5 hours in and I'm hooked!

[Poor_Kid]

I just started playing 2 days ago and have spent a few hours each day playing. In addition, I've been scouring the wiki while at work. All I can think about is what to do next! I'm only like 5 hours in and am wondering if I should restart. I feel much more prepared for the experience and challenges presented to me. Before I made poor and uniformed decisions, but if I start over I can make better ones. When you started playing did you feel the same? Should I start a new world or continue with this one? I'm worried I will run out of food before it is too late!!

[Veronica Hohenheim]

2 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

I just started playing 2 days ago and have spent a few hours each day playing. In addition, I've been scouring the wiki while at work. All I can think about is what to do next! I'm only like 5 hours in and am wondering if I should restart. I feel much more prepared for the experience and challenges presented to me. Before I made poor and uniformed decisions, but if I start over I can make better ones. When you started playing did you feel the same? Should I start a new world or continue with this one? I'm worried I will run out of food before it is too late!!

I played 45 hours in my first save and currently am in second one.I would reccomend experimenting and learning for the first save.Maybe try some mods.Then when u know what u want from the game make a new save and customize it.All the sliders,mods or self imposed challanges etc..

[DUCATISLO]

and soon u will have modded like me

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

Before I made poor and uniformed decisions, but if I start over I can make better ones. When you started playing did you feel the same?

Welcome to the forums! When I first started playing, I too made plenty of poor and uninformed decisions, and burned through plenty of worlds before I got enough experience to be confident about hanging on to a long-term world, with the settings I enjoyed the most(similar to standard difficulty).

 

23 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

Should I start a new world or continue with this one?

It depends on whether or not you're really attached to your current world. In my case, I found it less frustrating to just start over whenever I made a major mistake, since I didn't have the experience to really get to bronze(at this point the time investment in a world is usually fairly significant). On these "practice worlds" I generally used easier settings as well in order to reduce my frustration. Once I got enough experience to confidently make progress, I took off the training wheels and started a fresh world for long-term play.

Starting over fresh is probably what I would recommend, since that's a solid way to learn the most critical survival skills quickly. If you've got the early game handled(food supply, set up a base of operations), the rest of the game can be handled easily enough. However, I would also recommend holding on to your first world for a while before you make a final decision on whether or not to keep it. While you might hone your skills in practice worlds, it's possible you might want to return to your starter world once you have more experience, and continue the adventure.

32 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

I'm worried I will run out of food before it is too late!!

I'm not going to say that winter isn't a concern, because it is, but it's not the big scary thing that it seems to be at first. For brand new players though, I do recommend just making "survive the winter" the first goal. If you can handle the planning for winter, you'll be able to tackle anything else in the game you set your mind to.

I'll also note though that in the event your foodstores do run a bit low, you can still survive by hunting animals, foraging for mushrooms/overlooked wild crops, or resorting to digging up cattail roots. It'll be rough, but it is doable, and it'll be one of the stories you can share around the proverbial campfire later with your friends.

[Poor_Kid]

7 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

If you've got the early game handled(food supply, set up a base of operations), the rest of the game can be handled easily enough.

I definitely do not have a handle on setting up a baseline food supply. I feel like I'm constantly starving and can never store anything I find (foraged or hunted). My crops also don't seem to be growing this may be due to my misunderstanding of soil fertility. I used low fertility soil since all I can find is that and barren soil. I just assume that better soil is made or fertilizers are required. So I do feel like restarting a few times and trying to nail down farming might be a smart idea.

I also might have made a mistake in rushing forward in technology instead of getting enough food set up. I already have a good amount of copper and am looking for tin.

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For brand new players though, I do recommend just making "survive the winter" the first goal.

That is absolutely my first goal! I am still confused on the lengths of time? how long is a day, a month, a year?

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Poor_Kid said:

I'm only like 5 hours in and am wondering if I should restart.

I can see value to doing it both ways. After a couple of very short starts to get basic mechanics under my belt, I stuck with the first game I ran for more than a couple of hours. I was clueless about a lot of things, and it led to a VERY difficult winter where I ran out of food halfway through and spent February digging cattail roots out of the ice and running home to cook them before I froze to death. I'll never (I hope) be so completely unprepared and ignorant, and it's some of the most immersive gameplay I've ever had. You can only be completely fresh at something once, and really all you lose is time -- getting your act together in your 2nd year has the same long-term effect as getting it together in your first year.

[LadyWYT]

29 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

I used low fertility soil since all I can find is that and barren soil.

 Well now I have to ask--what climate zone did you start in? Low fertility is probably the most common type, with medium fertility being the next most common(and occurring in areas with higher rainfall). Barren soil though...the only places I recall seeing that is the arctic, and mountaintops in the cool climate zone. By default, the starting climate is temperate, so if you kept that as default it sound like you may have gotten super unlucky and spawned on a glacier.

In any case, you can craft terra preta, which is the best possible soil, but it takes a lot of time and resources, so you may want to start over with a better spawn in order to have an easier time with farming.

33 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

That is absolutely my first goal! I am still confused on the lengths of time? how long is a day, a month, a year?

The default month length is 9 days, and a day in Vintage Story is equal to 48 IRL minutes, I think. The actual amount of useable daylight you have in that day though varies depending on latitude and time of year, just like real life. In any case, you should have plenty of time before winter hits on default settings(around the end of October).

 

1 hour ago, Poor_Kid said:

I also might have made a mistake in rushing forward in technology instead of getting enough food set up. I already have a good amount of copper and am looking for tin.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how much time you sank into technology versus establishing food supply. Technological progress is always good, but you do need to keep yourself fed for it to be of any use. If you're good at hunting and gathering though, it's not hard to devote a day or two to hunting and foraging and sealing the resulting meals into crocks for later.

[Never Jhonsen]

2 hours ago, Veronica Hohenheim said:

I would [recommend] experimenting and learning for the first save.Maybe try some mods.Then when u know what u want from the game make a new save and customize it.All the sliders,mods or self imposed [challenges] etc..

I wanna second this statement, both to you (OP) and every new player

Your first world I strongly recommend playing Standard Vanilla. Get a feel for the game. Expect to make many mistakes. Take note of what you like and dislike on the game.

Then with your second world, make the changes. Add on mods to remove the dislikes, turn features on that you'd enjoy.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Poor_Kid said:

I used low fertility soil since all I can find is that and barren soil. I just assume that better soil is made or fertilizers are required.

Actually, this is the mistake I made that led to the difficult first winter. Well, ok, I made two mistakes that both led to it. First, I thought wild crops behaved like farmed crops, i.e. I could mark where they were and come back when they matured to get a decent harvest + seeds. Secondly, I figured that because all I saw was low fertility soil, higher quality soil was a soil upgrade, and that as I advanced I'd reach a way to enrich what I had. Wrong on both counts.

Wild crops do eventually mature, but not on the kind of schedule that farmed crops do. Their ticks of advancement can happen at wildly random times, and the chunk may need to be loaded. I waited months for wild crops to mature, then found myself staring down August without nearly enough planted. 

The correct thing to do is to just bash those wild crops and get the seeds from them, then go home and plant them yourself. 

Secondly, soil quality is not made unless you're crafting terra preta with compost. (OK, you can make a permanent improvement with potash, but that's far more difficult.) If you're seeing low quality and barren soil, you're in a very arid place. Soil quality is directly related to environmental moisture. Try to find a lake or pond in a higher rainfall area (the rainfall is recorded on the summary you see when you hit C). Probably there will be more lush grass on it. That's the kind of place that's likely to have medium quality soil. Once you found it, you can just bring it back to your base, and it'll work just as well as in the moister climate. 

[Kleave]

2 hours ago, Poor_Kid said:

I'm only like 5 hours in and am wondering if I should restart.

I just started playing last week and have been absolutely loving it as well!  Ran into the same feeling about wanting tor restart when I realized my world had no oceans due to the default world gen settings.  Spent the better part of last Saturday generating new worlds with different settings, only to decide at the end that I wanted to continue with my first world, mostly because I had some sentimental feelings for my little A-frame log hut, perched by a nice pond in the forest lol.

My new worlds were all named variations of "The One", as in this is going to be the one I play.  I renamed my original world to "The Truth" after realizing the truth was I just wanted to keep playing my first world lol.

[Echo Weaver]

5 minutes ago, Kleave said:

my world had no oceans due to the default world gen settings

Did you create this world on the most recent version (1.21)? I think the default world gen DOES generate oceans. It just might take a journey to get to one.

[Kleave]

28 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Did you create this world on the most recent version (1.21)? I think the default world gen DOES generate oceans. It just might take a journey to get to one.

I did!  1.21.1 iirc, fingers crossed there may be an ocean somewhere that I stumble upon in my travels, would love an excuse to built a sailboat! I did end up making a copy of my world and flew about 100k blocks north in creative mode last weekend to see if I could find one and didn't see one during that time. 

Slightly off topic but after I deleted that copy of the world I made, my original world kept all the uncovered areas of the map as if I had traveled all that way for real lol.  I felt guilty after pulling a cheese move like that, denied myself the excitement of actually exploring that way. Lesson learned.

[Echo Weaver]

5 hours ago, Kleave said:

I did!  1.21.1 iirc, fingers crossed there may be an ocean somewhere that I stumble upon in my travels, would love an excuse to built a sailboat! I did end up making a copy of my world and flew about 100k blocks north in creative mode last weekend to see if I could find one and didn't see one during that time. 

That's a bummer. My main world was created in 1.19, and I set the land coverage stats to match default 1.21 when I upgraded. I made a backup of the world and checked that one in creative to see if there were ugly chunk boundaries from the worldgen change, and it didn't seem to be too bad. But I'm acting on faith that those defaults do produce oceans eventually.

5 hours ago, Kleave said:

Slightly off topic but after I deleted that copy of the world I made, my original world kept all the uncovered areas of the map as if I had traveled all that way for real lol.  I felt guilty after pulling a cheese move like that, denied myself the excitement of actually exploring that way. Lesson learned.

Huh. I don't think that happened to me. Seems like it shouldn't if you made a copy. What did you do to make the copy and return to the original?

[Kleave]

5 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

What did you do to make the copy and return to the original?

I opened the save files folder then copy and pasted my world file, renamed it, and checked the file name (not the world name) in the 'edit' menu inside of the game to be sure I was launching the right copy.  Deleted it from the save files folder after I was finished with the copy, checking the file name in the same manner.

[Echo Weaver]

4 hours ago, Kleave said:

I opened the save files folder then copy and pasted my world file, renamed it, and checked the file name (not the world name) in the 'edit' menu inside of the game to be sure I was launching the right copy.  Deleted it from the save files folder after I was finished with the copy, checking the file name in the same manner.

Hmm. OK. I'm going to guess that the map information is stored outside of the save file then? My game has a Maps folder in the game data. It looks like that might be it. 

I don't know if you're talking about the same thing, but on the Singleplayer worlds menu where you pick the world to enter, the pencil icon takes you to an edit menu. You can make a backup of your world from there, which is stored in the BackupSaves folder. You can move that backup into the Saves folder and access it from there like any other world, and its map information is disconnected from the original.

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

That's a bummer. My main world was created in 1.19, and I set the land coverage stats to match default 1.21 when I upgraded. I made a backup of the world and checked that one in creative to see if there were ugly chunk boundaries from the worldgen change, and it didn't seem to be too bad. But I'm acting on faith that those defaults do produce oceans eventually.

That should allow newly generated chunks to match the default 1.21 generation, so you should be finding an ocean eventually. They just seem to be very rare on the default settings, so unless you got lucky with an ocean spawn nearby you'll probably need to search quite a while. I'd recommend testing out some worlds with higher water percentages, and see if there's something more to your liking there, and then adjust the values on your played worlds again(backups, just in case!). The sweet spot I've found for my worlds is 80% land to 20% water; there's a few oceans in that case, that are easy to find, but land-based travel will still be dominant.

[Echo Weaver]

17 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The sweet spot I've found for my worlds is 80% land to 20% water; there's a few oceans in that case, that are easy to find, but land-based travel will still be dominant.

Hmm. That sounds closer to what I'd hope to see. I tried to get a sense of the tradeoffs, but I couldn't get to a point where I could visualize the effects of tweaking the settings o.O.

I'll have to make a backup world and look around a bit with new settings the way I did before.

[Poor_Kid]

On 10/10/2025 at 1:43 PM, LadyWYT said:

what climate zone did you start in?

I don't know the names or how to look it up, but the area feels like a savannah. It's very aired and I've only found one small pond. I don't know the temp since I don't have a thermometer or other way of telling.

Yesterday, I did start a new save and I absolutely got a better start. I spawned on medium fertility soil and tons and tons of wild crops. It's so far not been difficult to grow the crops or find food. I think my assumption is that I just got a rather horrible spawn for my first game.

[LadyWYT]

53 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

I don't know the names or how to look it up, but the area feels like a savannah. It's very aired and I've only found one small pond. I don't know the temp since I don't have a thermometer or other way of telling.

Gotcha. I'm assuming it's probably just an arid grassland in the temperate zone, as those aren't uncommon. A savannah will be similar, but have acacia or ebony trees and be much further south.

 

54 minutes ago, Poor_Kid said:

Yesterday, I did start a new save and I absolutely got a better start. I spawned on medium fertility soil and tons and tons of wild crops. It's so far not been difficult to grow the crops or find food. I think my assumption is that I just got a rather horrible spawn for my first game.

Sounds like it. Atrocious spawns can be fun to play, but they aren't really the best for learning the game.

[vinnland]

Over 300 in, and 100 hours into my 3rd world. I realise that, with or without mods, this game has peak replayability. 

I play 30 day months so a game lasts long.

[Echo Weaver]

Wow, I've been obsessing over my stone age world, and I see that it's only 26 hours in? Wow, You can do a lot in 26 hours . 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

Wow, You can do a lot in 26 hours . 

I think it's possible to go from stone to steel in about that much time, however, you have to really know what you're doing, as well as have decent RNG on the map generation.

[Echo Weaver]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think it's possible to go from stone to steel in about that much time, however, you have to really know what you're doing, as well as have decent RNG on the map generation.

Right, and of course I'm doing the opposite of that. I've built most of my permanent base, I probably have enough planted to get me through the winter, and I have breeding stock for livestock from mods: ducks from The Critter Pack, and aurochs and giant deer from FotSA.

I have enough copper nuggets to advance to the copper age just from panning, and enough surface copper flagged on my map to at least produce a pickaxe. So I'll be fine in the spring when I'm ready to move to the copper age.