Getting started
Welcome to Vintage Story, an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game that emphasizes challenging gameplay. This page will guide you through everything you need to start playing: World creation and customization, character customization, and the controls. After reading this, make sure to check out Survival Guide - Your first day to learn how to survive your first day.
World Creation
When creating a new world, the player can decide between different presets or customize them individually. It is recommended for new players to check the customization options for their first world or start with the Exploration template, as some of the difficulty settings of the Standard experience can be unforgiving.
Customization
If you choose to customize your world, some difficulty points that can be especially challenging for new players are as follows:
- Grace Timer for monster's appearing in the world (0-10 days)
- Death Punishment (Keep or drop inventory on death)
- Timer for items dropped on death (5-60 min)
- True winters (whether or not winters will damage crops, reduce animal spawn, etc.)
- Temporal Stability, Temporal Storms, Surface Stability and Rifts
- Climate Distribution (the distance between different "biomes" and whether these are distributed realistically around an equator, or randomly in patches)
- Surface Deposit frequency (both copper & tin, as they are both important starting metals)
Presets
The below table shows the available world presets. An in depth list of all customization options can be found on the World Configuration page.
| Preset | Important Aspects |
|---|---|
| Standard | The intended way to play. Despite its name, though, this might not necessarily be the best starting point for new players. It comes with the full assortment of enabled options which might increase the difficulty , such as temporal stability, hunger, temperature etc. Without customization, monsters will spawn from the first night on and inventory will be dropped on death. |
| Exploration | Most direct threats like creature hostility & temporal stability are turned off, natural difficulties like hunger and temperatures are reduced. The player will keep their inventory on death. |
| Wilderness Survival | Hard Mode - not recommended for new players. Standard Mode with additional challenges - inventory is dropped on death and the player will respawn in a random location in a 5k block radius. Player health points are reduced and creature strength is raised. |
| Homo sapiens | Turns off all lore features such as traders and ruins. Used to play as the "first human". |
| Creative Building | As the name implies, this is your typical flat building world with Creative Mode enabled from the start. If you'd rather like to build in a normal map, customize a different preset to start in Creative Mode instead of Survival Mode. |
Character Customization Screen
The first thing you will do after creating your world is to set your appearance and class. (If you accidentally close this window, it will reappear when you re-enter the world). You can choose from various hairstyles, facial hair, eye colors, and skin tones, as well as a voice tone, which are based on instruments. As of 1.19.8, there are 6 options for a player's class
- Commoner
- Hunter
- Malefactor
- Clockmaker
- Blackguard
- Tailor
Besides changing the avatar's starter clothing, class choice influences hunger rate, run speed, and more. See Classes If it's your first time playing the game and you're unsure which class to choose, it's recommended to select the Commoner class, as the others may have some negative attributes that can be difficult to manage if you are not familiar with them.
Controls
This is the default key bind, please keep in mind that when changing, for instance, the Shift key for sneaking to a different one, all combinations previously using the shift key will change to your new key choice as well.
| W A S D | To move around |
| Space | Jump |
| Ctrl + W | Run |
| Shift | Sneak (used to place active items on blocks) |
| G | Sit down |
| Q | Drop currently held item |
 |
Place or interact with blocks |
 |
Attack or break blocks |
 or 1 to 0 |
Scroll through hotbar slots |
| Ctlr + or 1 to 4 |
Scroll through backpack slots |
| E | Backpack Inventory and Access Crafting Grid |
| C | Character Inventory (Clothes and other Gear) |
| F5 | Cycle through camera modes (first person, third person, overhead) |
| H | Survival Handbook - can also be used while hovering over an item in the inventory |
| M | Show/Hide worldmap |
| J | Show/Hide diary |
| Tab | Show/Hide chat overlay |
| T | Begin typing in the chat overlay |
| F4 | Show/Hide user interfaces |
| F6 | Show/Hide user minimap |
| Ctrl + B | Show/Hide block info |
| Shift + H | Survival Handbook while looking at a block or item in the world |
| Ctrl + N | Show/Hide block interaction help |
| Ctrl + V | Show/Hide coordinates |
| F12 | Take a screenshot |
| Esc | Exit/close any interface |
