A few plant related suggestions

[Phytotoxin]

Hi! I know a fair bit about plants and am quite elated at how well the trees are executed in terms of shape and their occurences.

Here are some ideas or suggestions:

1. Willow or Poplar trees. Notoriously soft wood (less firewood yield), Poplars grow to great size, Willows could prefer proximity to water.

2. Cattails like to grow near or in water and worldgeneration reflects that, so I think being required to keep them near a body of water when replanting would only make sense.

3. As it is now you have to find pines with resinous logs. Freshly grown trees don't have them, which makes sense. If you've ever worked with any kind of resinous Conifer IRL however, you may well know that the dont just leak but outright ooze resin when you cut them especially with fresh wood. Apart from that if you want to collect resin from a tree you can just cut through the bark and it'll leak resin out of the cut. In terms of gameplay you could use a knife to cut a resin channel into a log face which then oozes out resin continously exactly in the way it's already implemented. To balance that and to mimic realism moreso the channels (also the ones provided by worldgen) would eventually dry up and if you cut too many into a tree it'll wither and die (no logs for you, I suppose). Also if using stone knifes it has a chance to fail, as a poasibility for including knife quality.

4. I really wonder why flax seeds are split into edible and plantable ones in the game. Surely everyone knows that IRL they are the same.  Just give more seeds and have those ones be plantable.

5. Related to 4, Why exactly do games always simplify the gardening process so much, especially complex games like Vintage Story? If you want your turnips, carrots, parsnips, onions to seed, they need to be left to grow for another season, then they'll flower and fruit. IRL you'd need to leave a patch of veggies outside overwinter, ingame it could just be another bunch of days.

6. Tule. This plant isn't very useful ingame as it is, and I keep wondering why it doesn't have more uses. It's terribly inefficent food, it takes forever to make a thatch roof out of it and it doesn't burn well. On a side note, I do really wonder about the plant itself. Me being european I'd never heard of tule prior to this game. I know Phragmites australis which at least nowadays is prolific everywhere (whatever if's english name is). Just out of curiosity, why isn't it that plant?

7. In the spirit of survivalism, it'd be kind of cool to have oaks drop acorns in fall and be able to process them to food.

Alright, that's it. Those are my Ideas for now.

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Vincent Schneider.

Poplar would be a good addition for ultra-compact woodlots. Not sure they would look good with a log at the center. There's a tree that looks kind of like the poplar in some of the lower latitudes but it does not have a central core. How do you see it looking? Top view would be a"+", with the intersection being log, the arms being leaf blocks? That would let you nest them tightly.

Resin is kind of oddball in that a single stack (32) is a lifetime supply. Maybe if you collected sap, had to boil it down, and had to break the cookpot to get it out? Maybe a pot full of 24 sap boils down to 4 or 6 resin? Have to play around with it. I suspect even 4 will make resin way too common. Two pots would give you a large gear, IIRC.

Annual crop seeds are likely that way to keep food from becoming even less of a challenge. The game does not have compensating mechanisms like germination failure, cutworms, rot, etc. This way, the game limits how fast you can expand a field.

Biennials, I think you would have to make the time between mature and seed much, much longer than a couple days. If you log out at night, by the time you wake up, an entire month might have passed. Plus, there being a story and all, t would be nice to be able to head out for a few in-game days on the story and not completely wreck your garden. It doesn't do that IRL. Carrots can sit there all winter long if need be, and still be OK to eat.

Don't know much about tule, other than as currently balanced, you really need to be committed to the look to make it worthwhile.

[Entaris]

Dunno about you, but I'm not terribly pleased with oaks being a 7x7x7 solid block on a stick

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, Vincent Schneider said:

4. I really wonder why flax seeds are split into edible and plantable ones in the game. Surely everyone knows that IRL they are the same.  Just give more seeds and have those ones be plantable.

5. Related to 4, Why exactly do games always simplify the gardening process so much, especially complex games like Vintage Story? If you want your turnips, carrots, parsnips, onions to seed, they need to be left to grow for another season, then they'll flower and fruit. IRL you'd need to leave a patch of veggies outside overwinter, ingame it could just be another bunch of days.

Regarding 4, I think grains are like that in order to keep the code a bit on the simpler side regarding implementing farm crops.

As to 5, I think the main reason the farming system is still "simple", is that the game is still tuned to provide a consistent experience to a wide variety of players. Not every player enjoys farming, and the player also has several other things they will need/want to do in the game besides tend a farm(like doing the main story, which requires quite a bit of travel). That being said, I think reducing wild crop spawns and adding a way to allow crops to go to seed in order to have more seeds to plant would be a fair way to increase the challenge of farming, without making it too tedious.

[Phytotoxin]

Well, I'm on mobile, so I'll keep it simple without quoting any of you, not that I have much to say.

Resin being not too much of a necessity makes sense, at least for now. Makes my idea a bit of moot point. Admittedly it doesn't have too many uses IRL either. Who knows, maybe the devs might implement more uses later on.

Poplar was just kind of an idea as they are on the more magnificent side where I live. We already have a lot of trees ingame, which is super cool, even though I have yet to see most of the ones outside the temperate starting areas. I haven't made it terribly far in my game yet.

LadyWYT

The explanation for plants being that way makes sense. It's not that it upsets me, I always just wondered why things are the way they are.

And Entaris

I admittedly haven't looked too closely at oaks, but at the different forms of pine which reflect their often twisting, sometimes very straight nature, or at the larches with their sparse branching that reminds of some ginkgos. The Birches with their drooping branches, small sizes and the way they occur as pioneering trees, growing where none other yet want to be.

 

Alright later

[LadyWYT]

22 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Resin is kind of oddball in that a single stack (32) is a lifetime supply. Maybe if you collected sap, had to boil it down, and had to break the cookpot to get it out? Maybe a pot full of 24 sap boils down to 4 or 6 resin? Have to play around with it. I suspect even 4 will make resin way too common. Two pots would give you a large gear, IIRC.

I do want to note that you need resin to make glue, which is really important if you're playing by default rules and intend to salvage decorations from ruins since you'll have to glue them back together first. And it takes a LOT of glue to do that.

Otherwise, I do agree that resin doesn't have that much use. Perhaps if pitch were added, and we had to use pitch to waterproof certain things, maybe it would see more use?

[Bruno Willis]

16 hours ago, Vincent Schneider said:

Resin being not too much of a necessity makes sense, at least for now. Makes my idea a bit of moot point. Admittedly it doesn't have too many uses IRL either. Who knows, maybe the devs might implement more uses later on.

Violins. It's clear that chapter 3 will be primarily a violin concerto arch, and we'll need a lot of rosin for our bow strings. 

[Facethief]

14 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

Violins. It's clear that chapter 3 will be primarily a violin concerto arch, and we'll need a lot of rosin for our bow strings. 

Just gonna leave this here.

[Thorfinn]

15 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

Violins. It's clear that chapter 3 will be primarily a violin concerto arch, and we'll need a lot of rosin for our bow strings. 

No! I draw the line! There are plenty of games with that kind of garage. We don't need another game full of sax and violins!

[ifoz]

With the new fishing stuff, I have been thinking about the potential to add cork trees.
Historically cork has been used in fishing equipment for thousands of years, and could also make for an interesting construction material.
Having a certain time of ingame year where the player can pry the cork bark from the tree without damaging it longterm would be pretty cool, I think.

[EDIT]: Oh also, could open up the opportunity to cork wine to preserve it longer.

Edited November 24, 2025 by ifoz

[Heart_Afire]

On 11/23/2025 at 8:53 PM, ifoz said:

With the new fishing stuff, I have been thinking about the potential to add cork trees.
Historically cork has been used in fishing equipment for thousands of years, and could also make for an interesting construction material.
Having a certain time of ingame year where the player can pry the cork bark from the tree without damaging it longterm would be pretty cool, I think.

[EDIT]: Oh also, could open up the opportunity to cork wine to preserve it longer.

I love the idea of being able to bottle and cork juices, wines, etc. just to preserve them for longer. You could even use the opportunity to maybe expand on glassmaking a bit. Glass is one of the most useful substances in the world, after all. Even just glass bottles for storage would make dipping into glassblowing worthwhile, especially if cork gets included.