World Gen and Navigation Improvements

[MassiveHobo]

I saw this topic and had some ideas that would genuinely improve my experience in the game. 

 

There are some tremendous improvements that could take the gorgeous world gen this game has and turn it up even further. They mainly have to do with water, rivers, and ruins. Civilization almost always exists along a coastline or river. Story locations need to be connected to the rest of the world by large rivers and oceans, sailboats need this. It needs to be possible to navigate the entire in game world by boat without ever having to get on land, without the entire world being ocean with a few islands. The need to get out of a sailboat to travel more than a thousand blocks in any direction shouldn't exist with default worldgen. It makes the sailboat less useful as an addition. 

On the navigation side I think sailboats aren't quite ready, I think we need to be able to break them down to the bare hull and drag them across land by elk (faster) or by hand (crouch speed). All the cargo, rigging, and the mast has to come out. Maybe the boats gunwales even have to be stripped off leaving only the bottom half of the hull intact to be drug across land. Everything except the cargo and hull could be transported inside of a players inventory, the cargo could possibly be pulled by player wagon or sled (think valheim cart) while the elk follows pulling the hull. 

On the most specific and intensive side of ruins, I think they are too sparse and shallow. They don't do as much as they could for world building. If they were to be connected over vast distances by paths, roads, or railways and they were more expansive they would be amazing. Maybe there are no towns/cities and just very small villages or lone homesteads like death stranding where everybody lives on their own in their own settlement like a bunch of introverted hermits. More comprehensive ruins ought to generate, especially along rivers and coastlines, and I think those ruins need to connect to one another by way of dilapidated roads, bridges, and maybe even broken and interrupted sections of railroad. If theres a railway line connecting one ruin to the next spanning a thousand blocks of distance, 2-5% of those 1000 blocks have rails. There may not even be rails either, just sections of wooden ties as if somebody scavenged the copper/bronze rails. Broken bridges spanning rivers/ravines would also be incredible, to avoid a path/rail taking a 20 block nosedive in altitude as paths/roads/railways realistically try to minimize elevation changes. Maybe there are even basic tunnels going through mountains that have branch mines within them. 

 

[Khornet]

Yep, most of the frustrations of sailboat travel (swimming into an inland sea/lake and then having to backtrack a LOT because you landlocked yourself from the proper direction) could be indeed solved by adding rivers, which would allow you to swim inside them in order to "cut" across continents. 
Only detriment is that's a nuisance for elk travel, but a much more minor one, because it's easier to cross a river via an elk than an island via a sailboat.

[LadyWYT]

Rivers would be cool, even just small streams to find while out and about too. I think the main issue with them is figuring out how to get flowing water to generate like that. That being said, if rivers are added, I would probably also advocate for rapids as well, as a somewhat rare obstacle. I don't know that I would make rapids destroy boats necessarily, but they should be impassable spaces for watercraft at the very least. Small rapids would probably just be a nuisance, while big ones could limit which sections of river are really useful for water navigation.

On 12/6/2024 at 5:46 PM, MassiveHobo said:

On the navigation side I think sailboats aren't quite ready, I think we need to be able to break them down to the bare hull and drag them across land by elk (faster) or by hand (crouch speed). All the cargo, rigging, and the mast has to come out. Maybe the boats gunwales even have to be stripped off leaving only the bottom half of the hull intact to be drug across land. Everything except the cargo and hull could be transported inside of a players inventory, the cargo could possibly be pulled by player wagon or sled (think valheim cart) while the elk follows pulling the hull. 

Hmmm, I like this idea. It lets the players move their boats around, so they don't need to sink resources into building multiple boats, but at the price of taking more time and effort to move the thing.

On 12/6/2024 at 5:46 PM, MassiveHobo said:

On the most specific and intensive side of ruins, I think they are too sparse and shallow. They don't do as much as they could for world building. If they were to be connected over vast distances by paths, roads, or railways and they were more expansive they would be amazing. Maybe there are no towns/cities and just very small villages or lone homesteads like death stranding where everybody lives on their own in their own settlement like a bunch of introverted hermits. More comprehensive ruins ought to generate, especially along rivers and coastlines, and I think those ruins need to connect to one another by way of dilapidated roads, bridges, and maybe even broken and interrupted sections of railroad. If theres a railway line connecting one ruin to the next spanning a thousand blocks of distance, 2-5% of those 1000 blocks have rails. There may not even be rails either, just sections of wooden ties as if somebody scavenged the copper/bronze rails. Broken bridges spanning rivers/ravines would also be incredible, to avoid a path/rail taking a 20 block nosedive in altitude as paths/roads/railways realistically try to minimize elevation changes. Maybe there are even basic tunnels going through mountains that have branch mines within them. 

I actually disagree here; not because it wouldn't be interesting, but because I don't think it would fit the lore of the game. The short course, as I understand it, is the world of Vintage Story is set in the late medieval period(with some steampunk influences) after an apocalypse-level event essentially reshaped the entire world. The remnants of humanity that are left are few and far between. As for the ruins, they're either leftovers from the old world(underground mainly), or survivor settlements that got overrun(most likely scenario for surface ruins, based on the events in the Ghosts short story). In short, the player has been dumped into a monster-infested wilderness, with practically nothing except what's left of their clothing, and very limited knowledge of how they even got there to begin with.

Now I do expect ruins to potentially get another facelift or two as the game is further developed, but barring the specific story locations, I think they're primarily minor points of interest that may or may not hold anything of value to the player. In the meantime though, the Better Ruins mod upgrades the ruins to make them more detailed.