Esrael Posted October 26, 2025 Report Posted October 26, 2025 After Action Report of my first 400 hours of Vintage Story 1.20.12, having experienced the whole "tech tree" up to the steel age and the first two story chapters Preface First of all, thank you for creating this awesome game that is Vintage Story. I found the game on July 3rd, during my summer vacation, through Bellular News, a YouTube channel I'm subscribed to. I saw a video on the cancellation of a game called Hytale (that I had never heard of before), and I was reading all these comments below about another game called Vintage Story. They got me intrigued, so I looked up an hour long VS tutorial video by AwaPinku, which convinced me I wanted to play this game. General comments of the playthrough Looks like I'm a complete sucker for bushcraft survival crafting games, since I was totally hooked at the start. It's been a long while since a game has had me so invested and immersed in it like Vintage Story did. I basically no-lifed the game for like a week straight, by the end of which I had basically finished surviving and even coming out thriving after first ingame year (largely thanks to the aforementioned tutorial video). Sure, the beginning was me just barely managing to evade death by starvation, but once I found my way out of the dry section of map I had spawned in, I was able to find more food, cattails and other materials next to a nice lake to set up my base in. As a little side-note, my spawn point had a trader spawn really close to me, so when I first talked to him, I was able to ask him about all these monsters roaming about, even if hadn't in actuality ever come across any, yet. I love the underground droning ambient music (in addition the excellent overworld tracks, of course). I was feeling really apprehensive about each block further down I dug, as the stability meter started spinning down harder the deeper I went. I wasn't even totally sure what would greet me at depth 0. Suggestions During my 400 hours of gameplay, I experienced most of the game mechanics and all the story chapers 1 and 2. After that I decided to end playing my first world, update to version 1.21.5, and write this AAR. Things I didn't experience off the top of my head: Beehive kiln Making blue cheese Probably a good chunk of remaining lore from random ruins Building a sailboat (no large enough bodies of water around to really need one) Exploring the arctic So, with all of this in mind, I'll list down the miscellaneous suggestions that came up in my head as I was playing: Make ice blocks usable for refrigeration, insulation/lowering cellar temperature --> Incentive to travel to the arctic or high mountains to get ice. Perhaps glacier ice could be more useful than lake ice? Speaking of ice, ice forming/melting should be taken into account even in inactive chunks. It feels silly to come to an area in the middle of July with icy lakes. Maybe the game could check when the player has last visited a chunk and based on the climate model calculate whether ice should have formed/melted between now and then, idk? Have liquids freeze in watering cans, barrels, buckets and other containers. Clay containers could even break from the expanding ice if they are close to being 100 % filled. Jugs feel currently clumsy to use. Maybe with some modifier key make it possible to apply other amounts than 0.3 l? Also, it's not possible to take water out of a jug with a bowl. I think I've seen this commented on quite a bit before, but I'd like some more flexibility to smithing, such as allowing the player to change what you're working on. I'd also like the capability to add individual metal bits to a forge. That way, steel bits could be salvaged and used. Tweak suggestions for pies: Making a pie requires a table, right? I think the restriction feels a bit too artificial. Shouldn't basically any solid surface do? But if the requirement should stand due to gameplay reasons, maybe include other surfaces instead of just tables? Such as polished rock blocks etc.? Make it possible to make pies with fewer than 8 fillings. Make mushroom pies possible. All pies seem to start with the same freshness time, regardless of close the ingredients were to going bad. Shouldn't the pie be fresh for a shorter time with old ingredients, kind of like regular meals do (I think)? I think I've seen this being considered already by the team, but adding a weight system: Max amount of weight a player can carry. The maximum can be increased, if you're healthy with a balanced diet, for example. The more you carry, the higher hunger accumulation. I think roosters were cockadoodling at night time. Shouldn't they be sleeping? I think there were butterflies flying around at winter time. Is that realistic? Make beekeeping more involved by introducing more complex flowers: Different flowers have different flowering/blooming times (requires new flower graphics for non-flowering seasons) Bees only go to blooming flowers. If you want honey for the whole growing season, make sure you have flowers that bloom at different times. Add a propagation system and lifespans for flowers. For example, some flowers live for like only one year and some are multi-year. Flowers pollinate, and flower seeds can fly further when there's wind. Add wool and stuff you can make out of it (warm wetness-resistant clothes) --> Make shearing sheep possible. Make linen fabric crafting a manual prosess similar to clay-forming or something like that. You have to manually click each voxel to existence. Maybe too boring/tedious, though? You can make a loom to make the process a LOT faster, like one row at a time or something? Introduce manual glassmaking, glassblowing? Could make glass bottles, jars and whatnot? Introduce grapes, so you can make "real" wine. Make sleeping necessary by introducing a stamina system (similar to Death Stranding). If you don't sleep, your running/mining speed/damage output can decrease all the way down to 50 % of their maximum. your screen eventually starts to wobble, as if you were drunk. you start receiving damage after staying awake for days on end, and can die. You can restore your stamina partially by just resting/sitting (with chairs restoring your stamina faster), but not to its maximum. The longer you don't sleep in a bed, the lower your maximum becomes and the less effecting mere resting/sitting becomes. If you're in combat, you go to adrenaline mode, which maximises your running/mining speed/damage output, but after the combat ends, your body "crashes out", resulting in a quick drop to your current maximum stamina. Going to bed will restore your maximum stamina back to normal. Compared to hay beds, regular beds and aged beds can increase your stamina past 100 %, to like 125-150 % or something like that, so the additional hours spent sleeping are useful. If there's a rooster about, you can choose to be woken up by its cockadoodle in the morning, so you effectively have an alarm clock. Introduce sound insulation/proofing by walls (computationally too expensive?) Introduce a proper stove, that is more fuel-efficient compared to the open firepit. Not sure if it's already the case, but an active charcoal pit should melt the snow on top of it. Have snow decrease in size a little bit as entities move on it. Or better yet, add footprints, dependent on the creature, introducing a hunting mechanic. With a shovel (right-click?) you can flatten the snow to conceal your traveling (useful against other players). Make coal retrievable from the forge, by ctrl-clicking or at least by breaking the forge? Speaking of forges, could you make them burn longer with better quality coal? Pressing an assigned key while hovering an item on your inventory equips it straight to the off-hand, if applicable for off-hand wear. Refractory brick gratings should allow light and liquids through them. Not sure if it's the case already, but snow on top of greenhouses should prevent light from reaching the plants, halting growth. I heard in an interview of the team considering status effects. How about introducing illnesses, caused by eating spoilt food, for example? Sleeping would drastically increase healing time. You could also create natural remedies/medicine for specific illnesses. The more balanced diet you have, the less the illness affects you and the faster you heal. Maybe add an equip button for armor items? Having to do it all by moving the items around with the mouse pointer is tedious. But is it intentional, actually? After all, putting on or removing clothes isn't really an effortless task IRL. It would be more realistic that you shouldn't be able to apply bandages if you're wearing armor, or even the clothes underneath. But, it might make combat too unbalanced? Well, something for you guys to consider. Make it detrimental to one's health to be in a smoky hut (caused by e.g. firepits and torches). The smaller the room and the more smoke sources, the worse the effect. --> Would incentivise building chimneys, through chiseling or bespoke chimney blocks. Shouldn't birches and a bunch of other deciduous trees drop all of their leaves come winter? Rain should fill empty buckets, barrels, condensers and watering cans over time. (Already implemented in a mod that includes thirst mechanics.) If a barrel includes food and is filled with water, it should get spoiled a lot faster. Trees, dirt and other materials could "soak up" and eventually let rainwater through. Dirt blocks could soften and fall down --> Would make roofing necessary, not just a decorative element. A soaked roof could make the space lose it room status? (In fact, because of these reasons, I never built an "actual" house with a proper roof during my playthrough and simply had the same packed dirt hut "box" as my house throughout the playthrough.) Introduce pests that attack your crops. You can use natural pesticides, such as pest-eating bugs to counter them. Create an alternate recipe for mining bags using linen sacks? That way players can still have a use for their old bags, instead of having to just sell them to traders. Similarly, an alternate recipe for sturdy mining bags using regular mining bags could be an option? I wanted to salvage the iron from my old pounder caps, but it turned out they couldn't be chiseled down to bits. So, could this be changed? Make it possible to kick/push bombs, so you can have them fall down holes to their unsuspecting victims. When hovering your mouse over a cooking pot in a firepit, it would be nice if I was told what was on top (for example a meal with x servings left) It would be nice to be able to light up torches from torches that are in torch holders. Currently, you have to remove the torch from the torch holder and place it "naked" on the wall. Suggestions for story elements: Spoiler Thankfully version 1.21 made it easier to find treasure hunters, because it took me forever to get to the story. I had basically completed the "tech tree" by the time I finally found a treasure hunter. I had only come across like 5 lore tidbits from random ruins by that time. I think the drop chance of lore texts could slightly be increased in random dungeons. I think the Bell enemy reveal in the Resonance Archives was ruined, because by the time I got to the story, I had killed tons of them already, so there was no shock factor anymore (despite the nice buildup). Maybe make them spawnable only after the first one has been alerted in the archive? Not a fan of the temporal storms when in the middle of exploring the story areas, especially the resonance archive library for the first time, when I just wanted to explore the reward in peace after having survived the boss fight. Some kind of a rift ward there would be in order, in my opinion. Monsters also spawn in the past timeline of the Devastation tower during a temporal storm. Is this intentional? The Resonance Archives had a chance to get strong fog, effectively ruining my ability to see much anywhere, even with night-vision glasses. Consider disabling fog in the archives altogether. The timeshift mechanics could be telegraphed better in the Devastation tower, especially the fact that the game wanted you to timeshift while flying in mid-air. I had to resort to a video walkthrough to grasp the concept of timeshifting in mid-air. Up until that point of giving in to watching a walkthrough, I had figured out ways to parkour my way up in the ruined timeline all the way up to like floor 5 or something. It required a lot of careful, difficult and risky jumps to the floating debris outside the tower. On one floor I had to squeeze my way through a low tunnel, using a technique similar to crouch jumping from old FPS games. Depriving the player of the ability to parkour to higher floors without using timeshift, would help players to sooner explore different ways of experimenting with the timeshift mechanic, instead of trying to brute force it to the top by sheer parkouring, like I did for hours. I find it kind of odd that the player can make advanced Jonas equipment without any drawings, unlike the glider, which does require drawings. Consider requiring drawings for them, as well. Not sure, where the drawings could be found, though. It took me forever to grind highest level monsters deep underground for a single missing Jonas part for a Terminus teleporter. Bad luck, sure, but I'd like to suggest increasing Jonas part drop rates for the highest tier monsters. Also, I'd like it if nightmare level monsters and perhaps even corrupt level monsters could have a chance, albeit a small one, to drop Jonas parts. It would be nice if getting too close to a temporal rift wouldn't so easily turn off your currently playing music track. I was just at a nice point of Rust and Radiance when I accidentally stumbled upon a rift to ruin the song. I wish you had a window of mercy to escape from the rift in time before the music track completely fades out and turns off. If you're able to escape in time, the track returns back to normal volume and continues playing as if nothing had happened. End words Phew, that was a lot of text to write. I wouldn't have written it, if I didn't like the game or didn't want it to become even better. Anyway, I hope it proves interesting or useful to someone. There were some things that I would consider downright bugs, so I intend to file separate bug reports for them. 1
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