Streetwind

@BronzeSpartan The reason OP is asking is because there's a new game mode coming for 1.18 that doesn't have any traders (or anything else that implies the existence of other people). It's meant for people who want a stone age simulator and don't care about the lore and story. @Ruyeex You could always cook up a bunch of regular clay bricks, switch to creative mode, delete the bricks you made, and pull out some red and brown ones in their stead.

Such a seed doesn't exist yet, because Vintage Story cannot generate oceans yet. Thus islands are also nonexistant for the time being. This will change with the coming 1.18 update. You can take a look at it in the prerelease, but keep in mind that it is still quite unstable at the moment. Also, the ocean generation is still highly experimental and fairly likely to change again before the stable release. Starting a new savegame for long-term play with the prerelease is a bad idea - give it another month or so to reach stable first.

This already exists, but you have to be logged in for it.

You can generate the world you want in singleplayer, and then make your multiplayer server use it.

I always fully reinstall major versions. Comes with the territory of having a separate install of each version I want to play

The glider you get from interacting with the story event/dungeon is incredibly fast. Sure, you need a high place to jump off of - but you can travel decently by leaping from a hill, gliding to the foot of the next hill, hopping up that hill, and leaping off the top to glide again. Admittedly, that won't let you cross massive oceans. But a tall launch tower at the water's edge will get you across pretty much any lake in the default worldgen setting. Also, the raft is probably a first prototype for the boating system. I don't expect it to be the final word on water travel. But already, it is more useful than you think - it lets you avoid getting wet in winter while crossing bodies of water.

On one hand, I love the idea. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of outright disabling a game mechanic. Perhaps the scarecrow could track how long it has been placed? That would just be a simple calendar check. And the longer it has been there, the more likely it becomes that animals will decide to ignore its presence. You could then let the player change something on the scrarecrow - like changing its pose or dressing it in a different shirt, or even picking it up and placing it in a different spot - to reset the counter and restore the scariness.

You're in luck - this is already implemented for the coming 1.18 update

Oh no, Microsoft is streaming telemetry from my OS, I will avoid that by letting everyone else but Microsoft get into my system through huge gaping holes that no antivirus can keep closed anymore! Sorry for putting it like that, but the argument is nonsense. Sure, if you want to make a point of protesting Microsoft's corporate strategy and its greedy collecting of your private usage data, that's entirely fair. But please don't pretend it's about being security conscious, because if you really were, you'd be aware just how vulnerable Windows 7 really is these days. And you would have migrated away long ago. Linux is an option, sure. But if you'd like a familiar environment, there are ways to beat the phoning-home out of newer Windows versions too. Either through tools you can install when Windows is already running, or through custom pre-built sources that install slimmed-down versions without all the telemetry and bloatware. Ghost Spectre Windows is one such. (But as with any ISO you download off the internet, I encourage you to not blindly listen to me and rather look into it yourself to determine if it looks trustworthy to you.)

There is an exclusion zone around the player where no rifts can spawn, just like no creatures can spawn within a certain number of blocks of you. If your house is large enough, you may still get a rift in one part while you're in another, but only if there are some areas that are not well lit. And it will not be near enough to you to affect your stability while you sleep. Additionally, the coming 1.18 update will add a thingamabob that players can build to block rift spawning in an area.

This is currently under very active discussion on Discord, and a lot of people have a lot of opinions about this. On one hand, both .NET 4 and Windows 7 are extremely old. Using Win7 with an internet connection in this day and age is a major security risk for the user, and building software on an outdated framework makes that software slower and less safe. .NET 7 in particular has significant performance optimizations under the hood that would really benefit people using older hardware. Additionally, the Steam user survey, which is a fairly representative global sample of PC gamers, suggests that fewer than 2% of all Steam users are still using Windows versions older than Win10. On the other hand, reducing the scope of supported platforms without prior announcement is a dick move, even with an essentially unlimited refund policy like Vintage Story has. The team is well aware of this, and Tyron aspirationally wants to continue shipping old framework builds for multiple future releases. On the third hand, shipping multiple builds in parallel is fraught with issues, both when it comes to developing the base game, and when it comes to mod support. Maintaining support for the old framework costs development time that could be spent on improving the game instead. Modders would have to choose between supporting and debugging two separate versions of each of their mods, or to pick just one and not service the other. This risks a split in the modding community that'll get worse the longer the base game decides to maintain support for the outdated framework and Windows versions. It has been confirmed that 1.18 will be shipping on both .NET 4 and .NET 7. Anything beyond that, nobody knows for sure. Meanwhile, good lord, update your OS. Please don't tell me you habitually do online banking on this machine...

If you configure the server correctly (for example using 30 days per month and tuning the spoilage modifier to account for it) then you will have fewer issues. And as l33tman said, consider playing on a server that matches your schedule, together with other people with similar schedules and timezones. The server stops progressing time when nobody is on it, meaning that if everyone only logs on in the evenings, then the server remains paused for the majority of the day, and nothing spoils. If you hop onto a server that has players from around the world, including adolescents who have time almost around the clock, then the server will never pause because someone is always online. This gets suggested every now and then, and every time it is suggested, it is still a terrible idea that whoever is suggesting it has not thought through all the way. The game needs to be able to support gameplay with an arbitrary number of people. It must be playable alone, with two people, with three people, and so on, in any combination of concurrency. VS currently has six classes. Let's limit them so that there are six major things that are class specific. Only the Commoner can farm and breed animals, only the Blackguard can smith weapons and armor parts, only the Tailor can make anything that's worn including armor and backpacks, and so on. Congratulations, you have now made the game impossible to play with less than six players. You could make a special singleplayer class that can do it all, but that doesn't solve the problem. A pair of friends who want to play together cannot, unless they all pick the singleplayer class that can do it all. Neither can three, or four, or five people. And what if you have seven? Every role is already taken, and no matter which class you choose, your one special thing won't be special anymore. Guess what the solution to this problem is? Yes: the solution is everyone picking the singleplayer class that can do it all. Which is the model we currently have. Also, imagine that you have a busy life, and you can only play every couple of days in the evenings. You need to set time aside specifically for the game, sacrificing other things you could be doing in that time. You log on, having a precious three hours that you want to make use of, and a plan what to do with them. Within ten minutes of gameplay, you figure out that you really need something from another player, without which you pretty much cannot do what you planned to do today. Unfortunately, that player isn't online right now. He was here yesterday, he was here earlier today, and he'll be there tomorrow - but you missed him, because of your busy schedule. Also, your class is blocked from doing the thing yourself. Congratulations, your entire plan for the evening just went up in flames, and your precious three hours will be wasted. Guess what the solution to this problem is? Yes: the solution is everyone picking the singleplayer class that can do it all. Which is the model we currently have. Perhaps the developers actually do have a little bit of an idea what they're doing? Now, I'm not saying that there are no solutions to this. Though rare, there are games that successfully implement a personal specialization model in an open world freeform survival game. Eco is such a game, for example. But if you wanted to use that as an example, you'd also have to understand how drastically different Eco is from Vintage Story. In Eco, there are no classes; specializations are built dynamically, through an experience-grinding and levelup system. Meanwhile, VS is built from the ground up with the idea of player progression coming in the form of player knowledge, skill, and access to resources. In Eco, the worlds are tiny, so that you can reach any point of the world on foot in fewer than five minutes, enabling you to easily visit any player's homestead at the drop of a hat, and there is no story or exploration whatsoever. Meanwhile in VS, the worlds are gigantic, and exploration and background lore are a key game design pillar. In Eco, there is no combat, neither PvE nor PvP; there is only one single danger, and that is the looming meteor impact 30 days after world start, the avoidance of which is the goal of the game; and after the destruction of the meteor, there is no further goal or challenge or reason to keep playing. Meanwhile, VS seeks to make you fight for survival on a daily basis, both against the environment and potentially other hostile players (if that's your thing). It does this without a time-limited goal that arbitrarily decides whether a world is still worth playing in or not. In Eco, the whole game is set up to be a collaborative effort against that one single final goal, where every single player's base is basically a shop front that offers their specialized goods for sale while they are offline, which while useful also leads to a lot of multiplayer gameplay devolving to interacting with store fronts rather than interacting with other players. Meanwhile, VS seeks to immerse you in a world where you, or you and your friends, feel like you are really there. Where you are presented with a variety of possible approaches to a variety of different problems and can set your own goals and game plan without a time limit. Your takeaway here should be that what you really want to see - an engaging multiplayer experience with meaningful personal specialization - takes far, far more of a change than just limiting what classes can do. It takes so much of a change that, potentially, the changed game would no longer be the Vintage Story you are currently enjoying. So this is a very, very difficult topic. Considering that the game isn't even feature-complete for singleplayer yet, there are probably other things higher up on the dev team's priority list.

Yes, temperature currently changes at a rate of 0.667°C per block height difference (says Tyron on Discord), colder at high altitudes, warmer at low ones, independent of total world height. Note: 1.18 is likely to make changes to this formula, as there is a worldgen revamp coming with it.

You do this by placing the slabs into the crafting grid. This locks them in one orientation. Place them into the crafting grid again locks them in the other. Doing it a third time resets them to normal.

I play with soil gravity on. Looking up and realizing I just wandered randomly into a place where I can see caves all around me and there might be nothing below the layer of dirt I'm standing on is a frequent source of anxiety Also, a bell spawning close by and suddenly going off. (If you don't know what that is - good, your face when it happens will be glorious!)

Looking at past updates, the time between the first preview build and the stable release of an update is somewhere between 1.5 and 3 months. Right now, we've not had a first preview build posted yet. Therefore, I'm personally not expecting a stable release before late March at the earliest, possibly April. That should help you decide whether you want to wait or not.

...Touché. I did not consider multiplayer (chiefly because I've never been on a server).

This game is meant to offer progression across multiple ingame years. I've seen a thread about a challenge to reach steel in year one, but that's a narrowly focused speedrun - even the most experienced players need a second year to really get everything fully set up and themselves kitted out. Nevermind future content additions (this game is unfinished as of yet), or getting into lore and exploration, themed building, and other activities beside progression. If the time it takes for a crop to grow once is too much for you... then yeah, maybe this is not the right game for you. The good news is, the game has a very generous refund policy. You can ask for a refund at pretty much any time, for pretty much any reason, and you will get it.

No, the passage of time is paused while you are in the character editor. You can confirm this is the case by installing the HUD Clock mod. It will show you that it remains 08:00 in the morning the entire time you spend on tweaking your character. The clock only starts advancing after you've exited the editor.

That's not good enough, I'm afraid. When installed this way, both games will use the same default data folder (at %appdata%\vintagestorydata), meaning the same config files, the same saves, and the same modset (incompatible between versions). To really have two entirely independent versions side by side, it's necessary to manually retarget the data folder. Thankfully, that is easier than it sounds. Using this technique, the only limit to the number of parallel installs is your disk space.

Could you perhaps tell us what your mod is supposed to do, so those potentially interested in testing know what to look out for? I get it, no one likes writing documentation. I don't either. But while you can read your mind - we can't! We need it spelled out, fully and in detail, or we risk forming mistaken assumptions about anything and everything.

The spinny thing? Why, it's right there in the name! It spins, of course! It dries your wet laundry! It entertains small children! It mesmerizes your enemies! It prevents squirrels from getting to your bird feeder! It prevents rifts from forming nearby! It's the perfect christmas gift for your spouse! Everyone wants a spinny thing.

From the Discord, posted this morning:

As far as I know, it was never confirmed what exactly it is (unlike the spinny thing, we know exactly what that is) but there have been guesses. Everything from a portable glider to a portable... painting easel.

Which store did you buy from? External stores (Humble, itch.io) have occasionally run out of keys in the past, and needed to be resupplied by the dev team. But that shouldn't happen with the game's own store. Did you check your email spam folder? Sometimes autmated mails from unknown addresses get falsely flagged. If neither of these things explains you not receiving your key email, and 24 hours have passed, mouse over the "client area" button at the top of the forum. There'll be two new links appearing in the white area below it, one of them called "Support". There, open a support ticket explaining where and when you have bought the game and with which email address. A support team member will try to help you. However, allow a few days for this to happen, especially around christmas, as the VS team is a small group comprised largely of volunteers.