The Definite Guide to Vintage Story (2024)

Movement

Interaction

Interface

Character

The first thing you will do after joining a world is customizing your skin and character class. If you accidentally close this dialog without clicking "Confirm", it will reappear after rejoining.

When you're playing the game for the first time, it is recommended you pick the Commoner class, especially if you're not sure what to go with. You start with a set of clothes matching your class, though you can discover more as you play.

Opening your character dialog (C) ingame allows you to look at and switch out your clothing and equipped armor. Additionally, you will see a "Stats" dialog which tells you information about yourself, and an "Environment" dialog that shows you the date, time, temperature and frequency of rainfall.

The nutrition bars will fill up as you eat foods in those categories. You will find that cooked meals are an especially good way to fill multiple at once. This is important because you can raise your maximum health from 15 health points (by default) to a total of 27.5 when all 5 categories are full.

Health and satiety displayed here are also visible above the hotbar as the red and green bars to the left and right, respectively. If you're curious what the cog in the center does, go and read up on the Temporal Stability mechanic in the handbook. The additional stats are affected by the armor you wear, and notably, carrying an item in your offhand raises your hunger rate by 25%.

Handbook

Before you jump right into the game, you should definitely be aware of the ingame handbook, which can be opened by pressing H. You can also hover over an item in your hotbar, inventory or any container and press H to directly jump to its page, or Sneak+H to do the same for blocks in the world.

The handbook allows you to read information about certain mechanics (such as smithing), how to create an item and what it can be used for. Navigate it using the search, or click on icons and links to move around and use the back button to go to where you were previously.

In addition to this handbook, you can also use the already mentioned Vintage Story Wiki for more in-depth information about certain topics beyond what this guide can cover.

Resources

The following list shows some important resources you will want to be looking out for early on.

Tall Grass		When harvested with a knife, drops a piece of dry grass. Can be made into hay and cob 10 , used to create a firestarter and firepit.1
Sticks		Sometimes found laying about, you can also get them from breaking leaves, in particular branchy ones. They're used to create tools, a firestarter, torches, ladders 3 , and may be used as fuel for the firepit.
Rocks		Certain stones can be used to craft tool heads: Granite, andesite, basalt and peridotite. Other rock types, such as sandstone pictured here, are too soft. Can be thrown at enemies for minor damage.
Flint		A bit more rare than stones, but found anywhere in the world. Slightly better material to make tool heads from, and unlike stones also arrow heads.
Obsidian		Found only in areas where the top layer of rock is basalt. It's the best non-metal material for tools. Below patches of obsidian stones, you may find obsidian rock underground.
Copper		Will yield 1 to 3 copper nuggets.2 Consider holding off on collecting them, due to your initially limited inventory space. Either way, be sure to create a waypoint where you find them, because there is a surface deposit of copper ore hiding below!
Cattail		Found near water, cooper's reed will yield cattail.3 Use a knife, or you'll destroy the plant. Harvesting it a second time drops a root to replant or cook. Used for hand baskets 2 2 2 2 2 to expand your inventory and baskets 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 to store things at home.
Horsetail		This special flower generally found in forests allows you to create horsetail poultices 4 2 4 early on, which heals 2 hitpoints. Also rarely spawns on empty farmland.
Clay		Is used to form pottery and molds, important for cooking, preservation and moving into the copper age. There's also a much rarer varient called fire clay which is used in the process to create your first iron.
Terra Preta		This dark and especially rare soil is the best block to till into farmland to grow your crops on the quickest, so keep a lookout for it. Just be aware that, once tilled, it can't be picked up anymore.4

Knapping

It's time to make your first tools! To do so, you need to hold at least 2 of any knappable material (Flint, granite, andesite, basalt, peridotite or obsidian) in your hand, then Sneak+ on the ground. Using flint, you will begin knapping right away. With stones, you have to "place" a second one against the first.

A dialog will show up, letting you chose what you want to make. You may want to start with a pair of knives, and eventually you'll also need an axe. You might want to consider a spear or two to hunt or defend yourself, but inventory space is precious right now.

Next, a flat grid of voxels will appear on the ground, some highlighted with an orange outline. While holding another item of the same (or any knappable) material, knap away voxels either by holding down or clicking at your own pace, until no highlighted voxel remains. You can break away voxels by disconnecting them from the main work piece.

Consider sitting down using G to get closer to the crafting surface. Once you're done and received your tool head (here, 2 knife blades) slap it into the 3x3 crafting grid in your inventory (E) with a stick below to receive your finished tool.

Inventory Expansion

Especially once you have a knife, you can look around bodies of water for cooper's reed, which will give you cattail. Just 10 of these can be crafted into a single

hand basket

2

2

2

2

2

1, and 40 is enough to fill all of the bag slots you can see to the right of your hotbar. Each hand basket adds 3 slots to your previously non-existant inventory.

Food Gathering

The next worry you might have is your dwindling food bar. Thankfully, there are a number of options when it comes to gathering food:

Veggies and  Grain (Crops)		Fully grown crops will drop vegetables or raw grain for you to eat. To check their growth stage, look at the block/entity info HUD (toggled with B). However, they also drop a seed bag, which is valuable and you shouldn't leave it behind, but it takes up equally valuable inventory space, and requires farmland to plant. I personally find flax to be one of the few crops worth grabbing, as its fibers are valuable. For anything else, just create a waypoint for later.
Berries		These bushes can be harvested for berries by holding down . Unlike crops, you can easily replant them by just placing them back down, making them a great first food source to relocate to your base.
Shrooms		Field mushroom, bolete and fly agaric are found in humid forests. Can you guess which one is poisonous? When harvested with a knife, they regrow after a few days. Unfortunately, mushrooms in newly discovered areas start out "harvested".
Small Animals		Hares, chickens, raccoons and the predatory foxes are scared of you (most of the time). But they are also very quick on their little feet and don't give a lot of meat. Throw spears from afar and aim well for success.
Large Animals		Bighorn sheep and boars have a good amount of redmeat on them, but they also don't like it when you poke them. Make sure you're at least somewhat prepared if you want to take them on.
Danger Animals!		Once you're not scared of wolves and hyenas anymore, you can hunt them for their bushmeat for a change. Either keep your distance by throwing spears, or charge them with a longblade and ideally some armor.
Cattail		This plant again? Yes, the cattail root can be cooked in a firepit and eaten, in case you're running out of options. They're not really renewable, though.

Shelter & Fire

With sunlight being limited, and night approaching, you might want to look into creating a safe spot for yourself. Here are some materials / methods you can use:

• Dig a 2 blocks deep trench, so nothing besides a leaping wolf can get to you.
• Soil can be found anywhere, so why not build with it?
• Packed Dirt

  

  

  

  

  

  

  6

  , Arid Packed Dirt

  

  

  

  

  

  

  6

  , Cob

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  10

  and Strewn Straw

  

  

  

  

  

  

  4

  are some alternatives.
• Hay

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  is made from dry grass and quick to break. Works well to close up entrances.
• Logs you chop down are perfect to look like load-bearing pillars!
• Cobblestone

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  2

  can be crafted if you have lots of stones and some clay.
• Speaking of cobblestone, with some luck you can find and spruce up a ruin.
• Light

  2

  2

  4

  

  4

  2

  

  2

  4

  and dark mudbrick

  2

  2

  4

  

  4

  2

  2

  4

  is made with any sand and low fertility soil, specifically.

Once you've made yourself reasonably comfortable, it's time to make a fire! First place a piece of dry grass followed by 4

firewood

4

on the ground using Sneak+. This creates a basic, unlit firepit, which you now have to start using a

firestarter

- again hold Sneak+ until it succeeds. When the firepit starts burning its temperature will start to rise, and will continue burning as long as you provide it with fuel.

Next, use some of those excess sticks you've gathered and turn them into torches by just placing them in the firepit. Torches can start fires even better than the firestarter, so you can throw the latter away. In your inventory they last forever, but keep in mind that when placed, they burn out after 3 days, or simply go out when it's raining, if not covered by a block.

You may create some

baskets

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

(8 slots) to store those goodies you find, or vessels (12 slots) which are made by clay forming - a good way to spend your night. Of course, if you don't like the darkness, 5 hours can also be skipped by making a

hay bed

and sleeping in it.

Clay Forming & Pottery

Clay can be found in areas of the world that are somewhat humid. Fire clay is about 5 times as rare as blue clay, the former being used to build a bloomery to start into the iron age.

To begin clay forming, hold Sneak+ while holding either type of clay - for most recipes, it does not matter which one you use. Now you can select one of the recipes.

• Vessels
  Clay Forming

  35

  

  are quite useful for storage and food preservation.
• If you want to start cooking, make a cooking pot
  Clay Forming

  4

  

  24

  4

  and some bowls
  Clay Forming

  

  

  4

  4

  .
• To go into the copper age, start with a crucible
  Clay Forming

  2

  

  13

  4

  , pickaxe
  Clay Forming

  12

  

  and hammer
  Clay Forming

  12

  

  mold.
  Later, you will need an anvil
  Clay Forming

  28

  

  and at least 2 ingot
  Clay Forming

  3

  

  5

  2

  molds. This takes 59 clay total.

Now you will, similar to knapping, find yourself with a voxel grid, except this time you'll (mostly) be adding voxels rather than removing them, building the chosen item layer by layer. Remove orange voxels with and add them to where you see green outlines with .

You start with 25 voxels worth of clay and when you run out, a piece of clay will be consumed from your hotbar to give you 25 more voxels to work with.

When you press F you can switch the tool mode from 1x1 to 2x2, 3x3 and duplicate layer. This is especially useful once you've finished a layer and the next one is the same. You can then use the duplicate layer mode to easily and quickly fill in the same voxels as the previous layer.

Get closer to the ground by sitting (G), and enjoy the company of your friends, who can help you work on the same recipe. When you're all done, either the items will pop off the ground or you have to pick them up. Burn the unfinished pottery and molds in the firepit to finish them.

Cost of clay forming recipes

The game does not display the usual cost for crafting clay items in the handbook, therefore I will provide you with this information in the following table here.

Crafting result		1x / Cost	Qty. / Cost
	Ingot Mold	3	2x	5
	Bowl	1	4x	4
	Claypot	4	4x	24
	Crock	2	4x	14
	Crucible	2	4x	13
	Flowerpot	4	4x	23
	Shingle		12x	4
	Planter	28
	Storage Vessel	35
	Watering Can	20

Crafting result (molds)		1x / Cost
	Anvil	28
	Axe	11
	Hammer	12
	Helvehammer	5
	Hoe	12
	Lamellae	8
	Longblade	12
	Pickaxe	12
	Prospecting Pick	13
	Shovel	11

Due to starting out with 64 voxels for a single piece of clay, and only getting 25 more when you run out, the crafting cost can vary a lot when making multiple items at once using the batch recipes. While most batch recipes are more expensive, it is worth pointing out that 4 bowls cost the same as when made separately, and making 2 ingot molds is even a single clay cheaper.

Voxelcrafting using mouse cursor

You might feel more comfortable working on these voxel flavored crafting recipes if your camera wasn't constantly moving around. To do this, open any dialog or hold Alt to unlock the mouse.

Charcoal Pit

An important resource going into the copper age will be charcoal. It is one of the few fuels that burns hot enough to melt down copper nuggets in a crucible, so you can pour it into molds. This takes a lot of

firewood

4

and some time. I recommend to do this sooner rather than later, so you can get right into smelting that copper when you have enough of it.

To turn firewood into charcoal, you need to create a structure called a charcoal pit. This can be as small as a single block or as large as 13x13x13, surrounded by solid, non-flammable blocks such as soil, filled entirely with firewood piles.

To begin the charring process, a firepit needs to be placed on top of one of the firewood piles, lit with a torch, and then covered up. If you hear a burning sound, get in there and save as much wood as you can! However, if done correctly, you will see smoke particles being emitted from the entire structure, and it'll be done in 18 in-game hours for you to dig out. Each of the piles of 32 firewood will turn into 6 charcoal on average.

Farming & Husbandry

Farming Crops

Soil		Fertility
	Low	25
	Medium	50
	Compost1	65
	Terra Preta2	80

Nutrients	Speed
>75	110%
>50	100%
>35	90%
>20	60%
> 5	30%
≤ 5	10%

Fertilizer		N	P	K
	Bonemeal	3	30	0
	Saltpeter	13	0	44
	Potash	0	0	66

Crop		Stages	Days	Nutrients
	Rye	9	5.0	40	N
	Spelt	9	4.4	40
	Turnip	5	3.0	30
	Cabbage4	12	6.5	40
	Onion	7	3.6	35	P
	Parsnip	8	6.0	20
	Pumpkin4,5	8	3.5	30
	Flax	9	4.2	50	K
	Rice	10	4.2	50
	Carrot	7	4.0	40
	Soybean	11	5.4	35

Different types of soil can be tilled using a hoe. Higher quality soil results in more fertile farmland, which also determines the natural maximum amount of nutrients. For example, Terra Preta will till into a farmland block with 80 nutrients for each nutrient type.

Each crop requires wet farmland and one of 3 nutrients (N, P or K) to grow. Water can hydrate up to 3 blocks away from it.3 The crop's growth speed depends on how many nutrients of its required type are available in the ground. For example, when the nutrient levels are at N=65, P=45, K=15, turnips will grow at 100% speed, onions at 90% and carrots at 30%.

Thus, you need to do crop rotation: When you harvest a crop, plant one that requires a different nutrient (ideally the highest), or leave the farmland bare. The block/entity info HUD (B) shows you the current nutrient levels.

Farmland slowly regains its nutrients, as long as a fully grown crop isn't currently residing on it. Another way to increase nutrients, is to use fertilizers, which will slowly release nutrients into a single farmland block over time, up to a maximum of 100.

Another function of bare farmland is that it grows tall grass and, quite a bit more rarely, horsetail as well.

You will have to build trenches, walls or fences around your crops, or else hares will snack on them. Thankfully, they will drop the seeds for you to recover, as long as you don't let them despawn.

Cooking Meals

Food Preservation