Anego Studios Development update, June 2026

[Tyron]

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists

As with every year, spring time means gardening for Saraty and me. It was a cold spring here in Latvia, which compressed most of the gardening efforts into the month of May. Conveniently it coincided with us needing a break after the strenuous efforts of the 1.22 release. But now, the time has come to refocus on Vintage Story.

As much as I'd love to just jump neck deep into the game engine to code 1.23 content, there are currently other tasks in greater need of my attention. The first task: Showing you all what we're up to! (even though the team wasn't exactly helpful with that )
 

1. Story Trailer
It's about time - 4 years have passed since our previous game trailer - we've begun production on a new trailer in earnest. In fact, several team members will travel to our offices in Latvia in the hopes of getting the gears turning on this! Our previous trailers were all about showing off as much gameplay as possible while using 100% ingame footage. This time we'd like to try something different and tell you about the games story in a more cinematic format, in fact it might not use ingame footage at all, we haven't fully decided yet. We will still showcase what you will actually do in the game though. The fantastic NeddyTheNoodle joined us to build out the scenes for us. The story board is nearing completion, elvas will begin building the relevant scenes soon and Neddy is currently tuning the visual style.

Storyboarding is fun!

2. Logo rework
As mentioned in the art rebrand post we've begun a broader effort of finding a more consistent visual language for Vintage Story. Your feedback was very valuable to us and so we went back to the drawing board based on the lovely fan impression of the logo by Phobiak. Once we got that nailed down, we'd begin applying this new visual style to all our platforms, hopefully. Thank you for everyone's ideas and suggestions!


The agony of choice

3. Pilot Project: Creator Program
We'll also be launching a new pilot project - a creator program for our fellow community members that diligently create content for Vintage Story. A new team member was added for this task. We will announce more on this soon!

4. VS Mod DB - Additional filtering
The recent controversy on AI generated content has not gone unnoticed by the team and we've been thinking of a solution on how to address it. Our current plan is a form of "individualized self moderation" - allow players to report content as "AI / Low effort content" and conversely can set themselves a threshold after how many reports they want these mods to not show up in their mod list. This should create a level playing field where every visitor has a choice on whether they want to see low effort content or not.

5. New site: VS Server DB
In parallel Rennorb is also working on a proper web version of the public servers list where server authors can take ownership of their servers and edit their server info in a user friendly manner. Search functions and categorization should help with server discovery, to give players a more straightforward way to find the right servers. This is likely to be released this year. 

6. The 1.23 update
This it the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: Tighter, more visceral hit detection; More varied attack animations; Possibly rework of armor- and weapon tiers; A few more types of weapons; and more! The combat changes will be in good hands - we have Maltiez, author of the mod Combat Overhaul, on our team to advise us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection tech from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \o/
(For clarity, we will not integrate Combat Overhaul into the vanilla game. CO will still have a reason to exist after this update)

Balduranne has descended deep into a major armor rework as teased in #devlog. There will still be 3 armor slots, but each piece can be built up in layers. 

Dana, Pizza2004, Sekelsta and Maltiez have been active in doing code cleanup, bugfixing and improving mod support. Tagwin has completed the inventory sound project - which adds over 200 new sounds to the players inventory. Redram has embarked on a pixel density consistency journey, ensuring items are about the same sizes no matter when held, dropped or placed and now has moved onto more rideable creatures. Arkaik has been diligently pixeling more berry bush variants and new types of foliage. radfast plans to continue his river research. Luke is writing lore, Hayden is tasked with doing music for our trailer and viv has begun animating cats. Though disclaimer, we don't know yet which of this stuff will be in the next major update. As for Elvas, has anybody seen him? I think he's asleep on the keyboard 


Kumquat berry bushes!


Pretty Willow tree leaves

More is planned for 1.23 but we will not reveal that just yet. In parallel, the story team will begin preparing for 1.24 that will bring Lore chapter 3 to Vintage Story. We have no ETA yet for either 1.23 or 1.24. 

Anego Studios Project "Glint"
The glint team is hopping in great strides towards a playable experience. Apart from the aforementioned combat hitbox tech, and various other secret new systems they also built their own entity AI system that's easier to work with and continue maturing their much more immersive graphical user interfaces. There is a decent chance that we can share the first few visuals of the world of project glint this year. Either this year or next year we will be building a wholly separate community for Project Glint.

Anego Studios Project "Nex"
Our little action RPG project is also progressing continuously. Clovergruff recently finished building the foundation of the game and is now primarily focused on building game content. Here as well we should be able to show something off this year. 

Summary
We spent the time since the 1.22 release to step back, to reflect and to plan ahead. Anego Studios has always been a multi-project undertaking and today is no different. A multitude of Ideas have turned into concrete plans, and those plans are now set in motion. We will continue our relentless pursuit in building the best survival voxel game that we can. Thanks for playing VS and stay tuned!

View full record

[Lielac]

19 minutes ago, Tyron said:

2. Logo rework
As mentioned in the art rebrand post we've begun a broader effort of finding a more consistent visual language for Vintage Story. Your feedback was very valuable to us and so we went back to the drawing board based on the lovely fan impression of the logo by Phobiak. Once we got that nailed down, we'd begin applying this new visual style to all our platforms, hopefully. Thank you for everyone's ideas and suggestions!

Ooooooh. I like 4B the most. I think the big, bold temporal gear means it would show up well at icon size, while still looking good at the size it is in this concept art.

Edit: wait what, first ? that'll teach me not to look at timestamps huh 

Edited 18 hours ago by Lielac
I'm first reply?? neat

[EnbyKaiju]

The teased features for the next update look utterly spectacular, and I'm sure they will make a lot of folks very happy. Thanks to the entire VS team for all they ongoing work making the game we love so much.  

[Gordon Wrigley]

Maybe consider tweaking the trailer tone. I didn't play for a long time specifically because of the existing trailers, now it's one of my all time favourite games. The current tailers make the game out to be hard, punishing. But it's not, it's just detailed. If you respect it's world it's not hard. For example I've never frozen or starved to death, but the trailers make it seem like that's a typical part of the experience. Focus more on the detail and less on the dying. Some of it is just what you lead with. Consider this trailer the first 30 seconds set a tone and that tone is "this is a game about dying a lot", is that what your game is actually about?

edit: even the thumbnail conveys "difficult unpleasant time"
 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by Gordon Wrigley

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

2. Logo rework
As mentioned in the art rebrand post we've begun a broader effort of finding a more consistent visual language for Vintage Story. Your feedback was very valuable to us and so we went back to the drawing board based on the lovely fan impression of the logo by Phobiak. Once we got that nailed down, we'd begin applying this new visual style to all our platforms, hopefully. Thank you for everyone's ideas and suggestions!

These designs look great on their own and I think they are clearly a step forward from the initial art rebrand post, though I cannot help but feel like they still somewhat drift towards excessively small individual features. This would look excellent as a title screen or home page logo or something of the sort, but I would be interested to see propositions for something simpler to serve better as a desktop icon or favicon, or at least an explicit consideration to make them look good in that context, since they currently seem to use the same art:

• Alpha 1 A  and B  I worry might look like nothing much when scaled down heavily. Different colors might make it more acceptable (it's probably the most similar to the current logo, I think).
• Bravo 2 A  and B  have arguably better shape language, assuming you don't mistake them for mushrooms.
• Alpha 4 A  and B  have some very small features, although I think B ends up looking massively better due to the large gear helping out tremendously with the center area, and the crown (including the dead half which inadvertently looks like a shadow) selling the shape really well - it's largely a matter of style and preference, still, but I think that the last one has a lot going for it.
• Some community suggestions like this one  or this one  have gone for something that ditches the tree and focuses on the gear to make a more digestible small icon (a temporal gear  might still be better for contrast and to avoid similarity to games like Factorio).

Granted, there's a lot of complexity here and giving them proper colors and different backgrounds would naturally change things up. If I had to specifically choose one out of these six new concepts, I would lean towards Alpha 4 B . Have a roughly painted-over color version , far from perfect but illustrative enough, because I wanted to see how it could potentially look with the colors of the current logo.

 

Additionally, if I may also ask to reconsider the font here: . I'm guessing it's probably closer to being a concept than a finalized design anyways, and overall it's quite fine and certainly nicely stylized, but I was genuinely confused about a couple of the letters for a few seconds, especially the V and N. Making it more immediately legible could be worthwhile.

 

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

6. The 1.23 update
This it the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: Tighter, more visceral hit detection; More varied attack animations; Possibly rework of armor- and weapon tiers; A few more types of weapons; and more! The combat changes will be in good hands - we have Maltiez, author of the mod Combat Overhaul, on our team to advice us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection tech from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \o/

Fever dream, I tell you. There are certainly plenty of hopes and ideas in the community regarding combat in VS. I, for one, somewhat worry about the survival aspects becoming a lower and lower priority in favor of the adventure, story and combat (1.22 still feels kind of unfinished for me, though maybe that's just a matter of mismatched expectations), so I wouldn't really be satisfied with a combat update that doesn't also bring adjustments to hunting and animal AI. This is shaping up to be a very interesting update nonetheless.

The "new types of foliage" also really make me hopeful, because I've felt that VS is very lacking in this area right now, especially in grasses, mosses, shrubs and other low-lying plants.

Edited 14 hours ago by MKMoose
Minor rephrasing, added a painted-over version of the logo.

[Facethief]

It suddenly occurs to me that “berry” in game is a generic term and not botanical.

[Rhyagelle]

One of the greatest games of all time with some of the greatest devs and creators of all time. Very hyped for the future of this game, man! Thank you to everyone for all of your hard work! We all appreciate it!

[LordRaygon007]

Thank you for your continued efforts and work on systems that involve the amazing modding community. 

[Steel General]

I'm starting to think that the clock in the tree is not going to be an important story element.

It was one of the first details that intrigued me, before I even saw gameplay - a green gear would have had no meaning at that time.

(It's not like I'm going to stop playing because there won't eventually be a treeclock.)

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

Your feedback was very valuable to us and so we went back to the drawing board based on the lovely fan impression of the logo by Phobiak. Once we got that nailed down, we'd begin applying this new visual style to all our platforms, hopefully. Thank you for everyone's ideas and suggestions!

I missed seeing that one in the thread, but I really like it, as well as those thumbnails based on it. It does a good job of covering the lighter and darker elements of Vintage Story and teasing the lore, without giving too much away. Though I do miss the clock. 

 

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

3. Pilot Project: Creator Program
We'll also be launching a new pilot project - a creator program for our fellow community members that diligently create content for Vintage Story. A new team member was added for this task. We will announce more on this soon!

Honestly, I'm highly skeptical here, if this is what I think it is. I'm assuming it's potentially some sort of commission/reward system for community members who consistently produce high-quality content for Vintage Story? It's not that people shouldn't be rewarded for hard work--indeed they should be--however, when money and, to a lesser extent, attention starts to be involved then it can actually end up undermining the community by attracting the wrong sorts of people and casting doubts both on what those users say and what the devs are doing. The Sims community program is a pretty notorious example of that--a lot of big community names get kickbacks and exclusive content access in return for saying positive things about the game. It happens a lot with paid promotions and social media influencers as well. There are a lot of people who will do things purely for the money and status, and not care much about how they get it.

Now in fairness, that's certainly not all influencers, and I'm not saying that's what's going on here with this announcement. I want to make that very clear! But some clarification would be much appreciated.

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

4. VS Mod DB - Additional filtering
The recent controversy our AI generated content has not gone unnoticed by the team and we've been thinking of a solution on how to address it. Our current plan is a form of "individualized self moderation" - allow players to report content as "AI / Low effort content" and conversely can set themselves a threshold after how many reports they want these mods to not show up in their mod list. This should create a level playing field where every visitor has a choice on whether they want to see low effort content or not.

Oh good, maybe the community will finally stop going to war with each other over this...one can hope, anyway. I assume there's also a penalty for false reports? In any case, this seems like a pretty fair way to handle it.

 

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

6. The 1.23 update
This it the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: Tighter, more visceral hit detection; More varied attack animations; Possibly rework of armor- and weapon tiers; A few more types of weapons; and more! The combat changes will be in good hands - we have Maltiez, author of the mod Combat Overhaul, on our team to advice us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection tech from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \o/

There will be a lot of happy players when this releases, I bet. Really glad to hear about hit detection improvements, because that's probably the biggest issue with the present combat system.

 

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

This time we'd like to try something different and tell you about the games story in a more cinematic format, in fact it might not use ingame footage at all, we haven't fully decided yet.

I like the idea of having a collage of artwork for the cinematic sequence, rather than sticking to in-game models and animation, especially if it's for a flashback sequence or character's memories/stories, as what seems to be the case for this storyboard panel. Aside from being easier to code(I assume), artwork is a lot more flexible in what it can do, and the different visual style can help set the cinematic apart from the standard gameplay. For character memories specifically, the style could also shift certain elements as a clever narrative trick to help portray the character's personality. A morose character's narrative might have muted colors; a tormented character's memories might have more jagged lines and darker shadows. A cheerful character might have a lot of bright colors and playful linework. A character with a sharp memory might have very clear, detailed pictures while a character with faded memories might have blurry, less detailed pictures.

The main drawback to using artwork for cinematic, I think, is that it's not really possible to portray the player character accurately. There could be a generic seraph as needed, but it's not the same as actually seeing your own character there in the scene.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

53 minutes ago, Steel General said:

I'm starting to think that the clock in the tree is not going to be an important story element.

It was one of the first details that intrigued me, before I even saw gameplay - a green gear would have had no meaning at that time.

(It's not like I'm going to stop playing because there won't eventually be a treeclock.)

Or maybe it is, but they're trying to throw you off the scent!

[Slam]

I’m most excited to see the trailer they’ll cook up, I really like the 2022 trailer and 1.20 showcase, but I’m excited to see what they’ll do for a more climatic trailer.

I'm also excited on the 1.23 combat update, I wouldn’t say I disliked combat, but more options to keep the shivers at bay will be nice. It could also see it change temporal storms maybe, I like everything about them except the fact a multiple tier 4 shivers can just spawn on top of you, though I would not be upset or too surprised if they didn’t change it, something has to stop them steel plated seraph's.

I’m not to sure what i think about the logo, I liked the original “cartoony” redesign and Phobiak’s design but I don’t like the gray of the alpha designs, though I don’t I could come up with anything better.

over all very cool! I can’t wait to see the hard effort of the devs!

[BattleReadyEagle]

I LOVE the concept art for the new VS logo! However, I personally love the "Alpha 1 B" concept the most. Something about it draws my eyes the most and really makes me think the most about what the game is about. I like how the different elements of the game are interwoven in it in a very noticable, but not "noisy" way.

It feels like every element is balanced correctly and not overpowering the others or putting too much emphasis on one thing and not drawing enough attention towards the others.

In any case, I'm hyped for the new trailer and for update 1.23!!!

I'm looking forward to a new in-depth combat and armor system! Being able to make custom armor without the need of a mod will be huge for me! I love designing and decking out my avatars in games with my own custom drip!

Edited 11 hours ago by BattleReadyEagle
Added Things

[Raiback]

i really want to see the next update! lets goooo

[HalfAxd]

Has there been any mention about the procedural dungeon work that's on-going and if it will be held until version 1.23 or released in parts as completed in 1.22.x?  Thanky   

[KahvozeinsFang]

8 hours ago, Tyron said:

For clarity, we will not integrate Combat Overhaul into the vanilla game.

Ok cool. I'm just hoping that update isn't too close in style to that mod, because I've used that mod once and I definitely didn't enjoy any part of it. 

[FairyKairi]

Personally, I like the concept of more story, lol.  While I have not actually gotten to most of the story bits in my current game, I HAD managed to at least get that started on my previous laptop before the motherboard fried and I lost everything but my screenshots.  For reference, I am fifteen hours in and just beginning the Copper Age on my current save.  The prospect of more story keeps me here.  As for the logo, I am most intrigued by 4B, to be honest.  Though, as mentioned by someone else above, I would consider modifying the font.  I tend to judge logos based on whether they would look good on a T-shirt (regardless of if I could fit into said shirt) and that font would likely NOT look good on clothing.  The font is barely legible to me.

[CastIronFabric]

9 hours ago, Gordon Wrigley said:

Maybe consider tweaking the trailer tone. I didn't play for a long time specifically because of the existing trailers, now it's one of my all time favourite games. The current tailers make the game out to be hard, punishing. But it's not, it's just detailed. If you respect it's world it's not hard. For example I've never frozen or starved to death, but the trailers make it seem like that's a typical part of the experience. Focus more on the detail and less on the dying. Some of it is just what you lead with. Consider this trailer the first 30 seconds set a tone and that tone is "this is a game about dying a lot", is that what your game is actually about?

edit: even the thumbnail conveys "difficult unpleasant time"

 

100% agreed and I had the same experience. VS videos where showing up on my feed for more than a year and most of them talked about how 'brutal' the game was leaving me pretty much uninterested. That all changed when I saw a video by Rhadamant doing mechanical work and smithing, I was sold at that point.

[Guimoute]

10 hours ago, Tyron said:

More is planned for 1.23 but we will not reveal that just yet. In parallel, the story team will begin preparing for 1.24 that will bring Lore chapter 3 to Vintage Story.

Ah, you said in February 2025 that 1.23 was lore chapter 3 and that was already counting it being pushed by one version. 

[CastIronFabric]

Although the next two updates do not sound like something I am going to be overly excited about I am in part relieved because it means I can dedicate about a year to my current world without being concerned about updating breaking anything.

[Guimoute]

1 minute ago, CastIronFabric said:

it means I can dedicate about a year to my current world without being concerned about updating breaking anything.

I've been on the same world since 1.18. It does not break. 

[CastIronFabric]

9 minutes ago, Guimoute said:

I've been on the same world since 1.18. It does not break. 

I have seen on youtube videos of peoples worlds breaking on upgrades.

I do not know all the specifics etc but I would just rather not. I plan on playing this new game file of mine for a likely a few years. We shall see if they have an update that leaves me wanting to upgrade but these two update descriptions not so much. I do like MAKING armour and weapons, I am just not a big fan of actual combat, those days are done for me.

CORRECTION: I have seen updates to the game break mods. My bad, yes, I am running about 30 mods

Edited 8 hours ago by CastIronFabric

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, Guimoute said:

Ah, you said in February 2025 that 1.23 was lore chapter 3 and that was already counting it being pushed by one version. 

As much as I would love to see more story in 1.23, I don't mind if it's pushed back to 1.24. That gives the devs time to focus on adding status effects(which I think was supposed to be in 1.22 and didn't quite make the cut) and improve the combat--both of which the community has been requesting for quite some time and which will likely also be a bit time-consuming to implement properly. Writing and polishing new lore and tying it in seamlessly with the old is no simple feat either, and should really be the focus of its own update, with more minor changes accompanying it.

Plus it's probably easier to balance new combat systems first, and then add new creatures and tweak them as needed once players have had time to adjust to the new systems, than it is to try to do both at once. 

[Bruno Willis]

12 hours ago, Tyron said:

The 1.23 update
This it the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: Tighter, more visceral hit detection; More varied attack animations; Possibly rework of armor- and weapon tiers; A few more types of weapons; and more! The combat changes will be in good hands - we have Maltiez, author of the mod Combat Overhaul, on our team to advise us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection tech from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \o/
(For clarity, we will not integrate Combat Overhaul into the vanilla game. CO will still have a reason to exist after this update)

This sort of news is always so exciting! The V.S. dev team seem to out-do expectations every time, in such creative ways. 

If you're working on combat and hitboxes, I'd love to see some of that work translate into more accuracy-based hunting too, but regardless, best of luck.

[Chuckerton]

1.23 COMBAT UPDATE LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOO I will wait as long as it's needed, but the hype train has indeed departed. 

Also, love Alpha 4A and 1B as the logo designs, those are definitely my favorites