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Messages - Modest Grouse

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It seems like there are certain items that are impossible or nearly impossible to obtain at higher qualities unless on is a skilled/master carpenter -- arrows and skis in particular. It seems like villages only have arrows in standard quality, and skis they don't have at all. This is also true of textilecraft -- yarn is only in villages in ordinary quality. AFAICT currently the only way to get fine/superior yarn is to make it oneself. As it is, it makes carpentry seem like of overvalued skill: it provides a unique path to certain items that can't be obtained otherwise, which is not true of other skills.

So if you have a grandmaster bowman or skiier, to fully exploit that skill, it seems like they also have to be a master carpenter (and for a bowman, also a skilled textilecrafter).

If one wants some perfect boards, one just has to find a (grand)master timbercrafter and give them a masterwork axe. It's not 100% easy, but it's easier than increasing the skill.

If you want perfect/masterwork almost anything else, you can find it somewhere in Driik or on a trader. The most I've ever seen foreign traders carry is fine arrows.

One suggestion would be to make higher-quality versions of arrows and yarn available in villages. And perhaps to make skis and ski sticks available at all for sale (including at higher qualities).

Another method would be to have companions make arrows/yarn/skis, and have potential companions tell you what their carpentry skill level is. This is on the dev map, but might be a further reason to prioritize. 


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Suggestions / Re: Make it easier to find quests + add more quests
« on: December 28, 2023, 11:16:28 PM »
It is the case in the same village (other than these "personal problems" quests). However, that part of my feature request is to have this also be the case for nearby villages as well. In other words, if the NPC "knows" of the location of a nearby village (in response to "Are there any nearby villages?") then they are also able to tell the player that there is an active quest there.

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Suggestions / Make it easier to find quests + add more quests
« on: December 28, 2023, 07:25:31 AM »
After playing for a while, I decided I would like to do all of the quests, or as many of them as I can find. However it seems like finding a quest to do is often more time consuming than actually doing many of the quests.

If this post

https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=57.0

is correct in that every 15 days there is a quest that is triggered in a village, but it is not immediately clear which one, then perhaps make it somehow easier to figure out which village it is that has the active/open quest?

I'm thinking maybe a dialog option where you ask NPCs "Ask for gossip" or "Ask about troubles in the area". And the response -- if there is a village with an active quest nearby -- is something like "I hear that the village six miles northeast of here in 'Sausage heath' having some problems". Or maybe that can just be part of the response to "how's it going?".

Alternatively (or additionally), consider having the possibility of more than one open quest at a time rather than this "one every fifteen days" logic. It is just kind of . . . weird that one can walk/ski across miles and miles, discovering dozens of villages over a period of weeks, and everyone is like "We're doing fine, no problems here". Maybe like a fixed 5-10% chance of there being a quest on initial village generation there is a quest, something like that.

Secondly, maybe consider just adding more (and more complex, multi-stage) quests as part of game development? While one can I suppose make up challenges for oneself (island survival, explore everything, etc), it is sometimes nice to have (or at least be able to choose) more structure and narrative.

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Previously it would be possible to create fine or superior blunt arrows with sufficient crafting skill. Since the arrows makeover, a highly skilled crafter gets the "You could have done better, but you can't make good out of bad" message when crafting blunt arrows, and all are standard quality. I presume this is because all slender tree trunks are of the same "standard" quality. Consider reinstating the ability to make fine/superior blunt arrows, or at a minimum removing that message.

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Bug reports / [3.82] Dogs end up inside walled village on arrival
« on: December 16, 2023, 06:43:50 AM »
On arriving at a new walled village, I was outside the walls (as usual), but my two dogs were inside the village walls. Seems like they should spawn outside with the player? This was on the first visit to the village if that makes a difference.

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Bug reports / Punts on Dogs (or other pack animals)
« on: December 23, 2021, 06:18:52 AM »
I'm thinking a punt should be too large for a dog to carry, yet they can. Even a bull I can't really imagine carrying a punt.

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Gameplay questions / Re: Capture dog in the wild?
« on: December 15, 2021, 06:44:16 AM »
Just found a dog in one of my deadfall bear traps, with a fire and fox bones next to it. Seems like an NPC hunter found a fox in my fox trap that was in the same place; cooked it; while he was doing that his dog got entrapped; and then he took off, leaving his dog in the trap! Nice guy. (I set the dog loose).

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Stories / Re: Island challenge stories
« on: August 19, 2021, 09:35:05 PM »
I did a variant of this. Essentially I did Nekot's challenge; got to a mountain, saw that I was outside a cultural region and on a peninsula with no villages; and shortly thereafter decided that staying zoomed-in all the time was excessively tedious, so I just decided to not explore and see if I could survive the winter without villages. The story I had in mind was that I was exiled for a year. More of a peninsula challenge, but that's not so different from a large island. I just made it to midwinter, but this character is now well-equipped enough that, absent doing something stupid, there's no reason he won't survive winter. The main turning points were:

Spoiler: show

First, I caught a lynx in a big (non-bear) deadfall.

A lynx fur by itself wasn't enough to make an article of clothing, so I was carrying it around when a foreign trader turned up, with a fine handaxe, that he would trade for a rough lynx fur! Having a sharp iron object greatly increase the amount of meat you get from animals.

And finally, the point where it was clear he would survive winter, this catch at 44% starved; this is probably my favorite scene yet playing this game:  a starving man, and a moose caught in a trap, looking at each other just before dawn.






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Suggestions / Re: Reinstate leather cord for arrow-making (3.70 beta 3)
« on: August 07, 2021, 04:37:26 PM »
Also a suggestion for this forum would be to increase the posting limit just a little bit. I have another suggestion but can't post it as a new topic because I've "reached my posting limit" with this one post here today; the message does not say when I would be able to post again.  I will give it here as a reply just in case I forget to come back.

Topic: Heather as tanning material

According to Wikipedia's page on heather,[1] "Formerly heather was used to . . . tan leather". So, how about adding it to "tanning material" along with animal fat and birch bark? For characters that are just starting out or scraping by or doing The Challenge, this would allow them to use heather for tanning and roast/eat the animal fat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calluna#Uses

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Suggestions / Reinstate leather cord for arrow-making (3.70 beta 3)
« on: August 07, 2021, 04:27:34 PM »
With the introduction of yarn, only "yarn" is suitable material for making arrows. At least from what I can find quickly, it seems like animal sinew was most frequently used, at least by American Indians. Here's the state archaeologist of Iowa: "Points were attached to the arrow shaft with a variety of methods. Most frequently, the arrow shaft would have a slit cut into the end to accept the point. Sinew would then be wrapped around the shaft to pinch the slit closed".[1] Not that yarn is wrong -- other parts of that Iowa page make clear that plants were sometimes used for bowstrings, and so why not arrows as well -- but rather that it should be possible to make an all-animal-product arrow.

This is relevant for gameplay since I'm doing "The Challenge", and so in that scenario starting in winter with no access to villages there's just no way to make an arrow anymore (wild nettle is all wilted).

[2] https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=901.0

[1] https://archaeology.uiowa.edu/american-indian-archery-technology-0

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Not bugs / Re: [not a bug] Unfindable "Cliff" Quest Treasure
« on: June 06, 2021, 09:50:41 PM »
Thanks Plotinus! My initial reading was "oh this will be a cliff tile", because after all that's what he says, but then other posters made it seem like sometimes it was on a mountain or hill, and I certainly  wasn't expecting there to be a cliff all by itself in the middle of a forest! Sure does blend in. Anyway, curiosity satisfied.

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Not bugs / [not a bug] Unfindable "Cliff" Quest Treasure
« on: June 05, 2021, 07:03:42 PM »
I've read all the posts on here on reddit on this quest (including one person who screenshotted what a "ravine" looks like, so I have a sense of what I'm looking for). I spent about a month in-game time searching, and the region in question only has about 7-8 hill or mountain tiles that would have cliffs in them, and I cannot find it. I know there was a map maintenance issue that may or may not have removed it sometimes (so that's why I'm posting here under "bugs"). And I guess this quest treasure perhaps an NPC can carry away (so maybe not finding it sometimes is supposed to be part of the game), but just uploading if it's worth investigating. I'm also at this point curious, like "did I miss it in all that time I spent searching" so if someone does find it, feel free to tell me where it is. Savegame: https://morris.cloud/files/CHAEGHAL.zip

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I'm doing The Challenge[1], and my adventurer, while desperate, stole a cut of meat from a nearby village. But he was caught and took a reputation hit. Now he's slightly less desparate and it would be good to get back on their good side to get better terms on trades.

What's the lowest-cost way to increase reputation? Or just . . . what increases reputation generally? Surprisingly, there's not much about it on the wiki. Searching for "reputation increase" in the forums indicates that quests, and trading, particularly if one does generous trades, increase reputation. I'm curious if there is more detailed information available. Is it frequency of trades? Does the village keep a sort of balance sheet where one big generous trade would do it? Etc.

[1] https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=901.0

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I've played the game for a while but just hired companions for the first time. Two suggestions, neither really critical, but just a couple of points where the game seemed less realistic than it does in general:

(1) Make companions reject boards as payment, since they make them. I recently hired a couple of companions to help build my cabin. Once it was clear I had enough logs for my cabin, on a whim I told them to split some into boards. They were both fairly skilled in timbercraft, so soon there were piles of fine and even perfect boards around camp. When they started to say they wanted to leave and wanted payment, I paid them with the boards they'd made. Using fine boards, they hit their carry-weight limit just short of the amount of "gear" they wanted, but the remaining balance was a couple of arrows per companion. If I had used perfect boards it seems like it would have been possible to pay them entirely from the products of their own labor. Maaaaybe that's fine; it's sort of like a little Marxist lesson on exploitation of labor built into the game (would've been even more so if I'd lent them axes, but these two had their own already). But the realism seems a bit strained that this would be acceptable "payment" when they could just have been splitting boards on their own time, plus the time they spent making those boards was about 5-10% of the time they'd been with me. 

(2) Have companions sleep. It seems like companions just . . . don't sleep? I'd work all day along with them, and then as I was "exhausted" and about to go to sleep, I'd give them orders to go chop trees or whatever, and it seemed like they'd keep working through the night. I wasn't monitoring their work output carefully -- perhaps they stopped right as I went to sleep and started up again right when I woke -- but sure looked like they were not sleeping. Never saw any Z's by them for sure.

Another companion nice-to-have would be adding "chop wood into blocks" as a companion command; the block is a nice unit of wood for smoking/staying warm in winter.

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Bug reports / Dogs sleepwalk on zoomed-out map
« on: May 24, 2021, 09:08:10 PM »
One of my dogs went to sleep outside my cabin while I was crafting some arrows. I then zoomed out the map to go check on my traps on adjacent tiles, and the dog kept sleeping: first following me asleep on the zoomed-out map (laying down with "zz" next to it), and then when I zoomed in on the other tile with traps, the dog had followed me to the new tile . . . but was still asleep. Maybe when the player is zooming out with animals, do a check if the animals are asleep, and if they are, wake them up. Seems consistent enough with real-dog behavior (if human is leaving, go with) and with gameplay expectations (dogs stay with player). 

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