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.

This is indeed what I am most scared of. In modern capitalism the value of a country's population is their expendable income and ability to create. The ability to create ideas is moving to AI, and the ability to create goods is moving to robots. When there are no jobs - or very few jobs - and the people have little or no expendable income, their value is also gone, but then the goods produced by robots and AI become less affordable, meaning those prices must come down in order to still sell. Somewhere there should be an equilibrium where the cost of producing goods through robots and AI is more than the cost the consumer can bear, at which point businesses either pivot back to human-produced goods, or simply stop producing goods for the mass-market, focusing only on those that can afford them. My feeling is that there will end up being two classes (though arguably we're already there): the ultra-rich living in their own world of rich people, AIs, and robots, and all of the other people who are no longer actually required, and in fact take up valuable space and resources that could be better used creating a utopia for the few.

Some newer models do indeed search the internet, but it's not the same as the "distilling into a statistical model" phase but more like a kid doing an open-book exam and having the reference material there to copy from without really understanding. The statistical model part can generate some wild stuff though, if you remember those crazy pictures that were super-trippy with like eyes appearing in clouds and stuff. I think if models would skew the generated results using the actual contents/structure of their statistical model (which would be unique to each model based on the training process) the results could be considered much more unique and slightly less derivative. I agree, but also disagree There are people who can look at a drawing and 100% recreate it themselves by hand, people have pitch-perfect memory and could play a Chopin piano piece perfectly, and even if you increase the challenge and they need to study the material for years they can still eventually recreate the original - and it's generally allowed. The process of learning from and copying source material is not unique to humans and I think there's nothing wrong with AI doing it, except indeed the moral aspect of "stealing someone's work without permission" and then "reproducing their work, to supplant the original author's role". I have personally learned a great deal from copyrighted material, and used my gained knowledge to reproduce it (not 100% identically) and gotten paid for it - that was the point of going to school and learning a topic on which to build a career. So the process of "learning from copyrighted material, distilling it into a statistical model (in my head), and making money from it by reproducing that material cheaper (as a junior developer)" is allowed for humans, but not for AI? I feel like it is the same thing we all already do to some extent, only the AI can do it much faster, and much better. The friction is due to how quickly some of these human efforts are being replaced. Theoretically if the AI could remember 100% of the input data, and you asked it to generate a picture of something, and then with that it gave you a "bill of materials" saying: this is 1% RandomDude2690 from tumbler, 1% Rembrandt, 1% .... - would that make it ok? You would have attribution and could then follow along to the source for the original if you wanted to. But, as we can see with AI summaries by search engines, attribution is often not worth a cent, and even a flawed reproduction is "good enough" for very many people. So automation should not replace actual jobs? I think we are hundreds or thousands of years too late for that. Again to me it feels like it's the scale and velocity at which the AI can do what we humans have been doing for millennia that's causing the problems. Just to be clear here - I am personally terrified about the future and my own future employment prospects, never mind my child's future prospects. I was surprised and somewhat insulted to find AI-generated music in my Spotify playlist, and considered canceling my subscription entirely, though simply blocking AI-generated music is a good enough solution (for now). I hate AI slop on the internet, and do think that every AI company that trained on copyrighted material should be fined so heavily that they are bankrupted and must start again training on licensed (or truly, intentionally "free") material. However, the technology is there and won't disappear, it is useful, and it is just a tool. I think that the purpose of society is to ensure that society can progress and thrive in a way that benefits everyone, so it's up to "all of us" to ensure that this tool is used responsibly. The truly unfortunate part is that all of us have a vote, but the richest individuals and corporations are the ones who have the biggest votes, and also have the most to gain and the least to lose when this tool goes wild.

This is exactly how I feel also. If you know what you want, and can describe it to like 95% accuracy, the AI can generate it - the less flexibility you give the AI, the better the result. In my day to day work, it largely automates many small tasks. Most of my programming nowadays is in GoLang where you have a lot of code like: The italic part is what I would expect the AI assistant built into my IDE (vscode with google's gemini code assist extension) to write for me. On its own this is a very trivial bit of code, but it adds up, and the predictive ability of the AI is really impressive - it can write a lot of code for me very quickly, and I can eyeball it and confirm it does what I would have done (with maybe minor stylistic differences, or different phrasing in the error messages etc). I would equate it with an artist creating a file "box.jpg" and drawing a single line, and the AI fills in the rest of the box. If I am an artist drawing a cityscape that is full of buildings, and I need to draw 2,000 apartment buildings, the question is: is the style of each building and its location relevant to my creative vision? Is any random arrangement of buildings sufficient - maybe I'm preparing this cityscape for a giant asteroid smashing into it, and that's where my creative energies will go? Or maybe I want a specific shape for my city center, and I can draw some elements there to steer the AI, but then the periphery is not as important? Or indeed every single building is important, in which case I can just go draw each one myself and not offload it to AI. I agree with this 100%.

Yeah - and I know it was a big hoopla about training on opensource code and laundering it without license etc, but as you said the solution is a post-processing phase that checks "is this copying too closely?" and then changes it enough to be unique. I can write - or ask AI to write - a bunch of image filters, and write a system to detect output that is too-similar to existing art, and then apply my colour-change + distortion filter until it is different enough to pass the test. Does it make it more or less plagiarism? So I agree that the difference is in the complexity of the product - the number of unique attributes of the output that allow the freedom of expression. And I agree that writing an SVG generator to make a face is simple and there are not many solutions if you just want "round circle, two dots for eyes, and a line for a mouth". But I would say that a modern SaaS application also has a ton of flexibility in how to write it - the overall architecture and what components you have, the language(s) you use, frameworks, the logical flow through the application - and you can absolutely tweak those using AI. I've asked AI to generate the same code for me multiple times - for example "give me an html file, css file, and js file that'll ingest a JSON file containing kubernetes logs and display them" and each time is different, and I can say "no I do not like this approach of event overloading and instead make it so I have my main function first call parsefile, then store the results in an array named, then visualize it with a RenderLogs function, but actually also do...." - there is a ton of flexibility there. So just by adding functionality to my code I'm increasing the complexity (and creative potential) - so is it the number of lines of code that determine if this is code-plagiarism or some truly creative output that's simply assisted by the AI? I am not 100% sure either but my impression is that it's basically "you're the pointy-haired boss telling the AI what to write, and you just go with it, letting the AI fix the issues as you go". Ultimately - specifically for programming - I find AI assist fundamentally changes my approach to programming. Having been programming for such a long time, part of my design process is banging out code to see what works - this is not an efficient use of AI. Instead (again for myself) I find it front-loads the complexity, so I need to consider the overall architecture and write a proper design document to get good (controllable) output from the LLM. It change the "programming" task into a "software architect" task, which is far more interesting. When an artist chooses a brush, canvas, specific oil paint and specific blend of colours, they are half-experimenting but also drawing on their experience which lets them know that "later on when this water and the sun are drawn, these brush strokes will be like waves". The artist often (not always!) has some conception of what the finished product should look like, and what feelings it should evoke, and I would argue that if an artist were able to write a full "design document" for their painting, the AI could generate it, and for me the result would be something new and not plagiarism.

This is a great topic and definitely bigger than this game/this forum. I am also a developer, and I love programming - have been programming since I was ~12 and now I am in my 40s. I also enjoy making art and also music. I find it pretty funny that it is artists and musicians who are the most up in arms about the plagiarism aspect. If I draw a circle and AI auto-fills a face, it's plagiarism, but if I write a function definition and the AI fills it for me, it's absolutely fine? I have written a ton of really cool code, and consider programming to be an art form full of flexibility to express creativity, exactly like art and music. I use AI code assist for most of my programming nowadays. Writing code is fun for about 20% of the work, but the remaining 80% is very dumb work that I am extremely happy AI can offload for me. For sure the AI can only do that because it has read through a ton of code and can copy it with slight tweaks to suit my needs, but because of "open source" being a thing that encourages copying and modifying code, it is socially acceptable even though it is clearly removing many jobs and greatly impacting entry-level programmer jobs. On the other hand art and music - which I would argue are careers with the lowest bars for entry - are sacred and as soon as AI starts chopping those jobs we need regulations and restrictions etc. Personally, I never looked at art or music as a way to make a living, it was purely a way of expressing my creativity, and that's also why I started programming - so for me having AI to do 80% of art/music/code to let me focus on the parts that I enjoy is absolutely fine.

I do agree with all of the above - and the game does expand significantly once you have an anvil. I also agree that better documentation for "block game newbies" would be nice, I actually never played any other block games except I guess infinifactory - I have watched streamers play MC but somehow it always felt "for kids" and never appealed to me. That said, I tend to stop somewhere between getting an anvil and "having enough food to survive winter" - rarely going into iron or even building a windmill, both of which are fun and interesting but after a few times it feels more like busy-work. I don't think I've ever made steel because it just seems pointless. So, for me, it's a good "first year of survival" game but then I run out of steam - if there was more in terms of a living world with entities that I can interact with, villages to visit (or villagers who visit me!) I could see myself persisting much longer.

I run with 48 mods, mostly they are small changes like crafting sticks from firewood, letting torches burn forever, increasing the amount of time firewood/charcoal/etc burn. For me the game is a little too grindy so I make that part a bit easier so I can focus on building a nice house and exploring the world, and I change my world settings to support that also - so more starting health, a bit faster running, slower food spoilage/hunger. I have some 'bigger' mods that make more changes, like terrain gen changes or more variety in the foods, plants etc, but sometimes mods and settings can interact in unfortunate ways. For example, I really like the Hydrate or Diedrate mod, it adds a little extra in terms of survival needs and makes the game feel a bit more realistic. I also like to play with cave-ins and instability, so digging into a dirt hill will cause all kinds of landslides, which are fun! Unfortunately in my most recent game I was reaching the start of summer, house was going well, I had the basic copper tools and had actually found bismuth and zinc so I was starting on my set of bronze tools. While going out prospecting around my house, which was built on a little peninsula, I was near the edge of the water looking for some nice exposed stone to pick at. I found a bit right on the shore and started picking at it, and while doing so I briefly thought: huh, the water looks abruptly deep here. At that moment the rock broke, and it turned out that my peninsula and in fact most of the local area was on tall mushroom-shaped rock formations that went really deep, I think the Hydrate mod spawned some aquifers right under the peninsula. The unfortunate combination of aquifer, peninsula, and soil instability meant that with that one rock, the entire peninsula including part of my farm collapsed into the sea. That doesn't really go well near water since you end up with some very steep waterfalls, which of course pulled me down into the depths, at which point I rage quit. I will probably do it again, but will consider trying to find more stable lands.

There is nothing wrong with changing the settings to suit your play-style and tolerance for the grindier aspects of the game. I play with increased run speed, decreased hunger, longer-lasting food, more HP, reduced enemy strength, and increased tool durability - which I then crank to 11 through console commands as soon as I start the game. I am not at all willing to make a fifth copper pickaxe while searching for tin or whatever, my copper pickaxe will last me as long as I am willing to play with that character, I only need a better one to reach better materials. I'd rather focus on exploring and building cool things. And if I set off on a long journey on my boat to discover a new continent and halfway there realize I forgot my pro-pick? I am absolutely flipping over to creative mode for a second just to spawn myself a new one, which I will then throw into the ocean on my eventual return trip home.