“Let me tell you about my boat.”
I am a player who has been somewhat active on Vintage Realms for the last month or so. Before I started playing here I had tested the waters in a handful of other servers and before that learned the basics on a small private server with some friends. I’ve only had the game for about a month and a half at this point. There is still quite a lot that I do not know.
As of last night the server was in August of year two. With 60 minute days and 30 days in a month, there is still plenty of time for a new person to join up and be fairly well prepared for the winter. There is also a way to reach a warm area within about 10 minutes of spawn via TLs if you just really don’t like winter. Even if you read this weeks from now when the coming winter has arrived, fear not; you will be taken care of. If you are apprehensive about joining a server that has been on long enough to reach year two don’t be; this place is one that prioritizes journey over destination. If you are a builder you may be pleased to know that the claim system has an increased limit of some kind and I myself have not hit that limit yet despite having multiple large claims many thousands of blocks apart. If you are a homesteader or animal enthusiast this is a good place to be; plant growth speed has been tweaked to be a bit faster and there are mods that allow the capture and taming of several additional kinds of animals. If you are an explorer like me and live to see what’s over that next hill or beyond the other side of a translocator you’ve just repaired, this place is great. I have been very happy here as a wanderlusty pioneer who has a penchant for cooking too much food, finding TLs, and getting lost in caves.
Between Gloomeclasses and Xskills, the personal progression is far more robust than one might expect. The short version is that regardless of which class you pick there will be perks to make all aspects of the game improved. Do a thing to get better at that thing, Morrowind Style. Press the letter “O” once ingame to see the skills interface. There have been a few bugs as is to be expected with any modded server. The admin team has a bug report system in place via the discord and does their best to fix any issues that arise. For instance, early on I had an issue with a synergy between my class and my skills not interacting properly and two of the admins stayed up late testing things with me and applying fixes until the problem was solved. These are people who care about getting it right.
As for the community I made fast friends with a smith who makes legendary nails and a tailor who makes life savingly warm clothing. I myself am a hunter with over 1000 waypoints marked, some up to 20k away. There is another person on the server who has been 30k away. A few of us like to build roads and paths, and so far everyone has at least some presence near the world spawn or the roads and pathways connected to it. Several recent additions to the server have banded together to form a small village. They were having slight issues with gathering enough food while getting established and trying to build things while juggling IRL responsibilities, so I went on a light hunting expedition and then dropped off 30 sealed crocks of freshly made stew and 148 charred pies late last night. I say this not only because that was an absurd amount of assorted pies and was rather funny, especially the termite pie, but because this kind of helpful mindset is the norm here on this server, not just from me but from everyone.
