Development direction poll

[Mad Engineer]

Normally I'd vote for bugfixing, but I have encountered so few bugs, and the few ones I've encountered are so minor, that I'd say finishing/polishing existing content is more important.

[Xiarno]

I believe the guidebook should be remade. Or at least worked on.

For a new player it can be pretty confusing and also missing stuff or being very unclear. Basically it's not user friendly and many time I had to go look online for clearer answer.

[Thorfinn]

6 hours ago, CreativeRealms said:

Personally I would love to see changes that make JSON modding easier (which I'd be happy to elaborate on further)

I'd be interested. I'm not sure what could be done to make it easier. If you understand enough about JSON to make the changes, ModMaker 3000 handles pretty much everything else.

[Krimzain]

I love the idea of new animals, I love the idea of flint and steel, I love the idea of a way to cook that's a bit more advanced than just a campfire.

I love the idea of a rowboat that can serve as a middle ground between sailboat and raft. Horses, cattle species (buffalo, bison, yak), seals or blubbery animals in northern temperatures. I would like an earlier game way of warding off drifters from your base that isn't just light based like "popular block game" (perhaps something superstitious like religious trinkets or talismans?). Adding the thing that mod does that lets you pick up and move anvils + similar blocks and for the love of all that is holy adding that fish trap line mod to base game (living any temperature north of temperate is near impossible without it).

BUT the dejank and bug fixes/stabilizing should take priority in my opinion

[CreativeRealms]

9 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I'd be interested. I'm not sure what could be done to make it easier. If you understand enough about JSON to make the changes, ModMaker 3000 handles pretty much everything else.

I don't mean making it so it is easier to create JSON patches. I mean making them a more powerful tool for modding. Right now there are some pretty significant limitations to JSON patching which I think can be solved with some tweaks to the base game.

I kind of wish I made a list of suggestions when I encountered a lot of them.

[Thorfinn]

I prefer a combination. Alternate de-jank (which IMO, there is not a whole lot to do) with polishing and creating releases. So the cycle would be something like new, de-jank, polish, de-jank. At the moment start with de-jank. Collapsing high fertility soil that disappears is disheartening. Taking damage in rockfalls where your voxel is not affected is puzzling. Taking damage because you were standing too close to a block where you were digging, and a loose flint falls on your toe is funny. At least in most circumstances.

It would be nice to know where a given feature is headed, too. For example, the new calcined flint is a good step. But is that the end of that idea? Is the firepit just a stopgap, or is it the intended vehicle? Was there a reason that only tools move to the hotbar when the old one is exhausted? Why not firewood or dirt or rammed earth? Understanding the vision behind those choices would help a lot. 

[EDIT]

I think I know the answer to the firepit question, though. I take it the stove still needed some work, so is for a future release?

Edited February 27, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Guest]

I would really like an improvement in the interface. Especially for the guides and for blocks. It was difficult for me to understand what crafts was available and how to use some blocks and items. 

[Drakker]

Everything is in place to have the player's backpack items drop to the ground as containers that do not despawn. Maybe a temporary belt container item could be created to store whatever is in the player's belt. There's no reason to lose our stuff to a despawn timer when we die. Something would need to be done about lava, it would be nice to not lose everything.

[Tetsune]

I'm always a sucker for more non-modded content, but more than anything I think building a solid foundation and paving the ways for easier implementation for the future is a far better option. Keepin it tidy, fellas.

[Zensuu]

Client and server hosting performance should be the leading priority imo.

For some of us (as seen in bug report threads in the discord) 1.20 introduced some very intense stuttering issues, especially when hosting and playing on the same computer, an issue that 1.19 did not have. There is all these funny workarounds we have to do to limit it, but do not entirely prevent it. It would be nice to get back the performance of 1.19 before anything else is fixed or added.

[Thorfinn]

50 minutes ago, Tetsune said:

I'm always a sucker for more non-modded content, but more than anything I think building a solid foundation and paving the ways for easier implementation for the future is a far better option. Keepin it tidy, fellas.

I think in an ideal world Team VS would work hardcore on game engine, implementing limited proof of concept JSONs that serve as examples for creating mods. Which is, I think, mostly what the vision is. It's up to the community to expand from the specific instances into the broad panoply of realistic options. Skeps are proof of concept, @Vinter Nacht's From Golden Combs is the more full-throated implementation. The cooking pot is proof of concept, @l33tmaan's Expanded Foods is one of several expansions of the idea. Windmills are proof of concept to @Spear and Fang's Millwright or the waterwheels from @Rhonen's Medieval Expansion.

But to make this into a general solution one thing @Tyron's team has to implement is a rock solid dependency resolution system. A simple dependency chain is easily resolved, and, near as I can tell, is always done correctly. So modding a single mod which has a dependency is fine. But it's easy to end up with cyclical dependencies if you are modding multiple mods, particularly with some of the more popular ones being essentially megamods on their own. Those are not always resolved correctly, and, depending on the load order, can give very inconsistent results.

That's a long-winded way of saying I'm not a huge fan of expanding base game content, apart from things central to the vision, like the story. Let 100 people come up with their own visions of cooking, or animals, or mapgens, or whatever, and let people pick and choose from amongst them for what they think the game should be. Or, indeed, introduce a few tweaks and make it their own.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Thorfinn

[WiggleStick]

Debug, Polish, and Finalize. Enjoy the satisfaction of completion. Nothing is heavier than an unfinished project.

If you decide there is more after that. Start VS2, For what I paid for this experience, I would gladly do it again.

[Voldemort]

7 hours ago, Robinzon said:

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

Watch out with these memes. I once posted some and got flagged by moderator for harassment, lol. 

[ToastyDerek]

I voted for bug fixing but the more i think about it, the more I'm actually leaning towards a polishing/dejank. Specifically, I would love to see a pass on the UX and general interactions in the game. For example:

• Interacting with fired clay items should all behave similarly. Why can I right click to pick up a clay mold with a non-empty hand but I cannot do the same with an ingot mold? Ideally, all items that can be right-clicked into your inventory should be doable as long as there is an open inventory slot.
• Filling a bloomery full of iron nuggets is an exercise in carpel tunnel syndrome. Why is only 5 added at a time while also requiring such a crazy key combo?
• Filling pit kilns with things like bricks is frustrating because of the first insert adding only one brick, requiring the removal of a brick at the end to make 12. Additionally, I think it would be great if there was a stop point at the pit kiln max if the pile starts in a 1x1 hole to make adding the exact amount require less precision/tedium
• Crates are a UX nightmare. Why am I required to hold the item to insert into a crate that already has that item? Look at the BetterCrates mod. Double-tapping right click inserts all items of the crate's type automatically. Coming back from a trip and inserting 12 stacks of rocks, for example, requires me to insert each stack individually, tediously messing with my inventory to do so. This is needlessly frustrating and breaks me out of the game.

These are just the things I remember and I haven't played in a couple of months.

Additionally, the mechanical systems are in need of a lot of dejank. The bug that makes chutes/hoppers/etc spill items all over the place when the chunks become unloaded means you have to babysit your base while you are using automated machines. Defeats half the purpose of automating it in the first place!

Also, the way chutes work (or rather, don't work) to split and merge different pipes could use a look. I think we could remove pre-crafting chutes all together and using the chute sections in-world to build pipe networks would not only be more fun, but also more intuitive.

The quern also behaves in undesirable ways. The most annoying of which is that the operation resets if a side is blocked rather than outputting to the first available side. This makes quern setups unnecessarily complicated and is not intuitive.

 

At face value, a lot of these issues might seem small and insignificant, but over hundreds and thousands of hours of playing this game, they add up and create a frustrating experience.

[Blackmare]

Personally voted for the dejank and polishing and in that polishing adding trait restrictions to other recipes other than just grid types.

[Thap]

Just adding my voice to the consensus here, the game needs its systems/mechanics worked on in a major way before more content is added, if only because building "story locations" on an unfinished foundation WILL prove to be a major problem in the future. Personally, I'm most interested in world generation (rivers, mountain ranges, slopes, valleys, getting rid of paraboloid hills and weird cliffs with regularly spaced edge walkways) and seeing some work on a Distant Horizons functionality (I don't care snow interferes with it, this is such a killer feature you need to figure it out, besides it would likely help the janky seasonal snow mechanics in unloaded chunks too), but also:
The Discord suggestions forum is full of good ideas.

The ModDB is full of good ideas.

Please, the game feels like it's stagnating or developing in directions most of the audience doesn't enjoy.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Thap
polish

[Norbix]

As a Vintage Story content creator and a player with around 3,000 hours in the game, I think I can contribute to this discussion. I believe the next two updates should primarily focus on refining existing mechanics and fixing what we already have. The world generator is still very unrealistic and fragmented. We desperately need more plains and rivers - how long do we have to wait for them? You’ve added boats and rafts, but outside of oceans, there’s barely any use for them. Water mechanics and water mills were supposed to be addressed as early as version 1.14 (if I remember the poll correctly), and yet we still have nothing. I honestly don’t understand why oceanic content is being added when there’s so much to improve on land (again, rivers and terrain generation).

We have farming in the game, but the hoe is practically useless. Why? Because we use it once to till the soil, and that’s it. There should be periodic plowing, weeds to remove, and maybe some rebalancing, because right now, a single harvest is enough to eliminate any food-related challenges. By the way, is pepper finally functional, or is it still useless? Bees, aside from providing honey and fragile honeycombs that constantly break, don’t really exist in the game. Maybe it's time for some improvements? Different types of beehives, bee interactions with farms and herbs instead of just randomly placing flowers around a hive and breaking it to collect honey. This mechanic has been flawed for a long time - thankfully, there’s a mod like From Golden Combs to fix it.

We got fruit trees and alcohol, but alcohol has no real purpose beyond "haha, I got drunk!" I’d love to see further development in herbalism and alchemy. Herbs have existed in the game for ages, but nothing has been done with them. You've added multiple goat variants, yet the world still feels empty. Insects as particle effects were a step in the right direction, but the world still lacks life. We can buy wolves from traders, but what’s the point? There’s still no taming system, and besides the current deer, we’re basically alone - no companion animals at all.

The 1.20 update should have been delayed by at least 2–3 months. We got a completely bugged boss that worked differently for everyone. The new translocator was a huge letdown - I expected something more than just teleporting to Tobias’ cave every X in-game days. I was hoping for actual teleporters with limited uses, maybe powered by temporal gears. Instead, we got something incredibly underwhelming. The update was supposed to be a "huge lore update," but it turned out to be a mess.

Optimization and memory leaks have plagued this game for a long time. You release an update only to push a de-jank patch immediately after because the game lags, crashes, and is filled with bugs. Either the testing process is severely lacking, or it’s time for a major code rewrite - this is not how things should be.

Combat is still weak. We recently got some shield changes, which are a step in the right direction, but nothing beyond that. Fighting feels like it was thrown together last-minute. There’s essentially only one type of melee weapon aside from the bow. Armor doesn’t work well and is ridiculously expensive for the player. There should be an additional death setting: drop only items from backpacks, but keep those backpacks/armor (would be great for multiplayer servers).

Mounts were hyped up as two different types, yet we only got one. And after a while, its sound effects become incredibly annoying.

I could go on, but I don’t want to complain about everything - there are some great mechanics in the game, like the clay overhaul (though a pottery wheel as a later tech upgrade would be nice), archives, improved ruins, etc. I just really hope you take this survey seriously and focus on improving and refining the existing mechanics. We don’t need new content - we need fixes and improvements.

Btw talk with modders, there are a lot of great ideas there. Most of them need refactoring, but most of the the ideas and base is good.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Norbix

[CastIronFabric]

Waterwheels which is on the roadmap as a possibility, I think should be priority.

I know many want polish done first but consider this:

When a new feature like Waterwheels is added to the game, that can change your strategy of progress completely.

In my opinion projected features that could impact the way a person goes about progressing in a game should be (when possible) addressed first.

 

 

Edited February 27, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Lich]

would definitely like to see the riding system fleshed out more

[Svarrmir]

I also think polishing existing mechanics is a good way to go since I was a bit disappointed (not too much, just a bit, I still love everything else) with some mechanics in the new version.

For example 1: Getting an elk feels rather "gamey" at the moment, I wish that we could actually encounter elks (and other mounts like horses, camels (and especially donkeys)) in the wilderness and tame them.

and 2: Not a fan of the fact that the boats have no collisions and you can't walk around on them

[Viceroy]

Was split between prioritizing bugfixing and polishing/fixing existing content. I am gonna opt for bugfixes. What has been grinding my gears a lot is bad networking. I play solely multiplayer and enjoy the game more with friends. Seeing the bounty go away for improved networking makes me question what happened to it. What I have noticed is:  

• still seeing ghost players 
• player pins not updating 
• both player and mount (elk) jitter and lag when observed by other player
• when connecting to a server you are vulnerable for couple seconds after your player model appears before you can move. Also the joining chat message is off sync.
• when engaged in combat your hits register with considerable delay and vice versa when you get hit
• placing blocks when jumping (might not be networking related not sure)
• lag spike whenever someone joins, sends message in chat
• various connection issues

Outside networking what has been annoying is garbage collection in RAM. This has been issue for a VERY long time. No LOD so far... Entities causing too much lag when players are gathered in small area because mod cap is per player and not in loaded chunks so you get million monsters in caves and dark areas. Performance has gotten worse. Many of my friends are baffled a block game is this laggy. Was laggy before but with the added content and very limited performance improvements have not made a net gain.

Regarding the polishment/fixes for the existing content and mechanics I think most has been already said. I would add that making glass in bloomeries is bit silly. Acquiring rock blocks by digging around it is the annoying and un-fun part when you want to do building. I am so glad for stone quarry mod and other mods "fixing" and improving existing content and mechanics. Modders are the real mvps here.Classes might need some lsight balancing imo. Tailor and clockmaker are bit lacking.
If this wins the vote I am cool with that. It is needed anyway. I am also bit disappointed you will be announcing dejank pt. 2 when previous update was a dejank. I certainly hope this does not become a pattern and this will be last dejank you do.

Edited February 27, 2025 by Viceroy

[DUCATISLO]

woah

[bungling]

i barely sank my teeth into this game and i can already tell that it needs some dejanking and some minor QoL features

just to start, being able to rightclick to pick up specific items, and sneaking to pick up multiple items (essentially just RLCraft) would be a very nice addition as i find myself struggling to pick up a specific item in a pile of them

[Cetasaya]

the elk and the parkour tower and boss are all heinously bad and should be scrapped wholesale and replaced, top to bottom.  elk is absolutely atrocious on nothing but the flattest and most barren terrain.  trying to click the half pixel wide saddlebags and cooking pots on it are a pain.  trying to wrangle it on and off the boat is an absolute nightmare.  the parkour tower is bland, low effort and isnt even parkourable.  the boss literally just knocks you off in one hit almost everytime.

i cant even get the simplest greenhouse to register.

i got an invicible wolf out there one time a couple days ago.

why does the game think im always trying to fight grass with a falx in my hand and not the bear trying to kill me?

Edited February 27, 2025 by Cetasaya

[DUCATISLO]

6 minutes ago, Cetasaya said:

why does the game think im always trying to fight grass with a falx in my hand and not the bear trying to kill me?

God i hate this...