Winters..

[N0ma13]

Hah!
I thought I was prepared AF.
Over a stack of flax grain, several pies, a few crocks. Gonna be fine..
I was not fine.
Three pieces of fur clothes and still too cold to travel far enough to scavenge.
Still made it Jan before deciding a new run with better understanding was called for. I am going to miss that beautiful stack of bronze ingots though

Now I have medium soil and it's already better.

Also, I set 12 day months. 9 seems too fast and oddly weird to me idk. I want to appreciate each season more.
Anyone played on 30? That seems a bit much.

[Guimoute]

I don't understand how you expected to last an entire winter, which might mean around 6 months without agriculture, on a stack of grain and "several pies". That's like a week of food. A stack of grain is the yield of perhaps 6 farmland blocks, that's quite a small garden. That was a good learning opportunity at least.

I don't understand why you would start a new run and erase all your progress because of lack of food either. Just go hunt. You can eat meat until the spring. Kill wolves and bighorns, they'll respawn eventually. Eat everything you have to eat to survive. Make meals to get the most satiety out of your ingredients.

As for the travel, who says you have to be warm all the time to go somewhere? Make a firepit when you are cold. Make a shelter when the night falls. You can travel any distance as long as you allow yourself not to sleep at home. The shelters that are spaced one short winter day of walk apart from each other will stay in your world forever and be useful every year.

Edited December 29, 2024 by Guimoute

[N0ma13]

I mean it was enough to last half way into Jan I just expected my berries to stay up as I've seen others have through winter. My climate was not their climate
It's ok if you don't understand, I enjoy playing the way I do as we all have our preferences.

My main purpose was to discuss the day length and share an experience. I'm already enjoying the new world more. Copper in less than a month (took like 3 the first run!). 
House is already better, cellar already in place. 
I love this game so far! Some day I'll go hunting for the lore.

[LadyWYT]

53 minutes ago, Guimoute said:

I don't understand why you would start a new run and erase all your progress because of lack of food either. Just go hunt. You can eat meat until the spring. Kill wolves and bighorns, they'll respawn eventually. Eat everything you have to eat to survive. Make meals to get the most satiety out of your ingredients.

I mean, when I first started playing Vintage Story I burned through several worlds due to mistakes. Sure, I could have kept those worlds and pushed through the consequences, but it was a lot easier and less frustrating to just start over with a better plan. Really just depends on player preference.

1 hour ago, N0ma13 said:

Also, I set 12 day months. 9 seems too fast and oddly weird to me idk. I want to appreciate each season more.

Twelve days per month is a sweet spot if you want more time with each season, but also want years to pass somewhat quickly(livestock, fruit trees, storytelling purposes). The default nine-per-month isn't bad either, but it does leave you with a bit less wiggle room when timing certain things.

1 hour ago, N0ma13 said:

Anyone played on 30? That seems a bit much.

I did once, mostly because I was still learning the game and wanted more time to cautiously figure things out without the pressure of feeling like I needed to rush winter planning. It was fun, and while the longer seasons mean you have a lot of extra time to do stuff, it also means you need to do some extra legwork when preparing for wintertime. Not that stocking supplies is terribly hard to do; it pretty much just means planting more crops and being more diligent about preserving food, along with digging an extra cellar or two. It's also nice having a realistic length of month and year, though I don't recommend picking this setting if you don't enjoy a slow-paced game. Time will drag quite a bit, especially if you don't often sleep through nights.

To my knowledge, 30 day months aren't used very often outside of multiplayer.

[N0ma13]

30 for MP is what I was thinking but not so much for SP. 
I like a slow pace and can appreciate small gains (Idle/Incremental are my fav genre) but IDK if I want to spend 'that' much time farming

[LadyWYT]

Just now, N0ma13 said:

I like a slow pace and can appreciate small gains (Idle/Incremental are my fav genre) but IDK if I want to spend 'that' much time farming

It doesn't actually take as much time farming as you might think. Just plant bigger fields and make sure they are irrigated so you don't need to spend time watering/relying too heavily on rain. That way all you have to do is work on other things until your crops are ready to harvest, and you'll get a much bigger yield per harvest as well.

That strategy does require that you have more seeds to plant to begin with, but with all the extra time you have finding seeds isn't going to be hard(unless of course you opted for some extreme environmental conditions in your world).

[N0ma13]

I do want to focus on a big farm so maybe it won't be so bad. We'll see how this 12day goes and how much better med is than low.
It definitely looks better lol

[Guimoute]

13 hours ago, N0ma13 said:

I mean it was enough to last half way into Jan I just expected my berries to stay up as I've seen others have through winter. My climate was not their climate
It's ok if you don't understand, I enjoy playing the way I do as we all have our preferences.

My main purpose was to discuss the day length and share an experience. I'm already enjoying the new world more. Copper in less than a month (took like 3 the first run!). 
House is already better, cellar already in place. 
I love this game so far! Some day I'll go hunting for the lore.

No problem I just think it's a shame to have lost the world but of course everyone has their preferences. I think keeping worlds forever is nice because they build up over time and it's a special feeling to revisit an area you had colonized (and perhaps abandoned) like 1 real life year ago.

About the month length, 30 days is a lot. That makes a game year last about 200 hours of play time. Personally I don't mind the cold weather and the snow but the length of the days themselves is a bit problematic in winter, as it forces you to sleep a lot even when you're just at home building stuff. It also makes your farmland 1/3 as effective, which can be inconsequential if you have a reasonably large farm. I have three chinampas of 7x7 and it's way too much food at 9 days/month so that should give you an idea of what you need for 30 days/month.

Overall I would say the default value is balanced. Maybe setting it to 10 instead of 9 to ease mental calculations.

 

[Zane Mordien]

One thing about food, is you can always survive the winter even without a big cellar of food. You just have to hunt all winter. Save this savegame file and come back to it when you are better at the game for a challenge. I just recently started replaying my first playthrough where I quit because I wasn't prepared enough and I've been enjoying the challenge of salvaging the playthrough. Good luck in your new playthrough!

[JAGIELSKI]

17 hours ago, N0ma13 said:

Anyone played on 30? That seems a bit much.

Actually my youtube series is set to be on 30 days per month. Not sure how much it will take. I will definitely need to get some wheat and bread production set up.

[N0ma13]

32 minutes ago, JAGIELSKI said:

Actually my youtube series is set to be on 30 days per month. Not sure how much it will take. I will definitely need to get some wheat and bread production set up.

Doing it SP? I may check out the channel. I watch playthroughs now and then for build ideas!

[N0ma13]

2 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

One thing about food, is you can always survive the winter even without a big cellar of food. You just have to hunt all winter. Save this savegame file and come back to it when you are better at the game for a challenge. I just recently started replaying my first playthrough where I quit because I wasn't prepared enough and I've been enjoying the challenge of salvaging the playthrough. Good luck in your new playthrough!

Yeah I may do that, I haven't deleted the save so maybe

[JAGIELSKI]

11 minutes ago, N0ma13 said:

Doing it SP? I may check out the channel. I watch playthroughs now and then for build ideas!

Yeah, singleplayer.

[Kevin Eric Snell]

Using default settings, how long are winters, usually? I've got snowfall around mid-November, sticking around until April. I also noticed at summer solstice I often have sunrise around 3:30 or 4 a.m., which apparently (at least so ChatGPT tells me) would put me around the 65th parallel in real Earth terms, so effectively northern Canada or northern Russia. Seems a little harsh for default settings, but who can say.

Also weird thing I've noticed, even though I see very little temperature variation (locally) going north & south, if I wander eastward over a few hills, I suddenly get a jump of 5 degrees. It's very weird, and it leads to me spending most of my early spring over the hill, because apparently my base is in this little pocket of cold.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Kevin Eric Snell said:

Using default settings, how long are winters, usually? I've got snowfall around mid-November, sticking around until April.

About 3-4 months, depending on whether or not you want to judge by snowfall, or musical cues. Mid-November to April sounds about right though, for standard settings.

It also depends somewhat on what altitude you settled at, and not just your climate zone. In my current world, I went with the default temperate start, but got plopped on top of a high-altitude plateau. So while I'm in the temperate climate zone, the actual environment behaves much more like the cool climate zone throughout much of the local area.

2 hours ago, Kevin Eric Snell said:

Also weird thing I've noticed, even though I see very little temperature variation (locally) going north & south, if I wander eastward over a few hills, I suddenly get a jump of 5 degrees. It's very weird, and it leads to me spending most of my early spring over the hill, because apparently my base is in this little pocket of cold.

The game tries its best to simulate a realistic environment, but it does have limits--hence scenarios like this. Though to be fair, it's not out of the question to get little pockets of warm/cold like that in real life either, especially in regions with a lot of mountains or hills.

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Mid-November to April sounds about right though, for standard settings.

Depends on what you mean by spring, too. Snow mostly stops falling, or reasonable to plant crops outside a greenhouse, or local ice is melted, or when you can switch to cooler (or no) clothes, berries/cattails start growing, etc.

My winters are generally a little shorter, because without movable water source blocks, you have little choice but to build your farm into a large lake, which is at sea level and it's quite a bit warmer at that altitude. The number I heard is 0.6C per m, but I think it's usually closer to 0.4. I'm not sure what all factors into it, but I generally build my mill at the top of a tall cliff, and my farm at sea level, and there's usually 8-10C difference between the two.

[Thorfinn]

Oh, one other thing, @N0ma13, is that you do not have to build a firepit to warm up. Just start a bush or a tree or a flower or one of those stupid useless ferns on fire and stand nearby. If it's snowing, you might need to place some packed earth or something above it. If you are walking around in your winter underwear, you clothes don't take fire damage if you are standing too close, either.

[N0ma13]

As I sit here with it not even 1700 and it's pitch black outside with snow on the ground and the wife needs cold medicine, I realize we need doordash in VS.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, N0ma13 said:

I realize we need doordash in VS.

We have it, it's just the delivery boys don't speak intelligibly, are slow, constantly get your orders wrong and then pelt you with rocks or smack you upside the head for pointing it out.