ok I've been playing for about 5 years and have many ideas

first , the one most important tool that is needed and can not be made is a knife
man has been making stone tools for a hundred thousand years
why cant i apply a rock to a stone and have a crude knife. this makes sense to me
and any way the tools have no meaning
a fishers knife should allow me to cook fish with a positive value making the fishers knife.. have value
a hunting knife should get a positive value when skining and so on

the next is .. sorry to say sami but there is to much of everything!
i played the newest version for one game day and had over 2000 lbs of meat and 4 reindeer hides enough to live for 6 or 7 years,,, why cant i choose to play in a less 'full' world
you have to make items more rare making them have some value

after completing the game course maybe the game could get somehow tougher allowing the player to play in a easy world untill he completes the course

and instead of dying why cant i age and lose skill points (the older you get the less strong, agill ,eyesight you have )

also , with all the hides and equipment in the game after you build a house there really is nothing to do (in an older version in 2 seasons i had 24 bear skins 40 lynx skins 17 reindeer skins with nothing to do with them) .... why cant i buy or trade for skill points or new recipes or new clothes making skills or whatever.... make it somthing ....anything...
you can make it cultural so the drik teach one thing and the owl teach somthing else ... and so on

This is a RPG and any RPGer knows that stats and skills is why you play the game, trying to make the best character
why cant i use my excess skins to get a "quest" from the village wise man or buy skill points from a craftsman
And wht is the cure skin anyway it does nothing
unless you made it so i cure a skin then bring it a craftsman (because i have low hideworking skill) and for half the fur you get a supurb skin

I know this all is a coding nightmare but .... i have alot more ideas as well

For sami -you should check out an old game like Darklands or nethack you may get some ideas

- "You have gotten lost" random encounter has been removed.


Why, Sami? ;-)

Don't remove it at all, just make the possibility to happen only when the character takes damage to the head and loses consciousness.
It will be looking like a real amnesia after concussion of the brain.

And it will be great to add another real effect - of an over-thirst - not only as it is now - the plain death of dehydration, but before it a day or two of delirium with a strange uncontrollable moves, hallucinations and few-minutes-on/few-minutes-off losing consciousness during the crawling.

I know it's just a sadistic idea but very effective looking... ;-)

unless the "lost" event also incurs a complete erasing of log, then it shouldn't be in.
Any reasonable traveler would keep a map of some sorts, and in this case, the log is the only real written object that's in-game.

If you'd really want amnesia to be semi-common, then fine.. otherwise, it's far more annoying than realistic.
Remember, Fun != Realistic.

If a "lost" thing was desired, it shouldn't just erase your map, and it shouldn't be permanent.

If you're supposed to be disoriented, flip the map around in a random direction so that north is no longer north, and make the map blank. This should all go away as soon as you're at a familiar landmark: A village, a large lake that you've already mapped out, etc.

This is the only way I can see a "Lost" feature being viable, and not just ridiculous like the old one was. I mean how can you live somewhere for a year, make the trip between the local villages and home a hundred times, and then walk 10 steps into the woods and suddenly forget everything and not even know where home is. And then have to remap all the villages, because even though you found home you magically forgot all the village locations.

Good idea for a way to salvage the event without incurring all the annoyances that came with it!



P.S. Sami (or another mod if one exists) could you spell the thread topic correctly, and/or merge/move this into the other suggestions thread.

Alright, let's see...

Yes, it seems to be true that the hunting for experienced players is too easy. And this very much because there are too numerous animals to hunt. I think that maybe as soon as in the next version, you don't find too much elks for example at one area. If you clear the area of elks, you'll need to go hunting them somewhere else.

But then again, for the players who haven't been playing the game very long - it might be a task of weeks, even months, to find that one elk and bring it down. In the case of UrW it really is that you experience as a player has effect on your character's experience.

To make items have their special useability is indeed in my mind. The same thing that is now applied for axes, will be applied for knives also. But then again of course, you should be able to skin your elk even with a crude knife also. And to fell a tree with your stone-axe only.

The idea of character slowly learning to make different kind of buildings, recipes and stuff is reasonable. But I bet there are some differences in players' opinions about what the character should know at a certain level of a skill.

Hey... this could be a time of community to think out loud:

How would you feel about character with a low hideworking skill first to be able to make only make cloaks and caps and mittens for example? And slowly learning to make shirts and trousers?

And being able to first build only shelters, and then more complex buildings...

Javelins and clubs, and then bows and arrows...

Roasting and salting meat and fish, and smoking them when more experienced...

Features like these are actually quite easy to implement - but the reactions from the community should be listened first, I think.

I love the idea of different skill levels allowing the making of items of various complexity.... BUT:

The player skill progression is still a bit unbalanced. Some skills progress insanely fast, while others take literally years to improve from bad to decent. Skills that are not used often should be a little quicker to improve than they are now. Also if you are to implement skill-limited item construction, I suggest you allow skills with a low percentage to improve a lot faster than skills with a high percentage. Skill level increase from 90 to 91 should take exponentially more work than 10 to 11. Naturally, skills that affect crafting abilities should also be improved by making items with various results: building a section of a cottage (5-8 hours) should increase timbercraft skill a lot more than making simple wooden stakes for 8 hours straight.

A question, what is the way you catch the animals the meat is from?
You did bump into a flock of reindeers?

Just because you see a herd of animals doesn't necessarily mean you should slaughter all of them. When I see a herd of animals, I just take one down if I need the food. Why would you need 2000lbs of meat?

In real life someone could come across a herd of reindeer or go out and hunt until you find way more animals than you need, and if they just slaughtered all of them they would have tons of meat. But what would they do with it? I have personally witnessed nuts going out and killing hundreds of animals like squirrels and it all just going to waste, it really is a shameful thing. Even in a game, you don't have to kill everything you see. It will just rot away in-game the same as it would in real life.

In one of my games, my character survived all winter by downing one elk and drying the meat.

Sami, perhaps you should implement the ability to overhunt areas? Make it so that if the player just runs around slaughtering everything he sees, he will start to see a lot less in that region. I'm not sure if it does anything like this now or not, but maybe a way to save the animals that you saw but didn't kill and put them right back into the environment. Like if you come across a bunch of herds of reindeer and only kill one animal, the herds will eventually disappear from the zoom-in map and still be roaming the zoom-out map and growing for later hunting? Or if you find a bunch of foxes in the summer, you can leave them be till winter and then hunt some for the furs. Like some kind of behind the scenes tally of different animals in a region, spawning in new ones only if they can 'migrate' from adjacent areas or are 'born' from the current supply of them.

in answer to your question.. i could see 3 flocks in the big map so i just zoomed in killed one or two zoomed out went to the next herd .... you get the picture
and i used just a club to kill them and never got hurt wearing just 3 pieces of
leather clothes

i was only 1 day old and needed clothes
i always play the runaway slave option to make the game at least a little challenging that way i dont start out with much and am forced to take advantage of everything i find, also i never wear iron armours

if it wasnt for clothes and equipment you really dont need to hunt at all!
just get a cow and your set or fish......
Sami now that i think of it cows need to be much , much more valuble
fishing nets too


i like the overhunting idea

thats why i think you should be able to buy skill points (differnt one from different cultures)
make them incredibly exspensive- 20 bear pelts 40 lynxs 60 foxs or whatever

Hmm, skills to dictate what items you can make?

As long as I can still make the BASICS I need to survive at first, I don't think it should be a problem.

Belts, cloaks, shirts, pants, hats... some order like that. :)

Yes, the players of the UnReal World seems to lead a different kind of game-styles. In my opinion too, whether in a real life or in the UnReal World, I find it pretty much not-satistying to kill everything at your sight.

However, in "rhodesia"'s scenario, three flocks of reindeer appearing this close to each others of is a bit of an statistical overkill to what it should be. Good luck. Or bad luck for a hunter who hunts only because it's possible.

And indeed in the UnReal World if you just want to stay alive - you mostly need only one fishy lake and your fishing rod. But that's not the excitement of the game - as we all know.

It's only good that the players can lead different kind of lifestyles in the game, and I don't like to draw in too tight lines of "how to play", but this leads in a situation where some people ask for villagers to fight back more aggressively since it's too easy to just slaughter a village after a village. Whereas some people ask for elks to appear more often.

Mm... there are numerous options to offer possibilities for different kind of players. One is to have the overkill effect. The number of animals appearing at a certain region. Then there's an option to have supernatural guardians of the forest to act more when someone is merely robbing the world just for a joy (or possibility) of robbing it.
And then there's option to make hunting harder. And at this point I can hear fresh unreal worlders to cry out loud "Noooooo! I've been roaming across the land for three weeks, and almost managed to bring down a hare! Don't make it harder!"

But it really shouldn't be possible to slaughter a flock of reindeers with a single club...

A story comes up: (since my real life experiences indeed do sometimes add something to the game also)

Some eight years back we were hiking up north, in lapland with a bunch of friends.
We had just come back from Norway, hiking, and haven't slept pretty much the night before. We were heading to the cottage that was said to be some 10 kilometers away. The path wasn't very clearly marked, and we were exhausted. It was july and it was snowing. Along the way a flock of reindeers, some 20 - 30, came across our way. If I was an UnReal World character at that time and have had a good bow in my hand I very well might have try to shot one down. And if succeeded, been happy with that. If we would have butchered all of them, we could have had a big meat festival right there - it could have lasted for seven months maybe. Instead we kept on walking and never find the cottage. We tried to make a fire, but because of the wind and the snowing and because only rocks were growing there, it didn't succeed. We decided to walk that 10 kilometers back and were really glad to sleep one night in a car.

And I like to tell this story better than to have eaten meat for seven months.

...but okay, I'll be thinking about how to make the game harder. That sounds frightening, don't you think ;)

I knew this was coming :)

The basics is different for everyone - I'm afraid.

Is a cottage basic? :)
Or a bow?
Or a punt?

One option would be to add in teachers... a skill craftsmen, from whom you learn different kind of traps, and you could "buy" teaching with the "basics" every freeman knows - meat, fish and hides.
And depending on the culture, the basic things you know would be different.
But defining the list of basics... umm.... there are A LOT of different opinions I'm sure.
Making a stone-axe, as basic it may sound, isn't really that simple. Starting from knowing the right type of rock to start with.
And talking about skis. And bows, and arrows - of which I have a lot of experience.
Even the firemaking isn't that basic :)

Glad to be of service. :D

I think one reason its so easy to take down herds of reindeer is after you kill one the rest seem to kind of freeze up sometimes. I've shot one reindeer down and had to chase it, and then skin it and while I skin it every other reindeer just stands in place. If I wanted to I could go around and club them all. This seems to happen in groups of animals, and allows a player to kill the entire group when normally chasing down 1 or 2 would be hard, let alone the entire herd. Not really sure what causes it, though...

I think it's fine the way it is. There is such a thing as making things TOO complex. :P

Indeed... I once spent a couple of days together with some friends trying to make fire with no success... It didn't even work with a drill and that was with a dry wood. Later on I heard about the reasons we failed, but still haven't tried if it works.

So, out in the woods, making a fire isn't as easy as it may sound. I'm sure everyone has heard the basics of making fire, but that is far from enough. If you don't know what kind of wood you need and how you need to work with them, you might spend weeks trying to get a single fire.


Of course taking into account we are talking about an adult living in the UnReal World. So, it is safe to assume that certain skills are known. Making a fire is one no matter the culture. But as for other skills, it should vary a lot based on the culture.

As for suggestions, there should be various people in more or less all villages that should be able to teach some more advanced things. Perhaps some of those randomly roaming people?

In addition to just being able to learn how to make say, a stone axe, learning skill should be also possible. Of course there are limits to what can be learned without enough practice. So, a person with low fishing skill could learn some tricks from a fisherman but after that there would be need for some practicing before some more teaching could be bought.

Woohoo, I finally find a post I can respond too. :P Okay, first the response to the hunting, or should I say overhunting. I don't know about you other guys, but when I jump a herd of reindeer I am for sure going to have three or four of them attacking me all at once, I have to pick a straggler and run him off in a direction away from the herd or I'm dead meat or at the least 30-50% injured. This has happened to me several times already and I have learned from my mistakes, never jump in the middle of a bunch of wild animals ;) Once I saw a beaver on the zoom-out map and went for it expecting a single critter. When I zoomed in I was in the middle of about 15 or so. Although not as aggressive as the reindeer several of the little buggers did start attacking me. Being surrounded I had no choice but to start spearing everything at my feet in all directions. I killed 5 or so and the rest scattered. After the "battle" I was at 20% injured and too tired to move. As for making it more easy, I truly think it has more to do with luck. Like Samii says, you can go weeks without finding a single critter to in the span of just three days running into entire herds of several different types of critters. So making it less easy isn't the issue. Sometimes we luck up and find rich hunting grounds, which we should perserve for future hunts and not just slaughter the animals because we can. After all, knowing where to go is half the battle and insures survival in the long run. When I end up with the excess meat of a hunt that I know will spoil before I can eat it, I simply roast it and take it to the nearest town and trade it off for goods that won't spoil and I can use later for trade. Necklaces, bracelets, anklets, whatever is light enough to carry back home. I first learned this trick when I wanted leather and I bought a cow to slaughter. I got my leather, but then had this massive amount of meat I knew for a fact would spoil before I could do anything with it. So I drug a couple of tree trunks over, made a fire and had a half a day cow roast. I was still in town, so when I loaded up to the max weight I could carry I would just run over to a merchant and trade for anything he had I could use or keep for future trades. Since I needed two cows to have all the leather required, I ended up pretty much owning everything in town.
Now to the crafting question. I agree things need to be learned, not just known right off the bat. Trainers in town who require a task to be done or a fee to be paid before they pass on their secrets is the best idea. I also feel this way about the rituals as well, I don't feel it's right to wake up in the middle of the night and have magicly learned a new one. A trip to a town shaman and a task done or a fee paid to learn a new one, one that you can pick as well. I know Samii has some sort of task system in place already because with my first encounter with a town shaman he requested food before he would heal me, and after I brought him the amount he wanted (took several trips too) he finally said, okay, I'll do it. I also feel that not all skills can be learned from a single trainer/shaman. Want a fishing ritual? Find a fishing village/town who has a shaman that is willing to teach, etc. So the big problem would be for Samii deciding which basic crafting items to start you out with. Keeping survival in mind and game play as well. Should it be like most crafting systems in place, start you off with the small stuff and let you work up to the larger ones? To be honest, it is much more simple to make a cloak than a pair of mittens, or a club compared to an arrow. To the percentage question, I also feel the lower percentages need to climb faster then start to slow down considerably after say 60-70%. Lets face it, after felling twenty trees with a skill of say 11%, it doesn't go up but one point to 12%. In real life after the first 5 you are going to learn a few tricks to make it a bit more easy on yourself. Now, lets say you got a skill of 86% in timber working. You are pretty much a master already, and twenty trees is nothing, but after another hundred or more you might learn something new. After my first winter my timberworking hit 100% and I started the char with a skill of like 38%. It seemed to me, I may be wrong, that the higher my skill got, the faster it went. It should be oppisite, the higher it gets, the slower it goes. Another option would be to have trainers for these skills as well. Say you have a skill of 69% in something but you cannot progress to 70% till you find someone who can teach you the new trick needed. You are fine until you hit 79%, then again you must find a trainer to teach you 80%, and so on. These trainers should only be able to teach a small range of increases, say 70-80% for one then you have to find a new trainer to teach you 90-100%. I think it would make the players have to explore more and increase game play as well. Wow, this is getting long, I'll stop for right now and see what kind of response I get :P

Thing thing with the skills is, you only get "points" towards a skill increase on a successful attempt, which is why skills get better faster as you go up.

I believe Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion have it set so you require more "Points" to go up one percent on a skill.

Something to consider.

No, the current system in UrW causes skill increase to get slower when the skill is already high. It might be that overall skill increase is too fast, which leads into a delusion that there's no such limit. It works like, when you have achieved "a skill improvement roll" it will be rolled against your current skill level, and if the roll (random(100)) is higher than your current skill, the skill is improved.
With a 5-15% skill mastery the roll pretty often succeeds, with 90% skill mastery - not that often.
But I'll be anyhow tuning up the skill improvement system now. It's also worthwhile to add a system that prevents skills from increasing more than a certain amount a month/week/day no matter how hard you use it. This way becoming an "overnight champion" wouldn't be possible anymore.
I'm also adding a system where for example felling small trees does rarely improve your timbercraft skill, felling big trees it's more possible and when building houses even more possible. And cutting firewood being less challening and educational timbercraft job than making boards, roasting meat being less challenging than smoking meat, making cloak is being challenging than making a shirt and so on...
It will turn out to be good I tell you!

I didnt think i would cause this much discussion ... BUT..
i agree you should always start with basic skills dont change any thing there...but advanced skills/stats and items....
it seems weird to me that i cant make gloves or a face mask and always freeze face and hands in winter
and what happened to tea or berry soup theses recipies could be available thru
higher learning and should do somthing like cure a cold or sickness (vitamin C) or decrease healing time

That might be it, then. What causes a skill improvement roll, if you don't mind my asking?

I think the genereal consensus among us mere mortals in the UrW :D is that it's cause by getting an "excellent" (really high) result on a skill roll that triggers an improvement roll.

I've been playing this game for.... seven, eight years now? I trust your judgement. :)

You are correct. A good success, especially in difficult condition, causes you to "learn something". With a very low skill also not that great success - as long as it's success - will cause improvement possibility.

After giving this some further thought, I think you really should be able to create any and all items with any skill level. Only the outcome of the job should be skill-dependent. I know for a fact that given enough time, raw materials and desperation (freezing my butt off), I can create a crude fur shirt even if I've never done anything like that before.

A simple solution would be to re-introduce attributes "awful", "poor", "good" etc for all crafted items, but I suggest a better alternative that suits all crafted items: Firstly, crafting something with a low skill percentage should naturally take a lot more time than with a higher skill. More importantly there should be the possibility to fail in crafting the item altogether, and maybe waste a portion of the materials when failing. It would have the benefits of both worlds: realism and fun factor. No hard-coded limits for what you can and cannot do. It's not what the game is about at all.

Jussi, if you're freezing your butt off, maybe you should make some pants first. :lol:

Actually though, I kinda like that idea. The fact that you can use multiple smaller pieces of hide to make a large item of clothing makes this a lot more of a possibility, as far as gameplay is concerned.

"You fail to make a fur hood and ruin some of the hide in the process."

Good point.

Jussi's idea +1

A badly made cloak might use extra materials, give less protection and/or wear off faster. Thus it would be possible to make something resembling a cloak with a low skill.

However, after you have made one, or more, of badly made cloaks, you would have better knowledge of making a cloak and as such you should be able to succeed better in making another cloak. Even though you have never made a good cloak. Thus at low skill levels even failing should improve the skill. People do learn from mistakes.

I'm also suggesting for multiple crafting skill levels. One for working with fur, one for working with leather (includes making leather ropes and such) and individual ones for each types of clothes.

Say, one has 70% skill with fur, but only 10% skill with leather. He has been making some shirts, so his shirt making skill is 50%. Now, if he makes a fur shirt, the effective skill is at 60%, but for a leather shirt it would only be 30%. But, as he has been making clothes a lot, the skill with leather would improve very fast.

To account for the skill improvement speed, I'm suggesting an overall crafting skill for each type of crafting. So, one would be for crafting clothes and alike. Say, the average of skills of working with fur, working with leather and single highest skill of making items of the type. This skill level would account for the increase of the skill level while the individual skills would account for the quality of the item.

And I think this should even go to very extreme. Say, a master shirt maker who has 90% skill with fur, 87% skill with leather and 93% skill with shirts. This would give 90% overall skill for making clothes. Now, say he is going to make a fur cloak but only has 10% skill with cloaks. As he is very used to making clothes, he should be able to make good cloaks only after a few failures. He only has 50% skill for fur cloak, but the increase in cloak skill should be big. Something like to 20% the first time and then 28%, 35%, 40%, 44%, 47%, 49%, 51%, 52%, 54%, 55%, ...

Of course this is extreme case, but even a normal not so skilled character should improve to being able to make average quality clothing quite fast. Fur and leather are hard to come by, unless you slaughter a forest full of animals and end up with 5000 lbs of spoiled meat.

Well before I quit that long post ;) that was going to be my next suggestion. The ability to make all items, only the quality would suffer, ie. worthless to merchants. The items would work in every way, just trade value would be near nil. Of course the higher the quality the more it would be worth. Also the item could come out "damaged" on a failure, otherwise a 12lb cloak could come out as 10lbs because of your clumsy attemps to construct it. I also like this idea myself because I find I can spend a week making javelins (around 70 or so) then go on a shopping spree that any modern girl would envy. Of course the way it works now I believe that timberworking is attached to wood weapon (wood items in general) making. Might be a coding nightmare, but I would like to see each class of items that can be made have their own skill points. Otherwise weapons making skill, wood item making skill, clothes making skill, etc. Later on this could be refined to: Stone Weapon/Tool Making Skill, Wood Weapon/Tool Making Skill, Fur Clothes Making Skill, Leather Clothes Making Skill, etc. This would be much eaiser to do than the trainer set up, while also allowing a char to survive winter even though he/she has no clue on what he/she is doing, they just wouldn't be pretty or worth much. My 2cents :)

I don't believe that leather and fur should be different categories when it comes to skills.
This would needlessly complicate the game and require twice as much fur/leather, causing even more over-hunting than the game already requires.
If you need good reasoning for this, then consider the fact that all fur is leather with thick hair. The differences in using the two should be minimal


A sub-skill for each type of item, that improves something like 10x faster than the base skill would be acceptable, as 100% in all sub skills should end up being reached around the same time the base skill reaches 100%, thus preventing a need for substantially more fur/leather.

As much as it would be fun with skill levels affecting what you can make and what not, when it comes to making clothes, I really just (okay, I want that too, but primarily...) want to be able to make more things. Leather gloves, sandals, birch shoes, coats. Not to mention female clothing, both for female characters and for gifts.

If you introduce linen and wool cloth there would be lots of other things you could sew. A brief note on wool, though. I don't know how the Finnish people collected the wool, but I do know that the Vikings didn't use shears - they collected the wool on the ground that the sheep shed.

There's another item that would be cool to have, but I've always assumed it's there pretty much indirectly: a backpack. You have to carry everything somewhere, right? If you did make a backpack, or other container, you could limit the inventory while you weren't wearing one. It could probably get messy rather easily if you would need to put things in and take things out of the pack, though.

I don't really think having to carry around a backpack would add more fun to the game; you'd probably just end up with a similar play experience but with more keystrokes to enter, which is something that I feel should be avoided.

Sure, as things are.

I've been thinking though for a while of making my own game; and the interface would be more of a point-and-click interface like Ultima. In that case you would have a display of items equipped to different slots on the body, each slot having different space and weight allowances. Then, if you get injuries on that body part you have to put less weight on it or the condition gets worse, and if its really disabled you can't carry anything.

Granted it may sound complicated, but if done the right way I don't think it would be.

That's pretty much what I said. There also wouldn't be any more keystrokes did it the way I wrote it. The only difference would be that you couldn't carry a huge amount of items without a pack, so there would be no extra commands to add.

Perhaps the only thing would be that if you dropped your pack while lugging around a lot of items, either encumbrance would go to max, or you'd drop the excess stuff. It could also lower your encumbrance per weight while wearing it (which might need a rebalance otherwise).

But as I said, I've always imagined the character having a pack for all items already, so there wouldn't really be much of a difference for me.

Yes, the skill progression should be made to fit the categories. So, you could get both fur and leather skills to 100% in the time it would take to get combined skill to 100%. As for small differences, that is why there is the average of both skills and highest subtype skill taken as the speed of advancing due to familiarity with the similar stuff.

Btw, on the skills thing.

On thinking about this for my own RPG, the basic idea I came up with was that a lot of crafting depends on pre-existing skills. So to make a proper chain hauberk you need to know how to do a lot of things, including making chains and linking them, sewing and leathermaking (they would generally be padded inside). Besides items that require being made in processes (like armor) you can have skills that depend on other skills. Trying to make something complex will first check your primary skill and if you fail on that check you won't be able to proceed with your secondary skill.

The second part of that was something like teachers, but more that you would apprentice yourself on a certain skill, requiring everything up to giving up some of your profit as you work for the master. Once you are at a level when you produce a masterpiece , you've completed that basic skill and then people will offer to teach you more advanced skills that depend on it.

So no numerical skill level--just advanced skills rely on more basic skills; and if you try an advanced skill without mastering a basic skill, you're setting yourself up for failure.

And of course, you can make some items requiring higher proficiency in one skill than other items, so some items are easier to fail making. (trousers having a higher fail rate than caps)

Btw Sami,

I think it would be an interesting part of the game if you could dig up clay and fire it to make pots, and also ornament clothing with a sewing skill