vforventura

Yeah, the polearms (lances, spears, pitchfork, etc) feel a bit... wonky in third person view. They may or may not have longer reach (haven't tested), but they feel harder to aim so I tend not to use 'em. In first person view, however, all weapons are pretty decent to hit with, so if you spend most of your combat time in first person the longer ones might be worth it. Regarding arcs, I'm not sure if there's any difference either. In third person mode they all seem to auto-target sort of randomly (breaking all sorts of random crap instead of hitting the huge freaking bear eating your face, for example) and I haven't noticed much of a difference between, say, the iron-level swords, axes and war hammers. Those are the only weapons I've wielded for any significant time in regular survival mode, before and after my testing, so I can't really say much about the others.

Nice format, this agrees pretty well with my own findings that I had posted on the Update Survival Tips for New Ylanders topic. I also put some conclusions there for melee weapons. I used a cage too to avoid the problem of animals running all over the place when shot. I couldn't figure out a proper way to accurately measure weapon speed for melee weapons but my gut feeling is that in the current version all melee weapons are equal in actual damage speed. Even tho the third person animation of some weapons (like the saber) seems to be faster, the actual 'hit spark' on enemies (that are the actual indication of when the damage happens) seemed to happen at the same interval for all weapons independently of the third person swing animation. I suppose one way to verify this would be to turn off creative mode, get in the cage with the target, and then see how many times the player gets hit before the enemy dies, but I haven't tested it yet. The damage difference is only noticeable between, say, a third tier (saber) and first tier (war hammer) weapon on enemies with more health. Most low health aggressive animals (like wolves and pumas) take 2 hits to kill with either weapon, but the difference is clear on tankier enemies like mutated bear alphas.

What @Velocifersaid is accurate, if a bit colorful. XOR, shortened from "eXclusive OR" gates are logic circuits that return a true / positive / on-state (1) signal from its output if only one (but not both) of its inputs are receiving a 1 signal, and return a false / negative / off-state (0) signal otherwise. OR, also sometimes called "inclusive OR" gates are logic circuits that return a 1 signal from its output if either, or both, of its inputs receive a 1 signal. AND gates only return a 1 signal from the output if both inputs receive a 1 signal. Splitters have two (or more, but in game currently only two) outputs and one input, with each output returning the same signal as is being received on its input. Randomizers receive an input and route it randomly to one of its outputs. For more in-depth information on logic gates, try this link. In the context of the game, 1 means energy is being emitted / received at a given input or output, and 0 means its not being received / emitted. It may help picturing each input and output as a simple light switch. A '1' means that that particular light switch is on, and so electricity (or energy) is flowing thru that point. a '0' means that the light switch is off, and thus the electricity is being interrupted at that point.

Personally I'd fire vehicle-mounted cannons at it until it was destroyed Shouldn't take too long.

I really hope I can find one of those seemingly infinite supplies of ylandium dust in my own games. I've found some very large caves with only one or two ylandium crystals (and maybe 50-80 dust from killing muties) and other caves with 50+ ylandium crystals and comparatively few muties, as well as plenty of disappointing caves with just 4-5 muties and no crystals, but so far I have yet to find one of those infinite springs of ylandium dust that you guys are describing

I don't think they actually do. If there's any difference in hit speed, its small enough that I personally can't notice it during testing. Not for melee weapons, at any rate. Short of having someone really quick with a stopwatch, or someone reverse-engineering the game files to check this, from my personal experience the war hammer is the weapon of choice if you want to take an enemy out in melee range while taking as few hits as possible yourself. It bears mentioning that polearms (lances, spears, pitchforks) tend to be kinda weird to aim in third person view, that is definitely a factor, and both firing and reloading speed is a major factor in the case of ranged weaponry, making the repeating rifle and pump action shotgun in my opinion better (but with more expensive ammo) than a crossbow. Another important factor in trying to snipe enemies, is that independently of you hitting the mob or not, every shot, even from a silent weapon, will spook the target and send it running in some random direction, which can get really annoying very quickly and make you waste a lot of shots before you actually get enough hits to bring the target down unless its under very specific conditions. There seems to be, however, a damage multiplier applied if you can snipe a sleeping animal (lets call it a 'guaranteed critical hit') which allows you to sometimes one-shot low health non-mutants that might take more than one hit to kill if they were awake. Since player proximity wakes animals up, I haven't found a reliable way to test if this is also the case for melee weapons, as animals wake up before you get close enough to hit 'em. At any rate, there's no need to take my word for it, anyone can fire up a quick creative mode game and make a quick cage to test this stuff out for themselves and find their own preferred weapons, and I would encourage everyone to do their own testing if trying to choose their preferred weapon for exploration mode games Quick edit: The saber (at least to my eyes) APPEARS to be faster in its third person view swing animation, but the actual frequency of 'oomp' hit sounds appears to be the same for all melee weapons. Its easier to notice this if you go into first person mode, as in that case there's no actual swing animation for you to see, and you only notice the little flash and oomp sound of the hit on your target. I emphasize the 'appears' because I haven't done any conclusively scientific testing to confirm or deny my impressions.

There's already a crowbar in the game, by the way. Sadly I don't think its currently being used for that. Apparently, in the next few updates we'll get a barrier system that will act as a sort of land claim, where the owner can break hardened blocks quickly (or pick 'em back up, I suppose) while keeping it harder to break by other people (for multiplayer situations). From what I've read elsewhere on this forum, the devs' intent is to keep the system relatively realistic (its a lot of trouble to demolish a house completely, and the faster you do it, the less useful stuff you can salvage from it) which is a fair enough design decision, and helps differentiate this game from other crafty-buildy-survivalish-sandboxy games in the market. I'm all for that, actually. But I think a compromise is possible. Perhaps its a bit more complex, but a potentially interesting way to get around the difficulty of building things (but not breaking them apart) could be something along the lines of using the editor (or creative mode) to save blueprints of structures, houses, or whatever else you want to make in a survival or multiplayer game, that you could then place as a single unit in the game and then fill with the building materials that it needs, like you would fuel a furnace for example, until the structure is fully built. That way remodeling a house would still take work, but it would eliminate the problem of things hardening WHILE you are building, so it would take a lot less time (and trial-and-error) to get things just right. Depending on how this is handled you could even possibly upload the blueprints of your creations to the steam workshop (or a dropbox or something) and share it with other players if you wanted. If I recall, Space Engineers had something along those lines, and I think its a very cool system that would work well for Ylands. The creation of a blueprint could even take some pencil and paper and such, keeping with the realistic approach.

The wiki is out of date, some of the weapons you find there were either removed or turned into merely cosmetic skins. The ones that were turned into skins can be found in the coyn store, usually for free. To apply a skin you click on the item in your inventory and in the window that pops up (the one with the option to break the item and whatnot), if its an item that can take different skins, you'll find a button for that.

Right, but that's not really my main point. The sabre, and other third tier weapons, do less damage across the board, to any animal (and objects) than second tier weapons, and those do less damage than the two first tier ones (iron lance and war hammer). To clarify: I don't believe that it is because bears are more resistant to sabers or anything of the sort, but rather that things like regular wolves (2 hits to kill from any weapon between third tier and first tier) don't have enough hit points for you to notice the difference. In fact, mutated alpha bears take A LOT of crossbow, bow and gun shots to kill. Of those, iron crossbows do surprisingly well (18 shots with a wooden crossbow vs. 12 with an iron one, pistol or regular makes no difference in damage). Bolt action rifles need only 8 shots, and repeating rifles 15, but you can fire repeating rifles a lot faster, so both of those are better than crossbows but require a lot more technology progression and arguably have more expensive ammo. Flintlock rifles are both slow and low damage, at also 15 shots to kill. Double-barrel shotgun takes 9 shots, pump action only 8 and fires faster. A double-barrel revolver uses 12 shots (24 ammo), while a regular revolver also uses 12 shots but only 12 ammo. An iron bow takes 14 shots. I think the devs still have to do some weapon balancing there, judging from those numbers - the double barrel guns in particular seem way off in the damage chart. Edit: If one is using a saber for thematic or aesthetic concerns, that's fine, but its not very attractive in terms of efficiency. Only two extra iron for the best damage melee weapon in the game leaves very little reason, other than looks, to choose a saber.

Also, Updated Survival Tips for New Ylanders

Yeah, I've reported some of his many, many, many posts. I think its a more productive approach than spamming the forum with new topics complaining about him, as someone else did a few minutes ago

I envy you. Do you think this is possible in the current release? I foresee ylandium dust running out very soon in my current game because I think I've cleared most, if not all, the mutants in caves and they don't seem to be respawning at all, even in the last few caves where I made sure to leave some alive in case that's how they 'repopulate' (I've read somewhere that you can hunt things to extinction on islands if you don't leave some animals of each species alive).

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet, so I think its fair to have it as a reply here: while sabers look cool, they're actually relatively bad at damage. After some extensive testing by spawning mutated bear alphas (I think its the highest HP mob currently in game, please correct me if I'm wrong) in creative and testing each possible weapon, the ones that take less hits to kill 'em are the war hammer and the lance (if you prefer polearms). With seven strikes, they use one less strike to kill a mutated bear compared with the several weapons in the second tier. Second tier notable mentions are the iron mace and iron spear. Finally, on the third tier you have a large number of weapons, this is where the saber and war axe fall in. Those require 10 hits total to kill a mutated bear alpha. The pitchfork might be the actual single entry in the third tier (9 hits) but since it is the only weapon, to my recollection, that took 9 hits to kill a mutated bear alpha, I've lumped it together with the 10 hit ones as being the third tier Since the difference in resources to craft a saber vs. a war hammer is minimal (2 extra iron ingots) and easily achievable early game, I see little reason to use anything else. Just gotta keep in mind that it counts for everything that requires a hammer to craft, so make sure to not make your only weapon into a repair kit by accident.

You can also find it on caves sometimes, if you don't want to deface your beaches, usually as patches on the walls / floor, sometimes under (or around) patches of Sulfur and such. What I usually do, tho, is to locate a beach area, then dig a small spade-size square straight down further inland, where its dirt instead of sand, and then quarry it up from a tunnel going towards the ocean, under the water level, being very careful not to pierce the ocean floor which would probably flood the tunnel. Then when you're done its easy enough to cover up the starting hole manually with dirt. It takes some good eyeballing to avoid defacing the visible surface of the beaches. That's only a concern if you want to have pretty beaches tho

The simplest way would be for him to suicide to something while naked. Every time you die, you have the option of creating a new character, changing appearance and name each time if desired.