✧✦Catherine✦✧
vintage story is one of very few games that has an integrated model of physics and thermodynamics.
actually, i can't think of any other game where a blacksmithing workpiece in your inventory is physics objects that can be quite hot, and if you throw them in a lake or something they sizzle violently
it even models blackbody radiation correctly! it's a texture overlay. sufficiently hot metal _looks_ the temperature it is, to me. incredible attention to detail
✧✦Catherine✦✧
similarly, rock isn't just some perlin noise with fluff, but modelled on actual geology, where you can go "wait! i know what this mineral does" and it usually does in fact do that
surface level lava causes hot springs to appear nearby! rock erodes! trees exists in biomes! and so on
you can tame animals apparently, and third generation gets less aggressive
✧✦Catherine✦✧
early minecraft industrial mods were basically all "here is a pure function. use this magic pipe to connect its arguments to other pure functions. now you need to evaluate a very complex expression with an IDE least suited to it" and it was mind-numbingly tedious and not really fun
even today, the voxels in minecraft are just for the world at large, not for the items in it. that's so borrring
✧✦Catherine✦✧
the only big thing vintage story is missing that's coming to my mind is hydrology! it doesn't have rivers. just randomly generated lakes.
rivers (and more generally, water erosion) is pretty challenging to do though, because you can't do it chunk by chunk. you probably have to generate un-eroded terrain and then simulate water flow over it to make realistic rivers and karst topography and caves and such
i hope they do that. i think it's on the roadmap. would be so cool
✧✦Catherine✦✧
i'm learning things about bees
also, vintage story has an absurd amount of animal life. flowers with names i've never heard of. over a hundred species of butterflies, many of them sexually dimorphic. incredibly detailed animal behavior simulator
✧✦Catherine✦✧
there are 37 types of mushrooms, all with their specific substrate/symbiote and biom epreferences
✧✦Catherine✦✧
if you open a wiki for a computer game and its wiki immediately hits you with this picture you know it's some good shit
✧✦Catherine✦✧
dwarf fortress does this, but my problem with dwarf fortress is that it's not visual enough (even with a tile pack). i got into DF because it was like an entire tiny planet on a vt220 terminal, but it turns out that i actually just can't remember what every sigil stands for (and also keep track of every complicated relationship and ratio i have to know)
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@0xC01DC0FFEE it really is
0xC01DC0FFEE
@whitequark yeah, I really need to play that one day. Looks fun :Blobhaj:
Your Old Pal Lewie
@nils Rimworld? It's a bit less granular than DF but you get to know your colonists a bit more in depth.
Nils Wloka
@whitequark I love #vintagestory so much! As you said, the attention to details is mindblowing. Do you have any other games that you'd recommend to a sandbox addict? Besides #dwarffortress and Vintage Story, #UnRealWorld and #SongsOfSyx are already in my list of all-time favorites (with the former having presentation very similar to DF).
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nils > UnReal World is a roguelike survival freeware (shareware before 2013) video game set in a fictionalisation of Iron Age Finland.[1] The game was first released in 1992 and continues to receive regular updates as of 2025.[2] The game was released on Steam on 26 February 2016[3] and is also available at GoG.com.
holy shit, this might be one of _the_ longest continuously updated games of all time
✧✦Catherine✦✧
Peter Brett
@nils I would recommend Stationeers if the idea of a basic understanding of thermofluid mechanics as a prerequisite to continuing to breathe without exploding sounds like an entertaining game mechanic
✧✦Catherine✦✧
there's something really amusing to me about a first-party release followed by updates on a website whose nominal purpose is "archiving games whose publishers long stopped existing"
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@lisyarus "generally yes" however i will note that my overwhelmingly dominant reason for gaming is "my life is extra spicy hell for reasons i cannot yet publicly describe" so i'm not really going to touch unfinished works, it's just not predictable enough to bet my mental health on
Nikita Lisitsa
@whitequark Oh wow well, can I interest you in my game? It's sort of df but very visual (and 3D, though terrain is just a heightmap, so no tunnels/underground stuff) and focused more on economy and trading and isn't even close to being finished yet 😅 Weather simulation & derived biome distribution using something like very simplified Holdridge is exactly what I've been working on lately.
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