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.

If anyone is unsure about it and owns Minecraft, check out the TerraFirmaCraft mod. Vintage Story and TerraFirmaCraft are both based off the VintageCraft mod afaik

I've been trying to get some people into it but so far nobody I know has time. Solo I get wrecked by nightmare shit by minecraft experience making me think I'm still safe.

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.

I just found what may be some helpful mods for addressing what does appear to me at least to be a legitimate design flaw, that being that limestone must be ground into lime powder, and that is the **only** may to make mortar in the vanilla game atm... which is imo bullshit, as there are tons of other ways of making different kinds of roughly comparable decent mortar irl. See my reply to piccolo. But ahaha, yeah, its brutal, thats kinda the point. The wise man knows that he knows nothing; You must first empty a bowl of sickly water to fill it with envigorating water; You must unlearn what you know, but isn't so, before you can truly learn what is useful. ... Or, maybe, this is just a bit too hardcore for you or others tastes, and you'd prefer something more casual. Absolutely nothing wrong with that! I guess I'm just a bit more on the masochistic side of my gaming preferences, lol.

Normal people can post empty clichés to sound knowledgeable without knowing what exactly went down in the studio.

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.

Vintage story has about the uppper limit of what I can tolerate and still enjoy. The fear of whatever the hell is growling right outside my door keeps me playing. I just want a game with goods crafting like this game with some terraria elements, building construction like valheim, combat like god of war ragnarok but slightly more souls like, tower defense mechanics that are never explained but you can just build using the normal construction, monster waves/events/bosses that can come to you/be summoned/you go to them, mounts including flying creatures, automation/factory and machine/vehicle construction, npc workers you can rescue and put to work in your base, monster capture pokemon would sue for, skateboard tricks and skate park building just for the kids and old timer thps fans, local star system space travel and station/orbital weapon building, space alien invasions with space and planet side combat, literally just gundams, "not even my father hit me" reference, and different stiffness of toothbrush so you can make the mistake of using anything other than soft and wear down your gums. That can't be too much to ask for right?

> The fear of whatever the hell is growling right outside my door keeps me playing. See this is what I love in at least some of the games I play... that actual, visceral _**fear.**_ > Gigantic description of your perfect game Yeah should be easy, just ask Grok to spit it out, easy peasy, done in a flash, bwahahaha! Ok now, unironically... I am actually hoping to be able to start working on at least the gameplay systems of a game that has... many of those features, but dear lord not all of them.... roughly, in some form or another, everything up to and stopping at spaceflight. See, I've been crippled for almost two years now, doing nothing but PT and shit posting on Lemmy. I am healing, but its gonna be some more months before I can sit, and use my wrist for extended periods of time. I have been just sponging up all the useful Godot guides and extensions and useful coding solutions to problems I'll have to solve... but I am also broke and cannot really make art assets worth a damn, unless I guess I make the whole thing at about PS1 level graphics... which, somewhat ironically, is apparently a sort of niche trending art style right now, demakes everywhere! I also really, reaaaallly want to avoid even having really, or managing a community, and you literally could not pay me to start some kickstarter early access bullshit at Step 0, I wouldn't even consider it untill I had basically a true beta, that is to say, feature complete or nearly so, and just needs actual testing to fix actual bugs, and money for maybe hiring some actual artists or paying for some asset packs or what not. I've also got sort of a framed up version of the world story and lore for this... but only in fairly big picture ways, as ... I want to make a game that _**basically**_ uses the same map everytime, but has so many underlying dynamic mechanics that can actually substantively alter the world itself, to say nothing of the people and factions that inhabit it... that it would have a lot of emergent nonsense that can just happen, and now thats what you gotta deal with. Sort of like Kenshi or RimWorld. Voice acting is basically out the window, just too many possible things people could say. I was thinking to do basically a sort of... modified take on what Animal Crossing does, just have a weirdly modified and stylized TTS system with different 'voices' and pronunciation patterns, that could all be procedurally assigned to npcs based on their attributes. Ironically I could keeo going on about this for days, but my wrist is screaming at me so uh... maybe one day I'll get to actually starting on all this. Been modding games for years, worked as a data analyst, db admin and software engineer... Im pretty sure I can handle the code end, the world sim, the gameplay... but getting the visual style and art assets, I'm probably gonna need help.

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.

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.

haha that's my silly mishmash game idea that would be an absolute nightmare to piece together and balance, if I could at least have shelter, power, internet, and food without working I'd probably just plug away at it as a project for just friends, family and myself, but if anyone else likes it, cool. simple graphics have been selling really well with games like lethal company or similar game thats a bit easier on the eyes r.e.p.o. I tried to do both 2d and 3d art but I have a really hard time maintaining a consistent level of detail and consistent style. And I like animal crossing voices, or the banjo kazooie style even more, but the voice sounds is actually one of the things I didn't like in vintage story. every time my character made a sound I had already forgotten about it even being a feature and it scared the shit out of me. It adds to the panic of getting groped by some cosmic horror though.

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.

This is the first time I'm hearing about this game. Guess I was already too old for minecraft and similars 10 years ago

> Minecraft but better > Minecraft but not Java Cautionary tales demonstrated by Minecraft itself.