Messages

1

General Discussion / Wiki down

« on: April 24, 2019, 09:54:44 PM »

The wiki seems to be down. When trying to check it, I only get the error: "A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software."

Hope it's nothing too bad.

2

Off-topic / Re: Trip to Finland

« on: July 02, 2018, 06:30:03 PM »

I'm not really that familiar with canoeing, but I decided to give some (hopefully helpful) comments anyway:

Travel:
Maybe you've already found it, but here's our national rail company's route maps for areas outside Helsinki region.

The company offering cheap bus tickets is Onnibus. Here's their route map. (I think the SKI ones are only active during skiing season.) These days their tickets can also be bought through the Matkahuolto website.

I've only spent two hours in an Onnibus and didn't find it too comfortable. Wouldn't want to sit in one from Helsinki to Oulu (or even Jyväskylä). Maybe you're both smaller than me and will find it comfortable enough though.

Hossa:
Difficult to get to - the buses go there during school days, i.e. August to May, monday to friday (This year the first bus goes August 9). In June or July one would need a taxi from Suomussalmi or Kuusamo and that will cost 100 - 200 euros (we just got new taxi legislation starting this July (i.e. yesterday), so no-one knows how the prices will be next year.)

I managed to dig up some Kainuu area bus timetables, and the closest to Hossa one could get by bus right now is Peranka (only mon-fri, once a day), a radio mast and a house in a crossroads 30 km from Hossa. (Turns out there's a Hossa taxi just for getting people from the bus stop to Hossa. No idea on the price though.)

Paddling to Hossa from Peranka (or Kuusamo, maybe from Suomussalmi. Google Maps doesn't really show how navigable rivers are.) is an option, but a plastic canoe is suggested for that. (According to Suomussalmi travel guide. An inflatable kayak doesn't sound like it likes sharp rocks.)

Lapland:
You'll want June / (first half of) July, if you want to experience midnight sun. Though the summer nights wont get that dark anywhere in Finland before August. (I suggest you bring sleep masks.)
(The Finnish Meteorological Institute's weather forecasts have sunset and sunrise times. Here's the current one for Kemijärvi (some 40 km north from the arctic circle), showing that the sun rose June 4th and will set July 9th.)

Like Erkka mentioned, Lapland's known for mosquitoes and other blood sucking insects. Early summer the insect populations will be smaller so travelling will be more comfortable. (Though people live there throughout the year, so managing two weeks there shouldn't be impossible )

If I was going to travel in Lapland, I'd want to do it in the first half of June.

Other location options:
My initial thought when I saw your post was to suggest traveling to Lappeenranta, renting a kayak, and paddling around Saimaa.

Another place to consider is traveling by train to Lieksa or Nurmes for Lake Pielinen and the Koli National Park. Pielinen drains to Saimaa through the Pielisjoki river, but I'm not sure how navigable that is. (There's the Karelia Rowing Tour for church boats and small boats every July rowing/paddling in the area so it should be navigable. If you decide to paddle around Pielinen, and want to travel by yourselves you may want to avoid that event.)

In Lapland there seems to be good canoeing areas in Inarijärvi (You can get to Inari by bus from Rovaniemi couple times a day) and Kemijärvi (where you can get by train).

(By the way, I'll be moving to Mikkeli in the end of this month, so I might be canoeing in Saimaa next summer.)

Edit: The National Land Survey of Finland has a nice map with topography/aerial images/whatnot.

3

Not bugs / Re: Skins

« on: January 22, 2018, 09:00:05 PM »

I did some calculations on how much the leather in a 5 lbs holding waterskin would weigh. I assumed a full waterskin would be a sphere, and used the apparent density of chestnut tanned leather I found in this article, which is 0.72 g/cm³. I converted the lbs to kilograms using both the standard lbs->kg ratio of 0.453 and the old Finnish one of 0.425 lbs to kg.

From the results, a 0.3 lbs waterskin with volume for 5 lbs of water would be made of 2 mm thick leather. (The leather weighing 0.27 lbs as standard pounds, 0.28 lbs as Finnish pounds.) The weight increases by about 0.15 lbs for each additional mm of leather thickness. (Averages for the first 10 mm of leather were 0.1417 lbs/mm for the standard pound and 0.1450 lbs/mm for the old Finnish pound.)

I don't know much about leather crafting, but  I'd expect a leather waterskin to be made of leather between 2-5 mm thick, meaning the leather of an empty UrW waterskin would have a weight of 0.3-0.75 lbs. Considering that a waterskin would not be a perfect sphere, and it would have a cork and a strap, I'd expect the game's waterskin to weigh between 0.5-1.0 lbs when empty, depending on what thickness the leather is supposed to be.

I don't expect crafting the skin requiring much more leather than it weighs. The extra leather cuts can be used to make a strap. (Maybe the recipe doesn't not need tying equipment at all... Just assume that it's made from the leather while crafting the skin.)

I also read somewhere that the Sami people used to make waterskins out of reindeer leather. Maybe the game's waterskins are based on those, but I don't have a clue what those look like or how they were made.

@GiTiB: Coming up with 4 lbs of leather isn't that difficult either, and a skin isn't that useful of an item. I always make one, but rarely use one.

4

Not bugs / Re: Skins

« on: January 21, 2018, 03:36:04 PM »

I believe Acolyte's talking about 0.3 lbs waterskin needing 4 lbs of leather to make. Here's how it is in vanilla diy_glossary.txt:

Code: [Select]

.Skin. [effort:1] [phys:hands]  *COMMON* /120/ %40%
{Leather} #4# [remove]
{Knife}
{Tying equipment} [remove]

It is probably a bug. I can't imagine where the remaining 3.7 lbs of leather goes...

5

General Discussion / Re: How old is your oldest survivor poll?

« on: January 16, 2018, 06:36:53 PM »

The game log (shift + L) contains all the important activities you've done (e.g. dug a pit, caught a roach, encountered/killed an animal, entered a settlement) and the date and time it was done (e.g. Day 3 of last week before midsummer point - year 16 - noon).  You start in year 16.

6

Gameplay questions / Re: Bones

« on: January 08, 2018, 11:13:27 PM »

Dogs eat them. A dog can eat from a single elk bone about three times.

7

Gameplay questions / Re: Agriculture

« on: December 10, 2017, 05:07:31 PM »

I checked with the UrW Object Browser, and plants don't have value. Barley flour has value of 4.38 and rye flour 3.96. Didn't spot other flours. So not that much compared to that of club/staff/javelin all of which have value of 2.

----

Edit: I did some quick experiments by buying village produce:

• Turnips have a value of 0.5.
• Goods of value 12 were "halfway there" for a 6 lbs bag of peas or an 11 lbs bag of broad beans. So 1 lbs of peas has value of about 4, and 1 lbs of broad beans has value of about 2.2.

But these prices are only valid when buying stuff from villagers. It's possible that villagers won't buy player produced agricultural produce.

So if you've got some of your own produce hanging around, you could try trading it and let us know, how it works

8

Mod Releases / Re: URW sufficiency mod

« on: December 09, 2017, 10:00:50 AM »

I haven't used this mod, but judging from the mod files and the news.txt that came with the newest version, there are two minor changes that this mod would overwrite.

This mod overwrites the encyclopedia (the GAME.NFO file), which got a couple of updates in 3.50 beta. Comparing the encyclopedias of 3.5 and 3.4, the encyclopedia got the following changes:

• .MYTHOLOGY.SACRED. was edited
• .SPELLS.INCANTATIONS. replaced the .RITUALS.
• .RITUAL. (about the skill) was removed
• .VALUABLES. entry was added (the following individual valuable items were not, despite claiming to be added in nov-19-2017. I suspect they've got the wrong year as the 3.4 file is older than nov-19-2017.)
• .HUNTING KNIFE. was slightly edited
• .ELK. and .STAG. were slightly edited
• .SACRIFICES. was added
• most of the ritual entries were removed: .FAVOURABLENESS OF THE TRAP. .FINDING THE WAY WHEN GOTTEN LOST. .BANISHING OF THE NÄKKI. .SAFETY OF THE NIGHT. .BANISHIN THE EVIL WATER GUARDIAN.BANISHIN OF THE NÄKKI. .SACRIFICE FOR A NEWLY KILLED ANIMAL. .FISHER'S SACRIFICE FOR A CATCH. .GENERAL SACRIFICE. .FISHER'S REQUEST FOR A CATCH. .HUNTER'S REQUEST TO CATCH A FOX. .PERMISSION TO SLEEP. .PERMISSION TO FALL A TREE. .BLOOD-STANCHING PRAYER. .THE ORIGIN OF FIRE. .THE OATH OF IRON. .HUNTING INCANTATION.

I might have missed some minor changes.

This mod also overwrites the flora_newherbs.txt where bogbean's anti-inflammatory property was misspelled and thus not working. In the 3.4 vanilla version of the file it reads anfi-inflammatory so fixing it is no biggie.

9

Suggestions / Re: Hint about impending expiry of quest or spell

« on: December 08, 2017, 02:16:14 PM »

I searched the msglog.txt for bird and quest but there's nothing about it expiring before the expiry note. I also scrolled a couple hundred lines before the message and didn't spot anything. Maybe it's related to quest phase, and the message doesn't spawn after the spell's been done.

10

Suggestions / Hint about impending expiry of quest or spell

« on: December 08, 2017, 12:19:47 PM »

Last night I got the Bird Thief quest, did the spell, and went back to camp to work on my cabin. I completely forgot about the quest and happily worked on my cabin until I got the message "Bird thief quest has expired and is removed from the quest journal" after about two weeks*. Considering that the quest was practically done - all that was left to do was to go talk to the quest giver for my reward, a reminder before the quest expired would have been nice. (The expiry date might be in the quest log, but it's not much use, if one's forgotten about the quest.) I'd also think the quest giver would remember that I did the spell for him and that a person from a neighboring village came to confess the crime for a bit longer than a few weeks. Perhaps the quest timer should be reset for this and similar quests to a couple of months (up to 6?) after the quest has been done, but there's waiting before the reward.

The hint could be either a blunt "The bird thief quest will expire in three days" or a more subtle "You feel like you've forgotten something".

*I'd done stuff before moving to comb the forest as I wasn't actually looking for a quest at the time.

I also read about someone trying out a new swimming spell and ending up drowning when the spell wore off. (I read about it in Steam's 'stupidest thing you've done' thread. It was there for a reason.) Some kind of hint about the spell's effect wearing off might be in order. Something like "You wonder how much longer the spell will last" after about 66 % to 90 % of the spell's duration the first time you cast the spell, and "The spell's effect will wear off soon" at about the 80 % mark in consequent times.

Maybe these are already in the game, and I and the swimmer both managed to miss the hints 

11

Off-topic / Re: Excel table to wiki

« on: August 04, 2017, 03:21:19 PM »

First of all, especially if your table has complex information (like the ones in the wiki's Plants page), make sure your table's wikicode is legible after conversion. The point of a wiki is that anyone can edit it at anytime so everyone needs to be able to understand the wikicode now and in the future.

I created the week calendar for the wiki using OpenOffice. Saved as html and copy pasted the contents of the html file to http://bmanolov.free.fr/html2wiki-tables.php#wiki. This created a lot of chaff though (IIRC, all formatting was saved individually for each cell and there were some completely unnecessary tidbits I removed manually), and the resulting wikicode is hard to read.

Can't remember if I've used this method for another table that doesn't change bg color in the middle of rows/columns, so don't know how it handles such tables. For such, I might just use a simpler widget like the Copy and Paste Excel-to-Wiki Converter and add colors etc. manually afterwards.

There's also a VBA-Macro for EXCEL table conversion, but I haven't played with that. (Haven't had excel in years)

See also:
Wikipedia's tool page
Wikimedia Commons: Convert tables and charts to wiki code or image files

12

Gameplay questions / Re: Armor - Maximum Protection

« on: May 26, 2017, 10:53:56 PM »

Diminishing returns in the way of more armor adding more encumbrance penalty. Sure, you can wear all the armor you can and barely be able to move, but the penalty will make most of your skills - including combat skills - useless.

Generally you'll want to keep your penalties to a minimum, because they directly affect most skills. So only wear heavy armor when you're heading for combat.

As far as I know, each body part's protection is calculated by the items covering it. Wearing a woollen veil or cowl will give the same amount of protection for skull and neck (double if both are worn).

(Linen undergarment actually protects the elbows, forearms, knees and calves in addition to those protected by a linen tunic. The wiki should be correct about this. It's not too long since I checked these.)

Not sure about the quality thing though. It might be that it only affects how durable the armor is, i.e. how many hits it can take before breaking.

13

General Discussion / Re: Unique Player Portrait

« on: May 26, 2017, 10:16:51 PM »

This thread in the old forums should hold the answer  :
http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=8343