Rainbow Fresh

Very much a world goal. Even got mods for post-steel progression.

Does "Being on my first save ever and not yet having reached Steel as I got sidetracked with way too big building projects, frustrated and took a break" count as "Never" or "Almost never"?

So the vast majority of randomly breaking crafting recipes still exists then?

As LadyWYT already said, I don't see a reason why metal hooks shouldn't be added to the base game, one day - but also there needs to be a reason for them to exist. "Several mods add the same thing" is not a reason for them to exist in the base game. And fishing isn't the reason a solid metal hook of the kind you hang on the ceiling/wall to attach stuff to needs to exist. As the devs are averse to gore, mechanics like with the Butchering mod will not exist and therefor I see little hope we will get a metal hook to hang corpses for funsies. Herbalism could add hooks for use akin to the alchemy mod but that remains to be seen. I don't know where and how A Culinary Artillery uses hooks as I do not use that mod myself right now, but going off of wishful thinking alone having hooks to hang pans and other utensils on the wall could be a cool thing to have in the game? Either way, with 1.23 being the armor rework (probably) and whatever the other main focus is update and 1.24 being the chapter 3 update, it will likely be quite some time until we can hope for any major changes that bring reasonable hope for base game hooks with it. As for the immediate future though, and a baseline for your request; While having metal hooks in the base game could be neat and would solve the issue you mentioned, the issue you mentioned being mod-related it should probably an issue to be mod-solved. Either the developers of said mods work together and make compatibility patches to reduce duplicate hook clutter, or someone goes be the good Samaritan and makes a library mod that doesn't add code snippets, but rather common items many mods use those mods could then depend on. A mod just to add hooks and other common crafting pieces so that other mods can rely on it as the baseline for those items.

So lemme get this straight: You took two flints and knapped a knife head, crafted an actual knife with it in your inventory using the knife head and a stick, and are holding that knife in your main hand while destroying the grass, as in the actual grass growing in top not grass blocks, with left mouse button? And are not getting any drops from it?

Welcome to not Minecraft. Things aren't spoonfed over here and also clay is just slighly differently colored dirt. You probably walked past several patches already.

The temporal stability of an area is baked into the chunk and determined at world generation. It never changes. Sadly this is simply a "bad luck" component of world generation that is easy to miss when choosing your first base location. You can either turn off temporal stability as a gameplay mechanic (as it does not really add anything truly meaningful) or live with it and move elsewhere/start over.

Agreed with williams. "Challenging" and "tedium" walk a very fine line in game balancing and that line is usually moved the most by the ability to overcome challenges. Take food for example. At the beginning of the game, you starve because you have nothing, no means to get anything valuable and spend all your energy trying to get somewhere. Then you progress the game, build a farm, tend some livestock and cook nutritious, long lasting meals. That is progress, you overcome the starvation. That is fun. On the other hand, no matter how far into the game you are, you will still need to constantly eat and eat and eat like a machine as you burn through satiety for every step you take. As unavoidable as this might be, it is tedious and will get boring and annoying real quick. Bears breaking down doors to get to food, which is kindly enough not you but unkindly enough your animals or food stores. How do you prevent that in the long run? By having to build a barn for animals that has to be reinforced with a steel door so it doesn't break? Or by using the several aforementioned cheesy workarounds LadyWYT talked about that essentially remove the door breaking mechanic again at the cost of forcing the player to turn every single door into a slow, ugly and boring block barricade you have to break and replace to enter? Neither sounds like a good time, just like arbitrary limitations in player creativity. Cause a sleek wooden door matching the woodtype of my house is several times nicer than a steel door, let alone 2 dirt blocks. And if we counter the cheese - however that would be possible - then people will just not bother at all with animal husbandry because, as william mentioned, if you get your several years of effort worth generation 5+ animals randomly mugged by a randomly spawned bear that randomly vandalized your barn that you have to expensively build in the first place because pens aren't vaiable at all anymore is bullshit and animal husbandry is non-essential. I understand wanting more challenge, but this is just adding challenge for the sake of challenge that ends up becoming a tedium real quick. Just removing indoors spawns from temporal storms would help with your initially mentioned problem.

All I remember is the sea monkey. Which does steal your held item the first time you encounter it but after that they just randomly hand you ore as far as I remember. Still "stoopid monkey" though Unless there was another one...

Vintage Story is not a horror game though. It doesn't need horror elements, especially not ones that exist solely for the spook. For example, why would armor stands move or items move? If you'd have something like that, you'd need something in the game that actually has the capabilities. In which case it'd be a whole new discussion (as just recently briefly touched in another thread about pests) of why we'd need some creature in the game that can break into your house and moves stuff around for fun. As for the other sub-suggestions; these showcase even clearer the point I am trying to make. Vintage Story is not a horror game. But things can be spooky nonetheless. Knocking on the door in the middle of the night? You only need to give drifters the ability to rarely make knocking sounds. Cause there are monsters, real ones, deadly ones, all over the place, all the time. You sit safely inside, they roam outside and camp at your door. How spooky the knocking actually would be, however, is to be debated cause we all know there are monsters out there. Rustling bush? Would be really nice if that was a feature. Not as "a sound" but because there is, in fact, something in the bush. Is it a deer? A rabbit? A bear 2 seconds away from obliterating you? Do you want to find out? The spook writes itself if you just give the tools to existing mechanics and entities. No need for "Let there be horror cause it would be cool." And adding stuff just to "remove the player's sense of safety" - there is a thing in the game that does this. It's temporal storms, where someone forgot to add code to restrict spawns and a Tier 4 drifter can spawn on the same block as you, inside you fully locked, fully lit home. And people despise this mechanic and want it gone.

Theoretically spearfishing should no longer be possible, as with the introduction of rod fishing their behavior was changed to supposedly "nothing personal kid" you when attempting to physically hit them.

That is the beauty of games with optional story - the answer lies solely with you. Do you want to learn more about the plot/lore, the world you have inhabited, why things are as they are? Well here you have a tiny piece of the greater picture. Keep looking to find more. You don't care about any of that? Chugg it back into the lake, it just takes inventory space. It's the same with Dark Souls games; you can dive into the deep lore of what happened; if you so choose. Or you just suffer through a world full of deadly bosses that speak in riddle-y nonsense that is none of your business, kill them and move on. That is, from what I can feel about the game as it is right now, the vision for the story. It is there, optionally, if you want to engage with it. Otherwise you can just live a somewhat peaceful life playing hardcore Minecraft. It's why Homo Sapiens mode exists. Speaking of which... It's a good concept used in several other games out there to package multiple possible experiences for multiple possible target audiences into a single game. Both people who like clear goals to follow and want to pursue the main story aswell as those not caring and just wanting a hardcore wilderness survival experience can play this game to their liking. I also, personally, think that optional story that is not force-fed down your throat is a better approach to games that aren't inherently story-focused like open world sandbox survival games are. Gives you more freedom to do what you truly want, when you truly want. You want to use the story locations as loot pools? Go ahead. You want to wait until you are maxed out on steel gear to have a better chance crushing any challenge story locations pose? Go ahead. You don't care at all and just want to build a nice village with reach steel tier before calling the game "done"? Go ahead. Better than "Oh, so you want to finally reach the copper age? Well you need to now take your flimsy stone tools and go to dungeon 1 and beat boss 1 which unlocks the necessary tech. Then you can use copper tools to go to dungeon 2 and beat boss 2 to unlock bronze" and so on. So I don't see a problem with having an optional plot experience on top of a game that you can play at your own pace. As LadyWYT stated, it starts when you find a treasure hunter trader, pick the right dialogue option (a little bit of curiosity required, I guess) and do the little quest given to you. The rest is just following the trails given to you and overcoming the challenges along the way. Right now? Being a nuisance to keep you "on your toes". In the future? Hopefully something actually cool that half of the playerbase doesn't want to mod out. That said, with the direction the current plot is going I expect to get information on storms in future chapters. Which finally ties into: What to expect from the game going forward, as deduced by a mere player on basis of the current game and the few updates I witnessed myself, assuming the devs stick to the current theming. As LadyWYT already mentioned as well, the progression is pretty much set in stone through what we have, what the roadmap offers and what things the devs have said in various interviews. The ultimate tier progression will go up to early steam power; so no much further than steel. The rest will likely be more in-depth mechanics for existing features to make things more engaging, realistic, maybe challenging. Hopefully revisits to existing mechanics that feel underwhelming. But the general flow is already mapped out. AS for the story, there will be 6 more chapters which, following the current theme, might get individually longer with bigger, more impressive locations to visit, puzzles and bosses to overcome. With the direction the story is going so far, I'd expect to learn all about what happened to the old civilization and where the rust creatures are coming from by the end, with the hopeful potential we might learn to do something against them; finish what our predecessors couldn't. But seeing as the story is and likely always will be opt-out-able I can easily see it just being flashy, cinematic exposition all the way down for those interested enough to care. As for mods; generally the golden rule is to install whatever you want from the game. It's what mods are for, to modify it in a way that is enjoyable to YOU. But if what YOU want is jumping ahead in a vanilla+ way you'd want to look into mods that expand existing mechanics into more in-depth interactions (like Butchering, Hydrate or Diedrate, A Culinary Artillery, Equus, Shipwright), things that add new mechanics that feel missing while still fitting within the scope of "max early, crude steam power" and "basic steampunk fantasy tech" (aka. Jonas tech) as well as mods that expand the lore and add more plot stuff to engage with (of which I only know Better Ruins).

Not in my experience either. I know Zombies breaking down doors on Hard difficulty is a thing. I have never even encountered it outside of poor villages being reduced to ash when the RNG-based zombie horde event kicked in. In my over a decade of playing Minecraft, I have had about 2 worlds on hard/hardcore difficulty. Mostly because for your average enjoyment of the game Normal is perfectly fine and because when playing with friends who are... less avid gamers than me putting them through anything higher would be unfun. In those two worlds where zombies could theoretically destroy doors... I never had it happen even once. Mostly because you just Light up a wide area so monsters don't spawn, sleep through the night, aren't anywhere near home 90% of the time or have infinite iron about 2h into the game to make iron doors. So I, too, cannot agree that it "works to great success".

I, too, would love to see more complex behaviors than the never-ending chase predators give you should you dare enter their sphere of influence and their D20 of a brain decides to switch to attack mode and the "move 180° in the opposite direction" fleeing behavior of everyone else. So to re-iterate on your ideas from a slightly different perspective: Seasonal areas - maybe even monthly ones. Having a fixed daily schedule would be a bit too much and too predictable me thinks. With a background simulation (aka. changes over time even if you are not there). This is what combines your "mating", "rearing" and "hunting/eating/drinking" ideas in a broader concept. Instead of just rolling a dice based on environmental conditions at world generation and runtime for the game to decide "There be Male Ibex here" and "Let there be 2 Mufflon sheep" and so on, the game rather generates areas concerning wildlife. Basically a middle-ground combination of what we already had with dedicated "wolf and bear spawn zones" and a little bit of what we now have as a proof of concept with fishing. The game generates areas like "home area of species X", "watering spot", "grazing grounds" and so on. This can involve generating caves/generating in already generated caves for den-style homes for wolves and the like. This way, there are dedicated areas in the game that act as spawn regions for specific animals, aswell as POIs animal logic can take. Like "occasionally move to grazing grounds or watering spot", "migrate to home during child spawning season". Even more complex logic like "predator goes hunt in prey species territory" and so on. As for the actual animals, their spawns should still - within the confines of their designated home areas - be tied to normal spawn conditions. Meaning a random number of animals is generated on first world generation and a differently weighted set can spawn in post should the "invisible stock" (fishing mechanic) be lower than the targeted one (simple ecosystem balance). But more importantly, require the conditions of the world around - and the actual world around, meaning re-evaluation on changes so we don't have a worse wolf/bear situation. If the player destroys a forest that is home of a forest-dwelling species of animals, they can no longer spawn there. As for your other two suggestions though - I am not too sure about those. Pests; As you mentioned, this - to a reasonable degree - already exists now that it was fixed in 1.22. Most any prey animal tries to consume your delicious crops on the field, forcing you to build a fence around it. Or be on guard 24/7 to hunt them down for a meaty snack. That is already fine. However "Pests that can climb fences" and are as such not avoidable innately add more frustration than value. Every threat should come with a solution. Most any animal eats your crops but you can build a fence to protect them. When birds eventually get added I heavily expect a scarecrow to be added aswell to protect your crops. Adding squirrels and other pests that can scale fences or even mice and similar, as was suggested in another thread, that can literally dig into your cellar and eat your store of food must come with some sort of protection aswell. How would that look? Constantly putting down and checking on mouse traps placed as a second wall in your cellar, reducing the max effective cellar size to 5x5? Doesn't sound fun. Adding cats and dogs to hunt for you and protect your land? Sounds like a nice addition in general but would require and entirely new animal companion system as those cannot just behave like normal domesticated animals, lest they eventually wander off or despawn in darkness. Also, while monsters so far ignore anything other than the player, I still am rather adverse to adding cute pets you emotionally bond to into a game where everything can die. Imagine a random bear walking by and murdering your dog. Not a good experience. But neither is making pets immortal a good balancing choice. And then curiosity. Curiosity is a core part of animals and partially the reason why domestication works. And there are a few behaviors that could be tied to it. A bear or wolf snooping around your base, detecting your food storage and deciding to break down your door - when not even rust monsters can do that - is kind of a big no-go though. If anything it need to be a difficulty setting if wildlife can break down blocks/doors and should be off by default. Nobody likes their hard work destroyed by RNG. See quenching, for example. Also, what I forgot to mention in the pests section, animals actively stealing from your chests should also be a no-go. I doubt most small pests can open a solid trunk lid. And this would result in some players not even knowing what's going on and filing bug reports for items randomly vanishing. While opening up griefing opportunities on servers where players steal from other players and when confronted just claim "pests are in the game, they could have done it. Happened to me too".

I think that we don't need to bake an entire AI model solely for world generation into the game. Performance cost and the never-ending rave about ethnics and morals of gen-AI and their training data aside, plenty of people will lose their shit if the game itself is suddenly labeled as "AI". And since you brought up Minecraft as a reference, Minecraft has very nice most time beautiful terrain generations and as far as I am aware they do not run a diffusion model in the background. I'm not entirely sure what they changed since the old days to improve world generation (minus the constant slices carved into the world since the Caves and Cliffs update) other than the Nether being generated from a noise-based generator but clearly it is possible to generate all the things with nice natural variety and including rivers and oceans and huge mountains with just normal world generation tactics.

Ideas/Suggestions/Wishes for more mechanical powered content float around every so often - a testimony to how underused of a gameplay concept it currently is - but I don't think conveyor belts have been brought up recently. Which is a very basic, staple feature of any sort mechanical power system and could be an easy and cool addition. However, the reason why this might not have been brought up more often is because conveyor belts are just the moving parts of a bigger system, and we are lacking the bigger system. Because if we add conveyor belts we first have to ask the important question of what do you even need them for? We don't have any machines that could utilize this yet. Unless we make the large bellows be able to cool down items lying in front of it (like blowing on your hot food) where you could then build a machine that... moves items you smithed/smelted in a 4x4 circle with a large bellows inside. A rather niche usage that only really has meaning for as long as quenching is so unsatisfyingly RNG. Feeding the helve hammer wouldn't work because in order to smith it needs an anvil-solid surface; which a moving conveyor belt isn't. Feeding the quern doesn't make sense. And neither does the pulverizer, really. So yes, while conveyor belts are an easy staple of mechanical power systems, we'd first need the machinery that could utilize it. By itself, even chutes are more purposeful and useful right now. So we'd first need more dedicated, mechanical automation-based machinery for this to make sense. As for moving blocks/structures Minecraft Create mod style; we already had the 4D quern. Jokes aside, making entire in-world block structures movable like entities is a huge undertaking and even said Create mod over in TOBG only does so with notable drawbacks compared to fixed machinery. While the potential is huge with what you can create (pun intended) it is also really whacking and artistically out of style for the rest of the game suddenly having a 10x10 structure rotate off-grid. And most things you'd want to move like this we already have, as dedicated moving parts. Windmills exists, so do waterwheels now. The helve hammer is a moving part. Playing with mods like "Immersive Woodworking" what the game might be lacking still is a mechanical saw for chopping logs into planks or similar but that, too, would be a fixed contraption with animated parts rather than free-style slapping a saw onto some blocks that rotate in space-time. Having more moving parts in the game and expanding on the mechanical side of things is certainly a good thing but I don't feel like going as far as to just add free-style block transformation devices is a good fit. Vintage Story's moving contraptions and multiblock system already add the foundation needed. You also mentioned building your own clock this way. That... would be huge. People have already talked about clockmaking and there are mods that add it - but those are for normal-sized clocks not ones build manually out of the giant gears we have. This would be akin to building a computer with Minecraft Redstone - possible, but not achievable in any survival world and taking up the entire render distance to build. Having clocks would still be cool but at best a mechanically powered 3x3 multiblock I'd say. Anything else would be overkill for the simplicity of having device that tells you the time. And finally, hot air balloons. Certainly not the most overpowered form of aerial travel suggested/requested. As with any suggested form of travel/transport, especially of the limit-free aerial travel kind, the balancing question stays front and center lest we end up repeating Minecraft's biggest mistake of adding Elytra; a single item (well technically two, you need rockets) that single-handedly made 90% of the game obsolete as nothing ever will nor can compete to the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want, at speed faster than the world can generate. Steampunk-style airship have already been modded into the game, I can see hot air balloons potentially be fitting enough for the base game though. As the naturally come with lots of drawbacks and limitations. Opposite to motored airships, you'd be at the whimsy of the wind and they'd be hard and skill-based to control if modeled realistically. However that said, the first problem would then already be "being at the whimsy of the wind". We don't have dynamic wind with varying directions yet. So at best you could control balloons by holding down W/A/S/D to go veeeeery slowly into the given direction. Yet once more we'll have to ask the question of the "why". What exact purpose would balloons fulfill? Exploration? They'd be a lesser choice to elks (or horses now that they've been teased) in terms of speed while being severely more end-game expensive and being up high in the air only does so much if render distance is the major limiting factor. Mods like Farseer would need to become vanilla game mechanics for this to add merit. Transport? If we see balloons as rafts of the sky you might be able to carry chests full of goodies at once; a welcome upgrade to elks/horses. Risking your big haul to unfavorable wind directions though seems like a sub-optimal move. And the ability to predict wind directions on a large scale and longer timeframe to plan trips would need to be added.

As far as I know that isn't a really reliable indicator for the fish population. Bodies of water have two sets of fish, those that visibly, physically roam the pond and the "hidden stock", which is what fishing usually pulls from if no real fish is close enough to bite. So while yes, technically there are always atleast the visible amount of physical fish left available for fishing, how much fish in general the pond has is and remains a hidden number.

So I am facing the situation where I have alot of land between point A and B and I need it gone to build a new Walmart parking lot canal connecting two lakes. I want to connect my home lake via continuous waterway to the ocean roughly 5000 blocks west so I can explore the 7 seas between me and a story location. The big problem now is, even with the most optimal pathing (still including a somewhat natural looking snaking design) I, at times, have to excavate up to 5 blocks deep just to get to sea level; not yet accounting for some varying depth. And so after breaking more than an entire copper shovel just to dig 1 block wide it became pretty apparent that digging an atleast 5 blocks wide (that's what you need for a sailboat to fit, right?) canal will be a monumental task and considering this is the first and probably shortest segment of the 5 I will need to reach the ocean my already dwindling motivation to keep pushing through the grind keeps further tanking. So I was thinking, clearly there has to be a better way (that is not creative mode or world edit, I'll save those as last ditch efforts). There a bombs. What about bombs? If carefully spaced they should easily create a wide enough hole with more or less natural variation. But then again, making that many bombs will be a very costly endeavor compared to just making a durability (or probably power for speed) quenched steel shovel (now that I have access to Iron and heading to steel). So how well would bombs actually work for this task? Is it worth it? Are there other alternatives? I already have 70+ mods so if there would be one dedicated to mass excavation/landscaping I'd happily take that too.

Very known issue that tying ropes to entities is broken af. Only way to really deal with it is relogging or trying to walk far enough away (out of loading distance) for it to stop, then just kindly dispose of the free ropes.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/44983 And several others that just do it by fixed amounts

Item/Block sounds is just a bunch of sound files and, at best, a small amount of code to trigger is based on a bunch of new lines of JSON for each item. That is a minor change in the grand scheme of things an can be considered "safe", therefor not requiring a major version change. More procedural dungeon content is just a bunch of files defining new structures that the procedural dungeon generator (already exists and works) can throw together. I don't know how exactly that works but it's reasonable to assume it's akin to Minecraft structures. This is a safe content update and therefor does not require a major version change. Mechanically powered bellows are a half-finished feature already in the game that just need some code fixes to actually work as intended. Maybe a scope reconsideration for the big old question of "Why though, what does this do different that makes it worth existing". That is a small enough change to reasonably still fit into a minor version change as the big change was already with it being partially introduced in 1.22. In-Barrel/Create content visuals are just a bunch of textures to add. It is therefor a "safe" content update and does not require a major version change. Metal tier mechanical power could be, in its easiest/quickest/dirtiest form, just a couple new block declarations copied from the existing wooden parts that use a new texture/re-use metal based textures and have some parameter tweaks. It is therefor a "safe" change and does not require a major version change.

Big changes will most likely be a major update thing, therefor 1.23. As the armor rework was announced as a "maybe if we do it in time" addition to 1.23 there gotta be a different main focus for that version which could very well be the status effect system. Would also work well with an armor rework, seeing as armor could reasonably have different protection against different wound statuses. 1.22.4+ will only have small additions/fixes/changes like the stuff mentioned above. And I don't think sub-versions ever had a pre-release cycle so 1.22.4-rcX will not be a thing. Also makes little sense from a versioning perspective.

Sounds like the new 1.22 procedural dungeon. And the gates are iirc the same story location doors seen on other notable locations; the ones that cannot even be operated by hand even if you were to obtain them. They have a gear symbol on them right? Either way I don't think there is an vanilla way to obtain them outside of cheating.

Define "AI programs". Because every major IDE out there has AI built-in for atleast auto-complete suggestions at this point. Meaning every mod not written in bare-bones Windows notepad and manually compiled running complex build scripts by hand in the CMD was created with an AI program. And doing the former is the equivalent of using MS Paint instead of any proper drawing program in terms of quality assurance. It also doesn't say anything about if the person actively interacted with AI in the creation process and if they passively did (e.g. by not knowing everything is AI powered these days and if their program kindly suggest a Tab auto-complete option they use it was AI suggested) they won't even think they did, let alone see the need to disclaim anything.

If anything, "electric" lights are already in the game. Just that they are pipes filled with magical glowing mystery liquid, as seen used in the Resonance archives. We'd just need a Jonas tech-esque way to create that ourselves.