Hello everyone!
Three of my friends and I recently purchased Vintage Story after seeing about 10 seconds of gameplay and a screenshot that showed a vertical slab. We have now played for a total of ~8 hours over 3 play sessions and I thought it would be fun to make a post talking about our experiences and some of our initial thoughts on the game. We have not used any YouTube, forum, or wiki guides on our playthrough, only using the in-game help guide.
With Vintage Story being a blocky graphics survival game where you can freely destroy and place blocks it will obviously be compared to Minecraft. Three of us were quite surprised that the game doesn't feel like Minecraft and truly feels like its own game with its own personality. We were fine if it had a Minecraft vibe as long as didn't feel like it was trying to be Minecraft. The fourth felt like the game was too similar and he could have more fun just playing Minecraft; he decided to stop playing about one hour into our first play session.
The first half an hour of our first play session played out with us completely ignoring the tooltip about opening the help guide, trying to punch a tree, realizing that does not work, getting mauled by a wolf, finding some rocks and sticks on the ground, trying to craft inside the 3 x 3 grind with them, realizing that does not work, getting mauled by a bear, then FINALLY reading the tooltip about the help guide which say to get flint and knap it into a tool shape, finding flint, starving to death, finding more flint and sticks, making some basic tools, then getting mauled by a monster and losing our basic tools, then doing it all over again, and then starving to death again for good measure. It was hilarious to get our butts kicked this hard.
Now that we had a better idea of what we needed to do and feeling like our world spawn was bad (this was completely vibe based), we decided start a new world and try again from the ground up. This time we were much more successful and had tools, fire, and full stomachs by nightfall of day one. The next hour and a half was spent with us making up a dirt hut, gathering wood, making hand baskets, and trying to find clay as that seemed like the next logical step according to the in-game guide. We were completely unsuccessful at finding clay and we were slightly frustrated that we couldn't find such a necessary resource after an hour and a half.
Our second play session started with us finding a huge clay deposit about 50 blocks from our dirt hut, go figure. We mined up quite a few stacks of the red clay and got to work with the pottery system and making pit kilns to get storage vessels, tool molds, cooking equipment, and food storage containers. We were very relieved when we figured out that the pit kilns only took one in game day and not one real life day to complete because at that point we weren't sure how grindy the game would be and the in-game guide only said it would take 20 hours and did not specify if that was in-game time or real time. While our pit kilns were cooking, we were spending time panning and hunting, and I got absolutely clobbered by a deer... twice. I did not expect the deer to fight back so valiantly and my friends still haven't stopped teasing me about it. We then used the copper we panned and filled in our tool molds to get some new copper tools and filled a few crockpots with red meat and berry stew. We were getting somewhere finally!
We really enjoyed the pottery molding experience and how it felt like you were actually putting together each item instead of just using a 3 x 3 grid to instantly get the items to place in the pit kilns. It also gives you something to do while hiding away from all the spooky monsters at night when they show up!
On our third play session with our copper tools made we at the ready, we went to try mining for some copper. We found one copper vein right on the surface of a cave and then after that... nothing. We decided to make the prospector pick to try to locate some veins. We found a couple spots with "decent" ratings and percentages in the 20's for copper ore but we were not really sure as to what to do after that. We were getting low on the copper we got from panning but we didn't want to waste through our pickaxe trying to dig around for a copper vein that seems to have a low chance of actually being there. We were trying to avoid having to pan again.
During this search, we had a temporal storm which ended up having us hunkering down in our little food cellar as monsters filled up in our base above. When the storm finally ended up and we cleared out the monsters (which included all of us dying multiple times), we were able to resume our activities. This was probably the first game system we did not enjoy. It was not very fun to essentially stop what we were doing to hide in a cellar for 10 minutes as monsters invade our base just for us to die multiple times clearing them out after the storm. Now maybe these storms are not a big deal later on in the game, but at this early stage, it felt pretty bad. This kind of took the wind out of our sails for the play session and we decided to log off for the evening and decided to risk it and try to mine around those copper spots with "decent" ratings the next time we play.
Overall, we are enjoying the game a lot. The three of us have been having a lot of fun learning how all the systems work and actually feeling challenged while not overwhelmed. I am sure half of what we were doing was making the expert players cringe with how wrong we are probably doing it, but please try not to give me any hints! We want to try figuring more out on our own. If anyone is interested I can also update later on with our progress.
Thanks to anyone who read through my entire post!