peitum

Personally, I voted for the Lovecraftian update, mostly for the main story event! Scrolls and clothing are not enough to satiate my extreme hunger for LOAR. Giant creatures and alchemy also see like new and unique additions to the game, and buffing ruins would also be great!

Combat comes in at a close second, but objectively, it should probably be ranked higher than the lovecraftian update. Ironing out some of the issues with combat is probably best done before adding in giant creatures (assuming, of course, that they're things we are going to be fighting). Also, when I brought in my friend to play, a lot of his complaints were combat-related, particularly the weird pathfinding and hitboxes, and the lack of shields.

The other three options do have some great options in them (boats, more animals/birds, leashes and a brick kiln all sound wonderful), but I'm not *quite* as excited about them as the Lovecraft/combat update.

Looks like homesteading is going to win though.

The sound design in this game is lovely, but I do have a few suggestions for more auditory additions to the game.

Auditory Cues For Smelting: While the sound of the cooking pot rattling is a great way to tell when the meals are still cooking, there’s nothing for the other campfire recipes. An auditory cue for when metal is done smelting or clay is done firing would be great for multi-tasking. Molten metal could bubble or sizzle as it finishes melting, and clay could make a ceramic pinging noise as it’s ‘cooling’.

In-Game Temporal Storm Warning: Have in-world warnings that temporal storms are approaching, as the single message in the chat log is easy to miss. Auditory cues could include some ambient music, heartbeats, or drifter noises. In addition, some visual effects could be the sky slowly turning rusty, or a few stray dust motes here and there, increasing in intensity as the storm approaches.

Time-Related Sounds: The sound of crickets at nightfall and birdsong in the morning. Even if these animals aren’t actually in the game (yet? ) the sounds will be a nice transition from night to day and vice-versa. They probably wouldn’t play during winter, but that would help winter seem more ‘lifeless’ by comparison.

Feel free to add some other ideas!

On 11/28/2020 at 9:04 PM, GhillieEilish said:

This would be a huge boon. I think just about every player does this. Maybe at some point add inkwells, quills and parchment/papyrus?

I like this idea! Papyrus is already a plant in the game (although it appears to give the same items as cooper's reeds). I see ink and parchment as more of a permanent, non-editable option, though. It's hard to erase ink. It would be great for multiplayer servers, as a way to send letters and record events. Let's see, going to ramble for a bit here...

For papyrus/parchment:

From this site: "Papyrus sheets are made by arranging two layers of papyrus, one atop the other, at right angles. The layers are then pressed together, and the gum released by the breakdown of the plant's cellular structure acts as a glue which bonds the sheet together."

So a basic crafting recipe could look something like this:

Stone

Papyrus Sheet

Papyrus Sheet

Would give you one sheet of papyrus.

Alternatively, an in-world crafting process could be right-clicking with the two papyrus sheets onto a solid block and then placing the stone on top. This might need to be left for a while, half a day or so.

Alternatives to papyrus (because it is quite localized) could be parchment made from dried hides, or paper made from linen. I don't know a lot about making paper from linen, but making parchment is a (link contains pics of animals skins, btw) bit of a process, requiring the hide to be soaked in limewater, scraped, and then stretched out over a period of time.

For the ink:

Inks could be made in a barrel, or a placed bucket of water. Ink making looks pretty complicated from just a brief bit of reading, but simplified for the game, it could require a combination of water + a solid pigment. There appear to have been a lot of different types of pigments used throughout history, but the ones that stand out are charcoal and ocher.

Charcoal is simple, just stick some charcoal in a quern and grind it. Mixing this with water would give you black ink, at maybe 1:5 ratio giving you 5 units of ink.

For ochre...this could either be a new form of ore, or a mixed combination of ground-up iron ore nuggets + a clay ball + sand. Mixing this with water would give you brown ink. Because of the steps involved, perhaps this could give you more ink per piece of pigment used (say, 10 units water + 1 part pigment = 10 units of ink).

And then there's olivine already in the game, which could give you fancy green ink.

yeah, pigs especially! they eat anything in real life, they should get their own trough that accepts any foodstuff. it would give them an advantage over the sheep, too. i haven't even bothered to capture any pigs because the sheep give red meat and we'll be able to milk them soon... what, exactly, do pigs offer? if i could feed them surplus vegetables, then i would definitely start raising them, too.

I'm also in the lootable corpse/grave camp. The first time I died, I started running back to where I died and got a temporal storm warning before I even left my base, so there wouldn't have been enough time to get there and back. It gives people a little time to strategize how to recover their items rather than just making a desperate run for them.

When exp and skills are a thing, will there be an option to lose everything on death, rather than just some? Having semi-permadeath would be a really cool game mode, especially if it was combined with the randomized spawn points that Omega mentioned (and maybe wiping the explored minimap/waypoints?) Your old character would be dead for good and you would have to start from scratch, with a chance that you might one day stumble across their body or home.

I love the adobe oven idea! Cooking meals takes up so much firewood, a way to trade off the temperature for longer fuel time would be wonderful.

Plus the smoked jerky, we really do need proper traveling foods.

For the mason jars, maybe you would have to cook them (boil them, in other words) in order to properly seal them? That way you still have to do something to set the seal, and the seal will still break once you start taking meals from it.

As mentioned, the roundhouse is the centre of my settlement, and there's quite a lot going on inside!

Edit: Links because forums do not like imgurs imbeds

The view from the door. Cosy!

To the right of the door is my cooking area. I wanted a proper stove so I used microblocks. The barrel collects all my honey and the blue tile is my ‘sink’ with my water source inside. Still trying to figure out a good design for a tap.

My smithing area. Everything I need to make my basic tools. I’m still trying to properly enter the bronze age. I have yet to find a sphalerite vein, all the bismuth bronze there is what I could get from panning. To the left is the staircase to the loft.

Hidden storage chests beneath the fake shelves for my to-be-fired clay and my glass.

Skipping over the stairs and cellar for the moment…

My little living area, with my bed and some of my favourite seashells. On my to do list is a display case and chiselling out the shelf in order to hide chests beneath to store the rest of my seashells, which are starting to pile up in my  storage area…

Storage area. Pretty simple, although I do have overflow storage in the loft above. The doors to the right lead to my little panning area, walled in for when temporal storms hit.

View of the door.

View of the loft. Not much up here, yet, except for bones, feathers and excess stone, but I wanted room to expand.

My root cellar. The pillars need to be changed to polished stone bricks, but for now it is functional. I have no idea how much food I would need for winter, but this is all I’ve managed to get. Meat and veggie stews are on the right, fruit porridge is on the left, and my jams are on the left. Most of the vessels and all of the barrels are empty.

And as a little bonus, here's my first little house, and a screenshot back from one of my first few nights.

Hope you enjoyed!

As winter approaches during my first year in Vintage story, I thought it would be nice to record my progress so far (at about 100 hours). For the record, I am playing single-player vanilla with all default settings except for 30-day months. These pictures were taken around September, 1386. This is my first real Vintage Story world, while I have owned the game for several years and played a few worlds for a few hours each, I've never made it beyond the stone age until now.

This is my little homestead, Stellar's Jay.

Stellar's Jay sits in a little meadow not far from the spawn point. I initially chose this settlement because of a burial mound I discovered in my first few days. Sadly, no pictures of it's original state.

I've since uncovered the mound, but I'm still not sure what I want to do with it.

The roundhouse was my first major build, and everything else has been built around it. Just behind it, you can see my little cave home that I lived in for my first few weeks.

My windmill. Facing west, as that is the way the wind blows.

My chicken coop. The chickens are currently in their fourth generation. I've not a lot of grain, so they're probably going to go pretty hungry over winter!

Sheepfold, currently infested with drifters.

Tannery. I put a lot of barrels in, as I prefer to make my leather in large batches rather than a bit at a time.

To the south of the chicken coop is my farm, very much a work in progress. I've been expanding plot by plot as I get enough terra preta to do so. Currently it is enough to feed me, but I've built it with feeding animals in mind.

My apiary field with a reed patch.

I initially thought to use tables to act as fake beehive legs, but then hit upon microchiselling a proper base. Unfortunately I've not done much caving, so these are the only two pieces of aged planks I've found so far.

And finally, the map of the area. The road to the southwest leads to the nearest trader, and the one to the south is a work-in-progress road to a commodities trader and the limestone quarry.

Planned expansions are a woodshed to the west of the tannery, a helvehammer workshop north of the windmill, and possibly a boar pen east of the chicken coop.

Interior of the roundhouse will be in the next post.

Good idea, but it would not make sense for flax, as the flax fibre you get is the stalk. Maybe you would only get grass/hay from rye and spelt (and possibly rice, I don't know that much about the rice plant)

There’s a lot to do in this game, and part of the complexity comes from proper time management. Quite often in this game I find myself writing things down, whether it’s future projects, the next day’s chores, or the goods a particular trader is looking for. While this works, I would love a way to do this in-game. Signs and charcoal exist, but they are stationary and require a lot of space for longer lists. I think there can be a better solution—something portable, that doesn’t require consuming precious charcoal. Wax tablets!

Wax tablets are wooden tablets covered with a layer of wax, that can be marked and ‘erased’ by use of a stylus. They’ve been used for thousands of years in real life. I propose their inclusion in the game as a form of in-world notebook. They could be craftable from beeswax, boards and a stick, and when right-clicked, open up a large writing space that can be edited freely, with a much larger character limit than the signs (preferably at least 500 words). Perfect for note-taking on the go.

Suggested recipe:

(Blank) Stick (Blank)

Board Beeswax Board

Board Beeswax Board

Very creepy, especially the second one!

Those reeds want to leave that lake so badly!

I voted "In rare large clusters and veins. Prospecting should directly indicate a cluster."

Prospecting works ok, although the second mode should really be enabled by default. Ore generation, though.. I like the idea that Erik put forward about a few smaller clusters for getting started, but also rarer massive veins.

There's not really any way to avoid an initial "minecraft clone!!!" reaction while it remains a voxel-based game. While "voxel survival-sandbox games" are becoming their own genre, minecraft is always going to be the first thing that jumps to people's minds when they see the blocks, and that's probably not going to change for a while, at least not until there's enough games, such as this one, that do their own unique thing and do it well. Maybe not even then.

Most of the things that make VS unique and special are non-visual... the slower and more careful progression, the more varied needs (nutrition, farming nutrients, animal weight), the realistic approach to the environment and resource abundance, and (probably the thing that I'm most looking forward to seeing expanded) the background lore. These things become apparently really quickly once you actually start playing, but anyone just looking at a couple screenshots or even watching a clip or two isn't going to pick up on them.

I mean when I posted some pictures of my little homestead to my discord server (friends with whom I play mostly minecraft), one of my friends actually thought it was from our minecraft server. And it was of my windmill, possibly one of the most visually non-minecraft things in the game.

So if it's going to be compared to minecraft anyway, it's probably best to focus on features that mesh well with the things above that make it special, instead of trying to make it Not Minecraft. Defining something by what it isn't doesn't make for a very cohesive game.

That being said..