August Moore

That's fair, but it is also how it could be solved in situations like this in real world situations. I mostly brought that up because as I pointed out in my separate post about animal behaviors, it would be nice for doors to not be a one size fits all solution to mob spawns. It could not just be an issue of enemy mobs but it could also be pest/hunting behaviors in animals. Bears and wolves are more likely to break down doors if they are hungry and know that prey is there than to attack humans. What if the door mechanic also applied to that? Sure, blocking up the door from drifters and the like would prevent them from getting into your base, but you won't always be able to stop bears or wolves from eating your animals. Could give the game a more dynamic late game feel. When you eventually move on from barring the door at night to using better doors that stop drifters and the like from breaking in, you get comfortable. You forget that higher damage mobs can break down better doors. You realize bears will attack your farm. That way you dont just end up with a 100% viable farm/defense technique. It could even be a feature you opt into like moving water sources or fire from lightening. That way newbies won't get destroyed right away, and veteran players can opt into a more dynamic and dangerous play style.

Look, to each their own, but I personally agree that is has been a successful implementation by Microsoft. They don't always manage to break down doors, which is the point I was trying to make. Drifters may not be able to break down every single door, door hp would be temporary, like in Minecraft. They may just give up the chase if they don't see/hear the player. It doesn't have to be dialed up to the highest intensity. Which was my exact point about using this mechanic in Vintage Story. There are so many ways to implement this in ways that don't ruin immersion, and are balanced. I don't want to argue for the sake of arguing, I just want a mechanic that works better than drifters spawning inside of what is supposed to be a secure base, and this seems immersive and easy to solve.

It doesn't necessarily require metal working right away. There are plenty of ways to get around that. Blocking up your door with dirt, adding a trapdoor right under it, even adding things like health to door types can mitigate the need to have more complex doors right away. It's not like we are suggesting that they can break down any door at any time. There are so many ways to deal with this. And yeah, it might be annoying for first time player to have to deal with, but Minecraft already has a mechanic like it and it works to great success. Not all mobs can break down doors, the only ones that could would be drifters, and unless you happen to have a particularly nasty one spawn in, the door problem is an easily solvable issue. Plus, I would much rather know that enemy mobs can break down my door and have to occasionally fix that then to keep turning around to a two headed drifter that spawned right behind me, or to keep getting sniped in my base. That is suuuuuuuper annoying.

I would also like rivers in game. I think the reason why they haven't happened yet is because it can be complex to figure out how to keep the water flowing from the source without crashing the game. It's a fairly complex issue, where does the source block start for flowing water, where does it end, how is generating the source block from another chunk going to affect gameplay. It can get pretty dicey pretty quickly. Especially in a block game where downhill rivers are easier to simulate than longer, less sloped rivers. The current flowing water mechanics are very cool as is, but it might just be an issue of complexity.

I kind of broached a similar topic in my post today, but the ability for things to break down doors feels very true to life. I get that it can make players feel like they have nowhere to hide, but there are options for that. Doors that are more solid, or even reinforced may hold up better to attacks. Meaning you can still use them to hide, maybe having a room with multiple reinforced doors so that even powerful temporal storms could be withstood. I am not a fan of the mechanic of drifters and such just spawning in your base even though it's light up like a christmas tree. I would prefer them being able to attack doors over spawning literally the second there isn't 16 levels of light.

I am thoroughly aware that this topic has been beaten to death, but if we all agree that animals should have more complex behaviors, it is more likely for the devs to see it and make a move on it. Which isn't to say we should pressure the devs. (Warning, I am autistic, I speak densely and bluntly. Walls of text ahead.) That being said, I'd like to see more complex animal behaviors, including; mating, rearing, hunting/eating/drinking, pests, and curiosity. First off, mating behaviors of animals are very complex and hard to boil down to "This animals behaves this way and that animal behaves that way." In particular, I'd like to see animals find companions of their own and join them. We see this in wolves, pigs, goats, and deer in game, but I'd like to see that expanded maybe a little more. Wolves usually travel in packs of five to twenty, and although fending off a pack of twenty wolves would be impossible in a single player and possibly multiplayer world, I'd like to see larger packs, make them a little more of a threat. Same goes with bears, they are *mostly* solitary creatures, expect when they fish and mate, in which tons of bears gather right after spring time. It would be nice to see more bears together in larger herds. This may impact performance, so I'm not asking for the game to become unplayable for the sake of realism, but I would like to see animals spending time together as they would in the wild. Rearing kinda follows this topic, in that instead of seeing one or two baby animals following the parents, maybe we could have dens/homes for the animals to defend. Wolves roaming the wild with their pups isn't super common, so maybe some caves could have less "spelunking" feels and more dark dense opening in the ground in which animals could hide. In the same sense that certain animals will use areas are a sort of home base, maybe certain areas will spawn types of animals more often. For example; plains will spawn deer, goats, rabbits, and... other animals that live in plains, and they are likely to return there to graze as a sort of home. While caves will likely spawn larger packs of wolves or bears. I'd also like to see predators in particular defend their young. Hunting, eating, and drinking, in my opinion, need the biggest overhaul. I get really annoyed that not only do we not see animals other than bears hunt, but predators hunt the player character on sight. In reality, most animals avoid humans, even if they don't have a lot of experience with them, because of our size and complexity. Animals like wolves only hunt humans if absolutely starving, and are more likely to defend themselves or their young from humans and don't always attack to kill. Which, to be fair, wolves in game sort of behave this way. But what I'd like to see more of is complex hunting strategies. Wolves are ambush predators, instead of running up on them, maybe they could sense us from a distance and hide in the underbrush, leaping out to attack when we turn our back. Bears usually only defend their young against humans, black bears are very timid and stay away from humans rather than attack on sight, brown bears are more aggressive, but even they can be pretty nonchalant around us because they know they could kill us. In the same sense that they hunt with complex behaviors when they do, I'd also like to see animals gather around water sources. Even though drinking isn't currently a mechanic, it would be nice for animals to still behave in realistic ways. Pest behavior is a big one for me. As much as a I hate pests in real life, they fill an important ecological niche, and can add a realism to gardening in game. Animals like racoons, gophers, rabbits, squirrels, and much much more will root around in your garden and uproot plants, eat your plants, and all round cause havoc. This kind of happens if you have a garden without walls in game, goats and such will at your plants, but I'd like to see animals that can scale fences, or dig under walls to get into your garden. they don't always destroy all of your garden, in fact I have a garden right now that has been terrorized by the local animals, but they only hurt less than half of my garden. Either way, it would be nice to have some sort of way to keep gardens from becoming over blown fields of produce in late game that are both impossibly giving, and very easy to maintain. And this doesn't just apply to gardens, all animals have pest behaviors. For example, wolves and bears WILL try to break into homes or boxes with food in them. Although it make predators op, maybe the need for food and the next mechanic can be combined to make wolves and bears occasionally try to break into homes. Could make home defense more interesting. Which leads into the last topic, curiosity. All animals have levels of curiosity, some much less than others. Foxes steal food from houses and people all of the times, gopher sneak into gardens and eat your food, squirrels follow people around and will befriend humans who give them food. I'm not saying these are all mechanics that are doable in game, but a level of curious behavior and theft could easily be doable by in game animals. For example, if a chest inside a house with an open door, or if the chest is outside, contains food, foxes will steal that food. They could also snatch food out of players hands if it is the item they are holding. Wolves and bears might inspect a door rather than charge at it blindly, and if the reward is big enough, might decide to break down the door in order to get the food or animals inside. This would be particularly realistic in the sense of barns, because predators break into barns all of the time rather than hunting down dangerous humans. These are all pretty in depth and decidedly complex, so please feel free to add, subtract, or diversify how they could all be accomplished. Some of these might just make the game more cpu heavy and therefore aren't super doable, and that's understandable. I would like to see some more complex behaviors because it kinda bothers me that wolves and bears attack on sight, every single time, and that they don't truly occupy ecological systems. Idk. TLDR; the autistic woman want's animals to behave like an ecological system.

I think it's acceptable to have both systems at the same time. For clay that isn't spun it might have a higher chance of breaking and be lower quality, while clay that's spun on a wheel could be done as a time trial, each layer needs to be built up and will take an amount of clay voxels. This spun clay may take more time to dry and can crack easier while drying, but the finish product will have higher temperament. In the same way as adding hp to tools, clay items could have a system where the more you use it, the more likely it is to form a crack. Higher temper clay will form cracks less often, and the more cracks the clay has, the more likely it is to shatter. This marries to the need for the initial voxel system, the clay wheel, drying, and temperament with real life clay systems without making it too broken.