murlocdummy has written
After playing around for a bit, I've realized that the game needs a proper manual/player's guide in order to be fully appreciated. Going through 80+ pages of forum, using Ctrl+F is not the best method to find out how to make "gunpowder" or "poison machete"
Part of the goal is to have that be explained through the game. I haven't yet decided on a method I really like to do so though.
Quote
About the gameplay itself, a few hours into the game, and I've found that cooking is rather difficult with the small and large meat at night. The color change for both of them is rather subtle, the small meat's color change being more so. On more than one occasion, I've sat in front of the meat, waiting for it to cook, only to have it burn right in front of me. Perhaps it would be much easier if the texture for the cooked meats included large, black grill marks on them. Fish and bread, of course, are obvious to cook, since the color change from bright green to brown can't be mistaken, and the dough changes shape upon finishing.
How long the food is on the fire actually has no relation to whether the food burns or not. It's a random chance modified by your cooking skill.
Quote
Another annoyance is the fact that sometimes, items thrown into a grill/forge will get stuck in the fire. It takes a little bit of skill to throw the item into the right place so that they're retrievable when they're done. I've lost countless pieces of meat and tool items in fires after dejectedly pressing the "pick up item" key in front of said item hundreds of times in vain and being forced to give up.
Hit U. It's a bit of hack fix and hopefully will be unnecessary with the newest update. Which is currently delayed until I can either get my source code edits to compile correctly, or wait for the other S2 source code edit to add in the commands I requested.
Quote
One fact that shall always remain an annoyance is having to constantly press the right mouse button repeatedly in order to build. Not like anyone can change that game mechanic, but it's just one of those things that annoys me to no end.
Can't fix it.
Quote
One thing to mention: I never figured out how to cut up bacon/steak. I don't know if it wasn't implemented or what, but the skill description under "Cooking" claims that a diary entry is supposed to pop up. It never did. If the ability isn't implemented, it would be nice to have a diary entry that says so.
Some diary entries are implemented, some aren't. It *is* possible to cut up meats into steaks. Combine a large meat with a knife to cut it into steaks or small meats. Bacon no longer exists.
Quote
For instance, it took me near an hour to figure out that steel and salt don't work.
It didn't help that charzy misleadingly claimed that silica dust could be turned into fused silica with fire, leading me to try and create class with crystals for near half an hour before giving up. Upon coming back, I eventually found out the real way to create glass, which is to use a hammer with crystal and fire, then use a hammer with silica dust and fire, then to use bamboo with fused silica and fire.
You *can* make glass with crystals. Although to be honest, I'm not sure why it requires a hammer. I suspect that is a bug. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Quote
EDIT 3:
I've been playing for a while and I've found the end of my mine. After finding the lava forge, I thought that that might have something to do with steel making. I looked up the Stranded 2 Mod Viewer and used to it find out that you, Builder2-0, have spent a good amount of time making steel items. Too bad that it doesn't work on mmpatch5. I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to make steel, and all it resulted in was a lot of wasted effort and several forges full of unobtainable iron chunks and coal dust pieces. I found that throwing large amounts of stuff into a forge causes the items in it to totally mess with the game when you throw water on them, causing forges to become increasingly bothersome to use, the more items you lose in them, forcing you to construct new forges every now and then.
The mod viewer didn't let me know what was supposed to be the intended method to make steel, but from the false information that I've gained from this thread, the player was supposed to throw coal dust at red-hot lumps of iron while they're in the forge. Obviously, something went wrong somewhere, and it can't be made.
Forges have been dealt with in the same way that the grill was fixed. They will be much better in the next update. Steel items are made by placing iron on the forge, waiting for it to turn red hot, then right clicking with coal dust in hand. Also, looking at this, I can really clean up the code. It's terrible.
Quote
Also, the fishing rod doesn't seem to work. I assume that steel hooks have something to do with them. Of course, without an inventory editor, the steel hooks can't be obtained and the fishing rod becomes rather useless.
You don't need steel hooks to fish. Or hooks at all. Even if you did, you can make hooks from tooths, claws, and iron. I'll soon add bones and wood to that mix. With that said, I don't understand what you mean the fishing rod doesn't seem to work. Then again, looking at the code in front of me, there is an IF statement missing the IF and out of place. That could very well break the fishing rod. I also have no idea how long that has been there. You would've mentioned this before you.
murlocdummy has written
As for not wanting to use my head, it's oftentimes not me using my head that gets the combinations I'm looking for, but instead, clicking through every possible combination of items that I can possibly make. Grinding through stuff like that tends to take the fun out of a game. I'd rather have hints placed in the game that lead me to the idea of certain combinations, instead of having to look them up on the Mod Viewer. Not everything's implemented, so I don't want to spend hours looking for recipes that simply don't exist. Without the Mod Viewer, I'd still be trying to cut up and salt meat, and would have completely given up on creating salads.
You can create salads? I'm serious, I thought I removed that entirely. And once again, cutting up meat is knife + large meat. Hints/journal entries/etc are planned. It's just the problem of trying to decide when they should occur. Some of them are already in.
Quote
For fishing, maybe it's because I loaded up a savegame from before I applied the mm5 patch. I had forgotten I had it halfway through my playthrough and decided to use it. It fixed the loss of items from the mine and also caused my fishing rod to stop working. I'll just start a new game and see if steel is working.
I checked the patch. It has the broken IF statement in it too.
Quote
It's kind of disheartening for me to find out that my suspicions were correct. The game's made by someone that's more of a programming engineer than anything else. I've played games made by those kinds of people before. They're well-programmed, and the things that are meant to work work, but it lacks the touch of an artist, like Notch with his Minecraft, or Moromisato's Transcendence. Those designers, after several years, learned to polish up the edges around their works. Even if a particular feature wasn't ready yet, it "felt" like it was already done. Placing things like skill description entries into the game that tell you of abilities and recipe possibilities that don't yet exist in the game tend to make the mod seem more amateurish than it really is.
Oddly enough, I had the exact same thought about Notch. Come on, books? Although I think you'd take back the "well-programmed" comment if you looked closer at MM's scripting.
Quote
I'm actually quite surprised that after this amount of time and this level of sophistication for a piece of programming there lacks a cohesive website for the game. travman84, you should really consider starting up a fanmade wiki page for this mod. The mod has been in development for too long and is far too good for it not to have its own webpage.
I hardly have time to program the mod, much less make a webpage for it. 
Someone else is welcome to do that though. If you ever need help understanding the code, just send me an email or message.
Quote
EDIT:
I found out how to make steel, and guns for that matter. It seems that using the alternate fire button instead of primary fire button with coal dust turns the iron into steel. You're not supposed to throw anything onto the lumps, after all. Also, the lava forge works, but it requires you to sleep while in the mine. It pretty much is only useful if it's raining and you need to forge stuff. It's kind of a bother building a shelter in the tunnels, but at least it prevents you from losing health.
Steel, true. Lava forge, no. That's another bizarre bug. Every version I think I've found a fix for it, as it works on my computer, then I post it up, and nope. People still can't make the damn thing work. I had a suspicion it was because they didn't start a new game, but you did. ...It just occurred to me that I might need to fix the map itself...
Quote
A series of "simple berry salads", made from grapes or berries would help the player figure out that salad combinations are possible.
Once again, what the hell do you mean by you made a salad? I deleted salads. They no longer exist. They got removed at the same time I removed bacon and dozens of other food items that overcomplicated everything. With that said, you gave me an idea about descriptions to simplify the effort of finding combinations. I'll put hints in them.
Quote
Started a new game. Nope, the fishing rod does not work. It doesn't catch anything, nor does it use up bait. It increases the fishing skill, though. I tried running around the island, fishing, and found that it still recognizes places that you're supposed to fish at, in that it'll give a negative sound when you fish on land, but even though everything else about the rod seems to work, it won't take bait, nor give fish when you use it. I can't for the life of me figure out what went wrong with the coding.
item_tools.inf
Line 114-ish. There will be a line that reads ((playergotitem(98)+playergotitem(119))==0) by itself. Delete it. Should work after that. Haven't opened up S2 to test that fix, but I don't see what else could possibly be wrong.
Quote
EDIT 4:
I fixed the fishing rod by using the old Stranded 2 code for it. It's fun to go lava fishing.
Thank you for pointing out that bug.
Quote
Anyway, I've encountered an interesting problem. With large islands, as you continue playing, the game takes longer and longer to load. I really don't know why this is, but the number of animals on the island appear to increase over time, so that might have something to do with it.
I don't think it is the animals. The mod will spawn more animals to make sure that the island doesn't run out of them, but it is capped to prevent lag. I'll double check the numbers though. It might be a runaway script somewhere which is only being multiplied by the numbers of objects.
Quote
Also, the amount of time it takes for the "pick up all" function to run its course is correlated with the map's load time. Currently, it's taking near a minute each time I use that key. It's pretty annoying, so now I'm cooking and forging in bulk to save time. I'm not at all hopeful that this issue will be fixed. Just something players will have to live with. On a related note, every now and then the game freezes up for a good while, then resumes.
The pick-up key is an example of terrible, terrible hacky scripting. I've got an idea of how to fix it so it doesn't suck so much. Basically what is going on is a ridiculous amount of loop statements, for literally every possible type of item to be picked up, that run all at once, then they all run an IF statement to see how close they are to the player. This same method is used for other things dependant on distance. It just occurred to me, I can fix it all by using event triggers instead with an area argument. So much cleaner. And it'll be handled by the hardcoded game instead, meaning it won't lag like hell. And it should also fix the problem with a loop being run on bloody everything. That's why it takes more time on larger maps.
As for the freezing, probably scripts running their course. Might be able to optimize them a bit more. Every time I release an update I tend to go back and cut down what I can. Always see something new to remove to make it work better.
Quote
The amount of time it takes to freeze up is also correlated to how large the island is and how long you've been playing on said island. The freeze up seems to happen before certain events occur, such as mass wilting of plants, and sleeping.
Once again, scripts. But it is interesting that the freeze up relates to how large the island is. That narrows down which scripts could be causing it.
Ok, whew. Basically, here's what is going on:
The new version is close to finished. I however decided that I wanted to avoid another really hacky script, so I need to code in two new additional commands into the game's source code. However, despite being able to compile the code, the exe isn't working. Even when I try compiling the default S2 code, it produces a non-working exe. I have no idea what is happening. I've spoken to DC and the other Stranded 2 source code modders. None of them could figure it out either.
If anyone is able to compile working S2 executables, please contact me. I'll be able to write you the code for the new commands I need. It might take a few back-n-forth communications to get the bugs ironed out, but it'll greatly help.
Now... Here is a tentative list of errors pointed out above:
-Fishing rod doesn't work (fixed)
-Glass making requires a hammer (fixed)
-Fishing is possible in mine
-Lava forge doesn't work (already known)
-Game freezes at certain intervals
-Pick up key lags
-Forge is difficult to use (fixed)
-Cooking is difficult (fixed)
The others are added to my to-do list. Btw, if anyone has some suggestions for edited item infos that will give hints about what they can be used for, please feel free to post them. I'll add them in if they are suitable.
EDIT:
Oh, wow. I'm fucking retarded. I'm going to be issuing an emergency patch rather soon-ish. It'll fix some IDIOTIC coding I did when I was young and stupid.It'll also fix a lot of bugs, such as the ones reported here, and other bugs since the release on page 74. edited 2×, last 30.07.11 10:42:52 am
Stranded II 
Massive Mod
Offline
about the silica to glass.... see, just keep trying stuff... eventually you will get it. 
)
)
Wine: Healthy, not very intoxicating. Has a chance to act as an antidote to any poisons\toxins in you, furthermore, has a chance to NULLIFY the effect of anything dangerous you eat for a short time. In other words, if you're starving and all you've got is poison mushrooms and wine, DRINK THE WINE, then start eating.