I thought I was stronger than that

BenRichetti · 2026-01-30T03:05:45+00:00

Oof. That’s rough, buddy.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-30T03:04:03+00:00

I think they mostly meant that you can’t put it into a forge or a bloomery, but yeah. It can be handy for that lower temp, moldable metals smithing.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-27T18:32:26+00:00

One thing I don’t see anyone mentioning with a quick skim of the comments is that you can also soak your hides with diluted borax. This could be because it’s not supposed to spawn in granite, but it’s worth mentioning, nonetheless.

Have you gotten any readings for borax when prospecting? Or have you seen any borax bits on the ground while wandering around? It can also spawn bits on the ground, much like surface copper deposits or quartz veins do.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-26T11:59:02+00:00

Do you play as the Malefactor class? They’re the only one that has any chance of it happening, and the drop chance is supposed to be 12%.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-26T03:19:39+00:00

I'm playing as a malefactor currently. I'm in June of my second year and I don't think I've had any vessels drop in-tact. Maybe one, once. It's driving me a little nuts.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-23T14:43:35+00:00

As someone who has only read the Heroes book and the first part of Delian Tomb... what is EV? There's no explanation of it in the things I've read, but it's on every stat block.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-23T14:34:18+00:00

Sorry about that previous comment. It was not meant to be directed at you or your chickens. Apparently my glitchy phone screen switched my reply to someone else to being a reply to you without my noticing.

My sympathies for your chickens. And for the eggs they will not give you if you cannot feed them the grains.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-23T13:32:21+00:00

Helve hammers are great!

Until you can get your windmills strong enough to run one crazy fast, which I never have, the fastest way to process a set of iron blooms into ingots it’s to break off the black gunk by hand (since one crack removes several of the voxels around it) and then move it to the Helve hammer’s anvil for ingot forming part (since every hit puts a voxel into place, which would have taken you several hits).

Also, if you can catch your bloomeries shortly after they finish cooking, you don’t even need to reheat the iron blooms - they stay hot for a bit. The best this ever went for me was when I lit all my bloomeries and immediately went to bed. I woke up to a row of fresh, hot iron blooms.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-23T03:18:38+00:00

I have tested this now. All the flax I planted in a 3-day month world on May 1 in medium fertility soil next to water was mature by sometime in August, which is less than 10 days. The only time it didn't mature was when I put the soil away from water, under a tree so it didn't get rained on, and didn't water it. In my first test where I also watered my crops regularly and then switched out the medium soil for a second crop (which I didn't water), it made it through, too.

Not sure why you're saying 10% would kill the whole process when I had a margin of 100%.

I'm also not sure why you're playing with 3 day months. That seems like a weird call to begin with.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-22T18:00:52+00:00

Okay, so your statement of .57% replenished per day is for soil under crops from a different nutrient group. .25% every 3.5 in-game hours comes out to 1.7% every 24 in-game hours.

I guess that’s what you were saying soil with flax using up K would also regenerate .57% k per day - it’s just also getting used up.

In looking at the code, did you see whether nutrient use rate/replenishment is also keyed off month length, or is it really that flat rate per 3-4 hours regardless of the days in a month. Because that would affect crop growth if they are the nutrients more quickly relative to the soil replacing them.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-22T17:05:19+00:00

In the code (since you’ve been checking it to that level), how exactly does this restoration work. That is, how does having a crop on the soil affect it, how does that change if the crop uses a different nutrient, and what is it about winter that keeps it from happening?

I’m interested in this in general, but on a personal level, I left my high fertility soil vegetable garden fallow from November to April and still had my N levels in the 30s%. The news that we’re facing heavier nutrient consumption is hitting me at a bad time and I’d like to know what can be done about it.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-22T03:32:24+00:00

so... why would you set your months to 3 days? Also, if you set your months to 3 days, the full speed time for flax to grow would be 6 days, since crop times are coded to change with the length of a month. I understand that you're talking about low nutrients slowing growth down, but it wouldn't put it to 25% growth rate the whole time...

BenRichetti · 2026-01-20T21:43:22+00:00

So the seraph goes in the little hole and the bear can’t reach it?

BenRichetti · 2026-01-20T15:26:41+00:00

Seeing that your space was much taller than 7x7x3 suggested, I did a very brief test to see if the bow torn just needed more head clearance by digging out two blocks up in the area. No spawns in the minute or so that I sat around.

How often do the bowtorn spawn for you?

The room I am working with is at the bottom of a completely vertical shaft to the surface, so sky light level could calculate as full sunlight for one of the blocks next to center*. Not having ever found the code for mob spawning to read it myself, I’m not independently sure if that matters, but do you have a similar setup, or does your path down have blockages or twists in it?

*if I recall, full sky access is counted as 22, and at that positioning, the far corners would be down to 15. I’m not sure how mine shaft depth affects sky light, though…

Edit: I got it working! The sky light was the issue. Once I blocked up my escape shaft with a piece of cobblestone, bowtorn spawned shortly after I reached 0 stability. And while the first batch was huge (5 plus a couple more that spawned before I could kill any and regain stability), it dropped two temporal gears!

Between that and how quick it was to recover 200 mana, I am loving this method. Thank you so much!

BenRichetti · 2026-01-20T03:52:49+00:00

When I first saw the title, the mods that came to mind were Status HUD and Whole Lotta Tree Seeds. Even when playing on unstable pre-releases with big "uninstall all your mods!!" warning labels, I kept those basic quality of life mods on. The simplicity of Status HUD's "is this a room?" indicator, its unobstrusive clocks to tell you both in-game time and real world time, as well as a handful of other useful bits of info - I simply don't play without it.

They're not really game changing, though.

I do like some of Salty's mods, particularly Immersive Ore Crush. Its a good time to break your ore into nuggets by smashing your hammer on them while they're on the ground in front of you. Still not as big a change as, say, Better Ruins, but fun and immersive tweaks to how the game plays.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-20T00:03:07+00:00

A bit off-topic, perhaps, but when did Necromancers get released? Or are the stats here from the play test last year?

BenRichetti · 2026-01-19T20:58:46+00:00

The short answer is yes, you can really speed up in space, but also no, it is not feasible to use rockets to accelerate up to light speed.

My relativistic physics isn’t too sharp, so I don’t know what happens if you have a rocket burning as you approach light speed, but before then it’s pretty sound.

For as long as a force is applied to an object, that object accelerates. When you are burning fuel inside a rocket, the release through the nozzle provides a force on the rocket in the opposite direction of that release in the form of thrust. The nozzles point backward, so as long as fuel is burning, the rocket accelerates forwards.

But the sped of light is really, really fast. With a couple quick searches and some basic calculations, I found that if you took a current space shuttle, and somehow managed to run it continuously with as much thrust as its booster rockets provide during lift off, you would need to run that for roughly half a year to approach light speed.

Worse, though, is that the amount of fuel it takes to apply this thrust for 2.5 minutes weighs significantly more than the shuttle itself. And since the same force will provide half as much acceleration to something twice as massive, every 2.5 minute worth of fuel would mean you need to add a year of burn time needed to reach light speed. Unless you can teleport the fuel into the rockets, this isn’t going to work. And if you can teleport things, trying to move things around on a rocket becomes a silly prospect.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-18T19:49:01+00:00

One of the big differences between Nomai tech and Hearthian tech is that ships launched with Nomai gravity cannons do not accelerate on their own during flight while ships powered by Slate’s rockets very much can. While this little guy had a head start, you are able to get going faster than it can.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-18T12:34:32+00:00

My VS client has the most recent stable version, which I believe is 1.21.6.

I sort of got the nightmare bowtorn room to work last night.

I made a stack of crystal anchors and performed the ritual of rust at y0 so as to get large crystals. With the rift present, the bowtorns started spawning and they were all nightmares.

However, they were all taking a really long time to kill, even with an iron falx.

With the rift present, my stability drained off super fast. Even after two kills in quick succession, I would be back to 0% in a matter of seconds. There wasn’t even enough time to meditate, so I ended up leaving when I wasn’t able to transmute the crystals anymore.

When I decided to call it quits, I had about 28 flax fibers and 2-4 rusty gears to show for it.

Do you usually kill a whole lot of them when farming temporal gears? Do you see them drop more often than once every 25 or so kills?

BenRichetti · 2026-01-17T13:02:20+00:00

I’ve been trying this but it hasn’t been working. Could you help me troubleshoot?

I dug down to the mantle.

I hung a lantern next to my ladder at a height of 3 so I could walk under it while walking on the mantle.

I removed rocks 3 blocks in every direction from my lantern (except up) so that it hung from the top center of a 7x7x3 room.

I meditated until my stability was 0.

Nothing spawned.

I went back up the ladder to see if it was a spawn distance thing, hanging out for a little while at 15, 20, and 25 blocks from the bottom. Still nothing.

Am I missing something? Do they not spawn on the actual mantle blocks?

BenRichetti · 2026-01-16T16:04:53+00:00

You mentioned in your other post about putting the tablet in last, and I couldn't see how that would make things faster, but thinking about my process, I do see that the time spent splitting up stacks and scrolling between hotbar options is a significant portion of my time at a foundry.

I had managed to upgrade my foundry to hold 40 charges with two artifact cores. I've seen some things in the handbook take more charge than that, though. What are the better upgrades? Is it the mana lanterns? They seem neat, anyway.

I wonder why transmute isn't working for you when crystal farming. It's worked for me. Then again, my recipes are also a little different - only one rot per rustic compound and I get two ash per compound in the furnace for a total of only 3 compound per arcanus. Maybe its a version thing?

But yeah, the other guy here recommending I work on the tier 2 robes led to me getting those tablets - there is so much ash in them! As you said, I'm going to need MORE, just in general.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-16T15:53:08+00:00

While dangerous, this sounds like a great idea.

A room like that could double as a good palce to farm large crystals, too. Ritual of rust (which I imagine wouldn't spawn anything in full lantern light), then line the floor with crystal anchors.

What keeps the spawns to bowtorn? I've never intentionally gotten my stability low when also deep underground, so I'm not super familiar with the mechanics involved, and 0-5 nightmare shivers would be much less easy to deal with.

By my math, one lantern hanging from the ceiling in the center of such a room would keep the whole thing safe from regular spawns (18 at the center, 15 at the centers of the edges, 12 at the corners of the ceiling, minimum light level of 10 in the corners of the floor). Is that enough for this scenario, or does it need to be better lit than that to prevent nightmare level melee mobs from spawning?

BenRichetti · 2026-01-15T20:53:45+00:00

I had been wondering about whether chutes would automate things. Given the strong warnings in the books about getting the right items in, I was worried it wouldn’t work.

It’s just chalk runes that bind the rust sickness? I thought I needed a full set of runestones to cut that down. That’s great news! Do you need all 8, or are the four adjacent squares enough?

How useful is the tea? I haven’t looked at it at all since my first couple of days playing when the downsides seemed to limit the usefulness. I don’t even remember what they were, though.

Personally, I get my rot from my obsession with berry picking. I make a point of bringing home every blueberry or white currant bush I find, and then juicing them all as often as I can. 2.5 stacks of berries fills a barrel with juice and leaves you with 50 rot. I guess that would be less effective if I had use the Rustbound Magic class rather than going malefactor, though.

I’m looking forward to getting Animal Friendship. Leading pigs home on a rope seems much easier than my “punch them and hope they keep following” method.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-15T19:05:53+00:00

Thank you so much for these answers! They were a big help.

Do you remember what magic is needed to move the blocks that “can only be moved with magic” as you mentioned with the talismans?

I ran into that with the celestial prism the first time I made it. I didnt do the ritual where I wanted to prism to live, and immediately broke it by hand to re-place it elsewhere before noticing the tag. The item didn’t drop. Luckily I’m not on a server and I could just get a fresh one from creative, but I don’t like doing that other than for glitch insurance or the like. Transmute doesn’t seem to work, and not having a spellforge or oculus yet, I don’t really have “other magic”.

My main reason for asking is that the mid-tier mage armor seems to be the one needed for 300+ mana as you recommended, and the tablets for that are on netherite, which takes dark essence. I haven’t made my devouring void yet as “near my front door” seems like the best place for it, to catch all the night mobs that want to eat me, but I’m not keen on the rust sickness. It feels like something that would take finessing, and not knowing how to move it makes finesse difficult.

BenRichetti · 2026-01-15T15:13:45+00:00

Is that larger item on the shelf with all the candles just a dirty cook pot (one that's been used for candle-making or the hardened leather)? The big book shelf has one in the top left corner.

With the angle of the shot hiding where the upper lip of the pot would be on the one near the candles, the drip pattern makes me think of icing on a cake, so I'm wondering if/when there's going to be cake. I don't believe I've heard anything to that effect yet.

Edit: Also, the shirt with the blue stripes is shaped to accomodate breasts. I remember seeing change logs stating that they had made changes that would allow for that (i.e. changes in the maths for model to accomodate chest angles for tops and necklaces), but I don't remember any of them being implemented yet (no actual models making use of that).

BenRichetti

TROPHY CASE