February 2025 Development update: Forging ahead - version 1.21 and beyond

[Szczwany]

Hi! I feel like 1.19 and 1.20 gave us less survival / base game mechanics than previous updates and that's why some players are complaining. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel so

From 1.14 to 1.17 every update introduced something new base game changes and new survival mechanics: 1.14 steel, 1.15 and 1.16 pies, cheese, fruit trees, chicken nests 1.17 juice. So when we finally got 1.18 lore update it felt like it's high time to introduce lore.

.19 was focused on rework of all ruins, model reworks and new first person animations, new animals, antlers. It's all cool but there weren't many significant gameplay changes. More of them are in 1.20 but many players still wait for fishing, more complex irrigation system, combat rework or at least more weapons to choose from, integration or changes similar to Toolworks mod, more complex animal breeding, some visual changes of animals, higher generations giving more meat and milk, butchering, more realistic world generator.

I personally would like to see 1.22 to be big game reworking update giving new worldgen, rivers, fishes and fishing system, integration of toolworks mechanics and anounced rework of mechanical power to make us feel like the game really evolved between the Lore updates. I like VS Lore but I guess that most players loved this game because of its survival mechanics and we would really love to see them expanded too. I can't wait for 1.21 and 1.22. thanks for your work, this game is amazing

 

Edited March 2, 2025 by Szczwany

[DUCATISLO]

1 hour ago, Cetasaya said:

Oh god, the player's hurt and the trader noises were annoying enough.  I dont want to be serenaded by slapping and serpahs wailing like elk all night long...

i like them kinda adds charm to the game and reminds me of "don't starve" the game

[Cetasaya]

15 minutes ago, DUCATISLO said:

i like them kinda adds charm to the game and reminds me of "don't starve" the game

Sure.  I do too, but the volume is way too high compared to all the other sounds.  Especially when you run right up into a trader's cart youre literally inside of them and you open their dialouge box and your ears are bussy-blasted with HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK

And the volume level sliders in setting are all useless since entity covers everything from traders to drifters to bees to everything else that isnt wind or music, you either save your ears or have the game actually have audio.

[Ryan Thomas]

As far as roleplay, all I can do is speak for myself. I've never done MP, but I  roleplay a tiny bit in my SP games.

I personally don't like the concept of the Seraphs; I like to play as an explorer, sent to colonize what the government suspected was a peaceful planet. Once I discover that the planet has a little mystery to solve, sometimes I go to the archive, sometimes I don't and just build and farm and bop around the surface. Some things are easy to roleplay; the crafting grid is like some type of 3d printer or replicator or something. Some things I can't explain, like why I no longer need the bathroom (or bog, loo, water closet, terlet, or whatever people call them from wherever they're from). I can't explain why I suddenly sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown. From my perspective, I don't necessarily want to be a mayor/elder, setting up laws and zoning, but I think it'd be cool to have like a housemate or even a spouse and kids at some point. 

At the same time, maybe being solo in the game w/o a spouse and kids and stuff is a dream  vacation. In the game, I'll never have to hear "Ryan! For Pete's sake, you've had that Alice in Chains shirt since '96, either retire it or give it to one of the kids!" Or "Ryan, for Pete's sake! In our vows, do you remember hearing me say 'ya know, after a decade or two, it's totally acceptable for your underwear to be your only wear', or 'ya know, you're right, clothes Are for when company's over'?" I never have to hear "I'm not eating this! I'm not eating anything with a face!" I respect that, but how the hell was I supposed to know, when my daughter scarfed down a whole basket of popcorn shrimp last night? "Popcorn shrimp" isn't a type of popcorn! Shrimp have faces, she should know that, we have a thirty gallon tank with a ton of cherry shrimp swimming all over the place. 

So, while I don't need a sex update, I think having a spouse and offspring might kinda be fun, as long as I don't hear "Where do you think you're going? You can hunt later, right now the microwave's making a 'ker thwap, ting ting, ker thwaaaaap!' sound." I'm not an electrician! We do have an owners manual, and I'm not the only one who knows how to read. Yup, right here: "If microwave makes a 'ker thwap, ting ting, ker thwaaaaap' sound, there are several simple steps that you can take to fix it. 1) Unplug microwave. 2) Make a vulgar hand gesture to the microwave. 3) Throw microwave in the electronics recycling bin 4) Depending on your experience with the microwave, you can either say "so long, microwave, thank you for your years of reliable service" or "see you in hell, jank fart blossom". 5) Drive to appliance store and buy new microwave." Yup, I could totally write owners manuals

[Ryan Thomas]

2 hours ago, Cetasaya said:

HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK

As much as I love the game, I freaking hate that sound. Wasn't there an option to turn off voices at some point? I could have sworn....like 1.18, somewhere around there. Maybe I'm mistaken

[Maelstrom]

For one update (I think 1.17 or 1.18) there was an option whether to have the musical seraph voice or not.  But on the following update that option was removed.

[Ryan Thomas]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

For one update (I think 1.17 or 1.18) there was an option whether to have the musical seraph voice or not.  But on the following update that option was removed.

Ahh, thank you. I knew i wasn't losing it. Close, but not there quite yet. 

[lmfao]

On 2/21/2025 at 10:10 AM, Tyron said:

We also got something smol in the works

 

i wonder if this will be an emote or animation for a child npc. are we one step closer to being able to burn down orphanages in vs?

[Facethief]

It’s really fun to look back at these posts and look forward to what’s ahead in the game’s future.

[Centurions_War]

On 2/21/2025 at 4:10 PM, Tyron said:

Time for one of these again! Let's reflect a "little" and look into what the VS Team has been up to, while listening to awesome pixel remixes :D

1.20 post mortem
When you are knee deep in development it can be difficult to see the bigger picture, because oh boy did I not expect the amount of growth this update has created. On the day of release, the amount of purchases grew by 300%, consequently overloading every single server of ours one after the next over the course of 3 weeks. In addition to that some of our 3rd party providers had issues on their own causing further downtime. We had to optimize and up the specs on all the hardware we use to be able to deal with the additional load.
The downtime especially created massive amounts of new support tickets which our team was wholly unprepared for, so we had to quickly upscale the support team to overcome the flood of tickets.
Releasing the update on time itself came with quite a few sacrifices in terms of the content that we still wanted to add, but that has been the case for almost every update. Some of the rough edges have been ironed out in 1.20.3 and 1.20.4 with a few more things on the way, but more on that later.

Community and TOPS
Not only did we have an overheating help desk and servers, a growing community also means there are more points of contention and so we've had to adjust game content, processes and rules to ensure all our gathering spots remain friendly and welcoming places. Turns out, TOPS, our official public game server, is the perfect testing grounds to evaluate what tools are needed to provide just that. We have now added the capability for players to join in-game groups without invite (for language channels), prevent uncertainty when joining a full server with a join queue and we are in the works of adding a mod whitelist system so everyone playing there is on the same page. The additional game content of 1.20 also notably increased the hardware load on our game servers so that we had to lower the maximum player count on TOPS from 70 down to 55 and we are now optimizing various areas  of the server code to bring this back to 70 or 75 - to date we are already at 65 max players on TOPS. Furthermore, just very recently we've been hit by quite large DDoS attacks on TOPS and other player-run servers, which we are mitigating through optimization and blocking mechanisms, with a 1.20.5 coming out soon so other server owners can benefit from this mitigation as well.

The Mod Database also required urgent attention as we were lacking moderation tools there and we had to optimize the download bandwidth quickly, as it was bleeding money due to the peculiar cost structure of Amazon Web Services. In fairness, AWS even called me personally on their own initiative to offer their assistance with that. The VS ModDB is now serving 2.5 Terabytes of data daily.

On our Discord server we are currently testing a moderator support ticket system in order to simplify and streamline contact requests to moderators, which should come online very soon.

Moderation demands have also only grown and we have not yet kept pace with this increased demand. On that note, please be kind to our staff. We might not always get it right, but we try and we do listen to your feedback as much as possible.
 

Management overhead
At the same time, simply growing a company and all its related paperwork to satisfy all rules and regulations could be a full time job on its own. We are glad to have very good support for this from a local partner. Needing to keep an eye on all these aspects of this game project meant I am on a declining trend of availability to do the usual spearheading of game update programming and integration efforts. The demands on my time seem to grow quicker than my ability to delegate
That being said, I am optimistic that the right solutions will fall in place sooner or later and that I will be able to more strongly focus again on helping to get our next update built.
 

Continuing where we left off
As mentioned, the Team was left a bit dissatisfied with the current state of the 1.20 update. Consequently we initially planned to do a very very limited update with a much shortened development cycle, but the bar for this kept getting raised so we'll be doing it proper and make it a major release, ahead of our original plans for 1.21. However I will make sure to keep the scope limited to have this update released quicker than our previous ones.
Here's some of the points that we would like to address for 1.21. Disclaimer: Aspirational goal, some of it may get cut again.

• 2nd Boss fight improvements
• Bowtorn AI improvements
• Re-add Coral Reefs
• More direct ways to introduce the player to the game story
• Elk taming system: The elk should not be locked behind the lore content
• Better sailing system
• More work on some of the lore locations
• A rework of some of the existing animals and new wild life dangers for the warm climate zones, all very WIP still:
  
  
   
• We also got something smol in the works
  
   
• In parallel to that, we will more heavily focus on performance and RAM optimizations which will get added whenever the optimization is ready and tested. One of which is already in 1.20.4, another one will make it into 1.20.5 and more of them will come in future updates.
   

Beyond 1.21
Version 1.22 would then become what we originally planned for with v1.21 - dejank a number of mechanics and systems, mechanical power upgrades and likely one or 2 new or reworked crafting mechanics.
Version 1.23 will be the next major lore update where we will make more extensive use of the new dimension mechanics.

 

In Summary
Old plan:
1.21  Large update focusing on dejank and Mechanical power

New plan:
1.21  Small update to finish 1.20 content and fill in a few game content gaps
1.22  Large update focusing on dejank and Mechanical power
1.23  Large Lore update

One more thing
Wait you thought that's all? We wouldn't be called Anego Studios if we wouldn't be doing a hundred different things at once //content.invisioncic.com/r268468/emoticons/biggrin.png
We have also hired a fulltime & fullstack game developer that will work on a brand new secret game project completely unrelated to Vintage Story, but also a lot smaller in scope. Work on this project will be fully in parallel to the development of Vintage Story, so there will be no change in pace of updates for VS itself. I do have to say, its quite exciting to see it progressing already, I believe it has lots of potential.

That's most of whats happening around Anego Studios that I can think of right now. Next devlog in a month or two + 1.20.5 with fixes soon. Thank you for tuning in and keep being excellent!
 

 

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What happened to these teased creatures like the crocodile and  hippo?

Edited 10 hours ago by Centurions_War

[Silfrenbirce]

Okay wait.  There are hippos planned for the game?

Me getting constantly ganked by bears wasn't enough....?