Trying to get inspired for a mountain build

[QuinnCrafting]

Hi! I'm still very new to vintage story and trying to gear up for my first Real Build rn. It's in the mountains by a small lake with a hotspring for warmth purposes, but I don't really have any idea what to actually aim for. Any ideas for vibes/historical inspo/shapes/outlines to start with? Would really appreciate it. 

[Aezryn]

Something I've always wanted to do with a hot spring is make it an outdoor bath for an accompanying traditional Japanese inn, but I've never found a location that called to me (practically every hot spring I've ever found has been in truly uninspiring flatland D:). If you like the sound of that, some more specific terms that may help to find inspiration are "onsen" (hot spring), "ryokan" (traditional Japanese inn) and "rotenburo" (outdoors/open-air bath). Japan has a ton of onsen baths, some public, some private, and many offer truly stunning mountainside views.

Granted, you can't actually use it as a bath in VS (...not for very long at least) but there are mods for that.

Edited June 7 by Aezryn

[dakko]

Wow, what a great spot for a build!

Purely for inspiration and shapes, take a look at this video from Kurazarrh's Desert Life series: Episode 370: Finishing the Central Skyway Stairs and Paths.

[williams_482]

Do you have screenshots of the location? It sounds like a nice one. 

[MKMoose]

More on the historical inspiration side of things, for something simple, a log cabin in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History - bonus points if you add a sauna to something like this:

 

For something larger, Schronisko Murowaniec (Murowaniec shelter) in the Polish Tatras (admittedly relatively modern and probably overkill in size, but fits the aesthetics and block palette of VS quite well):

 

For something further back in time, a Bronze Age house drawing that I could find here, for when you want to torture yourself with getting all that thatch:

 

If you're not sure what to do, I cannot recommend anything more than to start small with easy shapes, and try to prioritize variety and small decorations to spice things up:

• a different roof material here,
• a different floor there,
• a fence to lead the eyes between two things,
• a path to the lake and a small pier on it (maybe it will even be good enough for fishing),
• a few hay bales next to the farm,
• a stack of firewood on the side of the house,
• some flower pots next to the door,
• a few berry bushes under a boring wall,
• a table and chair with some bookshelves on the inside to keep cozy.

If you only start off from a small hut, then adding on a second building for the forge, or a granary, or a hut for storage crates, is a fairly simple, step-by-step process, and can produce a neat little village of its own. Integrating a lot of things into one huge building, on the other hand, and decorating it all in a cohesive way, especially with the resource scarcity that VS sometimes likes to hit you with, is very hard and time-consuming even if rewarding. If you're relatively new, it's also impossible to really predict how much of that space you're actually going to need.

I personally spend almost all of my time in houses that don't exceed a roughly 5x10 footprint on the inside, and even that tends to be large - my first house was a 2-floor 5x7 with a cellar plus an outdoor forge with some storage crates, which carried me through a 200+ hour world with no major issues.

Edited Monday at 03:52 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

If you want to lean more into the fantasy side of things, the Magic Crafters section of the original Spyro game is pretty cool. Castles in the snow-capped mountains, with checkerboard tile floors and various symbols and designs etched into the walls. The Blowhard level even has windmills.

[QuinnCrafting]

Sorry! I made this post on a whim between tasks, I didn't even think about how hard it would be to actually answer . I've taken a couple of screenshots of the little valley I've set up in, despite the anomalous of animals constantly trying to maul me. Sorry about the rain, I tried waiting a few days and it still kept up. 

The rammed earth structure it my main base rn, but I think will eventually be a sunken A-frame situation I've seen done a few times really well here on the forum, or maybe a mossy roof Nordic type look? The other dirt structure actually by the hotsprings was the initial shelter I made before realizing putting my starter home exactly where I want to build my final one (abridged to the spring, for warmth) probably isn't a great idea. Beyond the hotspring is a pine forest, and in the other direction is a birch/larch one with one (1) maple tree I'm thinking of spreading for materials. I'm not sure if I could pull off a Japanese look in a clearly not Japanese biome, or the sprawl that a traditional compound would require, but I would be down to giving it a shot! Ig I'm just tired of the usual medieval style from all my time playing mc, and am looking for something else. 

[QuinnCrafting]

Thank you for all the replies! Some great advice here. And if ya'll want the seed, it's 2051784207. Tho I did tweak some settings (landcover at 70%, landcover scale at 300%, upheaval rate at 50%, landform scale at 120%, geologic activity uncommon) am used some world gen mods, (rivers, plains and valleys, maybe some others but I've changed my mods too much since updates that I'm not sure) and generated it like two-three updates ago so things may be different for ya'll. Me finding this world only took a few hours of resetting with geologic activity as uncommon and increased spawn location height tho, so I'm sure ya'll could find something similar pretty easily.