BigBadBeef

You have to find it first in that thick shrubbery.

I've watched the youtubers play the game. They all feared the woods. Terror, pain and death is the theme of anywhere there are large clumps of trees. They all agreed - DO NOT BASE IN THE WOODS! Okay so I start my first playthrough. I spawn in the wods... WELL THAT'S JUST GREAT! ... I said to myself. I started to move quickly south, grabbing only mushrooms and berries to subsist on. I advance with the disposition of a germophobe in a covid crisis centre. Twitchy and on edge. The forests just won't end. Regular forests to pine forests, pines to mountain forests, mountain forests to gravel forests, until at last, after two days, I come upon a clearing. It was some sort of bushy plains with swampy lakes full of cattails and caverns to hide in. SAFE AT LAST! Or so I thought. I take shelter in one of the caverns and start to have something a bit more hearty to eat. As I spend my first night getting settled in, I hear it - the howl! Wolves! And the sound came from south, deeper in the plains, not north in the forest. I thought to myself, its probably just a goat with diarrhea, and go investigate. But the foliage is so damn thick I can't see a damn thing. I stack some dirt to gain some altitude and then I see it - a baby wolf, the parents can't be far away. I decide to f** off while I still can and go explore the other direction from my camp. I see something else moving in the bushes. I ready my spears and close in. At first glance its the size of a goat but the color of a pig. Its moving out of the bushes, I get ready to strike. Ooooh, it looks tastyOMG ITS A BEAR! GTFORUUUUUN! The only thing that saved me was that I jumped over a hole into which the bear fell and had to climb out the opposite direction which gave me a chance to loose him. Forests are dangerous the youtubers said, you'll get ambushed and killed in there they said...

Did you know that you have to put one foot in front of the other in order to walk? Its really complicated! Okay, i'm a total newbie, but NOT for voxel games in general. The hardest part for me to realize was that its really not that hard. You already have everything you need to survive, its literally a matter of finding seeds and knocking a couple of rocks together to knap out a hoe. The rest is a matter of discovery, and you have the handbook to hold your hand.

Well, here I am. Wasn't much of a minecraft player, because you could get endgame materials in a matter of hours, anything after that is a dull grind of acquiring materials. And the only thing that has changed over the years was in adding fancy new graphics, many a sin of AAA games these days. And Vintage Story... well... its poetic justice that a group of zealous Austrians could design a block game, superior to what a multimillion euro project can hold, and is, as of yet, unfinished as admitted by the developers themselves. Who could imagine that I'd be thrilled over knocking rocks together, hoping I'd eventually get lucky and knap out something that resembles a useful tool?