Was just about to recommend this. Really wish I could get a server of people playing it. Single player is ROUGH. It takes so much time and effort to build cool stuff in survival and there’s just not enough time to gather all the raw resources in a day.
My biggest complaint is resources is far to scarce. My first map i had to abandon because it took me litterally 4 hours walking to find the nearest limestone. The scarcness would be ok for large servers that can support a trade economy. But in a single player world, all the resources needs to available within atleast 1k blocks of any single point. Minecraft solves this be distributing most of the resources within a chunk and only change their distribution based on their depth.
Not 100% sure if that last one works with current game version, but uh, if it doesn’t, I’d think it woukd be a pretty simple fix, as… the entire mod is like, 16 lines, a single, simple added crafting recipe entity.
The next map generated, limestone was litterally everywhere. What i want is more control with the resource generation. I dont want to explore a million blocks to find a biome that may contain a metal.
And for the record, i wasnt looking for limestone for mortar… it was for leather to make a backpack. I think its also needed for iron (or is that borax?) Idk, i never got into iron because just finding enough resources to even mine iron is just beyond tedious as a single player.
Ok, well, if you are doing leatherworking… you can use chalk, instead of limestone, I think?
Might be easier to find?
But uh yeah I mean, I do also think it would be nice to… maybe not necessarily tweak the resource generation itself… because the resource generation is actually very complex and based on like modelling real world geology… its not as simple as ‘limestone commonality = 1 to 10 to 100’.
What might make more sense, and/or be easier to implement in say a mod, or as a feature for the game… basically, keep the same underlying world gen sim, but give the player options as to where they actually spawn.
Like… find me a spawn point within 1km of x, y, z resources.
The game would have to like, start wherever it starts the world, and then just expand outward, generating more chunks, untill it actually found a ‘solution’ that matched the players ‘search filters’… or i guess times out or runs out of memory.
I haven’t actually looked into the worldgen code, I could be wrong, but as I understand it… basically, if you tried to just ‘make limestone more common’, this would alter and warp the entire rest of the world gen algo, because… its built from the ground up to be a realistic geology and climatology and plate tectonics sim… everything is finely tuned and dependent on everything else.
I think my first map was very unlucky, it was granite for tens of thousands blocks from my base. I dont think I ever found any sedimentary rock until I found a tiny limestone island (that was litterally the name of the biome iirc)… I get they are attempting to model real world, which is cool, I do like that aspect. The problem is the geographic biomes are insanely large. I think if the geographic biomes were the scale of minecraft biomes would make the game way more enjoyable to play without giving up too much of realism. There has to be a balance of realism to gameplay. I dont think theres many people in the real world that wants to walk to greece to find marble and then to the isle of portland to find limestone and carry it back to moscow.
The biomes being much closer to realistically scaled is… kinda again part of the core design ethos.
Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game inspired by eldritch horror themes
Like… if you have a fundamentally realistic geology model of how the lithosphere actually works… yeah, you can only scale it down so much before stuff just breaks. If you move things close together, the deposit sizes will scale down, the tiny pockets where really rare things appear in real life … well they vanish entirely.
Could they scale it a bit differently?
Maybe? But it would probably be an ungodly mess of work.
You are probably right, there are not many people that want to actually traverse a closer to realistic distance to get access to a whole slew of useful resources…
But some people do. This is the vision of the dev team, and as I think you already mentioned, this is far from the complete vision.
Its the weird and out there niche games that give you the truly unique experiences. If everybody aims for the middle, everything is normie appealing generic boring samey stuff, and innovation just stops happening.
Like… Death Stranding got a lot of hate for just being a walking simulator… and well whaddya know, actually, a lot of people like a walking simulator when it is complex enough to present challenging scenarios with multiple solutions / approaches / strategies.
I am not trying to fanboy Vintage Story, I am not saying its sublime perfection.
I am saying that it has a consistent, unique vision, that is actually executed shockingly competently (in the sense of executing that vision), and anytime I find any game like that, basically no matter what it even is, even if I don’t personally like that game, I will keep advocating for that team and its vision.
There’s more to making a video game than making something with mass market appeal.
Some people are more interested in realizing their vision.
Like its a personal work of art, not an advertisement for itself.
I dont think “uncompromising” means that they want to force brutal realism onto players.
Vintage Story offers multiple playstyles and a huge amount of customization options when you create a new game world. You have the power to choose a creative experience, a peaceful world, balanced survival, hardcore wilderness survival or quite literally anything inbetween.
Sounds like the devs want to give players the ability to play the game however they want to play. So i think its perfectly fine to give my criticism. Im not saying what they have created is bad, i am just sharing what i think could make the game better for me and others. Honestly, vintage story provides a lot of what I wanted minecraft to become. But it just needs something to reduce the tediousness of gathering resources. Perhaps even something as simple as an airship that travels faster than you on the ground so distances aren’t big of an issue.
Well, I guess I’m coming at this from more of a dev point of view.
What you are asking for, in terms of greater flexibility with the worldgen parameters…
I strongly suspect implementing what you’ve asked for would be immensely difficult, given how I suspect the game is actually architected, designed… I think the world gen is a highly complex foundation for everything else, and reworking it to allow for the kinds of flexibility you are asking for… I strongly suspect this would basically amount to redesigning almost all of the game.
Which is why I tries to give sort of workaround type solutions, that would not require said total rework.
But I could be wrong!
And I don’t mean to be saying your criticism is not valid, at least in a more broad, what is the actual player experience kind of way.
You bring up a system for faster travel, to reduce the tediousness of gathering spatially distant resources.
Airship? I don’t think that would make much sense given the realism focus on technological development. Lighter than air… ships… that can life much more than a pebble or small candle… require hydrogen, or helium… which require … well, mass production, advanced glass making, and at least the alchemy-transitioning-into-chemistry tech levels of the 1600-1800s.
But… perhaps the lovecraftian horror angle could provide some kind of essentially magical version of this, or an analogue?
Or… mountable animals, like horses, are on the roadmap.
Horses are quite grounded in reality… and also quite helpful at giddyupgofastnow.
Also grounded in reality: Sailing ships, paddled watercraft, or even ships drawn by a beast of burden alongside a riverside.
In much of human history, rivers acted as highways, especially for large amounts of cargo… much faster to go by water than drag the same things the whole way by cart or sled.
Then as we got better at sailing… well dang, now you can zoom around a coast line something like 5 to 10x faster than you can walk or march, even with decent roads.
Also also… there are NPCs you can trade with, though currently, they are quite rare.
Maybe the dev(s?) could at somepoint work on implementing a more comprehensive system whereby they would, to some extent, already have some kind of civilization or nomadic or pastoral societies, and you could interact with their economic systems instead of entirely building your own… and have that as a more easily toggleable or modifiable layer on top of the rest of the game, as another gameplay preset.
Yeah, when it takes 3 or 4 lakes of thatch to make a thatch roof, you only ever get one building.
The amount of stone required for bricks, the amount reed required for any sort of storage, the amount of sticks to power your kiln. There’s so much grinding for base materials that making anything pretty cuts so deep into your survival.
Leather in particular sucked because you needed borax or limestone or chalk. Took so long to find but it was the difficulty of building materials that drove me absolutely batty.
Was just about to recommend this. Really wish I could get a server of people playing it. Single player is ROUGH. It takes so much time and effort to build cool stuff in survival and there’s just not enough time to gather all the raw resources in a day.
My biggest complaint is resources is far to scarce. My first map i had to abandon because it took me litterally 4 hours walking to find the nearest limestone. The scarcness would be ok for large servers that can support a trade economy. But in a single player world, all the resources needs to available within atleast 1k blocks of any single point. Minecraft solves this be distributing most of the resources within a chunk and only change their distribution based on their depth.
Generally, what you are describing as a problem is what other people describe as a desired feature.
Some people play COD, others play Arma 3 or Reforger with a slew of mods on top to make everything even more complex and realistic.
Now, with limestone in particular being a bit of an unrealistic bottleneck for mortar production…
There are mods that address this, and add other bits that make the early game a bit less difficult.
https://mods.vintagestory.at/ancientmortar
https://mods.vintagestory.at/ancienttools
https://mods.vintagestory.at/bonestolime
Not 100% sure if that last one works with current game version, but uh, if it doesn’t, I’d think it woukd be a pretty simple fix, as… the entire mod is like, 16 lines, a single, simple added crafting recipe entity.
The next map generated, limestone was litterally everywhere. What i want is more control with the resource generation. I dont want to explore a million blocks to find a biome that may contain a metal.
And for the record, i wasnt looking for limestone for mortar… it was for leather to make a backpack. I think its also needed for iron (or is that borax?) Idk, i never got into iron because just finding enough resources to even mine iron is just beyond tedious as a single player.
Ooooooh!
Ok, well, if you are doing leatherworking… you can use chalk, instead of limestone, I think?
Might be easier to find?
But uh yeah I mean, I do also think it would be nice to… maybe not necessarily tweak the resource generation itself… because the resource generation is actually very complex and based on like modelling real world geology… its not as simple as ‘limestone commonality = 1 to 10 to 100’.
What might make more sense, and/or be easier to implement in say a mod, or as a feature for the game… basically, keep the same underlying world gen sim, but give the player options as to where they actually spawn.
Like… find me a spawn point within 1km of x, y, z resources.
The game would have to like, start wherever it starts the world, and then just expand outward, generating more chunks, untill it actually found a ‘solution’ that matched the players ‘search filters’… or i guess times out or runs out of memory.
I haven’t actually looked into the worldgen code, I could be wrong, but as I understand it… basically, if you tried to just ‘make limestone more common’, this would alter and warp the entire rest of the world gen algo, because… its built from the ground up to be a realistic geology and climatology and plate tectonics sim… everything is finely tuned and dependent on everything else.
I think my first map was very unlucky, it was granite for tens of thousands blocks from my base. I dont think I ever found any sedimentary rock until I found a tiny limestone island (that was litterally the name of the biome iirc)… I get they are attempting to model real world, which is cool, I do like that aspect. The problem is the geographic biomes are insanely large. I think if the geographic biomes were the scale of minecraft biomes would make the game way more enjoyable to play without giving up too much of realism. There has to be a balance of realism to gameplay. I dont think theres many people in the real world that wants to walk to greece to find marble and then to the isle of portland to find limestone and carry it back to moscow.
The biomes being much closer to realistically scaled is… kinda again part of the core design ethos.
Like… if you have a fundamentally realistic geology model of how the lithosphere actually works… yeah, you can only scale it down so much before stuff just breaks. If you move things close together, the deposit sizes will scale down, the tiny pockets where really rare things appear in real life … well they vanish entirely.
Could they scale it a bit differently?
Maybe? But it would probably be an ungodly mess of work.
You are probably right, there are not many people that want to actually traverse a closer to realistic distance to get access to a whole slew of useful resources…
But some people do. This is the vision of the dev team, and as I think you already mentioned, this is far from the complete vision.
Its the weird and out there niche games that give you the truly unique experiences. If everybody aims for the middle, everything is normie appealing generic boring samey stuff, and innovation just stops happening.
Like… Death Stranding got a lot of hate for just being a walking simulator… and well whaddya know, actually, a lot of people like a walking simulator when it is complex enough to present challenging scenarios with multiple solutions / approaches / strategies.
I am not trying to fanboy Vintage Story, I am not saying its sublime perfection.
I am saying that it has a consistent, unique vision, that is actually executed shockingly competently (in the sense of executing that vision), and anytime I find any game like that, basically no matter what it even is, even if I don’t personally like that game, I will keep advocating for that team and its vision.
There’s more to making a video game than making something with mass market appeal.
Some people are more interested in realizing their vision.
Like its a personal work of art, not an advertisement for itself.
I dont think “uncompromising” means that they want to force brutal realism onto players.
Sounds like the devs want to give players the ability to play the game however they want to play. So i think its perfectly fine to give my criticism. Im not saying what they have created is bad, i am just sharing what i think could make the game better for me and others. Honestly, vintage story provides a lot of what I wanted minecraft to become. But it just needs something to reduce the tediousness of gathering resources. Perhaps even something as simple as an airship that travels faster than you on the ground so distances aren’t big of an issue.
Well, I guess I’m coming at this from more of a dev point of view.
What you are asking for, in terms of greater flexibility with the worldgen parameters…
I strongly suspect implementing what you’ve asked for would be immensely difficult, given how I suspect the game is actually architected, designed… I think the world gen is a highly complex foundation for everything else, and reworking it to allow for the kinds of flexibility you are asking for… I strongly suspect this would basically amount to redesigning almost all of the game.
Which is why I tries to give sort of workaround type solutions, that would not require said total rework.
But I could be wrong!
And I don’t mean to be saying your criticism is not valid, at least in a more broad, what is the actual player experience kind of way.
You bring up a system for faster travel, to reduce the tediousness of gathering spatially distant resources.
Airship? I don’t think that would make much sense given the realism focus on technological development. Lighter than air… ships… that can life much more than a pebble or small candle… require hydrogen, or helium… which require … well, mass production, advanced glass making, and at least the alchemy-transitioning-into-chemistry tech levels of the 1600-1800s.
But… perhaps the lovecraftian horror angle could provide some kind of essentially magical version of this, or an analogue?
Or… mountable animals, like horses, are on the roadmap.
Horses are quite grounded in reality… and also quite helpful at giddyupgofastnow.
Also grounded in reality: Sailing ships, paddled watercraft, or even ships drawn by a beast of burden alongside a riverside.
In much of human history, rivers acted as highways, especially for large amounts of cargo… much faster to go by water than drag the same things the whole way by cart or sled.
Then as we got better at sailing… well dang, now you can zoom around a coast line something like 5 to 10x faster than you can walk or march, even with decent roads.
Also also… there are NPCs you can trade with, though currently, they are quite rare.
Maybe the dev(s?) could at somepoint work on implementing a more comprehensive system whereby they would, to some extent, already have some kind of civilization or nomadic or pastoral societies, and you could interact with their economic systems instead of entirely building your own… and have that as a more easily toggleable or modifiable layer on top of the rest of the game, as another gameplay preset.
Yeah, when it takes 3 or 4 lakes of thatch to make a thatch roof, you only ever get one building.
The amount of stone required for bricks, the amount reed required for any sort of storage, the amount of sticks to power your kiln. There’s so much grinding for base materials that making anything pretty cuts so deep into your survival.
Leather in particular sucked because you needed borax or limestone or chalk. Took so long to find but it was the difficulty of building materials that drove me absolutely batty.