DarkGold

Welcome! I understand what you mean! It becomes relevant later in the game, as you start exploring further from spawn and changing your spawn point. Up until then, it's really not too much of a problem to die if you are near world spawn. As LadyWYT has said... This could change in the future, but I like how the inevitable deaths that you suffer as a new player aren't too punishing at the moment. Another game I enjoy playing is Valheim, and they have a food system that buffs your stats, but you don't have to worry about starving. This means you eat before doing something risky, but you don't have to worry about eating while just pottering around your base. While the early game in Vintage Story is training you for later, and rewarding longer term investment in your nutrition, that mentality of "if I'm just at my starting base, food isn't so important compared to if I am out and about" reminds me of Valheim's design.

I've spent some time prioritizing trading, to save up enough gears for something I have seen becomes available to buy as you progress the story, and some fancy armor I'd like to buy. I haven't spent a lot of time fighting during storms, or delving underground yet (besides in well lit, mostly vertical mining tunnels after prospecting). I've just made it to my northern destination though, so my fortunes might be about to change...

Nice! I'll have to check them out when I finish my vanilla run and start adding mods. Same, I like to sell longbows and feathers, so keep some on my boat to sell. It's the kind of thing I imagine the player might have to invest in to gain a benefit from. Make one fancy piece of tech you leave at your house, and another fancy piece of tech to give to individual traders who you'd like to keep tabs on. Or potentially do some quests for them to help them fix up/install something.

Now that I have explored a large body of water with traders all along the edge, I am again feeling something I felt earlier in the game, that might make more sense as a mod than a change to vanilla... Early in the game, before you have a lot of rusty gears, you need to be careful with the trades you make if you want to stay liquid and make a profit. What this might look like is: Go to Commodities trader, find out what they want, when this might change, and how much money they have. Go to a Treasure Hunter trader, find out what they are selling. Travel back to the Commodities trader and deliver what they wanted if the Treasure Hunter had it and the costs lined up with what both you and the Commodities trader could afford. Do this before their next delivery date. Wait for the Commodities trader to save up some money again before repeating this pattern. There are variations on this for the Survival trader and Agricultural and Treasure Hunter traders too. While I really like having to go and purchase goods, then deliver them within a deadline, doing steps 1 and 2 without finding a match is time consuming, and doing step 1 before proceeding to 2, to remain liquid, increases the amount of sailing you do. This can add up to a lot of time. Fair; your efforts are making you money, tedium is the price you pay. It would be interesting if there was some way to remotely check the trader's info. A board that one could add them to somehow once discovered (and maybe some other condition/s met). Or a telephone like device one could contact them through to receive this info remotely, if certain investments were made (maybe late game tech). I am aware there are certain technologies that might replace sailing in certain circumstance in the late game. I see this being a similar convenience. Perhaps this mod already exists? I'm doing a vanilla run of the game at the moment, but would consider a mod like this in the future if the base game does not go in this direction.

The good: trading by ship. I have a lot of traders around the perimeter of the sea and it's fun (and profitable!) to sail between them. I was also able to travel maybe 3,500 blocks north by sea. That's more than half the distance of the journey north I'm on! The bad: as noted, there is less land around you with crops, soil and clay at the start of the game. If I were to play the seed again, knowing what I know now, I would make a raft before backpacks, so I could travel to more cattails early. I think I could overcome a lot of my year 0 troubles if I played the same seed again now, no longer being a first time player. My starting island has a nice little lake on it right near spawn, some ruins, and there was a larger island within swimming distance (important when I was killed by a bear on that island and didn't have enough cattails to make a second raft yet). The larger island also had a couple of very useful traders on it. For anyone interested, my seed was: 158219089. Version 1.21.6 and my settings were default standard game world.

That is very useful to know! And it sounds like, based on the following thread, that items persist in unloaded chunks indefinitely between closing and opening the game. That eases a lot of my worries, and should make future game choices a lot less stressful/risk adverse.

I have considered carrying raw grain and flour, since it wouldn't be hard to bring a clay oven in storage on my boat, or carry a cooking pot for porridge. Since I'm exploring in winter, I have to intermittently camp with a fire to warm up again anyway. After Bruno Willis's reminder about pickled vegetables, I've decided I'm going to try harvesting soybeans in the next growing season. I don't have many seeds at the moment (only found a handful in a ruin after the last growing season), so it'll be a slow start, but pickled soybeans should be a good option for long travels in the future. I just finished mapping the perimeter of the large sea (maybe roughly 5,500x7,000 blocks) I happened to spawn in the middle of. I'm going to have to establish an outpost at the northern tip of the sea, then head inland and see how far I can get as the next step of my journey. Maybe that will mean a second sailboat, carving a channel, or doing the rest of the journey on foot. Either way, I'll have to build some more land based storage.

I only relatively recently found salt, so this would be something worth trying now! I have been mostly using bread for exploration (in seasons without wild berries) up until this point. I also have only domesticated chickens so far, though I do have goats near my base. I know pickled vegetables are a step in making cheese, so exciting to maybe one day start down the dairy farming path! It's not something I have on my to do list at the moment though; I only just decided it was time to pursue the story after making it to the iron tier.

2 more thoughts: Bows Much has already been said by other people on the forums about bows. I also want bows to be more effective for hunting larger game than chickens and hares. I would prefer to be able to kill a deer in 1 hit (if I hit it in the right spot with the right gear), because once an animal runs away, it's hard to hit it again. I understand that PvP would be a consideration for balance, I know changes are coming to animal HP to make bows more effective. I didn't want to mention this to begin with because I feel it already has enough voices behind it and I know it's being looked at already. I'm really just mentioning it to confirm that it is currently something I, as a new player, do want to see changed in the future (and changes are happening). Storage spoilage reduction on sailboats The other thing I have decided I do care more about as of last night, while attempting to journey thousands of blocks north, is the lack of a spoilage reduction in storage on sailboats. I was generally just happy storage was a large increase to inventory, making it convenient to load up the items I would need to establish a new outpost or base. Previous sailing journeys had usually only taken me away from base for a day or two, or were to ferry me between outposts. Outposts were equipped with storage that reduced spoilage. But now that I am in a mode of extended exploration, where my sailboat is acting more as a base than a ferry, I would like the food that I take with me to last longer, so I don't have to return to a place where I have left my food within a week. Especially as it is winter, and the ambient temperature would make any storage outside my person very effective normally. As I say, just having a large amount of storage on the boat is fantastic, but reduction to spoilage really would just extend how long one can go on sea journeys in winter without returning to base. If the goal is to encourage players to return to base once a week, or establish many halfway houses, I can see why devs wouldn't want to implement spoilage reduction on ships.

Thank you for the warm welcome! I did spend a lot of time reading through the handbook (and wiki) with the game unpaused, but ultimately, the winter is very long and I eventually ran out of stuff to do. I was forced to begin farming in low fertility soil. The island I spawned on had no medium soil, and it took a long time to make a raft (cattails were first put towards storage and backpacks) and travel to a place that had any. Between low fertility soil and taking some time to find crops at the beginning of the game, by the time you get crops into the ground, many died due to a long growing season and changing weather (heat killed my carrots, winter killed crops planted late). This made year 0 very challenging in terms of food, but I became better at hunting as I became more experienced with the game and was better able to find food in winter later. By the end of year 1, I had enough food this was no longer a problem. Great to know! I saw on the wiki they were warmer clime trees, I just haven't gotten very far south yet. It took me a long time to get temporal gears, so I was constrained to not travel too far from spawn until I got my sailboat in year 2, lest I die and not be able to retrieve what I was carrying before it despawned, since it took so long to travel anywhere by raft (and I spawned on an island). Just the luck of the world gen. My journey is taking me a good 5,000 blocks north to pursue the story at the moment, so no luck seeking warmer climes for a while. Certainly this doesn't bother me now I am later in the game and food is a solved problem. Early in the game, it was just a little unintuitive that clothing (which supposedly kept me warmer) didn't also change when I started getting more hungry because of the cold. I like that there is a hunger penalty, and even if wearing clothes made a difference, it still gets cold enough that it would kick in anyway after a point. I saw this change was coming, so doubled my field sizes already. I don't see this significantly changing the game; once you find medium soil, it is not challenging to make larger plots of it. From what I have seen, it spawns in large enough patches. Now that I am later in the game, I certainly avoid starving intentionally, and I have enough food I don't really have a problem. This is more to conserve temporal gear spawns though. Early in the game though, before I had a sailboat, and before I had temporal gears, I really was limited in how far I could travel without dying being very risky (losing inventory), so I didn't really take a lot of risks or engage in a lot of gameplay that rewarded having higher max health. Given the nutrition penalties cap out when you still have a max of 15 hp, that made it feel like not much of a problem for the activities I was engaging with. I wasn't trying to get into fights with creatures where having more health would matter.

I started playing Vintage Story about a month ago and I've really been enjoying it. I've been playing the standard game mode with default settings in single player, and I've just gotten up to iron tier and starting pursuing the story. I wanted to share my thoughts on what I'd like to see added or changed in the game based on my experiences so far. 1) Sleep vs standing still. At the start of the game, standing still seemed to conserve satiety better than going to sleep. This was meaningful at the start of the game since I didn't have a good farm yet and food scarcity in winter made me want to stretch food further. This encouraged me to spend time doing nothing, mostly when waiting for the night to pass, rather than engage with other game mechanics. If sleep had been equally efficient, I would have preferred to use it to skip time and spend more of my time in game actively. When food eventually ran out (after February when winter was "over", but berries did not return until June), it became easier to just repeatedly starve to death, and make sure to die in a place I could pick up my inventory. Once I was able to find medium fertility soil (difficult on the island I started on, requiring a raft and much searching, perilous dying far from spawn across an ocean), and begin my farming season immediately after the first winter ended, I had enough food to no longer care about whether sleep was more or less efficient. 2) Temperature's effect on hunger vs health. It was intuitive that I might freeze to death if I got too cold, so I needed warm clothes. After making fur and rawhide clothing, I was confused to see that I still suffered a hunger penalty indifferent to what I was wearing. Were my clothes doing nothing? It took some reading to learn how temperature really worked in game; warm clothes would change when I started losing body heat, but I'd still get more hungry regardless of what I was wearing if temperatures dropped below a threshold and I wasn't indoors. I would have liked my clothing to offset the hunger threshold too, and for info about the total temperature offset my clothes were granting to appear nearby my body temperature info. Again, once farming picked up, I had enough food to mostly not worry about the hunger penalty. But until that first harvest in the following year came, starvation was a constant threat. 3) Sailing! Getting a sailboat felt amazing, though farming enough flax took me several in game years. Year 0, without medium fertility soil, no starting seeds, a shorter growing window, was not very productive for flax. Year 1 harvest provided about half the flax I required. Year 2 harvest provided the remaining flax I needed. Having found medium fertility soil part way through Year 1, I could also enjoy 2 harvests in Year 2, though I had enough flax after the first harvest of that year. The one change I would like to see with the sailboat is the way the furl/unfurl controls work. Currently a right click cycles closed > half open > fully open > closed. I would like to be able to left click to cycle backwards, right click to cycle forwards. I rarely want to go from fully open to closed, but instead go from fully open to half open, then closed. 4) Alternatives to fat, for the players that enjoy doing runs where they don't hunt animals. I'm not the kind of player who falls into this camp; I typically play a game without adding extra challenges, and leather is a valuable resource in this game. But I can see that beeswax and resin can frequently stand in for fat in bow making and food preservation. And soybeans are a cool alternative protein source already in the game. My workshop required a lot of fat to create all the gears and axles though. With tools like the fruit press, I was thinking about the long history of oil pressing from seeds. If oil is historically made by roasting, grinding, then pressing seeds, perhaps oil could be added to the game to replace fat in many recipes. Oil also has a long history of being made through water extraction, for that first bit of fat you would need to replace in the fruit press recipe, before it could be more efficiently made. I also see olives are in the game, though I haven't found them yet. 5) Potash is a pain to make a lot of. I would like to see a cauldron, or some other update that allows me to cook more of it at once than the cooking pot does. 6) I would really appreciate a spyglass, to zoom in on animals I can see in the distance, to better ID them without getting too close. Is that a boar or a wolf? What kind of deer is that? These are the questions I frequently ask. With the introduction of grinding coming in v1.22, it would be wonderful to be able to grind a lens, and create a spyglass item. I know there are mods for spyglasses. I am currently playing without mods, and would love to see one in the core game. I'm very excited for the fishing, in wall axle, big windmill, watermill and cabinets coming in v1.22, and the changes to cooking stacks of things without the temperature resetting. The direction the game is moving in seems great. And the way blueprints will allow me to bring my base to a new world, rather than start from scratch after an update that changes world gen is very exciting.