Jan 31
I finally got this blog set up after meaning to do so for ages! Random pile of screenshots from my heavily modded no-monsters-all-challenge Vintage Story server be upon ye all!
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I finally got this blog set up after meaning to do so for ages! Random pile of screenshots from my heavily modded no-monsters-all-challenge Vintage Story server be upon ye all!
I Wrote This Pinned Post Very Sleepy So It Might Be Rambly! Enjoy! Hello!
A few years ago I made a video of 100 days in Vintage Story. Six months later, it randomly went viral. The developers of the game have told me that my video's success led to a massive boost in their sales and income for a long time afterwards, and apparently this was likely the first step towards the game becoming better known.
I did not expect any of that to happen. If I had, I would have done a better job on the video. I am, however, delighted to have helped this incredible game become better known.
I've been working on a second video for years now. Making videos is hard. The next one should be out very soon though, barring (yet another) major life disaster. If you want to know what has taken me so long, you'll have to join my Patreon. I also occasionally stream on Twitch, usually on Sundays (stream VODs are also saved on my Youtube channel). I don't have a schedule because streams only happen when I have enough time and energy, and unfortunately those two things are pretty unpredictable.
I have been on Tumblr before, but if you think you've found my personal account, no you did not. Only this account will be linked to me outside of Tumblr in any way, shape, or form! (When I created this blog I discovered that the URL "secretfoxfire" was already taken. That is NOT me, I don't know who that is, but I admire their taste in usernames.)
This blog will be primarily used to talk about Vintage Story, since I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that there is a little community of players on here, and probably some posts on Hermitcraft and other related things. Reblogs will be queued (and probably not tagged very much sorry).
I host a Vintage Story server for my community and I would very much like some more players. It's limited to patrons to keep the server costs paid (right now my Patreon income is actually less than my server costs each month) and prevent trolls and the like, but it's only $1 a month to join, and higher tiers can invite guests to the server at no additional cost.
I also have a public Discord server, but I'm not going to link it here for now because we already have too many spambots joining, which is rather annoying for my mods. You can find the address on my Patreon page or in the description of any of my non-stream-archive videos on YouTube.
Finally, the obligatory rent-lowering gunshots: I am transgender and gay and poly and aro/ace and queer and neurodivergent and multiply disabled and anti-racist and anti-fascist and pro-palestine and anti-genocide and ACAB and I freaking love mushrooms and like being nice to people.
(Random note: foxfire has nothing to do with foxes. It is a term for bioluminescence caused by fungus. I thought this was common knowledge when I chose this name for myself and have been very disheartened to discover that I was wrong. Such is life!)
I'm gonna stream... next Sunday! And you can play with me!
Was thinking of doing it today but In Dappled Groves just released a 1.22 version which means I can finish parts of my foraging mod that were waiting for that, so I'm going to use my time today to do more modding, and hopefully over the coming week I can get most of my mod polished up and ready to play. Then I will make a temporary server for the stream and invite anyone who wants to join me to try it out. (Not restricted to my patrons or community!)
Sunday, May 17 at 20:00 CEST / 19:00 UK / 2:00 PM EDT and hopefully you can find your time zone from one of those. All you'll need is a Vintage Story 1.22 client with the latest update. The mods will automatically download when you connect.
There will be a lot of mods on there to create a real survival challenge, but no monsters. I will also be showcasing my own mod which I've been working on since 1.22 was released, which I'll be using along with the others to make a single-player survival challenge series for YouTube. This stream will be a chance for folks to dip their toes in and get a sense for the type of challenge I'm setting myself up for (and hopefully build up a little bit of hype for the series).
I'm not releasing all the info yet, but my foraging mod will include the ability to dehydrate and preserve edible mushrooms, recipes for flatbreads made from bark and seeds, randomly spawning wild vegetables that behave like mushrooms, season-specific drops for certain items, and more.
Come join me if you can! twitch.tv/secretfoxfire is the place.
You can also play with me on my patron server for like $3 a month at patreon.com/secretfoxfire to help cover server costs, which I'm partially paying out of pocket for right now. Yes that's right, being a youtuber and streamer currently costs me money. Damn video game is just too good.
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The Teapot Hates the Leafs?
Friends I have hit a massive roadblock in my progress on my 1.22 foraging series mod. I have spent the better part of the past three days trying to solve it and failing.
There's a Vintage Story mod called Make Tea Forked (an updated version of the now-outdated Make Tea) which adds a functional teapot and tea recipes. It is very immersive and very cute and I knew I wanted to use my modded leaves to make leaf tea as a drink and possibly a survival nutrition source. I even found another mod, the Black Raspberry mod, which has added in a custom recipe (using modded black raspberry leaves) for the Make Tea Forked mod. I tested it out and it works flawlessly.
So I copied the relevant files from the Black Raspberry mod and I changed the item names to use my modded leaves and add a new "leaf" type of tea.
And it doesn't work.
The Black Raspberry tea works fine! But my leaf tea simply refuses.
The tea itself appears in the handbook with all the correct values. The leaf items even have "brews into leaf tea" in their handbook pages. But the actual recipe is not working, and the leaves refuse to go into the teapot.
There are no relevant errors in the log files.
I have spent literal hours checking and re-checking and re-re-re-re-rechecking all the json. I have confirmed every comma and bracket is in the right place. It matches the Black Raspberry files (which, keep in mind, work flawlessly) exactly. The only difference is the item codes.
I know the tea itself is in the game because I can pull a bucket of it from the creative inventory and drink it.
I know the recipe is partially registering because the leaf items say in the handbook that they brew into leaf tea. But it won't actually let me brew.
I thought maybe another mod, or another part of my mod, was somehow interfering. So I made a new mod, copied over only the bare minimum of files necessary (the leaf item, shape, and texture files, the patch to add leaf tea, and the recipe), disabled all other mods except the test mod and the Make Tea Forked mod, and... it still doesn't work.
I am at the end of my rope. I have consulted multiple programmers and modders, and none of them have been able to find the problem so far. I have now contacted the developer to see if they can help me figure it out. They have agreed to take a look when they have some time, which I am incredibly grateful for, although they don't seem to know offhand what the problem might be.
And if any of the Vintage Story players here happen to know what the issue is, please reach out to me. I will be incredibly grateful and for sure add credit for anyone who helps to the mod and to the videos when they are finally coming out.
Anyway, I've lost several days of progress over this, and there's a chance it won't be solvable. If that happens, I will be forced to make leaf soup be the leaf-based survival food, as I have in past iterations of this mod idea. It would be disappointing, but I simply cannot spend much more time on this very minor part of the mod.
That aside, I have made great progress on the rest of the mod! I only have a few other things to add before I consider it ready to go. However, I'm still waiting on the Immersive Rope Crafting mod to update. The developer has said they will update it to 1.22, but there hasn't been any word for a while, and I'm starting to worry. I'm not sure how long I should wait before I just start recording anyway, but since rope crafting will likely be more important near the start of the game, it would be a shame to miss this part of it if the mod is updated later.
Meanwhile I am tentatively planning to stream this coming Sunday, something very very different from my usual stuff. It will be a challenge involving a lot of combat and scary things, and everyone will be invited to join me if they are feeling brave enough. (It may have to wait one more week, depending on various external factors, but I'll try to make a proper stream announcement once I'm reasonably certain.)
By the way, I'm still using my "developer art" for the leaves. If anyone out there has skill in pixel art or has a source for better pixel art leaves that would fit the Vintage Story aesthetic, please let me know! I will use these ones for my series if need be, but I think everyone would probably prefer something better...
Randomly spawning wild vegetables are working! I made some custom models based on the crop models, each showing just one vegetable, which makes a lot more sense than neatly planted rows. Each of these will drop one vegetable when broken, although the nutrition values have been slightly nerfed to represent these being wild crops, not domesticated ones that have been selectively bred for generations. I also enabled the placement offset so they aren't always just in a grid.
I also added grain ones. These are much rarer, and drop 1-2 grain each. The flax has a 50% chance to also drop a flax fiber. Additionally, breaking tall grass in the summer or fall has a small chance to drop a random piece of grain.
I'll need to do some playtesting to make sure the spawn rates for these are good. But before I do that, I need to start modifying the animals...
Come Fight the Darkness With Me!
I will be streaming tomorrow, Sunday, 31 May 2026, at 20:00 CEST / 19:00 UK / 2 PM EDT / 11 AM PDT!
This will be another challenge stream, but the challenge will be my greatest yet: with the help of mods such as Wilderlands Rustbound (and also some help from mods like Salty's Dodge Master), we'll be facing horrifying monsters in a world of darkness, fighting for our lives with limited resources, seeing how much progress we can make together.
This stream will be something of a practice run for an upcoming video! I hope being forced to fight for my life against a lot of scary monsters will help reduce my anxiety in the future. 🙏
This event will be open to the public, so please come join us if you can, and spread the word to your Vintage Story playing friends!
On a more personal note, I have just found out that I am likely to be losing my job in the very near future, as my company's leadership pushes "AI" chatbots to take over highly skilled human work. What's more, my entire industry has been decimated by this awful technology—which can't even do my (extremely specialized) job well, it just does it for cheap—so despite days of scouring job listings, I have found a grand total of Literally Zero listings for jobs in my field which don't amount to either short-term low-paying contracts training more AI, or being paid peanuts to "fix" AI-generated work (a task which is actually more difficult than doing it right in the first place, but pays far, far less).
So! My ability to continue living indoors may be in jeopardy soon. I have always said that I don't want to take money from anyone who can't spare it, and I stand by that, but if there's anyone out there who has five bucks or so to spare each month and would enjoy playing on private modded Vintage Story servers with a group of really nice people, now might be a good time to hop on over to patreon dot com slash secretfoxfire and maybe join my community! 🍄
Regardless of whether you sign up, I hope you'll all stop by for tomorrow's stream, and maybe help me fight against the forces of darkness for an hour or two.
(I'll be imagining the drifters as the personification of so-called AI chatbots, which I expect will motivate me to fight hard. 💪)
The premiere has been scheduled! 100 Days in Vintage Story: The Call to Adventure will premiere on Sunday. Bookmark this link so you don't forget to join us! And share it with friends. This one is less about the gameplay and more about a fun adventure story, so it should be interesting even for folks who don't care about Vintage Story or gaming. It might even help persuade new people to get the game! 🙌
I Pranked My Players for April Fools' Day
My community is amazing, so of course I had to prank them.
It was all in good fun, and we had a great time with this challenge. I even seem to have been forgiven for what I did to them. Are they secretly planning to kill me with sticks when I least suspect it? Possibly. Would I deserve it? Probably. Was it worth it?
Well, give it a watch, and then you tell me! 😆