Apprentice Mod (for Vintage Story)

Apprentice expands Vintage Story with playable races, professions, skill trees, hidden classes, poisons, advanced crafting, dangerous regions, and Grandmaster progression. Shape your fate.

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Inspiration

We created Apprentice to bring deeper role-playing, specialization, and character identity to Vintage Story. We wanted players to become more than their equipment by choosing a race, developing professions, discovering hidden classes, and eventually becoming Grandmasters of their craft.

What it does

Apprentice expands the game with playable races, appearance customization, height-dependent character models and cameras, professions, skill trees, hidden class discoveries, advanced crafting, poisons, traps, dangerous regions, new materials, and Grandmaster progression.

Player choices affect their strengths, weaknesses, abilities, crafting options, and progression through the world.

How we built it

We built Apprentice using C#, JSON assets, patches, textures, models, and the Vintage Story modding API. Wherever possible, we reuse vanilla meshes, transforms, animations, and mechanics so our content feels consistent with the base game.

Scalable character values use normalized interpolation: v(t)=vmin​+t(vmax​−vmin​),0≤t≤1 This helps character height, body proportions, and first-person camera position remain synchronized.

Our development process is highly iterative: implement a feature, test it in-game, inspect screenshots and logs, fix edge cases, and repeat.

Challenges we ran into

Some of our greatest challenges included synchronizing character appearance, aligning the camera with characters of different heights, rendering items correctly in inventories and hands, implementing multiplayer-safe poison damage, and integrating custom interfaces with the world map.

We also encountered missing textures, incorrect transforms, mirrored models, API differences, crafting conflicts, and compatibility problems with other mods. Even small visual changes could affect rendering, interaction, combat, or multiplayer synchronization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of turning Apprentice from a character-creation concept into a large, interconnected RPG expansion.

The race system, profession progression, hidden discoveries, advanced metals, poison mechanics, traps, and character customization all contribute to a world in which player choices matter. We are also proud of our vanilla-first design approach and our continuous testing based on real gameplay feedback.

What we learned

We learned that strong game design requires consistency, iteration, and attention to small details. Studying vanilla systems before extending them usually produces better results than creating isolated mechanics.

We also learned how interconnected mod systems are. A single change can affect crafting, rendering, animation, combat, progression, multiplayer behavior, and compatibility. Automated asset validation, detailed logs, and frequent in-game testing became essential parts of our workflow.

What's next for Apprentice Mod (for Vintage Story)

Next, we plan to expand poisoning and alchemy with poisoned food, liquid poison storage, healing potions, and the new Assassin and Distiller professions.

We also want to complete Starsteel and Aethersteel smithing, add glowing materials and light-emitting equipment, expand hidden class combinations, improve mod compatibility, and provide testing commands for profession experience.

Our long-term goal is to make Apprentice a cohesive RPG progression system that feels like a natural extension of Vintage Story.

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