mods vs specs

[FrostOne94]

so I recently started my PC adventure and bought a pc and it was just enough to play VS vanilla so I bought it and began to play on default settings.

 

found it hard to start, then watched a few videos to get some pointers realised my world could be 1000x better if I just tweaked a few settings but it wouldn't spawn any animals

so went back to default settings and looked into upgrading my pc.

Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz   4.00 GHz
Installed RAM    16.0 GB
Graphics Card    Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics (4 GB)

 

everything runs fine until I put one to many mods on.

 

now I only had limited money to get my pc runnable asap as I'm a impatient f**kwit, no I know my GPU is shit but I read somewhere that RAM is even though stated 16gb is plenty it often well exceeds that due to chunk loading ect?

so my best mate said need a new GPU (obviously) but would me slapping 32gb or the motherboard max of 64gb ram help with being able to have the mods I need world setting aswell or will both need to be upgraded for max performance? 

I know this is a stupid question but I really am that stupid and have no idea wtf I'm doing??

 
 

 

[Professor Dragon]

Hello FrostOne94,

Thanks for the info - let's get some more.

For starters, yes,  you're using an older setup - about the same vintage as mine. I'm not sure if that is your whole trouble though.
I'm running an Nvidia GEforce GTX 1050 TI, which also was released in 2016 like yours. Along with 16 GB of RAM. With an Intel i5-8300. So I'm on the different side of the vendor fence, but on paper my system should be less powerful than yours - but it runs fine with a few dozen low impact mods, and the game graphics settings set reasonably high. (It does run hot though, so I tweaked some things down.)

Use this as a guide: https://www.vintagestory.at/sysrequirements/

1. What Settings are you running for Graphics? Without Mods, have you tried turning settings down? There's a broad brush option at the top to adjust them all in one big hit.
2. What do you mean - exactly - by things running fine without mods? (See Q1). Can you freely look around, run, harvest things, look into the distance etc without stutter? This is important because you need to be 100% confident of the base game performance before continuing. Try to play without mods for a while.
3. WHICH MODS? Some, like the HUD clock, are super low impact. Some, like shaders, are super high impact (Forget them). Maybe it is only a few particular mods that are causing issues, so try to rule which ones in or out.
4. Check your system temperature. Either Task Manager may do it natively for your setup, or install something like NZXT CAM which will report back. Based on your system age, it might be possible it is running super hot, which impacts graphics in the first instance. You might need to redo the paste on the chips in the computer. I did that once and it immediately helped things. But ONLY do this if you NEED to do this if you're running super hot at very low setttings. It's a last step, as if  you muck it up, you fry your chips. I mean, it is an old system - all types of weird things can happen on old systems.

Professor Dragon.

[FrostOne94]

Good evening Professor

1. At first I played the base game no mods, no world gen change, no preference setting's and on low performance setting's due to low spec as I rustled my original build together out of my best mate's spare part box so I knew if I wanted it to be playable l needed to keep everything low, I upgraded yesterday and installed all driver and made sure temp stayed low after running around in game a few hours still low setting's and no mods, everything was all good(from my little understanding of things).

2. I wanted to start a new map with all the setting's I learned through research and applying them without issue in a previous world and I wanted to have colour map/world gen like oceans ect.

I installed mods and sorted desired settings and entered my new world, at first everything was fine no lag, smooth turning, animals spwaning every(damn wolves), made my day one essential crafts and started heading south but the more I travelled the less wildlife I would see till eventually nothing at all just me and the world, tried dropping a couple of mods off but even starting a new world with no mods just world gen and color map didn't sort the problem out.

ended up factory reset my PC and reinstalled everything just incase i messed up when installing drivers been at it all day trying to fix it, even just ordered 64gb of ram at the max mhz my motherboard can handle.

3. I installed loads of mods

more map markers

abc backpack mod

ops chisel 

molds

hud info

ancient weapons 

better ruins

xandus inventory 

carry on

4. My pc is running cold tbh I was actually quite impressed with my ak cpu cooler it's a beast of a thing I might struddle to get my new rams in with the cooler in the way so might have to remove it to put the 4 sticks of 16gb ram which Im hoping will give me the settings and mods I want on my new world.

 

[Professor Dragon]

Thanks for that. To be clear, the problem that we are trying to address is "See no animals after traveling away from spawn."

You've got to "box the problem" and rule things in/out if possible. Here are some contenders:

• The PC has an issue << This doesn't seem to be a PC problem. Let's assume that is good for now and park this line of enquiry.
• The world settings are impacting spawn rates << A possibility, although I don't know how. You would troubleshoot with a new world and different/default  settings.
  See https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Entity_spawning
• This specific world is glitched << Same troubleshooting as above. New world and test.
• The mods are causing an interaction << Remove them all and retest. Should be done anyway, even though your mod list looks unlikely to have an impact on animal spawns.
• Random events << Animals take a while to spawn, and need specific conditions. You could just be unlucky. Go into (Optional - a test world) Creative, and fly around in all directions just in case you missed them on foot. (If you do this in your main world, it will load the chunks you visit.)
• The version of Vintage Story contains a bug << Unlikely. I'm assuming that you're on the stable release, and we know things spawn there. If not, do that.
• The Vintage Story Graphics "Settings" combined with your PC are the cause << A possibility. Search for threads on this forum and over on Reddit like these:

Anyway, I see that this question comes up a little bit, so you may want to go through the above list and rule things in/out.
AND go have a search of similar posts, in case there is something useful out there.

Maybe some other people can chip in, but the more groundwork you cover, the better.

Good Luck.
Professor Dragon.

 

[Thorfinn]

I've got that beat. One of my systems is an i5, with a 980 Strix, and it was fine until I added BetterRuins. I was running 1024+ view distance, but often at max, plus glorious or whatever the absolute best settings are, but this one mod brought my system to a crawl. I bumped it to 64g and all was well, though I did have to settle for Ultra-High and no more than 1024. In 1.20, I had to drop the view distance one notch, and another with 1.21. By about 1.30, I'm going to have a view distance of 16.

It was a pretty decent system in 2014 (I think) when I built it...

Edited August 24, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

41 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

it was fine until I added BetterRuins

Better Ruins is pretty notorious for being rather demanding on system resources, if I'm not mistaken. I don't have a potato pc, but I don't top-of-the-line either, and I recall taking a definite performance hit the few times I played with the mod. The ruins are interesting and all, but it wasn't worth the performance loss, in my opinion. Likely why the vanilla ruins are rather simple, instead of being so elaborate.

[Thorfinn]

31 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Likely why the vanilla ruins are rather simple, instead of being so elaborate.

Yeah, that's why I'm a little wary of the suggestion to use partial blocks on the entire surface layer. Maybe that can be optimized, but I'm more than a little doubtful -- even if you only split a block in half, each of three dimensions, that's still multiplying the number of blocks to render by 8 for a given view distance, the rough equivalent of tripling the view distance.

[FrostOne94]

ive just done a system requirements test and my pc should run this game at medium with no mods according to https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/requirements/vintage-story/25456, im out of ideas? someone said it could be my harddrive not being M.2 is this a possibility??

 

[Professor Dragon]

3 hours ago, FrostOne94 said:

ive just done a system requirements test and my pc should run this game at medium with no mods according to https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/requirements/vintage-story/25456, im out of ideas? someone said it could be my harddrive not being M.2 is this a possibility??

 

Hello @FrostOne94

What exactly *IS* the problem that is seen? Can you recap and expand on the big picture of what is trying to be addressed and what is seen in game that is unexpected.
Just in a sentence or two. 

Sorry if this has been covered, but I think it is important to be clear on this, before diving into the technologies.

We can ping in @radfast if needed for performance questions, but we need to know what we're addressing.

Thanks, Professor Dragon.
 

 

 

 

 

[FrostOne94]

No entities are spawning in the world?? I'm pretty sure I explained all this in the post above 

[Professor Dragon]

45 minutes ago, FrostOne94 said:

No entities are spawning in the world?? I'm pretty sure I explained all this in the post above 

1) Is this correct for the current scenario?

No entities (sheep, pigs, goats, wolves etc) at all have spawned or are spawning in a new world with default settings with no modifications loaded.

2) What is the output of this command?
               /entity countg

Edited August 29, 2025 by Professor Dragon

[FrostOne94]

yeah it is a constant scenario 

nothing!!! no even a rabbit

always low like 3/18 or 1/32

like i keep saying my pc was less than system requirements and was playing vs fine then i upgraded my pc to better spec, instead of making my pc better somehow its got worse

[Professor Dragon]

Ok. Maybe try raising this as an issue here to see if you can get help:
https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues

You'll need to provide your logs, so zip and attach them to the ticket. (When you log into the game, there is a button on the front screen that takes you to the log location.)

Here is a similar, but different, example of a ticket logged for surface mobs not spawning:
https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/5875

Professor Dragon.

 

 

[FrostOne94]

could playing on a server fix this??