v1.21 - A new player's thoughts

[DarkGold]

I started playing Vintage Story about a month ago and I've really been enjoying it. I've been playing the standard game mode with default settings in single player, and I've just gotten up to iron tier and starting pursuing the story. I wanted to share my thoughts on what I'd like to see added or changed in the game based on my experiences so far.

1) Sleep vs standing still. At the start of the game, standing still seemed to conserve satiety better than going to sleep. This was meaningful at the start of the game since I didn't have a good farm yet and food scarcity in winter made me want to stretch food further. This encouraged me to spend time doing nothing, mostly when waiting for the night to pass, rather than engage with other game mechanics. If sleep had been equally efficient, I would have preferred to use it to skip time and spend more of my time in game actively. When food eventually ran out (after February when winter was "over", but berries did not return until June), it became easier to just repeatedly starve to death, and make sure to die in a place I could pick up my inventory. Once I was able to find medium fertility soil (difficult on the island I started on, requiring a raft and much searching, perilous dying far from spawn across an ocean), and begin my farming season immediately after the first winter ended, I had enough food to no longer care about whether sleep was more or less efficient.

2) Temperature's effect on hunger vs health. It was intuitive that I might freeze to death if I got too cold, so I needed warm clothes. After making fur and rawhide clothing, I was confused to see that I still suffered a hunger penalty indifferent to what I was wearing. Were my clothes doing nothing? It took some reading to learn how temperature really worked in game; warm clothes would change when I started losing body heat, but I'd still get more hungry regardless of what I was wearing if temperatures dropped below a threshold and I wasn't indoors. I would have liked my clothing to offset the hunger threshold too, and for info about the total temperature offset my clothes were granting to appear nearby my body temperature info. Again, once farming picked up, I had enough food to mostly not worry about the hunger penalty. But until that first harvest in the following year came, starvation was a constant threat.

3) Sailing! Getting a sailboat felt amazing, though farming enough flax took me several in game years. Year 0, without medium fertility soil, no starting seeds, a shorter growing window, was not very productive for flax. Year 1 harvest provided about half the flax I required. Year 2 harvest provided the remaining flax I needed. Having found medium fertility soil part way through Year 1, I could also enjoy 2 harvests in Year 2, though I had enough flax after the first harvest of that year. The one change I would like to see with the sailboat is the way the furl/unfurl controls work. Currently a right click cycles closed > half open > fully open > closed. I would like to be able to left click to cycle backwards, right click to cycle forwards. I rarely want to go from fully open to closed, but instead go from fully open to half open, then closed.

4) Alternatives to fat, for the players that enjoy doing runs where they don't hunt animals. I'm not the kind of player who falls into this camp; I typically play a game without adding extra challenges, and leather is a valuable resource in this game. But I can see that beeswax and resin can frequently stand in for fat in bow making and food preservation. And soybeans are a cool alternative protein source already in the game. My workshop required a lot of fat to create all the gears and axles though. With tools like the fruit press, I was thinking about the long history of oil pressing from seeds. If oil is historically made by roasting, grinding, then pressing seeds, perhaps oil could be added to the game to replace fat in many recipes. Oil also has a long history of being made through water extraction, for that first bit of fat you would need to replace in the fruit press recipe, before it could be more efficiently made. I also see olives are in the game, though I haven't found them yet.

5) Potash is a pain to make a lot of. I would like to see a cauldron, or some other update that allows me to cook more of it at once than the cooking pot does.

6) I would really appreciate a spyglass, to zoom in on animals I can see in the distance, to better ID them without getting too close. Is that a boar or a wolf? What kind of deer is that? These are the questions I frequently ask. With the introduction of grinding coming in v1.22, it would be wonderful to be able to grind a lens, and create a spyglass item. I know there are mods for spyglasses. I am currently playing without mods, and would love to see one in the core game.

I'm very excited for the fishing, in wall axle, big windmill, watermill and cabinets coming in v1.22, and the changes to cooking stacks of things without the temperature resetting. The direction the game is moving in seems great. And the way blueprints will allow me to bring my base to a new world, rather than start from scratch after an update that changes world gen is very exciting.

Edited March 22 by DarkGold
Added "good" to my mention of a farm in my second paragraph. I did start putting crops down as soon as I came across them, but only in low fertility soil.

[LadyWYT]

First off, welcome to the forums!

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

This was meaningful at the start of the game since I didn't have a good farm yet and food scarcity in winter made me want to stretch food further. This encouraged me to spend time doing nothing, mostly when waiting for the night to pass, rather than engage with other game mechanics.

If you've nothing else to do, reading through the handbook and studying your map to make plans for the next day are good options, especially for new players. Just make sure that time is unpaused while reading or else it defeats the purpose.

For farming, I do want to note that low fertility soil is passable for a basic farm, especially for faster growing crops like turnips and carrots. It's possible to survive winter without farming, but it's going to be very difficult. Starving to death over and over isn't really advised, since it lowers your overall health by halving your nutrition each death and otherwise heavily limits what you can do.

Lack of sleep may or may not end up applying some sort of debuff in the future, we'll see. In the meantime, if you want to flesh out that mechanic more, you might consider checking out the SleepNeed mod. https://mods.vintagestory.at/sleepneed

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

Temperature's effect on hunger vs health. It was intuitive that I might freeze to death if I got too cold, so I needed warm clothes. After making fur and rawhide clothing, I was confused to see that I still suffered a hunger penalty indifferent to what I was wearing. Were my clothes doing nothing? It took some reading to learn how temperature really worked in game; warm clothes would change when I started losing body heat, but I'd still get more hungry regardless of what I was wearing if temperatures dropped below a threshold and I wasn't indoors. I would have liked my clothing to offset the hunger threshold too, and for info about the total temperature offset my clothes were granting to appear nearby my body temperature info.

I feel like this is probably better suited to mods than a change for the vanilla game. The increased hunger when in cold temperatures isn't that bad, in my opinion, and easily countered by having a good store of food for the colder months. From a realism standpoint, the hunger increase makes sense given that the body is going to be burning more energy in order to keep itself warm, or otherwise burn more energy to move around in heavy layers/through thick snow.

 

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

Sailing! Getting a sailboat felt amazing, though farming enough flax took me several in game years. Year 0, without medium fertility soil, no starting seeds, a shorter growing window, was not very productive for flax. Year 1 harvest provided about half the flax I required. Year 2 harvest provided the remaining flax I needed. Having found medium fertility soil part way through Year 1, I could also enjoy 2 harvests in Year 2, though I had enough flax after the first harvest of that year. The one change I would like to see with the sailboat is the way the furl/unfurl controls work. Currently a right click cycles closed > half open > fully open > closed. I would like to be able to left click to cycle backwards, right click to cycle forwards. I rarely want to go from fully open to closed, but instead go from fully open to half open, then closed.

Can't really comment too much on sailboat controls since I don't really enjoy nautical content all that much. As for the flax though, I do want to note that grain crops are changing in 1.22 to have half the 1.21 yields but spawn in much bigger patches in the wild. All it really means is that players will want to till a large field for their grain crops rather than rely on the backyard vegetable patch.

Regarding medium fertility soil, it's most often found in areas with high rainfall. These areas also tend to be very green in warm weather. But like I said before--low fertility soil will still work just fine for farming, but will need to be planted sooner rather than later to account for longer growing times. If using low fertility farmland, one might also consider using fertilizer to boost the soil nutrients and speed up crop growth.

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

Alternatives to fat, for the players that enjoy doing runs where they don't hunt animals. I'm not the kind of player who falls into this camp; I typically play a game without adding extra challenges, and leather is a valuable resource in this game. But I can see that beeswax and resin can frequently stand in for fat in bow making and food preservation. And soybeans are a cool alternative protein source already in the game. My workshop required a lot of fat to create all the gears and axles though. With tools like the fruit press, I was thinking about the long history of oil pressing from seeds.

This is actually supposed to be a thing in 1.22, I believe. Linseed oil can be obtained from processing flax grain and can be used in place of fat for machinery parts, if I'm not mistaken.

Aside from that, there are a few mods that add alternatives, I think, and Survival Goods/Commodities traders can also sell fat(I think), giving players an option to obtain the material without needing to kill animals.

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

I also see olives are in the game, though I haven't found them yet.

Olives are found in the dry, warm climates to the south. By default, the player starts in the temperate climate zone. Traveling several thousand blocks to the south will take you to warmer climates, though I'm not sure that olive trees will grow in the temperate zone, outside of a greenhouse that is. At world creation, you can also change your starting climate or shorten the polar-equator distance to make traveling between climate zones faster.

 

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

I would like to see a cauldron

A cauldron would be a nice thing to have in general, though it's not something I really expect to see until a proper cooking update.

 

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

6) I would really appreciate a spyglass, to zoom in on animals I can see in the distance, to better ID them without getting too close. Is that a boar or a wolf? What kind of deer is that? These are the questions I frequently ask. With the introduction of grinding coming in v1.22, it would be wonderful to be able to grind a lens, and create a spyglass item. I know there are mods for spyglasses. I am currently playing without mods, and would love to see one in the core game.

I'd like this too, though I suspect it's the kind of thing more likely to come with an update to end game tech in general. Not that spyglasses are end game tech, exactly, but lens crafting is a feature that could easily be utilized for eyeglass cosmetics as well as Jonas tech devices.

[DarkGold]

Thank you for the warm welcome!

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

If you've nothing else to do, reading through the handbook and studying your map to make plans for the next day are good options, especially for new players. Just make sure that time is unpaused while reading or else it defeats the purpose.

For farming, I do want to note that low fertility soil is passable for a basic farm, especially for faster growing crops like turnips and carrots. It's possible to survive winter without farming, but it's going to be very difficult. Starving to death over and over isn't really advised, since it lowers your overall health by halving your nutrition each death and otherwise heavily limits what you can do.

I did spend a lot of time reading through the handbook (and wiki) with the game unpaused, but ultimately, the winter is very long and I eventually ran out of stuff to do.

I was forced to begin farming in low fertility soil. The island I spawned on had no medium soil, and it took a long time to make a raft (cattails were first put towards storage and backpacks) and travel to a place that had any. Between low fertility soil and taking some time to find crops at the beginning of the game, by the time you get crops into the ground, many died due to a long growing season and changing weather (heat killed my carrots, winter killed crops planted late). This made year 0 very challenging in terms of food, but I became better at hunting as I became more experienced with the game and was better able to find food in winter later. By the end of year 1, I had enough food this was no longer a problem.

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This is actually supposed to be a thing in 1.22, I believe. Linseed oil can be obtained from processing flax grain and can be used in place of fat for machinery parts, if I'm not mistaken.

Great to know!

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Olives are found in the dry, warm climates to the south. By default, the player starts in the temperate climate zone. Traveling several thousand blocks to the south will take you to warmer climates, though I'm not sure that olive trees will grow in the temperate zone, outside of a greenhouse that is. At world creation, you can also change your starting climate or shorten the polar-equator distance to make traveling between climate zones faster.

I saw on the wiki they were warmer clime trees, I just haven't gotten very far south yet. It took me a long time to get temporal gears, so I was constrained to not travel too far from spawn until I got my sailboat in year 2, lest I die and not be able to retrieve what I was carrying before it despawned, since it took so long to travel anywhere by raft (and I spawned on an island). Just the luck of the world gen. My journey is taking me a good 5,000 blocks north to pursue the story at the moment, so no luck seeking warmer climes for a while.

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The increased hunger when in cold temperatures isn't that bad, in my opinion, and easily countered by having a good store of food for the colder months.

Certainly this doesn't bother me now I am later in the game and food is a solved problem. Early in the game, it was just a little unintuitive that clothing (which supposedly kept me warmer) didn't also change when I started getting more hungry because of the cold. I like that there is a hunger penalty, and even if wearing clothes made a difference, it still gets cold enough that it would kick in anyway after a point.

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

grain crops are changing in 1.22 to have half the 1.21 yields but spawn in much bigger patches in the wild. All it really means is that players will want to till a large field for their grain crops rather than rely on the backyard vegetable patch.

I saw this change was coming, so doubled my field sizes already. I don't see this significantly changing the game; once you find medium soil, it is not challenging to make larger plots of it. From what I have seen, it spawns in large enough patches.

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Starving to death over and over isn't really advised, since it lowers your overall health by halving your nutrition each death and otherwise heavily limits what you can do.

Now that I am later in the game, I certainly avoid starving intentionally, and I have enough food I don't really have a problem. This is more to conserve temporal gear spawns though. Early in the game though, before I had a sailboat, and before I had temporal gears, I really was limited in how far I could travel without dying being very risky (losing inventory), so I didn't really take a lot of risks or engage in a lot of gameplay that rewarded having higher max health. Given the nutrition penalties cap out when you still have a max of 15 hp, that made it feel like not much of a problem for the activities I was engaging with. I wasn't trying to get into fights with creatures where having more health would matter.

Edited March 22 by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[DarkGold]

2 more thoughts:

Bows
Much has already been said by other people on the forums about bows. I also want bows to be more effective for hunting larger game than chickens and hares. I would prefer to be able to kill a deer in 1 hit (if I hit it in the right spot with the right gear), because once an animal runs away, it's hard to hit it again. I understand that PvP would be a consideration for balance, I know changes are coming to animal HP to make bows more effective. I didn't want to mention this to begin with because I feel it already has enough voices behind it and I know it's being looked at already. I'm really just mentioning it to confirm that it is currently something I, as a new player, do want to see changed in the future (and changes are happening).

Storage spoilage reduction on sailboats
The other thing I have decided I do care more about as of last night, while attempting to journey thousands of blocks north, is the lack of a spoilage reduction in storage on sailboats. I was generally just happy storage was a large increase to inventory, making it convenient to load up the items I would need to establish a new outpost or base. Previous sailing journeys had usually only taken me away from base for a day or two, or were to ferry me between outposts. Outposts were equipped with storage that reduced spoilage. But now that I am in a mode of extended exploration, where my sailboat is acting more as a base than a ferry, I would like the food that I take with me to last longer, so I don't have to return to a place where I have left my food within a week. Especially as it is winter, and the ambient temperature would make any storage outside my person very effective normally.

As I say, just having a large amount of storage on the boat is fantastic, but reduction to spoilage really would just extend how long one can go on sea journeys in winter without returning to base. If the goal is to encourage players to return to base once a week, or establish many halfway houses, I can see why devs wouldn't want to implement spoilage reduction on ships.

Edited March 23 by DarkGold

[Bruno Willis]

38 minutes ago, DarkGold said:

The other thing I have decided I do care more about as of last night, while attempting to journey thousands of blocks north, is the lack of a spoilage reduction in storage on sailboats. I was generally just happy storage was a large increase to inventory, making it convenient to load up the items I would need to establish a new outpost or base. Previous sailing journeys had usually only taken me away from base for a day or two, or were to ferry me between outposts. Outposts were equipped with storage that reduced spoilage. But now that I am in a mode of extended exploration, where my sailboat is acting more as a base than a ferry, I would like the food that I take with me to last longer, so I don't have to return to a place where I have left my food within a week. Especially as it is winter, and the ambient temperature would make any storage outside my person very effective normally.

As I say, just having a large amount of storage on the boat is fantastic, but reduction to spoilage really would just extend how long one can go on sea journeys in winter without returning to base. If the goal is to encourage players to return to base once a week, or establish many halfway houses, I can see why devs wouldn't want to implement spoilage reduction on ships.

This is something I care about as well.

I'd love to see a way to wrap storage vessels in wet linen or something to keep food cool on long journeys.

I guess also, use long-lasting foods, like pickles and salted meats? I've never had enough salt to really do that, but I guess that's already an option. 

[DarkGold]

2 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

use long-lasting foods, like pickles and salted meats?

I only relatively recently found salt, so this would be something worth trying now! I have been mostly using bread for exploration (in seasons without wild berries) up until this point.

I also have only domesticated chickens so far, though I do have goats near my base. I know pickled vegetables are a step in making cheese, so exciting to maybe one day start down the dairy farming path! It's not something I have on my to do list at the moment though; I only just decided it was time to pursue the story after making it to the iron tier.

Edited March 23 by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

I'd love to see a way to wrap storage vessels in wet linen or something to keep food cool on long journeys.

I guess also, use long-lasting foods, like pickles and salted meats? I've never had enough salt to really do that, but I guess that's already an option. 

Not to mention carrying raw grain/flour. It keeps for quite a while, even outside of a storage vessel, so it's easy enough to cook into fresh food.

Having some dried food options would be nice as well, though food supply has historically been a primary challenge of travel, especially on the high seas.

[PoisonedPawn777]

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

Bows
Much has already been said by other people on the forums about bows. I also want bows to be more effective for hunting larger game than chickens and hares. I would prefer to be able to kill a deer in 1 hit (if I hit it in the right spot with the right gear), because once an animal runs away, it's hard to hit it again. I understand that PvP would be a consideration for balance, I know changes are coming to animal HP to make bows more effective. I didn't want to mention this to begin with because I feel it already has enough voices behind it and I know it's being looked at already. I'm really just mentioning it to confirm that it is currently something I, as a new player, do want to see changed in the future (and changes are happening).
 

I'd expect to see an overhaul to hunting at some point, certainly enough folks wanting an upgrade. I think hunting and general combat could easily be differentiated from one another by the addition of status effects like crippling, blood loss, wound etc... These would have a serious effect on animals but maybe little to none on rust beasts or mechanical enemies. The idea of using two different sets of weaponry for two different purposes is one I'd like to see. I don't personally see the need to tailor game mechanics around PVP, I'd rather see more immersive hunting and combat even to the potential detriment of PVP. With the overhaul to spears and the addition of quenching to the game in 1.22 I find bows useful, but a bit more on the periphery. 

[LadyWYT]

47 minutes ago, PoisonedPawn777 said:

I think hunting and general combat could easily be differentiated from one another by the addition of status effects like crippling, blood loss, wound etc... These would have a serious effect on animals but maybe little to none on rust beasts or mechanical enemies. The idea of using two different sets of weaponry for two different purposes is one I'd like to see. I don't personally see the need to tailor game mechanics around PVP, I'd rather see more immersive hunting and combat even to the potential detriment of PVP.

PvP is less of a concern in this case, I think, than making hunting too easy/lucrative to the point that animal husbandry becomes more unattractive than it already is. Many players already skip it since it's easy enough to go out and slaughter the local wildlife for one's supply of meat, fat, and hides. Dairy nutrition can be safely skipped, and livestock needs to be generation 3 before the animals can be killed via butcher knife, and it takes a while for most livestock to reach that level.

With the addition of a status effect system, I would expect hunting to be made a little easier due to bleeds/cripple effects, but not to the extent that the player is killing large animals like deer, bears, and wolves in a single shot.

[DarkGold]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Not to mention carrying raw grain/flour. It keeps for quite a while, even outside of a storage vessel, so it's easy enough to cook into fresh food.

Having some dried food options would be nice as well, though food supply has historically been a primary challenge of travel, especially on the high seas.

I have considered carrying raw grain and flour, since it wouldn't be hard to bring a clay oven in storage on my boat, or carry a cooking pot for porridge. Since I'm exploring in winter, I have to intermittently camp with a fire to warm up again anyway.

After Bruno Willis's reminder about pickled vegetables, I've decided I'm going to try harvesting soybeans in the next growing season. I don't have many seeds at the moment (only found a handful in a ruin after the last growing season), so it'll be a slow start, but pickled soybeans should be a good option for long travels in the future.

I just finished mapping the perimeter of the large sea (maybe roughly 5,500x7,000 blocks) I happened to spawn in the middle of. I'm going to have to establish an outpost at the northern tip of the sea, then head inland and see how far I can get as the next step of my journey. Maybe that will mean a second sailboat, carving a channel, or doing the rest of the journey on foot. Either way, I'll have to build some more land based storage.

Edited March 23 by DarkGold

[Thorfinn]

On 3/22/2026 at 11:04 AM, DarkGold said:

lest I die and not be able to retrieve what I was carrying before it despawned, since it took so long to travel anywhere by raft

FWIW, it used to be, and I think still is the case, that the despawn timer only runs when you are within your view distance of your death spot. Turn that down to 256 and you could probably crawl there before it despawns if you wanted to.

[DarkGold]

18 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

FWIW, it used to be, and I think still is the case, that the despawn timer only runs when you are within your view distance of your death spot.

That is very useful to know! And it sounds like, based on the following thread, that items persist in unloaded chunks indefinitely between closing and opening the game. That eases a lot of my worries, and should make future game choices a lot less stressful/risk adverse.

[Slam]

1 hour ago, DarkGold said:

I have considered carrying raw grain and flour, since it wouldn't be hard to bring a clay oven in storage on my boat, or carry a cooking pot for porridge. Since I'm exploring in winter, I have to intermittently camp with a fire to warm up again anyway.

After Bruno Willis's reminder about pickled vegetables, I've decided I'm going to try harvesting soybeans in the next growing season. I don't have many seeds at the moment (only found a handful in a ruin after the last growing season), so it'll be a slow start, but pickled soybeans should be a good option for long travels in the future.

I just finished mapping the perimeter of the large sea (maybe roughly 5,500x7,000 blocks) I happened to spawn in the middle of. I'm going to have to establish an outpost at the northern tip of the sea, then head inland and see how far I can get as the next step of my journey. Maybe that will mean a second sailboat, carving a channel, or doing the rest of the journey on foot. Either way, I'll have to build some more land based storage.

Your adventures make me regret not choosing an island seed I found, I was just so focus on finding a seed with a good steep cliff to base near. Though I guess I’m not missing out on too much with your year 0 lol.

I have just read a wiki page that says soybeans last 3.4 years, though this was written in 1.18.6 so it may be outdated I have been lucky enough to find some soybeans myself so I can confirm with this soon, so if it does really last long, it could save some salt on vegetables.

[DarkGold]

20 minutes ago, Slam said:

Your adventures make me regret not choosing an island seed I found, I was just so focus on finding a seed with a good steep cliff to base near. Though I guess I’m not missing out on too much with your year 0 lol.

The good: trading by ship. I have a lot of traders around the perimeter of the sea and it's fun (and profitable!) to sail between them. I was also able to travel maybe 3,500 blocks north by sea. That's more than half the distance of the journey north I'm on!

The bad: as noted, there is less land around you with crops, soil and clay at the start of the game. If I were to play the seed again, knowing what I know now, I would make a raft before backpacks, so I could travel to more cattails early. I think I could overcome a lot of my year 0 troubles if I played the same seed again now, no longer being a first time player.

My starting island has a nice little lake on it right near spawn, some ruins, and there was a larger island within swimming distance (important when I was killed by a bear on that island and didn't have enough cattails to make a second raft yet). The larger island also had a couple of very useful traders on it. For anyone interested, my seed was: 158219089. Version 1.21.6 and my settings were default standard game world.

[DarkGold]

Now that I have explored a large body of water with traders all along the edge, I am again feeling something I felt earlier in the game, that might make more sense as a mod than a change to vanilla...

Early in the game, before you have a lot of rusty gears, you need to be careful with the trades you make if you want to stay liquid and make a profit. What this might look like is:

1. Go to Commodities trader, find out what they want, when this might change, and how much money they have.
2. Go to a Treasure Hunter trader, find out what they are selling.
3. Travel back to the Commodities trader and deliver what they wanted if the Treasure Hunter had it and the costs lined up with what both you and the Commodities trader could afford. Do this before their next delivery date.
4. Wait for the Commodities trader to save up some money again before repeating this pattern.

There are variations on this for the Survival trader and Agricultural and Treasure Hunter traders too.

While I really like having to go and purchase goods, then deliver them within a deadline, doing steps 1 and 2 without finding a match is time consuming, and doing step 1 before proceeding to 2, to remain liquid, increases the amount of sailing you do. This can add up to a lot of time. Fair; your efforts are making you money, tedium is the price you pay.

It would be interesting if there was some way to remotely check the trader's info. A board that one could add them to somehow once discovered (and maybe some other condition/s met). Or a telephone like device one could contact them through to receive this info remotely, if certain investments were made (maybe late game tech).

I am aware there are certain technologies that might replace sailing in certain circumstance in the late game. I see this being a similar convenience. Perhaps this mod already exists? I'm doing a vanilla run of the game at the moment, but would consider a mod like this in the future if the base game does not go in this direction.

Edited April 4 by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, DarkGold said:

It would be interesting if there was some way to remotely check the trader's info.

Luckily there's already at least two mods that let players do this. 

https://mods.vintagestory.at/tradernotes

https://mods.vintagestory.at/remotetradercheckmod

As for base game, it would be a nice QoL feature to have, but I'm not sure how it could be implemented while still feeling realistic. Fancy tech could work but the traders don't exactly seem to really have fancy tech. 

My general strategy for traders that are farther away is to only buy from those and not sell, or otherwise pack along items that I know they often buy, that I'm willing to sell. Sometimes I make sales and sometimes I don't. Profits I don't worry too much about, since I tend to get a lot of my gears from ruins or temporal storms. Treasure hunters are usually the ones I sell to the most, since they often buy things that are relatively easy to make, like backpacks and boots, that sell for a rather good price(a handful of gears each).

[DarkGold]

31 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Luckily there's already at least two mods that let players do this. 

https://mods.vintagestory.at/tradernotes

https://mods.vintagestory.at/remotetradercheckmod

Nice! I'll have to check them out when I finish my vanilla run and start adding mods.

32 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

pack along items that I know they often buy, that I'm willing to sell.

Same, I like to sell longbows and feathers, so keep some on my boat to sell.

33 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm not sure how it could be implemented while still feeling realistic. Fancy tech could work but the traders don't exactly seem to really have fancy tech.

It's the kind of thing I imagine the player might have to invest in to gain a benefit from. Make one fancy piece of tech you leave at your house, and another fancy piece of tech to give to individual traders who you'd like to keep tabs on. Or potentially do some quests for them to help them fix up/install something.

[DarkGold]

I've spent some time prioritizing trading, to save up enough gears for something I have seen becomes available to buy as you progress the story, and some fancy armor I'd like to buy. I haven't spent a lot of time fighting during storms, or delving underground yet (besides in well lit, mostly vertical mining tunnels after prospecting). I've just made it to my northern destination though, so my fortunes might be about to change...

Edited March 24 by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[DarkGold]

I completed chapter 1 recently. The story area was very engaging and I found it well balanced for solo play. I really appreciated some of the repairable loot; I absolutely took it back to base and made use of it later in the area. I am now working on getting steel (mostly to get sturdy leather) before I proceed with chapter 2.

My only 2 pain points were:

1. I found it quite tedious to travel back and forth many times to take what I looted from the story location back to my base (with 4 leather backpacks). I can only imagine this would be so much more tedious on a world where more than half my journey wasn't by ship.
2. When I arrived at the marked location and did not immediately see what my next steps were (dig? explore? how far?), after some fruitless exploration, I googled what I should be looking for. Once I knew what to look for, and in what range, it was straightforward, but without further information, I was quite lost.

[DarkGold]

Expecting some fighting, I did read a walkthrough before I proceeded very far through the story area. This was very helpful in uncovering secret areas and in knowing what gear I would need to bring to undertake the larger challenge.

I think, if I had gone in blind, I may have found the 1 way drop that likely results in more than 1 death to be frustrating, if I was under equipped. As it was, death was not a problem, as I could immediately respawn, take the 1 way drop, grab my items, repeat this loop comfortably. If I found that I did not have what I required after the drop to go further, it would have been frustrating to be unable to escape with what I was carrying and retreat.

[DarkGold]

When I used a temporal gear in the story location I was concerned that I did not get a message saying that it had worked. It looked like it had worked, but I was very worried that with no confirmation message it had not worked and my other spawn point was very far from there. Some message, in the typical location, confirming it worked and how many charges it has would be very reassuring.

[coolAlias]

4 hours ago, DarkGold said:

My only 2 pain points were:

1. I found it quite tedious to travel back and forth many times to take what I looted from the story location back to my base (with 4 leather backpacks). I can only imagine this would be so much more tedious on a world where more than half my journey wasn't by ship.

Mine was fully overland, so I noped right out and just teleported back and forth via console commands to bring the loot home. I don't have time or patience for that kind of tedium any more.

[DarkGold]

Now that I'm making steel...

I see I'm not the first person to wonder if it is possible to make charcoal in a coke oven...

Would be nice if it was possible!

[DarkGold]

I find the map system really useful. I'm sure there are mods out there that extend map icon options, but the default options we have cover most of my needs nicely. There are just a few things I mark on my map that I use the generic round or star icons for that it would be nice to have specific icons for:

• Flowers. Sometimes I want to know where that field of cornflowers or lupins I found was.
• Plants that aren't trees or grains or vegetables, like cattails (or brown sedge when I first ran into it). In my mind I see these using a generic leaf or fern shape.
• Reefs. I picture a coral or fish shaped icon for this.

If these extra icons were in the game, that would cover every scenario for me.

Edited April 4 by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[ifoz]

On 4/4/2026 at 7:59 PM, DarkGold said:

If these extra icons were in the game, that would cover every scenario for me.

I think a marker for where boats are would also be nice, maybe tie it to having an anchor equipped in the boat's front slot. This is already something you can do, the anchor just serves no current purpose.

I also think a marker for a ruined house would be nice, as the current "ruins" marker with the pillars is a bit skinny and hard to see sometimes on the map.

The trader wagon marker could also use an update in 1.22, since traders no longer live in wagons. I did hear they are working on doing that, though.