Primitive tools unrealistically restricted?

[SteveHanley]

I'll admit that I'm relatively new to the game, but I find it rather odd how restrictive the stone-age tools are, and it honestly makes for a grindy experience trying to progress through the early game. I understand and appreciate the more down-to-earth, rugged difficulty that VS has, but no stone woodsplitting? Basket and stick traps that almost never work over real world snares? For casuals like me who don't have hours on end to spare, it's almost not worth it to play the game because of how much time is required just to make it past the first tier of progress. I've tried a couple mods to mediate this, but they're only so-so stable. I've already had to sign out from my computer a couple times because when VS freezes, it really freezes.

For stone woodworking, I feel there could be certain tools restricted to Granite or some harder rocks in the same way arrowheads are restricted to flint. These tools may involve woodsplitting, hammers, and even low-level mining. There's no way someone couldn't just fasten a rock to a stick to make a hammer.

Another big example of the grindiness is getting from Stone to Copper. I've had to walk for almost half an hour in some worlds just to find nuggets of copper, and panning is almost as bad. It almost feels like VS is missing something - a tool or tools that are advanced stone that aid in getting to copper a bit more reliably then panning an entire biome of gravel for nuggets. They wouldn't even need to be an insta-fix for copper, but make it a bit more reliable. For example, maybe patches of dirt that have low-levels of ore. The only way to extract the nuggets is to smelt the blocks, leading to a slow but reliable source of ore. This method has ties in the real world as a primitive but effective means of capturing actual nuggets of ore, and I feel would fit well in gameplay.

Overall I feel like the early game could use some TLC. I know I'm not alone in this observation either, and "grindy" is a description I hear tossed around often when discussing early game. Like I said, I enjoy the more realistic gameplay of VS, but early game is actually less realistic due to how few things we can actually do to progress.

Edited July 12, 2025 by SteveHanley

[Rudometkin]

I've spent over 29 hours in my first world (wilderness survival) and am still in the stone age. (I keep getting yeeted around the map to start over) The entire experience is perfectly enjoyable and fine to me. If anything, I would like to see it become more complex on the difficult side. I'm in it for the journey. The greater the challenge, the sweeter the victory.

However, I would be supportive of some well-implemented solutions to your issue. In this area though, I feel too uneducated, or at least 'under-thought' to determine what would be "well-implemented" in this case, personally.

But perhaps if only one age should be "grindy", it is the stone age. 

Edited July 13, 2025 by Rudometkin

[Lugh Crow-Slave]

I'd agree if getting your first set of copper tools like the saw axe and hammer wasn't something you could achieve within the first couple dozen minutes. 

You're not supposed to be sticking to the stone age all that long and the restrictions not only add a unique feel to the early game and grant a real feeling of progress as you use stone less and less as metal becomes less expensive to you but is also the main push that gets new players to leave the stone age and enter copper.

[SteveHanley]

4 hours ago, Lugh Crow-Slave said:

I'd agree if getting your first set of copper tools like the saw axe and hammer wasn't something you could achieve within the first couple dozen minutes. 

You can speed run Minecraft in under an hour if you already know how to do everything because you’ve done it a hundred times. I’m not talking in reference to that player. I’m talking in reference to players who are not only new to the game, but don’t have afternoons to spare trying to figure out the best places to look for copper or learn exactly what red clay looks like against med fertility soil.

4 hours ago, Lugh Crow-Slave said:

You're not supposed to be sticking to the stone age all that long and the restrictions not only add a unique feel to the early game and grant a real feeling of progress as you use stone less and less as metal becomes less expensive to you but is also the main push that gets new players to leave the stone age and enter copper.

 

I understand the intent behind the devs restrictions and agree, but balance is the key to gameplay. If you get enough people calling something grindy, it’s probably grindy, and that’s the observation I keep coming back to with new players, myself included. 
I flat out stopped playing a new world yesterday because I’m in the Stone Age and found the perfect spot to make a homestead, but ended up quitting and playing something else because I knew what the grind was going to look like to get it up and running. 
Again, this isn’t for the player who could already play the game with their eyes closed. This is for casuals and newbies trying to get into a game but who find the door sticks when opening

[Facethief]

31 minutes ago, SteveHanley said:

best places to look for copper or learn exactly what red clay looks like against med fertility soil.

Deserts, places with lots of gravel. The bits aren’t obscured by grass, and most are fairly flat, so you can see a good amount.

Also, limitations on boards are just so that you can’t get everything in the stone age. Otherwise, copper and above tiers would confer little progression benefit.

[Echo Weaver]

I was also in the stone and pottery ages for a while before I found enough copper to advance.

Obsidiancraft offers some nice expansion to capability in the stone age: https://mods.vintagestory.at/obsidiancraft. It doesn't offer any. mining, which makes sense for obsidian, but it does offer scythes and saws (with low durability), both of which sound reasonable to me. My primary game has a ton of obsidian, but it sounds like that might be the luck of the area (plenty of obsidian, but I didn't find medium quality soil until after my first winter).

I only found it after I made it to the iron age in my primary game, but I am adding Claycraft to my must-have list https://mods.vintagestory.at/clayworks. I've griped in other threads that I think pottery, which is a tech level in itself between stone and copper, is seriously underrepresented currently. One of the primary advancements of pottery is the ability to carry water. Claycraft adds pottery buckets and barrels, which seems exactly right.

OTOH, the struggle is a big feature rather than a liability in this game. It really is about the journey rather than the destination. If you don't enjoy the deprivation of the early game, maybe you want to mod out the stuff that's not fun? The difference between "grind" and "challenge" is a completely individual one. I've gotten some folks really angry at me for saying it, and I swear I am not trying to be dismissive, but if the game feels grindy, maybe a survival game with a different focus might be a better match. Alternately, there's no shame in modding out the stuff that's no fun.

Edited July 24, 2025 by Echo Weaver
Wrote a line about mods that I accidently deleted

[Echo Weaver]

10 minutes ago, Facethief said:

Deserts, places with lots of gravel. The bits aren’t obscured by grass, and most are fairly flat, so you can see a good amount.

Also, limitations on boards are just so that you can’t get everything in the stone age. Otherwise, copper and above tiers would confer little progression benefit.

I dunno. Copper offers a ton of benefits, and I think a few could be shifted to earlier game without making copper less appealing. The hill I'm willing to die on is moving water vessels (buckets and barrels) to pottery.

 

[Facethief]

Just now, Echo Weaver said:

I dunno. Copper offers a ton of benefits, and I think a few could be shifted to earlier game without making copper less appealing. The hill I'm willing to die on is moving water vessels (buckets and barrels) to pottery.

If you aren’t spending flint on fireclay, (why bother if there’s nothing to use it on) then even if flint tools are low quality, the quantity easily outweighs that.

I do get where you’re coming from with the pottery thing, though. If it just took clay to make, though, it might make the wooden versions inferior. Maybe they could require resin sealing?

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

OTOH, the struggle is a big feature rather than a liability in this game. It really is about the journey rather than the destination. If you don't enjoy the deprivation of the early game, maybe you want to mod out the stuff that's not fun? The difference between "grind" and "challenge" is a completely individual one.

I would agree here. When I first picked up Vintage Story, I struggled a lot too making the leaps from stone age to copper, and it could be frustrating at times. However, that struggle is the reason why getting those first metal tools(and later upgrades) feels so rewarding; the player has to work at it a bit to get them(but not unfairly so), and the tools open up a lot of gameplay that wasn't really feasible before. The stone age might be pretty basic, but it's supposed to be in order to push the player to progress.

That being said, players vary in playstyle preferences, and not everyone enjoys the default. As @Echo Weaver noted, you might consider trying out some mods to alter the portions of gameplay you don't find that fun or find lacking. Aside from mods, you might also try cranking up the ore spawn rates in the world generation tab when first creating the world; doing so will ensure that copper, tin, and other minerals are much easier to find.

I'd also throw out Ancient Tools as a mod you might be interested in trying. It adds a lot of useful little things for earlier stages of the game, including an alternate leathermaking process(very useful if you don't have access to lime or borax). For traps and snares, you'll want to look into Primitive Survival, though it adds a lot more than just those things.

[Echo Weaver]

Just now, Facethief said:

If you aren’t spending flint on fireclay, (why bother if there’s nothing to use it on) then even if flint tools are low quality, the quantity easily outweighs that.

I do get where you’re coming from with the pottery thing, though. If it just took clay to make, though, it might make the wooden versions inferior. Maybe they could require resin sealing?

Resin sealing makes sense to me. Buckets and barrels don't have durability, so you can't reduce them that way. Claycraft makes the barrels lower capacity, which makes sense.

[Echo Weaver]

19 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'd also throw out Ancient Tools as a mod you might be interested in trying. It adds a lot of useful little things for earlier stages of the game, including an alternate leathermaking process(very useful if you don't have access to lime or borax). For traps and snares, you'll want to look into Primitive Survival, though it adds a lot more than just those things.

I totally forgot about Ancient Tools. Yeah, that seems like a great one for expanding the stone age. Add features that feel real and appropriate.

I played a bit with Primitive Survival, and it's overwhelms me . The traps and snares are fabulous, and I wish I could just pull those out.

[Dilan Rona]

I think the game balance is fine, but some items, and blocks of Ancient tools could stand being vanilla imo. Same with Primitive survival.

[Facethief]

3 hours ago, Dilan Rona said:

I think the game balance is fine, but some items, and blocks of Ancient tools could stand being vanilla imo. Same with Primitive survival.

Uhhh… which ones?

[FlareUKCS]

I would say its not perfect, but its at least better than TOBG to a point where copper is a bad thing, I dont think its too hard to get to copper a lot of the time as in I can get copper tools in 2-3 hours of a fresh start, and I think that is the slow aim of a vanilla play.

I prefer the slow progress to copper than the ignore copper because we have iron tools from TOBG... its not MC is bad, its just VS is focusing on appreciating progress, I mean I get copper in about 3 hours, and I am slow... I am sure a dedicated player would laugh at my time.

Not perfect, but for now its fun... at least we like copper.

[Pervy]

21 hours ago, FlareUKCS said:

I would say its not perfect, but its at least better than TOBG to a point where copper is a bad thing, I dont think its too hard to get to copper a lot of the time as in I can get copper tools in 2-3 hours of a fresh start, and I think that is the slow aim of a vanilla play.

I prefer the slow progress to copper than the ignore copper because we have iron tools from TOBG... its not MC is bad, its just VS is focusing on appreciating progress, I mean I get copper in about 3 hours, and I am slow... I am sure a dedicated player would laugh at my time.

Not perfect, but for now its fun... at least we like copper.

Unless you spawn in a Bauxite area, it should be rather easy to find copper. Given that Bauxite dont have any ores spawn in it.

[Ryilo]

For the new players that find early game diffcult: remember that there is a "customize" button that can be accessed before and after a world has been created, and you can customize the amount of ores that are generated and how easy it is to find copper and tin on the surface.

I've seen a lot of videos of new players that completely skip the world customization screen, probably because they think there isn't much to customize like in the other block game...