New Berry Bush Mechanics Experience

[Kyle Rick]

So... guess I am not planting bushes anymore? Considering I planted all of these around month 2 I was hoping to get some use out of them before winter started, but nope! (Assuming they don't grow berries if temperature is too cold.)

Most other bushes seem to have 10 days or so remaining. The time to grow difference per bush is wild, considering that farming crops grow quite consistently even. 



Mainly a problem because I would never interact with them due to finishing the game at around new years roughly. I imagine as the game has more story content and things to do it will work out better due to spending more time in the world, but due to how fast you can progress anything heavily timegated does not work very well in my experience.

It's really funny considering I never, ever had any diary in any playthrough of Vintage Story, because I don't like milking till gen 3 as it seems inconsistent before that but I would have started a new world at that point due to feeling like the world got boring.

For the berry bush mechanics themselfs, it's interesting and neat, but feels useless so far. I already have enough berries to last the winter so I don't have to worry about that, however it seems a lot harder to tell if berry bushes have berries in them compared to before.

Wanted to post this because the timegated parts of this game feels weird, maybe it's better in mutiplayer? I been wondering if I can find ways to make the game progression slower but even Wilderness Survival default settings don't do much. If I found bauxite I would have steel by now and really be done with the game. Story content can be rushed in about 10 days (Depends on distance and such.) once ready to tackle it all.

Curious what other people think of the new berry bush mechanics now it been a few months, and timegated things in general.

Edited Saturday at 02:19 PM by Kyle Rick

[cjc813]

Agreed.

The new mechanics are pretty neat overall, but the time it takes a cutting to mature is pretty ridiculous.

Classic Anego. They tend to overtune things upon release and relax them with later patches. My gut says they'll probably tweak it in the coming months.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Kyle Rick said:

For the berry bush mechanics themselfs, it's interesting and neat, but feels useless so far. I already have enough berries to last the winter so I don't have to worry about that, however it seems a lot harder to tell if berry bushes have berries in them compared to before.

Wanted to post this because the timegated parts of this game feels weird, maybe it's better in mutiplayer? I been wondering if I can find ways to make the game progression slower but even Wilderness Survival default settings don't do much. If I found bauxite I would have steel by now and really be done with the game. Story content can be rushed in about 10 days (Depends on distance and such.) once ready to tackle it all.

Curious what other people think of the new berry bush mechanics now it been a few months, and timegated things in general.

I think it's just an awkward growing phase of the game right now. Players can complete the entire tech tree and story within about one in-game year, so sinking time into bushes and fruit trees or even livestock can feel "useless" unless one makes the conscious choice to take their time. However, completing everything that fast also seems a bit silly for the kind of game that VS presents itself to be--after all, what's really the point of having seasons and making winter a challenge if the player is only going to need to survive one winter?

That's not to say that the player needs to be prevented from making faster progress and be forced to play at a particular speed. I do think though that bush overall is pretty good, and bushes are working the way they should, especially since the "complete" story is probably meant to unfold over the course of a few in-game years. It's probably going to feel a little off though, since we're so used to just breezing through everything and taking advantage of berry bushes that were quite overpowered before, but will feel better once other slow-pace mechanics have been added.

My advice in the meantime is to just relax a bit and enjoy the game at a slower pace. Perhaps focus on decorating your base with chiselwork instead of rushing iron. Explore for dungeons. Sleeping through nights instead of constantly working can also help, since it will progress time faster. Try to collect all the shells or fish or something.

[Kyle Rick]

23 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

My advice in the meantime is to just relax a bit and enjoy the game at a slower pace. Perhaps focus on decorating your base with chiselwork instead of rushing iron. Explore for dungeons. Sleeping through nights instead of constantly working can also help, since it will progress time faster. Try to collect all the shells or fish or something.

I thought about sleeping every night as i'm curious how it changes gameplay. So far in my current world I not slept at all so I not made a bed yet.

For decorating I have no creativity and I will enjoy making my packed dirt castles, it just works.

I was thinking of using some difficulty mods and anti-QOL mods to increase time in the world and slow things down. There is one mod that makes enemies break blocks during storms and underground with higher grade blocks take longer to break like cobblestone compared to packed dirt, as I think that is cool.

Bunch of other things I been thinking I could do. I tend to play games for gameplay, but once you past the early game in Vintage Story it tends to be quite solved.

[LadyWYT]

7 minutes ago, Kyle Rick said:

For decorating I have no creativity and I will enjoy making my packed dirt castles, it just works.

Chisel some seashells and call it a sandcastle?

[Hanril]

I find the new berry system pretty fair. The amount of berries you can get just by foraging in the wild is already very generous. It's always good to leave some bushes for expeditions, and in multiplayer you don't have to take all the bushes from everyone else. Berries are fine, fruit trees are fine, don't panic, don't rob yourself of fun that you paid for.

[MKMoose]

21 hours ago, Kyle Rick said:

Curious what other people think of the new berry bush mechanics now it been a few months, and timegated things in general.

I've spoken plenty about them in the berry bush rework sentiment poll among other places, but regarding growth times specifically:

• initial cutting growth time can be minimized by just replanting the cutting until you get a low value (close to two months),
• total time from plating a cutting to the first harvest is (assuming you don't cheese the initial growth time) 4-8 months until maturation and then on average 2.5 months until the first harvest, but it also gets slowed down by low temperatures - if you plant them shortly after starting a new world in the temperate climate, they will tend to yield the first fruit after fruit trees (tested planting 5th of June shortly after midnight in 5.9 °C climate, regular berries against pink apples specifically), so I genuinely don't know why I should ever bother with cultivating the berry bushes (in subsequent years they will ripen before fruit trees, but only that first harvest really matters from a balance perspective and early-game value),
• the cold end of the temperate climate band is around the range where bushes tend to only give one harvest per year, but will happily fake you out by progressing all the way to ripening and then suddenly going dormant (you might be able to mitigate this with a greenhouse).

Timegating can be a mostly fine balance component, but when both fruit sources are timegated in a roughly similar way and yet one of them has several advantages over the other (long spoil time and no fertilizer use, most notably) and is only slightly limited by randomness and scarcity, then I don't see much evidence for any thought having been put into balance at all - technically, we do know that some changes are planned for fruit trees, but that doesn't exempt the current state of the game from scrutiny.

And more generally on the topic of timegating, while it can work in some ways, I think it's generally inferior for most purposes to almost all other forms of restricting access to features, because it doesn't ask motivate practically any engagement in the player. Being told by the game to just wait doesn't even help with feature discoverability by informing the player of other things they could do in the meantime, while for example resource gating gives the player a thing to look for by hinting that those resources can be obtained in the first place.

Edited Sunday at 11:33 AM by MKMoose
Elaborate on timegating more broadly.

[Kyle Rick]

On 6/7/2026 at 6:03 AM, MKMoose said:

initial cutting growth time can be minimized by just replanting the cutting until you get a low value (close to two months),

Wow I figured it would just vanish if you break it lmao. There should be no reason to have that high variance then when you can game it.

Also while before this update planting barries being close to base was nice to get that nutrition right before winter, better preparing and getting lots of honey solves that already. 

Kinda realizing that I would need mods to fix some of the problems I have with progression in this game. Going from nothing to leather armour to steel chain armour is a bit silly.

[MKMoose]

25 minutes ago, Kyle Rick said:

Wow I figured it would just vanish if you break it lmao. There should be no reason to have that high variance then when you can game it.

Just to clarify, because I realize now that it can be interpreted in various ways: by "initial growth time" I mean growth from cutting to young bush (2-4 months) which can be gamed to consistently get close to 2 months, but then the maturation stage (2-4 months again) can't be cheesed the same way. You can reduce the total growth and maturation time in months from 4-8 (6 on average) to 4-6 (5 on average), and the fruiting cycle then also takes on average 2.5 months regardless. So it's not all that impactful.

A very similar way to game the growth time randomness has always been a thing with with tree saplings, by the way.

Edited Tuesday at 02:07 PM by MKMoose

[Kyle Rick]

27 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

very similar way to game the growth time randomness has always been a thing with with tree saplings, by the way.

Interesting, never did interact with trees myself. There is still so many game mechanics I don't know about or never use because I find no real use for them. Kinda wonder if I should try some of it, and maybe cheese for once.

[dakko]

40 minutes ago, Kyle Rick said:

Interesting, never did interact with trees myself. There is still so many game mechanics I don't know about or never use because I find no real use for them. Kinda wonder if I should try some of it, and maybe cheese for once.

The walls have ears, lol! As soon as we start talking exploits, it seems like The Powers That Be remove them.