Jubal

Thanks - in this case if a predator were to climb up the cliff they'd be starting well above the fence line anyway (and I think it's too steep for anything to climb, unless something were to directly spawn atop it. Visual attached: I've put the hen-boxes in a leanto type structure that's against the cliff, so I'm basically just checking I don't need to somehow surround the leanto with fence on all sides.

Q1. Fences and husbandry. Is it enough that the area simply be one that the animal cannot leave, or does it entirely have to be 100 percent surrounded by fence specifically? So I'm thinking e.g. if I have a sheer cliff face, and put three sides of fence against it, will that work? Or will that create issues for the game's domestication systems? Q2. Fish. Do fish need other fish to spawn? If I kill all the fish in a lake, will it restock eventually? Thanks!

Does the sailboat require a lot more space than the raft/does it require deeper water? I've been considering working on one, but I'm not sure my canals will be big enough. And thanks LadyWYT, those are useful thoughts

I've played quite a bit now: I'm about to start Autumn of Year 1, and that's already been 50-60 hours of gameplay I think. I'm also now at a stage where I'm thinking about the plot: I won't have to worry about starvation this second winter, though I also won't be travelling much so I guess mining might be quite a big time sink. But also, I have a little X on my map, and it's 5000 blocks south, and that's quite a long distance. I've been exploring south by building myself canals and taking my raft further south lake by lake, which has advantages like not risking unexpectedly falling in holes, but I'm not sure if this is a viable strategy for longer distance travel, or indeed really how to go about it. My worry isn't supplies, I can keep building canals or set up supply depots though that is a bunch of effort, it's more problems of sheer time and frustration: I don't have a huge stack of temporal gears (and I'm not sure if the spawn reset they do is permanent or not?), and my biggest general feeling is that basically every new segment I work through entails a steadily higher probability of being mauled by a bear: the game's general status of "you're fine until you're suddenly entirely dead and need to do a super long and frustrating corpse run" is really quite offputting for tackling long distance travel. I could travel light to reduce the corpse run problem but then I wouldn't have the stuff I will presumably want to explore the place when I get there, and there don't seem to be any ways to significantly speed up the journey times. So I kinda feel like I'm weighing up how and indeed if I want to tackle this part of the game, or whether as a solo player it'll just be more frustrating than fun. Any not-too-spoilery advice?

I found some borax so I've been using that, not got tons of leather so far but also I've only occasionally been out hunting.

Thanks for the advice everyone! Though I have ended up taking a home-bound approach in part because when I tried deviating from this method I just got attacked immediately every time I stepped outside. I ca't even go and take screenshots of the snow without multiple bowtorns taking potshots at me or a bear decapitating me it seems That is a good point. I've not really tried hunting much in the game - and from my experience I guess I'd be concerned that mushroom foraging would probably burn more energy than I gained? This bit I slightly disagree with - which is to say, I think "experienced players get a small leg up in the early game" is much less of a problem than "new players get really dragged down by the early game". Experienced players can do other things to stretch themselves and are more likely to be able to tweak settings etc in any case if they're dissatisfied. And I think if the reward was something like a small reward paid in gears then the game economy outpacing it would mean that it'd be fairly viable to not have a vast balance impact long-term while giving first-winter players something to feel they're really aiming for. I would agree with everyone who's said they don't think the default-mode death should be more punitive: I do think a survival reward system feels like a better route. That's fair, but VS is quite a long game for strategy: I've played a fair few tens of hours in this game and I haven't played a full year yet, so if the strategy adjustment needed was "store more food for winter", that's something a player can only fix over the next 30-40 hours of gameplay. I think a lot of the problems I'm noting here are very much first-winter problems, but also, if I see a third winter in this game I'll have played it for longer than the average blockbuster-scale RPG takes to run through, so I think it's worth bearing in mind the situation of "if the long term strategy is wrong, does the player have something fun to do in the meantime", given the meantime is more than a real physical day of their life.

Hi all, been playing a game on standard mode for a while, currently working through my first winter. I enjoy a lot of features of this game so far, I'm aware there's still a lot to explore, but I thought I'd comment on a couple of mechanics from the new player learning curve POV. I should also say I wouldn't consider survival-crafting my "main" game genre, the main analogues I have for this are a lot of playing Return to Moria which is very different in many ways and a bunch of playing Haven & Hearth which is a beautiful but also terrible game with kind of similar vibes to this but a player base from actual hell. I've never played e.g. Minecraft: a lot of my gaming is more RPGs, and I develop little free games when I get time. So that's my background for thoughts. Anyway, my main gripe with the winter is twofold: first, that I've ended up in a situation where the optimal strategy to do the thing the game is telling me to do is not fun or interesting or realistic, and secondly, the game is telling me to do something but then seemingly there's no actual benefit to me in doing so. Part one of this: I did my year, reached the first winter. It hit a bit earlier than I'd realised, so I was drawing on my stores earlier, and I think by my calculations I might have enough food to make it through until spring if I actually try to survive properly. But it'll be touch and go. In future years I'm sure I won't have this problem, but I spent a while learning the game in year one for obvious reasons. Now here is the problem: if I want to survive, the thing the game absolutely requires me to do is conserve energy. Things that don't conserve energy include doing literally anything, and especially doing anything outside. So my most viable strategy if I wanted to survive the winter (which is what the game prompts me to be trying to achieve) is to stand still and do absolutely nothing for quite a few real-world hours of gameplay. This isn't actually realistic, insofar as if you literally stood still in a small room all winter you'd get atrophied muscles, vitamin D problems, etc etc. And it also isn't fun. I've done a few tasks that don't require going into the cold, but going into the mines means getting injured or killed by monsters, and I've done about as much copper smithing as I have obvious use for, and I'm only one third of the way through winter. Part two: whilst I currently am trying to survive, I'm not actually sure why I'm meant to be surviving. The bits of this game that feel rewarding are generally tech advancements or discoveries when digging through ruins. I'm pretty close to my spawn zone and it's easy enough to find my way home if I die as long as I'm not adventuring too far: I know I also lose some nutrition score but my nutrition scores are garbage anyway because I'm scraping together on 1-2 bowls of multigrain porridge a day with occasional mashed turnip added for a treat. So it feels like there's a disconnect between the game selling itself on, and telling the player to work on, survival, but a gameplay loop that isn't really encouraging survival. I know I could change the settings to discourage death more by speeding up item loss or even going permadeath, but that would just make the game wildly frustrating I think given how easy it is to be jumped by a bear or monster when you're not expecting it. So it feels like on standard settings there's a disconnect between what the game wants you to do and builds its core mechanics around, and what behaviours it actually encourages or discourages. So two things I think could be fun answers to these issues as food for thought: first, it could be interesting to have some part of the nutrition system that actually checks for sunlight and physical activity, so there's at least a mild reason to encourage some sort of activity in winter. Second, and this would be a bigger chance, I feel like the game might do well to positively reward surviving, such that there's an obvious "oh hey if I just survive a bit longer I can do/get X", which would be something to weigh against "but I could just die repeatedly all winter and then by spring I'd have been able to dig a canal at the paltry price of 30+ of my own corpses". I'm not sure exactly what the latter would look like but something like a "hey you didn't die at all this month/season, have a gear/temporal gear" could be an interesting way to make the act of surviving feel like it actually aids game progression for the player. Meanwhile, only a bit over twenty days to go until my little guy can go outside again...