What mods do you use?

[wildforester]

I’m considering playing a bit of lightly modded vs and am looking for suggestions on mods that work really well together/with base vs. I’m also curious to know what ppl generally play with (not just mods, can be recipe/world tweaks, etc).

Additionally, how do ppl manage their mods? I’ve not kept up with any of the clients/mod managers that seem to exist now, anyone think they’re necessary for playing the game?

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, wildforester said:

Additionally, how do ppl manage their mods?

My general strategy is to keep the modlist small; that way, there's fewer moving parts to keep track of for updating and fixing things as needed. I also don't count on carrying a modded world to a different game version, since there's no guarantee that mods are going to keep working on a new game version.

 

2 hours ago, wildforester said:

I’ve not kept up with any of the clients/mod managers that seem to exist now, anyone think they’re necessary for playing the game?

I wouldn't call them necessary, but if you're intending to use a lot of mods or play multiple singleplayer mods with different modlists, they're probably very useful tools to have.

 

2 hours ago, wildforester said:

looking for suggestions on mods that work really well together/with base vs.

Shameless self-plug: https://mods.vintagestory.at/improvedquenching

Instead of grinding and playing the RNG game for good stats on an item, you can just choose a finishing method to get the benefits you want. There's also a bit of skill involved when it comes to quenching--not enough to be frustrating but enough to make you pay more attention to what you're doing.

[EnbyKaiju]

I go as lightly modded as possible, barely a vanilla+.

The two I use are Carry On (because I don't understand why we wouldn't be able to carry a heavy box at the cost of a lot of mobility)

And Farseer (because I do a lot of majority water worlds and it helps to be able to see when there is an island in the distance)

I used to use a few more, like metal tongs, but every update took away the need for something that I felt was necessary to the experience. Heck, we don't even need mods for fishing any more. As a vanilla game I think Vintage Story has *almost* everything in it that I need to long term, aside from those little quality of life adjustments, but I'm also real hesitant to rely on mods that could end up breaking my game or trivilaising the experiences that I enjoy. Not that I don't enjoy mods in a multiplayer server, as that is more about tweaking the game to more enjoyable in a shared dynamic, but as a solo experience I'd rather a really good vanilla over too many mixed flavours.  

[Rainbow Fresh]

I am playing with over 70 mods at this point. If there is something that looks like a cool addition to the game and isn't outright incompatible with another mod I have, it goes on the pile. If there is some tweak to a vanilla mechanic that bugs me, it goes on the pile. If there is the chance of fixing some of the mess the vanilla game made, it goes on the pile. Have I used any of the features of "Improved Metallurgy"? No. Haven't even made normal vanilla steel yet. Is the idea of having something to do after steel which I "could have achieved, like, 50h ago" "if I just wanted to" reason enough? Yes. On the pile. Vintage Story is just a fancier, natively more challenging version of Minecraft. And to me, Minecraft at this point in my life is just a mod manager. Not to say both base games aren't enjoyable just that I have seen these a million times already and want to see something new.

As for managing mods I have come to use that one Simple VS Mod Manager or what's it called even if just for the its ability to check all my installed mods for updates without me having to check a million mod pages or stalk the ModDB front page 24/7.

Edited July 9 by Rainbow Fresh

[wildforester]

57 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

I am playing with over 70 mods at this point. If there is something that looks like a cool addition to the game and isn't outright incompatible with another mod I have, it goes on the pile.

I imagine the same may happen for me, although I may be removing mods rather than adding mods (I made a list of 101 mods that looked interesting).

 

57 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

As for managing mods I have come to use that one Simple VS Mod Manager or what's it called even if just for the its ability to check all my installed mods for updates without me having to check a million mod pages or stalk the ModDB front page 24/7.

I came across Simple VS Manager too, unfortunately is windows only from what I can see. Looks very featureful/quite useful. MVL as an alternative looks good too, although I don't know if it has the same number of features as the latter. Being able to use it across windows and linux will be good for me.

Edited July 9 by wildforester

[CastIronFabric]

I think Better Ruins mod is a must have. However, with that said, the reason I think that is 100% dependent on how I personally like to play the game so I fully agree it might not be for everyone, but I do suggest checking it out, its friggin awesome.

 

[Kyle Rick]

Gonna plug in the mod list I use here.

I mostly been using mods that stall the game out more to make it take longer at least game time wise as I was getting tired of being complete before the year ended.

So far I picked mods that look interesting and difficult, but a decent chunk of mods I had to tweak because of more questionable design and balance that does not feel that tested. I also like to keep the mod list kinda small, like 30ish while adding more over time after a playthrough.

One of the big ones that is simple in practice is the SleepNeed mod. Makes it where you actually need to sleep or you get debuffed and having to manage energy. No content added otherwise. This makes the game progress faster due to skipping time via sleep but not increasing real world time spent with the mod that much. I did however had to tweak a BUNCH of settings because I don't like the buffs and other weird stuff it adds, just purely want it for required sleep and energy debuffs otherwise. This actually made the bosses impossible so I had to tweak a bunch of that too. I might redo it next time.

Of course there is HydrateorDiedrate mod, not much needed to be touched besides I increased how long water takes to spoil because I thought it was weird and spoils too quickly, and increased the hydration cap to 2000.

Then there is Vigor mod mostly because I like stamina management in video games. Don't think I changed much on this one. Do find it weird that anything combat related like using weapons does not interact with Vigor at all.
The funny thing is that this combined with Hydrate and SleepNeed mods makes my hud look like this:

(And this is before adding Statushud mod so it's even more cluttered lmao.)

Oh and well I made hunger cap at 2000 to match the other bars I edited in configs. Just a simple edit in the game files itself. There is a mod out there that also does that.

About half of the Wilderlands mods. Besides the combat stuff the caves and panning mods also look cool, however in practice the panning one sucks because the drop rate of copper is so low it's better to just search and find surface copper, something my current playthrough did anyway as I found so much, so I never even interacted with the panning mechanic and gravel. I changed the code to buff the rates to be something much more reasonable (Like one copper bit roughly per whole gravel block panned.) hoping that would be the way I would progress. I might just disable surface copper entirely next time. There is also the BlockAdjustments one that makes building bases more complicated and slower. So far I still just made one dirt house cube but with a wood log ceiling lol.

Rivers, Watersheds, and PlainsandValleys mods for base world generation. Then added some stuff on top of it like BetterRuins and TheDungeon, however while they can be game breaking I not seen much of such on my current playthrough so not gotten much out of them in terms of loot.

FruitBuff so that I can actually use the bushes and trees in a reasonable time frame after planting them. I think it's a bit overpowered though as I think it affects growth time for new berries and such as well so I been getting a lot of berries and year 0 wild fruit trees giving fruit. Not sure if that is normal though it been a while. This is like one of the few mods I use that makes the game straight up easier if not including ruins and having to deal with them, and guess StatusHud but that is more nice to have to me.

TemporalSymphony is a cool mod and should be base game roughly. Only thing I wish is that I could more configure how common temporal storms is then what the current game settings let you, and a setting to configure how far in advance the warnings of a temporal storm is. Think it's roughly 8~ in game hours for the first warning of a storm.

CraftableCartography is another mod that I enjoy because I think having a very strong tracking map is weird for a game like this, but also on Wilderness Survival base settings it just turns it off entirely and I think that is too far in the other direction so been using this instead. It interacts weird with story location map items though as it basically requires you have a map to see the markers placed, as you have to enable map and cords in the world creation settings to even have this mod be used.

LimestonefromCaves because I dislike having to find a seemingly random stone that does way more then other stones that once found you have way more then enough. (Same with Bauxite.) I much prefer the more Minecraft way of generation where ores is found nearly everywhere in certain depths but in small amounts spread out, is why iron is so weird because you can have enough for a entire playthrough in just one or maybe two good trips once found. I know there is other ways to get Limestone but it's not nearly enough. I think this mod does a good job of what I seek but it could work out better. I rather use this mod then generating worlds till I spawn near Limestone.

Now the mod that might actually make the progress the slowest out of all of these is ImmersiveMining. This I configured to make tools much faster on use but mine the blocks less per hit so that the better tools actually make a better difference on how many hits till a block breaks. This does make durability go though a LOT faster so you be replacing tools more often. This is something I was thinking on changing but kept it all normal. Because of this mod mining blocks in general is a lot slower, so building gigadirthouses and clearing out land is not happening early on. Once you get metal tools especially the higher tier ones it becomes more reasonable.

All the mods I can recall while at work. So far progress has been taking about 50% to twice as long as early game is more of a struggle and I don't have nearly as robust, secure, and roomy of a base then usual, but feel like I could quickly progress once I find iron and Bauxite as that is all I need to reach steel in terms of raw things needed.

I found some neat mods that I wanna try next playthrough when the 1.23 update comes out and to let the mods cook more. I really love hostile environments in video games so might look into a jungle playthrough and such one day with mods that go with it.

Edited July 9 by Kyle Rick

[Zaph42nd]

On the whole not too many plugins, mainly world-gen changes or movement changes or content that expands or enhances vanilla systems, specifically...

 

World-gen: Rivers (classic but gives a lot more life to the world), Watersheds (gives Rivers a bit more presence/prevalence by adding sources), Continental Worlds (more realistic and fits well with Rivers), and Vistas (testing this one still, usually I play with Terra Prety but doesn't work perfectly with Rivers)

Movement: Salty's Climb (more mountainous world-gen makes this a must), Salty's Catch (good for cave-ins and other accidents you may be able to save yourself from), Salty's Immersive Mining (fits nicely with a more slow and difficult early game), Salty's Manual series (reducing crafting grid is nice)

Content: big fan of Shipwright (fits well with Rivers and justifies building canals and other similar infrastructure), Ancient Tools (resin and mortar/pestle allow more early-game/stone-age processing), Infantryman's Dolabra (nice multi-tool that doesn't feel too off from vanilla), Walking Sticks Lite (cuts down to just the basic walking sticks, use the og mod for more options), Slowtox (alcohol now has more utility), Cup Mod Revival (plays nicely with Slowtox's buffing mechanics), Frontier's Map (an option for mapping w/o map features, plus it's easy to pick up and use)

 

I've tried bigger mod lists but on the whole I think the game is more than content rich for my playstyle (Homo Sapiens/Wilderness Survival) so not much to add or change....

[wildforester]

 

18 minutes ago, Zaph42nd said:

Salty's Climb (more mountainous world-gen makes this a must), Salty's Catch (good for cave-ins and other accidents you may be able to save yourself from)

Saw salty’s climb/catch as well but didn’t look that deeply. I think I’ll have to try it out

[Zaph42nd]

Just now, wildforester said:

 

Saw salty’s climb/catch as well but didn’t look that deeply. I think I’ll have to try it out

Def worth trying, one suggestion though is play with configs a little since by default can't grab/climb soil which is a little annoying for vanilla world-gen (very few sheer cliff-faces) (easy to fix though)

[wildforester]

5 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

I think Better Ruins mod is a must have. However, with that said, the reason I think that is 100% dependent on how I personally like to play the game so I fully agree it might not be for everyone, but I do suggest checking it out, its friggin awesome.

 

My concern with better ruins would be ease of access to too many late game things, plus in some cases I could imagine a ruin taking away the need for a base or putting a player’s own dirt hut to shame

[CastIronFabric]

27 minutes ago, wildforester said:

My concern with better ruins would be ease of access to too many late game things, plus in some cases I could imagine a ruin taking away the need for a base or putting a player’s own dirt hut to shame

it does exactly that and its friggin awesome. I know its not for everyone but its my favorite mod by far. At least check out the videos they created on the mod page, amazing stuff

[WillowsTree]

I would stray away from stuff that adds a buttload of surface structures. In my experience, while fun, they give you waaaay too much stuff.

The only essential mod that I have is CarryOn, but I have really enjoyed my time with Toolsmith, which adds things like custom handles and bindings for tools that can give better durability or speed, as well as sharpness to tool heads to also increase their speed.
If you don't put thought into tools with Toolsmith it will be a pain in the rear, since at base a stick and base head is a horrible tool, but if you put the time into getting even a decent handle and binding you can go a lot further than in vanilla.

[CastIronFabric]

39 minutes ago, WillowsTree said:

I would stray away from stuff that adds a buttload of surface structures. In my experience, while fun, they give you waaaay too much stuff.

The only essential mod that I have is CarryOn, but I have really enjoyed my time with Toolsmith, which adds things like custom handles and bindings for tools that can give better durability or speed, as well as sharpness to tool heads to also increase their speed.
If you don't put thought into tools with Toolsmith it will be a pain in the rear, since at base a stick and base head is a horrible tool, but if you put the time into getting even a decent handle and binding you can go a lot further than in vanilla.

I will say this about Better Ruins Mods. They have 4 main 'story' locations and I have only seen one of them in all my likely 1000 hour play using the mod. The minor builds they have (which I think there is a total of 600) are about (purely guessing here) about 3000 blocks from each other. Regardless, the game has a total max of 1 million by 1 million blocks so there is that.

[FairyKairi]

I use two:  Accessibility Tweaks and Buzzwords.  Though, I am thinking that the two are not compatible as I have not gotten the latter to work since I installed it.  The only things I have changed in AT is doubling the volume of wild beehives and turning off psychedelics.

Edited July 9 by FairyKairi

[Cedric the Silent]

I recently have been giving Collapse Story mod a try and am liking the extra building challenge that it gives that tests ones architectural knowledge and I noticed it pairs well with the buildable archways from the Medieval Architecture mod which for example can be used as part of the pillars of my building's cellar that is both practical, realistic, and looks nice. I also use the Posts and Beams mod because it can be used for similar structural support when paired with Collapse Story if the building materials for the stone archways aren't readily available  in the starting spawn area of your map.

Footprints mod, Blood trail mod, Flee Exhaustion mod, and Butchery mod all go well together for a better hunting experience.

Stone Railings mod, Sounds of Confessions mod, Stained Artifice mod, VS Roofing Mod, and Censership mod give you a lot of good pieces for building structures like churches or similar religious buildings.

Real smoke is fun for me because it forced me to think more realistically about parts of my builds.

Immersive rope crafting mod, Immersive Fibercraft, and Immersive Wood Working mod are a more engaging experience than default grid recipes and makes me wonder why they aren't base game features yet because they fit so well.

VS Lumber mod and SaltyWater's Falling trees mod

Lastly Farming Revamped mod plus Age of Flax forked mod for if your crazy person like me who for some reasons keep deciding to make the game harder for myself but I'm considering adding the Natural Fertilizer mod to my game to give me more realistic ways to produce fertilizers for my crops.

Of course there is more I play with as I use a heavy mod list of over a hundred mods but I don't think I need to recommend all of them as some of them have already been listed by others and some are small things not worth mentioning because they are minor changes compared to what I posted above.

Edited July 10 by Cedric the Silent
Small spelling and grammar mistakes and clarifying the name of one mod.

[Daquavious]

optitime, carryon, accessibility tweaks, player corpse, and farseer are some "essential" (imo) quality of life mods. since you're asking for lightly modded vanilla+, for combat i'd take a look at the combat overhaul series of mods. for food, there's a culinary artillery, expanded foods, long-term food, and wild farming, these four greatly expand your options in a way that feels very realistic and natural to the game. also there's hydrate or diedrate and slowtox, adds the need for water and makes get drunk more realistic respectively. if you want full realism there's stone quarry, immersive mining, and immersive woodworking/logging expanded (warning, doing anything will take SO long with these mods but it's def more realistic). also you'll prob want some kinda terrain gen mod, vanilla terrain kinda blows pretty hard. i used to use a combo of terra prety+algernon's watersheds for a while but lately i've been trying terrafirmastory and tbh it's my fav terrain gen so far, can't recommend it more. some visual/misc mods; footprints and bloodtrails (self explanatory), betterer prospecting, (adds more features to propick and removes the RNG, kinda feels cheaty at times tho) heraldry series, night-sky delights, tabletop games (great for multiplayer), temporal symphony.

22 hours ago, wildforester said:

Additionally, how do ppl manage their mods? I’ve not kept up with any of the clients/mod managers that seem to exist now, anyone think they’re necessary for playing the game?

mod managers are not necessary at all really. if you want separate modlists you can just install or copy/paste a separate instance of the game. also very important, it says not to put mods in the "1.22.3\mods" folder but i do it anyways, and have had no issues doing that for years. i have more issues if i put mods in the "roaming\vintagestorydata\mods" folder ngl.

Edited July 9 by Daquavious

[dakko]

On 7/9/2026 at 11:29 AM, FairyKairi said:

I use two:  Accessibility Tweaks and Buzzwords.  Though, I am thinking that the two are not compatible as I have not gotten the latter to work since I installed it.  The only things I have changed in AT is doubling the volume of wild beehives and turning off psychedelics.

I use both of those mods and they work fine for me. I've not changed any volumes in AT though (I use it for visuals).

[wildforester]

Follow up on my mod manager question: Using a mod manager isn’t that bad, it’s fairly useful I think. I’m using Mystivald’s vintagestory launcher and besides awkwardness with the English translation, it is working fairly well. Compared to a gold standard mod manager (my opinion) like prism launcher for the other block game ofc, it has a ways to go.

[ArgentLuna]

Immersive corpse drop and From golden combs

[CastIronFabric]

14 hours ago, wildforester said:

Follow up on my mod manager question: Using a mod manager isn’t that bad, it’s fairly useful I think. I’m using Mystivald’s vintagestory launcher and besides awkwardness with the English translation, it is working fairly well. Compared to a gold standard mod manager (my opinion) like prism launcher for the other block game ofc, it has a ways to go.

The one I saw a video on look great. Not only can you select which mods you want you can also select what version of vintage story you want and it does the rest.

 

[wildforester]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

The one I saw a video on look great. Not only can you select which mods you want you can also select what version of vintage story you want and it does the rest.

 

That doesn’t say much… link it?

[CastIronFabric]

18 hours ago, wildforester said:

That doesn’t say much… link it?

sorry I cant. It was in a video, I would have to find the video, find the location it was in the video. Sorry, I was just speaking generally I do not know the name of the mod.

Edited July 14 by CastIronFabric