Rainbow Fresh

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.

Gosh darn it, I always forget the word and then my brain told me "Yes, percentile is smaller than percent". My whole point was that it isn't easier to obtain if it only comes in tiny patches though, versus iron being huge chunks. But beelining for iron should be better then. Luckily I randomly came across an iron deposit of unknown size in another cave near the bottom of the world, guess I start there and hope it's alot. It is in a huge slab of Granite. Pretty sure in most parts of my wider home area it's Granite only, all the way down. Which when researching my crippling lack of lime I learned is apparently reason enough for some people to immediately generate a new world. But ok, hold on. One crucial question for my understanding here; I based my numbers on the one tiny patch of connected tin ore blocks I found by digging around the outside. Seeing as all this prospecting stuff is "chance based" I just assumed "that's it, I found it". If you are saying 0.2 permille basically guarantees "3 deposits per chunk" - chunk being a 32x32 blocks area? - would there be more around in the general area then? Cause if there is more to the deposit than the one connected bit, that would also notably change things. Oh yeah, you're right. Didn't see that. Just saw all the multiplier numbers for tools being lower in the wiki and assumed it's a generally weaker alternative. That does make it more viable for 200 durability per block chiseling operations. Well, uhm, a flint on a bone/stick is my primary axe/knife material cause I hate using notably limited/scarce resources... Bronze may take less time to produce and process, but to me personally, that is not a problem. I'd happily take slow as hell iron/steel production over "into crucible, onto fire, wait, pour, done" for the added benefits of durability and co. What does make an impact though, is the time and effort required to obtain the material, where huge veins that "supply me for years", as williams said, are always better than many tiny ore patches. Because time producing iron/steel is mostly just waiting at home. A passive activity during which you can tend to crops, animals, cook and preserve food, build a house, all the other things needing attention. Going out for days poking rocks, that is active work during which nothing else can happen, besides seasons ever-changing and crops dying. So occasionally prospecting until a reading appears, then prospecting finer until the peak is found, then digging down once into a vein you simply cannot miss and from here on out just having to come back and fill you inventory with stacks of ore chunks every now and then is much better than continuously spending days away poking the ground then burning through pickaxes and propicks trying to find the tiny, slippery bugger lasting you for exactly one haul.

So... is bronze even worth it, or am I just generally better off bee-lining all my efforts into the iron age? (Currently in mid copper age in the attempt to acquire meaningful quantities of tin to get to the bronze age). The story is the following. After being blessed with virtually no chalk for lime in a meaningful radius, I had to use Borax for leather instead, which already requires bronze tools to mine. Very luckily I randomly stumbled upon a few blocks in a cave one day, so I could afford a whopping 4 bronze ingots with what I had left, so I could finally progress. Seeing some things are gated behind bronze+ ingots (especially some of the cooler weapons from Combat Overhaul - Armory), the durability and damage/armor tier increase being very nice, and the difference between copper and bronze ingots being only two tin nuggets instead of 20 I thought "Ok, let's do that prospecting thing and find big juicy deep ore vein and be set for the forseeable future." So I went poking the ground in grids and lo and behold, soon enough I found a "High" reading peak. At 0.2 percentile. That's not alot. And after a whole while of digging and frustration, I finally found the sparkly rocks. About 20 of them total. But hey, atleast I got really lucky and got a "Copius" density vein! Oh... Looking into the wiki what rate that translates to, on top of all this nonsense Tin is also treated as valuable as Gold and gets the special snowflake treatment of just being generally worth less. Suddenly, my big, lucky prospecting expedition to find a highest tier Tin vein netted me literally as much as your average surface Copper deposit. That would be a total of 40-ish ingots. Certainly not "set for the forseeable future". So that begs the question; is this even worth it? Surface deposits are incredibly rare, and as much as this peeves me, I don't just wanna increase their probability either (which would only start affecting thousands of blocks away, too.) Deep ore veins are barely veins. Overall yield is artificially nerfed. Yes, you only need two nuggets per ingot, meaning even the poorest quality ore is an ingot per block; but at the same time the amount of time wasted not tending to crops, animals, building projects, food preservation and all the other stuff in your day to day life and the amounts of ingots burned through in pickaxe and propick consumption just to find these couple rocks counter-balances this. And while there are two other options for "Bronze", they aren't notably better either. Black Bronze, as cooler looking and more durable as it is, is made from Gold and Silver both. Trading one very rare, low yield nugget per ingot for two very rare, equally low yield nuggets does not improve output rate. Bismuth might be slightly more common (or, atleast, more bountiful) but Zinc doesn't help much there either; not to mention Bismuth Bronze being a weaker alloy. Meanwhile I have read people saying that Iron is much more abundant, supposedly, and there are some more iron+ gated things that would unlock for me. Thoughts?

I am currently using the Watersheds mod for rivers, which till be replaced by native rivers in 1.22 afaik. So that's a problem then? Some mods will probably need to be removed though, as their intended additions/mechanics will be implemented as vanilla content in 1.22. Which brings me to another thought - the wiki has some information for past updates where manual block-remapping needed to be done via command to map old blocks to their newer version (probably when things got split into variants or variants combined into a single block). Can this work for transferring modded blocks to their new vanilla alternative too?

I know, I know. Ages old question asked and answered about a million times in various forms. Person has played the game on a world they like very much in game version A (1.21.6) but a new version B (1.22) is looming on the horizon with cool new stuff that person would like to have, without losing their world. I have read around abit and know the general consensus of "should be doable", "worst case world-edit over your base on a fresh gen" and "if you play modded you're f-ed". That's not what matters to me though. I will eventually update, and if I have to world edit my base over to a freshly generated world as a last resort option, so be it. What I am more interested in, is knowing what exactly updating a world between major game versions would technically entail. To start off with, as a seasoned Minecraft player I am very well aware of the world generation border; the area past the already generated and explored chunks where new content will now generate, but there will be a hard cut in the world, potentially "transitioning" the deepest ocean into the sliced middle of a tall mountain, as the new version now uses a new world generation algorithm accounting for all the new things and so, even on the same world seed, generates a different outcome. Does Vintage Story also have this "issue", or is the world generator forgiving enough to smooth out the terrain between versions? Next off, I am indeed "f-ed" as I am playing with a list of 50+ mods, most all of which I deem necessecary for general enjoyment of the game. I am aware that this means I will have to wait extra for all of them to update - if ever - before being allowed to play 1.22 after it releases into stable, and I will certainly need to ditch some of them (either abandoned or now obsolete due to vanilla mechanics). But assuming we reached the point where all still maintained and necessary mods are then up-to-date and I can do the big update, what do I need to expect? And what do I need to prepare? Purge my world of all modded entities? Missing textures after the update? How many things could need admin-power maintenance after the great update?

The idea of creating blueprints to copy from using parchment and pigments is great to begin with. As for the actual copying itself; just reuse the clay forming mechanic's way of "copying" a layer. Still takes time, still drains chisel durability like crazy, as every voxel is chiseled one after the other (or maybe in steps of 4 at once like clay forming) but reduces the tedium of having to manually chisel the same shape of 1/16 grid custom fence pieces about 100 times (totally not speaking from experience.)