Messages

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Mod Releases / Re: Njerpez Cookery Mod v2.0 - Dec 2025 Update!

« on: December 03, 2025, 12:20:07 PM »

Posted v2.02 of the mod today, minor tweaks and fixes.

In the latest URW 3.87 there's now a hardcoded "ember-roasted turnip" recipe, which mods can't update or remove. Of course NjerpCooking mod always  included its own version of this, so I did experiment with using the base game one and getting rid of the one we always had. But sadly, the base game one felt too inconvenient, as you need to burn fires for many hours to get some decent glowing embers and even these go away fast. I dont' feel that's very realistic, I myself successfully cooked root veggies in the embers of an ordinary small campfire in real life before, not to mention that you could dig a small pit for the veggies, cover with earth, and start a campfire on top to slowcook them down there.

Our vision in the mod is that roasting the turnip should be simple and convenient (otherwise why would a player not just eat them one by one, in the raw). So the current version has the original mod's "Roast Turnip" recipe included just under the base game one. You can use both, but the mod's one is recommended since all it requires is a fire and it cooks more turnips at once. It's a little confusing, having two "roast turnip" recipes under Vegetables. I hope future game versions might improve on this by making the base game ember-roasted turnip recipe a normal one, not hardcoded.

And now just for fun, a couple of mod-theme "postcards from the East":

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Suggestions / Make "ember-roasted" turnip recipe a normal one, not hardcoded.

« on: December 02, 2025, 05:18:00 PM »

I think this one cookery recipe for Ember-roasting was accidentally added as a hardcoded unmodifiable and unremovable cooking method in URW v3.87 or so.

When making mods involving cooking, you often have to overwrite cookery_glossary.txt entries to avoid having confusing dupes appearing all over the place if you altered any of the original cookery. Until now, if you just replaced the file with your own, it worked great - but with the hardcoded ember-cooked turnip recipe, you have no recourse to either change or replace it.

Would be great if it became a normal cookery_glossary.txt recipe in a future update. As I see it, there's no overarching reason why it has to be hardcoded?

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Mod Releases / Re: Njerpez Cookery Mod v2.0 - Dec 2025 Update!

« on: December 02, 2025, 05:14:34 AM »

I finally got around to updating the cookery mod properly. It's up to date with URW 3.87+ latest Steam and Lifetimer versions. 

Enjoy everyone. And please do post if you notice strange things, I have been playtesting my own mod alone so far, and there have been a lot of changes done to it for v2.0, so there might be annoyances or bugs we have to work out together as we find em'.  Cheers, cheftains! 

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Mod Releases / Poisoned arrows

« on: December 02, 2025, 12:03:19 AM »

Poison Arrow Tips using Sand Mushroom!



Drop this file in your URW folder, and you'll be able to make poisoned arrows.

You will need:

- a wooden bowl for prepping the horrific Sand Mushroom poison paste, mixed with choice curses you have in mind for your enemies. The bowl is automatically trashed afterward immediately, being a hazard to health and life, if anyone accidentally uses it later.
- an ordinary arrow which you want to turn very evil soon
- a Sand Mushroom, please handle with care
- toxic intentions, toxic personality traits, general toxicity man, you need it all for this.

This is a simple mod that's safe to add and remove as you see fit & will not mess with any of your other mods. Simply copy the file to your URW folder, or delete the same file if/when you want to remove the mod.

On a technical level, what this does for you is turn an ordinary arrow into a broadhead; this is at the cost of effort, rare poisonous mushroom is required, plus effort to make the paste mixing bowl etc. Sadly there is no poisoning mechanism implemented in the URW engine, so what I did in the code was I tried to give it high point and edge damage upon hit, as well as turning the ordinary arrow into a broadhead for you which already improves damage.

The arrows worked well in my testing, though the increased damage code didn't seem to do much in terms of making your enemies instantly die (they do not instantly die). It's still a useful option, because at the very least your poisoned arrows should now be tradeable too for about twice as much as ordinary arrows would be. Feel free to add them to your game and enjoy.

PS: Animals downed with such arrows thankfully do not become poisonous.

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Mod Releases / Re: Njerpez Cookery Mod v1.01

« on: December 01, 2025, 10:35:54 PM »

I know this is necro'ing this thread, but I just wanted to say thank you, because after playing with this mod I made my own kvass at home and it was *delicious*.

That's heartwarming, that's the kind of feedback Njerpez chieftains would cheer for!  I too love home-made kvass in real life very much. Apparently since the fermentation naturally "catches" the spores flying around in the air and sitting on the breads you use, that means that the kvass made in each home can be expected to be slightly different in species & even taste to some degree! Your house must have the good vibes, no doubt.

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Modding / Re: A Query on Realism in Modding

« on: December 01, 2025, 04:39:13 PM »

My outlook goes something like this: I love the realism represented in URW, how the world operates based on intuitively understandable real life logic. But, I also want to enjoy my time playing the game as the player and not get carpal tunnel as much from repetetive actions that add little to my experience, so I frequently compromise the "technical" realism if that lets me get more enjoyable gameplay flow.

For example, I found that preparing and eating a tiny meal 3-4 times a day as URW character was too much fussing to constantly repeat, and was not enjoyable as the player. So instead I compromised (made more abstract) the technical water content in each cooking recipe to allow them to come out more nutrient-rich and concentrated. Each recipe lost realism in that it now only needed an abstract 1lb of water, instead of the real life measurements needed. It just became a "do you have water? ok good enough, we don't care too much about the amount you have". But in exchange, now you got nutrient rich pots of food becoming possible, and could eat twice or even once a day and be at "abundant" with some of those modded meals, but crucially for realism it still didn't create any nutrients out of thin air, it's still the same realistic nutrients you always had. You just no longer have to fuss as much on the keyboard to do the daily task of feeding yourself.

I feel like making stuff like that more abstract can be a very worthy sacrifice sometimes, where it improves the core gameplay loop & user convenience.

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Modding / Re: Mod with more character portraits from IRL photos, can I post it?

« on: December 01, 2025, 04:21:39 PM »

If you feel bummed out, having done all that work curating the photos, and not being able to post them as your own mod due to legal concerns, then as I see it there are two things you can do:

- You can just post your pic mod, and take the "legal risk", which all it amounts to is that someone in those photos may email you and ask you to take their photo down since they don't want to be a URW character and get killed by Lynxes in horrible ways. Honestly, what's the real likelyhood of that happening or anyone caring enough, considering you got the photos from openly available public sources? From a legal POV, it would be different if URW creators themselves included other people's photos without permission - they would never do that - because it makes them theoretically liable to owing money compensation to the people in said photos. Since you're just a modder and you make zero income from your mod, nobody cares.

- You could experiment with NanoBanana2, promising and powerful image AI google recently put out. You can find places that let you use it for free (https://aistudio.google.com/), and the idea would be to get this AI to make your own iron age stylizations of the photos you selected for your mod. That way it's no longer even the original people pictured, but AI stylizations of something that vaguelly looks like them.

Don't be disheartened and don't let legal concerns choke out that creative spark to see your selections actually come to life in URW!

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Bug reports / Re: LoydettiTarvike() bug, unknown what it does

« on: December 01, 2025, 12:13:59 AM »

This bug just happened also when crafting bandages - no clothes were involved.  < That sounded more risqué than it actually was.>

Thanks a lot Caius, that information helped me feel a lot better about that big red letters error. Was actually playing less URW because of it, hoping it's not progressively messing up my save. Knowing it's just an annoyance at this point is heartwarming and helpful.

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Bug reports / Poop deliveries to villagers

« on: November 30, 2025, 07:53:39 PM »

Minor tweak needed, when handing animal poops to villagers using the "Delivery" option, it feels like their reaction should definitely not be how it is now:

"Thank you for that, Bedlam Kaumolainen, that's going to be very useful."

  

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Suggestions / Re: Modular wooden building

« on: November 30, 2025, 10:31:13 AM »

I've got an "E" shaped house built (just without the middle prong on the E). There are a couple ugly visible seams on it, but it holds warmth and everything just fine, so to some extent you can already experiement with certain weird designs and don't have to only have square housing.

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Suggestions / Tying equipment focus in URW needs to be reasoned somehow

« on: November 30, 2025, 09:42:55 AM »

I came back to playing URW heavily again, with my last save dating years ago, back in good old version 3.51 or so. Back then, we had an important logical clarity that I took for granted and did not properly appreciate at the time: "OK, my crafting recipe calls for tying equipment, so do I have any? Right, got a cord from somewhere, will that work? Yes, works!". Same thing worked for ropes, and a player could think to themselves "hey how do I make these cords/ropes, is this even possible?" and easily discover the ubiquitous (at the time) URW abstraction of making all the tying equipment you need with 1lb of cloth. Since leather is also a kind of cloth, it intuitively made sense that you can make leather ropes with 1lb of that.

It was all logical, easy to hold in mind, and once you did it once, you know how to do it forever. That's the power of clarity.

Newest versions of URW have sought to improve the flexibility for players who prefer to live exclusively in the wilderness and may have no obvious sources for cloth, so many new options have been added, but has there been an unintended severe negative effect on player clarity and the logic of the game regarding the essential matter of tying equipment?

Consider what a new player may have to deal with nowadays: withes, cords, cotton/hemp/flax yarns, birchbark strips, leather ropes, strong tying equipments, weak tying equipments, generic ropes, retting, plant fibres, sinews, sinew fibers, sinew yarn... Have I even listed them all? I consider myself a veteran URW player and enjoyer, and that ... is difficult to hold in mind even for me, but consider too how an average new player feels when encountering this level of tying equipment complexity. Most modern players also have no linguistic idea what a "withe" or "retting" even are; their brain fails when seeing the word to paint a sufficient picture of what the game is trying to represent to them. So they may have no idea that they want to make a withe, or how one is made, or where it comes from.

Then there's the added complexity of certain tying equipment sources being seasonal, and the ever present question of "hmm, they have birch bark strips for sale, it has length, so is it a tying equpment or no?". After several hours of play, I still have no idea about most that myself, even as something of a veteran with a great "mental map" of how things work in URW,  having come back fresh from the old versions. Back then it was pure elegance, "1lb cloth, that's what you need, and you'll have your tyng needs sorted", but the current state of things is a major mental shock. How is a player supposed to know whether a hemp yarn is water-safe, but cotton isn't? How can they intuitively know the difference between a cord, a sinew, a rope, and withe, and yarn for crafting a fur mittens?  It's forcing frustrating trial and error for most players, for no good reason there...





Granted, one can always figure out even the most complex system with time. The problem is that someone who is away for a week from playing URW, will not be able to retain the confusing understanding of how things work now with tying equipment, owing to its overarching obscurity for most people's minds, it will be sure to slip away from their memories. And then you have to figure out all over, what was a "withe" again, or was it cotton that was water safe or hemp, or does sinew yarn work to make a small lever trap or did you need that other thingie...

My argument is that progress in tying equipment may have inadvertently gone too far. What do you guys think?  This is something along the lines of "not all progress is actually improvement, not all rollbacks are bad, if you went ahead on the wrong path then going backwards is the true progress". 

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Bug reports / [Fixed - persists in 3.87] LoydettiTarvike() bug, unknown what it does

« on: November 29, 2025, 03:47:53 PM »

Got this bug notice in red, in latest version 3.87. Please see the pic / log.

It happened when attempting to make Clothes->Fur Hood, using a recently produced forest reindeer fur and a 6ft piece of linen thread. The item seems to have been made OK. And there was no hang/crash, only the ominous message in red.

The only thing weird about the reindeer fur used that I can think of, is that it possibly came from being a formerly "cured" one. It soaked and turned into a proper fur without issues. Repeating the task gives the exact same error in red.

PS: Forgot to mention that I'm experimenting with modding, changed the crafting skill on clothes from COMMON to TEXTILECRAFT and to HIDEWORKING on leather items in my game, in case that may be relevant to the bug's appearance somehow. Those changes make sense in my head, for making clothing deserves having an existing specialized skill linked to it, but not sure if this is causing something unexpected.

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Stories / Re: The best shot I'll probably never do again

« on: November 29, 2025, 09:29:55 AM »

That was like hitting a coin sized moving object with a bow at 60 m !!  Through a spruce tree in the way!

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Gameplay questions / Re: What is the best material for a longbow?

« on: November 29, 2025, 01:41:17 AM »

I think you're right Matti, it doesn't actually change the bow quality. I got confused about the string wearing out slower due to quality, that part was mentioned somewhere in news.txt

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Suggestions / Villager Shops & Warehousing

« on: November 28, 2025, 03:57:38 PM »

Currently villagers seem to grab the stuff they get from trading with the player and put it into stores, thereby it seems to be preventing the store from properly respawning villager goods (it thinks "oh, the store is already full of stuff, no need to add anything the village produces).

So I was thinking, maybe the villagers could dump the trade goods they get from players into a specific communal building ("The Village Warehouse"), so it's pretty clear for the player where the stuff they traded away might be, in case they later wanted some of it back and other such situations.

When trading consistently with a village for years, that would really help keep their player-facing stores to be stocked properly with what they make there, instead of gradually becoming "clogged" with player trade goods and having little else to offer.