Jubal

So my game has a lot of bugged blocks in with unknown block id errors, mostly these are found in ruins (see attached screenshot). I'm getting a bit fed up with it as I'm now at pseudo-endgame (OK I've not made steel yet but I will not get the time for that in the foreseeable) and so I'm kinda mostly moving towards the game being casually poking around ruins and working on chicken husbandry. And the ruins should be pretty and it's frustrating that they aren't. I've not tried playing with switching game modes yet but I heard some people talking about using creative mode to remove specific bugged blocks like this. Is there a good guide anywhere on how to do that/would anyone talk me through it? Or are there any other fixes people know of?

Okay, I'm at lateishgame (still not got steel or got much into baking, but eg done both the story chapters). A few questions! Washing out pots where the food rotted. From the ingame text, I'd thought what you needed to do was just leave them in water for a while, but ground storing them in a water block never seems to clean them. What's the actual mechanic? Can you take an elk through a teleporter, either by riding in on the elk or alternatively by going through the teleporter and then whistling the elk? I assume the answer is no, but this does rather dramatically reduce the utility of teleport devices if you can't travel at a decent speed at the other end. Finding gold and silver (guess what, someone needs to make electrum plates) - do gold and silver appear properly on the area search of prospecting picks, or should I just dig tons of quartz veins wherever I find them and hope I stumble across some? Thanks for any help

The height is a fair point. If such a mechanic was wanted then the game does already have the breath-holding underwater mechanic - one could just implement a much slower-ticking version of that for altitude (but I agree it's probably not necessary. Could be fun for really high mountains though.)

I agree with LWYT, think if there was a full flight thing then it'd need a significant amount of compensating danger which would need a lot, lot more mechanical depth than it seems reasonable to ask for. I wonder if a better idea would be a balloon if a flight option was ever implemented - that could credibly be blown off course with winds on a level the player couldn't do much about, could be hit by lightning, possibly needing careful regulation of fuel, etc etc. And clouds to block visibility. Oh, and it'd definitely need to add cold and oxygen risks above particular heights. It is quite odd that flying ends up being the "safe option" in some games (I've never actually played Minecraft, but I'm sure I've played other examples of this). Flying is super dangerous!

Yeah, I think this is a big chunk of what some of this thread comes down to. And I agree, I think the game is pretty good at making the leather process slow but rewarding enough, whereas with the journeying side it really doesn't feel like the game does respect the time invested into playing it, especially when the likely outcome of playing in a more interesting way is a sanction of "burn real hours more time". Wanting to be able to access the plot of a game I already invested stacks of time into, in something like a normal-ish amount of playthrough time for a computer game, doesn't feel like it should be a terribly unreasonable thing to ask. (I'd almost say that if VS' design intention is to gate people like me out of being able to play in a normal human amount of time, it would be kinder of it to do so in a much more up-front way and really front-load unpleasant combat stuff that we'll find unplayable purely to make it obvious that we should just get a refund rather than dragging it out and shifting the goalposts to gate progression off many tens of hours into gameplay.) I think also reaching the first location of C2 particularly hits that exhaustion button hard, because you get there, you work through it, and it's not super big and doesn't unlock anything new except the location of the next place which is even further away from you than you are from home. So there's a major feeling of "congrats, you did the big uninteresting slog, here's your reward of a bigger uninteresting slog that you didn't have any way to know to prep for, so also you're going to have to do the first slog again twice to resupply with boxes even if you did bring enough other stuff". Which is... not super interesting game writing. I do agree with the points about adding some more environmental challenges and more pack animals for the longer travel, those definitely do sound like good ideas for improving the experience, and the idea of checkpoints for plot locations makes a lot of sense too. I think it'd be good if environmental challenges pushed the player away from the current dominant strategy of travelling on hilltops as much as possible, a thing people rarely actually do because being hit by a storm on a hill ridge with no shelter is quite unpleasant. And moving away from the major problems of travel being gotchas and insta-kills would generally feel more in keeping with the grounded feel the game is trying to give its real-world elements, IMV.

The core point here for me still being that you, an experienced player who has played many worlds, have all the information you need to adjust the game to your exact preferences, and a new player doesn't. But anyway, I'll leave it there, I don't really think there's any point carrying on this discussion: fundamentally given your bar for 'casuals' goes up to people who merely invest triple rather than quadruple figures of hours into a game, and you want the baseline game/plot to gate out a bunch of people who would like to enjoy playing it because of a sense of purism about it needing to be sufficiently 'serious', we're just not going to agree and that's not a design philosophy I'm ever going to endorse. I totally get wanting to be challenged by a game, and I think it's good when games have lots of ways to provide variance and extra difficulty for hardcore players, but I don't think I'm ever going to understand this philosophy of actively wanting new players to be kept out of or put off things they'd enjoy especially when that doesn't actually need to affect your personal experience of play at all. So yeah, let's leave it there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ As regards the temporal gear discussion: I think from my perspective finding ways to make trading a bit more interesting would maybe be a useful element, I'd like to do more trading but it's not hugely interesting at present and I suspect there could be more mechanical interest added. This might be partly connected to the lack of groundedness in the whole trading system at present so hopefully it's something that can be developed. I also agree with CastIronGear's assessment above re where most players are likely to be re the temporal gear stuff.

To be clear, this is exactly what I am doing, and I'm writing this precisely to highlight flaws in that first experience. I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but it's coming across as a bit of a strawman to jump from someone saying "this specific element feels slow and frustrating without adding much interest and challenge" and end up at "the game being so easy the player won't have any challenges to overcome". There's a wide gap between those things, no? And I'm not necessarily prescriptive about how this is solved, but I think the current balance is really quite unsatisfying. On other points: I'm absolutely fine with the "this is the real world" reveal not coming immediately, that's perfectly reasonable. However, it's quite a large lore point because it means you as the player can connect the whole real world of pre-VS-fall history into VS' lore, and I think should come in a way that's impactful, grounded, and feels like it makes some sense. I'm not sure any of those are the case now for me. The world up to that point feels so much a classic fantasy-medieval that I think it needs more than just the name-drop to make the connection feel meaningful - why for example is almost none of the pre-fall stuff we find attributable to anything culturally specific? And the addition of "we should be able to imagine our world turning into this one"... it throws issues like the impossibility of the sort of populations and ratios involved here into focus in a way that I'd be more willing to hand-wave in a world that didn't make that connection. I'll reserve further judgement until after I summon up enough energy to go and try and do the rest of the plot so far, but it didn't work as a reveal for me. I do have storms on, I find if I try to fight through them I mostly just end up frustrated and dead a lot rather than obtaining anything that could be described as useful loot. Thinking about it, I think this may differentiate a few of our perspectives here: I like planning and building and exploring in this game, but I am never going to be good at the slightly janky real-time combat elements, most of which are designed to be very high lethality. If I go into, say, a dungeon, or even just deep into some caves, or if a bear attacks me, the chance I'm going to die is vastly higher than someone who has a thousand hours more ingame experience, better reflexes, and/or less chronic pain than I do. So I think that's partly why the disincentive thing hits in: when something moves from "this might be an interesting risk and I could take a few scrapes" to "I plausibly expect to die an average of two times doing this even with a decent suit of iron armour, well fed, and carrying healing kit" then rather than "that's risky but interesting" many things become "well I don't actually want to do 10,000 blocks of walking to slowly work my way through two minutes of fighting spread over multiple real-time hours, when I don't actually know if there'll be any reward for that". And yes, one conclusion here is that you're clearly better at the game than me and you've played it a lot more, but that's kind of part of my point: what's trivial for an experienced player is not always going to be viable, let alone trivial, for someone on their first run with a mere 100 hours in the game (itself already a pretty big time commitment by most standards). The reason I think there needs to be more player perspective stuff is that lots of the game doesn't make sense, inherently, because it's a game. So there is no way to tell right now which of the things that don't make sense are assumed common knowledge about how the world works and which are actually part of the game lore., And again, I'm not asking for exposition, I'm asking for framing. Those are not the same narrative thing. I do also get the idea of doing something with no framing where you let the player tell their own story about who they are much more, but then that clashes with the game having a lot of very laid down lore about what's happened and how this all came to be.

I agree with this: I guess my corollary to this is that the default standard-mode settings should therefore be balanced to "what will give a new player who wants to have the main-line game experience a challenging but not overly grindy first world run with this game" on the grounds that experienced players who like the game can easily raise friction and difficulty with the settings as they please, but inexperienced players who are less used to the game do not have the same capacity to reduce or adjust specific bits of friction because they don't know what all the settings do yet.

Lots to discuss here, but a few points based on the discussion: To clarify re traders, I don't want more trader dialogue to find out what the traders know, and I'm happy for them to know very little. What I want dialogue there for is to communicate to me as the player what I know as the character. Is the fact that I revive after death surprising to me, for example? Even if the Trader gives a totally nondescript answer, the fact that I can ask the question tells me what I know in a way that helps frame what I should be curious about in the world and what I should accept as an abstraction of the game rules that is common knowledge for both my character and the NPCs. Like, being able to turn fibres into yarn instantly, or certain tools being condensed or working in a slightly magical way, are all valid and useful rule abstractions, but then in many games so are death mechanics, and I think making it clearer what the player character finds it worth asking about would help. The answers you'd get could be entirely meaningless and vague, I think that bit is fine, but the questions could still give useful pointers. I know some people differ but I don't think stumbling across plot locations early is or should be a problem: I think I'd be more motivated to keep playing and to introduce other people to the game if it was easier to go "look there's these cool locations you can find" more than "so if you play for six real-world months you might get to go to a small village". I do think that future chapters involving even further travel would either have to involve a lot more fast travel, or a change of the spawn mechanics/penalties, or would just be prohibitive for any normal player (bearing in mind that none of us in this thread, by virtue of being here, are in any sense normal players). Part of the question I try to approach this stuff with is "given how VS works, could I recommend it to friends" and I think this is the sort of thing where the answer becomes "maybe, but" rather than "yes definitely". I actually agree it'd be nice to have things like elk weight and stamina in there, the sorts of things that encourage me to set up nice little way stations are positives for me. I also don't dislike things like travelling in the day and sleeping at night, that feels nice: what gets to me much more is the very large disincentive to get off and look at anything on the way. Maybe for me the thing I dislike is that the challenge of travel is largely about big gotchas - you got mauled by a bear or most likely had to run from a bear and then fell down a giant hole - and basically everything is fine until suddenly you're dead. There's relatively little challenge that falls between "trivial" and "immediately likely deadly". I don't know if adding procedural dungeons helps with the travel and emptiness problem enormously, because it's another thing you could interact with but you're incentivised not to interact with? If I come across a dungeon when I'm already many thousands of blocks from my current spawn, I'll happily mark it on my map but there's no way I'm going to stop and investigate it because the corpse run if I die (which I'm very likely to at least once in anything like that) just isn't likely to feel worth it or fun. Re the historical background stuff, I think that's something I might need to think on and flesh out elsewhere, but I think it might need handling a bit differently, because when you first come across definitive real-world lore elements it comes across very much less as "oh wow, this was the real world?" and more "this is a very clearly fantasy world, why does it have France in it". I probably have some unusual bar-lines for verisimilitude on history stuff given that I am a medieval historian by day job - which isn't to say I'm an "accuracy stickler" in any sense, but I think the real-world tie increases the "wow this landscape is wildly empty" problem because it implicitly sets up reality, and even more explicitly real Europe, as a fair comparison. I feel like there's some expectations I want to gently nudge a corrective to, since I know some of you guys have been playing for many years. One is about planning, where I think the test of "could a player in their first world who hasn't been looking everything up in advance reasonably plan for this" is actually quite a useful one - otherwise it's not a planning challenge, it's a foreknowledge challenge - and I think there's a few too many cases where the answer is "not really". Especially things like, as mentioned earlier, something like "did you bring enough boxes". Another thing I'm confused about is that it seems like everyone is playing like temporal gears are multiple times more common than they appear to have been for me. I have averaged finding slightly less than one temporal gear per ten hours of gameplay of Vintage Story, including the haul from the C1 plot location which is where I found about half of my total so far: most of them so far were used on fixing transponders, a couple on moving spawns to do plot locations for C1 and the first one of C2. I have two left, one with me and one at base. So I haven't looked much into things like temporal gear powered devices, because I obviously cannot afford to use them anyway, and even if I did go home I'm then some way off being able to afford spawn resets for more travel? Am I missing some major source of these things? The final note I want to put here is that mostly I think the question here is defaults. Clearly some people love bits of this game that others don't like and vice versa: I think in a game that prides itself on flexible settings people absolutely should be able to choose to have 10,000 block journeys to the Archives or whatever if they want. But I also think it's reasonable for someone playing the standard mode of a game they've bought to want to actually see the game's content without having to spend many, many more times the time investment doing slow and careful daytime round trips to their base, avoiding any non-necessary interactions with the environment along the way, and I do think that's generally what the game mechanics push play towards as of now.

I think part of what I'm saying here is that the "seeing some actual content" bit involves such an excessive amount of seeing basically the exact same landscapes that the time ratios are out of whack by a mile. It's so many, many multiples of time travelling very similar or identical landscapes to actually finding and interacting with something interesting, especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later. And it's not interesting or challenging work to reach those things, because the game's mechanics make it a take-no-risks incentive structure not one where you ever push yourself. This bit is fair enough. I have partly enjoyed the lore so far, and the locations are cool, but I think part of the game's problem right now is that the world so extremely self-evidently doesn't make any sense that the only motivator is "huh yeah I'm vaguely curious about this I guess". I'm not always sure where the storyline is trying to go: there's bits where it appears to reference our primary world a bunch which feels weird in the obviously fantasy setting, there's bits where the world seems to be trying to feel grounded in how it works with the rifts/rust/Jonas stuff being an active divergence from this very grounded we-care-about-crop-rotation mechanics setting, but then a lot of bits that aren't in the Weird/Magic element also don't feel like they're trying to make sense. I think if it presented its core mysteries in a punchier way that might help, and maybe more early dialogue with traders could help with that. The traders seem... sort of remarkably unbothered by everything, and I think that doesn't really set up much sense of mystery: the writing doesn't always make it clear what you as a character do or do not know about things already, and gives you pretty limited options to ask a bunch of very obvious questions of the only people you meet (and I'm not suggesting the traders should know the answers, but they should help the player frame what the mystery and stakes are here). I'd considered this and started to explore this option, but nothing went in remotely the direction of The Plot. I'd hoped that plot locations were going to keep being scattered around base, rather than just strung out in an endless line. Because I can't very practically translocate with my elk, that also rather reduces this as an option I guess - also fixing translocators takes a lot of temporal gears and I never seem to have many of those. Also my translocator rooms all look horrible since someone on the bugs github told me to do a visual remapping command and now a lot of them have ugly question mark blocks in I do actually like the planning aspect! Working out what tools and supplies I need for a journey is something I enjoy, and I usually go well prepared. In the current situation, the only and main reason I'm "unprepared" for the next stage is not having hauled even more storage kit with me, something the game gave me absolutely no way of knowing I might need in the first place. I guess I think the game kind of takes it to a point where your optimum strategy is to not engage with the world, which is a pity for a game that is about building a very engage-with-able world. I love learning things on journeys and reflecting on that, and part of my frustration is that I feel that curiosity is discouraged by the mechanics: the travel is long, the benefit of curiosity during that travel is very low and the penalty gets extreme as it's larger the further from home you get. When travelling, you should ideally not be stopping, because any stop is a point at which an enemy you might not have noticed could attack, and you should not be travelling anywhere with low visibility, so avoiding forests and scrub, and you should not be travelling at night, and so you end up doing very cautious daytime travels and it feels anxiety-inducing because of the large punishment for failure but without it actually providing a challenge because all I'm doing is trying to avoid holes and bears, endlessly, for miles of the same blocky countryside. And the punishment for failure is that the game wastes enormous quantities more time as you walk back to wherever you were somehow. The things I most like doing which feel like good "journey challenges" - reconnaissance, clearing paths, ideally taking time to lay paths, mapping safe routes, etc - are just about viable within 5k-7k blocks, but basically become really time prohibitive for a 15,000 block journey. Having an extended challenge and planning requirement is impactful, I agree. What I'm arguing isn't that there shouldn't be planning and cost, but that the mix of spawn and distance and the fact that the game doesn't actually give you a lot of improvisation flexibility makes the optimal strategy for meeting the challenge time consuming and dull rather than creating interesting situations where it makes sense for me to improvise and work things out. I can't "improvise" a repair to a suit of armour, for example, that's something I can only do from home with these crafting mechanics, and I certainly can't improvise if I don't have a temporal gear available. I can obviously improvise building camps, and spending a bunch of time making clay jars for storage or whatever, but again, the incentive feels very heavily against doing that and in favour of just making you take days more game time to go home and sort things out, because the punishment of having to do a 12k block corpse run is never going to be worth any risk, so rather than improvising and taking interesting risks the thing the game won't penalise you for is just taking a big extra chunk of time. I think there's also a balance regarding world sparseness and VS, whilst I see the attraction of its sheer scale, feels silly in the other direction to me: yes, a full day of walking won't get you right across any country larger than Liechtenstein, but even premodern Liechtenstein had several villages in it, and with a long day's walk (14hrs on foot) from my current location I genuinely could be in another country and in a different city, having passed through a minimum of four settlements along the way assuming I took a relatively un-settlement-y walk: the actual road would take me through thirteen. Obviously VS is post-apocalyptic and we can assume a radically sparser population, but it doesn't make internal sense even with that caveat: a landscape (un)settled with villages at the density of VS would have an rapidly collapsing, dying population with each village getting crushed by genetic bottlenecking over the generations and certainly wouldn't be able to support me having a random building trade vendor a few miles over the hill. So I struggle to take VS much more seriously than Skyrim on that front? Skyrim feels artificially cluttered, but VS feels equally very visibly artificially empty (besides that my nearest neighbour in game sells luxury goods out of a cart that never moves and has no means of moving, never leaves his cart, never has any customers, never gathers food, and is apparently invulnerable.)

Raccoons can deliver damage right? I've been killed by a fox or a sheep but never yet by a raccoon.

I kinda like a shudder of shivers. I think it'd be a chill rather than a chilling if one went down that route.

Glad it isn't just me, and thank you all for the tips

So, I finally reached the second story location, about 8000 blocks or two full days of journey by elk from home, and now apparently I need to go the same distance again in the same direction for the next location? And for all I know there'll be further ones still? For a game that uses a single rare item for limited spawn resets (I have one left with me, plus one back at home) and which makes replacing your main transport mode very costly, that feels incredibly excessive in terms of distances and especially in terms of supply lines and loot: I am now already 8000 blocks from home, with two trunks full of stuff from this location which would take an age to get back: it's a long round trip to go home and get more trunks, and getting enough facilities together here to make more trunks to hold future loot is also a huge investment of time because it requires an anvil, and I'm... not really sure why I'm doing any of this? Either from an out of world or in-world perspective? The next location sounds interesting, but it's also SO far away from home that it's not going to be somewhere I can move near or visit at all regularly. It's wildly too far for me to be able to do anything useful as regards preparing better routes there, and I don't have that much physical IRL gaming time to take an entire ingame month per round trip even assuming I do every round trip perfectly and never mess up (which also means every round trip has to be done in the most boring way and I'm very disincentivised to explore). So getting to the new locations doesn't really add to my gameplay because they're too far from home to be especially useful, and I'm not totally sure what else I'm getting out of any of this. Before anyone says it, yes I'm vaguely aware that you can probably adjust these distances at world gen. But I didn't know that when I started my main world and I don't have time to make a new one: I think the default story location distances are about double what's reasonable for a "standard" player. I don't feel like I get anything extra out of the distances being further: the challenge isn't different, because it's all the same biome I'm not really seeing anything new about the world, and I'm minimising non-vital exploration because on the x-deaths-to-go-before-reset system I need to minimise danger much more than maximise interest in exploring. In general it feels like the game's pressure at this stage becomes to just do lots and lots of these pretty slow trips, because it combines very static home facilities with very long journey times and large quantities of moderately valuable but also awkward to transport loot. But yeah, interested to hear other thoughts or whether I'm really missing something here.

That is, the phenomenon where you're just really really nervous that if you take the elk out for any trip that you don't 110% need it for, you'll end up riding it into a hole and be a) sad you've lost an elk and b) suddenly a LOT poorer? It can get away from most predators etc, it's just those damned barely-visible vertical pits the VS landscape is covered in that really worry me a lot of the time.