Best Vintage Story Server Customizations (No Mods Required)

Most Vintage Story customization guides focus on mods, but what if you’re not interested in modding? This post focuses on built-in settings that let you tune difficulty, realism, and server behavior without adding any mods.

Vintage Story’s appeal is its depth and realism, but vanilla settings are pretty forgiving. You don’t need mods to tune difficulty or realism - the game has extensive customization built-in. These settings fall into two categories: startup parameters (easy to change) and serverconfig.json (more involved but still straightforward)

Startup Parameters

• Stop Time When Server is Empty - This setting prevents the server from advancing time/seasons when nobody’s online. By default, we set this value to false and we recommend keeping it this way - but if you’d like to change that, you can do so on the Startup Parameters page under [SERVER] Pass Time When Empty.
• List Your Server Publicly - This setting makes your server discoverable in Vintage Story’s in-game browser. If you want a public or community server rather than a private, friends-only server, this options is the best way to get discovered. To modify, navigate to the Startup Parameters page and set [SERVER] Advertise Server to true, then restart the server. We only recommend changing this if you want public visibility!

World settings

Now, we’ll look into settings that directly alter your gameplay experience. These settings require editing serverconfig.json in the File Manager. You can find serverconfig.json in the Quick Access panel. WinterNode takes automated backups, but having a manual one before config changes is always smart.

• Extend Year Length / Realistic Seasons: daysPerMonth controls how many in-game days there are per month. We recommend setting this to 12-15 days if you’re looking to have more time to prepare for winter, making seasons feel more substantial. A full year takes longer, but each season feels earned rather than rushed.
• Enable Harsh Winters: If you want to really challenge yourself, setting harshWinters to true makes winter actually punishing. Vanilla winter is pretty mild, but with this setting enabled, it adds survival pressure. It pairs well with longer years and adjusted food spoil rate (which we’ll cover next).
• Tune Food Spoilage: By setting foodSpoilSpeed to 1.0 or higher, you’ll find that food spoils quicker. This balances the difficulty of food preservation. We recommend setting it to 0.75-0.85 if you’ve enabled harsh winters, which gives a slight buffer without trivializing it. The default value is 1.0. The lower the value, the slower food spoils.
• Realistic Mining with Cave-ins and Block Gravity: By setting caveIns to "on" and blockGravity to "sandgravelstone", you enable structural collapses and force certain blocks to obey gravity. This makes mining require more strategy instead of just digging endless tunnels. You’ll find yourself actually caring about support beams and tunnel design. This will fundamentally change the way mining works - use caution!

WinterNode-Specific Tools

We provide substantial control over your server’s backup process. We take automated, off-site backups, but you can also customize the frequency of your server’s own local backups. On the startup parameters page, locate [ADVANCED] Number of WinterNode local backups, which controls how many scheduled backups WinterNode keeps in rotation to allow it to be backed up. At least one is required. Choose 1 if you need to conserve disk space, 2 (the default and recommended setting) for a balanced history, or 3 when you want the highest number of recent backups. You can also customize [ADVANCED] Scheduled WinterNode Backup Window, which defines when the backups are taken.

Finding the Right Balance

It’s important not to change everything at once. You should enable one or two settings max, then log in to the server and play for a few in-game days. See if you like the changes and make adjustments one at a time from that point. Here are some common combos we see:

• Harsh winters + realistic mining + fast spoilage = very punishing (maybe too much)
• Longer years + harsh winters = mildly challenging
• Cave-ins + block gravity = realism focus
• All of the above + increased food spoil speed = hardcore survival

Getting Started

If you’re new to Vintage Story server management, our help center has guides covering everything you need to know when hosting with us. Check it out in our Help Center.