lemonke

I haven't been playing much just lately, but I was making good progress on a second game (wrote off the bad winter start, at least for now). Started the game off by sprinting around eating berries during the day and sleeping at night to fill in the map until I got to what I thought was a good spot for a base. Knowing to avoid forest and knowing that sprinting + berry-eating was viable, and having some sense of what I would need out of an early-stage base, all kind of came together. The handbook is a must, but I don't think it quite gets you started, if you don't just luck into a fortunate base location by accident. And even if you do, you still have to understand that sprinting all over the map is a necessary early game strategy to get enough farming going early enough to stock up for winter. This does feel like a bit of a throwback to unfair game design. I dig the immersive absence of handholding, but could have used a few more hints, from "some places don't have wolves" to "wolves are supposed to be like that", to "get a farm going already" and "cover a wide area on foot ASAP". Cooking was fine once sushieater pointed out I missed the right handbook page.

You too, huh? Glad to hear your approach got you through the winter, since it's the same thing I'm doing. I'll start stockpiling and hopefully that'll be good enough. That's kind of what I was thinking. In a hilly, puddle and shrub-heavy semi-forested area, it's kind of rough. Also, thanks for the spoiler note about mining. That'll give me a good bit of direction... makes sense that it'd work that way, but I wouldn't have guessed. Even though I am theoretically avoiding spoilers, this was the specificity I needed to put two and two together. I ran around taking surveys of forestedness with that wgen command, and there's a lot of 20% or so forest around me. That seems to be enough to spawn wolves and bears, explains why I'm having a hard time exploring I think. I started a second Explorer-mode game, dialed back a little bit towards Survival settings, just to try to get my bearings. It spawned me in the middle of this black forest with temporal instability all around, would have been a hilariously rough start in Survival mode. I found 120 copper nuggets on the ground in the first ten minutes. But then, walking to some shrub-land that looked more like save 1's base, there was only, maybe twice as many copper nuggets per unit area that I ran into vs game 1, not scarce, but not so plentiful either. Clearly it's all about biome and RNG. Walking further is probably my best bet to make more progress, except that I can't easily tell when I set foot into dangerous territory. s'all good though. I think I've got enough a sense of why things felt broken to exorcise the doing-it-wrong feeling, and I should be able to get by with reading the handbook guide pages a little more systematically. Thanks everybody. I genuinely appreciate all the context, help, and tips. It's a shame the forum won't let you mark multiple posts as answers.

Sure enough, I read something about cooking in the guide, thought I'd read that guide page, but I had not. With the right strategy, they are not (but definitely not worth the effort and risk). Going melee toe-to-toe is the wrong strategy. Deep water is your friend. Shallow water is your enemy. Humans have been using traps forever. Melee is an option, once you have gambeson armor. Using early game armor that slows you down is a deadly mistake. It offers little protection and prevents you from getting away. Wolves and bears can re-spawn really quickly, so killing them is pretty much pointless (other animals are less risky and offer better rewards). Stay away from forest in the early game. This is all very useful, thanks. I'm definitely more interested in managing my relationship with wolves than fighting them. At least until I can tech up to space lasers and commit wolf genocide. Oh yes, the wolves will know fear, oh yes. Uh, where was... Oh, right, forests and ruins. Are forests delimited by anything you can visually identify? I mean, I need to chop a lot of trees somehow, and all the trees seem to have wolves behind hills or behind shrubs, stealthily hunting me. In fact, all directions from my base seem to have trees, wolves, and bears. I guess this is ok if running away and dying is a very big part of the early game, but this feels like I'm doing something wrong. I have only started one game so far. Maybe the RNG hates me. I've come across a fair number of ruins (half dozen?) with their old pots, found a little coal, some seeds, mostly stole the cobblestone blocks for base-building aesthetic reasons. Have I been unlucky, or were you lucky, with the pickaxes? Are traps more in the designed or emergent part of the game? Are we talking a craftable item, or something closer to a Minecraft monster farm? The handbook doesn't list anything when I search for "trap". Sorry for asking too many questions -- are the handbook files accessible outside the game? I'd kill to be able to read this in a bigger window with better navigation. Seems like there is some mandatory homework prior to playing that I haven't done yet, back to my original question about study of spoilers vs. blind exploration; and the handbook may be a good compromise between those two things.

Hi Shannon, I got curious and started looking up Windows HDR problems in forums. Yikes. You have my sympathy. Sounds like one of these classic industry-wide failure scenarios that could be caused by anything. Monitor settings, monitor cables, monitor drivers, monitor hardware, graphics chips, graphics drivers, whatever in the poorly conceived hell MSI Dragon Center is... some rando on reddit thinks it's a known Nvidia bug in fullscreen modes in games, might try running the game in windowed mode. I definitely can't help you, swore off Windows myself, but 0-reply forum threads are depressing, so I thought I'd commiserate.

Hello. I've recently started playing Vintage Story. As a new player, I'm not sure what to make of the game. I would like to play it unspoiled, with gradual revelation of game mechanics, lore, areas, etc. Is that even possible? My gameplay so far has been, I misread a beginner note saying you could cook cat tails, didn't understand several things about cooking, and died four times from starvation. Cat tail roots. This was probably on me. Cat tail roots not in a cooking pot. Cat tail roots without any other edible, cookable items. Seemingly arbitrary combinations of ingredients do and don't work, ingredient quantities must match, and the cooking pot tells you whether your recipe is valid using italicized text or its absence. This last point was what unlocked cooking for me. Previously, I was always picking invalid combinations and getting no feedback. As I understand it, combat consists of trying to not run into things while running away from things, making sure always to hold down the go-fast key and to avoid jumping off of or into anything. After being killed six times in a row by wolves and/or bears while attempting to retrieve one inventory, I turned off inventory loss on death. That wolf was standing right on top of my items, 10 minutes isn't long enough for strategy, and that would have been 64 cattails for the baskets alone, nevermind the other items. I now consider wolves to be an area denial mechanic. Bears, in contrast to wolves, are bigger and less common, so you can often avoid them, so they're more like instant-death rooms. Was that a graphical glitch? There was something wooshing past me... Oh, that's what a locust looks like. The Internet still thinks that surface copper is a thing, but I believe that was patched out. Got a total so far of maybe 10 pieces of copper, across four sites, and that was a ton of walking and a ton of granite and flint, hundreds of rocks. I really don't think I'm just overlooking it. Is panning the mandated approach now to bootstrap copper? Drifters feel pretty fair, to be honest. I did accidentally die at night one time and then the game started respawning me all night long in the same pack of 7 or so Drifters, so, oops. They seem manageable with caution, restraint at night, and attention to the Drifter weather. Made it through a light Temporal Storm, understanding intuitively that what was called for was the warm embrace of earth in my Safety Coffin, and patience. A bear killed me immediately outside my Safety Coffin, approximately at the same time as I said, "Shit, that's a bear!" In short, the game seems to punish you hard not so much because it's innately challenging, but for your ignorance. I have been reading the handbook, but it's more of a reference than a guide as far as I can tell. Am I just doing it wrong? How wrong? Is this just a case of "(Read the Wiki|Watch the YouTube), Stupid," like Nethack, or can the game lend itself to relatively blind exploration? Second question, are wolves supposed to be roughly impossible without armor? (If not, what if you don't have armor and don't like cheese tactics?) I read something about trees, and if I imagine that every single birch is a foreboding Forest of Doom, wolves make sense suddenly, but that makes the game kind of... there are a lot of trees and I struggle to understand what Vintage Story wants from me, what the design is conceptually.