Dear Extraordinary Survivalists
The development on boring old 1.19 has stopped some time ago, so let's talk a bit about the next major update - v1.20!
⚠ Danger Zone ⚠
Work in Progress Material ahead! Things may be in an unfinished state, get majorly changed or outright removed again.
With that out of the way, and as mentioned in previous devlog entries, the main goal of 1.20 is the addition of the second chapter of the game's story. This will comprise of 4 major and vastly differing locations that will be the near or at the world's surface, as opposed to the very deep first story dungeon. The plan is to have these 4 locations at a significant distance to each other, with new travel mechanics that make journeying an engaging part of the experience.
Since Oceans in Vintage Story are an optional feature, and will remain optional for the time being, we aim to build land travel as well as sea travel, in the form of animal riding and sailing respectively. The animal riding part alone required major rewrites with the game's current mounting system, so as to remain flexible, extensible and easily moddable, which is now mostly complete and we're currently in the process of working out the countless kinks of our fledgling riding system.
More specifically, the goal is for Elks (and yes, also Horses, albeit to a smaller capacity) to become something akin to a mobile base, with some amounts of storage and basic survival necessities accessible through various attachments that you can put on your mount. We would like to avoid the player travelling half the way, running out of food or storage, or getting mauled by a wolf and needing to fully restart the journey, so we will design this experience accordingly.
Here's a short demo of the mounted Elk, with some preliminary, not yet functional, accessories attached
As for sailing, there is little progress towards its concrete implementation, but should it hopefully simply be a "horse on water" as far as the technical aspect is concerned. We do have a preliminary model for it:
Again with the same goal - choose from a (or several?) prebuilt ships, but allow customizability. It is carefully designed to allow placement of block-sized equipment, including your land mount. Possibly in the future we can use the mini-dimensions system to allow full custom built ships, but this is out of scope for 1.20.
I won't reveal much on the story locations, but suffice to say, I feel confident they are going to be at least the same level quality of the first story dungeon, offer brand new insights into the game's story, let you encounter some brand new mobs and probably will make you feel quite differently about the game itself.
But that is not all!
New insect life & other game juice
As already showcased, 1.20 will bring at least a bit of new insect life to the world!
on Discord I also shared an improved water shader, that will give water a much more murky feel - it should greatly help with the sailing exeperience.
High fidelity animations
Our new animator is hard at work redoing animal animations
New Mob
There's going to be another (semi)commonly found mob to complement the current rather homogenous drifter threat. Models are mostly finalized from what I've seen, but for now you will only get to see the vague concept art 
More bricks
We would like to fully rework all in-game bricks and related mechanics for brick firing for 1.20. Here's a preview of the new bricks, drawn by the talented Arkaik.
In Conclusion
Most of these mechanics we are building are there to support the actual substance of the update - the second story chapter, so there's still more to look forward to 
We still have lots to work to do until this update is ready, I estimate a stable release date of Q4 2024.
Cheers,
Tyron and the VS Team
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