Development direction poll

[Tyron]

Hey players!

The coder team is getting to a point where we can begin tackling new tasks. I would be curious what the overall sentiment in the community is regarding what they should prioritize on. With emphasis on prioritize - usually we always work a bit on everything. Also please note, we are only gauging player interest. It might, or might not be part of our decision making.

[Lodeclaw]

There are a lot of incomplete features in the game right now and the longer the team waits to flesh them out the harder I feel it's going to be, in my opinion.

[chuck]

I don't care about jumping puzzles and bioware NPC dialogue I just want a flint and steel and a way to cook things that isn't the fire pit you make 3 minutes into the game.

[Jorrit Tyberghein]

Please finish and polish what's there first. That doesn't mean there can't be new smaller features but I think it's much cleaner to start adding big new features on top of a stable and polished game

[CreativeRealms]

Personally I would love to see changes that make JSON modding easier (which I'd be happy to elaborate on further) as well as the implementation of various QoL mods into vanilla. As mentioned in the previous dev post, adding more ways to craft blocks (be it in-world crafting and/or some form of crafting station similar to the stonecutter in Minecraft) that can be built upon by the modding community would also be incredibly valuable additions to the game.

Ultimately I'd like to see a de-jank update that is more focused on the foundational aspects of the game that we the community can build upon rather than one which focuses on adding new content.

Edited February 27, 2025 by CreativeRealms

[Nonchy]

New content can wait, as I'm sure there are still quite a bit of bugs present. For example shift clicking an item to your inventory and it disappearing, taking damage pushing you into blocks (not sure if it is still present).

[Tyron]

Fascinating, I did not expect this to take the nr.1 spot. The already proposed Dejank update apparently is the way to go.

 

[Weeder]

i would like to see some of the content smoothed out, but i really want more Blocks, more animals, more Breed able Animals ... More things that are meaningful. the jump puzzles and stuff i don't really care for

[Rexie]

As much as I am eager for new content, I'd like to see polish first with the new content and wrapping up whatever may not be finished.

Then probably follow up with bug fixing, then lastly content.

I'm quite impatient for this new river/mechanical overhaul that I've heard so much teased about, but unfinished content can accumulate and just lower the quality of the game in the long run. Besides, we still need coral reefs to be added, as I'm last aware of them being unfinished currently. Which is a shame.

[ifoz]

Definitely polishing existing content, I think.
I really felt like some of the second story chapter, as awesome as it is, could rather use a polish.
There's incomplete NPC features, and I also felt like a certain very tall location could have some alternate way to get up, for those players who would rather go gather resources to fix the elevator or something instead of doing the parkour gauntlet. 

That's just what I think, anyways. 
You're doing really great, guys!!

Edited February 27, 2025 by ifoz

[Gerritt McGill]

I'm with Lodey here, I feel like it would be great to have all the existing systems in the game brought up to the same level of polish as, say, the smithing and leathermaking systems.

Those two systems really work well and are enjoyable to me, it makes some of the less refined systems really stand out - things like field irrigation being a simple "place infinite water every 3 blocks" and shingle roofs being "spend 3 IRL hours handcrafting individual tiles" while bricks can be made en masse in the crafting grid. I spend a lot of time in the gameplay help channel on discord, and one of the biggest issues is explaining the propick to new players. And then once they finally grasp it, I then have to explain that for certain ores that only spawn in sedimentary rocks, the answers it gives are wrong and artificially lower than they should be. It also does not make sense that cooking a stack of items in the fireepit causes the stack temperature to reset after every item, unless you take it out and hold the hot stack in your hand and add the items back in one by one.

The rest of the game is so polished, pretty, and fun to play these little rough edges really stand out when the player finds them.

[Hexis]

I would agree with a few people here. there are some serious gameplay-halting bugs, like the item vanishing bug mentioned. its easy to replace in a solo world by switching to creative, but, a) that ruins the fun, and b) isnt always replaced (usually isnt) in multiplayer settings, which can cause serious setbacks. the animal pathing is also still very janky, for example the gazelles running away then switching to run towards you, plus cave ins causing serious eruptions of stone in some cases, or causing the mantle to fall. 

more content would mean more bugs, potentially some worse than what already is present, and you could get buried in that pretty quickly, so i think dejank should definitely be at least high up on the priority list. 

[ifoz]

1 minute ago, Gerritt McGill said:

things like field irrigation being a simple "place infinite water every 3 blocks" and shingle roofs being "spend 3 IRL hours handcrafting individual tiles" while bricks can be made en masse in the crafting grid.

I'm hoping for a more fleshed out weaving mechanic than "put the fibres/cloth in the grid", it'd give me something other than chiselling to do in the winters. 

[lakij]

while new content and lore is nice, it would be nice to see some QoL features, such as:
- chat commands having the ability to auto-complete
- world edit being simplified and more flexible (not needing to use exact coordinates)
- the GUI can be merged, currently its split into character menu, inventory, console

Also things that very much need polish:
- minimap unloads chunks you are at, for some reason
- creatures at times go invisible and item descriptions don't show (while it is likely tied to not enough RAM, it should still be changed so you don't get killed by something you cannot see)

while these are things that I would personally like to be handled (if they aren't already), and it's possible there are some limitations, I would still prefer it to new content

[Voldemort]

12 minutes ago, Tyron said:

Fascinating, I did not expect this to take the nr.1 spot. The already proposed Dejank update apparently is the way to go.

 

I dont mind new content, hell i am so hyped on new animals  

[KubaNowskyy]

I'm constantly encountering bugs while playing multiplayer (I'm hosting on lan with lan-like vpn). Mostly ghost players where they are somewhere else but I see them not moving in certain spot, etc. I would really love new content but polishing and bug fixing is definitely a better direction right now.

[Chicky Lumps]

Examples of mechanics that really need polish:

—Crafting recipes relying too much on certain recurring ingredients when realistically there should be alternative. e.g. Tule just being "grass but worse," when it should be an alternative to cattails in at least some recipes; flax farming being an ultra bottleneck for linen, when sheep should provide wool as an alternative.

—Terrain generation being kinda bare bones, leading to that samey parabaloid blob world look lots of basic voxel games have. (e.g. Minecraft in its early days.) Craggy mountains or gradual inclines are very rare, instead any hilly place is full of way too many ultra sheer cliff faces.

—Stacks of material in firepits reset temperature each time a single one cooks, making quicklime, calcined flint, and roasted meat take ridiculous amounts of time and fuel to make.

—Story locations seem intended for different stages of progression, but the first locations are usually so far from spawn that starting the story ends up happening after I'm through most other progression.

—Animal behavior being a bit one dimensional in some cases. Bears shouldn't constantly kill everything when not hungry, moose shouldn't hunt humans like polar bears, and chickens shouldn't readily swim across oceans.

—Clutter having a repair cost so you have to be somewhat selective what you really want is a good idea. However, the current pitch glue cost per clutter is just exorbitantly high. Currently you have to choose between clutter either being completely free or ridiculously expensive, there's no middle ground.

This is just reasons off the top of my head I voted for polish.

Oh, and don't get me started on how jank and unfinished vanilla combat feels.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Chicky Lumps

[Elustaani]

If possible I would personally like to see the world generation in vanilla to be less "random" and more realistic (Especially how the mountains sometimes generate) and regardless of the World generation settings. I somewhat like the randomness but I enjoy realism more!

Anyway... The game is currently going to the right direction and I hope it will in the future as well!

[Streetwind]

I am still wishing and hoping for that long, long overdue firepit rework. It needs to (a) follow the calendar instead of fixed amounts of RL seconds per recipe; (b) get balanced for an approach where the entire stack's temperature doesn't reset after every smelt, but rather scales the initial heat-up time with the stack size; and (c) have an eventual upgrade like a cast-iron stove.

Bonus points if it gets a secondary output slot where things like wood ash could appear. Even if stock VS doesn't immediately make use of it, you can bet that a bunch of modders will pounce on it with glee.

Heck, I'd even debate moving high-temperature crucible smelting out of the firepit entirely and into some other mechanic, leaving the firepit to focus on lower temperature cooking, torchmaking, and longer burn times for room heating. For example, coal/charcoal/coke could simply be removed as a valid fuel source for the firepit, so while you could still insert a crucible, it would not get hot enough for most metals. The forge could take over those high-temperature jobs. It is really easy to build as well, there's no progression problem there! (Of course, that would require the forge to get reworked as well, since at the moment it completely ignores fuel types and always reaches the same temperature...)

Then cut in half the temperature that peat can reach, and instead make it burn two or three times as long as a piece of firewood, and you have another thing that players have long asked for: something to keep the house warm that doesn't get consumed rapidly. That also turns peat deposits from a relatively inconsequential novelty that gets dug up solely for making funny screenshots for reddit into something that, in the winter, becomes as desirable as clay or copper ore. Or if that's too simple, let us craft something out of peat that becomes this low-temperature, long-duration fuel.

 

I'll also second the already mentioned need for something more than crafting grid recipes for spinning and weaving. How much more fun would playing a tailor be if you could have a whole workshop with immersive crafting stations for the whole journey from flax fibres over string and woven cloth to a dyeing section and mannequins for displaying finished products. We already have the latter half - so the first half would complete it.

 

And I won't discount that there are bugs in need of fixing... but if I had the opportunity to ask the dev team for one single thing and have it implemented? I would ask for the firepit rework.

[VSkeleton]

I feel there may be a lot of overlap between polishing existing content and bug fixing. I think a lot of things that need to be polished could feasibly be considered a bug and a lot of things people recognize as bugs may be due to a lack of polish. Regardless, ever since the full release of 1.20 I have been experiencing random severe ping spikes on any multiplayer server even if my ping to the IP is good outside of the Vintage Story client, in addition a couple chunks on my server with large gears set up in sequence seem to fail to load after the server first initializes the chunks. A great deal of things in the 1.20 update need addressing like Elks sliding up blocks instead of clipping up instantly and them falling in holes being such a consistent problem, I've seen many users mention a certain major story sequence breaking for them, too. I think an equal focus should be taken on fixing severe bugs and addressing game features that just don't feel fully baked yet.

[Gerritt McGill]

18 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

I am still wishing and hoping for that long, long overdue firepit rework. It needs to (a) follow the calendar instead of fixed amounts of RL seconds per recipe; (b) get balanced for an approach where the entire stack's temperature doesn't reset after every smelt, but rather scales the initial heat-up time with the stack size; and (c) have an eventual upgrade like a cast-iron stove.

Bonus points if it gets a secondary output slot where things like wood ash could appear. Even if stock VS doesn't immediately make use of it, you can bet that a bunch of modders will pounce on it with glee.

Heck, I'd even debate moving high-temperature crucible smelting out of the firepit entirely and into some other mechanic, leaving the firepit to focus on lower temperature cooking, torchmaking, and longer burn times for room heating. For example, coal/charcoal/coke could simply be removed as a valid fuel source for the firepit, so while you could still insert a crucible, it would not get hot enough for most metals. The forge could take over those high-temperature jobs. It is really easy to build as well, there's no progression problem there! (Of course, that would require the forge to get reworked as well, since at the moment it completely ignores fuel types and always reaches the same temperature...)

Then cut in half the temperature that peat can reach, and instead make it burn two or three times as long as a piece of firewood, and you have another thing that players have long asked for: something to keep the house warm that doesn't get consumed rapidly. That also turns peat deposits from a relatively inconsequential novelty that gets dug up solely for making funny screenshots for reddit into something that, in the winter, becomes as desirable as clay or copper ore. Or if that's too simple, let us craft something out of peat that becomes this low-temperature, long-duration fuel.

 

I'll also second the already mentioned need for something more than crafting grid recipes for spinning and weaving. How much more fun would playing a tailor be if you could have a whole workshop with immersive crafting stations for the whole journey from flax fibres over string and woven cloth to a dyeing section and mannequins for displaying finished products. We already have the latter half - so the first half would complete it.

 

And I won't discount that there are bugs in need of fixing... but if I had the opportunity to ask the dev team for one single thing and have it implemented? I would ask for the firepit rework.

Honestly, this and the irrigation are what stands out to me the most when thinking about things needing finish/polish. Smithing, clayforming, and leathermaking all feel like truly unique systems that really have a "vintage story" feel to them. they feel like part of a unique vision that is communicates wat Tyron and team are really trying to make the game into. The firepit feels like "Minecraft furnace, but harder and more expensive." Having different cooking temps and processing times is a good start, but resetting stack temperature after it's heated just feels like a halfway point between MC's furnace and a really unique VS experience. Crop irrigation is another one - water irrigates crops up to 4 blocks away in Minecraft - making it only 3 blocks away in VS, but with diminishing returns, feels very "minecraft, but harder." Especially since making infinite water is easier in this game than in MC.

[Waiban Taboricki]

I would like to order one bugfix update burger with polished contents fries as a side dish.

[DejFidOFF]

Prioritize performance 

[Scout]

Even though you already mentioned in an interview that you dont see an issue there i want to put it here: finally fix combat (hitboxes, proper hit detection, etc). 

The most voted suggestion ever on Discord is the combat update with 1000+ votes. I leave this here for people to react if they still think this should be adressed.

[Robinzon]

Before the next leap forward, it would be good to stop and lick wounds, for example fixing some bugs and resolving some technical debts.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Robinzon