Rainbow Fresh

Wow, this went into questionable territory real fast despite being the most objectively sane discussion including the word "AI" I have seen so far. OP has a point and somehow you didn't address it at all as LadyWYT just went repeating what OP already stated as if it answers a question never asked and Teh Pizza Lady just dogpiled as if OP insulted their personal taste. What is stated and the concept behind are quite simple and in my opinion pretty logical and straight forward: Tags and filters instead of some washy report threshold system. And I wholeheartedly agree with it. Not just for AI/Low Effort related stuff. The ModDB currently has a very barebones tag system and search functionality. You can look for some stuff, but you cannot look for not X stuff. Which may be due to the fact that tags in general are somewhat useless as they currently are and there wouldn't be anything to filter out in the first place and aside from one or another known vibe coder people could have a gripe with (and a certain individual center of a certain recent controversy) no reason to exclude author/contributor from the search with all other filter options being mutually exclusive categories to search in in the first place. But the lack in such option could and should be addressed and, AI related or not, OP has made a good example for why that is and why the simplistic report threshold system isn't cutting it at best and making it worse at worst. OP already stated how the system works, yes. The point tried to be made here is that this system is fundamentally flawed/insufficient. You can report. And, minus whatever may or may not happen behind the scenes for such a report to count, this contributes to a user-set threshold. If a mod has more reports than you "allow to see", the mod is hidden. That part functionally works right now. The problem brought up here is that this system does not allow for fine-tuned personal preference. The more reports a mod gets, the fewer people will see it until, with enough popularity and "honesty" of the reporting users, a mod becomes invisible to anyone filtering *anything* due to numbers alone, numbers based on other people's decision of what you do and don't want to see in AI/Low effort content. Additionally, reporting is a weird action for a filter system. Reporting innately feels like "This person did something wrong and needs to be punished for it". You report scams and phishing attempts on Discord. Stolen identities on Steam. Bad actions by bad actors you expect to get nuked by Moderation. So "reporting" a mod for AI/Low Effort content would carry the same undertone of "This author did bad and their mod needs to be removed/restricted", not "I want to let my fellow ModDB users know this is AI/Low Effort content so they can filter it out". A tagging system with a rule-given "enforcement" to properly tag your stuff would have the exact same result (with more detail) than the current system of reporting and "Don't make false reports or else", just with a more positive spin on it. Which brings us to Correct, but how does this differ from the current system? You report something (which by design of a "report" function would just notify moderation to check it anyway) and "False reports get punished", meaning that someone HAS to check it, verify it, and take action if it is clearly wrong. The end result doesn't change if we have a detailed tagging system and a rule that you need to tag your stuff properly (even outside of the typical AI discussion). The workload would however change as now there isn't a report to verify per person reporting per AI/Low Effort mod. But instead just reports, if any, on someone notably so mis-tagging/ not tagging their mod. And if people are already kind enough to put AI disclaimers in their text, they can also be kind enough to just put a tag instead. Which, as OP secondarily mentioned, opens up the option to more granular control than "AI yay or nay". A win-win in my eyes. Now for the unnecessarily hostile response to a valid idea by a person that already admitted to and apologized for phrasing things badly out of personal emotion. Who is taking the role as judge for anything here? The very idea is to NOT have people dictate stuff for other people by NOT having a mere number of people reporting X thing remove it for everyone else with vaguely Y setting. But instead just having tags, that everyone, themselves, on their own volition, can decide to hide for whatever reason from their own search results. Be it a blacklist kinda "I hate AI" thing or simply just "I want to check if there is X category mods that aren't also Y". You know, for people looking to expand their modlist in a very specific direction. Do you use or have used Nexusmods at some point? Imagine looking for a mod that has some name you search for, but filter out translations cause you want to find the mod, not the Brazilian, Russian, Chinese or French translation of said mod, which would show up first as they were made/updated more recently than the mod itself. It's utility for personalization and the very opposite of someone taking on the role of judge for others. It does also, natively, apply to many more things than AI and/or Low Effort discussions. Granted, noone would ever voluntarily put a "Low Effort" tag on their mod and we shouldn't go around judging people's skill at coding or mod making by reporting things so moderation puts the dunce hat on them, that is a whole 'nother topic - and as you correctly stated, any human can make lower effort slop than AI puts out if prompted with general AI code being extremely hard, if at all, provable - but a simple personal mod/author blacklist could do for such things. I don't think it punishes honest authors. Because if you would need/want to hide certain information, knowing that it would piss certain people off, just so that these certain people still download your mod in ignorance you quite likely have very questionable goals/morals. We don't earn money making mods so download numbers don't matter. If people like your stuff they use it. If you did ask Claude a single question and that rubs someone the very wrong way and they hate your guts and want nothing to do with you, their problem. Using a tagging system combined with a personal blacklisting feature as was already suggested in other threads before would make this whole ordeal much easier and much nicer for everyone involved - moderation doesn't have to confirm hundreds of reports for false positives, the variety of tags allows fine-tuned filtering per personal preference or use case (as OP stated the example of separation AI assistance from full Vibe Coding, and AI code from AI art - the latter of which obvious and not able to be hidden) and the honest authors stay un-harrassed by the masses of "Eww you used AI go kys" comments. Or if not, atleast reporting *those* will be much easier and straightforward because with the tools given to them they have virtually no reason to be here and be that toxic, and people actively seeking to be bad actors by purposefully mis-tagging or not tagging their mod can still be dealt with the same way the current system requires us to: report and wait. Granted, as OP already retconned after LadyWYT's response, this whole blocking downloads thing is a bit unnecessarily far. But there is still no reason to be so offended about it - it would still be a per-user system based on personal preferences. "But I'm sure you'll be okay with that, especially if it's one of those super popular servers that EVERYONE is playing on... but you". Eh... yeah? If someone, personally, voluntarily goes so far as to enable an optional setting in *their own* game to block server mod downloads from mods tagged AI XYZ then they surely value not having anything touched by AI on their PC, ever, over playing the game on a server. It solely affects themselves and their ability to have fun with others and, as you yourself started your reply with, who makes you the judge about how these people want to play (or not play) their game? As per the updated idea from the OP, making it rather a "Hey, the server has mod XYZ that has your blocked tag ABC, do you want to proceed?" is better than just silently failing and being like "Oop, can't play on this server sorry bucko" but the idea is no worse and no more offensive than the tagging system in general. So Tl;dr, a better tagging and accompanying filter system would be a very nice, very welcome addition to the ModDB. I am one of the honest people that would *love* to tag my mods, but everytime I uploaded one and tried I found the list of available tags so lacking that none would apply other than the category-redudant "It's a content mod". Having vastly more tags available or, even better, the ability to set custom tags would open up a very convenient system for people. And imho, any filter system needs a blacklist mode aswell. We can search for tags, why can't we also search for "Not tag X"? Outside of personal AI crusades, the ability to narrow down specific searches is a great tool. Nexusmods has such a comprehensive tag-and-filter system and it's one of the best features for me as mod user there. It would fully address the imo valid complaints OP has about the current AI reporting approach we have and I do not see how the supplied counter-complaints would actually apply here.

Kapok for sure. Pine if not available.

I guess zooming out and around like that could make things awkward, yes - but also I don't think we need some funky contraption like this to combat people willingly choosing non-standard FOV settings.

Disabling temporal stability effectively removes your gear at the bottom (I think it just is always empty without consequences?). Everything else still works. Temporal Rifts spawning and spawning monsters is a different setting. Temporal Storms is a different setting. Fairly sure technically, under the hood, the world remains temporally (un)stable but you would just not know as your only indicator for such no longer exists.

Vintage Story doesn't have "biomes" the way Minecraft does - which makes things even more complicated. It just tracks several climate maps that determine things like - Forest level of a given area - Humidity/Rain probability of a given area - Temperature range of a given area These stats combined define what spawns in terms of trees, crops and animals. The rest is the height map and terrain pass during world gen determining where mountains go, if you get lush green or a gravel/sand desert in your forest, then ores and resources. If anything exists, the world edit suite (enabled using ".we" in chat) could maybe help you edit, well, the world? Other than that there is alot of semi-independent value that would need to be carefully adjusted and you'd likely have to write a mod that allows you to specifically override the climate maps for a given chunk via command.

I am trying to imagine that but fail to see any real application, let alone implementation for this? You make pottery bottom up, finished layer by finished layer anyway. So you see all sides from the top while making it. Seeing as the Seraph is two blocks tall and a single pottery item cannot (afaik) exceed a single block in height you will always be able to look from the top and if you need to get closer, press G and sit down.

I, too, see alot of untapped potential with this game. As with most games, especially Open World Sandbox and even more Early Access. Doing a 180° and turning the sandbox into a generic checklist task hunt, however, ain't on that list. If people want to make custom maps with custom challenge.txt files that get uploaded to the interwebz, one day become really big and popular, then ripped of by greedy pay 2 use companies on marketplaces eventually bullying the creative original inventor legally off the face of the earth by scuffed copyright systems - sure, go ahead. But for the game itself as a baseline feature? No thank you.

Stripped Oak logs for support beams, Kapok planks for wall and floor textures as default "catch all" wood (temperate climate base). Birch or Larch, depending on availability, if a more white-colored theme is needed like when pairing with granite ashlar bricks or playing around with light mud bricks/tan daub. Pine for darker themes or for a more "solid" feel if that makes sense (my big stable is made out of it. Speaking of the stable, Acacia to complement as best as possible a red shingle roof) Honorable mention: Walnut but only after installing the mod that turns it from a purple-grey goop into the missing dark wood color palette akin to dark oak in Minecraft. Ebony doesn't count, too rare and too washed.

The only vanilla way is to wait for them to despawn. Only additional way would be, in Singleplayer, to use /entity l[] remove on the corpse (I think). Otherwise mods that make corpses despawn near instantly while auto-dropping their loot is the way to go.

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.