Vintage Story is basically… what if Minecraft had many, many more layers of realism and complexity to its world sim systems, and then also had a whole lot larger of a beastiary with Lovecraftian origins?
It is also largely open source, though it does cost money, a whole lot of its subsystems and essentially modding tools are just opensource.
Amazing game. Way more complex than Minecraft and 100 times more fun.
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
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.
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.
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.
They’re releasing all the source code and assets for the community to pick up though, right? So that it’s not a shitload of wasted time and effort?
of course not
“That’s my IP to sit on and do nothing with!”
Dammit!
And just like that another Minecraft killer goes the way of the dodo, what a shame. Hytale really did look promising too, can’t believe after all this time we didn’t even get a second trailer :(
Dragon Quest Builders (2) attempted something between RPG and minecraft-style building, and at least it released. It looks pretty good for a blocky game, it has spectacular block and item diversity, and great building tools. As a mostly creative game with a bunch of silly NPC villager interactions, it’s fun.
Unfortunately, there’s only the hint of a great base/town builder in there, but it’s too shallow in the end. You’ve got different classes of NPC villagers with needs and skills, but there’s no challenge, only the satisfaction of seeing your town run sort of well.
Story mode also teaches you to build defenses and traps against monster attacks but monster raids are scripted and very dumb. After the story ends and you get into full free build mode, you’ll never have a monster raid again, making it all basically useless.
And also there’s very little procedural gen in the game. Main islands are big, but static. Small islands are procedural each with a set biome, but their primary goal is to be destroyed for materials. You can only save 3 of them to use them as (small-ish) new landmasses for your builds.
What a supreme disappointment. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming after the first several delays though. Oh well.
This is the first time I’m hearing about this game. Guess I was already too old for minecraft and similars 10 years ago
Hytale… that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Ah, started development in 2015, that’s probably why
As I expected from the initial hype.
Let’s just realize that these are not what make a good unique game:
- Minecraft but better
- Minecraft but not Java
Many games of course have minecraft like elements, that work, they just do try to be their own things:
- FortressCraft Evolved: Voxel factory game with tower defence elements
- Colony Survival: Voxel building game where you protect and grow a colony
Moving away from games with Voxel building for those that “want better graphics” you have games like
- Valheim - build/adventure.
- ARK: Survival Evolved - build/adventure/poop jokes (sorry never got into the game the let’s play poop jokes got old for me)
Also might add there are minecraft aspects to the 2d games, but most have unique gameplay as well
Factorio Stardew Valley Terraria - I really should like this… But every time I try it I don’t
None of these are “Minecraft killers” because while they may allow for some sandbox play they are unique games. Same for some others I see in this thread.
Sure you have Luanti as well if you want to make a highly modded minecraft like, or just other voxel game to play test, and maybe prove why its better. But it never tried to replace minecraft.
Minecraft but better
Minecraft but not JavaCautionary tales demonstrated by Minecraft itself.
Called it. The developers weren’t interested in finishing a game, only making one.
A big problem for fan games, an absolutely embarassing position to be in professionally.
You have some internal infos?
No, i just saw (some of) what they released to the public. The biggest red flag was the engine change, but before that they talked about redoing all of the generation.
The engine change was made to incorporate mobile as well, right? I recall the original is not exactly mobile platform friendly.
So you were making stuff up.
You realize normal people can take information and make educated guesses based on that information, yeah?
Normal people can post empty clichés to sound knowledgeable without knowing what exactly went down in the studio.
There’s almost enough material for a “Top 10 of cancelled/stillborn games, in order of money
spentwasted”
