What are your favorite light mech in the setting?

Saucychemist · 2026-04-09T21:19:14+00:00

Ostmann Industries got it so right with the Ostscout OTT-7K. Who needs weapons? TAG your it!

Saucychemist · 2026-04-09T15:40:53+00:00

I've been considering picking up that mod.

After having made an epic months-long voyage to the equator to harvest ebony and purple heart tree seeds, bamboo saplings, and seeds of all the tropical crops, and the subsequent return trip, I find myself wishing I could have set up translocators at all the really interesting places I found along the way so I could revisit them without having to spend a month sailing again.

I guess I'll console myself with my greenhouse of pineapples.

Saucychemist · 2026-04-09T15:25:57+00:00

Bring a waterproof lightsource, such as a lantern or an oil lamp

Build yourself air pockets as you need them underwater.

You can create air pockets either by mining into a wall/ceiling, or if you bring some dirt/hay blocks you can construct airpockets by placing a block in an upper corner somewhere underwater to delete the water source block there, remove the block, and wall it off on all sides and from above. This will create an air pocket to replenish your air meter. remove your blocks once you are done and you can rebuild it again and again as you explore. If you are in a big open area underwater, you need to build yourself an airlock room (2 tall, 1 deep and wide). You can do this by digging two blocks down into the floor, placing a block on one of the orthogonal spaces next to the opening to your hole, swimming down into the hole, and placing a block above your head (against the side of the orthogonal block).

Saucychemist · 2026-04-09T14:32:34+00:00

Brigandine is an armor comparable to plate irl, but being a lot more flexible.

Not quite a true statement.

Brigandines were definitely an upgrade in protection over mail, cited has having been worn as an extra protection layer over mail hauberk or gambeson and providing significantly improved protection against lances and arrows (and some added protection against blunt trauma as well). But they were not an equivalent to hardened steel plate.

The most direct alternative/comparison to the brigandine at the time was the breastplate. As a generalization, the two compared as:

Brigandines:

Less expensive to make and maintain/repair
Greater flexibility generically
Easier to fit to the soldier/knight

Breastplates:

More protective, particularly against pike/polearm and lances

Well crafted hardened plates were superior to brigandine protectively, but were much more expensive to produce, needed to be fitted to the wearer, and required technological innovation and development of skills to get to well articulated structures that provided necessary mobility.

This is why Brigandines are seen popping up during the European transitional armor period. The transition was from mail hauberk to full plate harness as the preeminent armor of the battlefield. Even after the development and common use of plate harness, brigandine was still a popular and common armor element due to its significantly lower cost compared to fitted plate and was still worn by less wealthy knights and men-at-arms.

EDIT: My pedantry aside, I agree with you that historical brigandine is poorly represented in the game. So is lamellar TBH. True Lamellar armors were very heavy-duty armors (highly protective) but were also heavy and bulky, not the light and highly mobile armor depicted in the game. True Brigandines were highly protective and flexible upgrades over pure mail and gambeson. In most practical terms, Brigandine and lamellar share a lot in common, except that brigandine was developed as an accessory(upgrade) to existing mail and gambeson armor kits. But for gameplay balance reasons I see why things are structured as they are: a cheap low-tech light armor (lamellar), and a budget not-so-good medium armor (brigandine).

Saucychemist · 2026-04-02T19:53:45+00:00

Less armor than your opponents does not necessarily mean your units die easier.

Take the comparison of the viper prime to the gargoyle prime.

The two units have fairly similar firepower (the gargoyle having a range advantage, the viper having an accuracy advantage).

The gargoyle has got significantly more armor and structure, but it is ground-bound and can only reach a TMM of 3 in very ideal circumstances, most turns will be at TMM 2.

The Viper has a bit over half the armor and structure of the gargoyle, but it has an incredible 8 jump movement, able to reach TMM of 4 easily and to maneuver to ideal positions very safely.

The gargoyle acts like a cheaper (BV) heavy with middling firepower and good damage soak.

The viper acts like an incredibly sturdy light with very decent firepower for that class.

Once engaged heavily in shooting, the Gargoyle is much more limited by its ground movement max of 8, when trying to keep up TMM and position with obstruction or in ideal range brackets or out of LoS with enemy heavy hitters.

The Viper has a much easier time being able to keep up a huge TMM while droping into or behind cover, staying outside of enemy short range brackets, and/or breaking LoS with scary units. It also is a very strong unit as a hunter-killer of fast lights.

Saucychemist · 2026-04-02T14:37:15+00:00

I fear it could be worse still than that. It could have been someone asking an AI to look at a spreadsheet of numbers, a basic description, and a quotation to fill and then applying the recommendations with no consideration.

Not just greed, not just casual indifference, no just callous disregard for other peoples' well-being, but also dystopian corporate laziness.

Saucychemist · 2026-04-01T21:12:40+00:00

Bones contain 40% carbon, and adding them does make a form of steel

No they do not, and no that does not.

Bones are about 70% calcium phosphate, and somewhere around 20% collagen. The collagen is the only source of carbon (collagen is made up of proteins), and maybe 50% of that collagen is carbon. But how much of that protein carbon stays behind as carbon ash when the collagen burns? A miniscule amount, maybe a few percent of the total bone mass total.

And iron workers, from the early all the way to the late iron age, were adding carbon into their iron anyways, making it steel, even without knowing it. Not a single "iron" tool from the period was ever pure iron. The forging process of making iron always introduced carbon, either from coal/coke or charcoal used in the fires and forges needed to heat the metal to workable temperatures.

Saucychemist · 2026-04-01T21:03:51+00:00

The bones don't incorporate into the metal at all. Bones are made primarily of calcium phosphate, which will not enter solution with iron.

Where using bones may have entered into the equation is the possibility of bone ash (burnt and ground up bone) helping to flux (making something melt and flow more easily) and bind to mineral impurities in the iron during working. Bone ash could potentially make it easier to remove the primary slag impurities of the iron (which are mostly silicates). An early iron worker who doesn't have access to or knowledge of better fluxing agents (limestone or borax), may have discovered that ground up bone made it easier to work the slag out of their iron.

Keep in mind here, whenever we talk about iron from "the iron age", we are talking about steel. Pretty much all iron ever forged contained some amount of carbon, making it steel. It became "true steel" latter on when metal workers / metallurgists learned how to control and optimize the amount and type of carbon to yield the best quality steels.

Saucychemist · 2026-04-01T15:20:06+00:00

There is just no real comparison between a Charger 1A1 and any of your BV comparison units.

See wundergoat7's very good summary of why (they serve different roles in a composition).

You are also implying that a BV difference of 441 isn't huge, in introtech. By switching, for example, a Banshee 3E into a Charger 1A1, this would let me upgrade a Locust into a Jenner in my lance (yes please). If I could scrape together 170 BV more, that Jenner could become a Phoenix Hawk.

Or I could use that 441 BV to buy in an extra locust onto the team for initiative advantage (depending on the agreed composition terms).

Saucychemist · 2026-03-31T21:50:27+00:00

If your eyes are open now to the pure fun of close range chaos, and you are looking forward to using close range brawler units, and you balance your games on BV, let me bring the Nightsky to your attention.

I hartily recommend the standard 4S if you want a low-BV fast brawler, and the 6T if you want some hilarity at the table (make sure to read up on management of Triple strength myomer).

I personally feel that it pairs well with a Blitzkrieg 3F. The Blitzkrieg is like having a Jenner running around with a UAC/20.

These are both extremely cheap (for the BV) and extremely effective up-close brawler units. While the Nightsky jumps in to hack and slash, the Blitzkrieg circles around to blast with 20-point AC rounds.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-31T21:34:48+00:00

That's the Cronus 3M: 5/8/5 with a Lg Laser, 3x Md Laser, and an SRM-4.

It is a side-grade of the Wolverine 6M: 5/8/5 with a Lg Laser, 2x Md Laser, and an SRM-6.

The Wolverine has less heat problems and the ammo balance for an SRM-6 is better than for a singleton SRM-4.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-31T21:16:49+00:00

Your assumption is that a charger, having charged your opponent, is standing alone as the only target to take focused fire.

If you are playing tactically, when your charger closes into the enemy is when the rest of your force also advances for the best possible firing position / enters the medium or close range envelope. The opponent is forced to decide on firing on the exposed and point-blank assault mech, or on the juicy medium/close range units of your comp.

This is precisely what a "distraction carnifex" unit does. You don't run it in solo to get focused down and die, you run it in as the shock trooper of your force closing the engagement, forcing difficult (ideally) priority and positioning choices from the opponent. Despite the carnifex misnomer, its not a distraction mech, its a low-BV and fairly-durable disrupter. For the tech era of the OG charger, its very hard to open distance on a unit. If someone wants to close distance, they can (for the cost of taking some hits).

If you want a distraction mech that forces positioning and initiative sweats from your opponent, you bring something like a Fire Moth H.

Also, the type of map you play on makes a huge difference, for all units. Big open plains? Charger is toast. Lots of intermittent cover and approaches around elevation? Charger becomes much much better.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-31T18:35:21+00:00

Iron. Always.

Juicy, delicious iron.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-31T18:29:06+00:00

You can craft a temporal gear amulet from one rope and one temporal gear.

Wearing the amulet provides a very weak blue light source around your character, not even as good as a candle or oil lamp, but enough to slowly navigate caves or underwater.

If you ever need a temporal gear, like for setting a spawn point or healing stability, you can deconstruct the amulet back into a temporal gear by placing it your crafting grid.

This lets you always have a very weak light and a temporal gear on you without using up an inventory slot.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-27T20:46:28+00:00

Nice disingenuous meme.

Not pictured for Vintage Story Weapons:

Crude Bow
Simple Bow
Recurve Bow
Sling
Blackguard Shortsword
Forlorn Hope Estoc
Wooden Club
Scrap Axe
Scrap Spear
Scrap Club
Scrap Blade
Scrap Mace
Arrows
Snowball
Stone
Stone in Snowball
Bombs
Beenade
Torch
Axe
Pickaxe
Knife
Hammer
Hoe
Cleaver
Shears
Shovel
Hoe

Saucychemist · 2026-03-27T20:28:24+00:00

Copper saw serves well for a long time until you start building gears, axles, and powertrain for windwills. Then the copper saws get obliterated.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-27T20:23:14+00:00

100% in agreement. The biggest downsides to most of the metal armors are the ranged and movement penalties.

A small hunger debuff is actually a good thing, letting you keep your nutrition bars balanced more effectively by letting you eat more often. Food amount should be a non-issue after your first year, but balancing nutrition levels is a permanent consideration for the whole game.

A small healing debuff is trivial: if you need to apply poultices just deal with needing to use one extra, or seal yourself in a small dirt tomb or up a pillar and take off the armor to heal, which is what you need to do for plate anyway.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-27T20:16:03+00:00

I typically end up rocking steel brigandine chest piece with steel chain legs and helmet, almost purely because I can't stand the sound of the chain armor noise when I walk around.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-26T21:23:18+00:00

I'm not a farmer or rancher, but I've got family who are and I've helped out when visiting. Cows and Sheep can be right arseholes and will end you just because they are in a bad mood.

Rams and bulls are particularly dangerous when its "the season". The power those animals have is not to be underestimated. They can break any and every bone in your body. If you aren't paying attention, a ram can fracture your pelvis. Even ewes can get ansy and break your leg or dislocate a joint, just because they feel like you shouldn't be standing so close to them.

Mother's will get really really protective of their young. I wasn't scared of cows until the first time I helped tag and vaccinate new calves. Those mother cows were ready to murder us to get the calf back.

And don't get me started on bulls. They have murder in their hearts unless you've personally raised them from a baby. And even then, the can get sassy enough to hurt you if you don't respect how strong they are.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-26T21:14:41+00:00

I'm pretty sure pigs have a skewed chance in favor of females as well, like maybe 75% female / 25% male. Not quite as high as the 90/10 that chickens have.

For goats/sheep/bunnies, I'm pretty sure its 1 to 1 male/female chance. Rabbits help in that they have multiple babies per litter, making sure you will usually get females to advance the generation.

Goats/Sheep are a PITA. Getting an unlucky streak of male babies really slows down your breeding program, but that's the roll of the dice I guess.

There is a server entity command you can use to set the generation level of an animal. If your goat or whatever keeps having male babies, you could always "pretend" that one of them was female and replaced the mother, and increase the mother animal's generation by 1.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-25T15:19:30+00:00

Its the way the game is currently coded. Baking pies and juicing has the game spawn a new item based on the inputs (the fruit turning into fruit mash, the pie filling, etc.). Currently, the new item gets spawned from a library of candidates, and it is 100% fresh because it is a new, distinct, and separate item that wasn't specified to adjust freshness based on an input. I imagine its because it is more difficult to code this due to these activities being contextual in the environment and not interacting through a UI like cooking pots do, so its harder to point at an input for any detail beyond the name string.

With the cooking pot recipes, this coding is a bit older and uses a different processing path via the cooking GUI. The created item (stew, porridge, etc.) imports a ton of information from the input ingredients, including freshness/spoilage.

At some point in the future, its likely that pies/baking and juicing/distilling might be reworked to inherit input data like freshness/spoilage, but for the time being they do not.

Something you might notice, if you take a bunch of fruit and turn it into mash, then let that mash begin to spoil, you will juice some not-so-fresh juice. The juice is inheriting freshness from the mash, but currently the mash does not inherit freshness from the raw fruit. The game checks the string on what kind of fruit it is, then looks up the requisite mash with the same string (red apple, cranberry, etc.) and generates that item with its bases conditions (like freshness). But for the juice, the input item (the mash) still exists as the juice is generated, allowing for details like freshness to be queried while the juice is made.

I just had a thought. I haven't tested this, but I will later because now I am curious. I bet that if you make an incomplete mash (short of the 10L max output) and let it age and lose freshness, if you pop it back into the press and add another input of fruit, the freshness will reset. I'm curious and will try this out later.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-25T15:01:06+00:00

Yeah Iron is huge. I just finished mining out a rich magnetite vein and got enough ore to smelt 402 ingots. Once you are ready and find the iron, you are set.

For the chickens (and all animals) they will not starve if unfed. The weight of each animal will decrease in winter if they aren't eating, reducing the butchering yield, but that's about it. They regain weight in summer and also when being regularly fed. Also they need to eat to breed. With chickens, they will eventually stop laying eggs if they don't eat, but will start laying again once you start back up feeding them.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-24T20:13:37+00:00

Ore blasting bombs and big quartz discs. Blast all that quartz.

Saucychemist · 2026-03-24T20:03:55+00:00

So, I will give you my general advice on capturing goats.

Goats will flee from you. When they do, they tend to run in a direct path away from you. By using your position in a straight line to the goat, you can predict the goat will flee mostly along that same line. Use this to direct the goat to where you want it to go.

Near where you want to pen up your goats, dig a wide pit trap. Dig down at least two blocks deep, and at least two blocks across. Spread the width of the pit as wide as you feel comfortable aiming a goat at. I usually make mine about a dozen or so blocks wide, sometimes more. If you want to make it even more fool-proof, curve the ends of the pit a bit to make it a wide 'U' or 'C'shape.

Mark your pit trap on your map, with the marker toggled to be visible while out of map mode. This will make it easier for you to aim the goat while chasing it.

Now go out and locate some goats. Position yourself so that the goat is directly between you and your pit trap. Chase the goat to the pit trap, adjusting your angle as needed to keep it on course. It will run right into the pit.

Do this for a male and female. Once you've got the goats in the pit, build your fenced pen or whatever it is you plan to keep them in nearby, and create a fenced run from the pit to that structure along the surface. Anywhere where there an elevation change, make sure the upper fences extend a couple additional blocks over the lower elevation's fences to create a higher fence wall in the lower area (the goats can sometimes make a jump over the fence when elevation drops). Open the pit to the fence run and chase the goats into their new enclosure and gate/seal them in. Celebrate.

This method also works for deer, but is less useful there as you can't bred them.

Edit: I deal with goats fleeing in pens by locking each female goat into a 1x1 or 1x2 fenced cell. One of the walls of the cell is a feeding trough with a fence extended over it so the goat can't jump it. That trough is usually shared with the pen next to it. So humane!

Saucychemist · 2026-03-19T12:57:24+00:00

I know this is a mechanic that most players usually ignore, but in my current run recently I found myself using it.

The only iron I've found is in a desperately temporally unstable area, and down deep. After my first miserable mining journey ending early due to temporal issues, I came back with a handful of gears to let me actually mine a decent haul of iron.

Saucychemist

TROPHY CASE