Tags:

Crafting Tweak Survival

Authors:

vayyne, Mantismax

Side:

Both

Created:

Aug 13th at 7:12 PM

Last modified:

Aug 14th at 4:02 PM

Downloads:

179

Latest release (for Vintage Story 1.22.0 - 1.22.6, potentially outdated):
boomerang_1.5.0.zip  1-click install

Carve a boomerang from three boards, three sticks, or three pieces of beach driftwood, and hunt small game with something you can make within minutes of waking up.

Throw it, and if it hits nothing it comes back. Hold right mouse to line up the throw and release. It curves out to its full range, turns, and hunts you down for the catch, landing straight back in your inventory at no cost to its condition. A throw that connects with nothing is completely free, so a good thrower can keep one indefinitely.

It only wears down when it actually strikes something: a creature, a tree, or the ground. Whatever it hits, it drops there, and you walk over and pick it up. Wood choice decides how many hits you get.

Small game only

A boomerang brings down a hare or a chicken. It does not fell a wolf. Creatures taller than 0.65 blocks take no damage. The boomerang still stops dead and drops at their feet, so throwing at something big costs you the walk to go and fetch it.

This is measured from the creature's own collision box rather than a list of entity codes, so it works correctly with animal mods that replace the vanilla fauna. It was calibrated against Fauna of the Stone Age, whose animals use realistic anatomy. Its wolves stand shorter than vanilla's, and a threshold picked for vanilla alone would have let boomerangs kill them.

Fourteen woods, and they differ

Damage sits in the same band as a thrown stone or flint spear. Sticks and driftwood are the throwaway tier; the dense tropical hardwoods are worth going out of your way for.

Crafting

Any knife plus three pieces of the same material, arranged in the crafting grid as a V, the boomerang's own silhouette, with the knife in the top centre:

W K W        K = any knife (not consumed)
. W .        W = 3 boards | 3 sticks | 3 driftwood

Boards carry their wood type through to the result, so oak boards make an oak boomerang.

No knife? Lash it instead

Sticks and driftwood have alternate recipes that use a binding in place of the knife, in the same V layout. The binding is consumed, unlike the knife, but the recipe needs no tool at all, so a boomerang is reachable on your first morning.

• Flax twine works in any world.
• Cordage works if you have Primitive Survival installed. Twisted from wild vine, it needs no farming, retting or spinning, which suits this tier better than flax does. Without that mod the recipe simply does not exist, and adds no dependency.

Neither is offered for the board tiers. Producing boards already requires a saw, so anyone holding them has tools, and a lashed hardwood boomerang would undercut the carved ones for nothing.

Class perks

Perks are keyed on class code and configurable in json, with mappings included for Aldi's Classes (wildrunner and shadowstrider). Any unmapped modded class with genuine ranged aptitude picks up the damage perk automatically.

Hunters get more than the table suggests: the engine also scales projectile damage by their rangedWeaponsDamage stat, so an oak boomerang lands around 6.2 rather than 5.2 in their hands. The in-game tooltip shows each player their true effective damage.

Compatibility

• Fauna of the Stone Age: supported, and the small game threshold was calibrated against it
• Primitive Survival: its cordage works as a binding, with no dependency either way
• Aldi's Classes: supported, with wildrunner and shadowstrider mapped out of the box
• Every recipe checked against all vanilla grid recipes for conflicts

Requires Vintage Story 1.22 or later.