EnbyKaiju

The way I see it optimisation should never be the end goal of Vintage Story, the strive to min-max everything makes it feel too much like minecraft. Just enjoying the flow of the game and taking it in a way that feels natural to you. Having a little building set aside for each thing and making it feel real is a great way to do that. I can't wait too see the future incarnations of your little town and the builds that come next!

So much love and care has gone into all these designs, I really love them! I love how considered each space is to feel used and alive.

I love a good lighthouse build in VS, a game that very much encourages them. And this, it's a damn good lighthouse. Nice work. You picked the perfect spot for it to, I love how shaped to the outcrop it is.

Rainbow house!! It looks so cute!

Snowball earth runs are a fantastic challenge that I'd highly recommend if just because it teaches you how to do more with less. Most of your standard resourses are coming out of storage vessels, no real trader access, and most of your food supply will be meat. And you'll never find a better way to perfect the art of spear-throwing. Temperature wise the way Vintage Story handles it is that the further you are from the equator the greater the shift in yearly temperature. So while winters can get down to -40c+ (I think the worst I had was -50c, you get maybe 10 minutes outside before you freeze to death), the height of summer will go up to about 10c. Not great, but plenty to grow most cold-weather crops. I hope you like rye bread, haha. If you make greenhouses you can give yourself a little extra room to grow. I've even grown rice, but you have to be real good with your timing to get it to last the full growing cycle. The old "I spent 100 days in a snowball earth" youtuber trick used to be to grow all the stuff underground where it's warmer. But VS devs added an option to stop that being a thing by default and I agree with it. Mushroom farming underground I'd be cool with, but not the crops that need sunlight. A word of warning. It is the kind of challenge where you're probably going to die a lot. If not to the cold, or the hunger, then the polar bears who are waiting behind every snow drift. So be kind to yourself and maybe leave keep inventory on death on. It'll save you wanting to rage quit when you're having to travel thousands of blocks across glaciers to find your stuff. Good luck! And if you have any other questions feel free to ask

After about 210 hours spent in this long dark apocalypse I think I'm finally ready to close this chapter of my adventures. This was about 2 full in-game years with 20 day months (which made for very long, dark winters), on wilderness survival which was...a real challenge. There's only really so much that I could find to do on a snowball earth though, with so few biomes & seasons to work with, so it was never going to be a forever world. That is probably going to be for when the next update drops and I can finally let loose with all the ideas I've been planning up. But I'm really proud of what I accomplished here. Most of the story elements done aside from the very end. I reached the equator, both on foot and by elk, to find the last remnants of humanity to trade with. I've steel, sturdy leather, and all the mechanical power I could need. Domesticated livestock and enough food & ale in my pantry to keep my belly full. And a cozy castle keep built atop a basalt outcropping in the middle of a frozen lake that I fight off the eldritch monsters that come for me from my nightmares. If there is such a thing as thriving in an endless winter, I've made it there. Thank you, Vintage Story devs, for giving me something I could throw myself into when real life is such a struggle. And thanks to this wonderful community for always sharing kind words and feedback & demonstrating that the fandom for this game is the best around. I wouldn't still be here without this game enjoy. for that I'll always be grateful From my snow-topped castle at the North Pole, this will be my final log on this stage of my journey. Winter is fun to visit, but I wouldn't recommend living here -Kaiju

That is a gorgeous build! I love how organic and lived in it all feels. Has a very "a lone sole discovered the ruins and built their forever home from it" vibe.

I'm loving your small build designs, they are lovely! Vintage Story is thankfully far better designed for small builds than Minecraft is. You can get an impressive amount of stuff into quite a small house, and it really does feel like a game designed to encourage you to build smaller but denser builds than epic scale ones (though they can be cool too). Depending on the kind of world I'm playing I vary between one big build and a small town, both have their advantages, so stick to what makes you happy

A fantastic start for a new player! It looks like you've really taken the strengths of the game to heart and made something that feels cozy and happy for you. Hope you share many more of your builds in the coming years

I've had some folks ask where I referenced this idea from, and it's from a print from a Discworld collectables store. There's probably a lot more detail I could go into with it, and in my next build I probably will go a lot more intricate, especially on the inside, but if you'd like the reference to try for your own it's at the link below. It's a beautiful design that fits perfectly into the kind of design philosophies that Vintage Story allows for! And if you haven't read the Discworld books before, I highly recommend it! They are wonderful experiences. https://www.discworldemporium.com/product/granny-weatherwax-s-cottage-print/

Absolutely! I'd really love to do more Discworld themed builds in the coming runs, the Discworld Emporium sells a lot of puzzles that have fantastic art to use as references. Would be pretty lovely to do the Broken Drum, or Death's house, or go all in and try an Unseen University/Tower of Art. For a chilly temperate zone though I think Lancre is the perfect place to get started.

This is utterly stunning, huge levels of appreciation for the amount of thought that has gone into this. Been trying to work out a mod-less way of doing a proper tea-house and you've really come up with some beautiful designs here. Only wishing VS had a way of doing sliding doors without a mod as that's one of the few things you can't do, even with chiselling. 10/10 work, incredible!

I love winter in game, it's the only reason I don't set up down in the tropical zones more. If you leave yourself a bunch of stuff to do, stockpile stuff over the summer/autumn it can bring a real sense of joy to just be able to sit around doing little jobs where all you have to do is focus, and go with the flow. So I'll usually spend that time chiselling decorations, processing metals, making charcoal, planning out stuff I wanna do in the new year, sifting bony soil, solid reorganisation of all the stuff. Then you take a walk out into the snow with a jug of wine and enjoy the quiet. Maybe take the elf for a spin over the snow. I tend to do longer months though, like 20-30 day months, so it makes the whole thing a lot more of an experience to find your peace in. You do what makes you happy

Yus! It's a mix of chiselled basalt & chalk, the closest I could do at the time to replicate a proper Kyūdō setup. They are really great for practicing archery when you've got a little down time or want to do archery competitions with friends. Next run I do, when I've got more space & time is to do a full archery range, but this'll do for now

Yeah, I've seen those mods and think they are pretty hecking cool, but I try to keep my runs as vanilla as possible. I think it's more of a fun challenge trying to make the affects I want via chiselling (without any chiselling mods) and working those into the build as best I can. It gives me something to do during the long winter nights, haha. That being said I'm almost tempted to mod up just for sliding doors, which is the only thing I can't do without mods. I'm hoping the VS crew expand things to be a little more East-Asian friendly, but we'll have to see how they take things in the long run or if they just stick to a Eurocentric perspective.

After about 400 or so hours working on this survival island world (~0% landmass) I think I'm about done with this until the new update drops and we've some more tools to play with. But I've really enjoyed using the islands as a limitation to try out designs I really want to work into a forever world with larger landmasses. The castle is a bit of a mash-up between Matsumoto-jo and Himeji-jo, with a little bit of Osaka-jo outbuildings for balance, which I really liked playing with and helped me work out the kind of resources I needed for a project of this scale (i.e. a LOT, and I'll need a lot more than that if I want to go full scale), and the sort of balance between landscape & building to make it feel authentic. The internals were something I was never too happy with (mainly because there's not a lot of good traditional Japanese design availability in core VS (pls VS team, let us place stuff on half slabs one day), but this was a wonderful place to live. Yes, I'm an utter nerd for Japanese architecture & design, I've a half-dozen trips worth of photos that I'm using for inspiration. Getting decent tiered farming is still pretty difficult without infinite source blocks (I like the challenge), but I don't think it came out too bad. But the long term plan once the next update comes out is to do much larger islands so I can do at least a decent sized Japanese castle town. Waterwheels will be the gamechanger there because there's a lot more instances of waterwheels in feudal era Japan than windmills. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how all these came out, it's the same world as my Granny Weatherwax house and after sinking about 400 hours in when I really needed the safe space to exist, I might call this run to a close

I love a good snowball earth run and it looks like you're having a lot of fun with it! I haven't done one in quite a few versions and I think with the current update they are far more viable, especially long term, than they used to be. Especially for first homosapian run. Good luck with the rest of your run!

This was only really my starter house while I looked for somewhere a little bigger to set my plans on. I'm playing on ~0% landmass & 30 day months so this was just a tiny witch's cottage in the middle of the ocean so wasn't really suitable for long term. The inside was a very basic cozy layout without a lot of design work to it. It did last me till autumn though, which is when I had enough flax to make a boat and find somewhere better. But it's nice to know that if I ever die without a respawn gear set I'll end up back in that cozy cottage about 30k blocks away from my forever island, haha. Once I really get to work on my forever island I'll post up some screenshots.

I wanted to do something a little special to start my forever world, and with everything going on I needed to start somewhere familiar & comforting. So my first little house project is from something that always made me feel safe, the works of Terry Pratchett. It felt right to make Granny Weatherwax's cottage. A twisted home made up of little expansions & lean-tos. One day I'd love to do more Discworld themed builds, maybe do all of Lancre town in a mountainous region. Anyone else here a Discworld fan?

I really appreciate how much effort the team is putting in in these last few updates to improve a lot of older inconveniences. Being able to salt cheese properly so you don't need a full barrel has been a lingering issue, now sorted. The desire for mid-game use for obsidian now exists with arrowheads. It shows how much they are putting in to improving what is already there, not just adding new things (like some other voxel based crafting games). Just sending my love to the VS team and letting them know how much we appreciate what they do

While the suspense is unbearable, I deeply appreciate the work the VS team is putting in to make sure the next stable release is just that, stable. The level of transparency & communication with the players is fantastic and I love that, especially given how many other projects tend to leave players in the dark for weeks/months at a time. I've been playing around in the unstable to get a feel for things and I have to say, this is going to be an incredible update. When this releases it might finally be time to start that forever world.

Honestly it's posts like this that make me love the Vintage Story community so much. I go into so many other game forums to check for updates or see what folks are up to and there's so many complaints or hate-speech But I come here, to this game I love to sink hundreds of hours into, and someone is talking about how lovely the mushrooms are. This is wonderful stuff Also, I know folks who go semi-professionally foraging mushrooms and they love how many VS represents & how accurate it is

Absolutely incredible work keeping on top of the updates I've been running this update since the first experimental build of 1.20 dropped and y'all have done such a good job keeping on top of everything Lining up multiplayer with some friends as soon as the full version is out and so excited to experience everything y'all have put together. And I hope you are all taking a little time off to enjoy the holidays as best you can. Look after yourselves you wonderful people

Thanks for all your amazing work! I've been really enjoying the new build and you folks have been doing a great job as always