DeanF

They are beautiful, I'll give them that.

The way that bears and wolves behave in the game is already unfair to bears and wolves. What's the difference? The game just needs an oceanic threat, and sharks are the obvious possibility. A huge Humboldt squid would be pretty awesome, too, though. But I agree that players should be very safe in the sailboat. Just not swimming (or rafting?) huge stretches of open water. Rafts should generally be coastal craft, for instance. The water-creature threat should increase with water depth, and again the sailboat should be impervious. We should also be able to make a raft out of reeds (thule or papyrus), not just logs. And I'll plug my own old proposal for an intermediate craft bewteen raft and sailboat:

FYI- "Grains are seeds" is a well-known and often-discussed issue. The devs have commented. It's on the list of things to address, but not a high priority. Some day.

OK, where do I get the song?!? I must have it!

You mean an image editor? GIMP, because fuck Adobe. Those new ArtCraft clones give me a chuckle, too, but I'm not as familiar with them.

Sonoran Desert: Size, and thus challenge. It would be nice if deserts were large, and thus real obstacles to contend with- you would have to go through or around them (probably by sea). Think of the Sahara. And for a real challenge, start in one. It would be nice if rivers- when those get implemented- might have lush floodplains in deserts, and there were occasional oases, and sky islands, etc. And detailed desert flora and fauna. I absolutely love sky islands- the real ones, I don't just mean floating blocks. (And Minecraft does have the real ones, nowadays...) Davis Mountain, a sky island in Texas: Again, I have only played in temperate zones and am just now getting around to wide exploring, so if I'm wrong let me know. But the current small patches of sand or gravel seem more like the very unrealistic Minecraft biome system. But VS seems to at least make motions towards a bit of realism. The map is 1000x1000 km, with four climate bands: arctic, temperate, warm, and tropical. (Right?) Mind you, we could still have those gravel and sand patches- many of the gravel ones are covered in pine trees, similar to real environments in temperate areas, and things like the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado do exist. But the real deserst should be a band between 15 to 35 degrees, and those huge dunes in other areas should be relatively uncommon. Great Sand Dunes National Park: GSDNP is one of my favorites. I used to live nearby, and it and the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Crusto mountain range were sort of my stomping grounds. Ineed, and if you look at a globe you will see IRL that those areas of low annual rainfall tend to happen from 15 to 35 degrees (both north and south), usually starting on the west side of continents and spreading eastwards until it either hits a weather-driving mountain range or the eastern shore. (There are also arctic deserts, but that's not what I'm talking about.) This is because of Hadley cells, which are an effect of the Earth's size and rotation: The equator heats the air. Strong sunlight warms the tropical oceans and air. Warm, moisture-laden air rises, creating a belt of low pressure. As it rises, it expands and cools, and water vapor condenses into clouds and heavy rainfall. This is why equatorial regions tend to be wet. The air moves poleward high in the atmosphere. Having lost much of its moisture through rainfall, the air spreads north and south, away from the equator. It cools as it moves, eventually becoming dense enough to descend, typically around 20–35° latitude. The air sinks and warms. Descending air is compressed by increasing atmospheric pressure and warms. Its relative humidity falls, clouds struggle to form, and rainfall is suppressed. This creates the subtropical high-pressure belts in which many of the world's great deserts occur. The air travelling along the surface back towards the equator- skewed a bit by the Ciroiolis efect- is what causes the Trade Winds. And air travelling towards the poles causes the Prevailing Westerlies. (And at about 30 degrees are the Doldrums, with little wind.) That's why deserts tend to form on west coasts- the east coast at least gets a little moisture that the winds have picked up over the oceans. Also, there tend to be cold ocean currents along west coasts centered around 30 degrees, and cold water releases less moisture. These currents are also effets of the Earth's rotation (See: Humboldt Current, Benguela Current, California Current, etc.) These effects- wind and currents- reinforce one another to cause these deserts. The Sahara-Arabian Desert, the Desert Southwest of North America, the Atacama of South America, Western Australia, the Namib-Kalahari of southern Africa- they all follow this model. The Sahara-Arabian desert ends at the Himalayas, and the Atacama at the Andes. The others just peter out as they approach the east coast. Namib: There are other factors, of course. The Earth's rotation and prevailing surface winds also affect this, and can nudge the desert band around a bit. And large mountains- the Gobi and Taklamakan are almost entirely due to the rainshadow effect of the Himalayas, for instance, and the North American interior is at least semi-arid because of the very long span of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, which also creates a rainshadow. And Eurasia is just so immensely huge that it's interior gets little moisture. But the 15 to 35 degree arid band due to currents and Hadley cells is the general trend. Explanation- I got seriously into realistic climate models during a worldmaking phase a couple of decades ago. (Cartographersguild.com has great resources.) It's a rabbithole, and I'm not proposing anything like that for VS. But the devs do seem to like the idea of large climate zones, so a desert could be one of them. I had actually thought of this already, and it may not be as involved as it first seems. As I mentioned, the devs already have large climate zones where temperature and rainfall vary. And this then drives the local flora. The desert band would just have rainfall curtailed, then it would probably generate automagically. And decent desert flora and fauna would be nice. Well, we get to select where we spawn. I would propose five climate bands instead of four, since the desert lattitudes would act as one: Arctic Temperate Warm Desert Tropical I think right now we have four, right? Arctic, temperate, warm, and tropical? I could be mis-remembering- I have never spawned anywhere but temperate. And yes, the challenge is one feature that I already mentioned above. If you want a real challenge then spawn in the desert climate band! Everyone likes messing about in deserts- they seem "exotic". Unless you live in one, of course, as I do... And if you do want to go down the climate rabbithole then the desert band should have a narrow band of savannah around it- north, south, and east. The Maasai Mara, a savannah: No, not unless I am misunderstanding the VS map. I think it only covers the northern hemisphere, right? With arctic at the northern end (pole) and tropical at the southern end (equator)? So we would only see the 15 to 35 degree north desert band, between the Warm and Tropical climate bands. Am I wrong? Does the VS map go to both poles? I could easily be wrong- as I said, I am just now starting serious exploring.

I find that the deserts in VS aren't really deserts. They are too much like a random biome from that other game, just "an area with sand" or "an area with gravel". Maybe I just haven't traveled far enough? If so, let me know. Anyway, since VS has such huge maps I think it would be interesting (and preferable) to instead have HUGE deserts across the desert latitudes, approximately 15-35 degrees. They would be actual obstacles, creating challenges to cross.

Post the entire recipe that you are trying.

Dig a one-block wide stair down to the bottom of the pit. Bears and wolves are >1 block wide, so you can sit outide their reach and stab them with a spear.

Molybdochalkos is the way to go in the very early game, when you may not have tons of copper sitting around. You at least get to save a little, and lead is common. In the later game I tend to like brass, because by then I have lots of copper and I tend to also have a lot of zinc laying around once I get iron. So why not use the two things that I have in abundance- copper and zinc? Tin for tin bronze is often (appropriately) hard to find, and bismuth bronze takes fair effort since it has more ingredients to be hunted down.

Because it is lighter, titanium works horribly for some uses that require mass. Like hammers, axes, or swung swords. Even a titanium knife just doesn't feel right. (Titanium knives are used when corrosion resistance or non-sparking characteristics are desirable, such as for diving or EOD.)

Not completely. For some resources a heat map is generated from the seed, and that heat map is the same any time that you use that seed. The probability of whether a chunck actually has that resource in it is set by the heat map. Then all of the probabilities for those chunks get rolled randomly. Roughly. But that's why you can use the same seed over and over and not have cassiterite lodes in exactly the same place, especially if you found one in a "dim" area of the heat map where the probability was low. But in a "bright" area of the heatmap you should at least find some nearby. Here is a VS map viewer that you can play with that will make it all clear: https://vintagestory-map.com/?s=AQAAAABgbwy08R5IfA It has some issues- for instance it clearly doesn't display sea level or areas with many small lakes correctly, but it will teach you what I am talking about. Similarly, you will find traders in the same spot, but the type of trader gets randomly rolled, so they will usually be different even with the same seed. Ruins seem to work differently. I have found that that there can be no ruins whatsoever in a spot that had ruins in a prior playthrough of the same seed. Dungeons are the same. Yet ruins at least are likely to be in the same spot- just not always. (This last paragraph is experiential on my part- I'm not entirely sure how the mechanism works.)

I have reached the point where any time something happens in Linux that I don't understand, I just ask ChatGPT. Sadly. The big advantage is that you can then demand that it explain everything, instead of just reproducing the "magic words" that some smug ass gives you on a forum. Assuming that the smug ass even knows what they are talking about in the first place.

Only if by "close ranges" you mean 100m.

I have seen a lot of questions about making arches, so I thought I'd throw out the 2-block arch guide that I made for myself. It should print on an 8.5"x11.0" sheet. (Sorry, I'm American.) Remove the red and everything inside them. One of my goals was to leave at least one pixel on the outside of the arch. This is so that if there is a block of dissimilar material next to the arch, the different material will be covered. I did this because I often make an arched fireplace and put an oven next to it, and I didn't like to have the brown oven wall showing. This does mean that this is a 30-voxel circle instead of a 32-voxel circle, but if the two blocks under the arch are air it looks right. Edited because I'm an idiot and got it wrong the first time.