How does one play Vintage Story?

[lemonke]

Hello. I've recently started playing Vintage Story. As a new player, I'm not sure what to make of the game.

I would like to play it unspoiled, with gradual revelation of game mechanics, lore, areas, etc. Is that even possible? My gameplay so far has been,

• I misread a beginner note saying you could cook cat tails, didn't understand several things about cooking, and died four times from starvation.
  • Cat tail roots. This was probably on me.
  • Cat tail roots not in a cooking pot.
  • Cat tail roots without any other edible, cookable items.
  • Seemingly arbitrary combinations of ingredients do and don't work, ingredient quantities must match, and the cooking pot tells you whether your recipe is valid using italicized text or its absence. This last point was what unlocked cooking for me. Previously, I was always picking invalid combinations and getting no feedback.
• As I understand it, combat consists of trying to not run into things while running away from things, making sure always to hold down the go-fast key and to avoid jumping off of or into anything.
• After being killed six times in a row by wolves and/or bears while attempting to retrieve one inventory, I turned off inventory loss on death. That wolf was standing right on top of my items, 10 minutes isn't long enough for strategy, and that would have been 64 cattails for the baskets alone, nevermind the other items.
• I now consider wolves to be an area denial mechanic.
• Bears, in contrast to wolves, are bigger and less common, so you can often avoid them, so they're more like instant-death rooms.
• Was that a graphical glitch? There was something wooshing past me... Oh, that's what a locust looks like.
• The Internet still thinks that surface copper is a thing, but I believe that was patched out. Got a total so far of maybe 10 pieces of copper, across four sites, and that was a ton of walking and a ton of granite and flint, hundreds of rocks. I really don't think I'm just overlooking it. Is panning the mandated approach now to bootstrap copper?
• Drifters feel pretty fair, to be honest. I did accidentally die at night one time and then the game started respawning me all night long in the same pack of 7 or so Drifters, so, oops. They seem manageable with caution, restraint at night, and attention to the Drifter weather.
• Made it through a light Temporal Storm, understanding intuitively that what was called for was the warm embrace of earth in my Safety Coffin, and patience.
• A bear killed me immediately outside my Safety Coffin, approximately at the same time as I said, "Shit, that's a bear!"

In short, the game seems to punish you hard not so much because it's innately challenging, but for your ignorance. I have been reading the handbook, but it's more of a reference than a guide as far as I can tell.

Am I just doing it wrong? How wrong? Is this just a case of "(Read the Wiki|Watch the YouTube), Stupid," like Nethack, or can the game lend itself to relatively blind exploration?

Second question, are wolves supposed to be roughly impossible without armor? (If not, what if you don't have armor and don't like cheese tactics?) I read something about trees, and if I imagine that every single birch is a foreboding Forest of Doom, wolves make sense suddenly, but that makes the game kind of... there are a lot of trees and I struggle to understand what Vintage Story wants from me, what the design is conceptually.

[sushieater]

17 hours ago, lemonke said:

Seemingly arbitrary combinations of ingredients do and don't work, ingredient quantities must match, and the cooking pot tells you whether your recipe is valid using italicized text or its absence.

That's explained in the 'Meal Making' section of the handbook.

17 hours ago, lemonke said:

The Internet still thinks that surface copper is a thing, but I believe that was patched out.

It is a thing, but surface copper isn't that common. I found something like 40 nuggets in the first 10 days (there is a copper deposit below), spending all day exploring and traveling. I also found 3 copper pickaxes in ruins.

17 hours ago, lemonke said:

Second question, are wolves supposed to be roughly impossible without armor?

With the right strategy, they are not (but definitely not worth the effort and risk). Going melee toe-to-toe is the wrong strategy. Deep water is your friend. Shallow water is your enemy. Humans have been using traps forever. Melee is an option, once you have gambeson armor. Using early game armor that slows you down is a deadly mistake. It offers little protection and prevents you from getting away.

Wolves and bears can re-spawn really quickly, so killing them is pretty much pointless (other animals are less risky and offer better rewards).

Stay away from forest in the early game.

[lemonke]

1 hour ago, sushieater said:

That's explained in the 'Meal Making' section of the handbook.

Sure enough, I read something about cooking in the guide, thought I'd read that guide page, but I had not.

1 hour ago, sushieater said:

I found something like 40 nuggets in the first 10 days (there is a copper deposit below), spending all day exploring and traveling. I also found 3 copper pickaxes in ruins.

19 hours ago, lemonke said:

Second question, are wolves supposed to be roughly impossible without armor?

With the right strategy, they are not (but definitely not worth the effort and risk). Going melee toe-to-toe is the wrong strategy. Deep water is your friend. Shallow water is your enemy. Humans have been using traps forever. Melee is an option, once you have gambeson armor. Using early game armor that slows you down is a deadly mistake. It offers little protection and prevents you from getting away.

Wolves and bears can re-spawn really quickly, so killing them is pretty much pointless (other animals are less risky and offer better rewards).

Stay away from forest in the early game.

This is all very useful, thanks. I'm definitely more interested in managing my relationship with wolves than fighting them. At least until I can tech up to space lasers and commit wolf genocide. Oh yes, the wolves will know fear, oh yes.

Uh, where was...

Oh, right, forests and ruins. Are forests delimited by anything you can visually identify? I mean, I need to chop a lot of trees somehow, and all the trees seem to have wolves behind hills or behind shrubs, stealthily hunting me. In fact, all directions from my base seem to have trees, wolves, and bears. I guess this is ok if running away and dying is a very big part of the early game, but this feels like I'm doing something wrong. I have only started one game so far. Maybe the RNG hates me.

I've come across a fair number of ruins (half dozen?) with their old pots, found a little coal, some seeds, mostly stole the cobblestone blocks for base-building aesthetic reasons. Have I been unlucky, or were you lucky, with the pickaxes?

Are traps more in the designed or emergent part of the game? Are we talking a craftable item, or something closer to a Minecraft monster farm? The handbook doesn't list anything when I search for "trap".

Sorry for asking too many questions -- are the handbook files accessible outside the game? I'd kill to be able to read this in a bigger window with better navigation. Seems like there is some mandatory homework prior to playing that I haven't done yet, back to my original question about study of spoilers vs. blind exploration; and the handbook may be a good compromise between those two things.

[Arcanus]

I'm fairly new to the game too and just about to enter Spring in my second year. I'll try and answer your questions:

Quote

Are forests delimited by anything you can visually identify?

Not really other than what you would expect - groups of trees. Pointing the cursor at the ground and it identifies as 'forest floor' is another way.

Quote

I've come across a fair number of ruins (half dozen?) with their old pots, found a little coal, some seeds, mostly stole the cobblestone blocks for base-building aesthetic reasons. Have I been unlucky, or were you lucky, with the pickaxes?

Loot is random. It's worth adding that there is sometimes more than one pot in a ruin and other goodies. Craft a shovel and dig around. Take any bone soil back and try panning it to collect other stuff of interest. The best loot from the pots I have had was two tin-bronze scythes.

Quote

Are traps more in the designed or emergent part of the game? Are we talking a craftable item, or something closer to a Minecraft monster farm? The handbook doesn't list anything when I search for "trap"

Traps are designed and built by players, not craftable. I have two built (unashamably copied from YT content creators), one to run bears to (so I can safely collect resin from the pine trees in that area) and another for Storms to farm the rifters. At some point I will see if I can improve on them but they are perfectly fine for now.

Quote

Sorry for asking too many questions -- are the handbook files accessible outside the game?

Don't be sorry   this is a tough game with a fairly steep learning curve. I'm not aware that the handbook content is available outside the game but I suspect most of it is in the Wiki.

I think you'll find it very tough if you just try and go it alone without at least some homework. Winters in temperate regions are especially hard  (December - March) so you need to try and make sure you have enough food to last, along with some warm clothing. A cellar is perfect to help keep foods edible for a long time (with the help of crocks and storage vessels) and a fur coat/boots/gloves will help you survive the cold. The latter items can be easily made with hides and fat, you just need to allow the time for them to cure.

I have yet to venture too far from my home as it too appears to be surrounded by forests. Each time I have tried to make my way through them, some beastie or other manages to find me . In the meantime I've setup a home with farm, workshop with a windmill operated helve hammer, a greenhouse, and have some breeding sheep and pigs. I will be looking for some bees in the spring to populate the skeps I have waiting. In the surrounding area I have copper, tin and iron, blue and fire clay and peat. Although I have some iron tools I lack the resources to go 'full' iron so I will need to venture further. I have also yet to find much in the way of lore (no translocators yet either).

BTW one last thing, you can set your spawn point with temporal gears when you get one. Default setting (in world creation) limits it to 20 uses. It can be set to unlimited but that has to be done at the time the world is created.

[Dreconit]

Quote

I would like to play it unspoiled, with gradual revelation of game mechanics, lore, areas, etc. Is that even possible?

I would recommend reading the handbook at least. It should definitely be possible if you do that, if a bit harder than using other resources like the wiki.
I believe this is what I did for most of my first playthrough, but that was cooperative so I don't know how much other people looked up.

 

Quote

The Internet still thinks that surface copper is a thing, but I believe that was patched out. Got a total so far of maybe 10 pieces of copper, across four sites, and that was a ton of walking and a ton of granite and flint, hundreds of rocks. I really don't think I'm just overlooking it. Is panning the mandated approach now to bootstrap copper?

I know it exists on the latest stable release, but I can't guarantee it still exists if you're playing past that. Some places will have more copper than others, though. To my understanding ore spawns (read spoiler for more information if you want it)

Spoiler

will be concentrated around specific locations (not chunks, I think.) and become less common the farther you get from those central points. Copper spawn locations are common and large enough to where they could theoretically overlap I believe.

 

Quote

Second question, are wolves supposed to be roughly impossible without armor? (If not, what if you don't have armor and don't like cheese tactics?)

Depends on what you consider a cheese tactic. An easy enough stone age tactic would be to throw spears and get them in an open space. It'll be easier to run circles around them while you repeatedly throw projectiles that way. Easiest way for this to fail is if you run into something solid like a bush. They wade through shallow water faster than you, but you're a better swimmer, so you can also enter lakes. If you consider fighting them in the water to be cheese, you can still swim to the other side and throw spears before they catch up.

The same strategies work on bears, but you need to do a lot more running around and picking back up your spears. And things get much worse much quicker if they catch up.

[sushieater]

17 hours ago, lemonke said:

Are forests delimited by anything you can visually identify?

Trees. Unless they are pretty widely spaced, the forest density is probably above 50% and there will be wolves and bears. There is a chat command:

/wgen pos climate

which will print the terrain info for the current chunk. Shrubs / bushes are not forest and don't spawn wolves / bears. I also like to customize the world generation settings and reduce forest by 25%.

Quote

I've come across a fair number of ruins (half dozen?) with their old pots, found a little coal, some seeds, mostly stole the cobblestone blocks for base-building aesthetic reasons. Have I been unlucky, or were you lucky, with the pickaxes?

That's very, very little. I've probably searched (mostly surface only) several hundred ruins in the first 10 days, literally exploring/running the entire day. The explored area is something like 4000x5000.

BTW, that's with 1.19. The ruins are quite different from 1.18 and there are a lot more villages. I think I found less tools in 1.18.

1.19 also seems to have much more reasonable spawn rates for bears and wolves.

[lemonke]

On 1/13/2024 at 9:47 PM, Arcanus said:

I'm fairly new to the game too and just about to enter Spring in my second year. I'll try and answer your questions:

Not really other than what you would expect - groups of trees. Pointing the cursor at the ground and it identifies as 'forest floor' is another way.

...

I think you'll find it very tough if you just try and go it alone without at least some homework. Winters in temperate regions are especially hard  (December - March) so you need to try and make sure you have enough food to last, along with some warm clothing. A cellar is perfect to help keep foods edible for a long time (with the help of crocks and storage vessels) and a fur coat/boots/gloves will help you survive the cold. The latter items can be easily made with hides and fat, you just need to allow the time for them to cure.

I have yet to venture too far from my home as it too appears to be surrounded by forests.

You too, huh? Glad to hear your approach got you through the winter, since it's the same thing I'm doing. I'll start stockpiling and hopefully that'll be good enough.

23 hours ago, Dreconit said:

I would recommend reading the handbook at least. It should definitely be possible if you do that, if a bit harder than using other resources like the wiki.
I believe this is what I did for most of my first playthrough, but that was cooperative so I don't know how much other people looked up.

...

Depends on what you consider a cheese tactic. An easy enough stone age tactic would be to throw spears and get them in an open space. It'll be easier to run circles around them while you repeatedly throw projectiles that way. Easiest way for this to fail is if you run into something solid like a bush. They wade through shallow water faster than you, but you're a better swimmer, so you can also enter lakes. If you consider fighting them in the water to be cheese, you can still swim to the other side and throw spears before they catch up.

The same strategies work on bears, but you need to do a lot more running around and picking back up your spears. And things get much worse much quicker if they catch up.

That's kind of what I was thinking. In a hilly, puddle and shrub-heavy semi-forested area, it's kind of rough.

Also, thanks for the spoiler note about mining. That'll give me a good bit of direction... makes sense that it'd work that way, but I wouldn't have guessed.

12 hours ago, sushieater said:

Trees. Unless they are pretty widely spaced, the forest density is probably above 50% and there will be wolves and bears. There is a chat command:

/wgen pos climate

which will print the terrain info for the current chunk. Shrubs / bushes are not forest and don't spawn wolves / bears. I also like to customize the world generation settings and reduce forest by 25%.

That's very, very little. I've probably searched (mostly surface only) several hundred ruins in the first 10 days, literally exploring/running the entire day. The explored area is something like 4000x5000.

BTW, that's with 1.19. The ruins are quite different from 1.18 and there are a lot more villages. I think I found less tools in 1.18.

1.19 also seems to have much more reasonable spawn rates for bears and wolves.

Even though I am theoretically avoiding spoilers, this was the specificity I needed to put two and two together. I ran around taking surveys of forestedness with that wgen command, and there's a lot of 20% or so forest around me. That seems to be enough to spawn wolves and bears, explains why I'm having a hard time exploring I think.

I started a second Explorer-mode game, dialed back a little bit towards Survival settings, just to try to get my bearings. It spawned me in the middle of this black forest with temporal instability all around, would have been a hilariously rough start in Survival mode. I found 120 copper nuggets on the ground in the first ten minutes. But then, walking to some shrub-land that looked more like save 1's base, there was only, maybe twice as many copper nuggets per unit area that I ran into vs game 1, not scarce, but not so plentiful either. Clearly it's all about biome and RNG. Walking further is probably my best bet to make more progress, except that I can't easily tell when I set foot into dangerous territory.

s'all good though. I think I've got enough a sense of why things felt broken to exorcise the doing-it-wrong feeling, and I should be able to get by with reading the handbook guide pages a little more systematically.

Thanks everybody. I genuinely appreciate all the context, help, and tips. It's a shame the forum won't let you mark multiple posts as answers.

Edited January 14 by lemonke

[Michael Gates]

On 1/12/2024 at 1:36 PM, lemonke said:

• I now consider wolves to be an area denial mechanic.

The way to deal with wolves is, pit traps. Dig a 5x3x2 deep pit. Anger the wolf by throwing a rock at it; it will chase you. Let it get pretty close behind you, then jump across the narrow axis of the pit. Wolf falls in, and you can now stand back a bit from the edge and spear it to death. There are a couple of skills here, but once you've mastered them wolves become more "ooh, lunch!" than "oh no!" I put up a map marker on my wolf pits because the wolves DO tend to respawn in the same area.

On 1/12/2024 at 1:36 PM, lemonke said:

• The Internet still thinks that surface copper is a thing, but I believe that was patched out. Got a total so far of maybe 10 pieces of copper, across four sites, and that was a ton of walking and a ton of granite and flint, hundreds of rocks. I really don't think I'm just overlooking it. Is panning the mandated approach now to bootstrap copper?

Surface copper is a thing, but finding it in areas with grass or shrubs is a pain in the neck. Searching for copper in a barrens/desert area goes MUCH faster because you can see them from farther away. It's not hard to find four or five deposits in a day's running about. Remember to put up a map marker and a dirt pillar where you found every deposit, so you can come back with your pickaxe and get the underground part later.

[Arcanus]

Another tactic I have just employed to get around one of the forests is to dig a tunnel. Sounds extreme but the more I though about it, the more it made sense. It took nearly two bronze picks and half or so of a bronze shovel but I now have a 'fast' travel through the forest without having to go up and down over the local topography. Looking at the map I routed it to pass a trader in the forest so I surface next to his caravan which is ideal. To stop mobs spawning I place stones on every floor block of the 2x1 tunnel.  At some point I'll put some more surface tunnels in so I can emerge in the forest and explore the local area to see what resouces it has.

[Owktree]

One option as well is to relocate your base to a preferred terrain and possibly warmer clime.  

It does take a temporal gear to reset your spawn point and once you do so any real connection to your original spawn location beyond it being 0,0 on your map is gone.

One can also meta-game research spawn conditions for the various animals and plants and basically learn indicators of whether or not an area you are in is relatively safe from wolves or bears spawning there.  Relatively, since they are animals and will wander.  Bears chasing prey might end up a fair distance from their original position.

Finally, animals do not currently path over fences even if their abilities would allow them to climb over them.  They can and will path from an adjacent higher block onto the top of a fence.  Fences can thus be an effective barrier or used as part of a constructed trap as well.

[TheWalrusKing]

Mirrors my early game so far. Not really having a lot of fun. I'm just trying to find berries and cattails and can't seem to avoid the wolves, which seem to be all over. I end up sitting in a little cave with a fire at night, starving to death, and reading a book until morning. I've restarted the game three times after multiple deaths each time. I really hate the night, is there some way to minimize the screen so I can at least get work done while not playing the game?

[Thorfinn]

Few suggestions.

• Eating Cooper's reed roots is more or less admitting you are going to starve to death this game. They take way too long to cut and to cook. Time is better spent foraging for berries and crops.
• Don't know if it still works this way in 1.19, since I don't use it because it feels like cheese (and it slows down hunger, which reduces your ability to accrue bonus HP), but wait until you take hunger damage, then eat one food. Berries, veggies, fish, grain, whatever. Don't eat any more until you start taking damage again, then eat one.
• Mushrooms are not really worth it unless you see a massive group of field mushrooms or something, because different mushroom types do not stack.
• Don't spend a whole lot of time on  building an early base. You are almost certainly going to want to relocate anyway, and the time spent could be better utilized. If you have to have a base in the first few days, a 2-high dirt wall is plenty for anything but bears, so long as you light it up so nothing spawns on the top of your "fort". If you worry about bears, a 4x4 "fort" only takes 4 blocks to roof over, a 5x5, 9 blocks.
• Building this "base" on top of a clay deposit might be best, so you can spend the night clayforming. Remember you can carry more unfired storage vessels than either fired vessels or raw clay. Alternatively, you can build on as little as a single tile of water surrounded by sand or gravel and pan the night away, but you will need to leave a lot of stuff behind. Some can ground-stack, some you will have to create a firepit, each of which gives you 2 storage slots at the cost of 1 dry grass.
• Speaking of firepits, while exploring, you can use them to cache stuff you think you might want someday, but don't have room to carry. Again, mark the map, and, ideally, put them on the top of some obvious terrain feature like a hill. If you care to, you can use a description like "Spelt/Rye Seeds" or "Borax/Quartz" so you return in the order you want to retrieve them when you have more inventory space.
• If you have calm or low rift activity, even as a novice player, you can generally spend the night collecting grass or sticks. You can collect sticks holding a torch, for grass, you have to put it in your off-hand. You will want to have somewhere you can escape to you find the drifters too bad, or if it changes to Apocalyptic at midnight or something.
• Early game, make use of the layer of sticks. Yes, you have to place and break it to get the sticks back rather than the crafting grid, like works with hay, but it lets you carry 9x as many sticks at once, which you will appreciate when you start making a dozen pit kilns.
• Plant seeds every evening/night, so long as you can find medium fertility soil. Do the 8 soil around 1 water, filling in small ponds as necessary, surround it with a fence, and, since you are playing survival, mark it on your map. Leave the hoe behind, leaning it against some nearby block just in case.
• Elevation is your friend. In the first day or so, you may have to rely on terrain to get you high enough to see copper or crops or bears, but try to get a dozen or more ladders as soon as possible. Dirt is quicker and easier to nerdpole, sure, but it will cost you the time you saved having to dig your nerdpoles back down to the ground. Ladders, take out the bottom ladder and the whole thing comes crashing down.
• Check ruins for cracked vessels and storage items, but don't waste any time digging. Not yet. In 1.19, the loot table for ruins is much better, so you are closer to breaking even with ROI, but most of the finds still have no early-game use apart from filling your inventory.
• Don't mess with gathering cobblestone. It's quicker and easier to craft if you decide you want some in your build, and you will be trying to figure out what to do with all that stone anyway.
• There's no shame in a dirt home, at least to start. You can always build a large, better home around it, then tear it out after your new home is safe.

Probably lots of people disagree with me. That's just what I found to be useful. YMMV.

 

[TheRedd]

On 2/15/2024 at 2:31 PM, TheWalrusKing said:

Mirrors my early game so far. Not really having a lot of fun. I'm just trying to find berries and cattails and can't seem to avoid the wolves, which seem to be all over. I end up sitting in a little cave with a fire at night, starving to death, and reading a book until morning. I've restarted the game three times after multiple deaths each time. I really hate the night, is there some way to minimize the screen so I can at least get work done while not playing the game?

Find flint and sticks, make a knife, cut grass. Turn the grass into 3 hay bales, make a hay bed and sleep through the night. 

Then, in the day time gather resources. Flint, sticks, berries.  You can survive a long time on berries. 

We all started this game the same way just like you. Best advice I ever got...hit the H button and read the handbook!

[Brandybuck]

I am late to this topic, but thsi game hearkens back to the era of having to read the game manual before playing the game. We're now in the age of everything online, but there is still in-game handbook as well as the wiki.

Unless you really like a particularly difficult challenge, learning the basic mechanics of this game is essentially a requirement.

[lemonke]

On 2/15/2024 at 3:31 PM, TheWalrusKing said:

Mirrors my early game so far. Not really having a lot of fun. I'm just trying to find berries and cattails and can't seem to avoid the wolves, which seem to be all over. I end up sitting in a little cave with a fire at night, starving to death, and reading a book until morning. I've restarted the game three times after multiple deaths each time. I really hate the night, is there some way to minimize the screen so I can at least get work done while not playing the game?

On 2/22/2024 at 3:23 PM, Brandybuck said:

I am late to this topic, but thsi game hearkens back to the era of having to read the game manual before playing the game. We're now in the age of everything online, but there is still in-game handbook as well as the wiki.

Unless you really like a particularly difficult challenge, learning the basic mechanics of this game is essentially a requirement.

I haven't been playing much just lately, but I was making good progress on a second game (wrote off the bad winter start, at least for now). Started the game off by sprinting around eating berries during the day and sleeping at night to fill in the map until I got to what I thought was a good spot for a base. Knowing to avoid forest and knowing that sprinting + berry-eating was viable, and having some sense of what I would need out of an early-stage base, all kind of came together. 

The handbook is a must, but I don't think it quite gets you started, if you don't just luck into a fortunate base location by accident. And even if you do, you still have to understand that sprinting all over the map is a necessary early game strategy to get enough farming going early enough to stock up for winter. 

This does feel like a bit of a throwback to unfair game design. I dig the immersive absence of handholding, but could have used a few more hints, from "some places don't have wolves" to "wolves are supposed to be like that", to "get a farm going already" and "cover a wide area on foot ASAP". Cooking was fine once sushieater pointed out I missed the right handbook page. 

[Fredrik Blomquist]

I tried to start playing it "kind"  of unspoiled, i watched a few youtube videos before hand, and i think it's possible, a lot of things work like IRL, when it's not you can get why the developers went the direction they did. Wolfes (bears) and spears are the most problem. I still think spears should be made into two kinds - one javelin and one spear. Then the name of the javelin would be a give away on what it's for. I had no idea holding the, using the weight of the attack wolf and being able to keep thrusting the spear into its body when the momentum of the spear is lost only does half damage - instead your supposed to hurl the spear at the wolf (and have more of them ready). 

[SunshineFaith]

On 1/14/2024 at 3:55 AM, sushieater said:

Trees. Unless they are pretty widely spaced, the forest density is probably above 50% and there will be wolves and bears. There is a chat command:

/wgen pos climate

which will print the terrain info for the current chunk. Shrubs / bushes are not forest and don't spawn wolves / bears. I also like to customize the world generation settings and reduce forest by 25%.

That's very, very little. I've probably searched (mostly surface only) several hundred ruins in the first 10 days, literally exploring/running the entire day. The explored area is something like 4000x5000.

BTW, that's with 1.19. The ruins are quite different from 1.18 and there are a lot more villages. I think I found less tools in 1.18.

1.19 also seems to have much more reasonable spawn rates for bears and wolves.

Thank you thank you thank you, I had no idea you could do a command to see the terrain info for the chunk.  How big is a chunk? 

[SunshineFaith]

On 1/13/2024 at 2:47 PM, Arcanus said:

I'm fairly new to the game too and just about to enter Spring in my second year. I'll try and answer your questions:

Not really other than what you would expect - groups of trees. Pointing the cursor at the ground and it identifies as 'forest floor' is another way.

Loot is random. It's worth adding that there is sometimes more than one pot in a ruin and other goodies. Craft a shovel and dig around. Take any bone soil back and try panning it to collect other stuff of interest. The best loot from the pots I have had was two tin-bronze scythes.

Traps are designed and built by players, not craftable. I have two built (unashamably copied from YT content creators), one to run bears to (so I can safely collect resin from the pine trees in that area) and another for Storms to farm the rifters. At some point I will see if I can improve on them but they are perfectly fine for now.

Don't be sorry   this is a tough game with a fairly steep learning curve. I'm not aware that the handbook content is available outside the game but I suspect most of it is in the Wiki.

I think you'll find it very tough if you just try and go it alone without at least some homework. Winters in temperate regions are especially hard  (December - March) so you need to try and make sure you have enough food to last, along with some warm clothing. A cellar is perfect to help keep foods edible for a long time (with the help of crocks and storage vessels) and a fur coat/boots/gloves will help you survive the cold. The latter items can be easily made with hides and fat, you just need to allow the time for them to cure.

I have yet to venture too far from my home as it too appears to be surrounded by forests. Each time I have tried to make my way through them, some beastie or other manages to find me . In the meantime I've setup a home with farm, workshop with a windmill operated helve hammer, a greenhouse, and have some breeding sheep and pigs. I will be looking for some bees in the spring to populate the skeps I have waiting. In the surrounding area I have copper, tin and iron, blue and fire clay and peat. Although I have some iron tools I lack the resources to go 'full' iron so I will need to venture further. I have also yet to find much in the way of lore (no translocators yet either).

BTW one last thing, you can set your spawn point with temporal gears when you get one. Default setting (in world creation) limits it to 20 uses. It can be set to unlimited but that has to be done at the time the world is created.

/worldconfig temporalGearRespawnUses [-1 .. 9999]
The temporal gear allows you to set a spawn point. Here you can configure how often it can be used for respawning at the set point. -1 means infinite (default: 20)

 

I got this from the world configuration page.  So you can change it after.