DeanF

Y'know, I had thought of that same thing? Maybe for the Staff Sling- they generally launched much larger rocks than other slings. So the Staff Sling should have better range and more damage. Sling bullets should be recoverable like arrows, but of course they'll be much harder to spot. Oddly, by "uniform" I don't mean round. Evidently round sling bullets can spin unpredictably, like a curveball in baseball. Instead they were shaped like a rugby ball (or American football), which made them tumble predictably. The mold for casting lead bullets might be used with other metals. Gold would work just like lead, but copper and bronze aren't as dense so I think they'd lose the damage bonus.

Instead, let the Malefactor make a Crude Sling early on that can be made from flax fibers or maybe even just dry grass (I once made an excellent sling from jute), and let them make a more powerful Staff Sling later on, which is basically a sling on a stick. This mimics the model of the Hunter with the class-locked Crude Bow and Recurve Bow. Oh, and while we are at it can we add fired clay and cast lead sling bullets? The fired clay ones are just more uniform than randoms stones, so thus would have an accuracy buff. But the cast lead ones were both more uniform and denser, so buffs to both accuracy and damage.

New player, here. If I'm reading the wiki correctly then we have the primitive raft and the sailboat, and nothing in between. Perhaps we could have another small boat in which to use our paddle? Several examples could be justified: The Native American Canoe was traditionally a wooden frame with a bark hull. (I don't think that the game has a bark equivalent?) The Welsh Coracle was a round boat made of hides or leather over a stick frame. The Tibetan Ku Dru, Indian Parisal, and Native American Bull Boat are nigh identical to the coracle. The Inuit Umiak and Kayak were also traditionally hides over a wooden frame, but they definitely had finer lines than a coracle. The Irish Currach is much like a coracle or umiak, though they also tend to have finer lines. The Iraqi Kuphar is much like a coracle, but could also be made of tied reed bundles as well as sticks and hides, so construction might just need reeds and flax twine. The Ethiopian Tankwa is a more narrow reed boat. The Peoples of Lake Titicaca, the so-called Marsh Arabs, Egypt, and many others have traditions of other narrow reed boats. Building these should be more involved than just a recipe (as the raft is built). Instead they should be constructed, more like a sailboat. So first you construct a frame on the ground from sticks and rope or flax twine, then you make the hide hull and add it to the frame, etc. Or for a reed boat make a reed keel, then add reed floats for the sides, with both made from reeds and flax twine. These boats should not be storable in an inventory space in the way that a raft is, but the boats should still be able to be portaged by being carried in the off hand. They should also be able to be placed on land for safe keeping. The hide boats should be constructable out of either pelts or leather, otherwise they become copper age boats rather than stone age ones. (Y'know, we should have a use for un-oiled hides before they rot. Maybe cut them into rawhide strips that can be used in some recipes as a stand-in for rope or flax twine? Native Americans tied their canoes, kayaks, and umiaks together with rawhide strips, and coracles were made in similar fashion. Hides could give different yields of rawhide strips; 1 for small, 2 for medium, 3 for large, 4 for huge, or whatever. Braided leather ropes were a thing, too.) Perhaps three stone age boat variants are called for: a "Reed boat", a "Hide Boat", and a "Hide Roundboat". Hear me out... The advantage of truly round boats like the coracle are that they are very stable and easy to make, but the disadvantages are that they are slow and not very maneuverable since they tend to spin. But some of them were huge. So you could have one that moves glacially slowly but carries a lot of cargo instead- see picture below. For the Hide Roundboat give it 7 "spaces" in a 2-3-2 distribution, with the boatman in the rear-right space and reed chests or storage vessels able to to be placed in the others. But the front-left, front-right, and rear-left spaces can carry other players instead if desired (like the raft). I would argue that it should actually be 5% slower than the raft- it's advantage is the large cargo/passenger capacity. (The raft's big advantage is that it can fit in an inventory space.) But the narrower Reed Boat and Hide Boat should only have 5 total "spaces" in a linear distribution. With one boatman they sit in space #4, with #1, #2, #3, and #5 being for cargo in the form of reed chests or storage vessels. But with another crewman aboard then space #2 holds the second player instead. The reed boat should only be as fast as the raft, since they tend to be heavy and waterlogged, and the hide boat should be 5% faster than the raft. The Reed Boat probably should be the least complex to construct. Hmm. I kind of like that tradeoff in cargo capacity versus speed, for three primitive boats for which it is about equally difficult to source materials. Flax is scarce on the ground to make twine for the reed boat, whereas pelts require a bit of hunting. With two players paddling than the boat (or raft) should go a little faster, maybe another 5% increased speed. (But no bonus for more than two paddlers in the Hide Roundboat due to it's awkwardness.) Those speeds should be for running-effort paddling, incurring massive hunger increases. But we should be able to walk-effort paddle, too, at some lesser speed. (The raft as well.) Maybe 75% of running-effort speed? Those would be stone age boats. For the copper/bronze age there could be a "Plank Boat" too, dimensionally similar to the reed boat and hide boat but 10% faster than the raft, similar to the more modern Irish currahs, the larger American cedar canoes, and innumerable other small boats the world over. With the 5% speed bonus for two paddlers it would max out at 15% over raft speed- almost as fast as a sailboat, at least for as long as the crew's hunger held out. I guess that I could actually come up with a plank boat that is slow but with more cargo, too, for a fifth boat variant. Maybe give it 8 "spaces" in a 1-2-2-2-1 distribution, and make it 5% faster than a raft? Call it a Plank Skiff? Skiffs are often blunt, flat-bottomed, and slow.

I kind of like that idea, actually. Perhaps we could have both wooden shovels and bone shovels. Bonus points if the bone shovel actually looks like a scapula. I'm not sure how functionally different they might be, though. Possibly not at all.

I'm not sure that's completely right. I mean, I get what you are saying about medieval commoners, just not about the game mechanics. Because then why don't all of the other classes have farming debuffs? If they did then I would buy that argument, easily. Thanks for the link, I'll check it out! As for the rest, that is sort of what I meant by "deemed too powerful." But y'know what? We get to choose our difficulty at worldgen, anyway; Standard versus Exploration versus Wilderness Survival, etc. Heck, I turned Hunger down to 75% until I figured out the game mechanics. Nonetheless, any buffs should be very small, since they might have a disproportionate effect in multiplayer. Maybe half of those, so more like: Green Fingers: +5% planted crop drop rate, +10% foraging wild crop seed drop rate. (Because this one would be huge, but some day seeds and crops will be the same for grains, anyway.) Henwise: +5% chance to find an extra egg when looting a Henbox. (One in twenty seems mild.) Seasonal Energy: +10% movement and harvesting speed during Summer, opposite during Winter. (This one can stay at 10%, it balances itself) I don't think that would be game-breaking? And I have no idea how to add a cooking buff, since simply increasing meal yield might be too much, and there really is no time involved to be reduced. All I can come up with is stuff that might be too powerful, like: Gourmand: +5% satiety in prepared meals and pies with three or more ingredients Nutritionist: +5% nutrition for calculating maximum Health in prepared meals and pies with three or more ingredients. And what would other debuffs be? Commoners served in the levies in wartime, so initially I had thought no combat debuffs. But they I recalled that this highly targets cozy gamers, and they might not be terribly interested in combat, anyway. And probably underground stuff, like the hunter. So how about: Nervous: -15% melee damage. (But no debuff for ranged combat, farmers tend to be archers.) Claustrophobic: -15% ore drop rate, -10% mining speed.

Hmm. Does merely turning the cave-in switch on solve the problem? Is dirt less stable that rock, regarding cave-ins? EDIT- No, experimentation shows that somehow dirt is the most stable ground block in the game. Having played around with it a bit, cave-ins seem like how dirt should act, not rock. Rock should be a bit more stable.

Interesting... I cannot say that I am in any way qualified to be a modder, though, even secondhand.

Possible stupidity from a new player: When there are things like the Tailor and especially the Clockmaker, not having a farmer seems like an oversight. Maybe call it a "Yeoman", since obscure class names seem to be looked well upon. Make it a good cook, too, (plus maybe somehow a bonus to domesticate animals?) so that it basically meets the needs of "cozy players". There seem to be a lot of players out there who like cozy games (Stardew Valley is a thing, after all) and I would imagine that multiplayer groups might seek one out to keep them provisioned. Or maybe this has already been considered, and it was deemed too powerful?

The recipe would presumably be a stick and some flax twine.

There are mods for this, though I don't know specifically about wolves, bear, etc. Simple Map Markers is one, for instance, but it mostly adds element-specific ore markers.

Yes...? This would be for a food source, not capture for domestication. Thus, ideally snares would be available in the early stone age. Or am I missing your point? I was thinking smaller animals, honestly. Racoons, foxes, hares, etc. (Squirrels would be nice to have for this too.) But maybe there could be a larger size of snare that could handle pigs, smaller deer, goats, and maybe even wolves. I'd be happy just with the small game snares, though.

The reed basket trap sounds handy, but how about snares?

Stone makes for a very poor shovel material. It doesn't stand up well to prying or levering without snapping, a wide flat blade would be hell to knap, and unlike in an axe it's mass is of no benefit. In fact the extra mass is a liability in a shovel- you have to swing it around without it helping the shovel's function in any way. And the advantage of flint for knives, spears, arrows, etc. was sharpness, which also doesn't help a shovel very much. Well, except for some tasks some cultures reinforced a wooden shovel's blade with stone chips to make it sharper, like for peat cutting, but that is the closest there ever was to a practical stone shovel, and even then bone was more common. There were certainly stone adzes and hoes. But historically, primitive shovels were either wood or bone (bone shovels usually being made from an animal scapula)- well into the iron age, as a matter of fact. Stone shovels are essentially absent from the archaeological record, other than maybe some ceremonial objects.

Ah, so no, not an existing game option. But thanks- I'll try the mod! EDIT- The mod works great! No more thumb arthritis. That plus jumping to mantle 2-3 blocks as I described would be amazing.

Once I heard about it, I was very interested in trying out dirt instability. I hate having floating dirt blocks and large dirt overhangs everywhere. And a lot of the dirt roofs that I see in videos would not be stable- they would need bracing nearly every other block. But the switch seems to make dirt just as unstable as sand or gravel, which is too much. Especially for dirt stabilized by grass or other plants. It turns every hillside into a threat to your life. So I'm not using it any more, but I would still like to have cave-ins if I dig out something unstable in a dirt mound, or try to make a dirt overhang too large. Maybe one or two block wide tunnels could be pretty safe, but when they get wide they start getting questionable. Same with large overhangs. In short, I think that dirt instability needs to be somewhat less severe than sand and gravel instability.

I absolutely would not want full-on parkour mechanics in this game, but it feels like we should at least be able to mantle up two blocks, and maybe even three. A seraph would probably be able to reach up and grab a three-block-high ledge, assuming that they are human-sized. Obviously, pulling yourself up three blocks would take longer than two, etc. And right now one block is basically just walking. A lot of terrain in the game is very broken up, and these short mantles would help a lot with mobility. I know that there is a mod that does this but it is much more involved than just mantling- it is almost a parkour system, according to the video that I watched. And also I can't seem to get it to work right, anyway. And while I'm on the subject, is there a switch like in That Other Voxel Game to make stepping up one block automatic instead of needing to jump?

Fair enough. So is the feeding trough just to get them to breed or something?

Ah, ok. I guess that changes things. Wild peas might be a thing.

Not really- it is functionally impossible to remove every scrap of root, and they grow back from the tiniest fragment. Like sunchokes. You can feel certain that you found every tuber, but the things just grow back the next year anyway.

I'm new, so sorry if this is a dead issue.... So if I understand the wiki correctly you have to feed livestock from a trough, and there is no pasturage. It seems like the sheep and goats at the very least could somehow be pastured. (Though technically goats are browsers, not grazers.) And pigs traditionally have been released into forests to forage things like acorns, and they get rounded up later.

IRL that is totally true, but I didn't think that it would pass game balancing. And as you point out, the spoilage time is an issue- it would have to be changed.

I'm new, so sorry if this has been hashed out already... Beans other than soybeans, I mean- some sort of climbing bean, pea, or lentil. These generally don't have usefully edible wild equivalents, though, having undergone massive selective breeding since the seventh century BCE to produce the domesticated varieties, so you might have to get your initial seed stock from a trader. Some exceptions: There are sea peas, but they are slightly toxic and cause lathyrism if you eat too many. There is a sort of a "wild kidney bean" in North America (which is actually more closely related to the lima bean than the kidney bean).

I was surprised (I'm new) that the game didn't allow the use of willows for basketry. Willow or rattan furniture would look neat, too, with those curving lines. And canebrakes would be awesome! I should stop now, shouldn't I?

New here, be gentle. And sorry if this has been hashed out already. Loving the game, by the way, and I haven't even gotten farther than building a rammed earth hut. So, according to what I read in the wiki if you cook and eat a reed's roots (rhizome), it is gone forever. So you have to make a choice about whether you want to eat it or replant it, and if you eat them you will deplete the local reed population, leaving you without reeds to make baskets, etc. This gives me anxiety- I never want to eat one! I propose that when you dig up a reed's roots there should be a small chance that two are produced instead of one. "Small" meaning less than than 0.1, though I'm not sure what exact figure would be appropriate. But 0.01 seems too small, so somewhere in between? Anyway, then you could eat one now and again with a clear conscience.