Koobze

I think there are some good posts on the forum outlining some "normal first steps" - I actually find the initial phase of the game to be the most fun. I usually play on the Exploration setting and tweak it further to increase my health, decrease hunger, increase food/tool durability etc. Depending on the map you get it can be quite difficult to start, but basically my usual process is: Spawn in and start running south - I like to settle in a warmer climate, ideally near a lake or on a mountain with a cool view, but mostly I just want to explore. Make a knife and a spear, and later maybe a shovel and axe but it can wait. Keep running south for a few days! At night I slow down since it's hard to see and I don't have a torch yet, and if it's too dark I might make a small dirt hut with a bed to sleep through the night. While running, grab all of the berries and other growing foods. It can be hard to spot - I use one of the zoom mods so my character can 'squint' to see farther which helps to pick out the actual veggies growing, usually they are a brighter green. I usually find it easy to survive many days on just berries. While running, check the map occasionally and pick routes that are free of hills and ideally not dense forest (full of wolves/bears), and aim for small lakes so you can find reeds and make some hand-baskets for more inventory space. While running, if you spot ruins, run over and have a quick look - they often have storage vessels that may have useful tools, food, seeds etc. At some point I'll find a nice location that I could see myself living in. Sometimes it's a hill with a nice view, sometimes it's a peninsula where I can picture a nice dock, sometimes it's a little valley surrounded by hills that could become an enclosed ranch. At that point I'll shift more to building a house - which usually starts as just rammed dirt, or maybe some wood, but either way it's usually a single big room. I've usually picked up some loose copper bits, seeds, reeds, and clay, so I make some reed baskets to store that at my base, make a fireplace and bed, and start on a charcoal pit and doing some clayforming for storage vessels, molds, and a crucible. Some days I'll just be busy all day preparing stuff, some days I get tired of that and do some runs in a random direction, looking for berries/veg, ores, clay, wood etc - but usually food isn't a big problem since there are often berry bushes all around (and my settings mean I don't need as much food in general). Once you have a cooking pot it also gets a lot easier, just dump some grains and fruit/veg into the pot on a fireplace and (with a clay bowl) grab a portion whenever you head out, it's filling and feeds you for a few days no problem. I have started many many games by now, and some end very sad - run into a wolf, manage to kill it, then immediately run into another one. Run during the night and fall in a hole and die. Run during the day and fall in a hole and die. Walk slowly during the day and get surprised by an animal, jump in a hole, and die. Sometimes that's enough to take a break, or decide to start a new world... but over time you should get a hang of what to look for and what order you need to do things to survive, and if you find yourself struggling with something (like food) you can always start a new world with the same seed and mostly the same settings, just changing something relevant to the previous problem (make food last longer, make your character get hungry slower) and give it another go with the added benefit of already knowing the lay of the land.

I agree that overheating would be interesting, and in general having more impact from weather would be great, but not just for the player. Crops can already suffer from overheating, how about animals? Same for rain and wind, if I have a ranch then my animals should need shelter from really bad weather. Maybe I should also need to grow trees, or make other wind-breakers, along the edge of my farm to prevent wind from messing up my crops? Mostly though I wanted to address people saying "don't add a thirst bar" - I have been playing with the "Balanced Thirst" mod for a long time, and I think it is really great. It is not a big obstacle at all - you can drink from a pond which has mostly-clean water without issue. If you have one of the mods that let you collect rainwater it's also super easy, I just keep a jug on me to sip from as I go and if it's low and it's raining I just put the jug on the ground while foraging in an area and it's topped-up. You can also just eat berries to refill the water meter, which goes down as you exert yourself (running etc) and also goes down a bit when you eat. For me it adds a nice little extra bit of to-do, but doesn't require babysitting, I recommend trying it out.

This is a fantastic idea, I want to be able to make a collection of zippo lighters in different metals. I want to chisel art into my zippos. I want to have a wall of zippos on display, alongside my collection of pipes. I want to brew a pot of tea and sit in my library, sipping my tea, puffing at my pipe and admiring my zippo collection.

Thank you! I didn't know this existed and I used a similar mod in Factorio to keep myself on track so this will be super handy!

I am pretty sure that the team plans to continue to develop the game for release, so this implicit contract is still being upheld. Certainly we can say it would not be in good faith for the developer to take money and divert 90% of their resources to do something entirely different - as a purchaser of an EA game I expect some continuation of the (apparent) current development effort to continue being invested into the product that I paid for. I do not see any slowdown in development effort, but I admit that I am not visiting the developer's offices and have no idea how many resources they have and how they have distributed them. I think that if I wanted that level of oversight and control over the developer's roadmap and deliverables, I would consider being an actual investor or producer or similar, and write thorough legal contracts with roadmaps, milestones, and all of the KPIs. This is exactly the point - Early Access is just crowd-funding artistic ambitions. When I give money to an artist or musician, it is because I want them to continue doing art and music. I may really like their style and hope they continue in it, but I also don't want the same painting/album for the next 20 years - I expect some evolution in their output, and that may go in a direction I don't like. I agree that "early access" is a pretty loaded term nowadays, and this can be misleading if used in a way that implies "Steam-style Early Access" distribution - however even on Steam there are disclaimers saying the product is unfinished and may not be finished. That said, I don't see "Early Access" anywhere on the Buy page on this website, and in fact it just says: Allows you to play Vintage Story. Included in this purchase Access to the client area, which lets you download the game and all future updates I do think they are upholding that part at least, though I admit I did not thoroughly inspect all fine-print related to my purchase - because my intent with purchasing the game was to support a developer that seems capable of delivering a game I want to play. So then - what portion of the developer's income was from consumers who believed this implicit contract to deliver a full game in some (5 year? 10 year?) time frame? What portion of their income came during the ukraine-support offer? Or even now, specifically because of the Hytale announcement? I've bought copies of games for friends before just to support a developer's social cause. I would consider that income to be "fair game" for the developer to use how they see fit - hire new people for another game, go on a team-building event at a resort or casino, or whatever. I'm not attempting to micromanage a developer who seems able to manage themselves. I understand the concern that a developer splitting efforts for multiple products reduces the effort on the original product, but then it is a question of: how good is the developer at project management, business management, human resources etc. From reading the original announcement + followup about Hytale, I see no reason to be concerned - they don't seem to want to copy Hytale entirely - but rather agreed with the vision of that game and saw value in the creative folks working on that game. I am willing to let the studio try it and see, and maybe in 6 months to a year we will see some impact, and if it's negative maybe then I'll complain. It just seems premature to raise such a big fuss over what is basically the developer saying "we are willing and able to grow our team to develop a second product with some level of shared infrastructure alongside our first".

I am not sure what implicit contract there is, or what you think you invested in, but personally when I buy an early access game it's because I like what's there, hope that it gets better, believe that the developer wants to do more of what they're doing, and I have the disposable income to support them doing what they're doing. I don't expect some commitment or guarantee of a completed product, and for all I know the developers will decide to completely change the direction of the game and make it something I don't like - and that's absolutely fine and within their rights. I gave them money, I got a game, transaction is complete. I really like Vintage Story and want it go continue how it is, but I paid for what I got, and I'm happy to have given money to support an independent developer. If the developer wants to pivot and do two games at a time, or ten games at a time, great! Go for it! Maybe it'll work out, maybe not - I could have also waited until something was "finished" to buy it if I was so concerned about the future roadmap.

Are you playing with mods maybe? I ask because the only time I've seen Locust - Vintage Story Wiki these spider things on the surface was near ruins from a mod, though maybe they can also crawl out of caves. There might be mods that will also disable the monsters so that might be worth a shot, but I'm not sure - I don't like the monsters myself so I play with rifts disabled, but I do play in the exploration mode so they spawn in caves and elsewhere. I crank my player health and other stats all the way up, and lower the enemy stats also, so they're mainly a nuisance rather than a real threat - but I totally understand not wanting them there at all. It might also be worth checking if there's a "no monsters" multiplayer server you can connect to just to look around, I don't know if there's a way to see a server's "world config" but if there is you could check if there's any difference in how they set it up compared to how you did. And in general I try not to stay out after sunset, you can just sleep the night away in the trader's bed or idle standing in his wagon.

Nice! I've used the tea mod Make Tea - Vintage Story Mod DB before too, so we're getting there! We just need a mod for the Barista class, the true post-apocalypse survivor.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the approach, and it has been successful for many other companies - just look at the big names like Unreal and Quake? They started as a game engine and game built together before at some point diverging into an engine that's worked on by one core group, and multiple games using that engine - some built in-house and some licensed to other developers to use. Seems like a really great template to follow.

I mean if we're throwing our dreams in here then I absolutely want to be able to open my own starbucks and make some kind of mocha/cappuccino with maybe marshmallows and cinnamon? I won't drink it since that's way too sweet but it'll look great for my insta I guess. Also let me make chai tea/lattes. Definitely an end-game drink.

Crunching all those numbers is some good work indeed! I took the lazy way out and installed a mod that makes everything burn longer, so I put some charcoal on the fire along with my blend of metals and walk away, get distracted by a butterfly, go make dinner, go to sleep, and in the morning realize it's done smelting but the fire's still going and ready for the next load & distraction.

I think this is it, at least how I read it. If the game is difficult, but I as a player can learn and improve and the difficulty is reduced, this is the "natural" difficulty that tests a player's skills. Difficulty that exists regardless of the player skill is what I'd call artificial. The rubberbanding in mario kart is a great example, the AI does not follow the rules in order to make the game more difficult for the player. I'd say "take down a bear" in Vintage Story is closer to skill-based difficulty - though "nerdpole + projectiles" isn't a very skillful solution - but then if you needed to collect 20 bear-tails to do something it would start to lean more towards artificial difficulty, since there isn't much skill difference between taking down 1 bear and taking down 20, it's just adding tedium (and luck/RNG) to the task. I think artificial difficulty can be useful, and doesn't need to actually be difficult, it can be an artificial lack of difficulty. I believe some games like Civilization were designed such that the opposing players aren't really trying to "win", since it can be very frustrating as a player to get beaten by the AI, so some of them just do their own thing and are more like roadblocks/speedbumps in the player's journey to win. But then, Civilization also gives huge bonuses to AI players depending on the skill level, which is also artificial difficulty. I'd say making it have a strict definition is not necessary since it also really depends on the game. I mentioned that somewhere it shifts from skill to tedium and that's the line, but overcoming tedium through perseverance can also be considered a skill, and if "persevering through extended durations to overcome the challenge" is the point of the game then while it would (for me) qualify as artificial difficulty it might not be so to someone else who enjoys having their perseverance-skill tested.

Cool! Relevant to this thread's topic, as far as I'm aware the available pre-trained stable diffusion models were trained on the same "open" (stolen) data set as most other ai-gen models, so there can be some concern about attribution. I was recently chatting (with chatgpt ) about this in specific and if you search for "creative commons" or similar on huggingface you'll find at least some models that are trained on fully open-license material - I was looking to set up common-canvas (CommonCanvas) in specific on my home pc. The output quality isn't as nice but most likely good enough to do some textures/icons which is also what I was thinking to do. Edit: to add, common-canvas is also based on stable diffusion model architecture, but trained from scratch without the iffy maybe-stealing. ChatGPT - or if you don't like the online-hosted models you can self-host gpt-oss 20B or qwen3 4B or something - can give a python script to set up the model & environment etc too so it seems quite easy to get into. For normal chat-style LLMs (like gpt-oss/qwen) I am using "LM Studio" which is super simple to install and set up, and if you have some decent gaming hardware it should run great - my geforce 3060 handles both of those fine.

That's very cool! What do you mean by your own trained AI? Did you train it, what model is it based on etc? What kind of hardware do you run it on and how long does it take to add the shiny?

While I agree that having a nanny-state is awful, some permits are useful and good? I enjoyed buying a house and knowing that it was built according to a code, and had electricity installed by someone certified/approved by the government - meaning that it works and can be insured. And while I did still have to pay for someone to inspect the house, and it cost me a fair bit of money, it was certainly cheaper than having someone need to inspect the foundations and walls and pipes and cables and absolutely everything that could go wrong when you have some pack of bros who just stumbled onto the construction site, hungover, after partying watching Local Sports Team. As with everything, there is a scale and both ends are considered 'extreme' but there's a very comfortable middle ground. I live in Europe and would say taxes here are unfortunately uncomfortably high, and yet I'm very happy to live here (having lived in canada, america, and australia) because my quality of life is much higher, and from observing my fellow regular-joe citizens they all seem to have more life satisfaction than I witnessed elsewhere.