worldgen SAVING WORLDCONFIG TEMPLATES - they already exist, so why can't we make new ones?

[uuretch]

FROM DISCORD: SAVING TEMPLATES FOR WORLD SETTINGS, and...

"let's be real. how many suggestions wouldn't be here, if people could configure custom world settings however they wanted, saved the template, and never had to do so again when they started a new world?

you might see ', and...' up there, as well. i also mean to suggest that there should be distinct minimums and maximums for the more granular settings, such as how many days there are in a month (why not 8 days instead of 9..?! how do you divide 9 by 4?!?!), how much faster tools break, or how quickly tools can harvest resources. this allows players to be more picky and choosy with how the game plays and feels, without having to change very much about the game on the development side.

how would you accomplish that? i dunno. just put an integer field there instead of making us select from a dropdown. i could type in 4 (designated minimum), 8, 12, or 32 days (designated maximum) a month, rather than be locked into selecting 5 options that might not feel right for me at all. even a slider would work better. i could just change all of this in the console myself after the world is created, sure, but why put that upon players that don't want to have to learn console commands to enjoy the game's full range of customization?"

"i'm grateful that there's some method of [saving world settings templates], but if it's not intuitive to someone that's been playing games their whole life, it's not going to be very intuitive to someone that enjoys a couple hours of video games (let alone just vintage story) every day maximum

and they'd likely dislike having to extract the world settings from old worlds before they're able to delete them if they're no longer interested in them -- saying nothing of hardcore saves, where you might delete it without thinking after losing all of your progress

this concept is ultimately for player convenience, and to avoid moments of player frustration like that

i also don't mean to come off as like, dismissive or belligerent. i just dislike that sometimes even the process of fiddling with settings, or to have to go between old worlds or to preserve them just to extract the settings and delete them later, at times discourages me from both getting too experimental or comfortable with a single ruleset"

"copy-pasting configs is functional for the job of a template, but is really more practical for sharing world settings externally. there's an above-average level of savviness you need to intuit that you can even do it, or how you even paste it in when you have to do it at world creation and not into a particular field. saving templates is accessible, and intuitive

imagine configuring a bunch of stuff to more granular values unavailable in world config, while in-world, and then next to the button that lets you copy the world settings, another button that says 'Create Template from World'"

"you're already making me make text files and put them in a folder -- just let the game do it for me instead!!"

Edited September 17, 2025 by uuretch
clarity, and because i'm a pedant

[Echo Weaver]

What is the current method for saving world templates? From this, I'd guess copy-pasting a settings file?

[uuretch]

yeap; once you have your settings copied (which is just to your clipboard; if you want a file you've gotta open notepad yourself) you have to ctrl+v as you're creating a world, and then all the fields change to what the settings file dictates. it's not terribly obvious that you do it that way, and seems almost more like a debug utility than an intentional feature for the player.

Edited September 17, 2025 by uuretch

[LadyWYT]

Having presets saved would be nice, and I could definitely see that happening some time in the future. 

1 hour ago, uuretch said:

you might see ', and...' up there, as well. i also mean to suggest that there should be distinct minimums and maximums for the more granular settings, such as how many days there are in a month (why not 8 days instead of 9..?! how do you divide 9 by 4?!?!), how much faster tools break, or how quickly tools can harvest resources. this allows players to be more picky and choosy with how the game plays and feels, without having to change very much about the game on the development side.

how would you accomplish that? i dunno. just put an integer field there instead of making us select from a dropdown. i could type in 4 (designated minimum), 8, 12, or 32 days (designated maximum) a month, rather than be locked into selecting 5 options that might not feel right for me at all. even a slider would work better. i could just change all of this in the console myself after the world is created, sure, but why put that upon players that don't want to have to learn console commands to enjoy the game's full range of customization?"

On this part here, I'll speak from the developer side a bit--no, not a VS developer, just tinkered with mod creation  I think it's better to have a list of options for players to pick from, instead of letting them punch in the specific values. That ensures a range of choices that will also work well together for actual gameplay...for the most part, at least. That's not to say that players can't make their game unplayable with the settings currently given, but it's a lot less likely than if they were able to adjust absolutely everything themselves. It's the general logic my friend and I used when working on our mod; there's a lot we let the players customize themselves in addition to the included presets, but there was also a thing or two that we deliberately did not allow the player to control in order to ensure our vision for the mod remained intact.

For those wanting to adjust values like that though, that is where mods come in. Vintage Story is very friendly to making and using mods, even for those who aren't really familiar with coding. As I understand it, mods that just tweak base game values are some of the easier ones to make as well.

[Echo Weaver]

11 minutes ago, uuretch said:

yeap; once you have your settings copied (which is just to your clipboard; if you want a file you've gotta open notepad yourself) you have to ctrl+v as you're creating a world, and then all the fields change to what the settings file dictates. it's not terribly obvious that you do it that way, and seems almost more like a debug utility than an intentional feature for the player.

Good grief. No, that's no obvious at all. I would never have guessed it.

 

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

Having presets saved would be nice, and I could definitely see that happening some time in the future. 

This seems like the right solution. I hope that does turn up in the future.

[uuretch]

i can only really assume it's that way for reasons similar to Lady's for restricting configuration options: if you want some consistent play experience between lots of different players to make any judgements off of, you want to make standardized options of play the most accessible. i get the feeling that the default experience is going to receive a bit more fine-tuning before this kind of feature gets priority

[Thorfinn]

They kind of confused matters when they introduced the fantasy "mod" as "Adventure Mode" Playstyles formerly had been just presets of game parameters, and that would be the place that makes sense for custom presets. But unfortunately, Adventure Mode would also make sense to put into the section where you can choose between the other options called "modes" -- creative, survival, exploration, homo sapiens and wilderness, even though those are not "modes" as "Adventure Mode" uses the term.

Personally, I suspect the limits on both parameters and custom playstyles will be removed as it approaches release, but I, for one, am glad it's not there now. It's already like pulling teeth to get people who are asking for help to tell you what version and mods they use, let alone what custom settings they have selected.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

They kind of confused matters when they introduced the fantasy "mod" as "Adventure Mode" Playstyles formerly had been just presets of game parameters, and that would be the place that makes sense for custom presets. But unfortunately, Adventure Mode would also make sense to put into the section where you can choose between the other options called "modes" -- creative, survival, exploration, homo sapiens and wilderness, even though those are not "modes" as "Adventure Mode" uses the term.

Yeah, to risk bringing back the dead horse to beat it again, "Adventure Mode" looks like it would be more a mod existing in parallel to SurvivalMod than a "mode", where "mode" == playstyle == configuration settings on SurvivalMod. A more consistent name might have been to knock the "e" of "Mode", but I think "Adventure Mod" would have caused its own confusion. They're boiling in their own terminology pudding.

And continuing to rant about terminology, I've now probed the source code deeply enough to find playstyles, and they're really called "playstyles." That would have been a perfectly logical name except that "play style" has been a way of referencing the choices of an individual player for a long time. Makes your head want to explode sometimes.

[Krougal]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Personally, I suspect the limits on both parameters and custom playstyles will be removed as it approaches release, but I, for one, am glad it's not there now. It's already like pulling teeth to get people who are asking for help to tell you what version and mods they use, let alone what custom settings they have selected.

Good point.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

It's already like pulling teeth to get people who are asking for help to tell you what version and mods they use, let alone what custom settings they have selected.

I mean...if you lurk the Github bug tracker from time to time, it's not unusual at all for players to report issues with heavily modded clients...issues caused by outdated mods or mods that don't play nicely with each other, etc. Not that the devs don't want to know about modded issues, but they aren't responsible for improper mod setups or bugs in mods.

And like I was getting at earlier and like you mentioned here, it's not limited to mods either. There've been plenty of help requests on the forums, where the issue was being caused by improper mod setups or poor choice of settings, etc(that's not to put down anyone asking for help--by all means if you need help, ask!). The more settings a player can tamper with directly, with ease, the more likely it is they'll break something. A more limited list of options doesn't prevent things from breaking/being too difficult to play, but it does help keep things running smoothly and cut down on the number of help requests.