your house, ready to get to work for the day, having forgotten all about the last storm again just for the sky to turn red, the ground to shake and the distant bells to toll warning me "Nope, you're staying at home today." It's a nice atmospheric touch. It fits into the world and what little I know of the lore. Turning storms off entirely would just create an even bigger gap of "something is missing here". But on the other hand, I hate their current implementation mechanically. As do I lament the lack of any mods that change this (can storms even be modded?). Aside from their atmospheric contribution and their success at making me not want to go outside and make any progress for the day because the hordes of hell are roaming my front porch, they don't contribute anything other than annoyance. Not because of the limiting they do, but because of how they limit and the lack of any sort of contrary value they offer. And I'm not talking about loot here; hell, for all I care a good implementation of storms, however that may eventually look, could spawn special monsters that don't drop anything at all as temporal storms should not be loot goblin events. But they need to offer some value for not just waiting them out. First and foremost gripe: Spawning mechanics. Who the f- thought it's a good idea to remove any and all spawning restrictions allowing the highest tier of monsters to spawn 3 blocks besides you on your lit campfire cooking pot. This is stupid for so many reasons; I get it is probably to force storms to be a threat but actually they aren't. If you don't want to deal with them, you dig a 1x1x2 hole and cover it up until your screen stops being wobbly. No spawn restrictions or lack thereof circumvents this, unless mobs can literally spawn inside you, which would be even bigger bulls-. So instead of taking away the safety we earned by building and reinforcing our homes, acknowledge us earning safety and the possibility to do some work even during storms. Outside hell is unfolding, inside you are safe. Get caught outside, far away from home when the storm hits? Well, F. Good luck. It also makes no logical sense. Considering how frequent storms are, the game's entire lore would not make any sense. If monsters kept spawning during storms inside of your walls for no reason, the ancient civilization before us wouldn't have survived the age of nomads and there would be no ruins for us to find, let alone technology as advanced was whatever Mr. Jonas did. Secondly, rewarding interaction. Current storms are pointless, ignoring loot. And nobody needs that many temporal gears, seeing as every other resource dropped by monsters is either obtainable by much nicer means or useless. So if you sit out the storm, you lose a day for no reason. If you decide to fight through the storm, you lose the day for no reason, on top of the durability of your armor and weapons, probably health and as such healing items and food for recovery. All for nothing to change. Just going outside in full steel plate armor doesn't allow you to actually do any work, with the barrage of endless high tier monsters hot on your heels. There is nothing notable gained from interacting with the storm. And better loot is not the solution, that's just creating severe imbalance in the ecosystem. I honestly don't know "the" solution for this problem, so I get why storm haven't been improved upon yet, probably. But some of the suggestions around could possibly help. Make storms rare but heavy events resulting in a special mini-boss. Fail to fight the boss and they continue as normal, slay this mighty foe and you get a reprieve from temporal storms for a while. Dude's already walking circles around you anyway. Or make storms more like 7D2D blood moon nights, where the monsters are all actively out to get you and you better prepare actual defenses. If at all, please, make them potentially breaking blocks or something a toggleable option. Or something more aking to my third point. Three. What I can only assume to be content not yet implemented. When I encountered my first in-game temporal storm I was kinda disappointed. I saw the cool part in the game's trailer about the player walking around the twisted and warped castle-esque structure during the storm and thought this was the storm's doing - not just the storm's VFX on top of the cool building that had nothing to do with it. I saw mentions in the wiki about how low temporal stability brings you ever closer to the "Rust World", an entry that does not yet exist and currently low temporal stability just kills you. This could very well be the lacking link; temporal storms introduce us to whatever is on the other side of those space-time-rifts, the home of the rust, brought into our reality if even just temporary. Special structures and locations you can only explore during a storm, with high risk as if you stay on the other side when the storm ends, you die and your items are essentially lost. Something like that, maybe.

Since you were asking for other people's stories, it took me nearly to winter of the starting year to find my first copper because all caves were uselessly empty death traps, I didn't know I needed to mark down the first few surface copper pebbles to come back digging later, and for some reason I managed to not find any of the dozens of surface deposits around me until walking by the 100th time. Then, on the other hand, I too found iron just randomly in a cave one day, before even really interacting with bronze - just enough scraped together tin for a pickaxe and anvil. I could skip bronze alltogether, seeing as iron is better and seemingly more common, just harder to process. Am I unhappy about being "lucky" and that each new ore for each new tier of progession isn't a stacking 0.1x as common as the previous one? Not really. A bit late to enter the discussion on your specific conundrum though still want to give my 2 cents. You said you hate being given valuable stuff too easily; the problem is already with the definition though. Iron isn't valueable, by quantities atleast. Iron ore veins are supposed to be massive and as such more easily acquirable. Where you might have to look for more than one copper source and certainly scavange for rarer metals that might not even have that much of a use in the game, iron is pretty common (which I think is pretty accurate to reality). It's not quite a "rare metal". And those rare metals, in turn, you don't get given that easily, usually. Then there is the value of progression. Sure, Iron tier is higher than even black bronze tier. The equipment is stronger and more durable, and in case it wasn't just my mods adding stuff, latest iron tier is where you can craft everything that isn't a brass-only scone. Ultimately, that doesn't make too much of a difference though. More durability is nice especially for high-use tools like the hammer for smithing, the chisel for, well, chiseling your pickaxe for mining and axe for chopping down those humongous oak trees. Personally, I have found the increase indurability between copper and bronze not that notable though, still rely on tool repair mods and don't expect iron to change all that much about it anyway. Surface enemies are tier 1 monsters, meaning everything past leather armor is essentially overkill and if you go to the deepest depths, nothing but steel will properly protect you. Not to mention running from a bear while poking it with a stick without any slowing armor is safer than wrestling one head-on even with strong armor. So with all this free value given to you by some luck being rather relative and subjective, there is a more important point to consider which I think is nicely touched upon by this comment: It's not what is given to you, it's what you make of it. In my personal opinion, black bronze is the coolest looking material for armors with it's dark knight-esque black hue. So sure iron armor is statistically better, and steel evene more so, but even in the late steel age I would go out of my way to look for the comparatively much rarer resources needed to make black bronze just for a dope looking set of drip. My own sort of progession in this sandbox world with no actual goals. Tier progression is also just a more drawn-out, complex process compared to the other block game; in the core the freedom to shape the world, exploration and all that stuff in VS hindered by constant need for food supply and the tedium and hardship of creating the tools you burn through, remains the same. In Minecraft you can deck yourself out in fully enchanted diamond gear without ever mining a single ore, and if you go explore some caves you can be at the top of the tier progression in about 2 in-game days. Maybe 5 if you go Netherite. Yet you still play the game for dozens if not hundreds of hours, despite progression material being to easy to obtain. Vintage Story isn't all that different. You may be able to beeline to Steel by the end of year 0, but it will still take ages to build a nice little village to call home and it will still be nice to explore the lands far away and it will still be rare and rewarding looking for some rare shinies to turn into proud collections. And if at the end of all that you still feel unhappy, you can always tweak spawn rates, install mods and, as you did, just decide to simply not do or use something you have.

Lemme add my 2 cents of opinion to this discussion. Step Up. No thanks, how about just naturally integrating that mod that generates terrain slabs so the terrain is smoother and has naturally walkable half-block inclines in many places instead? Assuming VS uses the same 1 block = 1m³ measurement, walking up a step height of 1.2m would probably be possible (especially considering we don't play a normal human), but cumbersome at least. To balance and fit it would need to add extra hunger drain and slow movement/delays to stepping that high. Carry On. Oh, absolutely. It's a decently balanced way to transport stuff that would take several trips of inventory hauling instead. Immersive QoL. Simple HUD Clock. Mostly agree with LadyWYT here, there is generally no need for this. I guess it could be made a simple game setting for HUD preference; after all, it is all already there, just needs to be rendered either in position A or B. But there is no need for a constant display for me. As all the information is in the environment. In fact, I would go one step further here. What I personally would like to see vanilla-ized, and sadly it doesn't even seem there is mods for this yet, is to have less HUD information and more in-world mechanics/crafting. Why are we an omniscent being that can sense time, calendar and rift activity wherever we are? Why do we either have a full, magic map or none at all? Vintage Story is intended to be "uncrompromising hardcore survival" or what the phrasing was. So why don't we need to make a thermometer to know the temperature? There are enough unused ores in the game with which we could probably make a real-world thermometer. Make a clock, if not based on real mechanic "magic", based on the magic temporal gear as measurement/drive. Make a calendar out of parchments and some pigment to know the day. Build some mid-game temporal gear doodad to measure rift activity, possibly giving use to otherwise just cosmetic pendants. And an option that you have to actually draw maps to cartograph (option, you can have magic map as a difficulty setting still). Hell, Minecraft is more "uncompromising" in that regard. More Piles. Don't have it myself, but sounds very agreeable. Blood Trail. Another "Oh, absolutely." Even though it hasn't done much of anything for me as the animal usually stops bleeding before coming to a rest hiding in tall grass again. Player Corpse. Don't use it, can't say but the lore explanations to make it sound like a bad idea indeed. Am, too, for just trying to "drop" loot into ground storage or some other mechanic like that. Stone Quarry. Don't have it, can't say. But, personally, I don't feel like getting solid stone easier is necessary. This way products of solid stones (aka. essentially just ashlar bricks) have a sense of rarity and value. And considering the ground is literall full of rock, losing atleast 6 per excavated stone is a non-issue. Gives me more pebbles for stone path roads. Now for the more "controversially" discussed options. From Golden Combs. This mod I use, and I'd certainly put it on the "should be vanilla-ified" list. Can't really agree with LadyWYT that it goes "too far" for what vanilla should be. Vanilla is trying to be immersive, pseudo-realisticly hard and detailed. If we a dozen different factors/mechanics influencing crops and producing iron ore being a, like, 5 step process, then why are bees limited to just a single-use reed skep you have to fight for to get honey? And wax's only purpose is to make candles or as a crockpot sealing substitute for fat. Let us build proper, reusable apiaries. Let bees influence the plants around them. In fact, once again I would go further and say "Let bees be the direly missing mechanic to propagate (spread/regrow) wild flowers." Catch Ledge. Difficult topic. I have the mod, I like the mod and yet for the first time I have to agree with the opinion of "not quite fit for vanilla." Especially since the mod itself is kinda OP. If something like this were to ever be implemented it would need to be heavily balanced (but please not the same stupid way as losing a full chainmail armor worth of more hunger just because you hold something in your offhand.) So I guess being able to mantle up two blocks would be the compromise between this and the original suggestion of "Step Up"? Slow but possible terrain traversal outside of walking up stairs/slabs and "walking up blocks"? Story locations needing a rework to not be cheese-able with this, however, I would agree that if a mechanic like this were to ever come, is just par for the course. Many things in the game need to constantly adjust to fit with one another. Better Ruins. Oh absolutely. Granted, since I have played with this one since day 1 I can't really tell too accurately which ruins are vanilla and which are not, but I do have a feeling the vanilla ones are those couple cobblestones in the vague shape of what could have been a house, while Better Ruins are all the actual houses. Do they need to be as huge and complex as all the Better Ruins stuff? Probably not. Do I think the game needs more than just "couple cobbles in a vague shape" and story locations? Yes please. As for performance concerns; I don't think that should be a concern. If the ruins are too demanding, then building anything yourself would be aswell in which case it's not the ruin's fault but a general optimization problem. The ruins altering the lore; Really can't say anything about that as the only canon lore I got so far are three notes from panning. So for all I am concerned more ruins fit all the same as the old ruins. There once was an advanced civilization before, they died, now ruins. The end. As for my own suggestions not mentioned yet... I don't really know. I play with about 50 mods, frequently increasing and currently I wouldn't want to play without most any of them but the question of if they should be base game content is a different one. Not to mention the base game's own roadmap for implementing some of these modded features already aswell as sub-sequent disappointment of how the base game implemented them. Let's take quenching and grindstones for example. Both mods I use and general mechanics that I do agree should be in the base game. Clearly the devs agreed as they will be in 1.22 now. However instead of repairing stuff, the vanilla grindstone just sacrifices durability for a totally useless crit buff on weapons. I wouldn't agree with that and hope the Grindstones mod updates to 1.22 in some way, otherwise I will need a different alternative (like Toolsmith+). Quenching is now a risky type of upgrade instead of just a time-saving QoL improvement to cool down hot work items. Does it make sense? Probably. Would I prefer the "just cool it down bro" mod version? Absolutely. Anyway, if I were to throw some suggestions in from the top of my head, Watersheds/any other river adding mod (which will already be vanilla, one day, when they figure it out) Food Shelves/another storage furniture mod (which we are also already getting in very small part in 1.22 iirc), JSON Patch Lib (because these features for modding are like the basic JSON modding 101 toolkit every other game I personally made mods for had already), ConfigLib (because giving native configuration options to mods sounds like a very, very good improvement considering how modding-focused VS is), Temporal Symphony (because Temporal Storms are in dire need of a rework/upgrade anyway, but atleast making them immersive and spooky is a must) and maybe Equus (because we have the elk now, so why wouldn't there be a horse variety. Both currently have and should have different stats and abilities).

I... have learned. I temporarily installed that one x-ray "hacks" mod nobody likes on a copy of my world and looked. There is quite a little bit more somewhere down there than I'd ever thought. I will retract any and all complains and walk away from this as a learning experience on how to look for ores.

So far, I have prospected in a grid of 128, then 32 blocks to locate where the peak is supposed to be, marked the general area between the two equal highest points, just for my own sanity's sake randomly dug down in creative to check if I was generally on the right track with prospecting like this and did actually hit tin (filled it back up and didn't even mark where I dug). Then I later came back with equipment, dug a proper ladder shaft just to find nothing anymore. Dug a second hole not finding anything anymore. Probed about 10 further holes in creative again not finding anything. Digging out a huge area in creative not finding anything anymore. Finally remembered the proximity mode on the propick is a thing, used that to finally find the vein again, dug it out in creative to see how big it actually is for me to miss 12 times, found it only about 20 blocks big, and called it a night.