turns out I originally installed to game to my HDD when I should have installed it to my SSD (not sure if this had anything to do with the path that the data was being saved to but did that first anyway)
uninstalled the game and reinstalled it to my SSD.
then i went and right clicked the shortcut that was created on my desktop and entered the following to the "Target" box: { --dataPath Z:\Vintagestory} (there is in fact a space just before the "--" (double hyphen))
now that is an example, not what you should put... theoretically you can put it anywhere as long as its somewhere in your SSD [correct me if I'm wrong] but what I believe it does is take the strain off your HDD and puts it on something that has more space if your CPU is lacking in the computing department.
game works, crazy lol