Recommended Mods and World settings for engaging play.

[Pyre Baron]

Does anyone have a series of mods and/or world settings they use to get more out of the game? Vintage story has that precise level of tedium in a game that brings it to a satisfying level. You earn each step along the tech tree. You earn that shelf of jam that keeps the fruit bar up over the winter. You earn that first iron pick. And that's why I've sunk 240 hours into it. I'd like to flesh out the early and mid game of vintage story so that it's even more rewarding. The obvious thing is to play with decreased resource spawns or a harsh biome tendency, but that's not enough to have fun with. Challenge yes, but a boring one. I want more difficulty with more options on how to fight that difficulty to go with it.

Are there any mods or settings you play with to enhance the best parts of the game without adding irritation? Challenge without just adding time sink or constant combat.

Sorry if this was a questioned answered before. I couldn't find a post that helped me. Mod lists and setting screen caps would help a lot.

[Spear and Fang]

Engaging you say?  If you're talking single player....

1. Wilderness Survival mode - no map makes things a lot more challenging.  Things get frantic when you lose track of where your home is.
2. Unstable dirt and gravel - it really adds some interesting new aspects to the game.
3. Permadeath - nothing more engaging than knowing that it's all over when you die. Your head will be on a swivel.
4. Add some mods of interest to the mix.

YOU CAN DO IT!

[l33tmaan]

I LOVE unstable dirt. I saw one of Tyron's streams recently where he was working on cave-in mechanics and I'd be STOKED for something similar. 

At least, I love the idea of unstable dirt. And I love it in practice, mostly. There are just a lot of landslides in mountain areas that result in some ugly landscape even if I don't touch any of it.

[Frepo]

Me and some friends play with a "hardcore" modpack I put together, I've added some stuff myself, tweaked many of the mods and vanilla mechanics.
If you wan't, you can give me your mail and I'll send you the modpack.

Settings i strongly recommend with this pack:
- Hunger: 125%
- Creature Strength: 150%
- Global deposit spawn rate: 80%
- Worldmap and coordinates: OFF (very important)
- Soil sand and gravel gravity with side-ways instability: ON (very important)

Some notes on what's tweaked and changed:
- When you die; Each item in your inventory (and hotbar and worn) have 50% chance to be deleted
- Food tweaks (red meat nerfed, animal drops nerfed, bread buffed)
- Many recipes changed to "weave together" different mods, but mostly to make stuff more costly
- Raw grass, must be dried before you get dry grass
- Tool tier system changed (stone -> copper -> tin/bismuth bronze -> black bronze -> iron -> steel -> titanium)
- Sleeping made harder, low tier beds can break after use, can't sleep in rain or if it's too cold (make a fire and build better beds to mitigate the cold)
- All rocks have a small chance of coming loose and fall when mining a nearby block, deals quite a bit of damage if it lands on you
- Increased fall damage (+70%!!!), each piece of clothing reduces fall damage by 5%
- Can't break cobblestone with hands anymore
- Can't place water sources with buckets anymore
- Drifters spawn everywhere!
- More dealy wild animals

Notable mods in the pack:
- Primitive Surivial
- Medieval Expansion
- Better Crates
- Better Ruins
- Compass2
- Dungeons and Shafts
- Feverstone Wilds
- Kreatures and Kritters
- Farm To Table (fixed)
- Ranged Weapons
- Titanium Tools
- Lichen
- NoWaterproofInventories (crashes the game since .NET7 update, I might have fixed it, not sure yet, just remove if crashes the game)

+ much much more