What appeals most to you in VS?

[Thorfinn]

In the last week or so I've finally watched several videos of people playing VS (I really prefer to learn from play, not "just" repeat what the good players do), and what really jumped out at me is how little my playstyle matches what I'm seeing. It's likely that my inclination is founded in RTS, where you extensively use terrain features to your advantage. For example, many or even most seem to prefer flat ground, even to the point of terraforming to get it, even though it leaves lots of vulnerabilities. Even though TP is best utilized adjacent to water, at least in the early game, most seem to set things up as 3-wide plots, for scythe presumably, even though it costs at least a day -- the stuff adjacent to water matures faster. Skeps can be much more "efficiently" deployed by taking advantage of the verticals. I find myself using macros well beyond what I'm seeing, and I'm even recording macros I can't do in-game on my gaming keyboard and my StreamDecks. And so on.

So it appears I'm unusual in that respect, at least of those who record their play. Which, actually, seems weird -- if anyone would be inclined to use macros and StreamDecks, it would seem to be the type who find them useful for streaming.

I really don't care that much about the texture difference between oak and maple, any more than I care about the difference between Colonial White and Antique White, though my wife insists that's important. Maybe I'm missing something in the game experience?

What is it you find most interesting in the game?

[Ashery]

My hunch is that a lot of folks prefer flat spaces because it simplifies planning and construction. When you're moulding construction plans to existing terrain features, you're going to be making a lot more active choices regarding where and how things are placed. Most of that active decision making gets thrown out once the terrain is flat and featureless. So, terraforming becomes the first step for construction for many folks.

I've seen the same three wide farms and that's something I don't really understand, either. That said, it's not particularly difficult to stock up enough food for the winter with default settings, so it's not like the player needs to maximize food production.

Personally, I enjoy immersing myself in the world and environment, learning the lay of the land and exploring without the mini-map. And those moments of panic when you realize you're in a completely unfamiliar landscape and you're unable to orient yourself for some reason...Ahh...

Oh, and your wife's correct: There absolutely is a difference between oak and maple and oak is the far superior choice,

[l33tmaan]

Maple is the worst looking wood type in the game.

Fight me.

Edited March 28, 2022 by l33tmaan

[Maelstrom]

1 hour ago, l33tmaan said:

Maple is the worst looking wood type in the game.

Fight me.

Ok.  =D

Maple by itself in large quantities is pretty disgusting, but if used in smaller amounts provides a rich accent.  If that still isn't good enough, Maple looks great as a chest, door or charcoal; leaving other woods for their better visual qualities.

I win! 

[DX65]

Being creative and learning new things even though currently my brain literally hurts.  It literally feels like my poor brain muscles have bruised themselves up pretty bad right now.

I have been trying to figure out new textures and I haven't even gotten to hard part which is trying to figure out notebook +++ and code to place new textures on blocks.

I am just been working with basic colors and transparency, then I tried  to make leave texture and it just looked like ugly side ways diamond. ugh.

Edited March 29, 2022 by DX65

[maibock]

I'm mostly interested in the exploring aspect of the game, alongside all of the farming/animal husbandry and such. Definitely a big fan of going treasure hunting and collecting tapestry pieces for sure though, especially due to the lore pieces scattered within the journal entries and the item descriptions themselves.

I've come from a background of modded Minecraft, which I've always tried to mod in the direction of VS before discovering that it existed. Before I really got into the game I was in the process of making a Minecraft modpack with the same sort of general background, survival after an unknown cataclysmic event that reduces the world and civilization back to a primal setting with vague ruins and items hinting at what happened. Naturally I'd be interested in VS especially with all of the immersive game mechanics and such.

[allstreets]

I think the thing that appeals to me most is the self-sustaining, 'interacting with the environment' aspect. I harvested pears from a pear tree in game for the first time yesterday, and had a moment of real joy. I grew up in an area full of pear and walnut orchards, sheep and chickens, and farms, a very rural and isolated area, and since I've moved to a large city VS feels like a way to connect with some of these experiences that are no longer accessible to me. My SP games tend to be very small scale, at a very slow pace - I'm not interested necessarily in maximizing things, just learning how to do things effectively, seeing new landscapes, domesticating chickens...etc.

Edited March 29, 2022 by allstreets

[Muru]

Somehow the game makes unnecessary stuff like fruit trees and alcohol pretty appealing without going full RP. Could just be that I like being rich with my 200L of apple cider and vodka, though

I think the main pull for me was rare items. Finding the good shit like brown hardened clay and basalt/chalk cobble skull feels great, and feels even greater once you have a lot of them. The survival stuff and progression is cool as well, but I definitely like exploring for ruins and stuff the most

[Anthony frailey]

I think for me, its not just one thing, but several things rolled into one. 

The first appeal, especially early game, its the most -complete- survival, that's "interactive" as far as crafting, building, and exploration goes. 
Secondly, its not one where all the mechanics are inherently a back-drop to PvP, like so many "survival" games do out there. 
Thirdly, there's a solid community ... and the prospects of playing multiplayer , even with those that create content on youtube possible, making co-ops, or offering more avenues to enjoy and learn the game itself, is a big bonus. 

There's probably loads of things that's been done on the game, that i hadn't seen in videos , but figure someone has. Hard to come up with absolutely unique ideas, but I think i wanna -try- making a jungle-based tree hut, for example.
But, thats also fun parts, the -discovery- of it all too. 

[ZeroBlinkers]

Terrain wise , I find myself drawn to swamps with frogs and fireflies in these sort of survival games, I find the sound of swamps relaxing. Here I've settled next to a lake In a hut carved into a mountain , farming alongside the lake. Recently got the game and I'm on my first play trough , altho I have played Terrafirma I found it less accessible than Vintage Story for a number of reasons.

If you have ever seen The Betweenlands , that's my jam. The primitive technology here gives me similiar vibe.
When it comes to farming I'm always hyper disorganized , so the method of planting near a lake works just fine.

In a sense I live how I would imagine witch-doctor would, whenever I found that you can make healing items out of plants , I went on a craze and overstocked

[Pestilence]

On 3/28/2022 at 11:44 AM, Thorfinn said:

What is it you find most interesting in the game?

Exploration and progression.  The more ruins I have to dig through and the more resources I have to find or produce to enable myself to progress through the tech tree, the happier I am.  I live in a dirt rectangle and I get bored when there's nothing left to achieve. 

[ArgentLuna]

Exploration, Building and Mining.

Mining without the Propick extra effect turned on is a bit hit or miss but with that feature its a lot of fun to track down a good or interesting node

Edited April 27, 2022 by ArgentLuna

[Kazeoni]

Kind of the complete package. The attention to detail, the immersion and the good amount of grind for the perfect progression rythm.

Just the amount of work that goes into your first pickaxe to go caving makes your your world feel infinitely larger than MC. When I can 1x2 tunnel down to bedrock and get diamond pickaxe on my first night. Even before a world begins it already feels "been there, done that". Here, while you have to put in work, it feels so much more rewarding.

The ore distribution with rarer but larger veins and more varried types just perfectly fuels exploration.

Been at the point of trying to custom modpack something similar, before knowing VT existed, but never really fit together.

 

Also the Temporal storms are a soft spot for me as a lifelong Prince of Persia (Sands of Time trilogy) fan.

The way the storms bleach out the color palette to sepia gives me them good ol' Dahaka chase vibes.

I also don't get why most YouTubers skip/hide from/cheese storms. I always treat them like events... chanting "savages savages" as I gather my equipment and try to hunt down as many drifters as I can.

[MSwampcroft]

For me, I'm bedbound irl and my body can't handle a lot of the activities I used to do that bring me joy - the simulation aspect, the immersive crafting, actively taking care of my environment. Building things for myself and others, growing plants. Crossing a hill and seeing a beautiful field of flowers, hunting for mushrooms in the forest. The first moment I intuitively threw a red hot piece of metal into a pond and it hissed and steamed and rapidly cooled brought me so much joy that I just made the out loud sound equiv of !!!!!!!!

Multiplayer in this game has been really healing, especially since due to irl pandemic things I can't socialize with anyone outside of my home environment. I get to participate in a form of society, and that's really special for me.

The plants and mushrooms, I think, are what bring me the most consistent and enduring joy. If I were physically capable, I'd be pursuing formal study as a botanist or mycologist.

The modding scene as well, everyone seems so kind, and stuff like the Ancient Tools, From Golden Combs etc mods bring me so much joy.
 

Also the chiselling. Absolutely wonderful system I've barely scratched the surface of.

[Maelstrom]

@MSwampcroftA few other fun details you may want to try (if you don't already know about them)...

1. throw a stone at a pond/lake.

2. play a resonance chamber close to a rift.

[Ryan Thomas]

For me, it's not just one thing that I find most appealing. Mind you, geology is what alerted me to the game. My favorite thing irl is combing beaches for fossils, fields for arrowheads, and Wake forest for smoky quartz. But anyway, it's not just one thing that appeals most to me about the game, it's....it's like getting a really good burger. Before I lost my sense of taste to Covid, I loved going to a burger stand to get a cheeseburger called The Monster. It's not just the bbq sauce, or onion ring, or pepperjack, or anything else; it's how all of these little flavors come together to create this complex, layered taste sensation. And that's what Vintage Story is to me; a multi-layered adventure. 

This is the most fleshed out game of this genre that I own. Everything else I have shines in one or two areas, but kind of skimp on the rest. An amazing building game, for example, where you can grow a variety of crops, but have to eat them raw. A variety of wild animals are running around, but you can't breed them, and chickens don't even lay eggs. Or, a game about being stranded on an island, that has glorious water animations and a variety of colorful water creatures. It's fun to splash around the waves like Madonna in the "Cherish" video, but you can't actually catch any of the fish; you have to subsist on nuts and wheatgrass and junk. Fishing is coming, it's just taken five years so far to implement. 

That's another thing that really stands out to me; the VS development team's integrity. I'm not a developer, but I understand how much time and money it takes to develop a game. You can't just walk around, blinking stuff into existence like you're Barbara Eden on I Dream of Jeannie. I understand that the little guy can't crank out updates at the same pace as a megacorporation that has offices in every country on Earth. But I've never seen the VS team use that as an excuse. I've never seen them take a year to crank out an update, pumping everyone up in the process, said update being nothing more than "look, the flint axe has a new handle!", then cry "What do you expect from us, we're just a tiny company!" Disasters also happen. Covid happened. Just a few days ago, a hurricane blasted through my area like some unstoppable rebel force. Stuff happens. But I've never seen the VS team take things like that and use them as excuses; riding that sumbit like a pony for half a decade.

So, a multi-layered adventure, where I can live out my own version of Walden, from an indie team whose integrity I admire; that's what appeals to me.  

[Hirou]

Cooking.

I'm think cooking in VS is the best, so many types of food, I'ts very interesting, at start I'm want to make bread and pie, this time I'm want to do alcohol, but other game mechanics good too, like blacksmith, clay forming, fruit trees, CHISELING! And more, this really game where we can all.
But water It's need rework, unfortunately whole this do comands, no one person, for Anego studios it will ALL update, I think

[PhotriusPyrelus]

On 3/28/2022 at 1:44 PM, Thorfinn said:

Even though TP is best utilized adjacent to water, at least in the early game, most seem to set things up as 3-wide plots, for scythe presumably

I'm not sure what TP means, but if they're 3x3 plots, it could be they just don't want to remake their farms later, so make them 3x3 so eventually when they get buckets they can put a spot of water in the center.  That's all I can figure anyway.  I just water my crops manually.  It's not that big of a deal.  :shrug:

[Hal13]

I'm foremost a technical player and second to that a mediocre builder.

Like in Minecraft you just can build terrain features, so it's easier to start with a flat surface and build up the terrain you want to have around your build, unlike in reality where moving mountains is near impossible and mining stable tunnels into a building would take months, terrain itself poses little to no strategic value. The 3wide plots are efficient if you put water on both sides, though I mostly go for 7x7 greenhouses instead, imo the best way to irrigate farmland is making sure no block of it is further than 2 blocks from a water source; a single water source can irrigate farmland up to 3 blocks away so making strips of farmland 3blocks wide is efficient too, as it's the least work, the blocks directly touched by water are the best irrigated though and optimizing for growthtime therefore would mean farmland only adjacent to water, but having no block of farmland further away than 2 blocks from the water and optimizing for scythe use at the same time is the most efficient in terms of optimizing for as little time used for agricultural tasks as possible.

The features I like most in VS are having options to play the way I like, not necessarily how some dev intended the game to be played. I very much like that there is no end goal, no boss to be fought to reach the end of the game.

[Thorfinn]

On 6/19/2022 at 1:06 AM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

I'm not sure what TP means

Sorry. Terra preta.

I rarely make 3-wide farms because the center row will almost always lag unless you hand-water. Maybe not in extremely high rainfall, but I wouldn't swear to that. A 2-wide field flanked by irrigation ditches matures more or less at the same time, and a scythe isn't that large of an investment even if you waste 1/3 of its potential. It's not like you can't make the field 1/3 wider.

I'm not even sure that a 3-wide optimizes for player time. A 3-wide will take an extra day or two, and thus fewer harvests per year. Maybe more importantly, that delay results in fewer  bonus seed drops. Watering takes player time. I don't figure it's worth the time for the difference in yield, particularly first spring and into summer, versus just going with a 2-wide and never bothering even making the can, let alone using it.

YMMV.