How to Survive Your First 5 Days - Vintage Story, as a Beginner

[YordaEatsMelon]

You know you need resources to create tools, but you don't know how long it takes to gather them. No one wants to start off mauled by a bear and finding yourself at sundown with little more than berries, a torch, and a hole in the ground. Don't know where to start?

This guide provides a day-by-day workflow of resource gathering, tool making, building, and hunting for the first 5 days of your new world. Have fun!

 

Tips to Know Before You Start:

To find recipes for how to craft items and tools, press “H” and the Handbook will pull up. This also conveniently pauses the game!

Shift is crouch; this lets you sneak closer to animals, or away from them.

Ctrl is run! This is more hunger-inducing than walking, so do so sparingly.

G is sit on ground; lets you work without expending as much hunger bar, though save this for when you are inside your house at night.

C lets you check your in-game stats; your character’s stats and your world’s stats.

M opens the world map. Enable "color-accurate" in the settings before starting your game to better locate clay and peat deposits.

Don’t use a bed or sleep to pass the night. There’s so much you can do during that time and your character does not need sleep.

Torches can be made to never go out, but this takes remembering to pick them up and place them back once a day (usually in the morning if you have torches both inside and outside your dwelling). They otherwise extinguish in 48 in-game hours.

You can burn a lot of things to keep your cooking fire going; ferns, firewood, and peat are just some.

First-time players and seasoned veterans both die a lot in this game, and that's ok. Don't let that discourage you. Turns out that you not staying dead is part of the lore, so treat it as a superpower that you can use to your advantage and that factors into the story, rather than as a meaningless videogame "life". This perspective helps a lot.

If you need to, practice making the house from this guide first in a Creative world, or an Exploration world, where you have time to study its design and learn the game's mechanics and controls. This lets you feel more comfortable making a house once you are doing it for real and under pressure of impending nightfall, especially if it took longer for you to find clay than you expected.

Finally, the in-game Handbook is your friend. Don't be afraid to pull it up, even if it's just to pause the game while you think.

 

Suggested Goals for your first day (DAY 01):

Knap 1 knife + 1 axe. (Knapping stone tools)

Make 2 handbaskets + 1 chest. (10 + 10 + 24 = 44 cattails)

 

Explore until you find a lake or two with cattails, but not necessarily aiming to find the super perfect location. Pick a spot that has flat, level ground, even if it isn’t right up next to the water.

 

Make a camp with this singular chest (i.e. put it down and put a mark on your map):

• Put flint, berries, veggies, and fat inside.

• Stack any leftover items like unused cattails, flax fibers, small bones, seeds, sticks, and stones next to the chest (on the ground).

 

You are staying here tonight, even if this isn’t your preferred location.

 

Leave everything alone and head out to get:

• a few mushrooms (3-9), and berries (8-15)

• scavenge any dead birds (keep everything from these)

• sticks enough for 2 torches, 1 shovel, 1 backup knife (3 total)

• clay enough for 1 cooking pot, 1 bowl, 1 storage vessel (4 + 1 + 35 = 40 clay)

• enough grass to make 2 hay bales (8 + 8 = 16 grass)

 

Return to your camp and deposit these items. Now begin to build your house.

 

It is an 8x5 internal space, necessitating a 10x7 foundation (see pictures 1-3).

• First place down blocks 2x high in a 10x7 rectangle for your walls. Then add more to get up to x3 and x4 high on the narrow end walls. I used rammed earth (dirt --> packed dirt --> rammed earth), but you can use the others, too.

• The sun is probably setting by now. If you haven’t already, make a torch and fire-starter and light the torch. Set it on a wall.

• Now that you are enclosed, dig out the floor by one layer. This level is now the actual floor.

• Now you can make the roof. It will be an A-frame shape following the 2xwall-x2-x3-x4-x3-x2-2xwall pattern. Even if there is a gap between the wall and the roof, shivers can’t get inside (see photo 2; example of missing blocks in roof with moon in the sky--it's dark out!).

Okay, now you are safe! The size of the room and the hay bales sealing the door makes the finished room get treated as a cellar. This design is efficient for balancing usable indoor space, cellar viability, safety (the gaps are shiver-proof), and low-resource load during construction. The design isn't as simple as a block house but it looks a lot nicer and it lets you conveniently store baskets under the peak of the roof, freeing up floor space. Later on you can make slanted thatch roofing (using thule or dried grass haybales) and place these over the earthen blocks.

 

This is what you should do next:

• Re-organize your personal and chest inventories.

• Make a second torch and place this and your original one so that they are on both end walls of your house. This maximizes internal light and may help reduce drifter spawns outside, especially if you have a gap in the roof.

• Clayform the vessel, followed by the pot, followed by the bowl. This ensures you do not run out of clay for each item depending on how the voxels were applied.

• Cook any poultry you found. Save the veggies for later!

• If your hunger bar is near zero, eat until half-full and no more.

• If your hunger bar is about half-full (where it should be!), save the food until tomorrow.

 

Going forward and when you have a better food supply, you should still only eat until your hunger bar is half full in order to ration your food. This means no food is wasted if you die, as you come back with only half a hunger bar. This also helps instill a mentality that positively affects how you hunt for meat, hides, fat, and bones, leading to more efficient and (often entertainingly) creative hunting trips. Finding tricks is part of the fun and gives you a sense of accomplishment.

 

Now that these immediate tasks are done, you have time to consider your needs for the next day while the night passes:

- How much grass will I need to fire up these raw pottery forms? Each pit kiln needs 10 grass, 8 sticks, and 4 pieces of peat or firewood. If it’s the storage vessel, it needs 8 pieces of fuel.

- How much rammed earth will I need to make the pit kilns? 1 pit kiln needs about 28 rammed earth, this or more whether they are freestanding or chained together. It is more efficient to chain them. [See fourth picture.]

 

If you are on a budget for rammed earth, you don’t need the above-ground cover. However, this risks the flames being extinguished by rainfall or very strong winds. It is also more likely for you to burn yourself walking too close; to take damage or actually catch fire. Pit Kilns are risky since you can accidentally burn the woods down if built improperly or placed too close to grass, a tree, or your house; this design prevents that. The rammed earth of your house makes it inflammable, too.

 

When not in use, these kiln covers serve to let you stand up higher and get a better view without cluttering the ground outside your home. Pit kilns like this have enabled me to spot big game from a distance more quickly and have saved my life multiple times--letting me keep clear of predators and monsters. Multi-use structures are valuable. It's also why the roof of the house is an A shape; you can hop up on it each morning to check your surroundings, even when its covered in thatch roofing, and it works great to duck behind.

 

 

Suggested Goals for your next day (DAY 02):

Exit your house at 5am, no earlier, unless you want to encounter things that go bump in the night!

• Make a pit kiln or two. No more for now.

• Chop a tree for sticks + wood (remove leaves first to lessen wear on your axe, and improve chances of collecting sticks and seeds/nuts).

• Collect more cattails to make 1 more chest + 1 handbasket.

• More (~30) clay so you can get a watering can and a jug formed tonight. Together all these things (the vessel, pot, bowl, jug, and can will utilize 3 pit kiln firings. Add a crock to this to get ¾ of the small items up to 4/4.)

• Hunt a single animal: raccoon or bird, nothing big.

• Collect seeds from wild crops.

• Get medium fertility soil if you don’t already have some underneath your house. Keep in a chest.

• Find a handful of peat (5-9 pieces).

 

Day2 Goals Recap:

• 1 handbasket, 1 chest

• sticks, tree logs

• wild crops

• medium fert.-soil

• clay

• hunt a bird or raccoon

• Make 1 or 2 pit kilns.

 

Keep in mind:

- You’ll soon want fence, so save the logs -as- logs if you are short on trees. Place fence intentionally and sparingly.

 

At night, while waiting for morning:

• Clayform 1 watering can, 1 jug, and 1 crock.

• Make a club from 1 log and 1 knife. Keep on-hand.

• Make a pan from 1 log and 1 knife. Set aside.

• Knap any stone tool replacements as necessary.

• Make a straw hat to not get wet from rain.

• Make a backup torch if able. Pick up the existing ones and put them back to reset their timers.

 

Suggested Goals for your next day (DAY 03):

You are free to exit the house at 5am. Often the 'morning is arriving' type of music happens as early as 3am, so let that just be a heads-up for the light returning instead of your signal to leave the house. Press "C" to check the time and other stats.

• Go ahead and start planting seeds. Put N seeds on one side, P on another, and K in another. You’ll get a better farm layout later, so while you should try to keep seed types together, don’t fret about it too much. The important thing is you're getting them in the ground.

• Get cattails for your 4^th handbasket. Then get a third chest.

• Leftover cattails should be combined with horsetail to make healing poultices, if possible.

• Get those pit kilns up and running with either peat or firewood; fire up the vessel first, and if you have a second or third pit kiln, place the small objects in 4 at a time.

• Hunt another animal today.

 

At night:

• Re-organize inventories to optimize space and undo-redundancies.

• Craft rough-hewn fence.

• Make a club and a pan; both recipes use a log and a knife.

• Make 4 spears, preferably five. It takes practice to aim right and you don't want to get stuck having thrown them all and making another while watching the deer just walk away. You can pick up a thrown spear by walking up to and over it.

• Right now you just have a fire, but when you get a pot, the food will be even more filling. You can chose to cook meat now if you are starving, or wait until the kilns are finished to use the pot.

• If you have clay to work with, go ahead and make 4 crocks at the same time from the x4 option.

• Take a closer look at the in-game Handbook (press “H”); there’s so much to explore and right now at night is the best time to familiarize yourself with it.

• Make some improvised armor if you can. It's not much, but it helps to prevent being one-shotted.

 

Suggested Goals for your next day (DAY 04):

• Get the next batch of pottery in your kilns. Pull finished ones out and place raw ones in. Bring the finished ones inside--you'll need them tonight.

• Today, you hunt! Go after a deer, goat, or boar. Each has a different hunting method to best take it down without dying or losing all your spears. Deer and goats are generally throw a spear from a distance and let them run and calm down before you aim for them again. With boars, you spear them once and then switch to your club; if they start to run away, switch to spear and throw another at them.

• On your way home at the end of the day, grab some mushrooms and berries if they are in your path. Eat the berries to get up to half a hunger bar, and save the mushrooms.

• Pick up and replace the torches to keep them lit.

 

At night:

• Cook redmeat stew in your pot. The Handbook has the recipe, though if cooking ratios are confusing, the Wiki explains this.

• Apply one piece of fat to your medium or large hides, each, to oil them. This way they don’t spoil; you’ll need them for making winter clothes later. These can be placed on the floor (no need to take up chest storage). Over the next day or so you'll see them darken, indicating they've gone from a freshly-oiled hide to a cured pelt.

• If necessary, eat one bowl out of the pot and pour the rest of the pot into a crock. This frees the pot for more cooking and you can eat from the crock later. If you don't need to eat, place the bowl down next to the crock. Bring the bowl of food with you tomorrow.

• Place all veggies, grain, and mushrooms into your storage vessel. This is what you are saving for winter. Look at how many days (or years!) they will now last inside of here. This is because of this vessel, but also because the vessel is inside your sealed house, which was designed to act like a cellar.

 

Suggested Goals for your next day (DAY 05):

• Expand your garden with more medium fertility soil, till it, water it, and plant any new seeds you found the other day. If the seed types (N, P, and K) are getting mixed up or breaking the previous organization, don't worry about it.

• Place your new fence (made 1 or 2 days ago) around the farm. Leave an opening for you to place a gate at.

• Hunt one animal today, big or small.

• Check on pit kilns.

• Replenish stock of sticks, logs, and fuel (peat and/or firewood). If you find a pine tree with leaking sap/resin coming out of it, don't chop the tree. Mark this on your map as a source of resin.

• Feel free to explore a bit, you've earned it! Being on the move lets you see your surroundings and find things you didn't know existed. It can also get too easy to always keep close to home; expand your horizons.

 

By now you probably have a sense between daytime and nighttime tasks. You've probably also seen how incredibly detailed and immersive the world is--and just how much Vintage Story tests your bravery!

Check out the technology progression in the handbook. Right now you are in the late stone age since you have pottery, but probably don't have any copper yet. There are many guides out there for starting your sojourning's into copper, bronze, and beyond, so go look those up if you want to progress. If not, enjoy your farming (for which there are also guides, especially in crop rotation) and take time to hone your hunting. I used to find it really hard, but now it's fun.

 

That's it for 5 whole days of surviving in Vintage Story!

[Forceous]

Great guide, while I'm way past the 5 day mark it still had some useful information for me. Hopefully it helps other new players!

[SeaWarriorSon]

Excellent stuff!! Very nice

This might very well help the players who flounder without an initial structure

[Grummsh]

Good stuff for beginners indeed! I would just add one simple yet pretty good thing - when you get your first reed chest or later when you have more - keep one of them burried under at least one block. Id suggest make Your floor out of packed or rammed earth and in one spot next to a wall dig 2 block deep hole put a chest inside and cover with 1 block of regular dirt. That way whatever is inside gets treated like its in a cellar - so any food Youll put in will last you a lot longer before it starts to spoil  

[Echodrome]

Thank you for your guide, I got a bunch of things I wasn't aware of, for example there being a technology progression handbook.

However, I have a couple of questions:

1) Where/how do you find dead birds? I didn't know this was a thing, I don't think I've noticed bird in this game.
2) Perhaps it's my hoarder mind but why only 2 hand baskets on day 1, I find the thing I most struggle with on day 1 is storage space. I tried to go for 4 hand baskets so I can pick anything useful on day one but then again maybe I am prioritizing incorrectly.
3) Does hay prevent mobs to enter your base?

[YordaEatsMelon]

2 hours ago, Echodrome said:

Thank you for your guide, I got a bunch of things I wasn't aware of, for example there being a technology progression handbook.

However, I have a couple of questions:

1) Where/how do you find dead birds? I didn't know this was a thing, I don't think I've noticed bird in this game.
2) Perhaps it's my hoarder mind but why only 2 hand baskets on day 1, I find the thing I most struggle with on day 1 is storage space. I tried to go for 4 hand baskets so I can pick anything useful on day one but then again maybe I am prioritizing incorrectly.
3) Does hay prevent mobs to enter your base?

Hello, thanks! Those are important questions, thanks for asking. 

1) Birds are something I didn't initially find back when I first started playing, not because they weren't in that release version, but because I was too afraid to leave the immediate field of my home (lol). Since many years ago there have been small flocks of chickens and solo individuals that you can find wandering around. The most common way of finding them is by stumbling upon where they were resting or eating, and you'll know it when they spook. Another way is by listening for the tiny cheeps of chicks. Just be aware that if there's a flock, the others might try to defend themselves, even if you didn't hit them. Throwing a spear can one-shot the bird you aim for. Switching to a club (and looking down so it lands a hit) can one or two -shot the others who charge you. This can mean several birds-worth of meat in one trip, yum!

Finding dead ones can happen if you have any predators nearby, though primarily if there are any foxes. I'll be going along on my way to a new pond for more reeds, or maybe a ways over to dig up some peat, and I'll find the body of a chicken lying dead. If you hover your mouse over the bird, it will usually say "partially eaten". It won't give you as many drops as a bird you kill yourself, but it's good pickings when you don't have a spear yet (or lost them all, as I did a lot at first). Sometimes you can watch a fox chase some birds; before it goes to eat any, you can walk up and it will run away, leaving a fresh kill with all the drops.

 

2) It's totally doable to do 4 baskets. However, that can lead to someone stuffing their personal inventory full and then having little to no storage for putting it down once it's nightfall. Especially if you are back at your base and trying to put some walls and a roof up (that's a couple of slots for two shovels, a slot for rammed earth, and slots for any leftover materials from the process, i.e. low fert. soil and packed earth; that's five slots already). 

Recent updates expanded the kinds of items you can stack on the ground (i.e. don't require a chest or handbasket at all times to keep). If there's unlimited cattails or papyrus around, there's enough for 3-4 baskets and a chest or two, no worries. Many maps are not so providing in this regard. It means finding a balance of reed-distribution. How many of these reeds will I make into baskets vs make into chests? So, it's still totally up to you. Whatever you chose, though, will have an effect on gameplay. Some people don't mind having 4 baskets and no chest, others feel tight on space when that happens.

Having a stuffed inventory makes it difficult to go out and collect wild crops, medium fertility soil, peat, clay, etc. when you want to start planting things and your area only has low fertility soil. A stuffed inventory makes hunting more risky as its fewer slots for spears, and fewer slots for taking meat, hides, bones, and fat back home. It also means there's lots of goodies on you if you die and have to go crashing through trees and bushes to get them back. Sure, you can keep inventory when you die, but it still means reduced capacity to drop everything and have a clean slate for whenever you want or need to go out and get new resources.

 

3) Yes, hay does prevent mobs from entering. Videogames have a bad habit of showing a hay bale as something dry, hollow, or easy to break. Relative to a boulder, that makes a little bit of sense. But even in real life, hay isn't flimsy. Have you ever tried picking up or rolling along a big bundle of hay or pine-straw? It's heavy! It's why ppl who own horses and livestock prefer using a tractor to haul their hay from the big pile over to individual pens. If the hay has been bailed, square or rolled up, its incredibly dense. 

So in this regard, Vintage Story pays attention to hay's properties in that it treats it as dense--mobs don't tear through it and room-detection treats it as properly sealing for use in cellars. Sure, you can pick it up fairly quickly in-game, but that's also the case for any logs you chop down or stone you quarry out (lol). Unlike a crude door, hay doesn't ever fall apart (the bundles don't disintegrate into handfuls of dry grass) and mobs don't treat it as an entryway. Drifters will hound a crude or proper door--they won't with hay, as it's seen as a wall.

 

Edit: the emoji got oddly rendered as "//media.invisioncic.com/r268468/emoticons/smile.png" and I wanted to correct that. 

Edited February 3 by YordaEatsMelon

[Echodrome]

Thank you for the detailed response! 

What you mentioned makes a lot of sense and yes I had seen the hay been pulled by tractor but I had never considered how heavy these could get.

And I also didn't put two and two together when you said "birds" I was not thinking chicken

[williams_482]

I found the structure schematic to be quite useful as a template, specifically the idea of digging out a layer or two of dirt, then using that dirt to build a peaked roof over the hole. It maximizes useable internal space relative to wall material and limits the amount of additional digging needed to get enough material. 

Good stuff. 

[LadyWYT]

On 1/22/2026 at 11:59 AM, YordaEatsMelon said:

Don’t use a bed or sleep to pass the night. There’s so much you can do during that time and your character does not need sleep.

I actually disagree with this one. Sleeping to pass the night is perfectly fine, as long as you have some breakfast to eat since sleeping will burn energy. It is true that the player character doesn't need to sleep(at least, not at the time of this writing), but it's much easier to work in the daytime and safer as well since monsters are more likely to spawn at night.

The more important thing to note here, I think, is that beds do not set the player's spawn point--a temporal gear is required for resetting one's spawn point, and even then the number of respawns are limited. Thus it's better to settle somewhere within convenient travel distance of spawn, if one is prone to accidents.

A couple more things to note is that the number of respawns per temporal gear can be changed in the world creation settings, as can many other things like hunger rate, tool durability, player health, etc. It's even possible to set a grace timer for when monsters start to appear, as well as keeping inventory on death. While I do recommend playing the game on the Standard default settings first, it's not a bad idea to adjust the settings to be a little easier when needed when one is first learning the game. The difficulty can always be turned back up later once the player is more experienced, and most settings can also be adjusted after world creation via console command and reloading the world for the changes to take effect.

[SheepSheep]

Here is another way to visualize the construction, in case any of you find it to be helpful. It's not 100% identical to YordaEatsMellon's design, but it's close enough that it demonstrates the basic idea of the A-frame style house.  If you want to see what Yorda's design looks like, check out the image I posted below. 

Edited February 20 by SheepSheep

[SheepSheep]

And here is what the design would roughly look like if you try to do it like YoardaEatsMellon did above in the article. Stuff isn't quite to scale, but this is the general concept. 

[SheepSheep]

On 2/3/2026 at 1:33 PM, Echodrome said:

Thank you for your guide, I got a bunch of things I wasn't aware of, for example there being a technology progression handbook.

However, I have a couple of questions:

1) Where/how do you find dead birds? I didn't know this was a thing, I don't think I've noticed bird in this game.
2) Perhaps it's my hoarder mind but why only 2 hand baskets on day 1, I find the thing I most struggle with on day 1 is storage space. I tried to go for 4 hand baskets so I can pick anything useful on day one but then again maybe I am prioritizing incorrectly.
3) Does hay prevent mobs to enter your base?

Dead birds are just found by happenstance on the ground. Usually foxes or wolves kill some of the nearby chickens or foul and leave the corpse for you to scavenge from.

So, the number of handbaskets . . . it all depends on your map and how limited your resources and time might be once you find cattails. Cattails can be very scarce in some areas and you really want to ration it out across each day in order to make sure that you don't run out during moments when you need it the most. If you have lots, no problem, make as much as you want (within reason lol). 

Yes, the haybales keep monsters and animals from entering. I was skeptical of this at first, but yeah, it works really well. 

[Silfrenbirce]

I just want to drop a note for folks: The crude door does not break.  It has an 8% chance of falling off its hinges, but dealing with that takes no more time or effort than punching out and replacing two hay bales every time you want to enter or exit your house.  And animals and drifters won't go through it.

[YordaEatsMelon]

A caveat to the crude door; the room will not be considered sealed and so won't count as a cellar. Placing baskets and chests under the floor can remedy this but can get inconvenient; a separate hut can also be made for the purpose of a cellar. 

[CastIronFabric]

I have a restart addiction as such I have a lot of early game play. Here is a short version of what I do every single time. To be fair I play with monsters spawning on day 3 I think.

Before finding or building a temporary shelter I wait until I have the following:

1. Enough cattails for 4 hand baskets and 1 placeable basket, two torches made and lit.

2. One stack of clay (64), sometimes two stacks I am I making good time.

3. One stack of peat

That way I can immediately start clay forming at night. Most of the time I actually put the pit kilns inside my home made of either packed dirt or rammed earth or if I am lucky a cave. I typically do not make more than 3 pit kilns and I focus on making a cooking pot, crockpot, bowl and crucible (because four small items makes on pit) and a storage vessel.

After that it just all depends on the roll. Although I will say I almost never pan for copper.

 

Edited Friday at 02:34 PM by CastIronFabric