Limited Exploration Playstyle

[Sparkle Dragon]

Vintage Story's crafting and progression systems are amazing, but the game has too much of an emphasis on blind exploration for my tastes. I love building bases, taming the wilds, and slowly earning new advancements, but I find exploration in most games to be a tedious chore. Does anyone have any ideas for how I can limit my exploration and still find what I need to progress through the game using game settings, mods, or personal rules, and still have a challenge?

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! The most immediate thing that comes to mind is only exploring for things you absolutely need--like minerals, bauxite, and whatnot. To make things a little easier, make sure that you spawn in a place where the primary rock type isn't granite, chert, andesite, or basalt...granite being the main offender. Certain minerals that you will need to progress only spawn in sediment rock, and there's always igneous rock layers under the sediment layers as well, so this ensures that you'll have the widest range of minerals to work with, essentially.

When it comes to things like bauxite, if you can't find it nearby, just look for it when you travel between story locations. You'll need to do quite a bit of travel for chapter 2(and iron gear is also sufficient for chapter 2), so you've got a decent chance of encountering it in such travels.

For more exotic woods...traveling to the tropics is probably out of the question. However, you can shorten the polar-equator distance when setting up the world in order to make traveling between climates very easy--a day or two instead of a week or two. You can also buy different tree seeds from the agriculture traders, and if you have the Primitive Survival mod, you can loot some more exotic things like ebony seeds and pineapple seeds from the tree hollows the mod has(depending on gameplay preferences you may or may not want to disable some features that Primitive Survival adds).

[Sparkle Dragon]

Thank you for your response! I realized while reading it that I don't mind making big trips as long as I know where I'm going. I think spawning near sedimentary rock will go a long way for me though, since the minerals are something I need to get again and again, as opposed to seeds, for example, which I can propagate at my base.

[HalfAxd]

I would think that using the full color map would help you find things easier... I don't use it for that reason.