Suggestions from an Athropology/Archaeology student.

[Alexzandr]

Hey there!

My name is Alex, and I hold a bachelor's in anthropology, specializing in archaeology, from the University of Wyoming. I have plans to do obtain a master's in the same subject from the same school. 

That being said, Vintage Story is very much a game I enjoy, especially from my intrest in anthropology. So I figured  I could offer some insight from my perspective and background. 

A bit of an asterik, I have no background in game development and I have no idea if anything I suggest would fall within the scope of the dev team's vision, how it would really affect the balance  and pacing of the game, or if anthing I suggest would be possible within VS. If these ideas are found within mods, please let me know of them!

First, the early game has a lot of potential and room for growth. From what I've learned from hunter and gather subject classes, the early game could have more depth and easier in obtaining materials.
 

Hay & Lean-To. I believe the early game could support the construction of a lean-to structure or allowing more hay to be harvested with stone level tools. From what I remember, a lot of hunter gather groups use various lean-to and hay structures as a simple shelters. While this is possible in the current version of VS (1.22) it could be tweaked to support this idea. Collecting hay with a stone knife is a long and tedious job considering it takes 8 dry grass to make 1 hay block, and 16 dry grass to make on thatch roofing. With the simple stone knife collecting enough dry grass to make a straw hut or even something resembling a lean-to is very time consuming. A simple tweak would be to have dry grass blocks to drop more dry grass, that does affect the scythe tool and its desired efficiency. Perhaps speeding up the harvesting time for dry grass with a stone tool is another easy solution, but it could also affect the effiiciency of the metal knives. A more complex answer could be adding a stone scythe/sickle. There could be various tweaks and ways to make sure that the metal scythes stay more efficient such as speed, amount per stroke, area, etc etc. Stone scythes and sickles have existed since the neolithic, with simple stones being used as tools to harvest various grains and grasses. Ideally the addition of these tools could speed up the collection of dry grass for simple hay structures that hunter gather societies would reside in.

 

Quarrying and stone. This idea is basically allowing for the quarrying of stone with stone tools themselves. It is based off the Mohz hardness scale for minerals, where different minerals have different hardnesses. Many neolithic and copper age structures were used with stones quarried with simple stones called hammer stones. It comes down to banging a stone of a harder mineral composition on a stone with a softer mineral composition. Clearly this method of quarrying is painfully slow and not very percise compared to things like copper saws and pickaxes. The main idea is to allow quarrying of stones for querns, buildings, and more. I don't think it would be too detrimental to the current state of the tools as using hammer stones is a very slow process and often was a task that spanned days with multiple people working on one quarry site. Not sure if this idea would really serve any purpose as obtaining copper currently isn't that hard of a process, I'm just offering it as an idea for more RP purposes and for people who play at a slower pace (me). 

 

Manos and grain. Keeping somewhat on topic with stones, I'd like to see the implementation of manos and metates. These were a simple set of stone tools to processing grain into flour by using a trough/bowl like stone as a base and a smaller stone as the mill. Being so simple it wouldn't be able to process grain at the same speed and scale as a quern. The processing of grain in general could be expanded as turning grain into flour is a more complex process than just harvesting the grain. There is thresing where the grain itself is removed from the straw, which is done in various methods. Further processing is needed to remove the chaff from the wheat berries to make sure that just the berries themselves are being processed. Implementing something like this into VS could also add some depth especially in the early game where grain could be processed at an earlier stage in the game and allow for simple food like gruels, flat pancake like meals, and more. These idea's would open up the early game foods some I believe and give the grain side of farming some more depth, and perhaps make it more tedious.

 

Finally the argument of realism vs gameplay comes into play here. That would be probably solved while implementing and further design of these systems and ideas. How in-depth, tedious, efficient and the like would have to be evaluated to keep a balance of realism and gameplay. Vintage Story seems like a game that likes to lean into the realism with respect to the player, hopefully if these ideas would be implemented the same balance would be applied. I have no idea of how to go about this, like in my preface, I have zero knowlege in game design and balance. I just enjoy the more realistic and slow nature of Vintage Story and I think that some ideas taken from anthropology could be apllied to make the early game better. It is surprising what our ancestors were able to accomplish with simple tools of stone.
 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Feedback is appreciated. Take care!
= Alex

[Shoom]

I really like how this game attracts people from all kinds of backgrounds and contribute knowledge. Welcome to the community!

On the topic of hay and grass, an idea I've been playing with in the back of my mind is tall, dense grass that is 1.5/2 blocks tall and which yields more dry grass when harvested compared to regular grass, it could lead to some cool emergent gameplay where you might not spot animals like wolves and boars or while hunting you lose visual track of prey you're chasing.

Tule already sort of does this in-game but spots where tule grows are kind of sparse and the only use for tule is to make roofing, whereas dry grass is a lot more useful. As a proof of concept I suppose one could make a mod that replaces all grass with tule if possible, and make thatch interchangeable with dry grass in crafting.

Edited Sunday at 12:45 PM by Shoom

[Thorfinn]

Tule would probably be fine if you boosted the output, or drastically reduced the amount of tule needed for a thatch block. I would be hesitant to change dry grass too much since it's used as animal feed and tinder for the pit kiln.

[Bruno Willis]

17 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Tule would probably be fine if you boosted the output, or drastically reduced the amount of tule needed for a thatch block. I would be hesitant to change dry grass too much since it's used as animal feed and tinder for the pit kiln.

It always seemed odd to me that you get the same amount of dried grass from a "very short" grass growth as you do from "tall grass." There's a whole set of different heights of grass, why not give more dry grass the taller the grass growth?

[coolAlias]

I would also like to be able to harvest grass and reeds by hand, even if it's slightly slower than with a knife. Especially if we then needed a little bit to tie the knife blade onto the stick, and there was a knot-tying mini-game involved rather than the crafting grid...

[Heegrim]

Yeah, dry grass/thatch shelters need a bit of a rework. Everyone just ends up making a dirt hut because you can dig up full dirt blocks at about the same speed as a single piece of grass. The roofing blocks need to craft more per hay bale at least. I think you should have to hold right click on a dirt block with a shovel to make packed dirt instead of being able to instantly make 6 with your bare hands in the inventory.

Fully grown grass should drop more grass than short variants and a 2 block tall variant should be added. Regular grass probably shouldn't grow into the 2 block tall kind because that would be a nightmare for visibility, but it should generate in patches at worldgen.

Also, grass should be able to be harvested slowly by hand (maybe by crouch-right clicking). You should also be able to start a fire with just sticks instead of firewood. Having to knap a knife AND axe just to build your first fire is kinda silly since you can craft a firestarter with just those items (and if you have ever started a fire in real life, you use tinder and kindling first, NOT FULL LOGS).

[Heegrim]

2 hours ago, coolAlias said:

I would also like to be able to harvest grass and reeds by hand, even if it's slightly slower than with a knife. Especially if we then needed a little bit to tie the knife blade onto the stick, and there was a knot-tying mini-game involved rather than the crafting grid...

I heard the devs want to move away from the crafting grid eventually.

Would be neat to have a little in world minigame for adding the handle to tools. Real tools usually don't need string to hold them together (stone tools can just be seated in a notch in the handle and metal tools are fastened with a wedge). It will probably just be as simple as right clicking a tool head on the ground with a stick or combining them in your inventory by putting on on top of the other (like the good ol point-and-click adventure days).

[coolAlias]

11 minutes ago, Leo Steeves said:

I heard the devs want to move away from the crafting grid eventually.

Would be neat to have a little in world minigame for adding the handle to tools. Real tools usually don't need string to hold them together (stone tools can just be seated in a notch in the handle and metal tools are fastened with a wedge). It will probably just be as simple as right clicking a tool head on the ground with a stick or combining them in your inventory by putting on on top of the other (like the good ol point-and-click adventure days).

For stone axes and hammers and the like, definitely. I think a flint knife would usually be secured with some sinew or some rough cordage, though, if it was given a handle at all - I bet a lot of the early knifes were just handheld sharp stones or even bones.

Speaking of, some bone tools would be neat. Stuff like bone scrapers and sewing needles for early leatherworking.