Kevin Eric Snell

I know it's been a few months since I've played, but maybe don't log me out of my game account and force me to go through the "forgot password" rigmarole yet again. At this point the website keeps me logged in more reliably than the game.

After several weeks on an established iron-age world where I didn't really have to fear my environment, and with little interest in the main storyline, I recently tried a new world start. It's kind of a shock to reacquaint myself with that early game helplessness, and not a pleasant one. The mid-game mindset is incompatible with the gameplay I was confronted with. I'm not exactly certain if the presence of the new mobs ruins the early game experience or if I just need to remind myself how I played early on. I remember what got me through my first slog into the bronze age was learning to have absolutely no value for my possessions or my player's life. Also, in retrospect, it was also spurred on by the fact I didn't know how to use cheat mode. Even unconsciously, I think it affects my risk assessment knowing I can recover after a stupid death.

No problem, I'll wait until other people report my same issue. I'm used to it.

I don't think they make the game unplayable, but I do think they are incompatible with the established tone of the game. You'll be walking around in bright daylight, naturally on guard for wolves and bears, but then you see one of these creepy things spider-walking around, no mystery to it, no menace, like having Slender Man playing volleyball on the beach. At least if I bump into a bowtorn in daylight conditions, I can reasonably assume there's a cave nearby. Can we please at least have these mobs actively seek out the nearest dark hole to crawl into when it's noon in the summer?

Just found one. First time I've seen one after hundreds of hours of playtime. But I guess the bug is still here. And of course it's crawling with bowtorn.

I was noticing the same problem with moose in 1.19

I don't have a 1-to-1 comparison, since I left my old 1.19 world and started a new one, but... it seems like ice is melting more realistically in springtime after this latest update. What's everyone else's experience? In 1.19 I was seeing lake ice hang around into summer every year, effectively never melting. In 1.20, it's not perfect, with a few frozen ponds in 20+ degree weather, but it seems much better than before.

Fortunately, haven't experienced it since then. The one that spawned in daylight was shooting normally. I've also noticed surface caves that are sealed off with a thin layer of dirt will still have sunlight shining through. Maybe that's related?

While I was panning bony soils, a bowtorn spawned in broad daylight with no rifts nearby and started shooting at me. These things are ruining the game experience.

At this point any time I see a bowtorn outside, I just switch on creative mode, with no guilt. By the way, as I was creative-moding away from my last bowtorn storm (because they never despawn unless move far away), I flew up north to explore a little, and when I switched back to survival mode to collect some wild plants, I started taking damage and hearing bowtorn noises. It was from a bowtorn that had spawned below me in a cave. It was shooting me through several blocks of dirt and rock.

My experience is that bowtorns don't necessarily spawn more than other monsters, but once they're outside your house, they're never leaving, never despawning unless you sprint a few blocks away and come back. Sunlight does nothing.

Okay, my easygoing attitude to this issue is quickly turning into severe irritation. Every single time I use the prospecting pick, I have to take precious time to open up the chat, then lock down the screen so the mouse can select the tabs, mouse over to the info log, click, and then and only then can I see the results of my prospecting. Ridiculous. Fix this now.

Stew, yes. Although last time I checked, you can't make a fish pie.

Thinking back, most of my posts here have been dealing with the little issues I've encountered playing this game and encountering problems. So just in the interest of balance, I want to heap some praise on the developers for creating a game that runs incredibly smoothly. Given the power of modern computers, I don't see why all games can't run as well as this. A lot of the intriguing games I've found on Steam struggle with lag and rendering throughout their early access release and then go to full release without ever making significant improvements. My computer isn't even particularly optimized for 2025, and VS runs like a dream, with a few stutters here and there while new terrain generates, and I can even play YouTube videos or listen to podcasts in the background with no drop in performance. Congratulations all round. I was beginning to think nobody could achieve results like this anymore.

I noticed a similar thing, and in fact I was about to make a post exactly like this one, but then (just to make sure) I double-checked to make sure the info log was displaying. Seems like the difference is prospecting picks no longer automatically switch on the info log so you can immediately see the readings.

You're probably right. Personally, I never would've found this non-Steam game without hunting on YouTube for new games. I think it first showed up in one of those "10 promising new building games" videos, and I was intrigued enough to seek out more info. Finally decided to buy about two days afterward. Naturally, my YT feed is now full of Vintage Story content, so I can't judge how it is from the outside.

Odd. I've sat through temporal storms after dying several times, never had this happen. And yeah, this was probably over 10 minutes (barely), but so were the dozens of times in the past when the body remained. Oh well. I vaguely remembered what was in my inventory and used creative mode to replace it all. Wasn't about to lose a copper pick that early.

First time I've had this happen. Got killed after like five drifters spawned in my house in a temporal storm. Since my respawn point was only a few blocks away at my bedside, I decided to wait a while until the storm was over. One of the drifters still hadn't despawned by dawn, so I stepped outside and let him run away. When I went back in, no body, no items.

I've only been playing a few hours on a 1.20 updated world, where I'm tooling around in a primitive building in early bronze age. Twice now I've noticed drifters spawning during daylight. Rifts were nearby. The first time was during rainy weather, so maybe lighting conditions dropped, but the second one was in clear sunny weather. No caves around. Anybody noticed this?

I've also noticed a slight uptick in fish spawning and better percentage chance of meat drops (presumably this will go back down in colder seasons). It's very welcome, as fish stew is a great way to funnel my decaying berries into meals.

Setting landform scale to 200% generally gives me a world I like. There's still plenty of rough terrain, but the pockets of sanity are large enough to build in. I've never tried adjusting upheaval. The maddening part is when a map generates, and every square inch of flat buildable land near the spawn point is temporally unstable.

Knowing from experience that decent bronze chain armor will insulate me from wolves helps keep me motivated. Still, sometimes that /gamemode creative is tempting when I get chased by a wolf in the middle of a hilly forest and some unseen obstacle (probably leaves) blocks me from jumping and gets me unrealistically stuck. I also wish the animals wouldn't literally phase inside of me so I'm unable to hit them. Bears especially. I'm staring right at them, face to face, and nope, white cross target instead of red cross target because their hitbox is literally inside me. It's a neverending cycle of step back, swing, step back, swing, step back, swing.

In retrospect, I now understand you need a minimum of 1 vegetable to cook soup. I was attempting to create a soup with 1 meat and water, but I couldn't remember how much water was required. I added water up to 1 liter, nothing. 2 liters, 3 liters, 4 liters. Very frustrated at this point. May I suggest, when you've got a cooking pot with 1 meat and 1 liter of water, you display a little message saying something like "Will create 1 [meat] soup. Soups require at least one vegetable," so at least the player knows at that point that 1 liter is the correct amount of water and giving the helpful reminder about vegetables? Little things like this would help a player that doesn't want to consult a website for every tiny detail.

The learning curve involves a lot of death. I had to make my peace with that. In order to streamline the learning process, I began tweaking my games to increase my HP, while leaving monster strength untouched. Depending on where your spawn point is, that might be a more enjoyable strategy, or it might leave you annoyed at having to flee pursuing wolves and getting lost multiple times. (One early game I had a terrible spawn and only found a decent region to build my base several hundred blocks south, so every death was a massive headache.) Is it enjoyable? Eh. I did a lot of grumbling, swearing, and yelling, and I deleted a lot of worlds. Eventually, using slightly tweaked hunger and HP, I found my bearings and established myself. I became attached that particular world and I'm still working in it, building roads and gradually civilizing my local area, but I can now see that my tweaks to hunger weren't entirely necessary for survival (except for the very very early game), and I think in the future I'll leave them at standard. Now armed with better knowledge about how to progress, I restarted with standard settings and found myself much less frustrated.

Eh.... five years in, my experience is there's nothing related to loaded or unloaded chunks. A frozen-over lake, even right next to my base, will remain mostly frozen, forever, unless I actively punch out the ice blocks. Maybe a handful will thaw out on their own.... 30 to 40% maybe. Otherwise it'll just be stuck that way all spring, all summer, all autumn. The snow system works great. The lake ice.... is just driving me nuts. Needs fixing badly. Is there a mod that deals with this?