too much grinding

[Fredrik Blomquist]

7 minutes ago, Hal13 said:

as you do stuff when awake i think you lose saturation a bit faster when awake, other than that sleeping gets rid of most of the dark parts of the night and you are rather safe from mobs while you sleep.

If stay in your base you don´t have to bother with enemies, you can do panning, metal smelting, cooking and crafing during the night. With fences you do your harvesting during the night aswell. And personally i think surface drifters are a minor problem. Sure, wolves are harder to spot at night and it´s harder to run, but if you are in wolf free zones or close to base there is no mayor problem. I haven´t really compared saturation, but the difference much be pretty small.

[Hal13]

48 minutes ago, Fredrik Blomquist said:

If stay in your base you don´t have to bother with enemies, you can do panning, metal smelting, cooking and crafing during the night. With fences you do your harvesting during the night aswell. And personally i think surface drifters are a minor problem. Sure, wolves are harder to spot at night and it´s harder to run, but if you are in wolf free zones or close to base there is no mayor problem. I haven´t really compared saturation, but the difference much be pretty small.

Sadly even if I stay in my base, several drifters (surface and deep ones) will spawn in the cellar where ich store food stuff. I can prevent most of that by skipping most of the night. No idea since when slaps and lights do not prevent mobspawns anymore.

[l33tmaan]

Drifters are really stupid, you can easily run past them most of the time. Heck, hit 'em a couple times and sometimes they run off on their own.

[Fredrik Blomquist]

I guess i could comment - i always considered myself fond of "grindy" games - to a certain limit, since many of the games i liked by many where considered grindy. That was until i found a pretty good review that analyzed what grindy actually means. After all, many games include pressing the "fire"-button 123.349 times to shoot down 12.983 enemy's to progress, but that is rarely considered "grindy". But if you have to press a button the same amount of time to for instance farm copper that is usually considered as grind. Now, if you find the game interesting, if the road towards getting capturing, you don't count the amount of times you have to press the button.

The reason i fell for Vintage story is the more realistic apporach to crafting that the game has taken. 1000 % realism is nothing anyone wants, but i think this is a sort of game that attracts people like me, and i think it would be stupid to move away from that path. I do find that certain moments in the game tends to get a little boring, but i think more things to explore in the world, more crafting options would help to overcome that, not less "grinding".

 

[l33tmaan]

"Grinding is the game" might sound derogatory, but it's true. If you can't have fun scrounging up just enough copper to make an anvil so you can smack pixels for 3 minutes just to make a pickaxe, then this is probably not going to be an enjoyable game for you. 
I am the kind of idiot who will happily sit in front of a wall chiseling it for 20 minutes just so it looks nice. For some reason, that is fun to me. Everything I do in this game has a sense of weight to it.

[Raelyn]

I also love more realistic games and I love simulator games. This however, we're close to 100 hours in combined on my server and we're still missing a lot of content because doing one thing, anything we choose to focus on takes a TON of time and energy and resources, that then we have to refocus on to replenish spent resources. 

We have a farm, we have some animals, chickens, pigs, we have a bee farm (which hasn't made it easier given how many cattails I need to just make a single skep) and we have a nice forge area and a windmill.

This morning I remembered you can make cheese and I felt like that might be a fun change of pace, till I looked up what that entails. Capturing bighorn sheep, which is a hassle to capture ANYTHING in this game because it has to either run from you or chase you, but to even find some, and then you have to do it twice so you can breed them and then you can milk the female if they have one. Keeping the animals fed has been a whole ordeal in itself and figuring out the farm in order to keep us and them fed through winter. Ugh. We'd love to build a sailboat but there is no body of water like an ocean around us to justify making one. Even a raft was useless.

Game has been out for 4 years? I do actually love it, I love what the creator is doing mostly. I even paid extra to support, but for 4 years kinda seems like a lack of content, tons of really intricate ways to do something sure, but besides ores, what am I caving for? It's far too dangerous. We found a teleporter and repaired it (lots of resources there since it was crazy far from home) and used it to find another one (same deal) and then again just to another cave. I kinda get it, but the rewards aren't enough for the grind we just put in, when we break a vase just to get some cabbage seeds.. yeah just feels like it needs more content, not more time wastey things. 

Edited April 27, 2025 by Raelyn

[Zane Mordien]

Wow, you dug up a 4yr old thread. They need to have an option that gives you choices on the type of world. Ie. Oceans vs default settings which give you one big landmass. I just started a world with the plan to build the boat. I hope I'm not disappointed to find out my world settings didn't generate any oceans and my boat is useless. I've never bothered with cheese for those reasons either. I've had the goats penned many times but just can't make myself make cheese. Maybe I should make that a goal of my current playthrough as well since god knows how many hours I have in this game and I've never had my dairy bar full. 

[Vykintas]

Dude wait till you get to iron age... This game is grindy yes, but 900 units of copper is not that bad if you marked all the copper deposits you found. I usually make only copper pick/hammer/prospecting pick and go straight to bronze because its more easy to manage and better tools.

 

[Dilan Rona]

This was a necrod topic unfortunately. From 2020. There really needs to be a time limit as to how old a topic can be before it is time locked. With new replies referencing the older topic instead.

[WinnieTaylor]

I started playing about 3 months ago and find this topic relevant. I have played over 300 hours both Standard and Homo sapiens.  I don't why I have spent some much time playing this game.  It's too complicated for my small brain.  It takes way too long to accomplish anything.  Nights and winter are too long.  Great game if you like to watch paint dry.

[Daev]

Personally I have yet to have any issues with "waiting through the night" between the intentional stuff I leave for the nights and the stuff I outright forget to achieve during the day.  Usually I just do whatever I have around base from actual tasks to just organizing and planning for the morning and that usually gets me through most of the night and then I just sleep until around 5 am and that's enough to get out and start doing.  I understand the desire for sure but I can't see it as being enough to ruin the experience, even for me being the kind who would rather explore and let survival tasks be more of a passive thing I fulfill as I explore.  Even  in my dirt hut without fencing or dirt walls the night is hardly an issue as long as my wits are about me (which isn't often enough) still I agree that having a game option similar to the one that lets you choose to sleep through Temporal storms or not for sleeping until dawn would be fine, but I definitely don't think the vision of the game should be compromised to "appeal to a wider audience and make it more accessible" and I think making it a requirement from the devs is a bit much.  I don't use commands hardly at all but I remember rightly you use commands to skip the nights easily enough.  I understand it can take you out of the immersion perhaps but it's hardly more work than making the bed and clicking on it.  Perhaps there is a mod for this?

[LoveWyrm]

I think a lot of the grind is awful cause it's unessarily interactive.

Game would benefit from 'mannable' (in quotes cause player race is not human) workstations.

Wayyyyy to many clicks required for wayyy to many things in this game. But the things the clicks are used for, I do not generally hate.

I just wish I didn't have to burn my tendons for em.

[Dilan Rona]

If it was easy, it would be like that other block game for kids. As for saving your tendons, give Knapster (https://mods.vintagestory.at/knapster) a try.

[LoveWyrm]

Grinding is pretty much just a time tax, and that doesn't have to be also be an input (muscle actuation) tax.

I'm fine with being time taxed but I would like a native option to have the computer do it for me, that's the job of it, to solve my problems, not the other way around lol.

So, I'd just like some automation, it can still take time, I'm not put off by less interactivity. I like movies for example, and I'm not too sad about not having to turn a crank to keep it playing for me.

Still plenty of gameplay left, too. The tactical decisions remain, you simply would be spared 150 clicks and mouse moves for doing a whole night of panning, for example.

Time remains the same, resource usage remains the same (including food clock) but no, to me, pointless input stuff.

 

Furthermore, it's not really a matter of easy vs difficult. Many people consider the vim text editor difficult, or at least complex. I still put in the hours learning it because it ultimately is one of more ergonomic text editors out there.

Often it is advertised for it's speed , even stating things like "text editing at the speed of thought" but to me, the speed is a side effect of it ergonomic prowess.

I use it because I can keep my fingers on the home row, I don't have to reach for the mouse, and the chording (modifier key + key) is minimal since text editing in vim is more or less completely separate from writing text with it, a whole different mode where all the keyboard keys are text editing 'hotkeys', where `dd' deletes a whole line, p pastes whatever is in the pastebuffer, and so forth.

 

And to go even beyond... there is this free software project called 'plover' which has brought the paradisical world of stenotyping to the everyman. There are no more excuses, due to its existance' to now teach stenotyping to every new child/student in this world. Cause while this project made stenotyping more accessible, keyboards for it are still somewhat pricey.

 

Were it mainstream tho.. man...even novices having like 100+ words per minute? That'd be sweet. But yeah that's a tangent. Point is tho, I'm an ergonomy guy, not a difficulty guy.

[HugoCortell]

On 5/13/2020 at 5:46 PM, Drakker said:

Actually, the fastest way to proceed would be to make a pickaxe and a hammer (both 100 units). Then go back to where you found the copper nuggets on the ground and dig down, you'll find a copper deposit, mine it all then break the ore into nuggets with the hammer and with luck you'll have more than enough for an anvil AND a saw. Then its on to the bronze age. There's nothing wrong with the game in my opinion, but there's a lot you currently need to figure out on your own, which takes time, especially in single player. Playing on a server with other players helps because they can answer all your questions and share resources with you.

Have ore vein sizes changed since you made this post? I've exhausted 4 entire underground veins and only just barely had enough for one pick, hammer, and anvil.

[Feycat]

You can still do things at night, that doesn't have to be wasted time. On Calm rift nights, you'll hardly see any drifters. Mining is pretty safe. Do your cooking. Do your forging. Do your chiseling. Do your clay forming. You're seriously going to waste time doing all those things for hours, do them at night!

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, HugoCortell said:

I've exhausted 4 entire underground veins and only just barely had enough for one pick, hammer, and anvil.

Surface ores? Yeah, that can happen. Very occasionally a cave will chop away all the ore, leaving you a small fraction of the ore body, but usually only surface deposits are that poor.

[HugoCortell]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Surface ores? Yeah, that can happen. Very occasionally a cave will chop away all the ore, leaving you a small fraction of the ore body, but usually only surface deposits are that poor.

Yes, surface ones I think they were (the ones right under nuggets on the ground). I considered going cave diving, but found that for the most part it's just a great way to get myself killed for little more than some quartz or bismuth. I never found any copper in caves.

Do you have any advice? I did try to use a prospecting pick, I admit that I don't understand it too well (triangulating stuff isn't something I'm too good at) but so far I've prospected about a quarter of the pick's durability and have yet to find any copper.

It feels rather stressful to be in a race against time to locate another vein before my pick breaks and I get sent right back to the stone age.

Edited May 10, 2025 by HugoCortell

[Thorfinn]

I rarely prospect for copper. Maybe once I'm iron, because it doesn't require as much charcoal as iron. Even on WS defaults, I find there's plenty of surface copper if I just run around enough.

[Maelstrom]

I hate surface copper as more often than not it's on the FIRST layer of rock and now I've got 3 or 4 layers of dirt to deal with to get that poor quality copper (which seems to be the majority of surface copper).  Given my recent experience with ultra-high copper, I'll go digging deep into the bowels of the earth for copper as soon as I have the equipment.

[NeutronCoffee]

I still am learning how to prospect, I will take that poor quality copper lol

[Maelstrom]

Early on I'll take poor over nothing, even if it's that top rock layer.  I just might not take very much of it.

[LoveWyrm]

2 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

I hate surface copper as more often than not it's on the FIRST layer of rock and now I've got 3 or 4 layers of dirt to deal with

Sooooo true.

I play with full cave ins and instability (and could just not do that) but I have developed the notion that this game would fall into a deep, morose illness if it were unable to cave in something around and/or onto me for what feels like 5 friggin seconds.

And that's under normal move around gameplay, being faced with a pit full of dirt you know is covering the copper is something that ...well, I tend to accept my fate eventually, make a few shovels and get to it.

But I still complain lol.

[Evoken]

Reading this old topic and i can't believe there was unskippable night and day lasting 14 irl hours

[HalfAxd]

13 hours ago, NeutronCoffee said:

I still am learning how to prospect, I will take that poor quality copper lol

This is an important piece of progression... once you have the two modes of the pick figured out it opens up the world of mining in a big way.

It was cornfusing for me at first but it's worth the effort to learn it and exploit the world for all it's giblets!  Rock and Stone!