Vintage Story Fantasy (Adventure Mode)

[Enjen]

Vintage Story (VS) Fantasy Gamemode

Goooood Morning Vintarians!

In light of the newly announced game mode project (W.I.P Title: Adventure Mode), what sort of Fantasy items, blocks, worldgen, creatures and other stuff are you hoping to see??

I love Fantasy settings! This has got me rather pumped. I'm curious to see what the team can come up with (and how quickly ) I already like the mention of Dwarves and Elves. Perhaps we'll see some magic systems? Wands, Tomes, Magic Circles, Alchemical Dusts and Rituals etc.

Again I ask, what are you hoping to see?

Edited July 7, 2025 by Enjen

[Foe Hammer]

Personally I would love to see how they liven up character animations. While I think the animations of Hytale were a bit on the cartoony side, VS feels a bit stiff, especially in combat. The animation of a staff/spear being included in the walk animation looked very cool.

Block/item wise, I would like to see new metals like Mithril, and I would quite enjoy some new blocks that gear towards castles/stone structures like some sort of portcullis or working braziers (though that is not fantasy specific and I would love that in the regular game).

As for races, I always have a soft spot for the scaled ones lol. Would love to see Kobolds, Dragons, maybe some sort of Dragonborn like DnD (but with tails as God intended lol).

And the idea of magic and alchemy does excite me some. It may be too far out of the scope, but something that starts to push into the realm of steampunk/clockwork stuff would also be amazing!

[Echo Weaver]

Dragons! 

Subterranean dwarven cities. 

A vibrant color palette with beautiful varied landscapes.

A deep magic system. One of my favorite mods in That Other Game was Electroblob's Wizardry. You could build out your wand's capabilities with all sorts of specialties. It had a mana resource to gather. Grimoires and spell scrolls could be obtained a variety of ways, with some interesting ones to be found in dungeon chests. And the spells were USEFUL and well-designed.

My default play style in That Other Game was to find a village, build it out, encourage it to increase population, and install myself as its defender. I'd love to be able to revisit that basic structure in a game with an actual RP focus. The usual expectation of high fantasy is that you'll be a roving adventurer, but I really loved building a community. Relatedly, some NPCs that are interesting, though even better if they're still procedurally generated (assuming they're still planning to be procedurally generated environments).

[Foe Hammer]

8 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Dragons! 

Subterranean dwarven cities. 

A vibrant color palette with beautiful varied landscapes.

A deep magic system. One of my favorite mods in That Other Game was Electroblob's Wizardry. You could build out your wand's capabilities with all sorts of specialties. It had a mana resource to gather. Grimoires and spell scrolls could be obtained a variety of ways, with some interesting ones to be found in dungeon chests. And the spells were USEFUL and well-designed.

My default play style in That Other Game was to find a village, build it out, encourage it to increase population, and install myself as its defender. I'd love to be able to revisit that basic structure in a game with an actual RP focus. The usual expectation of high fantasy is that you'll be a roving adventurer, but I really loved building a community. Relatedly, some NPCs that are interesting, though even better if they're still procedurally generated (assuming they're still planning to be procedurally generated environments).

Yessss, could not have put it better myself!

8 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Dragons! 

Subterranean dwarven cities. 

A vibrant color palette with beautiful varied landscapes.

[Foe Hammer]

16 hours ago, Enjen said:

Vintage Story (VS) Fantasy Gamemode

Goooood Morning Vintarians!

In light of the newly announced game mode project (W.I.P Title: Adventure Mode), what sort of Fantasy items, blocks, worldgen, creatures and other stuff are you hoping to see??

I love Fantasy settings! This has got me rather pumped. I'm curious to see what the team can come up with (and how quickly ) I already like the mention of Dwarves and Elves. Perhaps we'll see some magic systems? Wands, Tomes, Magic Circles, Alchemical Dusts and Rituals etc.

Again I ask, what are you hoping to see?

Upon seeing the reply from @Echo Weaver I realized another thing I would love to see. A way to populate your builds. I love making castles and towns and working on working layouts. The ability to populate that brings it to life with NPCs that do tasks in the day and return to their quarters at night would be simply amazing.

 

Having a tavern run with bakers and cooks.

A large smithy to work in with other thing characters hammering away on items.

Castle and city walls with guards posted and patrolling the gates and walls.

A bustling market district with vendors and traders set up to sell there wares (maybe even actual traveling trades that move from place to place with working and moving wagons ).

An archive/museum/artifact showcase/storage building with curators walking the exhibits dusting and organizing books.

Clinics where apothecaries concoct remedies and doctors/healers treat injury and illness.

Man just listing that all out gets me HYPED!

Edited July 8, 2025 by Foe Hammer
Improved message structure and punctuation.

[dakko]

Wow, @Foe Hammer, that populated build idea is amazing! You've got me hyped as well! I normally stop playing due to my single player world being so empty; this would make a huge difference.

[Foe Hammer]

5 minutes ago, dakko said:

Wow, @Foe Hammer, that populated build idea is amazing! You've got me hyped as well! I normally stop playing due to my single player world being so empty; this would make a huge difference.

Right!? If I was confident with modding and had the time I would start working on that as a mod for people and to gift wrap and give to the other dev team lol.

[Never Jhonsen]

9 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Dragons!

Hi. Yes

[LadyWYT]

11 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Dragons! 

Subterranean dwarven cities. 

Especially if we can be the dragons and pester those pesky dwarves for a proper Smaug experience. 

 

2 hours ago, Foe Hammer said:

Upon seeing the reply from @Echo Weaver I realized another thing I would love to see. A way to populate your builds. I love making castles and towns and working on working layouts. The ability to populate that brings it to life with NPCs that do tasks in the day and return to their quarters at night would be simply amazing.

 

Having a tavern run with bakers and cooks.

A large smithy to work in with other thing characters hammering away on items.

Castle and city walls with guards posted and patrolling the gates and walls.

A bustling market district with vendors and traders set up to sell there wares (maybe even actual traveling trades that move from place to place with working and moving wagons ).

An archive/museum/artifact showcase/storage building with curators walking the exhibits dusting and organizing books.

Clinics where apothecaries concoct remedies and doctors/healers treat injury and illness.

Man just listing that all out gets me HYPED!

I really like this, as it's something I'd like to do in Vintage Story, but doesn't really fit the story or the lore. Which is perfectly fine! That is, after all, what modding is for, and if that kind of gameplay is added as a whole new gamemode/game with its own lore...well, then I can have my cake and eat it too!

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Especially if we can be the dragons and pester those pesky dwarves for a proper Smaug experience. 

I'm kind of in the category of wanting to be able to both fight and tame/ride them, but I could totally imagine taking a turn AS a dragon.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I really like this, as it's something I'd like to do in Vintage Story, but doesn't really fit the story or the lore. Which is perfectly fine! That is, after all, what modding is for, and if that kind of gameplay is added as a whole new gamemode/game with its own lore...well, then I can have my cake and eat it too!

Yeah, I have VS Villages and VS Quests installed in my primary game because I just couldn't imagine playing a procedurally generated voxel landscape without them. Those mods are very well done, and I think they'd be a great source of ideas for Adventure Mode features. BUT, to my shock, I don't like them in this setting. The problem is that the post-apocalyptic vibe really works. That game is just vanilla with basic QoL mods, and the world feels like it should be mostly empty.

I think I'd need to start a different game with a different vibe and headcannon for the villages to feel like they belong. That seems like exactly the kind of thing that Adventure Mode should be looking at.

[Enjen]

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

The problem is that the post-apocalyptic vibe really works. That game is just vanilla with basic QoL mods, and the world feels like it should be mostly empty.

Agreed! The only reason I think I'd consider adding NPCs to my VS world is if it were a Multiplayer server populated with other players, creating their own communities. Literally breathing life back into the world from it's Apocalypse. For VS Fantasy? Oh hell yeah. Bring me all the population goodies~ 

[Enjen]

14 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

but I really loved building a community. Relatedly, some NPCs that are interesting, though even better if they're still procedurally generated (assuming they're still planning to be procedurally generated environments).

Oooo maybe establishing it as a Kingdom of sorts. A form of Diplomacy with you as it's ruler would be pretty cool! Albeit quite an ambitious feature but cool nonetheless! 

[LadyWYT]

15 minutes ago, Enjen said:

Oooo maybe establishing it as a Kingdom of sorts. A form of Diplomacy with you as it's ruler would be pretty cool! Albeit quite an ambitious feature but cool nonetheless! 

There used to be a couple of Minecraft mods for that kind of thing, back in the day: Tales of Kingdoms and Ancient Warfare. The former dove heavily into RPG aspects(though was never finished, to my knowledge), while the latter was less about RPG mechanics and more about the player creating infrastructure and NPCs to manage.

There are probably a handful of other mods that do similar, at for Minecraft, but it's an area that's still being explored on the modding side of Vintage Story.

[Enjen]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

There used to be a couple of Minecraft mods for that kind of thing, back in the day: Tales of Kingdoms and Ancient Warfare. The former dove heavily into RPG aspects(though was never finished, to my knowledge), while the latter was less about RPG mechanics and more about the player creating infrastructure and NPCs to manage.

There are probably a handful of other mods that do similar, at for Minecraft, but it's an area that's still being explored on the modding side of Vintage Story.

Ahhhh! I was a big fan of ToK. I got out of it though because I think the Mod wasn't updated for future versions. I had almost forgotten about it! I would often pair it with "Minecraft Comes Alive" for the vanilla villages. 

Ancient Warfare sounds very interesting! A sort of City Management approach. Seeing features like these as I mentioned would be very ambitious, but I'd welcome it with open arms. Perhaps when you're interacting with these mechanics the view changes from First Person to an overhead of what you marked as a Kingdom etc.

So many possibilities! lolol My ADHD cannot contain itself 

[Echo Weaver]

6 minutes ago, Enjen said:

Agreed! The only reason I think I'd consider adding NPCs to my VS world is if it were a Multiplayer server populated with other players, creating their own communities. Literally breathing life back into the world from it's Apocalypse. For VS Fantasy? Oh hell yeah. Bring me all the population goodies~ 

Yeah, I have been pondering what kind of VS configuration would be appropriate for villages. Definitely different from what I have. I'm currently focusing on a vanilla-feel game with mods like sharable map waypoints to play with my kid and putting pies on shelves and other QoL tweaks. (I can almost never go unmodded for long, heh).

I think a village-friendly setup would need to be pretty heavily modded to change the feel of the world. I've been pondering something in Homo Sapiens mode with the lovely Stone Age fauna mods. Or possibly default mode with temporal storms turned off to keep the threat of drifters. I have watched a rust magic mod drift by but never really checked it out. Build some new lore in my head.

What it needs is some sense of over-arching goal, because even though I spend most of my time on survival, it starts to feel pointless once I get the homestead pretty comfortable unless I have incentive to explore. Obviously, a game with NPCs and RP could go far to fill that hole.

That's mostly a brainstorming tangent, but I figure it's useful if some of the Adventure Mode team wants to mine this thread for ideas

 

3 minutes ago, Enjen said:

Oooo maybe establishing it as a Kingdom of sorts. A form of Diplomacy with you as it's ruler would be pretty cool! Albeit quite an ambitious feature but cool nonetheless! 

That would be pretty cool. Rebuild this ruined city, help its inhabitants, perhaps become its leader. Alternately, build a kingdom of your own.

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Enjen said:

Ancient Warfare sounds very interesting! A sort of City Management approach. Seeing features like these as I mentioned would be very ambitious, but I'd welcome it with open arms. Perhaps when you're interacting with these mechanics the view changes from First Person to an overhead of what you marked as a Kingdom etc.

I wouldn't zoom the player out into an overhead view of the kingdom area; I'd implement some sort of map table instead. When you interact with the table, it brings up an interface with a small model of the settlement, along with a list of options to make managing some things a little easier. 

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

What it needs is some sense of over-arching goal, because even though I spend most of my time on survival, it starts to feel pointless once I get the homestead pretty comfortable unless I have incentive to explore. Obviously, a game with NPCs and RP could go far to fill that hole.

The immediate idea that comes to mind is take Vintage Story's temporal storm mechanics and monsters, and rework the motifs a bit. Now instead of time storms, mechanical monstrosities, and eldritch horrors, maybe you have an evil wizard teleporting his orcish armies around, or an undead dragon with a slew of skeletons trying to break free of a dimensional prison. From there, you could add in more NPC settlements and let them explain the new lore as needed.

[Echo Weaver]

Along the lines of building your city, I played quite a bit with Tektopia. A similar mod was Minecolonies. Tektopia had a really lovely system of villagers with specialties doing useful things. Even (sort of) better, it had a built-in threat of of invading wizards/monsters that would attack every so often. I burned out on it because the invaders seemed to be far more powerful than anything my village could defend against, but the whole structure was great.

 

[Enjen]

4 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

What it needs is some sense of over-arching goal, because even though I spend most of my time on survival, it starts to feel pointless once I get the homestead pretty comfortable unless I have incentive to explore. Obviously, a game with NPCs and RP could go far to fill that hole.

Yes! That is my one fear with this game and most other survival games. Is that it just feels pointless or the goals I set are arbitrary. I'm happy I still have the Story to delve into hehe. I also don't play without Mods (MorePiles is essential )
 

6 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

That's mostly a brainstorming tangent, but I figure it's useful if some of the Adventure Mode team wants to mine this thread for ideas

That was my hope for this thread! To be an outlet for people to share their visions, ideas, and wants for the new Mode! as well as for the Devs to sort of, take inspiration or confirmation that an idea they had will be well received. 

 

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'd implement some sort of map table instead. When you interact with the table, it brings up an interface with a small model of the settlement, along with a list of options to make managing some things a little easier. 

I LOVE YOUR IDEA SO MUCH BETTER. It's immersive and does the same thing of an "overhead" view. Very creative Miss Dragon! I think the reason my mind went to a very Menu-centered approach was because of a mod in the other block game that turns it completely into a Real Time Strategy game. With resource management etc.
 

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The immediate idea that comes to mind is take Vintage Story's temporal storm mechanics and monsters, and rework the motifs a bit. Now instead of time storms, mechanical monstrosities, and eldritch horrors, maybe you have an evil wizard teleporting his orcish armies around, or an undead dragon with a slew of skeletons trying to break free of a dimensional prison. From there, you could add in more NPC settlements and let them explain the new lore as needed.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!~ Repurposing already existing mechanics and expanding on it. You impress me more with every post Lady. (Sorry for the glazing)
 

4 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Along the lines of building your city, I played quite a bit with Tektopia. A similar mod was Minecolonies. Tektopia had a really lovely system of villagers with specialties doing useful things. Even (sort of) better, it had a built-in threat of of invading wizards/monsters that would attack every so often. I burned out on it because the invaders seemed to be far more powerful than anything my village could defend against, but the whole structure was great.

Daaaang so seems the Balancing was a bit off haha or expected too much of the players. It's a fascinating premise though! What I think would be really cool to see in this new mode is NPCs actually interacting with the world/terrain. A baker needs to go and find it's ingredients to keep it's bakery stocked etc. and we can go see him in the late hours of the night (or a day where the bakery is closed) harvesting the materials needed and taking them back to his home, and he actually prepares it using the oven and other mechanics available in the game. This sort of autonomy seems wildly inconceivable  

[LadyWYT]

24 minutes ago, Enjen said:

What I think would be really cool to see in this new mode is NPCs actually interacting with the world/terrain. A baker needs to go and find it's ingredients to keep it's bakery stocked etc. and we can go see him in the late hours of the night (or a day where the bakery is closed) harvesting the materials needed and taking them back to his home, and he actually prepares it using the oven and other mechanics available in the game. This sort of autonomy seems wildly inconceivable  

It's not as inconceivable as you might think. The Ancient Warfare mod operated on similar concepts. Banished is a small city-builder type game that also follows similar logic, especially if you play with mods like Colonial Charter. The premise is deceptively simple, but getting a settlement to 100+ people is relatively difficult, since there's both a lot to manage and it's not really possible to just change your plans on the fly if something doesn't work. You have to really plan several steps ahead in order to keep your town running smoothly.

[Enjen]

6 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

It's not as inconceivable as you might think. The Ancient Warfare mod operated on similar concepts. Banished is a small city-builder type game that also follows similar logic, especially if you play with mods like Colonial Charter. The premise is deceptively simple, but getting a settlement to 100+ people is relatively difficult, since there's both a lot to manage and it's not really possible to just change your plans on the fly if something doesn't work. You have to really plan several steps ahead in order to keep your town running smoothly.

I see! Banished is an RTS right? I'm not sure what changes Colonial Charter does but I assume it adds more to manage hahahah I tried Banished for all of an hour. As embarrassing as it sounds, I got the game because I liked the idea of naming the individual villagers. (something I couldn't do in CIV 5)

Your comment about it not being as inconceivable as I might think gives me hope! I may have to dip my toes into modding. I typically stream gameplay of VS but perhaps I'll use that time to Publicly learn coding!

Edited July 8, 2025 by Enjen

[LadyWYT]

14 minutes ago, Enjen said:

Banished is an RTS right?

Not really. There aren't any enemies to challenge your settlement or anything, unless it's maybe a mod feature. The worst that can happen is accidents, natural disasters(which are optional), and your own poor planning. 

 

16 minutes ago, Enjen said:

I'm not sure what changes Colonial Charter does but I assume it adds more to manage hahahah I tried Banished for all of an hour.

Colonial Charter roughly quadruples the content in the game, I would say.

 

17 minutes ago, Enjen said:

As embarrassing as it sounds, I got the game because I liked the idea of naming the individual villagers. (something I couldn't do in CIV 5)

I don't think you can name the villagers in Banished, but you can in Farthest Frontier, which is a sort of spiritual successor to Banished offering more RTS-like options for gameplay.

[Echo Weaver]

Just looking at the VS Rustbound Magic mod. It look awesome and just the kind of deep system I would be looking for, though its mood is definitely lovecraftian horror rather than high fantasy. There are great ideas in there. I don't tend to jump into a heavily-modded game that adds major features until I've really explored the vanilla experience, but that is definitely going on my list for the next level.

 

[Echo Weaver]

23 minutes ago, Enjen said:

I got the game because I liked the idea of naming the individual villagers. (something I couldn't do in CIV 5)

Haha. We have a lot in common.

[Enjen]

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Not really. There aren't any enemies to challenge your settlement or anything, unless it's maybe a mod feature. The worst that can happen is accidents, natural disasters(which are optional), and your own poor planning. 

 

I think my definition of RTS might be inaccurate LOL. I've simply grouped any top-down city management/civilization management/wargame in the same bucket. During my research a few years ago Banished does seem rather harsh! Another aspect that attracted me but ultimately didn't get around to experiencing.
 

13 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Colonial Charter roughly quadruples the content in the game, I would say.

I love when people love a game so much that stuff like this happens. Hallelujah!
 

13 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't think you can name the villagers in Banished, but you can in Farthest Frontier, which is a sort of spiritual successor to Banished offering more RTS-like options for gameplay.

Oh my goodness you're right! I could've sworn there was a feature like this... Perhaps I'm thinking of the feature/mod where you can control the villagers in First Person mode. I may be thinking of another game entirely, and only remember Banished as a game I came across during my search... 
 

11 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Just looking at the VS Rustbound Magic mod. It look awesome and just the kind of deep system I would be looking for, though its mood is definitely lovecraftian horror rather than high fantasy. There are great ideas in there. I don't tend to jump into a heavily-modded game that adds major features until I've really explored the vanilla experience, but that is definitely going on my list for the next level.

You prompted me to take a closer look (I also very much enjoy things that are Magical) and this looks incredible! I'd definitely consider adding this to my worldI follow the creator on YouTube to watch him code and whatnot. Your description of it is definitely accurate. I think it utilizes the concept of rust and rifts well
 

11 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Haha. We have a lot in common.

It would appear so 


After thinking about it a bit... Maybe this thread would be better suited in Off-Topic rather than Discussion?