It feels like we don't have enough reasons to thrive as opposed to just survive?

[Kaldo]

Hi all, I'm a new player (~40 hours) and I'm really liking the game so far! However, it feels weird to me that despite all the complexity in VS, there aren't actually that many reasons or rewards for engaging with these complexities. You can fulfill all the basic requirements really easily and everything afterwards is just a bonus for personal satisfaction and that's it. Shouldn't it be the other way around and the game should incentivize and reward you for going the extra mile?

Some specific examples to illustrate what I mean:

- You can build the house with (packed) dirt and be fine forever. It's even arguably safer than building with combustible materials, and cheaper than any other option.

- Having a varied diet just temporarily increases max hp. You might as well live off bread and turnips forever if you want to.

- Building a fortified defensible base doesn't make sense because enemies can spawn within it anyway. 

- Food spoilage and storage is presented as a big deal but it's solved so fast into the game by just building clay vessels and placing them in a cellar.

- Prospecting starts off as a fun triangulation system but then it's just digging, digging, digging, mostly blindly, until you hit a vein.

- Winter and cold is supposed to a be a big dramatic risk and then it's just... waiting it out with some increased hunger? Stacking some clothes fixes it?

I am not saying the game should be more difficult or annoying (it has enough arbitrary time wasters as it is), but I think there should be a clearer sense of purpose for advanced goals and interesting tangible rewards for engaging with the systems rather than just delaying negative effects. Maybe it's not popular to draw comparisons with other games here but let's look at Valheim - despite being a much simpler and easier game, the sheltered / home rested bonus incentivizes players to build decorated and comfy houses. The food system rewards you for making better food by increasing your stats like health, stamina or mana. Advanced materials have stronger support letting you build taller. Enemies cant spawn in workbench radius so building a defensive palisade or moats actually makes sense. World gen focuses on islands and sea traversal so boats aren't just a luxury, they are a requirement, you can't just run everywhere.

TL;DR: VS should incentivize players more to engage with its complex systems instead of it just feeling like chores/creative outlets with no purpose.

[CodenamVenom]

Good points. I also made a comment on a another topic regarding food and valheim was exactly what I was thinking about too. They do have some good rewards for engaging with the different mechanics. Obviously VS is its own game, with a cool a focused vision from what I've seen, but it doesn't mean they can't learn from other games.

[Unsp0ken]

I think you bring up a lot of great points here. For the first 10 days of a playthrough, I survived in a 3x3 dirt shack, and I had no real reason to get rid of it; the only reason I did was vanity. I am also disappointed that there is no real reason to fortify your base. I'd love to see spawning mechanisms changed; if a drifter can't get in a space, they shouldn't be able to spawn in it, and even then, fortifying your base has no point except looking cool, maybe something along the lines of hordes that are configurable in the settings, I feel like temporal storms are just too easy, just hide in a building and wait, hordes could know your location and try to break down doors or something. 

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- You can build the house with (packed) dirt and be fine forever. It's even arguably safer than building with combustible materials, and cheaper than any other option.

You can do this...and it's also ugly to live in. Now some players don't care about aesthetics, but most do in some form or another, so most are probably going to end up building something that looks a bit nicer than a packed dirt cube. So I think there's already a fair incentive to build nice structures.

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- Having a varied diet just temporarily increases max hp. You might as well live off bread and turnips forever if you want to.

While this is true, I believe you also get about 2.5 extra HP per nutrition bar that you fill, and those extra HP can be vital to your survival depending on the circumstances. Keeping the bars filled isn't terribly hard either; it's a matter of not eating the same food all the time. Easy as swapping some of that meaty stew for a fruit pie every now and then.

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- Building a fortified defensible base doesn't make sense because enemies can spawn within it anyway. 

Defense rules in Vintage Story are a little different than they might be in other titles. Normal monster spawn rules get temporarily repealed during temporal storms, as those storms are anomalies that are meant to be very dangerous. Otherwise, keeping your perimeter fenced will help keep natural predators from wandering in, and lighting your base up well(and keeping your interiors on a smaller scale too) will significantly decrease monster spawns. To keep rifts from appearing in your base, you'll need to build and maintain rift wards--a late game piece of tech game that prevents rifts from spawning in an area as long as it has power.

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- Food spoilage and storage is presented as a big deal but it's solved so fast into the game by just building clay vessels and placing them in a cellar.

The food spoilage rate can be adjusted to be faster or slower, depending on player preferences. It also depends on your climate and days per month. A hot climate will be more difficult to store food in long-term, whereas longer months mean more days that you need to feed yourself and longer times for crops/livestock to produce.

Overall though, no, food supply isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve if you know what you're doing and plan ahead. However, I would also point out that the more time the player has to spend just on securing food sources, that's less time they're spending in other areas. If food supply is a big enough hurdle that a player spends the bulk of their time on it, they're going to be much less inclined to go adventure or otherwise take risks to progress in other fields. Not ideal when you actively need to travel quite a lot both to locate other resources and complete the main story.

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- Prospecting starts off as a fun triangulation system but then it's just digging, digging, digging, mostly blindly, until you hit a vein.

I'm not really sure how you make mining more exciting than prospecting and digging hoping you find what's advertised. Perhaps making exposed ore nodes spawn a little more frequently underground, especially in the deep underground, so there's both more reason to venture there and an alternate method of acquiring resources for those who don't like digging holes.

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

- Winter and cold is supposed to a be a big dramatic risk and then it's just... waiting it out with some increased hunger? Stacking some clothes fixes it?

Winter is a good time to do things like blacksmithing and steel refining, since there's no farm chores to do and exploration is a lot riskier. If you know how to counter the cold, no, it's not terribly challenging, however, it also depends on what activities you choose to do during winter. If you're primarily hanging out at your base, living off your food stores, then yes it's going to be an easy time. If you're going out on long exploration trips, then the difficulty increases since supplies, shelter, and daylight are harder to come by.

I'd also note that how challenging the cold is depends partly on your game settings. Enabling true winters and making your seraph more sensitive to the cold will increase the threat that the cold presents, though much like I said about food supply...how much of your time do you want to have to devote to just keeping yourself from freezing?

4 hours ago, Kaldo said:

I am not saying the game should be more difficult or annoying (it has enough arbitrary time wasters as it is), but I think there should be a clearer sense of purpose for advanced goals and interesting tangible rewards for engaging with the systems rather than just delaying negative effects. Maybe it's not popular to draw comparisons with other games here but let's look at Valheim - despite being a much simpler and easier game, the sheltered / home rested bonus incentivizes players to build decorated and comfy houses. The food system rewards you for making better food by increasing your stats like health, stamina or mana. Advanced materials have stronger support letting you build taller. Enemies cant spawn in workbench radius so building a defensive palisade or moats actually makes sense. World gen focuses on islands and sea traversal so boats aren't just a luxury, they are a requirement, you can't just run everywhere.

Personally, I think Vintage Story does fine in giving the player goals and incentive to work towards them. The main story and other lore helps push players to progress and explore the world, and each "tech tier" feels like a proper step up from the one before it. Aside from that, it's also somewhat a sandbox game, so it's up to you to decide your own goals to work towards and how you're going to go about it.

I do like Valheim, but it's a very different game from what Vintage Story wants to be. With Valheim, your express goal is to find specific monsters and slay them to get to Valhalla; yes, you build some cool bases along the way, but the game revolves around monster hunting. Which is a goal it does very well, but if you don't enjoy monster hunting that much or want gameplay options to pick from...it's going to end up falling short.

Valheim's food system is good for adjusting your stats on a whim, and it serves its purpose well for what the goal of the game is. I don't think it would work very well in something like Vintage Story though, and I would also say that Valheim's food system is boring in comparison. Old food becomes practically irrelevant once you unlock something new, which means that while there's a variety to pick from, it really only makes sense to be eating the best you have available for the specific task you're trying to do...which also means you're pretty much eating the same thing all the time. Farming also isn't complicated, as you simply stick seeds in the dirt and wait for them to grow; no crop rotation needed and water supply/climate/soil fertility doesn't matter.

When it comes to building defenses, it's more critical in Valheim given that enemies will actively try to destroy your stuff. Which I will also note is highly aggravating if you're wanting to focus more on building. Now it's possible that we could see some kind of weathering mechanic or destructive enemies in Vintage Story, however, I also think such an addition would need to be done very carefully, especially since the game currently encourages a lot of fine detailing via the chisel system. It's one thing to just replace a few simple broken blocks, but quite another to have to replace blocks that you may have spent hours chiseling to perfection.

As for Valheim's sea travel...it's well-done and absolutely makes sense for a Viking game, but it's also a gameplay feature I both love and hate. In small doses, the sailing is fun, but otherwise it tends to up something I find tedious. There's not much to see out at sea, the wind can be aggravating(there's an ability that solves that problem, but taking it means not picking other abilities that have more utility), and not everything can be transported via portal meaning that you'll end up needing to spend a good chunk of time just hauling cargo around. That's not to say that water-dominant worlds aren't viable in Vintage Story--there's already settings to achieve that. But I don't think it should be the default. What I would expect for a "standard world" is primarily land navigation, with an area or two where a boat is a requirement for timely progress.

[Thorfinn]

A lot of valid points, @Kaldo. It's hard to get too excited about raising swine when it gives pretty much no advantage over just hunting. The only reason to make juice is to make wine so you can make brandy so you can make aqua vitae so you can make alcohol bandages, which are only useful in some situations anyway. But I strongly suspect the Status Effects System in the roadmap is the plan to address things like this. Well rested could give a productivity bonus or something. In any event, based on the moddability of the game so far, it should be easy to add new effects, and tie them to the coziness of your home, so you construct and decorate it so as to obtain those buffs.

Like @LadyWYT says, for now  that's mostly only of value to those who like to roleplay, but I can easily see it becoming quite a little more worthwhile.

 

[LadyWYT]

49 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

It's hard to get too excited about raising swine when it gives pretty much no advantage over just hunting.

The main advantage to raising swine/other livestock over hunting, is that it's a lot less risky. When out hunting, it's possible to fall in a hole, get ambushed by a predator(or prey!), or potentially even get caught in a temporal storm/die from exposure if one isn't paying attention. With livestock, you don't have to leave the comfort of your base, and it becomes even easier to harvest them once they hit generation 3.

The main nitpick I would have here is that for players who aren't in to roleplaying and just want to constantly push for progress, there's no real reason to sit in the base for extended periods, as that's basically time wasted. Which I'm not entirely sure how you fix that, as forcing players to sit in their bases for some reason will probably end up being more frustrating than rewarding. I think what we have now is fine, as it allows players to choose how they want to approach their own gameplay and doesn't force a specific route for acquiring food.

59 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The only reason to make juice is to make wine so you can make brandy so you can make aqua vitae so you can make alcohol bandages, which are only useful in some situations anyway. But I strongly suspect the Status Effects System in the roadmap is the plan to address things like this. Well rested could give a productivity bonus or something.

I'd also suggest that a "Well-Rested" bonus could be used to deal with certain status effects, if one doesn't have the means to create a cure for it otherwise. It'd be the slower method of dealing with a temporary penalty though, so that players don't end up just ignoring a medicine system entirely.

Incidentally, I think one of the main hurdles of game design to overcome is the tendency of players to opt for the path of least resistance...that is, the gameplay that appears "most efficient". While it's natural to default to the most efficient gameplay methods, efficiency doesn't always translate to fun. I'd cite bunny traps as an example--if you dig a deep trench around crops in Vintage Story, bunnies will happily hop into said trench to try to get those crops. It results in an easy source of protein, but it's not as engaging as hunting food yourself or putting in the effort to manage farms and livestock. Likewise, living in a basic dirt cube the whole game is efficient, but not aesthetically pleasing. That's not to say those ways of playing the game are wrong, but players might be setting themselves up for a shallower experience if efficiency is the only focus.

[Tom Cantine]

This is an issue I've always struggled with in almost every RPG I've ever played: pleasure. How do you build into the game some way to reflect the sheer aesthetic pleasure of eating something that's just plain TASTY? We code in all sorts of buffs and bonuses to act as incentives to seek out the better foods, and yes, both Valheim and Vintage Story do provide decent incentives to vary the diet beyond just hauling around a stack of cooked porkchops. But the paradox is that these buffs and bonuses are inescapably utilitarian in nature; they let you perform game tasks more effectively. And while it's certainly true that being comfortable and well-nourished does increase your capacities in the real world, that's a by-product we have to explain and document to bean counters who imagine lean mean austerity as supremely efficient. It's not really why we enjoy good food or music or art.

Valheim's comfort mechanic is nice, but it's an example of this mechanism. Once you've got your Rested buff, there's no longer any in-game reason to relax by the fire appreciating the subtleties of that tasty mead you brewed. 

I guess a big part of it is that the computer game only gives us actual access to two senses, sight and hearing. No tastes or smells, no tactile perception, just what we see on the screen and hear through our speakers. So we can actually enjoy the beautiful sunsets or autumn leaves, or the sounds of crickets chirping or birds in the trees, but we just have to imagine what something tastes or smells like. We get a jarring red overlay and howls of pain when we take damage, but we don't appreciate any tactile difference between a rawhide mantle and a linen shirt. 

Here's an idea for a sense of smell: First create a list of relevant smells: smoke, flowers, rot, etc. Assign each a colour. Then display on the status/toolbar a small pie-chart showing how much of the various smells are present at any given moment. This could be actually useful for things like hunting or foraging, in that you could find your way to ripe berries the way a prospecting pick can lead you to ore nodes. It could also alert you to danger. And it could, quite incidentally, become a kind of visual surrogate for the aesthetic qualities of olfaction: we'd learn to like or dislike certain patterns of smell display.

Just spitballing here, of course. 

[Thorfinn]

38 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

How do you build into the game some way to reflect the sheer aesthetic pleasure of eating something that's just plain TASTY?

Wait did I miss something? VS now has bacon!?!?!?! Mmmm, bacon. Speaking of which, I'll be back in a few...

[Facethief]

I’ll spend thirty minutes on a world and one of three things will happen:

I collect 20 berry bushes and decide that that seraph lives happily ever after;

I realize that X variable is wrong with the world;

or I realize that my base area is too rainy and that I don’t feel like finding another spot.

[LoveWyrm]

I'm fine with all the points you touch on, which means I don't agree they need much changing, except the spawn system.

 

A survival game will always be a chore, best to keep the baseline choreness to a minimum.

So yes, it's a chore to make cobblestone, when you could just live in a dirt shack, but that's fine. That way you can roleplay someone who just will not settle in dirt shacks and will do everything to live in a real building, and maybe eat off real plates using real cutlery.

But if you just wanna play the game 'baseline' then you can survive in a dirt hut.

 

Apply this to the other points. Food too easy? Roleplay someone who eats three meals per day, even if it means throwing away a whole bowl of soup by washing it the bowl in a puddle.

Roleplay someone who doesn't run unless in danger, cause people don't run everywhere, makes the passage of time more meaningful.

Play someone who sleeps at night no matter what and if you didn't get 8 hours of sleep, roleplay a higher food consumption the next day.

 

Things like that...that can get 'involved' real quick even with the default "no big deal" settings the game has.

 

If you do not have the self control for self imposed challenges, then I would like the developers to put your suggestions on a very low priority and tweak other systems first.

Cause it's always better to have someone get bored, than someone angry at too much tedium... yes, that's more nuanced than I make it seem, perhaps, but that should be the credo of all sandbox/survival devs.

Always be cool with someone getting bored and doing something else (after all playing videogames is basically bleeding away precious lifetime that you will never get back) than trying to make things more and more contrived in the vain (pointless) hope that it will appease optimizers...nope. I would call it an axiomatic statement that it's not gonna help, all you'll end up with is "neck strain after reading a book for an hour in project zomboid and now you can't play the game without being miserable" and co.

 

That spawn thing tho? 100% agree.

The rest? Very much deliberation has to be done...and with a focus on bonuses rather than making the baseline awful. The dirt shack should always be viable.

I'd rather consign the devs to a hellish existence where they have to implement a subjective-but-really-objective cozy and glamour perception system.

Where your character will innately feel better in some structures based on their...structure and material, than making the dirt  shack unviable. Even if that system is ten trillion times more difficult to implement. I don't care. It's the only true fix to that system.

 

Lookin at you...crude door on a lottery that makes it so it jumps out of the hinges every couple of actuations... ... stupid...

Anyway, if my post seems hostile or anything, it's not meant that way, in fact, I am a scared and driven individual, not an angry one...at least not on that front. Way too many games degenerated into memery and rigamarolic rituals to deal with ever increasing shackles by the devs.

 

Make dirt shack stay viable. Make hole in ground with a pot inside be a fridge. Make cold just be a calory tax. Even if food is abundant.

And always push for player made roleplay conducts first.

[LadyWYT]

On 5/3/2025 at 11:41 AM, Tom Cantine said:

Here's an idea for a sense of smell: First create a list of relevant smells: smoke, flowers, rot, etc. Assign each a colour. Then display on the status/toolbar a small pie-chart showing how much of the various smells are present at any given moment. This could be actually useful for things like hunting or foraging, in that you could find your way to ripe berries the way a prospecting pick can lead you to ore nodes. It could also alert you to danger. And it could, quite incidentally, become a kind of visual surrogate for the aesthetic qualities of olfaction: we'd learn to like or dislike certain patterns of smell display.

Just spitballing here, of course. 

It's an interesting idea, but...

On 5/3/2025 at 11:41 AM, Tom Cantine said:

This is an issue I've always struggled with in almost every RPG I've ever played: pleasure. How do you build into the game some way to reflect the sheer aesthetic pleasure of eating something that's just plain TASTY? We code in all sorts of buffs and bonuses to act as incentives to seek out the better foods, and yes, both Valheim and Vintage Story do provide decent incentives to vary the diet beyond just hauling around a stack of cooked porkchops. But the paradox is that these buffs and bonuses are inescapably utilitarian in nature; they let you perform game tasks more effectively. And while it's certainly true that being comfortable and well-nourished does increase your capacities in the real world, that's a by-product we have to explain and document to bean counters who imagine lean mean austerity as supremely efficient. It's not really why we enjoy good food or music or art.

Valheim's comfort mechanic is nice, but it's an example of this mechanism. Once you've got your Rested buff, there's no longer any in-game reason to relax by the fire appreciating the subtleties of that tasty mead you brewed. 

I'd argue that the primary fault of Valheim's comfort system is that it tries to translate aesthetical pleasure to mathematics. Now there is some math that's important for what makes things aesthetically pleasing(golden ratios, color theory, and the like), but you can't just translate art to a single numerical formula and expect it to work, because individual taste is a thing. If you try to tie the aesthetic elements to pure math formula and associated buffs and debuffs, then what happens is players will figure out the most efficient formula and just go with that every time. Which isn't exactly wrong, but it leads to gameplay going stale a lot more easily.

3 hours ago, LoveWyrm said:

A survival game will always be a chore, best to keep the baseline choreness to a minimum.

So yes, it's a chore to make cobblestone, when you could just live in a dirt shack, but that's fine. That way you can roleplay someone who just will not settle in dirt shacks and will do everything to live in a real building, and maybe eat off real plates using real cutlery.

But if you just wanna play the game 'baseline' then you can survive in a dirt hut.

 

Apply this to the other points. Food too easy? Roleplay someone who eats three meals per day, even if it means throwing away a whole bowl of soup by washing it the bowl in a puddle.

Roleplay someone who doesn't run unless in danger, cause people don't run everywhere, makes the passage of time more meaningful.

Play someone who sleeps at night no matter what and if you didn't get 8 hours of sleep, roleplay a higher food consumption the next day.

Which is why I think that players are missing out on a certain element of sandbox games like Vintage Story if they never bother to engage with any roleplaying elements. Sure, not everyone is a roleplayer, and that's fine, but part of the fun of games like this is the ability to impose your own rules and thus experience something new rather than the exact same thing each time. It's partly why challenges like Snowball Earth and Scorched Earth exist, and why we have different classes rather than just a blank slate of a character.

3 hours ago, LoveWyrm said:

Cause it's always better to have someone get bored, than someone angry at too much tedium... yes, that's more nuanced than I make it seem, perhaps, but that should be the credo of all sandbox/survival devs.

Always be cool with someone getting bored and doing something else (after all playing videogames is basically bleeding away precious lifetime that you will never get back) than trying to make things more and more contrived in the vain (pointless) hope that it will appease optimizers...nope. I would call it an axiomatic statement that it's not gonna help, all you'll end up with is "neck strain after reading a book for an hour in project zomboid and now you can't play the game without being miserable" and co.

I think it also depends on which demographics one wants to appeal to. The wider general audience you try to appeal to, the more simplified/diluted the gameplay ends up being in order to have the needed broad appeal to keep the players happy. However, if you're trying to appeal to more specific demographics, then you'll need to tailor the gameplay to suit the kind of audience you're trying to attract, which usually results in a more niche product. A product that is too niche won't be able to garner enough support to stay afloat, whereas a product with mass appeal might have a huge playerbase but a comparatively shallow experience since it's trying to please everyone. Ideally, a game strikes a balance between those extremes so that it offers a rich, in-depth experience without being so niche that it can't garner the support it needs to stay afloat.

Incidentally, that's one of the advantages of a sandbox game that has a robust modding community; the devs can create a solid baseline product, and players can season to their specific tastes with mods.

[Obison]

Agree with all of the what the OP said. 

[LadyWYT]

Speaking of Valheim's food system, this mod just popped up on the DB. https://mods.vintagestory.at/valkyrnutritions

I don't know how well it works, of course, but for those looking for a system like Valheim's, they now have that option.

Edited May 4, 2025 by LadyWYT

[Morndenkainen]

IDK, I kinda like the pig/chicken farms... It's easy to get hundreds of leather when your pigsplosion yeilds around 100 piggies. Farming becomes a bigger challenge as you need more food to supply them with and keep them alive, and while yes, I COULD builda  massive tower out of packed dirt, I'd much rather use something like andesite and chisel it into something that looks halfway decent as well as make custom kitchen furniture...

One thing this game could potentially use is furniture related buffs... Sleep on a straw mat? No buff... Sleep in an exuisite wooden bed? 10% reduced hunger and 10% speed buff for 12 game hours.. Something like that would be kinda nice and give you a "reason" to make the better furniture.

[Kaldo]

I just wanted to add that I'm not saying they should copy Valheim or Grounded or that any of the other ideas are a good or a bad fit for VS, I just wanted to give examples of how some other games do it and what is "thematically" missing in VS for me. I think it's an issue with progression and that all those improvement steps we have in the game shouldn't be just for roleplay or cosmetic "pretty" building since the game is otherwise very mechanically-oriented and challenging.

Basically, it is weird for me that a game where you have to manually shape clay to create a mold to pour molten metal in... a game that has temperature and seasonal changes with harsh winters... that has a 5+ step process for leatherworking...doesn't even differentiate between a pile of dirt, or a properly built house with thatch roof. It seems like a missed opportunity, and its not related specifically to house building but how the game feels in general, in other areas too.

[Facethief]

I guess they could add something like leakage during rain: lower tier blocks give the room they constitute a debuff for temperature during rain or snow. Still fine for cellars & all, but discourages packed dirt houses and holes in the ground.

[Faithwalker]

21 hours ago, Facethief said:

I guess they could add something like leakage during rain: lower tier blocks give the room they constitute a debuff for temperature during rain or snow. Still fine for cellars & all, but discourages packed dirt houses and holes in the ground.

Why do that, though? Some people don't like to build. Pressuring them to build isn't going to make them happy when what they really want to be doing is hunting or fighting or exploring the map. As it is, the game lets you build if that's what makes you happy, or you can just live in an easy to make house if that ticks the box for you. The current system sounds like a way to satisfy more player types.

[Kaldo]

6 hours ago, Faithwalker said:

Why do that, though? Some people don't like to build. Pressuring them to build isn't going to make them happy when what they really want to be doing is hunting or fighting or exploring the map. As it is, the game lets you build if that's what makes you happy, or you can just live in an easy to make house if that ticks the box for you. The current system sounds like a way to satisfy more player types.

You could phrase an argument like that for almost any existing mechanic in the game too. Why make it so people have to craft their tools manually - it won't make them happy when all they want is to run around and hunt, fight, explore? Why have food spoilage in the game or winters when all it does is slow down the game? Why mold clay one bit at a time when it would get in the way of action? Remove things like that and you're just playing vanilla minecraft again.

I think most of the discussion in this thread is very much in line with what the game already expects of you as a player in a realistic immersive survival game. You can't have long term satisfaction and sense of progress without some cost being associated with it, so it's weird that the game is so selective about what it wants to simulate to such an extreme degree and what gets ignored completely on the other hand.

Edited May 6, 2025 by Kaldo

[Zane Mordien]

I am not a mega builder but giving a benefit for a real roof vs a flat roof would make sense to me. 

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Kaldo said:

You could phrase an argument like that for almost any existing mechanic in the game too.

Interestingly, most of the things you mention already have mods to do that. If it's reasonable to require someone to use a mod to remove functionality, why isn't it as reasonable to require people to add a mod if they want increased functionality?

But, again, I'm quite happy to wait for the Status Effects update. I'll play vanilla a while to appreciate the vision, but I'm absolutely certain that when it says, "Comprehensive", it means I'll soon be modding out the fluff I don't like.

[Facethief]

9 hours ago, Faithwalker said:

Why do that, though? Some people don't like to build. Pressuring them to build isn't going to make them happy when what they really want to be doing is hunting or fighting or exploring the map. As it is, the game lets you build if that's what makes you happy, or you can just live in an easy to make house if that ticks the box for you. The current system sounds like a way to satisfy more player types.

My suggestion is more like dirt box < cobble box < dry stone box rather than mud hut < 2 bedroom house. Or at least that’s the concept.

Edited May 6, 2025 by Facethief
Elaboration

[Tom Cantine]

If there were a mechanic for rainwater or snowmelt to flow downhill and cause erosion or pool in places, and then for certain materials (say, packed dirt) to become unstable when adjacent to water, then advantages to investing in sloped thatch roofs would emerge organically.

[LoveWyrm]

21 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

If there were a mechanic for rainwater or snowmelt to flow downhill and cause erosion or pool in places, and then for certain materials (say, packed dirt) to become unstable when adjacent to water, then advantages to investing in sloped thatch roofs would emerge organically.

Anything that makes terrain more cool is something I love.

And the organic part is a very strong key point of this suggestion.

Just like I sometimes feel bad slapping down a mud hut at a riverbank, on sand, at the water lol.

That said, I think one of the fundamental design considerations is ...uh..how to put it... urgency vs permanence.

The fact that there are supernatural entities out there, and that it, due to it being a game, time flows 'weirdly' ...well that's why I want the dirt shack to be always viable.

The underlying game systems just don't lend themselves to slow but good building, unless you already have a safe base.  IRL you can get away with a little cubby made out of pine branches and all that, cause animals most likely will avoid you and there are no rabid gibbons from the rustworld, either (unless maybe you camp near some sort of tweaker park...)

 

So IRL you can, over the course of a couple of days, peck away at a slightly better shelter, then an eve better one, and then a real good one.

In VS you can easily end up having to entomb yourself in a dirt coocoon for the night.

 

So...how to balance cool stuff like erosion that melts your mud yurt with the supernatural gibbons and wildlife? Maybe they wouldn't come if it rains... or something. Cause if your hut melts AND they come to pester you (every day) then reinforcing the mud would become another chore.

 

With supernatural power comes...supernatural responsibility, and I think it's one of the hardest thing to balance with survival games. And even without supernatural stuff, time rarely passes normally, or the player would literally be playing an alternative life or something lol where everything progresses slowly.

But it doesn't progress slowly, so you gotta eat allll the time, do maintenance, allll the time, walk around allll the time, etc.

 

P.S.:

And just to be clear. If I had to choose between gibbons or cool weather/terrain ...I'd choose the terrain...

 

Edited May 7, 2025 by LoveWyrm
messed up the edit

[CannelleYT]

Perhaps a class overhaul would be interesting. The main reason people play Commoners is that they have no bonuses or penalties, making them perfect for keeping things simple. Overhauling existing classes and creating a Nomad class for travelers, allowing them to sleep comfortably in the wild, whereas the Sedentary class would be forced to sleep in a decent house, could make things interesting.

It would also be necessary to find a way to build real makeshift shelters by mixing branches with leaves for example to be able to put a bed of hay inside and would only be able to put it inside. Travelers will therefore have to go through this step to sleep rather than stupidly putting their bed and sleeping anywhere.

Regarding food, the cellar concept is interesting in itself. But it's too easy to acquire at the beginning because there are no size requirements. The storage periods, or even the basic expiration dates, should clearly be reviewed. Because champions and vegetables have completely excessive storage periods, meaning that with a good stock of vegetables/mushrooms, you can easily last three years.Perhaps making grain/vegetable plants rarer in the wild and increasing the number of animals in the wild to encourage the player to use hunting more at the beginning of the game and farming later.