Hate shivers and bowtorns, devs fix this please, I wont be able to play until then.

[Mac Mcleod]

On 9/21/2025 at 12:53 PM, Kalzamar said:

I was running full tilt at night in a field in low rift activity. Shivers caught up to me, bowtorns shot me, cant run to them, cant see them at night and shiver on my ass. cant build a defense while shivers are running at me and blowhorns shooting at me. couldn't make a shield, not enough cat tails in my spawn region.

how can I approach combat early game if there are no answers to them early game. sleep, don't want to, hole up, don't want to (VERY BORING) . . . so die. so your answer is for someone that has no idea how to mod, to learn to mod to play a game, thanks but no thanks.

Try moving your "gamma" level up under video options.  It's dark but you are not effectively blind.

Build pillars and walls every ~60 meters.    3 blocks high, one block a part. like this...

X X

X X

This will give you decent protection from Shivers, Bears, Wolves, and some protection from Bowtorn.
The Bowtorn do appear to have been turned down.    Before 1.21, I had over 20 outside my little hut and they *were not despawning*.   I literally had to dig a tunnel under ground about 15 meters and then sprint from that to escape.
And caving was absolutely miserable- since you often faced fire from 5 to 7 bowtorn when in average sized open caves.

[Echo Weaver]

I guess I have trouble with the initial premise of this post -- that there isn't enough time to prepare for rotbeasts before nightfall. First of all, you can give yourself a couple of days of grace period in the worldgen settings. Even if you don't do that, the first day has a decent amount of time in it. If you wanted to make improv armor, you could do so. A shield I guess would depend on how readily available cattails are in your area. 

But I don't really want foes that are easy to beat with minimal prep and gear anyway.

I don't have trouble setting up a quality hobbit hole with a crude door, a bed, and a cookfire by nightfall on the first day. Then I bash a window-hole in my wall and stab at the drifters with a spear in an effort to farm my first gears. That's neither sleeping nor being bored. 

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I guess I have trouble with the initial premise of this post -- that there isn't enough time to prepare for rotbeasts before nightfall. First of all, you can give yourself a couple of days of grace period in the worldgen settings. Even if you don't do that, the first day has a decent amount of time in it. If you wanted to make improv armor, you could do so. A shield I guess would depend on how readily available cattails are in your area. 

I'm thinking a lot of the complaints stem from players coming to Vintage Story from the other block game, expecting the same style of game and getting a rude shock when it becomes apparent that Vintage Story is not that kind of game. I'd wager it's also due to a lot of games limiting opponents to what the average player can easily handle for different tiers of progression, in that early game enemies will be pushovers and late game enemies will be tough(but still easy enough to manage provided one has appropriate equipment).

Vintage Story isn't shy about throwing the player more than they can handle up front and letting them figure out how to deal with the challenges that ensue, and that's also what makes the game so much fun for a lot of players. It's also not everyone's cup of tea, and I think a lot of new players aren't really aware of just how much one can customize their game with the vanilla settings, let alone mods.

Overall though, I think it's just a mismatch of players expectations versus what the game actually offers.

[hstone32]

I'm not sure I understand the complaint. What's wrong with staying indoors at night? It's not like you don't have anything to do. You can do clay forming, crafting, cooking, metalurgy, tanning, juicing...

there're plenty of chores at any stage of the game. I don't ever feel my fun is a stake by not engaging with enemies, personally.

[Kaldo]

I also think some people get a bit too defensive over the combat system in VS that is simply put controversial. One of the most popular mods with over 300k downloads at this moment is Combat Overhaul after all, and I don't think there's a better argument than that to prove that people don't want it easier - they want it better.

I dunno about other people but when *I* say that I don't enjoy fighting the bowtorn it has nothing to do with difficulty. I played many other games in the genre that had both simple and complex combat, more or less difficult, customizeable or not. It has nothing to do with the other block game or this game somehow requiring a special pass for being "uncompromising". I think their attacks should be better telegraphed, as in align with their actual animations better, and be more fun to play around than what they are now. Bears should make noise. Drifters shouldn't throw rocks at a whim. Difficulty should be accomplished in other interesting ways and not boil down to locking you into a shield to deal with 1 out of 3 (common) varieties of the rift enemies. Some of these ways can be adding weak points, different attack patterns or behaviors, increasing enemy variety, making gear more in-depth (for instance, not just having spears, falxes and bows)... Or just giving players more options on how to engage with them besides cheese.

As for the comments about staying in during nights, that's a very moot point considering I've had many situations when they just stay on the surface well after the sun is up.

I thought people don't like talking about combat because it's always been like this but then I realized bowtorn have only been added relatively recently, in 1.20, even their wiki page isn't finished yet. Feedback about them should be welcomed in such cases even if this game weren't basically in early access, and especially with such low enemy variety to begin with, meaning they need to do well with the few they have.

Edited October 8, 2025 by Kaldo

[Aksha]

Some players leave furious, while others, on the contrary, arrive intrigued. The point of a survival game is to survive without a guarantee, not to kick monsters barefoot on the first night. Dangers you can't handle at this stage of the game, but which won't hinder your progress—that's the right thing, I think.

Bowthorns irritate me too: they shoot from afar, out of nowhere, and they run away from me, which is really annoying. They're inconvenient monsters; they don't run straight at my falx so I can kill them, hooligans! Driftoons!!  So what if they're the reason I can't play? They won't achieve that. Shield, armor, fence, trap—and you can build your houses again.

The only thing I don't understand is why they don't leave during the day or after a storm? The drifters leave, but they don't. It's strange and seems illogical. But I haven't downloaded the new version of the game yet—maybe they've already been shown the right way.

[Aksha]

8 minutes ago, Kaldo said:

As for the comments about staying in during nights, that's a very moot point considering I've had many situations when they just stay on the surface well after the sun is up.

 

That's why I always make two exits in the house, facing in different directions. At a minimum.)))))

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Kaldo said:

I also think some people get a bit too defensive over the combat system in VS that is simply put controversial. One of the most popular mods with over 300k downloads at this moment is Combat Overhaul after all, and I don't think there's a better argument than that to prove that people don't want it easier - they want it better.

Well, sure, it's all about how you approach the question. The biggest problem I see when we get into the question of how to improve the game is that everyone has to be able to embrace the fact that there are a huge number of diverse approaches to playing. So if you say, "This is broken -- it must be changed to match the way I want to play," you're going to get a ton of pushback from everyone who likes the status quo.

I don't play with Combat Overhaul and don't want it. I'm not in the game for combat sophistication. I think it's one of the most commonly-used code mods, if not THE most commonly-used, but I'm still pretty sure that it doesn't represent a majority of users. The whole point to having a supported mod system is that mods are a legit alternative to the vanilla systems. It's not being dismissive to point someone to a mod that makes the changes they want to see.

ETA: Actually, Expanded Foods is probably the most popular, but I think Combat Overhaul is probably #2.

1 hour ago, Kaldo said:

I dunno about other people but when *I* say that I don't enjoy fighting the bowtorn it has nothing to do with difficulty.

So yeah, I'm still struggling with bowtorns, and as you say, it's not really about difficulty. It's more about the mood I like and the parts of the game that I most enjoy playing. I really like the day/night mood, where daylight challenges are "mortal" challenges -- bears, wolves, finding food, exploring, building a homestead. Then when the sun goes down, I better track the rift activity to know if I should get inside or be prepared to fight creepy eldritch monsters in the darkness. Bowtorns hanging around in daylight really bug me. I also want to be able to focus on daylight tasks when I'm running around in daylight, not dealing with arrows coming at me. Bears and wolves are quite enough, and they're actually more dangerous.

If eldritch monsters are hanging around all the time, the daytime experience gets to be pretty much the same as the nighttime experience, except in one case you can see clearly.

But one important thing is that I'm expressing that preference repeatedly, but I'm not offended when @LadyWYT comes back with why bowtorns are not a big deal. And I'm modding the game to get closer to the mood I want.

1 hour ago, Kaldo said:

Bears should make noise. Drifters shouldn't throw rocks at a whim.

But yeah -- I don't agree with all your statements. Bears DO make noise. They make this hoarse half-bark sound, and I've heard it behind me plenty of times and known to get the hell out of Dodge. You just don't always hear them before you see them, and if you see them, it might already be too late. 

I think drifters SHOULD throw rocks, so long as they go away when the sun comes up. 

1 hour ago, Kaldo said:

Feedback about them should be welcomed

Sure, so long as you realize that, no matter what you say, half of the forum denizens is going to disagree with you. You have to come ready for a discussion and not expect everyone to be awed by your insight. And if someone links to a mod that does 80% of the changes you want, that's not an insult. That's help.

Edited October 8, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Echo Weaver]

(To poison the thread with a different tense debate about game mechanics, wow Betterer Prospecting is not nearly as popular as I thought. It has two orders of magnitude fewer downloads than Combat Overhaul, or perhaps a more fair comparision is 1/4 of the downloads 1 day after a version release.)

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, hstone32 said:

I'm not sure I understand the complaint. What's wrong with staying indoors at night? It's not like you don't have anything to do. You can do clay forming, crafting, cooking, metalurgy, tanning, juicing...

there're plenty of chores at any stage of the game. I don't ever feel my fun is a stake by not engaging with enemies, personally.

The main gist I recall getting from the opening post wasn't so much that there was nothing for him to do at night...it's that he didn't want to use any of the options the game offers(like working indoors or sleeping) and expected the game itself to change to suit his individual preference rather than tweak settings or use mods to achieve his goals. That's not to say that people aren't entitled to have opinions, because they are, but to quote Echo Weaver here as an example:

 

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

But one important thing is that I'm expressing that preference repeatedly, but I'm not offended when @LadyWYT comes back with why bowtorns are not a big deal. And I'm modding the game to get closer to the mood I want.

In general, most "complaints" I've seen roll across the forums have been of this nature. The OP expresses an opinion about the game that may or may not be popular, but they politely make their case on what they aren't enjoying and why, and how they think it could change to be more fun for the general playerbase. The opposite of that is the complaints that also express opinions that may or may not be popular...and advocate for the base game to change to suit individual taste rather than offer a solution that could benefit the entire playerbase. In both cases, there tends to be quite a lot of discussion generated, but the latter case is almost guaranteed to generate more pushback and argument rather than productive discussion.

 

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

I don't play with Combat Overhaul and don't want it. I'm not in the game for combat sophistication. I think it's one of the most commonly-used code mods, if not THE most commonly-used, but I'm still pretty sure that it doesn't represent a majority of users. The whole point to having a supported mod system is that mods are a legit alternative to the vanilla systems. It's not being dismissive to point someone to a mod that makes the changes they want to see.

Pretty much my sentiment regarding Combat Overhaul. I've never used it, and I'm not inclined to use it as I enjoy the vanilla system. It might not be complex, but it gets the job done, and action isn't why I play Vintage Story either(I have plenty of other games for that). I think if more focus were placed on combat, then it's less a survival game about homesteading in the wild and solving creepy mysteries, and more of a generic adventure game where the main goal is slaughtering monsters with some building and story tacked onto the side.

That being said, I can understand why some would prefer a system like Combat Overhaul. It seems to be a more action-oriented mod, so it's probably pretty fun to use if one is looking for more of an action game. To my knowledge, it also retunes the hitboxes for creatures as well, and in fairness the vanilla hitboxes could use some work as they are a bit wonky at times. And wonky hitboxes can make an otherwise solid combat system feel underwhelming.

2 hours ago, Aksha said:

The only thing I don't understand is why they don't leave during the day or after a storm? The drifters leave, but they don't. It's strange and seems illogical. But I haven't downloaded the new version of the game yet—maybe they've already been shown the right way.

Bowtorn lingering after a storm is a bug. I think it's been mostly fixed though. It's not unusual for the odd monster or two to linger for a bit after a storm, but generally they will wander off and disappear.

As for monsters appearing during the day--that's actually been confirmed a deliberate change to the rift system. If there are rifts active, they can spawn monsters regardless of the time of day, but daytime spawns are still a lot more rare and tend to disappear rather quickly unless aggroed. I assume this change was made to better match what's presented in the lore, as well as to make rift weather more foreboding in general as a challenge and lend greater value to rift wards.

2 hours ago, Kaldo said:

Drifters shouldn't throw rocks at a whim.

I actually disagree here. There are actually times it's more beneficial to the player for the drifter to launch a rock rather than try a melee hit. If you have a high level one after you and don't have the means to deal with it(poor equipment or too much health loss), the tier 0 rock throw probably won't kill you, but the tier 3+ melee hit certainly will! The rock throwing on a whim also makes drifters somewhat unpredictable, which makes it a little harder for the player to exploit their behavior.

Additionally, while drifters do seem to be somewhat intelligent, they aren't on the same level as seraphs or humans. They're smarter than animals, but are otherwise governed by basic instinct rather than rational thought.

Edited October 8, 2025 by LadyWYT

[Thorfinn]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Combat Overhaul. It seems to be a more action-oriented mod, so it's probably pretty fun to use if one is looking for more of an action game. To my knowledge, it also retunes the hitboxes for creatures as well, and in fairness the vanilla hitboxes could use some work as they are a bit wonky at times. And wonky hitboxes can make an otherwise solid combat system feel underwhelming.

Yes, CO does some great work making creatures with multiple hitboxes, mostly to make some shots (like headshots) lethal, or at least more lethal. We talked about that in some other thread a while back. It has a very different armor system, too. For those who want the game to be more battle-oriented, it's a good option.

But I disagree with whomever upthread that total downloads is a good metric. I suspect the real number of CO users is somewhere around 10-15k. It's just that updates are so frequent, and the same user updating the mod is counted as a new download.

[Broccoli Clock]

I've been remodelling my home a little and that involved some armour stands, one of which I used to place my linen armour. I ended up in a tussle with a couple of bowtorns, sans armour, and was very quickly down to my last couple of health "segments". 

I really can't stress this enough, if you are having issues with mobs, and you have no armour, then you're going to have a hard time. Even basic wooden armour (improvise || lamellar) noticeably reduces damage, both are craftable with stuff pretty much within your reach*.

* for lamellar you need one resin, which may be less available in early game, but the basic wood just wants logs and grass.

[Echo Weaver]

24 minutes ago, Broccoli Clock said:

I ended up in a tussle with a couple of bowtorns, sans armour, and was very quickly down to my last couple of health "segments". 

Heh. I had this happen and forgot I wasn't wearing my armor. Why are these drifters handing my butt to me??

I strongly suspect that the vast difference in opinions on bowtorns has a lot to do with whether one wears armor by default or not. Higher-level armor has significant penalties, though, so you really don't want to be wearing it when you're out gathering resources. 

In my stone age game, I've been really enjoying the improvised bone armor from Bones, bones, and bones. I haven't really compared its stats to vanilla early-game armor to see if it's OP, though.

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

I really can't stress this enough, if you are having issues with mobs, and you have no armour, then you're going to have a hard time. Even basic wooden armour (improvise || lamellar) noticeably reduces damage, both are craftable with stuff pretty much within your reach*.

 

2 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I strongly suspect that the vast difference in opinions on bowtorns has a lot to do with whether one wears armor by default or not. Higher-level armor has significant penalties, though, so you really don't want to be wearing it when you're out gathering resources. 

I wonder if new players are reading some of the tactics of the more experienced, and simply skipping early armor since it's "useless", when in reality it's useful for reducing damage but won't turn the player into a tank. Or maybe it's just a force of habit for all players to skip early armors since prior to 1.20, the monsters were hardly much of a threat given that drifters were the only thing you'd be running across on the regular. For myself, I still skip early armor most of the time, since gambeson isn't too hard to acquire before winter and I tend to either sleep through nights or just work indoors. Natural threats like bears and wolves are typically easy to avoid, but the rifts being able to produce the occasional monster in daytime does make me reconsider the overall strategy of skipping early armor.  The bear armor would be my choice, in that case. It's not terribly durable, but it looks cool and is decently protective for its tier, and also has the warmth bonus in the event that I lowered the seraph's temperature tolerances.

[Broccoli Clock]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The bear armor would be my choice, in that case. It's not terribly durable, but it looks cool and is decently protective for its tier, and also has the warmth bonus in the event that I lowered the seraph's temperature tolerances.

Bear armour is indeed lovely, however, there is the issue of "acquiring" the bear.

 

[Echo Weaver]

17 minutes ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Bear armour is indeed lovely, however, there is the issue of "acquiring" the bear.

WORD.

[Tom Cantine]

I actually prefer to deal with bowtorns during the day. I can shoot them from farther away.