suggestions Use Different Primitives for Trees and "Water Flow" for Sloped Generated Terrain

[Feynt]

I'm a fan of Vintage Story's personality, but one of the big detractors from Minecraft has been the block aesthetic. I really dislike everything being cubes. Voxels aren't just solid cubes, and the marching cubes algorithm has been open for decades now. I realise at this stage of the game asking for a complete aesthetic rework is a big ask, but there are two things I think are completely viable:

1. Tree primitives - Since trees are generated continuously when planted, they could be generated with whatever primitives you wanted. A six sided cylinder that scales down in thickness as it gets higher off the ground would go a long way to distancing the game from Minecraft's blocks at the addition of only 8 triangles per voxel space. The rendering of "wood" blocks (regardless of the tree type) could be made to render this way without having to regenerate the world. A mod also made an adjustment to the foliage to use low poly spherical shapes rather than cubes, and it adds a lot to the appearance of forests. And this also has the advantage of splitting up the "solid crown" of some trees like oak trees where "branches" spread out but in actuality just form a single shelf of logs.

2. Sloped terrain - The one block variance of the entire world is quite annoying. I have to jump everywhere. It's one of the things I disliked about Minecraft way back when. It was such a bother to everyone that it became a vanilla feature, auto jumping up exactly enough to climb over steps. While I don't expect world gen to continually update the landscape to be slopes, especially when you're digging out the world space, I would appreciate it if you could use the water rendering routine to slope the default terrain vertically. Think of it like anti-aliasing for the ground. Run it once at world gen, all sloped terrain is technically still a solid block so it gives material as if it were a block of that kind, but since it's a slope it can be walked up without having to jump everywhere.

[Facethief]

I feel this wouldn’t work with the game’s aesthetic. It seems like the devs are looking to use more, smaller cubes to create details rather than just having low-poly models. I also see a lot of voxel consistency in the models, so that probably has some impact.

[Feynt]

I wouldn't mind if they exploited the voxelisation to make the entire world more granular either. I love 3D Dot Game Heroes' aesthetic. I just dislike giant chunky cubes. They're unnavigable, ugly, and bland; there are better things to aspire to than "it's like Minecraft!" as far as looks go.

(as an aside for efficiency, if the world was made to be mini-voxels, you could use a quadtree for game world rendering and limit rendering depth based on distance so you aren't rendering tiny blocks out on the horizon of drawable block space. That would also let you scan the quads beyond drawable space to create a dynamic skybox for the horizon)

 

Going with the idea of "everything is voxels", if there was a geometry renderer for spaces filled with voxels, you could store the shape as a simple primitive or marching cube representation and then render the shape using voxels, kind of like ray marching. That way you don't have to specifically create every voxelised asset, you can just ensure that shapes are voxelised from primitives.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! I agree with @Facethief, Vintage Story wouldn't look right at all with smooth slopes and non-cubic polygons. It would either look low quality, or like it was built for perhaps the Windows 98 era or something to that effect. But I'm leaning towards "low quality indie title" appearance in that regard.

8 hours ago, Feynt said:

I really dislike everything being cubes.

Based on this statement though, I think it's just a mismatch between personal taste and the artstyle that Vintage Story employs. Which is fine, but I don't think it's worth changing the entire game aesthetic just for one's individual preferences, outside of mods that is(or if the individual in question is Tyron or Saraty).

[Feynt]

49 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums! I agree with @Facethief, Vintage Story wouldn't look right at all with smooth slopes and non-cubic polygons. It would either look low quality, or like it was built for perhaps the Windows 98 era or something to that effect. But I'm leaning towards "low quality indie title" appearance in that regard.

I was thinking late PS1 era. Retro graphics are in vogue yet again, but there's a timeless quality to well done low poly aesthetics.

 

Quote

Based on this statement though, I think it's just a mismatch between personal taste and the artstyle that Vintage Story employs. Which is fine, but I don't think it's worth changing the entire game aesthetic just for one's individual preferences, outside of mods that is(or if the individual in question is Tyron or Saraty).

I qualified it in my second reply. The standard block size that exists now is off-putting, but the 3D Dot Game Heroes aesthetic is appealing. I just don't like the entirety of everything,—player models included—being flat surfaces that fill an entire block space. Especially the world, because it's needlessly hard to navigate "gentle hills" when it's a series of 5 block high peaks and valleys.

[LadyWYT]

17 minutes ago, Feynt said:

I was thinking late PS1 era. Retro graphics are in vogue yet again, but there's a timeless quality to well done low poly aesthetics.

Well-done low poly aesthetics, yes, but it's also an aesthetic that's relatively easy to screw up.

 

19 minutes ago, Feynt said:

I just don't like the entirety of everything,—player models included—being flat surfaces that fill an entire block space.

I don't think it's fair to include player/NPC models in this comparison. The models are blocky, yes, as that is the overall artstyle of the game. When it comes to facial features and hairstyles though, those are individual model parts and not flat textures on a block face.

I would also assume that having a simpler model makes it easier to put more detail into clothing items, since the clothing will be easier to fit to the model without clipping. 

 

22 minutes ago, Feynt said:

The standard block size that exists now is off-putting, but the 3D Dot Game Heroes aesthetic is appealing.

I had to look this up to figure out what it was. To each their own, but I'm not a fan of that aesthetic at all. 

[Feynt]

21 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I had to look this up to figure out what it was. To each their own, but I'm not a fan of that aesthetic at all. 

And yet, voxel tractor crawlers are fine. 3D Dot Game Heroes goes for bright and cheery colours and shiny shaders, but voxel art done well can look very different.

[LadyWYT]

10 minutes ago, Feynt said:

And yet, voxel tractor crawlers are fine. 3D Dot Game Heroes goes for bright and cheery colours and shiny shaders, but voxel art done well can look very different.

I wouldn't call either of those quite in the same category as what I see regarding 3D Dot Game Heroes, and it's not due to the coloring either. Both examples you've linked here are blocky designs utilizing small blocks, yes, but both look like they're meant to be 3D to begin with. In contrast, 3D Dot Game Heroes looks like it was designed as pixel art first(which is 2D), and then turned into a 3D object after the fact.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

11 hours ago, Feynt said:

A six sided cylinder that scales down in thickness as it gets higher off the ground would go a long way to distancing the game from Minecraft's blocks at the addition of only 8 triangles per voxel space. The rendering of "wood" blocks (regardless of the tree type) could be made to render this way without having to regenerate the world.

Problem: Chiseling. Because you can chisel wood blocks, they have to be cubes.

11 hours ago, Feynt said:

It was such a bother to everyone that it became a vanilla feature, auto jumping up exactly enough to climb over steps.

I don't remember this happening. What I do remember is a lot of physically disabled people being a lot happier that they could play the game better. Accessibility options are huge in video games. Best gamer I knew when I was in university was this guy who suffered from dwarfism and had tiny hands. So he played video games on a tiny keyboard made for people like him. He was a beast.

[LadyWYT]

Regarding the auto-jump thing: I wouldn't be surprised if that particular feature was added later as part of the accessibility options. For now though, there are mods like these that cover the function:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/stepupadvanced

https://mods.vintagestory.at/stepupcontinued

[EmperorPingu]

Not a total fix, but check out Belomaximka's Terrain Slabs mod - reduces the blocky aspect of terrain somewhat and allows for a more gradual and gradiented traversing: https://mods.vintagestory.at/terrainslabs

[marmarmar34]

21 minutes ago, EmperorPingu said:

Not a total fix, but check out Belomaximka's Terrain Slabs mod - reduces the blocky aspect of terrain somewhat and allows for a more gradual and gradiented traversing: https://mods.vintagestory.at/terrainslabs

Was just about to suggest this! 

While I personally don't mind the cubey look of the game, I'm glad the community is proactive in creating solutions for people with different preferences! 

Now I am unaware of any mods that make trees look less blocky, but I bet there's one out there.

[EmperorPingu]

3 minutes ago, marmarmar34 said:

Now I am unaware of any mods that make trees look less blocky, but I bet there's one out there.

There use to be this mod for MC that was used in RLCraft that was pretty decent - it gave like a rounded trunks aesthetic and iirc, the trees use to fall down to one side or the other when chopped down.

I can't find anything similar at the minute checking the mods page. If I get round to it I might do a tree redesign mod request at some point. Would need a lot of thinking though - to me, the main problem I envision is how you can justify cubic blocks (very useful for building - just think about the beams in houses or even just a general building block) coming from a circular trunk. Something will have to give somewhere I expect, but I'll put my head to it and see if I can't come up with a solution.

[Facethief]

37 minutes ago, EmperorPingu said:

There use to be this mod for MC that was used in RLCraft that was pretty decent - it gave like a rounded trunks aesthetic and iirc, the trees use to fall down to one side or the other when chopped down.

Dynamic trees is the mod you’re thinking of. Still maintained too, I think.

[Tabbot95]

I think a slab-based world would do alright; would be easier to implement; would also help with rivers and elevation changes to some degree.

 

Ideally 10cm³ blocks would be the thing chosen, as that would allow for things like tides and semi-realistic floodplains, but would also require an entire engine reconfiguration (so save it for VS2) but that has far more serious performance and data demand issues.

Slab-based world would also help by reducing the slab-gap problem a bit

[Feynt]

On 1/14/2026 at 11:13 AM, Facethief said:

Dynamic trees is the mod you’re thinking of. Still maintained too, I think.

Do you have a link on this? I can't seem to find a mod in the listing named "Dynamic Trees", or anything tree related when looking for "Dynamic" alone.

[Facethief]

15 hours ago, Feynt said:

Do you have a link on this? I can't seem to find a mod in the listing named "Dynamic Trees", or anything tree related when looking for "Dynamic" alone.

link:
Dynamic Trees - Minecraft Mods - CurseForge

[Sleeves]

I think part of the appeal of having precise chiseling despite blocky terrain is the ability to choose what to detail. I often use single voxel chiseling for layering; to make the linings of walls pop out, give rooves an overhang, et cetera. This would be lost were everything in the game detailed.