Game didn't quite live up to "Uncompromising Wilderness Survival"

[jerjerje]

I've been playing this game for over 200 hours now, and I wanted to comment on my experience with the game (I only made the forum account now, though). Before I get into the complaining, I should mention, that I very much enjoy this game a lot! Vintage Story has quickly become one of my top three games. I wouldn't have played it this long if I didn't like it. I just don't think it was nearly as hard the description "uncompromising wilderness survival" had led me to believe.

My two main issues are:
1. The winter cold was too easy to overcome.
2. Acquiring enough food felt too easy

Next I will elaborate on these points in more detail. For context, I was playing on default settings in version 1.20.?.

1. The cold

The cold doesn't feel like much of a threat. 
For my first winter, I had prepared a set of fur hide clothing. Since I didn't want to waste any durability, I decided to only start wearing the clothes when I started needing them. I never used the fur hide clothing AT ALL during that winter. I could easily stay outside during the winter for quite some time being fully naked (or rather wearing my 0% durability starter clothes, which should be equivalent to being naked). I was holding a torch in my offhand for the slight warmth boost. I spend most the winter close to my base building and whenever I got too cold I just went back inside. But I was still able to stay in negative temperatures for quite some time. Winter clothes are more relevant, when travelling during winter, but even then I got by with the occasional campfire.
I had used the fur hide clothes a little in the second and third winter, but even then I never actually had to repair them (or make a second set), because I barely ever needed them.

My suggestion for improving the cold would be to make rooms cool down too. Players would need to occasionally warm up rooms with a fire pit, or the room would be below freezing in winter. How fast the room would be losing heat could depend on the size of the room and the material it's made of. This would add a bit more strategy to base design: Players could either collect a lot of firewood or build a single well isolated room.

2. The food

Getting enough food for winter felt too easy.
This is in part, since crops give a lot of food and also because most foods last very, very long. For my first winter, I already had more than enough Grain and Vegetable stored. A rather basic cellar will trivially allow both of these to last multiple years. I was lucky and found Halite quite quickly, so I was able to preserve a decent amount of Protein, too. I had trouble finding Goats/Sheep, so Dairy was still of the table. Since I didn't think ahead on preserving berries, I didn't have any Fruit nutrition available either. So for the next year I made plans to get bees, so I could have honey, jam and wax (for sealing pots of berry porridge). However, then I harvested one (1) fruit tree and instantly had enough Fruit for the winter. This was rather disappointing, as I had been making plans for keeping Fruit nutrition available, and suddenly these plans were useless. I was just given an instant solutions to this problem, without actually putting in any work.  After that, I stopped preparing for winter. It simply didn't feel necessary to prepare anything. I was just planting whatever seeds fit the soil's nutrition and never put more thought into it (aside from when I needed flax).

For food, I feel like the main problem was the unrealistically long spoilage times. I think shorter spoilage times (below one year in a cellar) would do a lot to make food feel less trivial. Different crops should also have different spoilage times and nutrition values, to allow more complex decision-making.

 

I would love to hear your feelings on the topic. Were your experiences similar to mine? And most importantly: Do you think these things should be made harder/more complex?

And I know that there are settings and mods to make these things harder. That's not the point. My point is that a game that calls itself an "uncompromising wilderness survival" game, should  (on default settings and without installing mods) be "uncompromising". And it just didn't feel like that for me.

Edited November 19, 2025 by jerjerje

[LadyWYT]

First off, welcome to the forums!

29 minutes ago, jerjerje said:

I would love to hear your feelings on the topic. Were your experiences similar to mine? And most importantly: Do you think these things should be made harder/more complex?

My experiences starting out were similar, yes. However, I think the standard difficulty is just fine as is. The game overall is uncompromising, in that the player absolutely will get punished for making mistakes. However, if the player prepares themselves well for the challenges, then the player is likely to have a fairly easy time as a result. That's just the reward for playing the game well.

 

31 minutes ago, jerjerje said:

And I know that there are settings and mods to make these things harder. That's not the point. My point is that a game that calls itself an "uncompromising wilderness survival" game, should  (on default settings and without installing mods) be "uncompromising". And it just didn't feel like that for me.

Honestly, if the default setting wasn't challenging enough, I'd recommend trying Wilderness Survival, tinkering with the settings to make portions of the game even harder, or install some mods to change the game to your specific liking. That's why those different options exist. I'm assuming that you picked Standard difficulty, which is fine, but do keep in mind that option is the one balanced for the widest range of players. It's tougher than players who want easy mode will really enjoy, but it's also too easy for those looking for a game that shatters their kneecaps on the regular.

For winter challenges specifically, you might try starting in the Cool climate zone, or even the Icy climate, and see if you can eek out a living with shorter summers and longer winters. There's also mods like Brain Freeze, which increases penalties for freezing, among other things: https://mods.vintagestory.at/brainfreeze

[hstone32]

I feel like a lot of this is relative. If you stick around these forums long enough, you'll see a number of people come on here to complain that the game is too uncompromising. While there are many valid and applicable criticisms, a lot of people's complaints boil down to "I knew this game was harder than minecraft, but I didn't think it would be this much harder." Those people likely didn't come from the modding scene like many of us have, and so have never been exposed to the common tropes and design principles of hardcore survival modpacks that made it in to this game.

I don't think I've played enough survival-crafting games to give a broader perspective of where Vintage Story sits relative to other entries of the genre. It does seem to me though, that VS does have a stronger empassis on the reality and demands of wilderness survival, wheras those other games derive their challenge from other things like combat or locating necessary resources. I find that the progression curve in VS doesn't often rely upon arbitrary milestones to unlock progress, but it happens organically: when you first start the game every waking moment is focussed on survival; you don't have any time for mining, farming, husbandry, mechanical power, story content, etc. As you progress, your ability to feed and protect yourself increases, which allows you to dedicate more time to those other activities. Survival doesn't get trivialized, it's just your capacity to focus on more things increase.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

3 hours ago, jerjerje said:

The cold doesn't feel like much of a threat. 
For my first winter, I had prepared a set of fur hide clothing. Since I didn't want to waste any durability, I decided to only start wearing the clothes when I started needing them. I never used the fur hide clothing AT ALL during that winter. I could easily stay outside during the winter for quite some time being fully naked (or rather wearing my 0% durability starter clothes, which should be equivalent to being naked). I was holding a torch in my offhand for the slight warmth boost. I spend most the winter close to my base building and whenever I got too cold I just went back inside. But I was still able to stay in negative temperatures for quite some time. Winter clothes are more relevant, when travelling during winter, but even then I got by with the occasional campfire.
I had used the fur hide clothes a little in the second and third winter, but even then I never actually had to repair them (or make a second set), because I barely ever needed them.

Sounds like you settled in a warmer environment. Default settings has your cold tolerance pretty high. Try lowering it. You'll get cold when it's below 10c outside... then your winter furs will be more valuable. I'm also thinking that you never properly let the cold set in from getting wet by being outside while it was snowing? idk I get cold all the time while playing VS as a hunter, but my blackguard friend doesn't. I think maybe the class you choose also has a hidden cold tolerance. Try experimenting with different classes and temperatures. Your winters may just be mild. Ours get well below freezing, (deep negative temperatures most of the winter!) so that might also make a difference.

[Thorfinn]

FWIW, Wilderness defaults aren't that much harder so far as hunger goes. Spoilage goes up a bit, hunger rate, too, cold kicks in earlier, such that you can go hypothermic into June, but its real effects are the reduced HP and increased strength of monsters. That and learning to go without a map.

IMO, it's not that food lasts too long -- when I was a kid, we had potatoes and carrots and apples keep in the root cellar until late spring and early summer. Canned meat and veggies lasted years. Keep grain dry and away from rodents and bugs and it lasts for years. My grandparents used to keep grain in milk cans, and I remember my grandpa making flour out of 20-year old grain. Maybe it requires too little food to remain sated, or, alternatively, crops are way too prolific? But a square meter of carrots is a lot of food. Maybe it's that you can harvest that several times in a growing season? Dunno. But you are right. Even if you crank the settings to max, it still is not very hard to stay well fed once you understand the food system.

But like others said, many people come here and complain about it being too hard. Tough to balance the two, considering that most likely, you would have to drastically change the crop growth model. There have been mods to do that, though I never found any of them that much more difficult, and I couldn't think of any tweaks they didn't incorporate. I suspect it has to do with how many wild crops there are, such that you can create a farm that provides more than enough food with just your first day's foraging.

[Darksong]

I would say that the initial learning curve is the only steep hill here, when you need to open the survival guide every other step and basically before you get clay.
That's where the rough wilderness survival really only exists if you ask me... as soon as you reach the pottery age then you no longer get hungry as often and can already store food for long times. I went into the game blind the first time and my first couple of hours of learning were an exciting mess, but as you make progress and technology, yeah the challenge goes away.

That's why when I had to start a new world due to the update that changed traders a little while ago (I've had about 200-ish hours of playtime at that point shared trough my solo world and the one I play with my friend), I decided to make the next world with a few more realistic settings.
I made it so that I get cold when it's below 10 degrees C, made my tools have more durability... and a few more things. It hasn't impacted my experience much, but I have noticed that on longer exploration runs during winter, especially if night catches me, I will start getting cold, and I refuse to just dig myself into a 2x2 dirt pit and light a fire to get warm, I'll either get home or to a checkpoint with a fire, get into a cave and light a fire there or just make one wherever I need it (unless it's too windy or raining).

 

So although I understand that it's not as hardcore as it might should have been, you can make the world more unforgiving when making a new one. If that's what you're looking for, you're able to make it here!

[Feycat]

I mean... there's a Wilderness Survival setting. It's pretty uncompromising. Sounds like you need to try that. 

[jerjerje]

Thanks for the replies! I suppose difficulty is rather subjective. I suppose that's why Anego added so many settings. I will definitely see about changing settings/adding mods, when I eventually start a new save. Maybe I'll look into VS Modding myself if I can't find what I'm looking for.

[Maelstrom]

I will say the early game has gotten a little easier since I started in 1.14.  But most of the early game difficulty is balancing resource gathering against progression while managing the time and limited inventory resources.  

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

managing the time

Time management is also one reason I tend to advocate just adding more interesting things for players to do at various levels of gameplay, instead of making the game loops themselves more difficult. Essentially, weaponize the player's own attention span! Which I mean...is also really dangerous if you have the playstyle of a caffeinated squirrel, like me. 

[Maelstrom]

Time is already weaponized against me.   I focus on getting to tools that don't wear out just because I look at them longingly (looking at you copper) and getting a reliable source of MEAT so I can maximize my caloric intake while I'm galavanting around the galax... err... wandering all over creation gathering ingredients for steel.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

 I focus on getting to tools that don't wear out just because I look at them longingly (looking at you copper)

Interesting. Recently I've been focusing on copper and especially bronze for exactly the same reason. I can cast new tools vastly faster than I can beat them out on an anvil. By the time I have bombs, it's hard to justify making things out of iron. A stack of bronze axe heads works out a lot better than a single iron axe. Steel, dunno, maybe the faster cutting makes it worth it the extra effort and materials expended? Then again, I need a whole lot less resources like charcoal or iron ore if I'm using mostly bombs and bronze. The only point of a helve hammer becomes to make plates for lanterns, and with a "properly" sized apiary, candles are even better than lanterns. 

[EDIT]

I still make the helve hammer and all, but it's mostly out of habit. Why waste the time getting resources for it if it has so little use?

Edited November 20, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

6 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

A stack of bronze axe heads works out a lot better than a single iron axe. Steel, dunno, maybe the faster cutting makes it worth it the extra effort and materials expended?

That's when you use the steel axe to chop down the trees due to its speed, and the bronze axe to chop the resulting logs into firewood.

[Thorfinn]

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

the bronze axe to chop the resulting logs into firewood.

I still use flint or even stone for most of that. Admittedly, I'm making a lot less firewood, not needing nearly as much charcoal, but it seems I always have some slack time, waiting for cooking to finish, for example. Or waiting around for the last of the turnips so I can get stuff growing. Ripe crops do not count as flowers, so I want them at the first and last stages for as little time as possible.

[Maelstrom]

So you spend huge amounts of time banging out stone axes?   I suppose that makes sense if your charcoal pit is less than say, 4x4x4.  With my world ending industrial center I burn through two trunks of logs for one firing of my charcoal pit.   I burn through almost a steel axe just chopping all the firewood.  Much faster to smith a steel axe than knap all those stone ones, even if they are obsidian!   Not to mention forging an axe is less than 3 minutes if you include heating the ingot.  I think knapping more than 8 axe heads would take longer.

Edited November 20, 2025 by Maelstrom

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I just make my blackguard forge my weapons and then gripe at her for eating all the food.

[hstone32]

50 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I just make my blackguard forge my weapons and then gripe at her for eating all the food.

I think you might be lost, friend. The humorous story thread is that way.

Actually, nevermind. All threads can do with a little humor.

Edited November 20, 2025 by hstone32
clarified intent

[Thorfinn]

6 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

I suppose that makes sense if your charcoal pit is less than say, 4x4x4.

Sure. A lot of it depends on how much cassiterite I find. If I find a decent amount, of course it's quicker to cast a few axe heads instead. But the beauty of splitting with stone (or even bronze) is you need so little charcoal. Yeah, I used to focus on several pits about to 6x6x6, but anymore, I rarely need much more than the initial 2x2x1 and a later 3x3x2, well within reasonable for stone or flint splitting. It's the bloomeries and blooms and steel that make things so charcoal intensive. That and calcining flint, which you don't have to do much of if you aren't processing much iron. 

Yea, that's one of those efficiency things, some might even go so far as to call it speedrunning. I just consider it opportunity cost. You only need lots of durability if you want to make lots of high-durability stuff.

Edited November 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Scorpixel]

On 11/19/2025 at 4:04 PM, jerjerje said:

I was holding a torch in my offhand for the slight warmth boost

Just so you know it's not a thing https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Temperature you are just giving yourself the offhand hunger malus.

On 11/19/2025 at 4:04 PM, jerjerje said:

My suggestion for improving the cold would be to make rooms cool down too. Players would need to occasionally warm up rooms with a fire pit, or the room would be below freezing in winter. How fast the room would be losing heat could depend on the size of the room and the material it's made of. This would add a bit more strategy to base design: Players could either collect a lot of firewood or build a single well isolated room.

My issue with temperature is it's either an issue or not at all, you can ignore it completely or have a set timer to do whatever you want until you just pop fire down and resume things after a minute. I agree that rooms as they behave also trivialise things, i'd expect to need a hearth running most of winter for survival.

On 11/19/2025 at 4:04 PM, jerjerje said:

Getting enough food for winter felt too easy.
This is in part, since crops give a lot of food and also because most foods last very, very long. For my first winter, I already had more than enough Grain and Vegetable stored. A rather basic cellar will trivially allow both of these to last multiple years. I was lucky and found Halite quite quickly, so I was able to preserve a decent amount of Protein, too. I had trouble finding Goats/Sheep, so Dairy was still of the table. Since I didn't think ahead on preserving berries, I didn't have any Fruit nutrition available either. So for the next year I made plans to get bees, so I could have honey, jam and wax (for sealing pots of berry porridge). However, then I harvested one (1) fruit tree and instantly had enough Fruit for the winter. This was rather disappointing, as I had been making plans for keeping Fruit nutrition available, and suddenly these plans were useless. I was just given an instant solutions to this problem, without actually putting in any work.  After that, I stopped preparing for winter. It simply didn't feel necessary to prepare anything. I was just planting whatever seeds fit the soil's nutrition and never put more thought into it (aside from when I needed flax).

Similar situation, i do stumble upon bees and collect untold seeds and berry bushes in my first year (have yet to even encounter sheep in any playthrough, i think they're a hoax, plus getting animals is hell), but don't bother actually farming them until the second. I use the first winter as farming prep instead of the opposite, that's how trivial it is. Never found salt deposits but that's not an issue either. A lot will rot before i get to eat it but i'll always have more, if multiplayer then it'll be eaten before it rots. My harvests are so far apart i barely care about soil nutrition.

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

That's when you use the steel axe to chop down the trees due to its speed, and the bronze axe to chop the resulting logs into firewood.

I'm a cheapskate, i'll use steel for chopping and flintbone for any significant grid crafting (access to a redwood would be an exception, then full steel debauchery).

[Ceepert]

On 11/19/2025 at 7:48 PM, Thorfinn said:

FWIW, Wilderness defaults aren't that much harder so far as hunger goes. Spoilage goes up a bit, hunger rate, too, cold kicks in earlier, such that you can go hypothermic into June, but its real effects are the reduced HP and increased strength of monsters. That and learning to go without a map.

IMO, it's not that food lasts too long -- when I was a kid, we had potatoes and carrots and apples keep in the root cellar until late spring and early summer. Canned meat and veggies lasted years. Keep grain dry and away from rodents and bugs and it lasts for years. My grandparents used to keep grain in milk cans, and I remember my grandpa making flour out of 20-year old grain. Maybe it requires too little food to remain sated, or, alternatively, crops are way too prolific? But a square meter of carrots is a lot of food. Maybe it's that you can harvest that several times in a growing season? Dunno. But you are right. Even if you crank the settings to max, it still is not very hard to stay well fed once you understand the food system.

But like others said, many people come here and complain about it being too hard. Tough to balance the two, considering that most likely, you would have to drastically change the crop growth model. There have been mods to do that, though I never found any of them that much more difficult, and I couldn't think of any tweaks they didn't incorporate. I suspect it has to do with how many wild crops there are, such that you can create a farm that provides more than enough food with just your first day's foraging.

I think personally its not because of spoilage or anything either. Its more that its pretty easy to farm alot of food. You can basically ignore the nutrition stats of dirt, just replace it every other harvest with medium fertility soil which you can get everywhere and your fine. Then hoeing and planting takes maybe half a day at the absolute most and you are fine. Put a fence around it if not already and now you can basically completly forget the farm until its ready for harvest.

For that small burst of time investment you get a ton of food.

Just making the plants give less food is not a fix though, you can just plant more (assuming you got the seed) cause planting an extra 20 plants doesnt take long.

Deepening the farming mechanic would propably be better.

-make it so that if you mine dirt it becomes "useless" as farm soil, you either have to refertilize it or use existing soil patches -> removes the "exploit" of just replacing the dirt every 2 harvests

-plant diseases would make the process more interactive, same as weeds. You cant just ignore your crops anymore or you risk loosing most or all of your harvests. You have to check them regulary and remove weeds with a knife or shears and make stuff against the plant diseases

-a greater importance to nutrition would also help to avoid to just rely on 1 or 2 foods. Right now it only gives a buff I think to health. Low nutrition in one of the stats should give debuffs (movement speed, mining speed, damage)

Not sure if these would fix the situation, but it would at least improve it a bit

[Thorfinn]

28 minutes ago, Ceepert said:

Not sure if these would fix the situation, but it would at least improve it a bit

I like to keep an eye on ModDB to see what kind of game players are choosing for themselves. There are mods that make things more difficult, or at least more tedious, but those generally don't get many downloads, while mods that let you convert crops to sees, or increase the number of seed drops are usually between 5 and 20 times as popular. Whether we are talking crops or trees or sticks or ores or terra preta high fertility soil or prospecting or whatever else, mods that make it less intense, even cozy are much more popular. I'm not for nerfing what's there, by any means. Just not sure whether it needs to be harder on the n00b. The learning curve was plenty steep when I started.

Or as Dostoevsky put it in Anna Karenina, all cozy games are alike; each hardcore game is hardcore in its own way. Or something like that. It's been a while. I'm not even sure what he was getting at there, but I am sure it was deep because it was required reading. And had that gold embossed lettering on the binding.

Edited November 22, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

33 minutes ago, Ceepert said:

You cant just ignore your crops anymore or you risk loosing most or all of your harvests. You have to check them regulary and remove weeds with a knife or shears and make stuff against the plant diseases

Yeah and if this is implemented, then the player is forced to choose between babysitting their farm, and doing other things like prospecting, mining, metalworking, exploring, the main story, etc. The main story itself requires the player to spend quite a bit of time away from home, and it's not fun to feel like you have to allow your homestead to fall into disrepair in order to do the story. 

Likewise, as @Thorfinn already noted, there are already mods that tried to add mechanics like this, and said mods weren't popular at all. The farming mods that are popular tend to be the ones that add more crops, which I think is a better way to increase the difficulty without increasing the tedium. More crops means that players will either need to choose carefully which they plant, or put in the effort to make bigger farms. More crops also potentially distracts the player from other activities, in that if they spend too much time exploring for different things to plant they'll end up progressing very slowly, or perhaps even be underprepared for winter.

39 minutes ago, Ceepert said:

-a greater importance to nutrition would also help to avoid to just rely on 1 or 2 foods. Right now it only gives a buff I think to health. Low nutrition in one of the stats should give debuffs (movement speed, mining speed, damage)

The health boost is more important than you think, especially at harder difficulties. Each nutrition bar is worth 2.5 HP, if I'm recalling correctly, and only relying on 1-2 foods means that the player will be sacrificing 5-7.5 HP(10 if you count dairy in the mix, which I do not). That's at least an extra hit or two the player can take, on average. Or in other words, 2.5 HP doesn't sound like a lot, until that 2.5 becomes the HP that would have allowed you to survive that fight, if only you had it.

It's also worth noting that dairy isn't feasible to get until later in the game, which means that realistically, the player would be forced to suffer at least one debuff for quite a long time before they even have access to a way of fixing it.

25 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm not for nerfing what's there, by any means. Just not sure whether it needs to be harder on the n00b. The learning curve was plenty steep when I started.

I actually do think some things could be harder on newer and older players alike, but increasing the challenge does need to be done carefully, and in a way that's actually fun. Which realism doesn't always equate to fun, especially when it comes to gameplay. Vintage Story is an uncompromising survival game, yes, but it does make a few concessions in order to keep the gameplay from getting tedious to the point that the player stops having fun and quits(though there are a few cases this has happened).

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Ceepert said:

-a greater importance to nutrition would also help to avoid to just rely on 1 or 2 foods. Right now it only gives a buff I think to health. Low nutrition in one of the stats should give debuffs (movement speed, mining speed, damage)

This may or not be what the status effects update will contain. That will allow an expansion of foods, which kind of blocks anything with growing more or different crops at the moment.

Like @LadyWYT said, don't undervalue the impact of HP. Between the percent reduction and the flat damage reduction those points multiply. Besides, thematically, whenever possible, I'd rather have bonuses for doing something well than penalties for doing something wrong. There is a already a great plenty negative reinforcement in the real world to cover most people.

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, Ceepert said:

-plant diseases would make the process more interactive, same as weeds. You cant just ignore your crops anymore or you risk loosing most or all of your harvests. You have to check them regulary and remove weeds with a knife or shears and make stuff against the plant diseases

-a greater importance to nutrition would also help to avoid to just rely on 1 or 2 foods. Right now it only gives a buff I think to health. Low nutrition in one of the stats should give debuffs (movement speed, mining speed, damage)

While I like the motivation behind these changes, they bring several risks with them. Besides what others said, I'll mention that a lot of things in the current state of the game are highly forgiving, like domesticated animals never dying of hunger or diseases, or farm crops only ever dying from extreme temperatures in a way which is easily predictable and still gives back the seeds. This invites a rather cozy and casual playstyle, which admittedly somewhat conflicts with the idea of an "uncompromising wilderness survival", but regardless it is a well-liked part of the game's identity at this point.

The thing that requires a very careful balance is that both weeds and diseases and punishment for low nutrition would introduce negative consequences for inaction, which is a great incentive in a somewhat more hardcore survival like Don't Starve or Project Zomboid, but I'm not sure that an excess of it would benefit Vintage Story - we already have hunger and food spoilage, and some players already find it pretty difficult. Punishment generally serves as a strong short-term motivator, but may end up discouraging the more casual players over time if they feel like the game requires tedious, routine maintenance or limits their available choices.

That said, I do feel like farming could be slightly reworked to require more effort for the full benefits, so that it would land better in-between the easily-available berry bushes and fruit trees which essentially require no maintenance to bear fruit regularly, and animal husbandry which requires significant upfront investment and then works essentially as a nutrition type conversion with a roughly linear relationship of input to output.

I made a related suggestion at one point here, if I may plug it, but in short, regarding weeds and diseases, I would prefer a more relaxed implementation, in a sense similar to the way nutrients and temperature work currently. They generally wouldn't be an issue right as the player starts the game and they shouldn't outright ruin entire crops aside from extreme cases, but they would reduce yields if neglected for an extended period of time (i.e. at least ~2 months on average for the first small debuffs to start appearing, and progressing slowly from there).

[Ceepert]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

While I like the motivation behind these changes, they bring several risks with them. Besides what others said, I'll mention that a lot of things in the current state of the game are highly forgiving, like domesticated animals never dying of hunger or diseases, or farm crops only ever dying from extreme temperatures in a way which is easily predictable and still gives back the seeds. This invites a rather cozy and casual playstyle, which admittedly somewhat conflicts with the idea of an "uncompromising wilderness survival", but regardless it is a well-liked part of the game's identity at this point.

The thing that requires a very careful balance is that both weeds and diseases and punishment for low nutrition would introduce negative consequences for inaction, which is a great incentive in a somewhat more hardcore survival like Don't Starve or Project Zomboid, but I'm not sure that an excess of it would benefit Vintage Story - we already have hunger and food spoilage, and some players already find it pretty difficult. Punishment generally serves as a strong short-term motivator, but may end up discouraging the more casual players over time if they feel like the game requires tedious, routine maintenance or limits their available choices.

That said, I do feel like farming could be slightly reworked to require more effort for the full benefits, so that it would land better in-between the easily-available berry bushes and fruit trees which essentially require no maintenance to bear fruit regularly, and animal husbandry which requires significant upfront investment and then works essentially as a nutrition type conversion with a roughly linear relationship of input to output.

I made a related suggestion at one point here, if I may plug it, but in short, regarding weeds and diseases, I would prefer a more relaxed implementation, in a sense similar to the way nutrients and temperature work currently. They generally wouldn't be an issue right as the player starts the game and they shouldn't outright ruin entire crops aside from extreme cases, but they would reduce yields if neglected for an extended period of time (i.e. at least ~2 months on average for the first small debuffs to start appearing, and progressing slowly from there).

I mean there is always the option of having it as a toggle option in the advanced settings for those who dont like it. Balancing a game like Vintage Story around the "cozy gamer" I feel like doesnt match.