Game Review: Vintage Story (patch 1.20)
2025-Jul-17, Thursday 19:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
You ever have a game come out of nowhere and just kind of...take over your gaming life?
In 2023 it happened with Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, an event which has repercussions to this day, considering how much hobby time I spend how on developing CDDA--we're about to release the 0.I version and I have top billing in the special thanks section--and this year it happened with Vintage Story. I can also blame that on CDDA, since on the development discord people would constantly talk about Vintage Story, about mining and smithing and clayforming and farming and being attacked by bears that lunged at them out of the underbrush. I watched the stories with fascination while I played Horizon's Gate (which I still plan to get back to), and around halfway through January I finally gave in, went to the dev website and bought Vintage Story, and downloaded it. I installed a few mods that came highly recommended like that one prevents a fire temperature from resetting on each item in the stack, loaded up the game, and was promptly greeted with a very familiar sight:
Voxels.
"Now wait a minute," I can hear you think, "that's just Minecraft." And it turns out that's partially correct. Vintage Story has its genesis in the famous Minecraft mod TerraFirmaCraft, which took as its basic principle that Minecraft crafting isn't complicated enough, it needs to be both more difficult and more visceral. What if instead of just slamming a rock onto a stick, you had to knap that rock piece by piece and then attach it on? And from TerraFirmaCraft came VintageCraft, which kept TerraFirmaCraft's crafting changes but overhauled the biomes so rather than hard lines with a swamp on one side and a biome on the other, biomes were dynamically determined from a combination of temperature, elevation, rainfall, and vegetation coverage, and rather than all rock being the same, various rock strata contain different sorts of rock that can have different ores in them. The creators of Vintage Story eventually decided that being a Minecraft mod was more limiting than they wanted, though, so they split off, made their own engine, and Vintage Story was born.
Like Minecraft, when you spawn in, you're alone in an unspoiled wilderness and left to find for yourself. Like Minecraft, you have a small inventory and the ability to use a 3x3 crafting grid to mash things together and create other items. Unlike Minecraft, though, you run over to punch a tree and are greeted with the message that you need a Tier 1 (Stone) tool to affect the tree, so you look around for a stone. You try to attach the stone to a stick but it doesn't work, but there is a UI overlay telling you that you can put the stone on the ground, and when you do, a popup appears that lets you pick the shape you want. Do you want a stone knife? A stone axe? A stone hoe? And when you choose the option, you need another stone in hand and need to knap them, voxel by voxel, until you have your finished product.
Of legend and myth,
Is the craft of the smith,
The molten metal poured,
And pounded into sword...
-Clamavi De Profundis - When the Hammer Falls
This is the basic draw of Vintage Story compared to Minecraft--you physically have to make the things you're making, in a process that tries to get closer to the real-life complexity of the task. For the anvil in the screenshot, I had to make bismuth bronze, which required me to go out and mine copper, zinc, and bismuth and then alloy them together in a crucible, pour them into an ingot mold that I had made with clayforming (voxel by voxel) and then fired in a pit kiln, wait for the ingots to cool and then heat them up again in a forge to the proper working temperature, place them on an anvil--making sure to use tongs so I don't burn myself--and then use the hammer to pound and shape the hot metal, occasionally re-adding it to the forge if it dropped under working temperature.
This is pretty much the whole game, and if it sounds like tedious make-work to you, you'll hate Vintage Story. But the game was designed by people who looked at Minecraft, thought that mining requires you go out and find a cave, make torches, delve down into the cave in search of ore, tear it out of the living rock despite the danger of creepers and zombies and the things that lurk in the dark, and then haul it back to the surface, but that crafting just requires you to slap some things together in a grid and out pops a finished product. If you manage to get to the Steel Age in Vintage Story and make yourself a suit of steel plate armor, after building the cementation furnace using refractory bricks, traveling to find borax to help create an iron anvil, making a helve hammer powered by a windmill to pound out the resulting blister steel, and then actually assembling all the steel ingots into steel plates into plate armor, you will really feel like you're a king of the world.
Playing this game makes you understand why our ancestors were stuck in the Stone Age for hundreds of thousands of years. I didn't even try making steel, by the way, iron plate brigandine was enough for me.
Since Vintage Story is still in heavy active development, there are some hiccups in this system. While clayforming and knapping and forging all make heavy use of this in-world, hand-shaped system, basically everything involving cloth and weaving is just sticking flax in the 3x3 crafting grid. Most woodworking like chopping logs and sawing planks is all in the crafting grid, though there is a mod for woodworking that requires you to manually chop all the logs yourself (it's a great demonstration of how incredibly tedious actual farmwork is). It's a stated goal on the Vintage Story roadmap to remove the crafting grid in every circumstance it's possible, and I'm curious to see how they do it. There are some mods that grab low-hanging fruit, like the one that requires you to place a hide on the ground and use a knife on it to scrape it instead of just doing it in the crafting grid, and some mods that try and but ultimately show why the crafting grid is still useful, like chopping firewood. I can't see how they're going to turn sewing into a voxel-based activity, but I'm sure they'll find something once looms are in the game. Can't wait to spend days spinning flax.
Time to go wander while I wait days for my leather to cure.
I've brought up the active part of the crafting system, but there's a very important passive part of the crafting system, which is...waiting.
A big portion of Vintage Story is setting things in motion and then waiting hours or days for them to finish. Placing iron nuggets with coal in a bloomery and waiting for it to reach temperature hot enough to create iron blooms. Waiting for pickles to ferment. The aforementioned waiting days for leather to cure. For the people who like this game (like me), this is a draw, because it forces you to slow down and have multiple projects going all at once. Sure, that leather armor is great but it's going to take you a while to kill enough wild animals, find lime to soak the hides, find oak for tannin to cure the hides, etc., so you should also go explore more. Find wild seeds and make a farm, watch the seeds grow into plants, wall off your farm so wild animals can't eat the crops, build a pit so wolves fall in and can't eat your chickens. There's always more to do.
Now, I should also say that part of this waiting is my fault. The default month length is nine days--twelve months, nine days to the month--but I extended it to thirty days because I love slower-paced games. I also reduce skill-gain speed to one quarter in Cataclysm and tend to play Civilization on Marathon, it's just the kind of game I like. When you increase the month length most of the timers increase to compensate, so crops take two months to grow but in the base game that's eighteen days. In my game it was sixty days, so I had some real extreme food problems early on. This is somewhat intentional, because part of the game design is that you are not guaranteed any particular resources nearby and might have to roam for in-game days if you're missing halite (for salt) or lime or borax or you need to find more wild crops to start your farm. Go onto any Vintage Story discussion online and you'll find someone complaining about how they started in a giant field of granite and in order to find halite they needed to travel thousands or tens of thousands of blocks to get to a place where there was sedimentary rock close to the surface.
One element to help pass the time is the chisel, which lets you remove individual voxels from blocks and thus make very complicated designs. I didn't really do anything with it--I assume due to some mod conflict, trying made the game crash--but I have seen some truly astonishing pictures of the builds people have made thanks to their ability to work on sub-block-level details. Here are some pictures: these amazing arches and windows, this chair and table set, this staircase and railing, or this amazing grouted and tiled kitchen floor are all possible thanks to the power of the chisel. The usual advice given for people in winter, when you can't travel far without frequently stopping to warm up, is to finish building their base and decorate everything with the chisel and use the spring and summer to explore the area around you and find all the resources you'll need for the long, cold winter nights.
And of course, traveling will bring you into conflict with the local inhabitants.
Blowout: Find Shelter.
When you first spawn in a peaceful Minecraft world, you think oh, I'll explore around and get settled. You probably notice, if you go exploring, that the wolves and bears are aggressive in that very video-game kind of way where they attack you on sight and fight to the death, and that brings you to the first major difference with Minecraft--your fragility.
My guess with no information behind it is that the devs wanted a clear advantage to the various tiers of armor, so that steel armor is appropriately protective but doesn't make you invincible. But that means that basic attacks are also appropriately damaging against a flesh, which means that when a bear rockets out of the underbrush jaws agape, you will die in two hits if you're lucky and instantly if you aren't. This leads to all kinds of weird gamey strategies like narrowing down the exact location that a bear will respawn and digging a big pit under it so that whenever the bear spawns it immediately falls in and you can ignore it. The formerly dominate strategy of "noob pillaring"--building a 1x1x4 tower under yourself with dirt the instant you see an enemy and then throwing spears at them--has since been patched so that enemies will slowly wander away if they have no path to reach you.
I didn't do that, I just built a big wall around my base and ignored the roars and groans I heard coming from outside the wall. Safer that way.
But as I'm sure you can see in that screenshot above, bears and wolves are not the only enemies you have to content with. There are things that lurk in the wilderness, creatures that come through rifts in reality. The one pictured there shoots spikes of bone at you, but there are others. And every couple weeks, the rifts come to a head and unleash a Temporal Storm, where reality breaks, you can see the silhouettes of vast machines in the distance, and horrific monsters flicker in and out of existence all around you.
Now, that all sounds cool, but at the moment temporal storms are pretty bare-bones. For one, you can't affect them in any way. For another, they can spawn enemies anywhere including directly next to you so hiding indoors like I'm doing in that screenshot only works because I installed a mod that makes light level prevent temporal storm spawns--the standard strategy is to hole up in a room that's only big enough to hold you and maybe an anvil so you can work on something, close the door behind you, and ride out the storm, because temporal storms can spawn enemies of any difficulty including those who deal respectable damage to someone wearing a full suit of steel plate armor, which means they will instantly kill you if it's your first temporal storm. And when you die, you drop all your gear.
And that's the big problem with combat--it's basically just Minecraft. Dying and dropping all your gear in Minecraft is annoying but if you're not using mods, you can easily have enough stuff around your base to rebuild your diamond armor. If you die and drop all your gear in Vintage Story and don't make it back in time, which is very likely later on considering how far the game sends you to do the plot and find items, losing a set of steel armor is losing hours of work. Remember, you have to pound those plates into armor yourself, and if you die, you'll have to do it all over again. It's a very odd holdover and something that really doesn't fit, considering most of the game is a relatively steady progression through the ages. It seems like it's designed more for multiplayer servers, where a town might have a dedicated blacksmith who can churn out sets of armor and where if one person dies, the rest of the exploring team can pick up their gear and make a fighting retreat.
There are, of course, mods for this--I used one that left a corpse that held my gear behind--but by default, be sure to never die if you're holding anything important.
Get out of here, Stalker.
And that gets into the actual implementation of combat, which is a Minecraft clickfest.
Interestingly enough, while the Roadmap online does have cloth-weaving like I mentioned above, it doesn't have any improvements to combat mentioned which is odd to me. Bows are machine guns. Holding a shield just reduces damage by a percentage, there are no timed blocks. Weapons don't really have anything unique about them, you make your attack and the enemy makes their attack and off you go. Weapons hitscan enemies in front of you and knock them back slightly, like in Minecraft, and if you click fast enough and have enough attack speed enemies have a very difficult time getting close. Similarly if they get next to you they can knock you back, and while armor reduces damage it also reduces the amount of healing you receive from items, so combat is realistic in that it's a frantic test of reflexes until one combatant is dead, but it doesn't really fit the realism focus of the crafting and world generation parts of the game.
The healing at least is being reworked in the next patch, where rather than armor reducing the amount of healing you receive it will make healing take place over time rather than instantly, so you don't lose resources but the main goal--you can't spam-click bandages and be invincible--is still achieved.
Now, I say all that, but I admit I played with a mod called Combat Overhaul that vastly changes how combat works and I installed it relatively early in my game, and it fixed a lot of these problems. Combat Overhaul requires drawing back bows and holding them so you can no longer fire them off at one arrow per second. It adds hit locations and damage bonuses so if you shoot a charging bear in the eye it will be in much more trouble than if you hit it in the flank. That curved line in the top middle is indicating that I'm making an overhand attack with my halberd, one of four possible attacks--overhand chop, stab, left swing, and right swing--and certain attacks are better against certain enemies. For example, a stab is easier to use against an eye weakpoint than an overhand chop. It also allows layering armor, so I wore brigandine over chainmail over a linen gambeson. Opinions are very divided about it, so I wouldn't say it's a necessary install or something, but it made the combat more interesting and thus more fun for me. Previously it was something I just avoided at all costs.
Pick a gear, any gear.
I've been mostly positive so far, but at least in the current state of the game I have only bad things to say about the story.
Not the lore. I want to make a distinction and say the background of Vintage Story is interesting and I really want to learn more about the world they're building, but so far the way they're telling it is incredibly annoying. This will contain a bunch of location spoilers, though I won't talk about the actual plot revelations.
So to begin, you need to find a Treasure Hunter trader, which is a gamble and might require you searching hundreds of square miles, though I got lucky and there was one only a few in-game hours from my base. Upon bringing them a few tools, they give you a map to a location you might find interesting which will probably be several days' journey away, so you need to prepare for that by making preserved food, getting your armor and weapons in order, possibly making some waystations along the way, and so on. I originally thought I had to sail there, which would have required me to build a canal across the narrowest point of land between two seas--the continent I was on was a C shape pointing down, and I was on the inside of the C--but I found an overland route and made it to the Resonance Archive. I set up a little base just outside, delved into the depths, and then got extremely confused and wandered around for an hour until I looked up what to do.
See, Vintage Story has the classic Minecraft problem of "how do we make a dungeon in a game where people can just mine infinitely through all terrain?" and the answer is ban people from mining through terrain around the dungeon. But it's not just that, you can't mine, you can't break down the doors, you can't even put a pot down on the ground and take out anything from it. Doing anything gives you a message that a "higher power" is protecting this place, which, okay, now I know I can't interact with anything so I need to find some other way to solve the dungeon, right? Wrong--the solution is to search through until you find the few very specific objects you can interact with and use them on each other. In adventure gaming we call this "pixel-bitching," where you need to click on every single spot on the screen until you find the exact yellow pixel of the ring on the desk or whatever it is that you're trying to find, and it's not any better in Vintage Story than it was in King's Quest. Anyway, I solved those puzzles after looking them up, fought the final boss, and discovered the object I was there to find, and took it back to the Treasure Hunter, and got an elk.
That sent me on to another story location, where I found a location to a third story location--each further away from my base than the last--and after loading up my boat I sailed for four in-game days until I found the Devastation. In its center was a tower, with a really cool mechanic involving shifting from the present to the past to bypass obstacles. Unfortunately, this means you have to parkour, and despite the existence of the Parkour Civilization, Minecraft-style games are not the best at jumping puzzles. If you make it up top, switching between present and past the whole time, you have to fight a boss so infuriating that as of the time of this writing they've already nerfed it. At the top of the tower is a giant flying thing, so you can mostly only hit it with ranged attacks. You can only see its health when it's close enough to attack, so it's easy to dodge just by time-shifting. However, it has a ton of health, and the landscape around the tower is so murky it's almost impossible to see it unless it's close to you, which means that unless you're already facing it when it's coming in to attack, you should probably timeshift, which means only a fraction of hits will land. And then it takes about 50 shots to kill. I've seen people say they fought it for half an hour before finally winning. You can see why it's being nerfed.
All the lore I learned on the way was neat, but the process was painful. I had far more fun with the survival aspects than the story.
Holy ground.
I keep talking about mods and it's because I installed a bunch of them over the course of my playthrough. This is from one of the more popular ones: Better Ruins. Vintage Story has ruins by default but they're mostly just shattered walls and a few foundations, and Better Ruins adds some more substantial structures like this ruined church (and a variant that's much more intact), a fragment from a long wall, a ruined windmill, ruined house with barn foundations, the ruins of a castle, and a bunch of other things I haven't discovered. I built my base in what turned out to be a Better Ruins ruin, a set of half-ruined houses in a small bay--I took some of the stone from the other houses (with my bare hands--turns out you can mine cobblestone barehanded) and built up a base, and so avoided the dirt hovel stage that most Vintage Story players go through in the beginning. This is part of why people sometimes recommend that you don't install Better Ruins, because while there is a precaution to make sure the ruins that have a bunch of loot don't spawn anywhere near your world start point, a lot of players will travel very far before finding a place they want to permanently settle down and that might be far enough to stumble across a ruin filled with treasure.
Another big mod I installed is called Primitive Survival, and this one is also divisive. It does make some parts of the game much easier but in a reasonable way--for example, you can evaporate seawater to get salt instead of having to mine it, which is historically how a lot of salt was gotten by people who lived near the ocean. Some changes are more controversial, like the ability to build fish traps and get essentially infinite food from them, though this doesn't bother me, because if there's one thing that's true about nearly every survival game on the market it's that food stops mattering after the very beginning of the game. And there are some changes which are pretty universally looked down upon, like the ability to use ancient relics fished from the deep to build altars to the Great Old Ones and perform sacrifices to earn their favor, just like our ancestors did. Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
It's a common problem that mods become more omnibus over time--it's something I consciously have to avoid in Mind Over Matter for Cataclysm--but I agree with all the people who quite reasonably ask, "why are their eldritch monsters in my mod about Stone Age survival?" I fortunately never encountered the actual monsters even in the depths of the caves, but if you search for Primitive Survival monsters online, you'll find people out there complaining about them, and their complaints are valid.
Speaking of monsters, I installed two big series of mods designed to increase the wildlife in the world. One of the is the Fauna of the Stone Age series, and the other is the Legacy of the Phanerozoic series. The first adds megafauna like mammoths and cave tigers, and the latter adds dinosaurs. And let me tell you, trying to fight dinosaurs with Copper Age technology does not go well. I ended up mostly having to cower inside my walls once I found a nanuqsaurus in the woods out there and being very careful when I ventured outside. On the other hand, there was a bear out there before I installed the mod, and after I did, well, let's just say I never had to worry about bear attacks again.
There were quite a few other mods I installed but most of them were just QoL mods, like one that lets you pick up barrels and put them back down without having to empty them, or one that adds insect and bird sounds to the forests, or the one I mentioned above that prevents the fire from resetting its temperature every time it finishes cooking an item. A few also made the game harder, like one that made lighting a fire in wind or cold difficult to impossible--this one really made travel in winter a pain--and one that slows down anything that travels through tall grass, which really helped me get away from that nanuqsaurus a couple times. That said, if you enjoy the basic gameplay loop, none of that is necessary. Vintage Story is a great game on its own.
The fruits of my labors.
That basic gameplay loop is what kept me going for the two hundred and ten hours I played the game. The monsters were neat but the story was meh, and exploring the story locations was annoying. There are caves in the game but monsters spawn down in the dark, and the combat balance is such that it's very easy to get overwhelmed or turned around and die. And if you die and drop your gear and can't get it in time, well. Hope you have a backup set of steel plate, and plenty of torches--they'll burn out if you leave them burning too long.
But farming, watering the plants, exploring for wild seeds and putting up traps, and working on my house, those were great. It actually turned out to be a bit of a trap, because even though![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
sashagee kept telling me to go out and actually do the story and explore, I spent so long just exploring the nearby area, trying to find leather, seeing what sort of traders were nearby, and otherwise doing small local tasks that by the time I finally thought I was ready to go and actually do the story winter had come and travel was significantly more annoying. If I had set it to the default of nine day months, I would have been in spring of the third year and just ready to go, but I actually started the story in the end of February and had to repeatedly stop during my long travels to build little winter shelter huts to hide in and warm up. It was fine, because I picked oceans worldgen so I was able to stack a bunch of building materials in my boat, but with better planning I could have just sailed straight on and not needed to stop so often.
It seems ridiculous to complain about it after two hundred hours, but one big problem I can see is that I doubt I'll play Vintage Story again any time soon. And not just because I played it for so long and want to move on to other games, though that is part of it, but also because there isn't a lot of variability in the current state of the game. Biomes being dynamically created out of temperature, rainfall, and so on is great for realism but it means you'll never stumble on something like Biomes O' Plenty's Sacred Springs or Ominous Woods, just more forest and plains. The default worldgen has a lot of little hills so I installed a mod to add rivers and one to flatten the world out a bit, but other than a single story location, there's nothing I can find in any particular location that I couldn't find in any other location. The only thing is rock type changing every few thousand blocks. There are mods to set up climate bands and sort animals (including mods animals) into those bands so you'll only see appropriate animals for your climate bands but by default, the only reason to travel far is because the game makes you travel far. And that's part of why I stayed close to home, because thanks to Primitive Survival the only thing I might have needed to go far for in the early game, salt, I was able to haul out of the ocean. When I did travel later, it was just forest and plains and water, just like the real world.
Home sweet home.
I say that, but I did play for two hundred hours. The basic gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying, and I can see Vintage Story being an amazing engine to build mods off to have a slightly more fantastical experience. Add some forest spirits, some Unreal World-style ritual magic, add in Primitive Survival's Cthulhu Mythos stuff, and you have a solid platform for a Stone Age low fantasy game. You can even turn off the existing lore with the in-game Homo Sapiens mode, which turns off the ruins, temporal storms, and the lore, and also removes your in-game map and minimap so it's a game of pure survival. You'd need to build marks and follow landmarks, the way our ancestors did, but would also need to appease the spirits, the way our ancestors also did. I think that would be a lot of fun for basically a different perspective Unreal World.
I've seen people talking about that on the Vintage Story Discord but there's nothing like it now--though there is a mod called Rustbound Magic for all you old Thaumcraft fans--but let me be clear that the basic gameplay loop of Vintage Story is a lot of fun for a certain type of person. If you can just tool around in Minecraft and make things but want your crafting to be a bit more involved, or if you're continually bouncing from survival game to survival game on Steam looking for one that scratches your particular itch, Vintage Story is the game for you.
But maybe wait for 1.21 to do the story.
In 2023 it happened with Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, an event which has repercussions to this day, considering how much hobby time I spend how on developing CDDA--we're about to release the 0.I version and I have top billing in the special thanks section--and this year it happened with Vintage Story. I can also blame that on CDDA, since on the development discord people would constantly talk about Vintage Story, about mining and smithing and clayforming and farming and being attacked by bears that lunged at them out of the underbrush. I watched the stories with fascination while I played Horizon's Gate (which I still plan to get back to), and around halfway through January I finally gave in, went to the dev website and bought Vintage Story, and downloaded it. I installed a few mods that came highly recommended like that one prevents a fire temperature from resetting on each item in the stack, loaded up the game, and was promptly greeted with a very familiar sight:
Voxels.
"Now wait a minute," I can hear you think, "that's just Minecraft." And it turns out that's partially correct. Vintage Story has its genesis in the famous Minecraft mod TerraFirmaCraft, which took as its basic principle that Minecraft crafting isn't complicated enough, it needs to be both more difficult and more visceral. What if instead of just slamming a rock onto a stick, you had to knap that rock piece by piece and then attach it on? And from TerraFirmaCraft came VintageCraft, which kept TerraFirmaCraft's crafting changes but overhauled the biomes so rather than hard lines with a swamp on one side and a biome on the other, biomes were dynamically determined from a combination of temperature, elevation, rainfall, and vegetation coverage, and rather than all rock being the same, various rock strata contain different sorts of rock that can have different ores in them. The creators of Vintage Story eventually decided that being a Minecraft mod was more limiting than they wanted, though, so they split off, made their own engine, and Vintage Story was born.
Like Minecraft, when you spawn in, you're alone in an unspoiled wilderness and left to find for yourself. Like Minecraft, you have a small inventory and the ability to use a 3x3 crafting grid to mash things together and create other items. Unlike Minecraft, though, you run over to punch a tree and are greeted with the message that you need a Tier 1 (Stone) tool to affect the tree, so you look around for a stone. You try to attach the stone to a stick but it doesn't work, but there is a UI overlay telling you that you can put the stone on the ground, and when you do, a popup appears that lets you pick the shape you want. Do you want a stone knife? A stone axe? A stone hoe? And when you choose the option, you need another stone in hand and need to knap them, voxel by voxel, until you have your finished product.
Of legend and myth,
Is the craft of the smith,
The molten metal poured,
And pounded into sword...
-Clamavi De Profundis - When the Hammer Falls
This is the basic draw of Vintage Story compared to Minecraft--you physically have to make the things you're making, in a process that tries to get closer to the real-life complexity of the task. For the anvil in the screenshot, I had to make bismuth bronze, which required me to go out and mine copper, zinc, and bismuth and then alloy them together in a crucible, pour them into an ingot mold that I had made with clayforming (voxel by voxel) and then fired in a pit kiln, wait for the ingots to cool and then heat them up again in a forge to the proper working temperature, place them on an anvil--making sure to use tongs so I don't burn myself--and then use the hammer to pound and shape the hot metal, occasionally re-adding it to the forge if it dropped under working temperature.
This is pretty much the whole game, and if it sounds like tedious make-work to you, you'll hate Vintage Story. But the game was designed by people who looked at Minecraft, thought that mining requires you go out and find a cave, make torches, delve down into the cave in search of ore, tear it out of the living rock despite the danger of creepers and zombies and the things that lurk in the dark, and then haul it back to the surface, but that crafting just requires you to slap some things together in a grid and out pops a finished product. If you manage to get to the Steel Age in Vintage Story and make yourself a suit of steel plate armor, after building the cementation furnace using refractory bricks, traveling to find borax to help create an iron anvil, making a helve hammer powered by a windmill to pound out the resulting blister steel, and then actually assembling all the steel ingots into steel plates into plate armor, you will really feel like you're a king of the world.
Playing this game makes you understand why our ancestors were stuck in the Stone Age for hundreds of thousands of years. I didn't even try making steel, by the way, iron plate brigandine was enough for me.
Since Vintage Story is still in heavy active development, there are some hiccups in this system. While clayforming and knapping and forging all make heavy use of this in-world, hand-shaped system, basically everything involving cloth and weaving is just sticking flax in the 3x3 crafting grid. Most woodworking like chopping logs and sawing planks is all in the crafting grid, though there is a mod for woodworking that requires you to manually chop all the logs yourself (it's a great demonstration of how incredibly tedious actual farmwork is). It's a stated goal on the Vintage Story roadmap to remove the crafting grid in every circumstance it's possible, and I'm curious to see how they do it. There are some mods that grab low-hanging fruit, like the one that requires you to place a hide on the ground and use a knife on it to scrape it instead of just doing it in the crafting grid, and some mods that try and but ultimately show why the crafting grid is still useful, like chopping firewood. I can't see how they're going to turn sewing into a voxel-based activity, but I'm sure they'll find something once looms are in the game. Can't wait to spend days spinning flax.
Time to go wander while I wait days for my leather to cure.
I've brought up the active part of the crafting system, but there's a very important passive part of the crafting system, which is...waiting.
A big portion of Vintage Story is setting things in motion and then waiting hours or days for them to finish. Placing iron nuggets with coal in a bloomery and waiting for it to reach temperature hot enough to create iron blooms. Waiting for pickles to ferment. The aforementioned waiting days for leather to cure. For the people who like this game (like me), this is a draw, because it forces you to slow down and have multiple projects going all at once. Sure, that leather armor is great but it's going to take you a while to kill enough wild animals, find lime to soak the hides, find oak for tannin to cure the hides, etc., so you should also go explore more. Find wild seeds and make a farm, watch the seeds grow into plants, wall off your farm so wild animals can't eat the crops, build a pit so wolves fall in and can't eat your chickens. There's always more to do.
Now, I should also say that part of this waiting is my fault. The default month length is nine days--twelve months, nine days to the month--but I extended it to thirty days because I love slower-paced games. I also reduce skill-gain speed to one quarter in Cataclysm and tend to play Civilization on Marathon, it's just the kind of game I like. When you increase the month length most of the timers increase to compensate, so crops take two months to grow but in the base game that's eighteen days. In my game it was sixty days, so I had some real extreme food problems early on. This is somewhat intentional, because part of the game design is that you are not guaranteed any particular resources nearby and might have to roam for in-game days if you're missing halite (for salt) or lime or borax or you need to find more wild crops to start your farm. Go onto any Vintage Story discussion online and you'll find someone complaining about how they started in a giant field of granite and in order to find halite they needed to travel thousands or tens of thousands of blocks to get to a place where there was sedimentary rock close to the surface.
One element to help pass the time is the chisel, which lets you remove individual voxels from blocks and thus make very complicated designs. I didn't really do anything with it--I assume due to some mod conflict, trying made the game crash--but I have seen some truly astonishing pictures of the builds people have made thanks to their ability to work on sub-block-level details. Here are some pictures: these amazing arches and windows, this chair and table set, this staircase and railing, or this amazing grouted and tiled kitchen floor are all possible thanks to the power of the chisel. The usual advice given for people in winter, when you can't travel far without frequently stopping to warm up, is to finish building their base and decorate everything with the chisel and use the spring and summer to explore the area around you and find all the resources you'll need for the long, cold winter nights.
And of course, traveling will bring you into conflict with the local inhabitants.
Blowout: Find Shelter.
When you first spawn in a peaceful Minecraft world, you think oh, I'll explore around and get settled. You probably notice, if you go exploring, that the wolves and bears are aggressive in that very video-game kind of way where they attack you on sight and fight to the death, and that brings you to the first major difference with Minecraft--your fragility.
My guess with no information behind it is that the devs wanted a clear advantage to the various tiers of armor, so that steel armor is appropriately protective but doesn't make you invincible. But that means that basic attacks are also appropriately damaging against a flesh, which means that when a bear rockets out of the underbrush jaws agape, you will die in two hits if you're lucky and instantly if you aren't. This leads to all kinds of weird gamey strategies like narrowing down the exact location that a bear will respawn and digging a big pit under it so that whenever the bear spawns it immediately falls in and you can ignore it. The formerly dominate strategy of "noob pillaring"--building a 1x1x4 tower under yourself with dirt the instant you see an enemy and then throwing spears at them--has since been patched so that enemies will slowly wander away if they have no path to reach you.
I didn't do that, I just built a big wall around my base and ignored the roars and groans I heard coming from outside the wall. Safer that way.
But as I'm sure you can see in that screenshot above, bears and wolves are not the only enemies you have to content with. There are things that lurk in the wilderness, creatures that come through rifts in reality. The one pictured there shoots spikes of bone at you, but there are others. And every couple weeks, the rifts come to a head and unleash a Temporal Storm, where reality breaks, you can see the silhouettes of vast machines in the distance, and horrific monsters flicker in and out of existence all around you.
Now, that all sounds cool, but at the moment temporal storms are pretty bare-bones. For one, you can't affect them in any way. For another, they can spawn enemies anywhere including directly next to you so hiding indoors like I'm doing in that screenshot only works because I installed a mod that makes light level prevent temporal storm spawns--the standard strategy is to hole up in a room that's only big enough to hold you and maybe an anvil so you can work on something, close the door behind you, and ride out the storm, because temporal storms can spawn enemies of any difficulty including those who deal respectable damage to someone wearing a full suit of steel plate armor, which means they will instantly kill you if it's your first temporal storm. And when you die, you drop all your gear.
And that's the big problem with combat--it's basically just Minecraft. Dying and dropping all your gear in Minecraft is annoying but if you're not using mods, you can easily have enough stuff around your base to rebuild your diamond armor. If you die and drop all your gear in Vintage Story and don't make it back in time, which is very likely later on considering how far the game sends you to do the plot and find items, losing a set of steel armor is losing hours of work. Remember, you have to pound those plates into armor yourself, and if you die, you'll have to do it all over again. It's a very odd holdover and something that really doesn't fit, considering most of the game is a relatively steady progression through the ages. It seems like it's designed more for multiplayer servers, where a town might have a dedicated blacksmith who can churn out sets of armor and where if one person dies, the rest of the exploring team can pick up their gear and make a fighting retreat.
There are, of course, mods for this--I used one that left a corpse that held my gear behind--but by default, be sure to never die if you're holding anything important.
Get out of here, Stalker.
And that gets into the actual implementation of combat, which is a Minecraft clickfest.
Interestingly enough, while the Roadmap online does have cloth-weaving like I mentioned above, it doesn't have any improvements to combat mentioned which is odd to me. Bows are machine guns. Holding a shield just reduces damage by a percentage, there are no timed blocks. Weapons don't really have anything unique about them, you make your attack and the enemy makes their attack and off you go. Weapons hitscan enemies in front of you and knock them back slightly, like in Minecraft, and if you click fast enough and have enough attack speed enemies have a very difficult time getting close. Similarly if they get next to you they can knock you back, and while armor reduces damage it also reduces the amount of healing you receive from items, so combat is realistic in that it's a frantic test of reflexes until one combatant is dead, but it doesn't really fit the realism focus of the crafting and world generation parts of the game.
The healing at least is being reworked in the next patch, where rather than armor reducing the amount of healing you receive it will make healing take place over time rather than instantly, so you don't lose resources but the main goal--you can't spam-click bandages and be invincible--is still achieved.
Now, I say all that, but I admit I played with a mod called Combat Overhaul that vastly changes how combat works and I installed it relatively early in my game, and it fixed a lot of these problems. Combat Overhaul requires drawing back bows and holding them so you can no longer fire them off at one arrow per second. It adds hit locations and damage bonuses so if you shoot a charging bear in the eye it will be in much more trouble than if you hit it in the flank. That curved line in the top middle is indicating that I'm making an overhand attack with my halberd, one of four possible attacks--overhand chop, stab, left swing, and right swing--and certain attacks are better against certain enemies. For example, a stab is easier to use against an eye weakpoint than an overhand chop. It also allows layering armor, so I wore brigandine over chainmail over a linen gambeson. Opinions are very divided about it, so I wouldn't say it's a necessary install or something, but it made the combat more interesting and thus more fun for me. Previously it was something I just avoided at all costs.
Pick a gear, any gear.
I've been mostly positive so far, but at least in the current state of the game I have only bad things to say about the story.
Not the lore. I want to make a distinction and say the background of Vintage Story is interesting and I really want to learn more about the world they're building, but so far the way they're telling it is incredibly annoying. This will contain a bunch of location spoilers, though I won't talk about the actual plot revelations.
So to begin, you need to find a Treasure Hunter trader, which is a gamble and might require you searching hundreds of square miles, though I got lucky and there was one only a few in-game hours from my base. Upon bringing them a few tools, they give you a map to a location you might find interesting which will probably be several days' journey away, so you need to prepare for that by making preserved food, getting your armor and weapons in order, possibly making some waystations along the way, and so on. I originally thought I had to sail there, which would have required me to build a canal across the narrowest point of land between two seas--the continent I was on was a C shape pointing down, and I was on the inside of the C--but I found an overland route and made it to the Resonance Archive. I set up a little base just outside, delved into the depths, and then got extremely confused and wandered around for an hour until I looked up what to do.
See, Vintage Story has the classic Minecraft problem of "how do we make a dungeon in a game where people can just mine infinitely through all terrain?" and the answer is ban people from mining through terrain around the dungeon. But it's not just that, you can't mine, you can't break down the doors, you can't even put a pot down on the ground and take out anything from it. Doing anything gives you a message that a "higher power" is protecting this place, which, okay, now I know I can't interact with anything so I need to find some other way to solve the dungeon, right? Wrong--the solution is to search through until you find the few very specific objects you can interact with and use them on each other. In adventure gaming we call this "pixel-bitching," where you need to click on every single spot on the screen until you find the exact yellow pixel of the ring on the desk or whatever it is that you're trying to find, and it's not any better in Vintage Story than it was in King's Quest. Anyway, I solved those puzzles after looking them up, fought the final boss, and discovered the object I was there to find, and took it back to the Treasure Hunter, and got an elk.
That sent me on to another story location, where I found a location to a third story location--each further away from my base than the last--and after loading up my boat I sailed for four in-game days until I found the Devastation. In its center was a tower, with a really cool mechanic involving shifting from the present to the past to bypass obstacles. Unfortunately, this means you have to parkour, and despite the existence of the Parkour Civilization, Minecraft-style games are not the best at jumping puzzles. If you make it up top, switching between present and past the whole time, you have to fight a boss so infuriating that as of the time of this writing they've already nerfed it. At the top of the tower is a giant flying thing, so you can mostly only hit it with ranged attacks. You can only see its health when it's close enough to attack, so it's easy to dodge just by time-shifting. However, it has a ton of health, and the landscape around the tower is so murky it's almost impossible to see it unless it's close to you, which means that unless you're already facing it when it's coming in to attack, you should probably timeshift, which means only a fraction of hits will land. And then it takes about 50 shots to kill. I've seen people say they fought it for half an hour before finally winning. You can see why it's being nerfed.
All the lore I learned on the way was neat, but the process was painful. I had far more fun with the survival aspects than the story.
Holy ground.
I keep talking about mods and it's because I installed a bunch of them over the course of my playthrough. This is from one of the more popular ones: Better Ruins. Vintage Story has ruins by default but they're mostly just shattered walls and a few foundations, and Better Ruins adds some more substantial structures like this ruined church (and a variant that's much more intact), a fragment from a long wall, a ruined windmill, ruined house with barn foundations, the ruins of a castle, and a bunch of other things I haven't discovered. I built my base in what turned out to be a Better Ruins ruin, a set of half-ruined houses in a small bay--I took some of the stone from the other houses (with my bare hands--turns out you can mine cobblestone barehanded) and built up a base, and so avoided the dirt hovel stage that most Vintage Story players go through in the beginning. This is part of why people sometimes recommend that you don't install Better Ruins, because while there is a precaution to make sure the ruins that have a bunch of loot don't spawn anywhere near your world start point, a lot of players will travel very far before finding a place they want to permanently settle down and that might be far enough to stumble across a ruin filled with treasure.
Another big mod I installed is called Primitive Survival, and this one is also divisive. It does make some parts of the game much easier but in a reasonable way--for example, you can evaporate seawater to get salt instead of having to mine it, which is historically how a lot of salt was gotten by people who lived near the ocean. Some changes are more controversial, like the ability to build fish traps and get essentially infinite food from them, though this doesn't bother me, because if there's one thing that's true about nearly every survival game on the market it's that food stops mattering after the very beginning of the game. And there are some changes which are pretty universally looked down upon, like the ability to use ancient relics fished from the deep to build altars to the Great Old Ones and perform sacrifices to earn their favor, just like our ancestors did. Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
It's a common problem that mods become more omnibus over time--it's something I consciously have to avoid in Mind Over Matter for Cataclysm--but I agree with all the people who quite reasonably ask, "why are their eldritch monsters in my mod about Stone Age survival?" I fortunately never encountered the actual monsters even in the depths of the caves, but if you search for Primitive Survival monsters online, you'll find people out there complaining about them, and their complaints are valid.
Speaking of monsters, I installed two big series of mods designed to increase the wildlife in the world. One of the is the Fauna of the Stone Age series, and the other is the Legacy of the Phanerozoic series. The first adds megafauna like mammoths and cave tigers, and the latter adds dinosaurs. And let me tell you, trying to fight dinosaurs with Copper Age technology does not go well. I ended up mostly having to cower inside my walls once I found a nanuqsaurus in the woods out there and being very careful when I ventured outside. On the other hand, there was a bear out there before I installed the mod, and after I did, well, let's just say I never had to worry about bear attacks again.
There were quite a few other mods I installed but most of them were just QoL mods, like one that lets you pick up barrels and put them back down without having to empty them, or one that adds insect and bird sounds to the forests, or the one I mentioned above that prevents the fire from resetting its temperature every time it finishes cooking an item. A few also made the game harder, like one that made lighting a fire in wind or cold difficult to impossible--this one really made travel in winter a pain--and one that slows down anything that travels through tall grass, which really helped me get away from that nanuqsaurus a couple times. That said, if you enjoy the basic gameplay loop, none of that is necessary. Vintage Story is a great game on its own.
The fruits of my labors.
That basic gameplay loop is what kept me going for the two hundred and ten hours I played the game. The monsters were neat but the story was meh, and exploring the story locations was annoying. There are caves in the game but monsters spawn down in the dark, and the combat balance is such that it's very easy to get overwhelmed or turned around and die. And if you die and drop your gear and can't get it in time, well. Hope you have a backup set of steel plate, and plenty of torches--they'll burn out if you leave them burning too long.
But farming, watering the plants, exploring for wild seeds and putting up traps, and working on my house, those were great. It actually turned out to be a bit of a trap, because even though
sashagee kept telling me to go out and actually do the story and explore, I spent so long just exploring the nearby area, trying to find leather, seeing what sort of traders were nearby, and otherwise doing small local tasks that by the time I finally thought I was ready to go and actually do the story winter had come and travel was significantly more annoying. If I had set it to the default of nine day months, I would have been in spring of the third year and just ready to go, but I actually started the story in the end of February and had to repeatedly stop during my long travels to build little winter shelter huts to hide in and warm up. It was fine, because I picked oceans worldgen so I was able to stack a bunch of building materials in my boat, but with better planning I could have just sailed straight on and not needed to stop so often.It seems ridiculous to complain about it after two hundred hours, but one big problem I can see is that I doubt I'll play Vintage Story again any time soon. And not just because I played it for so long and want to move on to other games, though that is part of it, but also because there isn't a lot of variability in the current state of the game. Biomes being dynamically created out of temperature, rainfall, and so on is great for realism but it means you'll never stumble on something like Biomes O' Plenty's Sacred Springs or Ominous Woods, just more forest and plains. The default worldgen has a lot of little hills so I installed a mod to add rivers and one to flatten the world out a bit, but other than a single story location, there's nothing I can find in any particular location that I couldn't find in any other location. The only thing is rock type changing every few thousand blocks. There are mods to set up climate bands and sort animals (including mods animals) into those bands so you'll only see appropriate animals for your climate bands but by default, the only reason to travel far is because the game makes you travel far. And that's part of why I stayed close to home, because thanks to Primitive Survival the only thing I might have needed to go far for in the early game, salt, I was able to haul out of the ocean. When I did travel later, it was just forest and plains and water, just like the real world.
Home sweet home.
I say that, but I did play for two hundred hours. The basic gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying, and I can see Vintage Story being an amazing engine to build mods off to have a slightly more fantastical experience. Add some forest spirits, some Unreal World-style ritual magic, add in Primitive Survival's Cthulhu Mythos stuff, and you have a solid platform for a Stone Age low fantasy game. You can even turn off the existing lore with the in-game Homo Sapiens mode, which turns off the ruins, temporal storms, and the lore, and also removes your in-game map and minimap so it's a game of pure survival. You'd need to build marks and follow landmarks, the way our ancestors did, but would also need to appease the spirits, the way our ancestors also did. I think that would be a lot of fun for basically a different perspective Unreal World.
I've seen people talking about that on the Vintage Story Discord but there's nothing like it now--though there is a mod called Rustbound Magic for all you old Thaumcraft fans--but let me be clear that the basic gameplay loop of Vintage Story is a lot of fun for a certain type of person. If you can just tool around in Minecraft and make things but want your crafting to be a bit more involved, or if you're continually bouncing from survival game to survival game on Steam looking for one that scratches your particular itch, Vintage Story is the game for you.
But maybe wait for 1.21 to do the story.
