Do we really need a combat overhaul? What are your opinions on it?

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Please do, because so far my gameplay experience suggests the opposite. On calm days there doesn't tend to be a lot of activity underground, unless it's a really unstable chunk, and on days with higher rift activity the underground tends to be a little...busier.

You're mentioning rift activity here, though, which is another component of the system that wasn't brought up earlier. Should have probably mentioned that myself as well. When saying that "this is not true" I was referring specifically to "unstable surface areas are more likely to spawn rifts, and unstable areas underground are more likely to have monsters", just so we're clear.

Overall, the code relevant for the temporal mechanics can be found primarily in these classes:

• SystemTemporalStability in TemporalStability.cs (most important for our purposes),
• EntityBehaviorTemporalStabilityAffected in BehaviorTemporalStabilityAffected.cs,
• ModSystemRifts in Rifts.cs,
• ModSystemRiftWeather in RiftWeather.cs.

The "ambient" temporal stability affects nothing except the player - doesn't make rifts more likely, and doesn't increase monster spawns. The SystemTemporalStability.GetTemporalStability() function is only called in one place in the entire codebase, in EntityBehaviorTemporalStabilityAffected, and it is used to modify the player's stability.

The player's own temporal stability is used primarily in two places:

• In SystemTemporalStability.Event_OnTrySpawnEntity() to bump monsters to higher tiers at low player stability (only takes effect below 25% stability).
• In SystemTemporalStability.CanSpawnNearby() to determine whether enemies can spawn nearby. Broadly speaking:
  • low player stability gradually reduces the effectiveness of artificial light sources at blocking spawns (at below 25% stability),
  • on the surface, monsters can only spawn in proximity to rifts, much less frequently during the day,
  • underground, they can spawn regardless of rifts (because rifts don't even spawn underground) - in this context, low player stability has the following effects:
    • at below 25% stability, gradually reduces the minimum distance at which monsters can spawn, from the default of 18 down to ~12.7 at 12.5% stability,
    • at 12.5% stability and lower, reduces the maximum distance at which monsters can spawn to 10 blocks, and ignores minimum spawn distance - this actually greatly reduces the effective spawn rate, since it reduces the spawning area to just a 10-radius sphere around the player.

The currently active rifts are only accessed through the ServerRifts property in SystemTemporalStability.CanSpawnNearby() as mentioned above, to check proximity to rifts when determining whether a monster can spawn on the surface.

The rift activity is used in ModSystemRiftWeather.onServerTick() to adjust the maximum quantity in the runtime spawn conditions for surface drifters and deep drifters depending on the current rift activity. For some reason, it doesn't affect shivers and bowtorn, so it still allows large quantities of them to spawn regardless of rift activity. And this kind of problem is precisely what makes me say that I increasingly doubt "intentional design choices".

 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

What I don't like about "just make it bed spawns[like Minecraft]" is that...it's a very cheap way to handle it.

6 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Why would you even craft a terminus teleporter at your spawn location when you can just drop a bed and sleep in it right before you die?

How can any progress ever come out of a discussion when the default reaction to criticism of the current system which didn't even bring up Minecraft has to include the mention that porting over that game's system with no changes would be worse than what we have now? You're disproportionately focusing on just one solution and discounting it on the account of being unfitting for whatever you're imagining Vintage Story's design direction to be by immediately assuming that the person who mentioned beds would want them to be implemented just like in Minecraft. No one in this discussion except you two has even mentioned Minecraft.

 

On 8/21/2026 at 5:03 PM, Nekkowe said:

Are there any announced plans of changing any of that anytime soon...?

This is what Tyron has said in the latest dev update, and it is very nearly everything we know - next to nothing as far as actual specifics go:

Quote

The 1.23 update
This it the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: Tighter, more visceral hit detection; More varied attack animations; Possibly rework of armor- and weapon tiers; A few more types of weapons; and more! The combat changes will be in good hands - we have Maltiez, author of the mod Combat Overhaul, on our team to advise us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection tech from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \o/
(For clarity, we will not integrate Combat Overhaul into the vanilla game. CO will still have a reason to exist after this update)

Balduranne has descended deep into a major armor rework as teased in #devlog. There will still be 3 armor slots, but each piece can be built up in layers.

https://media.vintagestory.at/monthly_2026_06/Armor_Rework.thumb.png.781c2c6f7431b07be770028c7beb18db.png

Edited August 22 by MKMoose

[Nekkowe]

7 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

which means you weren't reading to understand, you were skimming to prove a point

Pot, meet kettle.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

No one in this discussion except you two has even mentioned Minecraft.

Except Nekkowe did from the start.

On 8/21/2026 at 10:03 AM, Nekkowe said:

Death returns you to world spawn, for some ungodly reason (until you install a bed spawn mod)

What other block games allow you to set your spawn point with a bed? I'm curious. 

Because the fact of the matter is Minecraft started the whole idea.

• VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) -- Minecraft recreation - Includes bed spawns
• Luanti (Minetest) -- several games (including VoxeLibre) built on this engine include bed spawns
• Core Keeper -- top-down mining game where beds act as spawn points
• 7D2D -- bedrolls set your respawn point

Of these 4, that I could find using the internet, I have only heard of 7D2D and I didn't even know it had a bed respawn mechanic. I think it's safe to say whenever someone is talking about beds resetting the spawn point, they're directly referencing the other block game... so don't pretend no one in this discussion has mentioned it except me and @LadyWYT. It was here all along, just implied instead of named directly. Not saying the name of the game doesn't mean it wasn't being referenced. This also isn't the first time this has happened. Someone references a mechanic that happens to resemble the other block game, doesn't say the name, then someone says, "But that's like TOBG", and then you jump in and say "nobody mentioned TOBG until you did" as if the comparison wasn't obvious from context. If the shoe fits...   #jussayin

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

You're mentioning rift activity here, though, which is another component of the system that wasn't brought up earlier. Should have probably mentioned that myself as well. When saying that "this is not true" I was referring specifically to "unstable surface areas are more likely to spawn rifts, and unstable areas underground are more likely to have monsters", just so we're clear.

Ah, okay. That makes a lot more sense.

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

How can any progress ever come out of a discussion when the default reaction to criticism of the current system which didn't even bring up Minecraft has to include the mention that porting over that game's system with no changes would be worse than what we have now? You're disproportionately focusing on just one solution and discounting it on the account of being unfitting for whatever you're imagining Vintage Story's design direction to be by immediately assuming that the person who mentioned beds would want them to be implemented just like in Minecraft. No one in this discussion except you two has even mentioned Minecraft.

In fairness, Vintage Story gets compared to Minecraft a lot. Minecraft has bed spawn mechanics. Several players join Vintage Story expecting it to be the same thing as Minecraft, and get frustrated when they find out that that isn't the case. So I don't think it's entirely unfair to assume that when bed spawning is suggested, that the individual requesting it means the same thing as Minecraft if they don't otherwise explain themselves, no?

But in fairness to Minecraft, other games use the same general mechanic, and have the same general problems. It's a very convenient mechanic, but it also very much helps encourage the player to not think too hard about what they're doing, since the consequences aren't as severe. And @Teh Pizza Lady does bring up some good points; if bed spawning is a thing in some fashion, then what really is the purpose of the terminus teleporter or base return pylons? If some sort of penalty for going without sleep is introduced, then what does the player do in the event they don't want to reset their spawn? The temporal gear feels plausible as a lore explanation for changing spawns, since it's an esoteric item that has some power, but a bed is...quite mundane, in contrast.

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

What other block games allow you to set your spawn point with a bed? I'm curious. 

Don't forget Valheim. Maybe Hytale does as well, though I'm not sure. 

[Banch]

15 hours ago, MKMoose said:

It is clear that persistence hunting is a real and meaningful strategy, but I don't personally see any real reason to go as far as to say that "humans are famously persistence hunters". It's a popular idea, but not one that is particularly well supported.

While this is not exactly part of your suggestion so I'm addressing it more broadly, I want to also note that I kind of hate the idea of giving animals stamina. Because I don't get the point of adding the boring version of hunting - if there is the possibility to implementing mechanics allowing the player to stalk, injure, track and finish off the animal, then I don't understand why it would be seen as a good idea to pick out the most boring step from the whole process and allow to just follow the animal until it starts keeling over from exhaustion.

The one feature that I think is sufficient to make hunting better is to implement reasonably realistic bleeding - weakened animals could have dulled threat perception and should probably be a bit slower, but I don't see any need for standard stamina mechanics.

I appreciate the correction, I guess the idea of humans as persistence hunters is just something I hear a lot and didn't think to question the truth of. But to your point, I agree with you on the bleeding and tracking rather than giving animals a stamina mechanic.

[River Oak]

The last page of this thread converted me away from being a bed-spawner (I can't be bothered to read the whole thread)

[Nekkowe]

Tons of survival games respawn you at the last place you slept when you die, I don't know where all these insecure Minecraft comparisons come from. I also never said that it's The Perfect Solution and that Vintage Story should adopt it, just that making world spawn some kind of special return spot - regardless of how badly suited world generation may or may not leave it - is not very well thought out and provides uninteresting incentives.

That said, I find some of the concerns brought up with it pretty silly. Preventing people from "just placing a bed when they're about to die" is completely trivial; just don't let players sleep too close to enemies, or only allow them to sleep on beds inside a room, something the game already has a concept of and detection for.

Death also does already have another penalty attached to it; it shaves off a chunk of your max HP every time, something you can only recover slowly and with preparation. Getting in fights you shouldn't will also wear down your armor quicker, so it's more resource intensive. Systems like this ensure death is never fully thoughtless without implicitly making an inflexible and possibly completely unsuitable part of the world much more important than it should be. So far, I have not heard a single good argument for my actual original stated concern with the system: "Why world spawn, exactly?" These two both just saw a mention of beds, reflexively jumped on it as Too Much Like That Other Game™, and completely ignored the broader point. I'm starting to feel like that happens a lot around here.

19 hours ago, MKMoose said:

There's naturally a lot of deliberate design choices that make the game what it is, but equally there's a lot of old baggage, unintentional side effects, questionable decisions, and yet-unimplemented plans.

I absolutely agree. I think this kind of thing is unavoidable. It's silly to treat every aspect of it as sacrosanct; every placeholder feature with unintentional consequences can be excused if you throw a big enough word wall at it. But there's developer intent, and then there's stuff just left by the wayside. I think there are plenty of things in this game that deserve a second look, but even stating that much is treated as an invintation to get shouted down politely and civilly "Firmly Rebutted" for "opinionated whinging". If the game were already perfectly aligned with the vision of the developers, they wouldn't be working on a combat overhaul in the first place.

[Banch]

I don't really have an opinion on the respawn mechanics, I've never had a situation where I was annoyed by them. I always set up near world spawn at the start of a new world, and later in the game 20 respawns per temporal gear is more than enough to never end up running out. But if you are having that problem, it's also an option to make the respawns infinite. Also having your 'starter base' near world spawn means if you do end up getting sent back there, you're not left with nothing. Are all of these just strategies to work around an unnecessary mechanic? I mean... you could frame pretty much any advice about how to play the game that way.

[Nekkowe]

28 minutes ago, Banch said:

Also having your 'starter base' near world spawn means if you do end up getting sent back there, you're not left with nothing. Are all of these just strategies to work around an unnecessary mechanic? I mean... you could frame pretty much any advice about how to play the game that way.

Yeah, that's fair! 
Ultimately, decisions about where to have what kind of friction is what a game is made of, and I think Vintage Story really excels at leveraging that into confronting players with interesting situations and choices and experiences in a lot of its systems. The long term planning for crops, bushes and trees, making ore deposits rare but large and possible to slowly pin down through prospecting, bears and wolves, managing metal, there's a lot of really cool and well-thought-out stuff there.

My favourite is the food system, managing hunger and food expiration while thinking about the different satieties, how certain kinds of food spoil much faster or slower than others and make for better candidates to leave a stack of at some home-away-from-home side base, tying that into animal husbandry, and then the way agriculture and gathering are affected by the seasons and regional temperature ranges and weather... hunger and food are incredibly well networked into all that surrounds them. Great stuff from start to finish. That's an example of good friction to me. 

I just wished for - and now I'm looking forward to - combat receiving the same treatment, since the game hinges a lot of itself on combat, it's maybe the only system besides hunger that a player has to engage with on some level no matter what.

Edited August 23 by Nekkowe

[PhotriusPyrelus]

I haven't played the whole host of blocky-buildy games, but the only one with combat I even nearly enjoyed was SkySaga: Infinite Isles (RIP).  *Before* their combat overhaul that removed the stamina system and turned it into a MineCraftian "just spam attack button forever".

I don't know if it's me, or games or what, but most of the time, unless it is the absolute central focus (almost to the exclusion of anything else), combat feels like a waste of time, and something I do just to remove threats (or in the case of this game, get food).  I don't really know how to make melee combat feel good without lifting FromSoft's (early) style - even Scrolls combat [Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind] feels pretty lame by comparison. FromSoft combat (at least on the player end) always feels top tier.  Satisfying and enjoyable, at least non-boss fights.  Punishing, but not unfair (partly because the entire world is hand-crated rather than procedurally-generated, so encounters are tailored to the environment in which they occur).

(spoiler is long tangentially related Souls-game rant; read at your own peril)

Spoiler

Boss fights are becoming increasingly misses for me as they try to maintain the undeserved reputation as "mUh SuPaH hArD gAmE!!!1!11!1one".  Souls games were never that hard because the bosses were exceedingly difficult.  They were "hard" because you had to run a gauntlet of normal enemies (and traps) who would punish you if you screwed up, but individually weren't really that difficult.  Go back and really look at Demon's Souls (the first Souls game).  You had to beat the *whole level* (including the boss), on one life.  But the bosses themselves weren't actually all that bad.  The hard part was staying locked in and not getting overconfident in an area you've been through a thousand times, taking extra damage before you even get to the boss arena.  Now look at Dark Souls.  Pre-Boss bonfires are much closer, and often times you can just straight up run past the enemies between it and the boss.  Guess what.  Bosses got harder.  Now look at Elden Ring.  Most of the non-repeat bosses are harder than *ANYTHING* in Demon's Souls and most bosses in Dark Souls.  Because most of the time there's a bonfire basically right outside their fog wall.  I haven't even bought Shadow of the Erdtree yet because the bosses don't even look fun anymore.  I'm not interested in zippy bosses that wale on me for 10 seconds and give me .5 seconds of opening to return fire.

If your game is not built from the ground up to be a combat game, combat is best viewed, developed, and treated like a minigame.  Combat being *the* way to make story progression in a survival game seems wildly counter-intuitive to me.

It's not very "survival" to go /looking/ for trouble.  ...acquisition of food is an entirely different matter, and trapping has historically produced superior results to hunting if you're looking to get resources rather than a thrill, and for significantly less effort (and risk) being passive rather than active.  "Set and forget" as it were... except don't /actually/ forget; you *do* have to go retrieve your spoils periodically.

[ifoz]

25 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

It's not very "survival" to go /looking/ for trouble.  ...acquisition of food is an entirely different matter, and trapping has historically produced superior results to hunting if you're looking to get resources rather than a thrill, and for significantly less effort (and risk) being passive rather than active.  "Set and forget" as it were... except don't /actually/ forget; you *do* have to go retrieve your spoils periodically.

Honestly, a trapping expansion could be quite cool. We do currently have the basket and crate traps, though something more involved like pit traps could be interesting. While the latter two are just items you place and bait, you'd at least have to dig a pit trap by hand, which plays into this being a block game where you can do that dynamically.
While you can currently just dig a hole and then aggro an animal into running into it, I think it'd be nice if there was a more passive way to do this. Having to make wooden spikes or a camouflaged covering for the trap could have animal pathfinding treat it like a solid block, only to naturally fall in.

On the topic of combat being required for story progression, I think there's both positives and negatives. Combat does incentivise the player to gear up, utilising the game's other systems like cooking (more max health) and smithing (armour and weapons), while also providing a soft difficulty gate for certain story locations. On the other side, combat isn't necessarily the main focus of the game. While I think it being a large part of certain story locations makes sense, I'm more on the fence about a certain location in chapter 2 being a parkour gauntlet. It's fun for the types of players who enjoy it, and I think it's interesting, but it also feels to me personally more like it was designed that way because "our game can handle parkour, so we should include parkour" rather than something more fitting of the general gameplay loop.

If there was some way to avoid certain combat/parkour sections of story locations by optionally substituting them with different systems/pathways (eg; solving puzzle/s to open a door the leads past an area rather than fighting your way through) I wonder if that would help to accommodate alternate playstyles. On the other hand though, that might detract from the soft gate that combat has on the player's story progression, meaning they wouldn't have to interact with other systems that aid them in combat as much.
(For the parkour though, I do think an alternate sidequest that allowed the player to skip a chunk of it would be a nice compromise )

Edited August 23 by ifoz

[MKMoose]

10 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

13 hours ago, MKMoose said:

No one in this discussion except you two has even mentioned Minecraft.

Except Nekkowe did from the start.

What other block games allow you to set your spawn point with a bed? I'm curious. 

"They mentioned Minecraft because they mentioned a bed spawn mod" is a truly extraordinary leap in logic.

Terraria released with bed respawns just a couple months after Minecraft had them added. Since then, it's been a common, simple and intuitive mechanic found throughout the survival genre. Rust, ARK, Conan Exiles, Raft, Grounded, Valheim, Hytale, and many others. Suggesting that mentioning bed respawns is functionally equivalent to mentioning Minecraft exposes your own biases more than anything else.

 

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In fairness, Vintage Story gets compared to Minecraft a lot. Minecraft has bed spawn mechanics. Several players join Vintage Story expecting it to be the same thing as Minecraft, and get frustrated when they find out that that isn't the case. So I don't think it's entirely unfair to assume that when bed spawning is suggested, that the individual requesting it means the same thing as Minecraft if they don't otherwise explain themselves, no?

To mention that bed respawns would have to be implemented differently than in Minecraft to fit VS? That's fair. I don't see the point of bringing up Minecraft, but I guess it's popular, and a fairly common comparison point to VS.

To assume that the person frustrated with the current respawn mechanics and turning to a bed respawn mod wants Minecraft's mechanics to be ported over directly with no changes? Absolutely not. That's absurd and unjustified.

 

3 hours ago, Nekkowe said:

That said, I find some of the concerns brought up with it pretty silly. Preventing people from "just placing a bed when they're about to die" is completely trivial; just don't let players sleep too close to enemies, or only allow them to sleep on beds inside a room, something the game already has a concept of and detection for.

Yeah. Minecraft beds detect enemies in proximity, and back in the beta versions they actually used to perform pathfinding logic and spawn monsters in nearby dark areas (I have no clue why that was removed, frankly). Room detection is a thing in Terraria, among other games.

Changing the mechanic from "click a bed to set a respawn point" to "sleep in a bed to set a respawn point" is also a pretty obvious tweak. And that's how it worked in Minecraft prior to 1.15, if I recall correctly.

 

On 8/21/2026 at 7:54 PM, LadyWYT said:

This is no longer true. Wolves and bears both have footsteps now. They are, however, quite subtle, so if you aren't paying attention they're quite easy to miss.

Bears have some sounds with a 15/25 block range when walking/running (with a 16-30 block seeking range depending on context) - those are not terrible, though still too quiet and too low range. But wolves' footsteps have a pathetic 10/15 range when walking/running (with a 15 or 25 block seeking range depending on temperature) and are so quiet that I had to go into the game files to make sure that they are actually there. Even if they were louder, their range is so small that they are almost always only audible after the animal has aggroed.

Audio mixing in general is also lacking in VS, with music and environment sounds often masking whatever quiet footstep sounds there are.

 

On 8/21/2026 at 7:54 PM, LadyWYT said:

[Item despawn timer] can be changed in the world settings.

Do keep in mind that while you can change the despawn timer, you can't change the fundamental problem of items disappearing forever semi-arbitrarily - even a one hour timer is clearly not a guarantee that the items will be safe. What makes this worse is that, if I recall correctly, the timer is not paused in unloaded chunks.

And this is another case where the game sets up an expectation that the player will generally be able to retrieve their items (it's easy most of the time, or trivial with a 1-hour timer), but ends up kicking the player in the balls on the off-chance that they don't make it in time. Long runbacks themselves are plenty discouraging already - adding on the pressure of having to get there quickly enough not to lose all items permanently is just unnecessarily frustrating. While the despawn timer can be a necessary performance consideration for dropped items, player corpses are a very simple and common feature which circumvents performance problems, and it's among the most popular mods in the game's history.

 

40 minutes ago, ifoz said:

While you can currently just dig a hole and then aggro an animal into running into it, I think it'd be nice if there was a more passive way to do this. Having to make wooden spikes or a camouflaged covering for the trap could have animal pathfinding treat it like a solid block, only to naturally fall in.

They are already stupid enough to walk straight into a pit. If that is not satisfactory, you can place food above the pit to attract animals in a 48 block radius. This is, by the way, a prime example of the unintentional side effects I was talking about - by fixing a bug which caused animals not to eat player-grown crops, intended to incentivize enclosing farmland with fences, the devs have inadvertently introduced an extremely effective and dirt cheap way of trapping animals.

Overall on trapping, I would prefer to have passive traps be only viable for birds and small game. I think that larger game should be hunted actively, because it just seems like a much more interesting option over waiting for an animal to walk into a pit and then stoning it to death.

Edited August 23 by MKMoose

[ifoz]

23 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

(I have no clue why that was removed, frankly).

Iirc it was removed because the code for it was kinda buggy (monsters would sometimes spawn in fully enclosed and lit-up rooms if your bed was against a wall, pretty sure) - but then just never re-implemented for some reason. Personally I quite like it conceptually, though if you go back and play those versions it does become a bit annoying when the aforementioned incorrect darkness detection thing happens.

 

23 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

They are already stupid enough to walk straight into a pit. If that is not satisfactory, you can place food above the pit to attract animals in a 48 block radius. This is, by the way, a prime example of the unintentional side effects I was talking about - by fixing a bug which caused animals not to eat player-grown crops, intended to incentivize enclosing farmland with fences, the devs have inadvertently introduced an extremely effective and dirt cheap way of trapping animals.

Yeah, that is true. I'd hope that before a theoretical trapping update (or hunting update) that animal AI would get some tweaks and improvements. I have also seen people utilise that crop trap method, but haven't tried it myself because I've never really seen the need (I usually get by fine on berries, wild crops and hunting until my first harvest).
Maybe next playthrough I'll actually give the basket and crate traps a shot, just to see how worthwhile they actually are.

Edited August 23 by ifoz

[PhotriusPyrelus]

40 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Overall on trapping, I would prefer to have passive traps be only viable for birds and small game. I think that larger game should be hunted actively, because it just seems like a much more interesting option over waiting for an animal to walk into a pit and then stoning it to death.

Bear traps are a thing, you know.  They work for wolves, too, but wolves will gnaw off a limb to escape.  Be kinda cool to see some tripod wolves running around after catching nothing but a leg in your leghold trap.

[Stralgaez]

5 hours ago, Nekkowe said:

Tons of survival games respawn you at the last place you slept when you die, I don't know where all these insecure Minecraft comparisons come from. I also never said that it's The Perfect Solution and that Vintage Story should adopt it, just that making world spawn some kind of special return spot - regardless of how badly suited world generation may or may not leave it - is not very well thought out and provides uninteresting incentives.

Regarding that, how about using Cairns as a 'spawn point' - Easy enough to make with rocks and some knapping, and more on-point with where you start off, eventually coming with 'updates' to touch it up more visually once you get your hands on more fancier materials. A quick sit down in front of it, with a few second of meditation, and you are done setting your spawn.

2 hours ago, ifoz said:

While I think it being a large part of certain story locations makes sense, I'm more on the fence about a certain location in chapter 2 being a parkour gauntlet. It's fun for the types of players who enjoy it, and I think it's interesting, but it also feels to me personally more like it was designed that way because "our game can handle parkour, so we should include parkour" rather than something more fitting of the general gameplay loop.

One reason my group won't go there at Year 3 of our server adventure - They do not have the time and commitment for it, neither the necessary 'skills' and patience to traverse the place reliably without getting frustrated. And that's just with the parkour, not to mention what comes before and after that.

Luckily they did the trip to the settlement after the Archives and enjoyed it, so I set a 'southern winter' vacation instead of tackling chapter 2 to keep them motivated.

Edited August 23 by Stralgaez

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Do keep in mind that while you can change the despawn timer, you can't change the fundamental problem of items disappearing forever semi-arbitrarily - even a one hour timer is clearly not a guarantee that the items will be safe. What makes this worse is that, if I recall correctly, the timer is not paused in unloaded chunks.

And this is another case where the game sets up an expectation that the player will generally be able to retrieve their items (it's easy most of the time, or trivial with a 1-hour timer), but ends up kicking the player in the balls on the off-chance that they don't make it in time. Long runbacks themselves are plenty discouraging already - adding on the pressure of having to get there quickly enough not to lose all items permanently is just unnecessarily frustrating. While the despawn timer can be a necessary performance consideration for dropped items, player corpses are a very simple and common feature which circumvents performance problems, and it's among the most popular mods in the game's history.

Hence why there's a "keep inventory" option available. If the player really doesn't want to risk ever losing their stuff, the option can be turned on and they never have to worry about it. As for the long "death runs"...that's why investing in a terminus teleporter is a good idea, as is bring a temporal gear or two with you on long expeditions.

A player corpse mod kind of fixes the issue, but if you can't reach your corpse then it doesn't really do much to help you retrieve stuff. There's also the case that if seraphs don't leave permanent bodies behind when they die(ie, the body disappears when they respawn), then adding a mechanic where a corpse gets left behind with stuff on death doesn't really fit into the game. Leaving it to just the backpacks is a possible solution, but one I'm still not a fan of, since I think it encourages the player to be less careful.

1 hour ago, Stralgaez said:

Regarding that, how about using Cairns as a 'spawn point' - Easy enough to make with rocks and some knapping, and more on-point with where you start off, eventually coming with 'updates' to touch it up more visually once you get your hands on more fancier materials. A quick sit down in front of it, with a few second of meditation, and you are done setting your spawn.

What is the reasoning behind why this should work? A temporal gear is plausible, because it's an esoteric item that shares similar properties to the player--ie, temporal gears can cheat the laws of time and physics, so it's plausible that a being sharing similar properties could use one to alter their connection to the world. A pile of rocks doesn't exactly do that, so it's a downgrade from an obvious game mechanic with some lore explanation, to just an obvious game mechanic(which just isn't as interesting). It's also not an option that can be used in story locations, so it's a distinct downgrade from the gears as well. If added alongside temporal gears though, then you have still have the lore problems, in addition to the issues of...what purpose do things like the temporal gears, terminus teleporter, and base return pylons serve? And does the cairn have unlimited respawns, or does the player still have to periodically refresh the spawn?

Likewise, it still presents the issue of...if the intention behind the original design is that setting spawn is a powerful mechanic, and a power that shouldn't be used frivolously, then it's rather counterproductive to make that kind of power accessible without effort. Words from Tyron himself: 

 

3 hours ago, ifoz said:

If there was some way to avoid certain combat/parkour sections of story locations by optionally substituting them with different systems/pathways (eg; solving puzzle/s to open a door the leads past an area rather than fighting your way through) I wonder if that would help to accommodate alternate playstyles. On the other hand though, that might detract from the soft gate that combat has on the player's story progression, meaning they wouldn't have to interact with other systems that aid them in combat as much.
(For the parkour though, I do think an alternate sidequest that allowed the player to skip a chunk of it would be a nice compromise )

I think it would be nice if the player had some alternate, if more time-consuming/dangerous, options to complete certain events, so they could have a plausible way to skip certain things(like difficult parkour) that they may really hate/have actual physical issues completing. However, I also think that there are limits to that logic as well--the player shouldn't be able to just skip every bit of difficulty or inconvenience the game throws at them. More "completion routes" means more work to both implement and balance.

For the parkour stuff specifically, I think it will likely be making a return in the near future, though perhaps not quite as complex as what's presented in chapter two. Personally, I think the mechanic was a really interesting way to give the player a puzzle that is very challenging but not very dangerous...well, at least if it's kept more on a horizontal plane rather than a vertical one. It also introduced interesting possibilities in combat, since having a safe pocket dimension where you could heal at will or retreat was very nice to have, but came with the drawback of losing track of whatever enemies you were fighting in the process.

[Stralgaez]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

A temporal gear is plausible, because it's an esoteric item that shares similar properties to the player--ie, temporal gears can cheat the laws of time and physics, so it's plausible that a being sharing similar properties could use one to alter their connection to the world.

Because temporal gears are not a guarantee. Just like finding specific resources, you either hit the jackpot on day one, or you slog through for months or perhaps even years to find even a single piece of it. Or you don't.

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Stralgaez said:

Because temporal gears are not a guarantee. Just like finding specific resources, you either hit the jackpot on day one, or you slog through for months or perhaps even years to find even a single piece of it. Or you don't.

Right. But that could be said of many things in Vintage Story, not just temporal gears.

What I want to know is what is the lore reasoning behind why a pile of rocks can fill the same function as an esoteric item brimming with power and sharing similar properties to the player? In addition to things like how many respawns the rock pile is supposed to offer, and how other things like the terminus teleporter and base return pylons get balanced to compensate. The terminus teleporter is quite an investment, but there's not really a point to build one if you can do things like retrieve a corpse or just build something cheap and set your spawn point at a location. Base return pylons would have to have something other than spawn point to link to(which in turn makes them even more expensive). Temporal gears themselves become mostly useless in terms of setting spawn point, since while they could still be used in story locations, there's not much point to doing so when you can just use something much cheaper to set your spawn outside.

[Stralgaez]

25 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

What I want to know is what is the lore reasoning behind why a pile of rocks can fill the same function as an esoteric item brimming with power and sharing similar properties to the player?

I don't offer a lore reasoning to it, I just say what I would rather have, gameplay-wise. Just as it is acceptable to have stacks of solid rocks in your inventory and not get weighted down by it, or your bags suffering from carrying so much - People don't question it, either. It just works.

Basic vanilla gameplay functions don't need much of a lore reason to exist, nor should be gated behind a item that is based on RNG where you have a chance you never would get your hands on it. 

Edited August 23 by Stralgaez

[Kolyenka]

Late to the party (at this point so late I might be off topic lol); I can't speak to PVP combat as I've done virtually none of that, and can't even really speak to combat against drifters, bells, or any of them guys. However, I have done a LOT of combat versus prey (pigs, gazelles, goats, etc) and I really like how it works. Once you get half decent with spears or a bow you can take down pretty much whatever you want, but the trade-off is 1) it may take far longer than you planned for to get the animal and get back home and 2) you are, to an extent, at the whims of the terrain. I think that is a pretty winning combination wrt hunting. Sneaking while you pursue them is key, and if you know the area, you can steer clear of big drops that'll crush your prey or areas of dense foliage that'll be a nightmare to flush them back out of. Feels fairly realistic and rewarding to me. I do agree that bleed out for some hit locations would be cool (for example in The Long Dark, you can shoot something and then follow it a while until you find it dead... it is a bit less exciting but more realistic, which feels in keeping with VS).

Tl;dr, I don't really care one way or another what gets changed for PVP but for hunting in particular, I think the system is good as is and I enjoy it. If you're trying to get back on Blackguard alone it's not so fun, but there's a reason ranged weapons and traps have historically been used for hunting rather than walking right up to an animal and whaling on it. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

8 hours ago, Nekkowe said:

I absolutely agree. I think this kind of thing is unavoidable. It's silly to treat every aspect of it as sacrosanct; every placeholder feature with unintentional consequences can be excused if you throw a big enough word wall at it. But there's developer intent, and then there's stuff just left by the wayside. I think there are plenty of things in this game that deserve a second look, but even stating that much is treated as an invintation to get shouted down politely and civilly "Firmly Rebutted" for "opinionated whinging". If the game were already perfectly aligned with the vision of the developers, they wouldn't be working on a combat overhaul in the first place.

And you know, that's on me. I've been reading this whole thread as if it were in the Suggestions sub-forum, and it's not, it's Discussion. That matters, because I hold suggestions to a much higher bar than I hold general discussion, and looking back, my tone through this whole exchange was calibrated for the wrong one.

So I owe you an apology. "Opinionated whinging" was far harsher than this deserved for a discussion thread, and I was pushing back against what I thought was some new player, used to the other block game, venting in a suggestions box, rather than someone just talking through frustrations in the place meant for exactly that. That's on me, not you.

For what it's worth, I still think some of what you raised reads more like preference than a specific, fixable problem, and I still don't agree with your framing on spawn points or storms, that part hasn't changed. But there's a real difference between disagreeing with someone and giving them the "irritated parent" treatment, and I did the second one without meaning to. I'm sorry.

I would like to go back and properly address your complaints and point out what you got right.

On 8/21/2026 at 10:03 AM, Nekkowe said:

Yeah, I feel like pretty much everything touching combat is in some way underbaked at best and frustrating in a boring way at worst...

• Temporal storms are unbearable; the spawn system makes even your home unsafe, incentivizing you to just dig a 2x1 hole to AFK in for several minutes (until you turn them off)
• Temporal rifts and regional stability broadly don't really add anything (until you turn them off)
• Death returns you to world spawn, for some ungodly reason (until you install a bed spawn mod)
• Items despawn in minutes (until you install a corpse mod, or get uncomfortably comfortable with /tpwp You Died Here) 
• Not a single animal or hostile construct enemy so much as makes footstep sounds
• Hunting is barely worth the time, for how impossible it is to actually track a hurt animal (until you install a blood trail and/or footprint mod). They can continue to outrun you forever, with no limits to their stamina and no way to really track them if you lose sight of them for even a moment
• Attacking things in melee feels both clunky and impactless at the same time
• Places like the Archive require light but don't let you build or place torches, negating any use for shields, so the odd sawblade locust just kinda kills you in two hits regardless of armor
• I have not yet made it all the way through the Archives, but I've heard of the boss fight down there, and not a single thing I've heard about it has been positive
• Non-animal enemies are straight up almost never worth fighting, not least since they almost never so much as drop anything

I was really surprised how much emphasis the game places on combat, considering how terrible of a state it's currently in. And I was surprised about how terrible of a state it's in, considering how well everything else works... except gears and stuff, I guess.

Even if you turn off temporal rifts and storms and the like, if you want to engage with the story content, you have to engage with the combat. And the combat is not in a good state at all.

Are there any announced plans of changing any of that anytime soon...?

• Temporal storms: already touched on this in a previous message.
• Temporal rifts and regional stability can force you to alter your path if your temporal stability is low. Also regions with already lower stability are more dangerous to mine in and I SWEAR that the good ores spawn in those locations, too -_-.
• Death returns you to world spawn because Tyron didn't like the trivial nature of bed spawns from the other block game so he introduced his own mechanic for resetting your spawn. Temporal gears can also restore stability at the cost of your own health.
• I think item despawning is configurable and should be able to be reset. That said, I think the fact that they despawn in minutes is deliberate choice meant to punish the player for dying. In a realistic scenario, if you know much of anything about the lore, dying and coming back to life could very well mess with some wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff that Dr. Who and the Avengers tried to warn against.
• Animals and other hostiles not making sounds is a real and valid complaint, however I would note that part of being a predator means that you are able to hunt without alerting your prey to your presence... so how would you balance this?
• I agree with this hunting bit and I main hunter. It's my job to chase stuff down and pretend I killed it in one hit because I am a hunter, that's what I do. I think specifically the hunter class needs to be able to deal a LOT more damage with a spear toss or firing an arrow because there's no way my native ancestors used a crude bow and flint arrows and fed their entire tribe on "whoops the animal got away".
• Melee is... eh... It's an issue and it's going to improve. I've missed multiple times when I was sure a melee hit would connect just because the game said my hit missed the box when it looked like a hit on MY screen...
• The sawblade locust is actually intended to be a surprise armor check. Did you wander in unprepared or did you actually take the time to find iron and make armor before venturing into the archives? sawblades are just nasty to deal with anyway and very tough to beat for any class that's not a blackguard.
• The boss fight used to be worse. I think it's fine the way it is. I could probably solo it, but so far I've mostly just been playing with my blackguard friend. I keep her fed so she keeps me alive. It's a symbiotic relationship that just works.
• Almost never... however they can be an early source of flax which is needed to make a windmill among other things and the nastier ones have a higher chance of dropping goodies like temporal gears, rusty gears, and Jonas parts. I wouldn't charge into a pack swinging, but if you see one or two, they are still worth picking off just to see. Some treat it like gambling, but there's no real cost other than some armor and/or weapon durability.

What specifically do you mean that combat is in a terrible place? And yeah as others have pointed out, they ARE changing combat in 1.23. They brought on Maltiez and SaltyWater (two popular mod creators) specifically to help with it so I'm confident they have something GOOD in the works.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Stralgaez said:

I don't offer a lore reasoning to it, I just say what I would rather have, gameplay-wise. Just as it is acceptable to have stacks of solid rocks in your inventory and not get weighted down by it, or your bags suffering from carrying so much - People don't question it, either. It just works.

Basic vanilla gameplay functions don't need much of a lore reason to exist, nor should be gated behind a item that is based on RNG where you have a chance you never would get your hands on it. 

Which is fair, but also personal opinion. It also goes against Tyron's stated belief that the ability to pick a spawn point is very powerful, and thus something to be earned rather than used lightly.

As for the basic vanilla gameplay functions...the lore is a part of the vanilla game. Gameplay functions don't always need to follow the lore, but gameplay functions that don't follow the lore tend to break immersion and feel tacked on. I don't think that's very ideal when it comes to game design, and should be avoided when possible.

The RNG statement isn't the best here considering that temporal gears are guaranteed to be found in certain circumstances. Certain monsters are guaranteed to drop them. Certain locations are guaranteed to have a few of them. Treasure hunters don't always sell them, but do sell them fairly often, and it's not particularly difficult to check in with a treasure hunter every now and then in order to obtain one. If you really want to grant players more leniency in this regard, I think it's better to just let them have the option to spawn with a temporal gear in their inventory, so they can have one "freebie" to set their spawn at a chosen base location immediately. It solves one common player complaint, at least, without creating too many other problems or trivializing the intended challenge too much in the process.

The only legitimate "spawn problem" I can think of, that probably should be addressed at some point, is that there's no way to change one's spawn location in Homo Sapiens mode without resorting to console commands. In that specific case, some sort of bed/cairn spawn rule makes more sense, however, I think the overall design philosophy needs to be respected(especially since it's a harder game mode as well)--that is, setting a spawn point is a powerful ability, and one that should cost the player something and require actual effort to achieve. A pile of rocks isn't at all hard to create. Neither is a hay bed. A wooden bed somewhat solves that problem, since it can be obtained in Homo Sapiens and still requires some effort to make. However, it still unbalances the original spawn mechanic significantly, along with causes problems with other items in the game such as the base return teleporter and terminus teleporter. It also doesn't satisfy the player complaint about wanting some sort of easy spawn reset so they can easily pick out a base spot wherever they want, or otherwise have the convenience of changing spawn points without needing to earn it.

How one solves this issue for Homo Sapiens, I'm not sure. In my opinion, whatever is added to the standard game modes doesn't need to be balanced for Homo Sapiens, since Homo Sapiens is literally just a game mode tacked on for players who don't want ANY of the lore, and is not the game mode that Vintage Story is developed around. However, everything added to Homo Sapiens mode must take the balance of the standard game modes into account, since those are the focus of Vintage Story's development. Otherwise, you just end up trying to develop and maintain two separate games with the same development team at once, and that's not particularly ideal.

39 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The sawblade locust is actually intended to be a surprise armor check. Did you wander in unprepared or did you actually take the time to find iron and make armor before venturing into the archives? sawblades are just nasty to deal with anyway and very tough to beat for any class that's not a blackguard.

Eh...I don't know that I would call it much of an armor check, as much as I would a mini-boss of sorts. The general minimum equipment level for the Resonance Archive is tier 2, but not all enemies within are tier 2 enemies. There are a few tier 3s, including the sawblade locust, as well as one(maybe two) tier 4 enemies. Tier 2 armor will soak up enough damage that these fights are manageable, but it won't soak up so much damage that the player can just run in, take every hit to the face, and expect to walk away scot-free. Depending on the player's skill, they may need to invest in better equipment in order to handle the Archive, or they may be able to use worse equipment and get away with it.

For the record, sawblade locusts are still nasty for Blackguards to deal with. Blackguards simply have an advantage when dealing with enemies like that, since they have more melee power and the extra 5 hitpoints means that the Blackguard can usually take an extra hit or two before death.

46 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I think specifically the hunter class needs to be able to deal a LOT more damage with a spear toss or firing an arrow because there's no way my native ancestors used a crude bow and flint arrows and fed their entire tribe on "whoops the animal got away".

I think this really only works for wildlife. If it applies to enemies in general, then Hunter can easily outclass everyone else since they already have very strong bonuses compared to their weaknesses, and killing targets at range is a lot safer than trying to deal with them in melee. 

 

51 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The boss fight used to be worse. I think it's fine the way it is. I could probably solo it, but so far I've mostly just been playing with my blackguard friend. I keep her fed so she keeps me alive. It's a symbiotic relationship that just works.

It kind of depends at which point in the game's life you refer to. When I first started playing, you could cheese the boss by getting catapulted into one of the alcoves and then shooting at it from safety or otherwise using the spot as a place to heal. Or just...leave the boss area and continue into the library, get the quest things, and then leave. Invisible walls were later added to stop the cheese.

Then you had the healing changes that were introduced in...1.21 or 1.20, I don't remember exactly which. But healing went from something instantly applied, to something that took time to both apply and take effect. Armor changed from preventing a certain percentage of healing, to simply increasing the amount of time it took to apply a bandage, making it possible to actually heal while wearing plate armor. Initially, the mechanic was tuned so that spending more than a second in the air would cancel the healing attempt, which in turn made the Archive boss much more difficult since it can launch the player into the air(with relative frequency, depending on the player actions). As a result though, the "airborne penalty" was later removed in order to make the fight less punishing.

Overall, it's a fairly tough fight, but the design is pretty solid in my opinion. I think my main complaint about it, aside from invisible walls not being particularly immersive(iron bars or glass would be better), is that the music for the fight is very cool, but the fight itself doesn't last long enough to really enjoy it. The second boss fight in the story doesn't have this problem, since the mechanics of that fight make it quite a long fight indeed, so the player can fully enjoy the epic music that goes with the fight rather than burning through the boss and only getting to hear the first minute of it. So while I don't think the first boss really needs an entire rework, I wouldn't mind seeing some adjustments to make the fight a little longer, so that the music has more impact.

[Nekkowe]

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

And you know, that's on me. I've been reading this whole thread as if it were in the Suggestions sub-forum, and it's not, it's Discussion. That matters, because I hold suggestions to a much higher bar than I hold general discussion, and looking back, my tone through this whole exchange was calibrated for the wrong one.

So I owe you an apology. "Opinionated whinging" was far harsher than this deserved for a discussion thread, and I was pushing back against what I thought was some new player, used to the other block game, venting in a suggestions box, rather than someone just talking through frustrations in the place meant for exactly that. That's on me, not you.

For what it's worth, I still think some of what you raised reads more like preference than a specific, fixable problem, and I still don't agree with your framing on spawn points or storms, that part hasn't changed. But there's a real difference between disagreeing with someone and giving them the "irritated parent" treatment, and I did the second one without meaning to. I'm sorry.

Apology accepted, thank you! 

[williams_482]

19 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The RNG statement isn't the best here considering that temporal gears are guaranteed to be found in certain circumstances. Certain monsters are guaranteed to drop them. Certain locations are guaranteed to have a few of them. Treasure hunters don't always sell them, but do sell them fairly often, and it's not particularly difficult to check in with a treasure hunter every now and then in order to obtain one. If you really want to grant players more leniency in this regard, I think it's better to just let them have the option to spawn with a temporal gear in their inventory, so they can have one "freebie" to set their spawn at a chosen base location immediately. It solves one common player complaint, at least, without creating too many other problems or trivializing the intended challenge too much in the process.

The only legitimate "spawn problem" I can think of, that probably should be addressed at some point, is that there's no way to change one's spawn location in Homo Sapiens mode without resorting to console commands. In that specific case, some sort of bed/cairn spawn rule makes more sense, however, I think the overall design philosophy needs to be respected(especially since it's a harder game mode as well)--that is, setting a spawn point is a powerful ability, and one that should cost the player something and require actual effort to achieve. A pile of rocks isn't at all hard to create. Neither is a hay bed. A wooden bed somewhat solves that problem, since it can be obtained in Homo Sapiens and still requires some effort to make. However, it still unbalances the original spawn mechanic significantly, along with causes problems with other items in the game such as the base return teleporter and terminus teleporter. It also doesn't satisfy the player complaint about wanting some sort of easy spawn reset so they can easily pick out a base spot wherever they want, or otherwise have the convenience of changing spawn points without needing to earn it.

How one solves this issue for Homo Sapiens, I'm not sure. In my opinion, whatever is added to the standard game modes doesn't need to be balanced for Homo Sapiens, since Homo Sapiens is literally just a game mode tacked on for players who don't want ANY of the lore, and is not the game mode that Vintage Story is developed around. However, everything added to Homo Sapiens mode must take the balance of the standard game modes into account, since those are the focus of Vintage Story's development. Otherwise, you just end up trying to develop and maintain two separate games with the same development team at once, and that's not particularly ideal.

My recommendation would be to allow the player to create some kind of specialized structure, or at least a specialized block, which can be "charged" with a temporal gear to create a permanent respawn point which can be temporarily overridden by a temporal gear or a duplicate structure elsewhere, but will still act as the fallback spawn point until it is broken by the player. In conjunction with a starting temporal gear amulet this gives a player the opportunity to spawn in, run far away from spawn, permanently set up shop in a new location, and play normally from there without needing to worry about what happens the 21st time they get munched by a bear. 

This structure should be relatively small, buildable without metal tools, and look nice. Perhaps some sort of cobblestone shrine, which once charged gets a faint glow and some pleasant chiseled details. 

In Homo Sapiens, that structure might work without a special charge, or would be charged with something mundane but relatively expensive like a gold ingot.