Secret Foxfire

It's not done yet, but I'm in the detailing phase and having a blast. I used wattle and daub for the walls and slate for the roof.

It's good for chiseling. Here is my front and back doors. By the way, every single piece of wood here had to be brought in from other islands, all of which are 1000+ blocks away (a 10 minute journey minimum).

There was only one tree on my island when I spawned in, and I used that to make a raft. I've done virtually all my cooking from grass, which is the only fuel source that occurs naturally on this island. I have yet to grow any other trees... hopefully the saplings will grow up this spring. Really, every material pictured besides reed baskets and granite cobble and flowers had to be imported, so it's been slow going.

I spent forever getting the lead for these windows but it was so worth it. This house has a lot of windows because the view is very beautiful.

As you can see, I've started in on some chiseled furniture. I haven't finished any rooms yet and there's a lot to do, but I'm happy with it so far.

I somehow spent 45 minutes chiseling this fireplace. And yes, that is meteoric iron to stand in for ashes under the pot. I found it on my island !

The (unfinished) kitchen. Those daffodils do some heavy lifting.

The fallow winter fields. And a half finished sailboat (!!!) in the distance. I cannot wait to never use a raft again. I haven't done anything with sailboats in Vintage Story yet and I'm very excited to see how it turns out.

Not pictured: An ugly cellar, a pit of Valais goats and Mouflon sheep I've been breeding, the chicken pit, my attic with a million chests full of most of my stuff, and a struggling berry patch. I also am halfway to a great handmade outfit, but I ran out of cloth so it's not done yet.

At one terrible point before I could make chests I had a half finished granite cobble hut with dozens of piles of everything you can think of--resin, stones, sticks, bones, saltpeter, charcoal, reeds, tools, unfired tiles... it was such a nightmare. It's good we can pile stuff on the ground but it spirals out of control so fast. Glad to have the place looking nicer.

for some reason people never like my vintage story root cellar system which i affectionately call "grain hell" because they enter grain hell and can never find their way back out from the cubic maze of identical interconnecting rooms

the trick is you put all the doors so they open towards deeper, so it's really easy to just reverse your steps out once you know that trick

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 finally found a friggin beehive! I had to use a mod AND creative, and I accidentally broke the first one looking for it. Thankfully, there was a second nearby that was a lot easier to get to.

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...

So we can have our delicious pine needle tea when we're shivering by the fire and trying not to starve to death in the middle of winter!

Let the record show that sargentsteveEr is a Legend. 🙏

(I'm still in need of better pixel art for my leafs though.)

Meanwhile another Legend has released a new mod called Ecosystem - Flora which does something similar to what the old "wild farming" mod did, except without using any entities, so it can be added and removed from the game at will, and it's intentionally balanced (and very configurable) to prevent plants from taking over the landscape the way they tended to do in Wild Farming. Certain types of plant spread during certain seasons like spring then die out when the weather gets colder. I've been testing it out and it's made my world so beautiful. The flowers are spreading the way they would in real life and it just looks lovely. This will also provide a renewable source of flowers without having to turn them into seeds. And the mod developer already saw concerns over the flowers potentially blocking mushroom spawns (just earlier today) and immediately released a new version that will prevent plants from spreading to mycelium blocks! Again: Legend!