The story and the salt (story spoilers)

[Chuckerton]

Im gonna be using the names of story locations, and some parts of the story location experience. If you dont want that, click away now. 

I finished the resonance archives. absolute masterpiece, 10/10. Genuinely blown away, i felt many emotions there. the way i made it there was by activating every transporter nearby and one of them took me within a few thousand blocks from the place. Enough that it was about a days walk. 

Sweet, time for more story content. Time for the lazaret. I know the dude was selling an elk, but i didnt want the elk because im not sure if i can take it through a transponder and i did have one that put me relatively close the the lazaret. Did that, that place was really well hidden and i expended a great many bombs tunneling down only to realize its not that far down and also theres a cave that you can enter from. Wonderful. Kind of a neat place, definitely not as impressive as the archives but thats to be expected. A map, sweet. "Go here"....

its 22 thousand blocks from home...

Looks like im buying that elk. 

So i go back home and make the stuff, and start riding. Took me about 2 days of pretty much non-stop riding to make it. Flat ground, wonderful, elk my beloved, swamps, marshes, weird vertical pancake lands, awful. I wish that kind of landform wouldnt generate. Anyway, made it to the village. Beautiful, super interesting, immersive characters, pretty laggy but still, cool place. Didnt realize i had to take the letter with me and i really try to avoid doing it but i wasnt going back home, and then back again to the village so i just spawned a letter. 

"Sick letter, go here"

Its 3 thousand blocks away....

Right. Glad i have the elk. Took me about a day. Again, more mountains, marshes, awkwardly hilly terrain. Made it there. Kinda creepy at first but then it became cool, cool old guy, pet bell? wild. "go grab this lens, its here"

...10 thousand blocks away... "watch the skies, expect death"

I know this part of the story was meant to be a journey but oh my god i do not have the patience for this. If i die doing this i think im uninstalling vs). I love this game but the whole "harsh journey" hoops its having me jump through are getting very old, very fast. Just getting to the resonance archives took me awhile, because i originally made the journey there on foot with no translocator and i just had bronze there, and I got intimated and left. The story is awesome, please stop putting the locations 30-60 real life minutes away from me. 

Anyway, while im on the way there (currently). i thought about my time so far in this world. Remembered trying to find halite, and failing. I dont really want the salt, i want the sylvite, i grow a lot of flax and having more nutrients would be nice. I started seeing a big mountain with bauxite and other sedimentary layers and thought "well if i found a salt dome i think it would be kinda worth it-"

Within 5 seconds of me having that thought this salt MONOLITH enters my view. I dont know if theyre supposed to be this large, but this thing is a titan. if i wasnt a good 30k blocks away from my house i would grind the entire thing down to its last atoms but seeing as i am im just gonna bomb a good chunk of it and be more careful with extracting the sylvite. I mean, thanks vs gods. 

Im still salty about how far the quests are taking me though. 

also just for funsies i decided to propick the dome to see what the resource spreads are here. 0 traces of halite. Sure. 

editing after making it to the devasation. I died. I also messed up the world trying to set the time to day because i was there for so long. I accidentally sent myself several decades ahead, expiring all of my food both with me and at home. I think ill be taking a break from this game for a minute. 

Edited April 26, 2025 by Chuckerton

[LadyWYT]

11 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

I know the dude was selling an elk, but i didnt want the elk because im not sure if i can take it through a transponder and i did have one that put me relatively close the the lazaret.

To my knowledge you can send them through translocators, but it does take quite a bit of effort to carve a path big enough to get them to the machine. You'll need the bone flute to help maneuver the elk, for sure. Whether the effort is worth it or not is up to the player decide.

11 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

Took me about 2 days of pretty much non-stop riding to make it. Flat ground, wonderful, elk my beloved, swamps, marshes, weird vertical pancake lands, awful. I wish that kind of landform wouldnt generate. Anyway, made it to the village. Beautiful, super interesting, immersive characters, pretty laggy but still, cool place

For what it's worth, the travel times on foot versus on elk are similar, assuming that you're deadheading between locations. The advantage to traveling on foot is that you can easily cut through forests, over mountains, and raft over lakes. On a mount, you'll need to find a way around most rougher terrain and large bodies of water, however, you won't burn as much food while riding and your mount can carry a lot of stuff for you.

11 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

I know this part of the story was meant to be a journey but oh my god i do not have the patience for this. If i die doing this i think im uninstalling vs). I love this game but the whole "harsh journey" hoops its having me jump through are getting very old, very fast. Just getting to the resonance archives took me awhile, because i originally made the journey there on foot with no translocator and i just had bronze there, and I got intimated and left. The story is awesome, please stop putting the locations 30-60 real life minutes away from me. 

If I'm not mistaken, the devs added an option to set the distances between story locations, though I'm not sure exactly where said option is. In any case, once you find it, you should be able to shorten the distances you have to travel.

Personally I like the default distances--they work very well for actually making the world feel as big as it's supposed to be, without being too big. Several games tend to scale their worlds down quite a lot, and while some scaling is often necessary the world doesn't feel particularly genuine if locations are supposed to be hundreds of miles apart...but reachable within a five minute walk real-time.

It's also worth noting that you only need to make the full trip once for chapter two; the reward at the end of the chapter unlocks a method of "fast travel" between your base and the main points of interest. I also suspect that chapter three may not require nearly as much traveling, perhaps being more on the scale of what we had for the Resonance Archive.

11 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

editing after making it to the devasation. I died. I also messed up the world trying to set the time to day because i was there for so long.

If you happen to have access to a terminus teleporter, you can use it to teleport to your last point of death. Otherwise, it's a good idea to bring a temporal gear or two with you if you're going far afield for an extended period of time, as you never know when you might run into trouble. Aside from that, one can also just turn on "keep inventory on death" temporarily(if it wasn't already enabled), and use the console to teleport back to where they were to save some frustration.

[Chuckerton]

I made a new world after my defeat and accidental meddling of the timeline. And by that timeline, i mean i tried to set the time of day as /time set 1200 like you would in minecraft, make the time noon, but turns out time works a bit differently in vs than in the other block game. i was sending myself forward in time 1200 hours. So when i did that command and saw that MONTHS went by i was like "oh i need to use a smaller number then to go back a few months". Bear in mind its like 3 am and ive been on an elk since 11pm, so my thinking wasnt exactly perfect. So i started using different numbers to try and get it back to march 9th, before i realized that 1) i was never going backwards, i was going forward, meaning DECADES passed 2) vs things that go based on time go on the actual in-game time, meaning all of my food expired, and probably all of the food back home expired too, 3) there is no autosave feature in single player. 

Decided i had enough with this entire journey and this world and made a new one. This one with oceans, and hopefully less ridiculous land upheaval. 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

For what it's worth, the travel times on foot versus on elk are similar, assuming that you're deadheading between locations. The advantage to traveling on foot is that you can easily cut through forests, over mountains, and raft over lakes. On a mount, you'll need to find a way around most rougher terrain and large bodies of water, however, you won't burn as much food while riding and your mount can carry a lot of stuff for you.

Honestly, wouldnt have been too worried. Bombs are wonderful for carving long paths and i made a lot of them. Thats how i would explore areas along translocators. Go through, find a good spot in the cave, and start blasting. 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

To my knowledge you can send them through translocators, but it does take quite a bit of effort to carve a path big enough to get them to the machine. You'll need the bone flute to help maneuver the elk, for sure. Whether the effort is worth it or not is up to the player decide.

I felt like it was a lot faster on the elk, as long as i was on flat ground. Forests and some mountains were troublesome but going around was never a problem. I was a blackguard, wearing iron scale, so the elk was a big improvement. Not to mention it can go up 2 block vertical gaps so i had no issue with smaller hilly terrain.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

If I'm not mistaken, the devs added an option to set the distances between story locations, though I'm not sure exactly where said option is. In any case, once you find it, you should be able to shorten the distances you have to travel.

Personally I like the default distances--they work very well for actually making the world feel as big as it's supposed to be, without being too big. Several games tend to scale their worlds down quite a lot, and while some scaling is often necessary the world doesn't feel particularly genuine if locations are supposed to be hundreds of miles apart...but reachable within a five minute walk real-time.

They did, its somewhere in the world generation settings when you first make a world. I set it to 50% of the default, which has the description of something along the lines of "story events are generally 2.5 HOURS REALTIME away from each other. If you like that, great, im good on all that. If biomes were more varied and interesting maybe id be interested but once youve seen the 10th pine forest youve seen the millionth pine forest. Its not to say there wasnt cool scenery on the way to the story stuff but it wasnt worth seeing it for the frustration of the whole experience. 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

If you happen to have access to a terminus teleporter, you can use it to teleport to your last point of death. Otherwise, it's a good idea to bring a temporal gear or two with you if you're going far afield for an extended period of time, as you never know when you might run into trouble. Aside from that, one can also just turn on "keep inventory on death" temporarily(if it wasn't already enabled), and use the console to teleport back to where they were to save some frustration.

I didnt bring a gear because i overprepared for the resonance archives and brought gears i never needed, and they took up inventory space, so i thought that maybe i wouldnt need it again. I expected it to be a challenge but i didnt expect the bird to just toss me off the tower

[Zane Mordien]

The second chapter is not my favorite either. You just gave me an idea though. Next time I go to the 2nd story location I'm going to set forests to 0% (-100% or whatever you want the game calls it) and just go there at warp speed. Then when I'm there I can set them back to normal, which for me is -50%.

Edited April 26, 2025 by Zane Mordien

[Chuckerton]

8 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

The second chapter is not my favorite either. You just gave me an idea though. Next time I go to the 2nd story location I'm going to set forests to 0% (-100% or whatever you want the game calls it) and just go there at warp speed. Then when I'm there I can set them back to normal, which for me is -50%.

You can change forest generation in game? I thought that was an at-world-generation thing only

[Zane Mordien]

6 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

You can change forest generation in game? I thought that was an at-world-generation thing only

Nope, you can change anything at anytime as the admin of your single player game. I don't do that often but I think for sanity next time this is what I'll do when travelling to the 2nd story location. I've done it once the hard way and that was enough. The change only affects newly spawned in chunks so anything existing will not change.

• /worldconfig globalForestation [-1 .. 1]
  Sets the global forestation offset for world generation. -1 means there will be no forests, 1 means there will be only forests, the value 0 means default forestation density (default: 0)

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

You can change forest generation in game? I thought that was an at-world-generation thing only

What @Zane Mordien said, though bear in mind if you change world-gen settings like forest coverage after the world has been created, the new settings will only apply to new chunks. If you want to apply those settings to old chunks, you'll need to regenerate them.