Why is spawn only at start spawn

[vintabius]

This is not a complaint.

I am not asking for ways to change my spawn point.

I know about temporal gears.

I want to understand the reasoning behind the decision. It does not make sense to me why you would put barriers behind spawning near where you died, when moving away from where you first spawned into the game to progress is a requirement, and it is especially easy to die when you're starting out. If I'm foraging in the bushes far away from where I spawned and a wolf kills me, I'm not walking for half an hour to get killed again where I died, I'm just deleting the world and starting over. It would make sense to me if you spawned within a radius of where you died, but a fixed spawn location with no early-game way of altering it even temporarily makes no sense to me.

Again, I know how this post might sound. I am not upset, I am not complaining and I am not asking for help. I'm trying to understand why this was designed this way. It's not because the game is in early access, since respawn point setting mechanics have been implemented, they're just inconvenient - which indicates to me that the devs want death to be a major frustration, at least early on. Why is that?

[Diff]

I think it's lore-related. Seraphs are immortal and are anchored to a specific point as part of their nature. You can alter that returning point with a temporal gear, but you are temporally anchored to your returning point and will always respawn there until you take action to alter it.

[Rainbow Fresh]

I don't know about lore implications and I can obviously not speak for the actual developer's reasoning, but I can try argue as to why it makes sense to me and why I do not agree with some points you brought up in order to try and reason as to why this mechanic might be how it is.

You mentioned the game's progression requiring going further out being a contradiction to the respawn model that heavily penalizes ever moving more than 1000 blocks from world spawn. I don't see that as a contradiction but rather the chosen attempt at being a challenge. Death should be penalized. Of course there should also be options to make the penalty weaker or remove it alltogether because not everybody likes to play the same level of challenge and not everyone might be capable of dealing with it - which there are in difficulty options and mods - but ultimately, by design, there needs to be some form of penalty to make a challenge. Give people infinite respawns anytime they sleep, turn on keepInventory and boom you have players happily running into a bear on purpose cause it gets them back home faster than walking 5000 blocks back. I know that, because it pisses me off everytime I have to allow this behavior on server I administrate.

So following this logic, death needs to be a challenging penalty, as most of the game's challenging elements revolve around... not dying. You start out near spawn, and slowly move your way outwards. As you progress you unlock new means of defense, of travel. You get the ability to set your spawn elsewhere, but only as long as you keep supplying it with temporal gears (or... don't die that often). Deliberately setting your spawn point is a choice of whethere it is worth investing that somewhat rare temporal gear or not. You could carry one around and set spawn when you get to a clearly dangerous location - but is it worth it? Is it worth risking to die elsewhere with your spawnpoint now set here until you return home and reset it? Are you better off marking the location down and coming back later when you are prepared for what lies inside? You also get better gear to survive bigger threats. You get more resources so that losing some of that gear when dying doesn't matter as much as if you run out in your first ever plate armor using up all your remaining ingots. It's a naturally scaling challenge that works the same no matter your phase of the game. It penalizes risky play and incentivises planning, carefulness and preparation. It introduces a passive linear progression system into an otherwise open world sandbox. So seeing that Vintage Story sells itself as an "uncompromising wilderness survival" experience, it makes sense that the default way to play means dying is bad, potentially really bad, and you should avoid it at all cost. Not try and kite a bear with a flint spear just for the fun of trying it and then dying and walking off like nothing happened.

1 hour ago, vintabius said:

If I'm foraging in the bushes far away from where I spawned and a wolf kills me, I'm not walking for half an hour to get killed again where I died, I'm just deleting the world and starting over.

Also, I feel like this is a bit of an overreaction. Why would you go and delete the entire world just because you died in the early game? At that point it doesn't sound like you lost much of anything to begin with as you didn't have anything yet. Making it less devestating and more of a learning experience. If course yes, wolves and bears are kinda jank and somewhat frustrating at times right now, but that isn't a fault of the death mechanic imo.

[LadyWYT]

First off, welcome to the forums and the game!

2 hours ago, Diff said:

I think it's lore-related. Seraphs are immortal and are anchored to a specific point as part of their nature. You can alter that returning point with a temporal gear, but you are temporally anchored to your returning point and will always respawn there until you take action to alter it.

Lore aside, it's probably as @Rainbow Fresh noted: a challenge for the player to overcome. By default, the player respawns within 50 blocks of the world spawn if they've not set their spawn point elsewhere; on Wilderness Survival though that radius increase to about 5000 blocks instead, meaning that an untimely death leaves the player essentially starting over from scratch. There's also the angle too, that if the player respawns where they died, then they can't get extra equipment from home or choose to retreat and do something else. There'd also be no incentive to reset one's spawn point elsewhere, or build the terminus teleporter to teleport back to the last point of death. It's not quite that death loses its bite entirely, but it would definitely lose some of the challenge and swap current complaints for different ones.

From a PvP standpoint, if players are just respawning where they died, then battles are likely always going to result in a stalemate, or somebody getting easily spawn-camped. Neither one is particularly fun.

[vintabius]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

I don't know if I agree that being relocated far away from your point of death is a good way to punish the player for dying, but the alternatives I can think of aren't much better anyway - aside from respawning in a radius around the location of your death instead of your world spawn, I think that would be a nice compromise.

I do like the lore justification, assuming that holds up to the devs' vision (and even if it doesn't, honestly, it's a cool idea).

[cjameshuff]

14 hours ago, vintabius said:

respawning in a radius around the location of your death instead of your world spawn

This means you're likely in an unexplored area of the world, in unknown terrain and far from any weapons and food you might want to grab before heading off to retrieve stuff from your body.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, cjameshuff said:

This means you're likely in an unexplored area of the world, in unknown terrain and far from any weapons and food you might want to grab before heading off to retrieve stuff from your body.

Or on the flipside...you respawn next to whatever killed you(or something just as dangerous), with no way to escape. While PvP would be the primary concern, I can think of a few places otherwise that I definitely would not want to get stuck.

[Rainbow Fresh]

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Or on the flipside...you respawn next to whatever killed you(or something just as dangerous), with no way to escape.

*PTSD flashbacks last time I accidentally opened the door during a temporal storm*

[Demoncyborg]

having a good consequence/punishment for death puts a higher value on items that would help with that, like temporal gears on their own, or as fuel for a late-game device that helps with this specific problem.

to me, the punishment of death is meant to make having a reasonable setup and back-on-your-feet ability feel better. you'll still be punished, but you will feel a lot smarter if you left a quick deathrun kit at home for the random chance a bear or 500 ft drop appears in front of you. the more you progress in the game, the more ready you are to face challenges like that.

I like this question though, asking fundamentally why there's a respawn point gets you thinking! for all we could possibly know, nothing said was considered at all and it's just because that's how other block games have done it. lol