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

[Venusgate]

5 hours ago, Crabsoft said:

Doing one thing means not doing another and not having that done should leave you open to real risk

I think the issue here would be "what is the risk a farmer takes by not exploring but instead focuses on food security." And I think the answer (currently) is, 'they risk not having as much fun.'

But take a step back to the "survival challenge," if you were dropped in the middle of the jungle with no hope to ever return to civilization, then of course, agriculture would be a high priority, but it would take months for it to pay off. In the meantime, you have to keep yourself alive, and keep the crops protected from drought, pests, fire, etc.

VS (on default) compresses those months to a few days, and the threats to crops and irrigation are inconsequential.

Like, imagine if surface rust mobs burned and blighted crops, and those crops took 20-40 real life hours to grow. How much would that change the way you play?

Edited December 15, 2025 by Venusgate

[Heart_Afire]

26 minutes ago, Venusgate said:

Like, imagine if surface rust mobs burned and blighted crops, and those crops took 20-40 real life hours to grow. How much would that change the way you play?

Well, it would cause me to seek to defend my farm first and foremost, but the honest solution to that is walls and Light, along with placing blocks that the creatures don't seem to appear upon.

Once my crops were properly protected, though, I would focus on setting up other 'passive' sources of food like fish traps from Primitive Survival. If there are no mods, then I'll focus on finding ways to stay alive until my crops are ready while also getting a cellar ready for storage. I would also be hunting mushrooms and cooking and sealing everything I could.

Honestly, I enjoy playing 30-day months. It feels more 'real' to me that I can spend a lot of time in Summer gathering resources and then spend Winter enjoying the quite literal fruits of my labors.

 

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, Crabsoft said:

I will say that playing permadeath does make you respect all the mechanics a bit more - and maybe that's enough.

I'm inclined to agree, but my observational experience suggests otherwise. I think it depends more heavily on the mentality of the player involved.

 

12 hours ago, Crabsoft said:

I think that we could take a page from grand strategy games and focus on the value of tradeoffs to keep it interesting. Doing one thing means not doing another and not having that done should leave you open to real risk. Right now, it's a little too easy to cover all of your bases at once. You never /really/ get nailed to the wall for being unprepared (except falling in holes with no blocks to climb QQ). It's very hard to strike a balance that remains fun and not tedious. Just personally, I think balancing half a game is almost always a waste of time and we shouldn't expect to see that kind of thing until much later.

I somewhat agree here, however, I think it's better to just offer the players more options, instead of presenting them two things that are absolutely critical to do and then only allowing them to pick one. Spending too much time on one particular task makes it become rather boring, whereas being able to have a choice of several to switch between helps keeps gameplay fresh and interesting. The player can simply switch to another project easily when they get bored with the current, and while it may slow their progress a bit they'll still be having fun and making progress.

 

7 hours ago, Venusgate said:

I think the issue here would be "what is the risk a farmer takes by not exploring but instead focuses on food security." And I think the answer (currently) is, 'they risk not having as much fun.'

Yeah pretty much. As stated above, I don't think the answer is forcing the player to tend their farm or else lose out on any kind of decent harvest. It's better to give them plenty of other things to get distracted by, so that while farming itself might be "easy" the player can also just as easily get too distracted by other things to do well at farming that season(like planting crops too late for them to mature before frost).

 

7 hours ago, Venusgate said:

Like, imagine if surface rust mobs burned and blighted crops, and those crops took 20-40 real life hours to grow. How much would that change the way you play?

Honestly, if crops are taking 20-40 real life hours to grow to maturity even without mob/disease/blight interference...I'm probably not going to be playing Vintage Story at all and will go play something else instead. That's a lot of time to invest just for ONE crop harvest.

It's also worth noting that the current design plan for VS seems to be that the main story(or maybe it's just progressing through the tech tree) will take around 100 hours of gameplay to complete.

Quote

How finished/playable is this game?
We consider Vintage Story to still be in early access, not due to its lack of stability and performance, but because our full vision is far from implemented. The game is fully playable and offers rich and varied gameplay from the Stone Age through to the Steel Age, including a number of story elements. The game is being developed with a carefully planned release cycle to always offer very stable gameplay. As for its completion - we cannot really put a time on it because we see no reason not to keep adding new content for many years to come. That being said, going through the main challenges alone should easily offer at least 100 hours of engaging gameplay.

If half of that play time is chewed up just by farming, then it seems like the time requirements for other gameplay loops would have to be increased as well to keep things balanced. Which I don't think would be healthy for the game long-term. While I do think VS is a game better suited to a slower style of play, I also think the vanilla game should be flexible enough that a player could speed up their progress quite a bit, provided they have the knowledge and focus to do so.

[Crabsoft]

19 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

instead of presenting them two things that are absolutely critical to do and then only allowing them to pick one

Perhaps I used poor phrasing. It's more like, you place a bet on what the future will hold and dealing with the consequences of bad bets is the fun part. For example, in Dwarf Fortress, if you get lazy about moving things inside the mountainhome (because you're busy slamming out trade goods and "nothing bad is gonna happen") in the first year, you may find yourself in a situation where you have to brave some Goblins to go retrieve your stash. If you neglect your farm in Vintage Story, that shouldn't mean that you just starve to death. It should mean that you're going without some resource and have to cover the hole with effort, execution, and skill.

In many ways, it already does but food is the only actual driving factor. Everything else is almost pure upside. There's no serious risk other than not having food (or fun!). As you say, story content will drastically change how anything feels by compressing time. I only mean to say that some other significant problems born of inattention would be nice. It doesn't have to be bloodmoons, either. A lack of firewood, torch-stealing drifters, or a plant that requires copper tools and slowly grows through your stupid dirt cellar walls would be equally compelling. Just something that says to the player, "Spend the time to do this right or you'll have hassles later!".

[Venusgate]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

If half of that play time is chewed up just by farming

I didn't mean any more labor put into farming (at least not the actual hoeing and sowing part), just having to keep yourself alive with the various other methods (foraging, hunting, fishing) for longer.

Edited December 15, 2025 by Venusgate