Preparation as play: Vintage Story

I’ve been staring at my in-game larder for five minutes now. Just standing in my cellar - a cellar I dug out - admiring my sealed crocks, pies, and grain baskets. Fifteen hours into Vintage Story, and this is my endgame: crocks.

Let me back up.

Vintage Story is what happens when Minecraft has a midlife crisis and decides it wants to be a hardcore survival sim. It’s slower, meaner, and deeply obsessed with the details - especially food preservation. You’re not punching trees and fighting dragons - you’re knapping flint to make an axe and worrying about whether your cranberries will rot before you can make them into jam. There’s a winter coming, and unlike Game of Thrones, this one actually shows up on schedule and will absolutely kill you if you’re not ready. Oh, and it’s good, unlike the ending of Game of Thrones. It’s been ten years and I still think about it from time to time.

So here I am, fifteen hours in, looking at my stockpile. Sealed crocks filled with meat and parsnips, grains, fruit wine, and pies - all kinds of pies, but mostly fruit pies, as that’s one of the best ways to preserve fruit for the winter. It’s a beautiful larder.

I have a confession to make: this isn’t my cellar. Mine was bigger, had more shelves and crocks, and many, many more pies. But my save got corrupted after the latest update. I know, I know, dog ate my homework.

The thing is, I haven’t actually used any of this yet. Winter’s still a few in-game weeks away. I’m just… looking at my stockpiles. I don’t even want to play through the winter - I think I’m done.

Fifteen hours of work

In fifteen hours of most games, you’ve saved at least one world. Probably killed a god or two. In Elden Ring, which isn’t particularly fast paced, you’ve already defeated Godrick the Grafted by now and are probably strolling around Liurnia of the Lakes. In Skyrim, you’ve likely forgotten about the main quest entirely and become a guild master - Archmage, Harbinger of the Companions, whatever floats your boat. The dopamine hits come fast - here’s a level up, here’s a new weapon, here’s a cutscene where everyone thanks you for being so great.

Fifteen hours into Skyrim, Ulag gro-Uzug, my mighty orc warrior, obtained a set of badass armor and weapons, including some pieces of kit literally given to him by the gods. He’s settling into a house he just bought - cash offer. Weep, Millennials.

In fifteen hours of Vintage Story, I have dug a cellar. I have built shelves. I have figured out the difference between a fired clay pot and a sealed crock. I’ve learned that berry bushes exist and that berries will rot in approximately three seconds if you look at them wrong, but jam and pies last through the winter. Pies in general are an awesome way of preserving food.

None of this is exciting when it comes to minute-to-minute gameplay. There’s no combat music playing as I harvest flax. No achievement popup when I successfully cook my turnips. Just me, my crocks, and the slow satisfaction of watching my stores fill up.

This is what I’ve been doing: preparing. And apparently, that’s all I needed.

I think I know why.

It’s the same reason I aspire to meal prep in real life. Getting my meats and veggies, maybe some risotto, or some fried rice, or couscous. It’s a fun process, it takes me hours, and my wife and I get tired of eating the same increasingly stale food for a week, but I feel good as I cook - because I’m planning (what to make), I’m preparing (for the week), I’m thinking ahead (about how to trick my wife into doing the dishes).

I love the feeling of a full fridge. Opening containers and seeing neat stacks of portions. Knowing that future-me won’t have to think, won’t have to decide - because past-me already handled it.

Vintage Story scratches the exact same itch. Except instead of plastic Tupperware, it’s crocks. Instead of a week of lunches, it’s a winter of survival.

That’s what my Vintage Story house looked like on the outside in the summer. A small, but fully functional farm to the right, a covered smithy to the left. Cellar’s under the house.

I would have probably been a doomsday prepper in a different life. I’ll get back to this thought in a bit.

Maybe this is just who I am. Someone who finds comfort in preparation. Someone who would rather spend fifteen hours getting ready for a challenge than fifteen hours actually facing it. Which brings me to the weird part: I don’t think I actually want winter to come. I think I just want to be ready for it.

Dopamine in a barrel

What feels good is knowing that I can survive the winter, not necessarily the act of survival itself. There’s dopamine inside those sealed crocks. Little ceramic containers full of “the future is going to be okay, I can see it right here.”

There’s something therapeutic about this. Real-life anxiety is formless, right? Will I have enough money when I’m old? Will my daughter be okay? Will the world keep getting weirder in ways I can’t predict? I just have to sit in this messy uncertainty.

But in Vintage Story, the anxiety has a shape. Winter is coming - I know exactly when. I need food - and I can figure out exactly how much. And the answer to “will I be okay?” is right there, on the shelves. I can count it.

I’ve conquered the uncertainty. It’s in the crocks now. Take that, anxiety!

Spoilage is a good game mechanic

What makes Vintage Story different from Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon or even Minecraft: the food rots.

Foraging feels engaging in Vintage Story: some foods - like berries - spoil fast, while mushrooms or roots last a long time if properly stored.

You can’t just hoard infinitely. You can’t fill a chest with 99,999 turnips and never have to think about food again. The game forces you to think about preservation - what can be dried, what can be pickled, what needs to be sealed in a crock and stored in a cold cellar (and yeah, temperature matters). And even then, nothing lasts forever.

This sounds annoying, but it’s genuinely fun.

I’ve written before about hyperoptimizing myself into misery in games. There’s no ceiling, no limit. I struggled in Stardew Valley because I felt the need to be uber productive. I keep going - one more harvest, one more year, one more hyper optimized planting pattern - until the relaxing farming game feels like a second job and I quit before finishing year one. Every time.

But Vintage Story’s spoilage system forces me to stop. I can’t overstock. If I make too many pies, they’ll rot before I can eat them. So I have to figure out the right amount - enough to survive, not so much that it goes to waste.

The limit is what makes “prepared” feel achievable instead of endless. I can look at my larder and think “this is enough.” The crocks will only hold so much. The food will only last so long. There’s a ceiling, and I’ve hit it, and now I can relax.

Constraints are good for game design, who knew.

About other games

As I’m writing this piece, I keep thinking about The Long Dark, another survival game I love. Different vibe - you’re alone in frozen Canadian wilderness after some vague apocalypse, scrounging through abandoned cabins and trying not to get eaten by wolves. Much more immediate, much more desperate.

But there’s a similar pleasure: preparation before a journey.

Before I leave my current shelter for a long trek, I might spend the whole day getting ready. Checking supplies. Repairing clothes. Making sure I have enough water, enough matches, enough everything. And there’s this moment, right before I step out into the cold, where I look at my packed inventory and think: “Okay. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Same satisfaction as the larder, different shape. I have what I need. I did the work. The uncertain future is, for the next few hours at least, a problem I’ve already solved. I feel prepared.

There’s really never enough food in Don’t Starve. I never feel prepared.

I thought for a while about what to say about Don’t Starve in this article - and I even played through a couple of hours of the game in hopes of coming up with a profound observation. But the satisfaction isn’t as clear with Don’t Starve - at least for me.

I never feel truly prepared in Don’t Starve, or truly safe - I always feel like I’m scraping by - which really is the point. Even if I have established farms and trapping grounds, something bad can always happen - farms can burn down, or hounds can charge in to ruin my day. The food spoils really fast too - in the matter of days, so you can never meaningfully stock up.

Or maybe I’m just bad at Don’t Starve. It’s probably the latter.

Scarcity tourism

I live in Western United States. I have a well paying job. I don’t exactly live in scarcity.

When I go grocery shopping, I fill my fridge to the brim. I overbuy groceries because I get excited, and then find a rotten bag of spinach in the back of the fridge a week later. Mind you, we don’t throw food away in this household. My mom taught me better than that. We put our food in Tupperware containers first. Then we throw it away a few days later.

While I recognize that many struggle - stretching a dollar to go far and scraping by - and I’ve lived through that too in the past - I don’t really have to manage limited resources these days. There’s no winter coming. So the part of my brain that evolved to prepare and store and survive lean months just… idles. Occasionally misfires into anxiety about retirement savings or whatever. But mostly sits there, underemployed.

That’s not my house, this a guest room in Vork’s house from The Guild. It’s a great 2010s show, if you haven’t seen it.

Vintage Story gives that part of my brain a project. The scarcity is fake - no one’s actually going to starve - but that doesn’t make the feelings fake. Clear rules, real consequences, a system I can actually engage with. And something in me lights up. Finally, something to prepare for.

I’m not a prepper. I don’t have a bunker (although the idea of digging a hole in the ground to hide in does sound appealing, for whatever reason). Real-world prepping often comes from fear, from imagining collapse around every corner. But in Vintage Story, I prep because the game tells me winter exists. No paranoia required. Just math and crocks and the satisfaction of a problem I can actually solve.

A job for my mild OCD

I’ve written before about my weird gaming habits. Using scaffolding to cut down trees in Minecraft because floating logs bother me. Restarting games because my inventory got too messy to look at. Reading every single book in Skyrim because I can’t have a wrong “books read” stat. My brain latches onto arbitrary rules and won’t let go.

Usually this works against me. It’s frustrating. It’s “why am I like this” at midnight when I should just be having fun instead of restarting for the tenth time.

But in Vintage Story, my brain has a job it’s actually good at.

The organized larder isn’t just satisfying - it’s functional. The game wants me to sort and categorize and arrange. Every crock has a place, every basket is accessible, every shelf makes sense. I’m not fighting my wiring here. I’m using it.

After I lost my save, I loaded up a new world, trying to rebuild and restock. 7 hours in, here’s my sad little cellar: 4 crocks and a vessel with some food I foraged. It’s always a slow start.

Crocks are sorted by expiration date and shelved, grains go into their respective vessels, wine barrels are stacked in a corner, my fruit pies are lined up on tables against the wall. There’s food for consumption now, too - some porridges, stews, and breads - all easy to grab, with soon-to-expire items in the front, just like in a grocery store. I just need to go down to my cellar and grab a meal for the day - and I’ll be good.

All the pattern-matching and organizing that usually makes me restart games in frustration? Here, it’s the main gameplay loop. The game says “you should have a storage system” and my brain says “oh thank god, finally.”

There’s something else going on. Something about visibility.

My real life is kind of illegible. Bills auto-pay from accounts I check maybe once a month. Food appears at grocery stores through supply chains I couldn’t explain. Money exists as numbers on a screen. I don’t really see where things come from or where they go.

But my Vintage Story larder - I can see all of it. I know where every crock came from. I dug the clay. I fired the pot. I harvested the vegetables and pickled them myself. I know exactly what I have and what it cost in time. The whole system is visible and countable and mine.

One of the few surviving screenshots from my Vintage Story home. It’s winter, and both the house and the cellars have been expanded. You can see lots of firewood neatly stacked behind the house.

Maybe that’s part of it. Not just having enough, but being able to verify it. The crocks are proof. Proof of work, proof of planning, proof that “being prepared” isn’t just a feeling - it’s a concrete thing I can look at and count.

The pies are for winter

Fifteen hours for this. Fifteen hours of digging and farming and sealing and organizing. No bosses, no world-saving, no achievements. Just a full cellar and the knowledge that I’m ready for whatever the game throws at me.

Winter came, and I did play for a few hours, but I soon lost interest. The best part of the game is over. Like a certain show which peaked early and lost all momentum.

This is a second week in a row I’ve written about video game food, for whatever reason: Why Valheim’s food feels good (and Fallout 4’s doesn’t). You might enjoy it.