Vintage Story - Mods

Prelude

I think Vintage Story is really good game with lots of deep mechanics. However some of these are not deep enough or are too tedious. Fortunately there are mods to our rescue. Below I present list of hand picked mods that I play with, and I think are great addition to the game.

Animal Cages - moving animals around

Animal Cages mod allows to create small and medium-size cages to capture animals. The recipe is copper age. Animal Cages is useful to create your first animal farm, and then manage it efficiently.

Normally for animal husbandry you probably want animals near your homestead. Vintage Story however for realism purpose doesn't have good way to move them (it's not simple to move a boar you find in a forest). Therefore there are three possibilities:

  1. Breeding animals in their natural habitat (build trought and fence wherever you find sheeps/pigs/chickens) until generation 2 which allows to move animals by rope (still tedious);
  2. Attacking and chasing (or being chased) to a fenced area near the base;
  3. (works only for small animals like chicken) creating trap and catching in a basket.

Animal Cages adds the third one: building cage to capture the animal and move it in your equipment. It functions a bit like basket trap, however is much more reliable. Small cage is suitable for hares and chickens, and medium-size cage is suitable for pigs, sheeps and goats.

To use a cage attack animal with a cage in hand. Note that to catch with medium-size cage an animal needs to be below 50% HP (unless generation 1 or higher).

To release animals from a cage place cage on the ground and destroy the cage. You will get the cage back, and the animal will be free.

Carry On - moving containers around

Carry On is a trivial mod you would never think of. Normally to pick up containers (chests, vessels, barrels) you have to destroy them. All good until they have content. In that case the content falls out alongside the container or - in case of liquids in a barrel - is entirely lost.

Carry On mods allows you to pick up such chest/barrel/vessel with its entire content as long as you have both hands free, and place it in new place. You are not able to run while carrying a block, but that's not a problem as usually you use the mod to reorganize your base.

QP's Chisel Tools - upgraded chiseling

QP's Chisel Tools expands the idea of chiseling (shaping custom blocks with hammer and a chisel). The mod is very vast in its functionality, but I'll focus on what I use it mostly for.

Why do you do chiseling in Vintage Story? Usually you want to decor your base with custom blocks. Creating single block is easy - for complex shape it takes few minutes. What if you need 100 of these blocks (which you usually do)?

The chiseling mechanic is great but it is unreal to create that many blocks by hand. Here comes Chisel Tool's Pantograph - it allows to copy shape (and materials) of a chiseled block, and apply it to a different block, essentialy creating a clone of the original. That way you become a designer instead a mindless worker.

Pantograph is great, but there are more useful tools available. There is a planer to add/remove entire layer of voxels (instead of clicking 256 times just to make block 1 voxel thinner), and a wedge tool which is upgraded version of wrench for rotating/moving/mirroring chiseled blocks (it allows to rotate a block along any axis unlike native wrench). Additionaly Chisel Tools allows you to paint blocks with plain colors and much much more - see mod's page for more details.

Overall I think that Chisel Tools is smartly designed utility mod, that is not breaking the original game in any way, but greatly builts on top of its foundation. It allows to put chiseling technique to real use, and allow your base to have beautiful exterior with detailed interior in sane amount of time.