Some small but required mods for Vintage Story:

[Chrondeath]

19 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Or for that matter, I don't really understand why some players keep playing VS despite begging for it to copy some other game's mechanics. Wouldn't they be happier playing the other game that was designed with X mechanics in mind?

Following from my stance of "there are behaviors that I like seeing incentivized and made meaningful"--Valheim and Vintage Story have a non-overlapping set of things that they do this well on, and I wish it was possible to combine some of their features.  Vintage Story is better on food and seasons and crafting, Valheim is better on roofing and smoke and transportation infrastructure (via weight), and it has better-than-nothing mechanics for fluff / comfort items.  I don't think it's weird to wish that there was more meaning than just aesthetics to replace my dirt hut's roof with thatch or to build a chimney.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

9 minutes ago, Chrondeath said:

smoke

Real Smoke mod is cool tho.

[Zane Mordien]

13 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

Try traveling 10k blocks to a warmer climate with standard settings and no bed-spawn mod.

I just give myself a temporal gear if I want to do this. Is it cheating.. yes, but sometimes why not.

 

I sort of hate the "must have' mod lists. I think you should try the game as intended and then adjust to what makes you happy. Starting off with mods just robs you of the fun of figuring out what works for you. 

7 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

I may have sleep the night through less than 2 dozen times.

I would say "me too!" but then I remember sometimes I sleep just to pass time through the winter or to get leather faster. I really hate looking at the barrel and it says 1.1 days out of 4.5 days. 

 

6 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Says who and by what framework? Some of the most beloved games are specifically beloved because death has fangs.

Dark Souls -- the whole identity of the franchise is built around death being your instructor. If you die, you did something wrong. Learn from it.

I think your right, this is the intent of the game. You are supposed to die and die and die, but darn it I hate dying in games... In my day dying in a game meant something!

 

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

I think your right, this is the intent of the game. You are supposed to die and die and die, but darn it I hate dying in games... In my day dying in a game meant something!

Not only that, but lowering the overall difficulty bar is somewhat patronizing as well, since it's basically telling players they either don't need to develop their skills/are incapable of developing their skills to be good at the game.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Just now, LadyWYT said:

Not only that, but lowering the overall difficulty bar is somewhat patronizing as well, since it's basically telling players they either don't need to develop their skills/are incapable of developing their skills to be good at the game.

I mean just go ahead an call me out *dies to a deer*

[runnybabbit]

On 6/5/2026 at 10:37 AM, Vexxvididu said:

in particular, fire arrows weren't really a thing in the middle ages

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Fire arrows very much were a thing in the Middle Ages,

To expand on this a bit, historical fire arrows were a lot more... "smolder-y" than modern movie pyrotechnics present. As MKMoose suggested they were mostly situational, and required lots of prep time so not the sort of thing a single hunter or archer would have much use for. They could be devastating weapons in seige and formation warfare however.

Tod Cutler had an excellent video exploring historical fire arrow recipes if you're interested https://youtu.be/EAAYhIJIOjg?si=qFYdVkrxKWN9JZXf

 

Edited June 6 by runnybabbit

[Maelstrom]

1 hour ago, Zane Mordien said:

I remember sometimes I sleep just to pass time through the winter or to get leather faster. I really hate looking at the barrel and it says 1.1 days out of 4.5 days. 

You just need to figure out more chores to do.  Bored during the winter?  Go caving, smith up a bunch of ingots and tools.  I think most of my sleeps were in my first long term world when I'd go on a long journey I'd sleep during the night; but that was when drifters spawned every night before the rifts appeared.

 

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I mean just go ahead an call me out *dies to a deer*

Hmmmm...  Sounds like a story for a certain thread I shamelessly plug.  *whistles innocently*

[MKMoose]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I disagree here, because there are a lot of designs that get labeled as "good" or "bad" due to the individual preference, and that goes for games in general, not just Vintage Story. If someone really hates a particular feature and doesn't find it fun, you're probably not going to convince them it's a good design, because to them, it's not. 

I think it's also worth noting that a lot of older games have "bad" designs when it comes to their mechanics; things are inconvenient, clunky, confusing, too complicated...the list goes on and on. Many newer games tend to prioritize player convenience. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, exactly, but it seems to me that older games tend to hold up better over time and attract new players, while newer games tend to fall to the wayside and get forgotten. 

The existence or partial subjectivity of bad mechanics does not in any way make justifying them with lore any more reasonable, so I don't really know what you're supposedly disagreeing with. Keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about the fact that lore still tends to be used as a justification for mechanics and sometimes seen as immutable even when there are few if any gameplay-centered arguments for the mechanics, as is the case for several components of temporal stability, respawn mechanics and animal hostility in Vintage Story.

Also, attempting to paint old games as holding up better over time and newer games tending to fall to the wayside seems like it conveniently ignores the swathes of old games which you've never heard of and the plentiful relatively new games which are highly popular and beloved, as well as the trends in the quantity of games released over time and the incentives behind those games. One of the biggest reasons why older games can seem like they hold up well is that the games which hold up well, regardless of how old they are, are also the ones you're incomparably more likely to now be familiar with.

 

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Or just...turn on keepinventory and don't worry about losing stuff?

Keeping inventory on death is helpful for casual players and for the sake of accessibility, but it does little to address frustration with the respawn mechanics themselves. It just reduces one of the consequences of death to the point of irrelevance.

 

14 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

> Heavy frustrators are the first priority for developers to address.

Says how and by what framework? Some of the most beloved games are specifically beloved because death has fangs.

Dark Souls -- the whole identity of the franchise is built around death being your instructor. If you die, you did something wrong. Learn from it.
Any number of roguelikes -- Hades, Dead Cells, Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress on hardcore mode -- Dying means losing a run you've invested HOURS into and that's the point.
Minecraft (believe it or not) before the death system was reworked -- death used to mean game over. Now it's been revamped into it's own hardcore permadeath game mode.
Rust -- Death means you lose ALL your items. Strip that out and you have a walking simulator with base building. Nobody wants to play that.

The holding pattern is that a meaningful and somewhat punishing death gives weight to failures, instead of brushing them off like they're not a big deal. If anything the death mechanics of VS are somewhat lenient compared the games I mentioned since you at least get to keep your clothing and get a handy map marker showing you where you died.

The reason I'm using the term "heavy frustrators" is because I specifically mean heavy frustrators, believe it or not. Some frustration is expected and natural, and acting like removing all possible frustration would lead to a better game would be absurd. What is a priority to address in game design is features or mechanics that frustrate players frequently and cannot be easily addressed by the player themselves in a satisfactory way to an extent that the player is at risk of putting the game away. The only things which keep the current respawn mechanics in VS from generating an onslaught of complaints are the option to keep inventory on death and the ability to use commands, but neither represents an proper solution to frustration with the respawn mechanics - they circumvent or neuter death mechanics instead, which only indirectly makes respawn mechanics less frustrating.

Regarding the game examples:

• Death in roguelikes and especially roguelites is a completely expected part of the process and is not a significant frustrator by any stretch of the imagination. Especially not in some of the best-designed ones like Hades, where death is largely reframed as a means to progress.
• Barring long runbacks, which are a common frustrator, soulslikes are very similar to roguelites in this regard. Even in games like Dark Souls, the most you'll generally lose on death besides time is souls or equivalent currency, which you shouldn't have much of on yourself either way. Runbacks, in moderation, can also be easily argued to be beneficial as a way to create spacing between fights, but even in the worst cases, a long runback is generally a frustrator by itself, not the death that leads to it. In some games, there's also the matter of recovering healing items, which is a similar kind of frustrator to item recovery in VS. VS is much worse in this regard overall, because you risk losing everything you had on yourself and you have to make the way back with spare equipment or nothing at all. And if you respawn far away from the point of death because you didn't decide to use a temporal gear in the middle of nowhere just in case you might die specifically on this trip, then the runback is a grueling chore more than any sort of breather, challenge or learning opportunity.
• Hardcore games or modes are something that the player very much signs up for fully aware of the consequences of death, and in fact you can do so in VS as well, so trying to compare hardcore games to base-game VS seems rather silly. Either way, any frustration in this case is far more likely to be focused on the mechanics or other players that caused the death, and there are fundamentally no respawn mechanics, so the comparison is doubly irrelevant.

You're pointing to how death punishment in all of these games is fine, but you're seemingly failing to realize that they are actually drastically different games where different design decisions make death in most cases much less frustrating than death in a far-away location in VS.

 

14 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

> A penalty that significantly exceeds the bounds of the challenge is an excessive penalty.

False, with exception. The whole structure of a true survival game (pick any) is that death is supposed to be a setback. Expecting a neutral outcome from the event will only lead to frustration. If you can always return to your corpse and come out roughly even, then death has no weight and neither does the tension that makes exploration worth anything. You never know what might be around that corner, be it a bear, a sawblade locust, or worse.

I love how you claim that what I said is false yet provide no explaination for why that is. Besides that, the fact that survival itself is an overarching challenge in survival games does not mean that any and all death punishment that affects prior player progress is free game.

Expecting a roughly neutral outcome is exactly what the game conditions in the player by allowing to easily retrieve items on death, and the frustrating part is the process of getting back to those items or the consequences of those rare cases where you don't manage to do so in time. In the majority of cases, all items can be retrieved trivially, and it's just tedious and annoying if the way back is long, so death already has little weight and exploration has little tension compared to many classic survival games - The Long Dark, The Forest, Project Zomboid, Don't Starve, and so on. I don't know that most classifications would even consider VS to be a "true" survival game, though that also depends on whatever that term is supposed to mean in the first place, because it's more often used as a means of gatekeeping with no consistent definition.

What exceeds the scope of the challenge in VS is not the death mechanics. It's the unnecessarily restrictive respawn mechanics which don't even do anything to make the game more challenging and tend to just be tedious, and the random loss of items which tends to just feel unfair and arbitrary when it eventually happens.

Here's a fun idea to consider for you: respawn mechanics in Wilderness Survival are less frustrating than on Standard settings. Why? Because Wilderness Survival presents a different set of risks and consequences evaluated in a different context based on a different set of expectations. Death in Wilderness Survival is more punishing and respawn mechanics more random and more restrictive, but they are a better fit for the playstyle.

 

14 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The lore point instead carries the majority of the weight in this thread. Temporal gears are not just flavor text slapped on a mechanical band-aid over a broken respawning system. They actually represent the temporal energy that allows the seraphs to even exist. By shattering a gear and giving that energy a place to focus, you redirect the temporal flow to the place where you want to respawn, for a while. It's not lore being used to justify a bad decision but rather a decision made on the basis of the already established lore.

You wouldn't even be aware of this "already established lore" if the mechanic didn't exist, and there is no internally consistent system or pattern which can be extended to respawning. There is nothing that we know of in the lore which forces respawn mechanics to be implemented in this very specific way or prevents alternative mechanics from being implemented. You're exactly demonstrating an even worse example of justifying a mechanic with lore - a circular justification.

Edited June 6 by MKMoose
Minor clarifications.

[Jubal]

I think I hold the position that the current spawn mechanic is a reasonable/correct default, but I do not in any way see why bed spawn shouldn't be available as an alternative settings option in the same way that Keep Items On Death is. Having less frustrating ways for some people to play the game is good, and VS is a game with so many interlocking systems that it's pretty reasonable for a player to want to do a run where they want to play the game in a way that focuses on some of those bits and not others. And for the people who don't like it, they can just leave it on default and not check the box, and it doesn't harm their experience at all.

[Diff]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

You wouldn't even be aware of this "already established lore" if the mechanic didn't exist, and there is no internally consistent system or pattern which can be extended to respawning. There is nothing that we know of in the lore which forces respawn mechanics to be implemented in this very specific way or prevents alternative mechanics from being implemented. You're exactly demonstrating an even worse example of justifying a mechanic with lore - a circular justification.

Nah, this lore is established in other ways in the discoverable bits of lore you dig up. Seraphs are immortal because they are anchored to a point in time and space. The temporal gear lets you exercise some influence over that returning point. But the returning point and the seraphs' immortality are the reason seraphs exist at all. The logic isn't circular, it's closed. No loose ends. Can it be changed? Sure. But offer another closed alternative. What logic is there to taking a nap altering a point in time?

[CastIronFabric]

I want to try and circle everyone back to the main topic not for a random reason but because I think people are having a debate over the assumption that a game mechanics in question would not be optional.

The game currently contains over 100 settings a person can change. Now I do not know what the OP means specifically by 'official mods' but I assume it basically means a setting one can change. So arguments about 'how the game is indented to be played' when said game has an entire mode called 'Explore mode' I think is missing the plot.

If 'only as the game is intended to be played' is sacred then why does the developer who created the game also create a setting that turns off temporal storms completely? again, this can turn into a circular logic. 'what the developer sets is sacred' 'ok , well the developer created a setting to turn of temporal storms.'

The debate over 'should a game not have options' is a compelling debate but I think that misses the plot of this thread specifically.

Edited June 6 by CastIronFabric

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, Diff said:

Nah, this lore is established in other ways in the discoverable bits of lore you dig up.

This supposed lore is entirely nonexistent as far as I can find, and it's especially not found anywhere in ruins or through panning, as that lore is predminantly focused on the events from hundreds of years ago and has no mention of seraphs. Specifically the words "energy" and "flow" return zero relevant hits in lang files, so they are at best an interpretation of the mechanics, and at worst just made-up nonsense. If you want to be so confident about it, then point to where exactly it can be found.

The closest I've seen is the conversation at the end of Chapter 2 talking about how the player got back into this world, and the in-game error message mentioning a "temporal anomaly", but neither provides information on how the player can return each time, just how they got here initially. The only piece of information we have on the location where the player returns to the world are the temporal gear description [1] and the respawn message [2]:

Quote

[1] "Can be shattered to create a 'returning point'. [...]"

[2] "You have re-emerged at your returning point."

which only mention the existence thereof and do not in any way describe the underlying mechanism.

 

Unless you somehow dig up lore that I can't find on the official website and in the game files, we land exactly where we were: there is nothing that we know of in the lore which forces respawn mechanics to be implemented in this very specific way or prevents alternative mechanics from being implemented. Changes to mechanics within a reasonable capacity wouldn't even require the slightest modification to any lore, because the lore provides practically no constraints. The explanations which are provided for the current state of the mechanics are notoriusly just an interpretation of the mechanics which doesn't reference any lore external to the mechanics.

Edited June 6 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

Unless you somehow dig up lore that I can't find on the official website and in the game files, we land exactly where we were: there is nothing that we know of in the lore which forces respawn mechanics to be implemented in this very specific way or prevents alternative mechanics from being implemented. Changes to mechanics within a reasonable capacity wouldn't even require the slightest modification to any lore, because the lore provides practically no constraints. The explanations which are provided for the current state of the mechanics are notoriusly just an interpretation of the mechanics which doesn't reference any lore external to the mechanics.

Or maybe the devs wanted respawn mechanics to be harder, and then built the lore around that so the concept would actually fit into the world rather than just be something that's an obvious videogame thing? In which case, the devs are gonna need to change the lore if they change that mechanic. Like @Diff said, being anchored to a fixed point in time and returning to that point is not the same thing as just touching a bed and magically tying oneself to that point.

 

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Expecting a roughly neutral outcome is exactly what the game conditions in the player by allowing to easily retrieve items on death, and the frustrating part is the process of getting back to those items or the consequences of those rare cases where you don't manage to do so in time. In the majority of cases, all items can be retrieved trivially, and it's just tedious and annoying if the way back is long, so death already has little weight and exploration has little tension compared to many classic survival games - The Long Dark, The Forest, Project Zomboid, Don't Starve, and so on. I don't know that most classifications would even consider VS to be a "true" survival game, though that also depends on whatever that term is supposed to mean in the first place, because it's more often used as a means of gatekeeping with no consistent definition.

From the home page itself: 

Quote

Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game inspired by eldritch horror themes.

Yes, that phrase has turned somewhat into a meme, and what constitutes a proper survival game will depend on who you ask. But I think it's fair to say that the devs are building their specific vision of what a survival game should be. 

I also think it's fair to say that death absolutely has weight in the game--why else are some players complaining about not being able to play according to Minecraft spawn rules? The player can't just cut some grass and slap a spawn down anywhere, which means that if they play carelessly or plan poorly they can end up losing their stuff or needing to backtrack. Some of that harshness can be mitigated by turning on "keep inventory", sure, but the player will still need to manage their gears and play somewhat carefully if they don't want to potentially lose a bunch of progress. That might be as simple as not poking the bears, or remembering to bring temporal gears along for story locations.

In contrast, death doesn't mean much in Minecraft. You can turn on "keep inventory" and lose nothing on death, and plunk down a bed most anywhere. That's not really a problem since Minecraft is supposed to be an easier game with relatively low stakes, but that's also why some of us have moved on from Minecraft and picked up Vintage Story instead. VS is more challenging, and personally I don't want to see it go the Minecraft route, where everything ends up watered down for the sake of player convenience.

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

You're pointing to how death punishment in all of these games is fine, but you're seemingly failing to realize that they are actually drastically different games where different design decisions make death in most cases much less frustrating than death in a far-away location in VS.

If we're going to say those older game examples don't count in this argument because they're different game designs, and thus shouldn't be considered in the context of Vintage Story, then it doesn't seem fair to turn around and argue that bed spawn mechanics are a good thing to add to Vintage Story because those mechanics work in games that are very different from Vintage Story.

Ultimately, I don't think we're going to agree on what make for good game design in Vintage Story. There was probably also a time I would have agreed with you that adding bed spawning wouldn't really be an issue. But I've seen what's happened to other games that made similar convenience decisions...once that needle starts moving, so to speak, the game in question can easily become a shadow of its former self and lose the qualities that made it great in the first place.

[CastIronFabric]

On 6/4/2026 at 5:55 PM, TεʞoшiИ said:

Hi, I was thinking that some of my ideas for official mods would be fantastic:

1- Crawling.

2- Fire arrows: one that functions as a torch for a short time and another that starts fires.

3- Keys for doors and chests, so certain people can access other people's properties.

4- Carriages.

5- Monocle.

6- Schedule with the date and time of online worlds.

7- Bone tools (like spears or fishhooks, for example).

8- Lasso and grappling hook for climbing.

 

Edit:

*5- I got confused because in Spanish it's pronounced like "Monocle", I meant telescope or spyglass.

*2- Also, the arrow that starts the fire could have the flame at the tip, while the one that serves as a torch has it at the tail...

To clarify many side tangent conversations that have been taking place here, what specifically do you mean by 'offical mods'. Do you mean a literally a mod that comes in the game by default, or 'modification' to the game that would at most just have a settings that one can optional disable?

[Diff]

 

9 hours ago, MKMoose said:

This supposed lore is entirely nonexistent as far as I can find, and it's especially not found anywhere in ruins or through panning, as that lore is predminantly focused on the events from hundreds of years ago and has no mention of seraphs. Specifically the words "energy" and "flow" return zero relevant hits in lang files, so they are at best an interpretation of the mechanics, and at worst just made-up nonsense. If you want to be so confident about it, then point to where exactly it can be found.

The closest I've seen is the conversation at the end of Chapter 2 talking about how the player got back into this world, and the in-game error message mentioning a "temporal anomaly", but neither provides information on how the player can return each time, just how they got here initially. The only piece of information we have on the location where the player returns to the world are the temporal gear description [1] and the respawn message [2]:

Has very little to do with the specific words "energy" or "flow" so that's not so surprising, but you did find the end of Chapter 2. That's (mostly) what I'm referring to. There are a few scraps of lore before the main story though.

Spoiler

The seraphim are the reincarnations of the people who escaped underground to try and escape the Rot. Player/Seraphim classes align with the classes of those people. One of the tapestries, Seraphim, mention this explicitly. "12. Seraphim To think we would have a chance to fight again. I do not know why we are returned to this world, but I am grateful."

The traders mention the recent arrivals. "Your kind have been popping up like daisies across the land. Dunno where you're from. Dunno what you're doing here. None of you seem keen to talk about it."

Even without getting any further, I feel like this is enough to work with. With temporal gears and their mechanics and flavor, there are enough dots to connect.

Getting into the Jonas/Tobias specifics, according to Tobias, many of those closest to Jonas's great machine were kicked "beyond time, beyond this world" when Jonas activated it and purged the rot from the world. Skipping a few in-between steps, the Devastation was the result of Tobias punching a hole in the world and anchoring the seraphs back into it.

And beyond temporal gears allowing you to temporarily move your returning point, there is one other game mechanic that interacts with them. The base return teleporter teleports you to your returning point. That makes little sense without there actually being something physically distinctive about that location. When they die, seraphs always return to the point they first re-entered the world. You can re/write lore to make that make sense some other way. I'm still eager to hear any alternative lore ideas you have for sleep being tied to respawning. And of course it can always be a convenience/configurable option. But the current mechanic makes internal sense and ties nicely to the lore.

Edited June 7 by Diff
typo

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Diff said:

You can re/write lore to make that make sense some other way. I'm still eager to hear any alternative lore ideas you have for sleep being tied to respawning. And of course it can always be a convenience/configurable option. But the current mechanic makes internal sense and ties nicely to the lore.

Not only that, but I mean...if the devs decided they really wanted to add the feature, they don't need to rewrite the lore or rely on beds to do it. All they'd need to do is give the player the option to start the game with a temporal gear in their inventory; the option can be turned off by default, and the player themselves can set the respawns temporal gears allow to infinite. That gives players the option to set spawn at their base easily(which I assume is why some players are requesting the feature to begin with), while still requiring the player to put some thought into how they play and when they choose to change their spawn, since it will cost them something.

Edit: Also worth a mention--the devs have already accounted for making lost item retrieval easier in the form of the Terminus Teleporter. The entire point of that machine is to teleport the player to their last point of death, for the cost of one temporal gear. Building one means that resetting one's spawn point is no longer necessary, but the player will need to put in some work to get that kind of luxury.

Edited June 7 by LadyWYT

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, Diff said:

Has very little to do with the specific words "energy" or "flow" so that's not so surprising, but you did find the end of Chapter 2. That's (mostly) what I'm referring to. There are a few scraps of lore before the main story though.

[...]

And beyond temporal gears allowing you to temporarily move your returning point, there is one other game mechanic that interacts with them. The base return teleporter teleports you to your returning point. That makes little sense without there actually being something physically distinctive about that location. When they die, seraphs always return to the point they first re-entered the world. You can re/write lore to make that make sense some other way.

How you do not see that as exactly proving my point is beyond my understanding.

The only lore you can find on the current respawning mechanics is the mention of a returning point temporal gear's and base return teleporter's descriptions, and the respawn text. Everything else you've mentioned is generally irrelevant, because it only describes that the seraph can't seem to die or at best mentions how they initially got into this world, not actually explains anything about the respawning mechanics. Any attempt at justifying the current state of respawning mechanics through lore inevitably relies on the scraps of information drawn directly from the items which allow to interact with the returning point in the first place and from interpretation of the current mechanics - ergo, circular justification.

 

20 hours ago, Diff said:

What logic is there to taking a nap altering a point in time?

If you want to talk logic, then rather than ask me to justify a random idea that I've never even argued for, how about you explain how it makes any logical sense that the player is always returned to an arbitrary area placed kilometers away from the place where they can be logically deduced from the lore to have first entered the world (or a single, manually set point which cannot be reasonably presumed to be the only such point in the world and yet is somehow matched to the player) even if they die hundreds of kilometers away from that location?

 

9 hours ago, Diff said:

I'm still eager to hear any alternative lore ideas you have for sleep being tied to respawning. And of course it can always be a convenience/configurable option.

Sleep being tied to respawning can be explained easily by just saying "the returning point is tied to the last location that the player has slept in". There are no further details necessary, just like the current temporal gear doesn't explain absolutely anything beyond "can be shattered to create a returning point". Though you could think up a range of metabolic changes, memory imprinting, or other ideas equally made-up as all the interpretations of what the returning point is.

Other alternatives include tying respawning to the location of death, to the general area that the player spent time in shortly before death (sleeping would be naturally integrated with it by registering the entire time that the player has slept in a single location, giving it significantly more weight), and to any number of items and blocks which could be carried, placed down or activated to move the returning point. Some kind of temporal anchors could be placed in some ruins, which could pull the player away from the returning point, helping new players with discoverability by directly putting them where they can find the materials to create their own anchor or any other Jonas tech or improvised devices, and potentially serving as a lore hook. Coming up with ideas is the easiest part in game design.

Edited June 7 by MKMoose

[MKMoose]

18 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game inspired by eldritch horror themes.

And yet its respawn mechanics are extremely similar to Minecraft, with the only really meaningful difference being temporal gears instead of beds. In some sense, it is even more forgiving than Minecraft because it keeps clothing and armor on the player, and it is incomparably less "uncompromising" than many classic survival games which implement permadeath mechanics.

 

18 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I also think it's fair to say that death absolutely has weight in the game--why else are some players complaining about not being able to play according to Minecraft spawn rules?

Why are you so fixated on Minecraft and beds?

Besides that, I've literally been explaining why some people dislike VS respawning mechanics this whole time. The original point of this discussion which gets constantly sidetracked is that respawning in VS is more frustrating than it needs to be. It has borderline nothing to do with death having weight or being punishing in isolation.

 

18 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

If we're going to say those older game examples don't count in this argument because they're different game designs, and thus shouldn't be considered in the context of Vintage Story, then it doesn't seem fair to turn around and argue that bed spawn mechanics are a good thing to add to Vintage Story because those mechanics work in games that are very different from Vintage Story.

This is the opposite of what I said. The games I've mentioned there (roguelites most notably) implement mechanics which make death significantly less frustrating, so it stands to reason that VS could take a page out of their book. Naturally, since they're different games, their solutions may not be entirely fitting for VS - ideas revolving around permadeath especially shouldn't be integrated into the standard world configuration - but there is nonetheless plenty of methods that can be found across many different games which aim to make death less frustrating.

 

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

All they'd need to do is give the player the option to start the game with a temporal gear in their inventory; the option can be turned off by default, and the player themselves can set the respawns temporal gears allow to infinite. That gives players the option to set spawn at their base easily(which I assume is why some players are requesting the feature to begin with) [...]

I applaud the observation. Being unable to secure a spawn in a home that isn't immediately on top of the spawn location in the early game is one of the main sources of frustration with the mechanics. Do keep in mind, though, that when you set up the expectation that the player can run off and set their spawn wherever they want, it's gonna be even more frustrating if the player happens to die before they decide on a suitable location.

 

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Edit: Also worth a mention--the devs have already accounted for making lost item retrieval easier in the form of the Terminus Teleporter. The entire point of that machine is to teleport the player to their last point of death, for the cost of one temporal gear. Building one means that resetting one's spawn point is no longer necessary, but the player will need to put in some work to get that kind of luxury.

Frankly, I've always thought that it's a wholly inadequate solution to a problem which shouldn't exist in the first place. The devs knew that the current design of the respawning mechanics can be frustrating and the ability to return to the point of death quickly can be very valuable, so they added... an expensive endgame device which a large portion of the playerbase is never gonna build. Seriously? That could be likened to recognizing the early-game food struggle and deciding to add some exotic endgame method for more efficient farming. It can be a fairly satisfying endgame reward, but in the extreme, if frustration compounds into the player quitting the game, then it doesn't matter what the endgame has in store. I've personally never even crafted the terminus teleporter because in every single world I've wanted to do so I've either spent the Jonas parts elsewhere (night vision mask or rift ward, before I've realized that they are largely useless) or just could never find one or two specific parts. The terminus teleporter solves almost nothing and should not be used as an argument against changes to respawning.

Edited June 7 by MKMoose
Minor clarifications.

[Diff]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Everything else you've mentioned is generally irrelevant

Only if you can't see the relationship between clearly parallel events. What you are failing to see throughout all of this is the internal mechanisms of the in-game universe. Again, alternative explanations are possible, but:

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Sleep being tied to respawning can be explained easily by just saying "the returning point is tied to the last location that the player has slept in".

This sure ain't it. This isn't an explanation. There's no in-universe mechanism for this. It does not engage with the themes of the game. The returning point is the point where the seraph returned to the world. That all ties together nicely. Internal universal consistency is not circular. Nothing here is sacred or unchangeable. And it's not like the game doesn't have holes in its universal mechanics. Just keep from ripping open any new holes in the universe.

Separate objects could work fine. Anchors found in ruins sound workable in terms of in-universe mechanics, although the mechanics around discovery like you describe sounds dreadful from a gameplay perspective. And on lore, what are anchors capable of holding a seraph doing in ruins from a time before seraphs? That has a fix, but what is it? All Jonas tech is far too end-game to be useful and IMO don't address the fundamental differences of seraphs. Temporal gears have the same weirdness seraphs do. That's aesthetically nice. Respawning in-game and respawning in-universe rhyme. Having the same explanation is aesthetically nice. It makes a world feel more cohesive and real.

I can't speak for others but when I point out lore it's rarely because I'm clutching my eldritch game bible and preaching. I'm pointing out elements that depend on or support whatever it is we're talking about. If that element updates, its dependencies should update as well. And it shouldn't be done by reducing the number of links. Or, again, toss it in as a non-default worldconfig and forget about it. Only the defaults need to worry about lore at all.

Edited June 7 by Diff
Rephrased a mess of a sentence

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, Diff said:

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Sleep being tied to respawning can be explained easily by just saying "the returning point is tied to the last location that the player has slept in".

This sure ain't it. This isn't an explanation. There's no in-universe mechanism for this.

And how is "can be shattered to create a returning point" any better? It doesn't clarify the mechanism in any way. There is no lore offering any explanation for how it might work other than a vague pointer in the direction of the temporal mechanics. You're constantly circling around seraph immortality and returning to the world, broad themes of the game, but failing to provide any explanation for how setting a respawn point actually works, because there is no explanation beyond that broad theming.

I'm well familiar with the themes of the game and the background of seraphs, and my point has not been anything other than that there is no lore which forces any specific design for how respawning should work in gameplay, and especially there is no lore explaining how setting the respawn location via temporal gears works.

On 6/6/2026 at 2:10 PM, Diff said:

Seraphs are immortal because they are anchored to a point in time and space.

How can you say this without seeing the circularity when the only way you can know that they are "anchored to a point" is that the respawn mechanic throws you back to the initial spawn location or to the one you manually set? If the respawn mechanic was different (e.g. centered around the point of death or more elaborate variants I've described), then the lore inferred from that mechanic could be different, but no lore would require any changes whatsoever to retain its internal consistency.

And actually, for all we know, it could as well be that it's the exact opposite of what you've said - the conversation at the end of Chapter 2 mentions that seraphs are likely not tied to time and space the way humans are, which can be easily argued to conflict with the current respawning mechanics:

Spoiler

Seraph - "I could slip through to the past and see the Tower as it used to be."
Tobias - "That is... simply unbelievable! And yet, I can see you are not lying. Incredible."
Tobias - "It makes a strange kind of sense, though. If my theory holds true, and given your presence here I believe it does, you and the others were lost beyond our world. Perhaps your time, or lack thereof, spent there has conditioned your body to more easily ignore that which holds the rest of us in place."

 

2 hours ago, Diff said:

And on lore, what are anchors capable of holding a seraph doing in ruins from a time before seraphs?

I'm gonna answer this with another quote of yours, originally on the base return teleporter:

15 hours ago, Diff said:

That makes little sense without there actually being something physically distinctive about that location.

Why is the respawn location not affected by temporal stability, temporal anomalies (i.e. the lore locations, especially Chapter 2), rifts, rift wards, or anything else that interacts with the temporal themes, but then completely determined by the seraph just... breaking a temporal gear? Is everything else not somehow distinctive in the temporal flavor? Sure, it works as a way of adding a gameplay function, but it weakens the lore, not strengthens it, when a feature is added in a way that operates purely within its own bubble and doesn't interact with things that it clearly relates to in theming. Frankly, there is nothing that I would like to see in the temporal mechanics more than large-scale integration with the game in a way that is based on a number of core rules applied systemically.

 

2 hours ago, Diff said:

I can't speak for others but when I point out lore it's rarely because I'm clutching my eldritch game bible and preaching.

My original point on that topic was admittedly somewhat overstated. The intent of it was primarily to point towards the idea that (more broadly, not just in the case of Vintage Story's respawn mechanics specifically) if there is little to no explanation for why a mechanic is good besides that it is related to the lore, then it doesn't seem to me that the lore alone is a sufficient reason to avoid changing that mechanic.

Edited June 7 by MKMoose
Phrasing.

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Why are you so fixated on Minecraft and beds?

Besides that, I've literally been explaining why some people dislike VS respawning mechanics this whole time. The original point of this discussion which gets constantly sidetracked is that respawning in VS is more frustrating than it needs to be. It has borderline nothing to do with death having weight or being punishing in isolation.

Probably because VS gets compared to Minecraft a lot, for understandable reasons, and many of the players who seem to request the bed spawn feature also seem to prefer Minecraft's design choice. That is, an easier game, that doesn't really push the player to improve their skills to be good at the game. There's nothing wrong with wanting a game like that, but that kind of game isn't really Vintage Story. VS does make a few concessions, but the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone, nor should it. The more concessions that are made, the more the door is opened for more concessions in the future, and it gets harder to say no each time.

I'm also not a fan of the argument "But it's JUST an option! It doesn't affect you!", because I've seen that argument made before. And the thing is...changes like that do affect me, at least in the long term, because piling up enough of them can shift the entire design direction of a game, to the point it stops being interesting because there's not much left of what made it interesting to begin with.

44 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Sure, it works as a way of adding a gameplay function, but it weakens the lore, not strengthens it, when a feature is added in a way that operates purely within its own bubble and doesn't interact with things that it clearly relates to in theming.

This is also why I don't like the excuse of "Just change the lore and say seraphs can sleep in a bed to tie themselves to that point somehow, it's easy!" A temporal gear makes sense, because while the process isn't spelled out directly, it's pretty clear that seraphs and temporal gears both exhibit unusual properties when it comes to time and space. Likewise, bleeding on an esoteric object to take advantage of its power isn't exactly a novel concept either, and combining blood that's not exactly normal with a gear that's not exactly normal explains just enough for the player to make the reasonable assumption that there's some kind of alchemical catalyst happening to produce the effect. On paper, it's just a typical videogame spawn. The devs didn't have to give it a neat little lore tie-in, but they did, and it's not entirely unheard of for game developers to do this either. Kingdom Come: Deliverance has savior schnapps, Spyro has fairies, etc.

The problem with bed spawns is...it's the same thing as Minecraft, which means that if it was added to Vintage Story, then it gets harder to justify VS as its own thing and not just a Minecraft clone. Other games use bed spawn rules as well, so while the idea does work, it's not anything fresh and therefore not a decision that's going to help Vintage Story stand out from other competition. Beds are also a mundane object, so it's a little hard to justify from a lore standpoint as to the how/why a seraph's return point would change just because they slept in a bed. It also opens up the question of...what counts as a bed, and what doesn't, because realistically, a seraph could take a nap most anywhere, so if it's just the act of sleeping/lying down then it shouldn't require a bed. A temporal gear, at least, a seraph can reasonably use anywhere, because it's small enough to believably carry on one's person, and the action to activate it can be performed pretty much anywhere as long as the seraph has access to a knife.

[CastIronFabric]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

 

The problem with bed spawns is...it's the same thing as Minecraft, which means that if it was added to Vintage Story, then it gets harder to justify VS as its own thing and not just a Minecraft clone.

please...explain more in depth on that.

[MKMoose]

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

This is also why I don't like the excuse of "Just change the lore and say seraphs can sleep in a bed to tie themselves to that point somehow, it's easy!"

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The problem with bed spawns is...it's the same thing as Minecraft, which means that if it was added to Vintage Story, then it gets harder to justify VS as its own thing and not just a Minecraft clone.

See, that's what I'm saying. You're talking about Minecraft and beds again. I'm aware of the community sentiment around beds and I largely share that sentiment, which is why I've never suggested it.

But, there's plenty of ideas which don't rely on arbitrarily setting the spawn point when sleeping, some of which have seen reasonable support from the community:

• a respawn anchor, effigy or something of the sort, which would work pretty much just like the current gears but could be used by multiple players, could be charged beyond a single gear's capacity, and wouldn't waste charges when switching between anchors if the player has multiple home locations or is temporarily setting a spawn near a boss or something of the sort (this is by far the most common suggestion I've seen),
• to address early-game frustration, the easiest solution is to make the default respawn location centered around the point of death, or arguably better - in the vicinity of where the player has spent the last day or two, as that addresses most possible death-loops and retains a short runback, which would naturally also give some weight to beds as they effectively make the player spend several hours in a single spot,
• a related solution could lie in an item which could be carried on the person (could literally be a temporal gear, if nothing else) which would behave in a similar way to the anchor or effigy from the first idea when placed, and shift the respawn area to the player's vicinity like in the second idea when carried.

And if that feels like it makes death lose its weight (it really wouldn't lose much of anything - respawning would just be less frustrating or tedious), then how about we consider to actually integrate death with temporal stability? Apply a penalty to maximum stability or stability recovery rate (it would need temporal stability to be revised to work) or other debuffs (ideally debuffs which don't impede regular gameplay and are most impactful in already-dangerous scenarios), which could be fixed by using temporal gears or other means (the current feature of using a gear to restore temporal stability could be reused for this).

If any sort of long-term injuries or diseases are implemented, letting most or all of them persist through death would also give plenty of weight to it and, crucially, incentivize interacting with several other systems to mitigate those penalties faster.

 

 

Then there are also some universal improvements to death and respawning that could be made:

• shift the spawn point away from temporally unstable areas and avoid spawning right next to monsters and hostile animals (at least for the default spawn, for the location set by the temporal gear it may not work as well and isn't as important anyways),
• improve the core death and respawn effects (purely audiovisual, or something more elaborate), because it is rather odd to just disappear from one place and pop into another in an instant,
• add a player corpse that stores the items (the single most suggested and most popular in mods death-related feature as far as I've seen), because the risk of losing all of your items is just annoying when it happens (especially if it happens to some very valuable items - I've had a share of fun with lore books myself),
• keep the death markers for all deaths (and ideally only remove them when the corpse is picked up), not just the last one.

And also as a side note, if we're looking for incentives to use beds other than respawning, then my suggestion for that would be to just lean into probably the most important purpose of beds besides sleep:

• if any sort of long-term injuries or diseases are implemented (as Tyron has mentioned that this is a consideration with status effects), then sleeping should be an important way accelerate the recovery,
• even if no long-term injuries are implemented, beds should probably be better at accelerating healing without also chugging the entire satiety bar.

Ideas are the easiest thing in game design. Of the above, I think that each has potential and probably wouldn't cause any major issues, though naturally there's all the usual caveats. And there's plenty of ways to improve the mechanics without constantly circling back to the one option which consistently receives pushback whenever it's suggested.

[LadyWYT]

38 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Ideas are the easiest thing in game design. Of the above, I think that each has potential and probably wouldn't cause any major issues, though naturally there's all the usual caveats. And there's plenty of ways to improve the mechanics without constantly circling back to the one option which consistently receives pushback whenever it's suggested.

I don't know that they're the easiest part of game design...it's easy enough to come up with them, for sure, but difficult to produce good ones, or decide on a specific one to use out of a range of options.

In any case, I do appreciate the clarification, and agree with most of what you've listed above.  I think part of what bugs me so much about topics like this when they come up, is many users don't really explain much about the problem they see, or offer much explanation of how their proposed solution fits into the game or solves the perceived problem. In those cases, it's hard not to read them as pure personal preference, or a desire for the familiar rather than trying something new.