In minecraft, if you wanna mine some iron, you punch a tree, use the wood to slap out a wooden pickaxe, grab some stone with it, then make a stone pickaxe, and you can mine it.

In vintage story you can't mine rock until you have a pickaxe, the lowest level of which is copper. You have to knap stone tools from rocks you find on the ground, and you can't make wood into planks until you have a saw (also needs metal). To get started with metalworking you have to explore and find copper bits sitting on the ground untill you have a lot, make crucibles and molds out of clay and fire them in a pit kiln, burn wood into charcoal in a pit (because wood doesn't burn hot enough to melt copper), and then you can melt and pour your copper into a mold. Do that with a pickaxe head mold, put it on a stick, and now you can mine stone. Then go find some more metals and do that some more because to mine iron you actually need a bronze pickaxe.

Minecraft when you can get full diamond enchanted stuff in 2 seconds because of caves and villagers.

Minecraft progression is very quick compared to most games. An average player with the required knowledge can get to the ender dragon in decent enough gear in a few hours, though they may need to be a bit lucky with diamonds and caves.

That's why I find vanilla fairly boring personally, if you don't want to build stuff. There's not really that much to do pure gameplay wise.

what makes it slow paced is its progression. It tries to make things a lot more realistic. it makes crafting in-depth by having you actually do things like pottery, stone knapping, smithing etc by manipulating voxels to simulate the actual work instead of just putting stuff in a crafting menu or having some gimmiky crafting mechanic that just tires you. It makes doing stuff hard but also rewarding.

also the game has working seasons and food spoilage so you must preserve your food for winter and keep it in an appropriate environment (a cellar) to fave the food last through winter. Animals must be tamed over multiple generations. To get metals you have to either find some surface copper but to get anything fancier you must prospect the lands sometimes quite far away to find an area that might have the metal you're looking for and then you must make exploratory mines to find the vein but once you do, you get a huge amount.

I'm sold..."No marketplace. No loot boxes. No microtransactions. No paid DLC. No hidden fees. No pay2win. No ads. No user data monetization. No software patents. No shareholders. No publisher. No NFTs. No BlockChain. No 3rd party interests."

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