Messages

1

Bug reports / Re: I'm On A Wall

« on: November 04, 2021, 03:10:42 PM »

This has been in the game a long time, I reported this back on the old forums.

You can recreate this easily: when you use 'climbing' skill, the game doesn't seem to check the destination square, so you can climb on top of building squares or anything else as long as you use 'climbing' to get there.

2

Gameplay questions / Re: Quick question

« on: July 23, 2020, 06:30:00 PM »

 Here you see that,

While the gains / increased level (over lifetime) is a lighter color

Dear heavens, how have you managed to more than double your building stat?! What are you building?

3

Gameplay questions / Re: Details of fireplaces and smoking meat with new fire mechanics

« on: July 23, 2020, 01:30:37 PM »

Thanks, I hadn't seen that Steam discussion, that is very helpful.

I can tell you 200 branches is much more than needed. I used 80 and got zero spoilage.

4

Gameplay questions / Details of fireplaces and smoking meat with new fire mechanics

« on: July 23, 2020, 12:38:20 PM »

I've been trying to get my head around how smoking food has changed in 3.63. The question I have is how large a fire is required in order to keep the process ticking along.

At first I thought that we would need to have a continuous fire for a few hours in order to fully heat up the fireplace, and I erred on the side of overdoing it. I tried various combinations of firewood and branches to get the fire to the level of either 'burning for a few hours' or 'burning for several hours'. The smallest combination in my haphazard trials was 5 firewood and 20 branches or thereabouts. I had no meat spoilage doing this, even if I missed a day (I would then make a larger fire, e.g. 80 branches, to make up for that).

Since I had no spoilage, I thought I was overdoing things, and this is a significant amount of firewood to go through in midsummer. Also, as far as I can tell the fireplace heats up even with the minimum fire (16 branches, or 5 firewood and 1 branch). So now I'm trying to see what happens with the minimum firewood. Now I'm getting spoilage. At first I thought it was that I had misjudged the boundaries between days and inadvertently missed one, but I get more spoilage the more that a batch of meat has been smoked during my 16-branch fire regime. The bits that were mostly with my large-fire regime and only a few days of 16-branch fires only had a little spoilage; my last batch that was entirely done during the 16-branch fire regime had ~40% spoilage. So, something is going wrong.

Is it that the 16-branch fires are too small? Or is it something with the timing of the checks, and my pretty haphazard schedule of lighting fires (while trapping, active hunting, building a cabin, long trips, etc.) means that the small fires doesn't have the margin of error for smoking that a larger one does? I've frequently lit a fire in the morning, left my settlement, and come back and lit a fire at night the next day. Perhaps this is now a no-no without lighting large fires. I presumed that the game would do a check at 8am each morning whether the fireplace was heated since the last 8am check. But that is just a presumption.

Another issue is that I don't understand the details of how heating a fireplace now works. It may be that 16-branch fires are too small to properly heat the fireplace. Maybe there is now a continuum of how hot a fireplace gets, and my ~40% spoilage is because a 16-branch fire only gets to ~60% of the necessary heat. In this case, the question is 'how large a fire is needed to fully heat a fireplace?'. A wrinkle here is that the game describes as a 'heated room' a room with even a minimum-sized fire that has just been lit, which is what emboldened me to try 16-branch fires.

I would need to do more systematic testing to come to any kind of conclusion. In the meantime, I thought I'd ask the other players, you, what your experiences and meat-smoking regimes have been.

[Spoiler:]

5

Gameplay questions / Re: [Spoilers] Which bow is best? Aiming to resolve confusion around bows

« on: July 21, 2020, 09:11:48 AM »

Discussing the spoiler text below:

Spoiler: show

So, it turns out that Northern bows have the best base statistics of bows? I have a masterwork longbow and am unlikely to change, but it would be good to know.

6

Off-topic / Iron age shield made from bark discovered in England

« on: May 30, 2019, 07:14:46 PM »

There has been a very significant find of martial a shield made from bark, rather than metal or timber as previously known examples from the period. The find is dated to the early iron age (~350-250BC) in England, used by Celtic warriors. This is especially rare and significant because a material like bark doesn't normally survive the centuries. I have no idea whether something like this would have been used in Finland, but of interest to people here nonetheless I'm sure.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/celtic-shield-leicestershire-archaeologist-ancient-warfare-a8927871.html?fbclid=IwAR0zkdCru1nancic6sPzg9It1IGhlK6Z--up-zTVrgQzFb-0PMvdF9j6aYU

The discovery reveals that the ancient Britons used the same lightweight shield-making material used at least in more recent centuries by Aboriginal Australian warriors.

It is likely that the Leicestershire shield was actually used in at least one battle. It has two probable spear impact marks and two probable blade marks, potentially made by metal swords.

Each blade impact mark gives a fascinating clue as to the defensive properties of bark shields.

Read more
 
Crusades fighters ‘had families with locals and recruited offspring’
Bark is more resilient than metal or wood – so sword blows (and arrows) tend to fully or partially rebound off them.

In the case of the blows which caused the blade impact marks on the Leicestershire shield, the blade had quite literally bounced off and back onto the surface, thus producing parallel five centimetre long repeat impact marks, just a few millimetres apart.

It demonstrates the almost rubber-like deflective nature of the shield’s bark composition.

But to make the bark behave in that extremely effective way, the shield’s Iron Age makers had to employ some very sophisticated manufacturing techniques, researchers have discovered.

First, they had dried the bark in such a way as to give it an inbuilt rubber-like weapon-deflecting “bounce” capacity.

They achieved this by inducing tension in the bark, as it dried, by deliberately bending it in the opposite direction to its natural tree-surface curve.

This enabled the inner face of the bark to become the outer impact-absorbing “business” face of the shield.

It is this deliberate curve-reversal-induced tension which gave the shield its protective qualities – and it was the ultra-lightweight nature of bark (as opposed to metal or ordinary timber) which would almost certainly have allowed the warriors to fight more agilely and for longer.

7

Suggestions / Re: Dual wield/throw like a rogue

« on: February 20, 2019, 04:28:09 PM »

You can already dual-wield: if you have a weapon in each hand, you can block or attack with each for an action. The idea of hitting somebody with both weapons at once is something for staged choreography and fantasy roleplay: you don't gain anything by doing so, and you can't hit from two different sides at once with any force, and it's really clumsy and self-defeating. This is the same reason it's not physically possible to throw two javelins/rocks in one action with any effectiveness--your body simply doesn't move that way. You generate power for your strikes in large part by rotating your shoulders and hips, and you can either rotate your left side forward or your right side forward. You can thrust yourself forward square to your opponent and generate power that way, but (a) this is a bad idea, since you have shorter range and make yourself a larger target, and (b) you're still only going to hit from one direction.

There is quite a lot of historical material on using two weapons at once, not from the target period but from the late middle ages onwards. You'll see in these materials that people either strike with just one of the weapons, using the other to defend, or strike with these weapons in turn. The system already simulates the historical use of dual wielding, so nothing needs to be changed.

8

Stories / Re: Run Away Slave on Winter (lucky)

« on: February 15, 2019, 05:53:28 PM »

It's happened to me before that Njerpez hit each other and start fighting, but never have they basically taken care of each other this way. A nice fluke!

Is your approach in the Runaway Slave scenario to run to the building and fight in the doorway? I can see that as a strategy, but I think knives are awful combat weapons and Njerpez tend to have high weapon skills. My favoured approach is to run away as fast as I can, spend a day or two making some javelins, go back and pick one Njerpez off at night with the javelins, loot him and run before the others can catch up, then rinse and repeat until either I feel I'm strong enough to take on the remaining Njerpez in a straight fight or I run out of javelin targets.

9

Suggestions / Re: No harpoons? Unique ranged hunting weapons in finnish culture?

« on: February 15, 2019, 02:19:01 PM »

I asked Sami about using harpoons back on the old forum somewhere. From memory, what he told me was that angons were used to immobilise seals, not as much by physically dragging them by a rope but because it's a large heavy object impaled in them. He also told me that since the game doesn't have a way to have animals impeded in this way, you can't use angons in the intended way in the game (and I can tell you from experience that in the game even crippled seals can crawl into the water and swim away, taking your missile weapons with them).

It's one of the things I would really like to see added in the game, because with the way I play seals are an important food source. Right now I use traps to catch them, which isn't really accurate but I don't have the accurate means for catching them available to me, so here we are. It is possible to catch seals by active hunting, but you normally have to have multiple goes at the same seal where you wound it, it goes underwater, it comes back and you wound it again, until you finally kill it. This is possible because they like to return to the same spot over and over, which also makes trapping them super effective.

10

Suggestions / Re: Bait not req for fishing? Really?

« on: February 15, 2019, 02:10:02 PM »

I'm happy to consider the baiting process to be abstracted by the Fishing skill. I don't know about traditional Finnish fishing, but in other places, including Stone Age cultures like in Polynesia (where metals were not available at all), artificial lures are used more often than bait. Something else that is common is not to use a hook (though hooks are common) but instead something called a 'gorge', which is a rod (of bone or wood, normally) which acts as a lure, and is rigged such that when you pull on the line it turns so that it sticks crosswise in the fish's throat. So, it's a combination of a lure and way to physically catch the fish.

 Since fishing rods can only be gained by trade, I'm happy to think of it not just being the rod, but also the tackle.

11

Suggestions / Re: Bait not req for fishing? Really?

« on: February 15, 2019, 02:05:53 PM »

The anglers do use fishing bait, which I don't know English name for, which is thrown into water BEFORE fishing, and even if they don't want to fish on a particular day. It is used to keep the fish nearby and make them less skittish in future. This uses more baiting substance than actual fishing. But if the engine would support this - I doubt it.

This is called 'burley' in English. A good source of burley is the guts, etc., of the fish you caught and cleaned yesterday.

12

Gameplay questions / Re: Trees as effective barriers?

« on: February 14, 2019, 02:38:48 PM »

I've been suspicious that large animals may be able to pass through spruces, because they seem to do it occasionally when chasing them. But I have no proof. I'm interested to know the truth on this... sort of. Many things that are uncertain in the game are part of the greatness of it, and I don't want to know all the secrets. Discussion of what can go through/over fences has been ongoing for ever, but trees... I don't remember a definite conclusion.

I've never seen this happen. I've also decently often chased animals into my trap fences, and every time this has happened they've stuck in a trap, i.e. run along the fence, found a gap, and got caught in the trap in the gap. So, they haven't run through spruce trees.

Sometimes it seems the game will, when I zoom into a tile, drop me on top of a tree. The way I noticed this is that when I'm hunting, when I get zoomed in I drop all my non-combat items, leave a map marker, and then go on my hunt unencumbered. When I go back to my pile of goods, it may be on the same tile as a tree, despite me not pushing it into a tree. So, it probably means that I didn't notice that as I zoomed in, I was placed on a tree.

13

General Discussion / Re: What's Going On In Your Unreal World?

« on: February 14, 2019, 02:05:14 PM »

I'm back to URW for the past couple of weeks, after having taken a hiatus of more than a year. I'm currently weighing up moving my home base, even after having built a small cabin (my smoking house). I'm currently on a four tile island, with my home site in one corner and a farming site on another corner, both with ice-free access year round, while also not being accessible over ice from the mainland. That's my preferred kind of home site. There's another site half-a-day away which is three small islands with ice-free access next to each other, and I may move there. Ideally I'd have two one-tile islands like that, one for my home site and one for my fields (smaller islands attract fewer animal visitors, and I don't want animal visitors to my fields), but that has proven elusive. Maybe I'll do some more scouting; there is still time before I need to commit to one home site for winter. Or I could try something I've never done, not only play a nomad over the winter but a nomad travelling by watercraft, which is likely to be really challenging but I'm not sure if it would be much fun (long-distance travelling by watercraft when most water is frozen over can be very tedious).

The trap fence I set up for the Advanced Adventures course is rather unsuccessful, with only two elk caught after about a month in action, and one of those was only caught after I chased an elk into the fence (a very successful strategy I highly recommend, and closer to how trap-fences were and are actually used). After the changes to animal spawning ~2 years ago, trap fences need more thought, and I rushed into this one even though I had misgivings about this site I built it anyway. That'll teach me. My other possible home-site is further away from this trap fence, so I'll probably just break it down (or just trigger the traps and abandon it) and maybe not build a new one. My main meat source is seal, and I get enough of them to not need any more meat. I've already stopped setting out my nets except when I specifically want fresh food.

 I must admit one of the factors keeping me in my current home site is the fact that it is in an area called 'Sword Strait', and that's just cool 

14

Gameplay questions / Re: Female Dogs

« on: February 24, 2018, 11:53:01 AM »

I can at least tell you that there are big and small female dogs, because I've seen some. I don't know if female dogs are inherently smaller than male dogs.

15

Gameplay questions / Re: Catching a glutton - advice?

« on: February 24, 2018, 11:11:17 AM »

I've never had problems with animals raiding my cellar. Part of this is that I like settling on small islands, but I also don't place any traps near to my home. I think traps spawn animals (it certainly used to, and I think even after Sami changed animal spawning they still do), and for me the bother of dealing with animals raiding my cellar and my home is larger than the benefit of catching a few more animals, especially since I normally have quite enough catches in my other traps.

The same goes for my fields. I don't put traps around it (I do fence around it), and for the most part animals leave it alone.