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, character customization, and essential controls.

After reading this overview, make sure to check out the Survival Guide - Your first day to learn how to survive your very first night!

World Creation

When creating a new world, you can choose from several pre-made templates or customize the settings individually. For absolute beginners, it is highly recommended to start with the Exploration template or to manually adjust the Standard experience, as the default difficulty can be quite unforgiving.

Customization Options

If you choose to manually customize your world, pay close attention to these specific difficulty settings, which can be especially challenging for new players:

• Grace Timer: Determines how many in-game days pass before monsters appear in the world (ranging from 0 to 10 days).

• Death Punishment: Decide whether you safely keep your inventory upon death or drop it at the location of your demise.

• Dropped Item Timer: Controls how long items dropped on death will remain in the world before disappearing permanently (ranging from 5 to 60 minutes).

• True Winters: Toggles whether freezing winter temperatures will realistically damage crops and reduce wild animal spawns.

• Temporal Stability: Allows you to completely enable or disable Temporal Storms, Surface Stability, and dangerous Rifts.

• Climate Distribution: Alters the distance between distinct biomes and determines if they are mapped realistically across an equator or generated randomly in patches.

• Surface Deposit Frequency: Controls the abundance of surface-level copper and tin, which are both extremely important starting metals for beginners.

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 Vintage Story. Despite its name, this might not necessarily be the best starting point for absolute beginners. It features the full assortment of difficulty mechanics, including temporal stability, hunger, and realistic temperature. Without customization, monsters will spawn from the first night, and you will drop your entire inventory upon death.
Exploration	Highly recommended for new players! Most direct threats like hostile creature aggression and temporal stability are turned off. Natural survival mechanics like hunger and temperature are significantly reduced, and you will safely keep your entire inventory if you die.
Wilderness Survival	Hard Mode — strictly not recommended for new players. This is the Standard Mode with additional brutal challenges. Your inventory is immediately dropped on death, and you will respawn in a completely random location within a massive 5,000-block radius! Additionally, your overall health points are drastically reduced while creature strength is vastly raised.
Homo sapiens	Turns off all mystical lore features, meaning there are no traders and no ancient ruins to discover. This preset is designed for players who wish to roleplay purely as the very first humans on earth.
Creative Building	As the name implies, this generates a typical flat building world with Creative Mode enabled from the very start. If you would rather build freely in a normal, naturally generated map, simply customize a different preset and select Creative Mode instead of Survival Mode!

Character Customization

You can freely select from various hairstyles, facial hair options, eye colors, and skin tones. You can also pick a voice pitch, which is uniquely generated using real instrument sounds!

Character Selector.

There are six distinct Class options to choose from. In addition to changing your starter clothing, your class significantly impacts your playstyle by altering your hunger rate, movement speed, crafting abilities, and more. For detailed stats, see the Classes page.

Commoner The Commoner is the well-rounded default class. If it is your first time playing the game and you are unsure which path to take, it is highly recommended to select the Commoner. The other specialized classes possess negative attributes that can be highly difficult to manage if you are not deeply familiar with the survival mechanics.	Hunter A master of the wilderness, excelling at ranged archery combat and animal harvesting. However, due to the need to carry a lot of arrows everywhere, the Hunter often has less free inventory space and struggles with poor ore mining abilities.	Malefactor A stealthy survivor who avoids monster aggression and specializes in foraging and looting. Their main weakness lies in direct melee combat and significantly lower overall health.
Clockmaker A brilliant tinkerer who is highly resistant to the terrifying effects of temporal instability. They can easily dismantle machinery, but their frail physique makes them weak in combat and easily exhausted.	Blackguard A heavy-hitting fighter capable of wearing heavy armor with ease and surviving brutal attacks. To balance this immense power, they require significantly more food and heavily struggle with precision crafting tasks.	Tailor A specialist in crafting beautiful clothing to survive harsh winters and repairing garments. They are more vulnerable to physical damage and harvest raw natural resources much slower than others.

Controls

Below are the default keybinds for Vintage Story. Please keep in mind that if you change a core modifier key (for instance, rebinding the Sneak key from Shift to a different key), all other combinations that rely on sneaking will automatically update to your new choice!

Quick tip: Many tools and items have special interaction modes! Sneak and press , or hold F with a tool equipped to open its unique tool menu.

Character Movement & Actions

W A S D — Move around the world.

Space — Jump.

Ctrl + W — Sprint forwards.

Shift — Sneak (prevents you from falling off edges and is required to place blocks or active items against other surfaces).

G — Sit down to rest.

Q — Drop the item currently held in your active hand.

— Place blocks or interact with objects in the world (such as doors, chests, and tools).

— Attack hostile creatures or break blocks.

User Interface & Menus

E — Open your Backpack Inventory and access your personal Crafting Grid.

C — Open your Character Menu to equip clothes, armor, and specialized gear.

or 1 to 0 — Scroll through your active hotbar slots.

Ctrl + or 1 to 4 — Scroll to seamlessly select different backpacks or storage containers in your inventory.

F5 — Cycle between camera perspectives (first-person, third-person, overhead).

H — Open the Survival Handbook. You can also press this while hovering your mouse over an item inside your inventory to instantly see its crafting recipes!

Shift + H — Open the Survival Handbook directly to the page of the block or item you are currently looking at in the physical world.

M — Show or hide the global worldmap .

J — Open your personal Diary to review important notes and story lore.

Tab — Show or hide the multiplayer chat overlay.

T — Open the chat overlay and immediately begin typing a message.

F4 — Toggle the entire user interface on or off (excellent for taking clean screenshots).

F6 — Toggle the on-screen minimap.

Ctrl + B — Toggle the block info overlay (displays the exact name of the block you are currently looking at).

Ctrl + N — Toggle the helpful block interaction text on or off.

Ctrl + V — Toggle the display of your current world coordinates.

F12 — Take a high-resolution screenshot.

Esc — Exit or close any currently open menu or interface.