Dead Sigma

Drink wine when you’re hungry? What’s the logic in that? I have proper food — wine is supposed to quench thirst, but the developers seem to have forgotten to add thirst in the first place.

I think thirst is absolutely essential for the game. I cried for a week when I found out I’d have to install a mod just so my 500 liters of wine would actually have any purpose.

If you had ever been in an unheated building, you’d know that warming up from your own body heat alone is impossible — even in the tightest enclosed space. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. And if you’re already frozen like in the game, or worse — wet — you’re done for. You’ll just die from hypothermia unless you find a heat source like a campfire. I also really dislike that there’s no way to control the temperature that affects crops, other than using greenhouses, which only give +5 degrees. In real life, you can create shade, cover the crops with tarps like they do on farms, or simply water them generously to cool them down — and again, sadly, none of this is possible in Vintage Story.

Testing the Effect of a Campfire on Indoor Temperature 1. Large enclosed room (14×14 blocks): With a campfire: the player warmed up from 31°C to 37.8°C in 25.11 seconds at –64°C. Without a campfire: the player warmed up from 31°C to 37.8°C in 25 seconds at approximately –60°C. 2. Small enclosed room (4 blocks long, 2 blocks high): With a campfire: at –60°C, the player warmed up from 31°C to 37.8°C in 25.77 seconds, while the campfire was burning at the far end of the room the entire time. Without a campfire: under the same conditions, the player warmed up in 25.15 seconds. Conclusion: The presence of a campfire has virtually no effect on the player’s warming rate in enclosed spaces. The minor differences observed can be attributed to measurement error — most likely, the campfire’s influence on indoor temperature is zero.

Based on my observations, a campfire does not affect the room temperature; it only affects the player's temperature. You might have encountered the warming of a closed space itself. This is what I described above: when the player is inside a closed room, they start warming up even though it’s –40 outside. To avoid being speculative, I will now additionally test how a campfire affects the warming rate outdoors, in a fully closed room, and in a semi-enclosed space.

I’ve actually survived at –40°C in the Arctic, and I didn’t cool down any faster than at –10°C. What really breaks the immersion for me is being able to warm up at such temperatures just by being underwater or inside an enclosed space without a fire. Or take my house, where I’ve lit many fires thinking they would raise the temperature: because of a single window in the wall, the house stops being recognized as a proper room and the player no longer warms up, even though the fires should logically heat the space. I understand that the game’s temperature logic doesn’t work that way currently, which is frustrating. In my opinion, it would be great to improve this mechanic so that the air around the player is properly accounted for — allowing it to cool or heat based on nearby heat sources.

In my opinion, the temperature system in Vintage Story needs serious improvement. One of the most absurd things I’ve noticed is that even if you set the temperature to minus one million degrees, the character freezes almost the same as at –40°C. And if you go underwater at such temperatures, the player actually starts to warm up. The same effect happens if you surround yourself with a room made of ice blocks. Both situations are completely illogical. Some might say that you can warm up by sheltering from the wind, but that’s not really how it works in real life. If you’re freezing, a box of blocks won’t save you. Crops are also impossible to control. The most you can do is raise the temperature by 5 degrees by building a greenhouse. At the same time, a garden plot can still be ruined by 35-degree heat, even if it’s in water with 75% humidity and covered with blocks on top (I really thought the sun and shadow mechanics were supposed to work here). I haven’t been playing Vintage Story for very long, but the temperature mechanics have been very disappointing — they feel unfinished and in need of serious work.

Thanks for the explanations! That already clears up a lot. One thing I’m still struggling with is my crops indoors: I try to insulate the space, but I don’t really know how cold it actually is inside. The outside temperature is shown, but is there any way to check or estimate the indoor temperature of a room? Right now it’s hard for me to tell if my insulation is good enough for the crops to survive the winter. Do you have any tips on how to measure or at least roughly judge the temperature inside enclosed farm rooms?

I noticed that the temperature in the game is displayed a bit strangely. For example, if I’m standing near a campfire or inside a completely closed dugout, the temperature reading is still the same as outside. At first, I thought this was meant to show the “outside air temperature,” but it actually changes when going up a mountain or down underground. It seems that this value reflects some sort of general regional temperature around the player, rather than what the character actually feels. It would be great if the game had a separate indicator for “perceived temperature” — one that depends on campfires, torches, and other heat sources near the player.