Picture this: you’ve been playing Minecraft for as long as you know. How many years has it been? A couple? Several? Your entire life? Whatever the case, you have most certainly grown accustomed to the blocky world you’ve stripped of resources to build your mansion for one, and several mob farms, storage systems, and processing facilities. Then, one day, you see a screenshot of another game. It looks like Minecraft with extra shaders, but it doesn’t seem right.
What you may have seen is a screenshot of a completely different game. This is Vintage Story, a world consisting of blocks where you gather resources and survive the night from various monsters. That sounds like an awfully familiar premise, so Vintage Story must be another clone of Minecraft, right? Well, as a long-time veteran of Minecraft, I can say with certainty that Vintage Story is not a game to approach like Minecraft.
How different are the two games? Well, let me break down just a few key differences.
First Difference: How to start progression
Minecraft has a particularly straightforward progression system, especially when it comes to tools. Do you need something to gather materials? Punch a tree, use the wood to make a crafting table, then you can punch a few more trees for more wood to get your first wooden tools. Simple stuff. So simple, you can move onto stone tools before you have even used up your first tools.
Vintage Story is very different in this approach. Your first tools are going to be made with stones or flint first, but how do you get those materials? Pick it up from the ground, then use the knapping mechanic to shape some tool heads, and stick it on the end of a stick or bone. It’s an easy first tier of tool, but the next tier is Copper. You can’t use a stone tool to mine Copper, so how do you get this tier?
First, you need to get a Pan, then find some sand. Use the Pan on the sand to sift it for items. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a Copper Nugget? You’re going to need 20 of these nuggets in order to make one ingot, but to make an ingot, you need to melt it down in a Crucible. However, that crucible needs to hit at least 1100C, otherwise you just have hot nuggets. Temperatures like this can only be achieved with some Charcoal, which requires mass logging efforts to get firewood. Don’t forget to shape and fire a clay pickaxe head mould so you have somewhere to pour the molten Copper into. Finally, after all that, you can finally use a Copper pickaxe to mine for more copper, or materials to obtain the next tier of tool, which in of itself is an entirely new sequence of events.
Minecraft has a particularly straightforward approach to tool progression, simply requiring resources and crafting tables. Vintage Story can grow into an involved process just for new resources to make new gear.
To make a long story short: progression in Vintage Story is a long, drawn out process that can take multiple in-game days to complete, whereas Minecraft has a more simplified approach.
Second Difference: Survival necessities
Like most survival games, Minecraft and Vintage Story have a fairly similar ideology: gather what you can for the day, then make sure you can survive the night. It’s usually a dangerous endeavour to be roaming around at night early into any survival game as there are monsters around, not to mention poor visibility making navigation difficult as pitfalls are harder to see.
It’s night and…night between the two. Where Minecraft’s night is a threat due to monster spawns, Vintage Story’s night is a threat of the unknown.
However, with Minecraft being around for so long, the night is more or less an early game obstacle, as the monsters at night become another obstacle. Even Phantoms, a hazard that shows up the less you sleep, become a harvesting opportunity more than a threat. That is not to say the night is never a threat throughout the game, but with Minecraft’s simpler progression, the hazards of the night can be avoided.
Vintage Story finds a way to keep the world around you a constant threat. Unlike the night in Minecraft, night time in Vintage Story has very little visibility, especially when it approaches winter. Torches can’t help as they burn out, so expensive resources have to be used on Lanterns, or carry one around. Of course, in summer, the night is a little less threatening as the sun lingers for longer.
But, the night is not the only threat here. The night brings cooler temperatures, and the colder the seasons get, the more frigid it gets. At a point, it becomes below freezing temperatures, so prolonged exposure to these temperatures means less survivability. If that’s not enough, there will be moments throughout each month where a Temporal Storm forms. Regardless of where you are, there is no safety to be had from these storms. It’s one management system of not succumbing to the environment.
Third Difference: Story narrative
Now, this is where things can get a little tricky. In my experience, the two games don’t have a focus on the story, rather it is something that “exists” in a way so you have an end goal. However, both being a sandbox survival, the story doesn’t delve too far into gameplay, only flavouring the world around you.
Minecraft’s story is pretty straightforward, but not explicitly told to you beyond Advancements. You start with nothing, punch a few trees, mine some resources, and eventually gather enough materials to locate a Stronghold to slay the Enderdragon. There are also the spinoff games that do feature a more explicit narrative, but within the confines of Minecraft itself, the story is pretty simple, and it can be built upon what you think happens in the story.
Underground structures of narrative significance? Both check the box off.
Vintage Story has, well, a story. As it describes itself as early access, the story is currently not complete, but there are goals given to you that build upon the world you are in. There are merchants dotted around the land that can direct you to a mysterious location, where you engage in a boss fight in a large structure. In the ruins above and under the surface, you may also find books. Reading these gives you insight into the world that once was, but they are not markers or checkpoints in your journey. Despite this, your progression isn’t entirely locked down. You can skip over these story locations and do what you please.
So, how different are the two games?
It’s easy to look at a screenshot of Vintage Story and say it just looks like Minecraft with shaders and a resource pack. However, looking beyond the two games being a world consisting of cubes and resource gathering being a necessity, coming into Vintage Story with the mindset of another Minecraft playthrough may result in many failures and deaths.
Perhaps if you are someone like myself that has endlessly played Minecraft to the point that even mods can’t hook you, Vintage Story might be that answer. You have to be careful, as Vintage Story does command a lot of care and attention to you and your surroundings. If you just want a plain and simple survival world, then Minecraft will be a better answer.
Do you have a Minecraft friend that needs an introduction to Vintage Story? Now’s the time to make a server and show them the ropes! It’s easy to set up a Vintage Story server. All you need is one of our affordable server plans, then create a new server and select Vintage Story. Just like that, you have a server ready to go! Don’t forget to check out our handy guides on setting up a Vintage Story server.
Of course, if you want something more streamlined in survival, we always have Minecraft servers to go around! Pick out an affordable plan for a vanilla server, or browse our wide selection of modpacks, and you’re set!