Tech Progression in QPTech - Getting Started!
If you are playing Vintage Story for the first time I really recommend doing a vanilla playthrough at least to the steel age! Vintage Story has a very deep tech tree and many cool things to discover on its own!
Teching up in Vintage Story is a challenging task without mods, especially getting to the steel age. In general I don't recommend attempting QPTech machines until you are firmly in the iron age in vanilla vintage story, with plenty of copper, brass, and bronze. A Helvehammer setup would be useful, but not strictly necessary. Make sure you have enough crops and food!
My main tip is to not get sucked into rushing the new tech as you will probably get yourself in trouble this way! Your fancy new macerator is not going to be very helpful if you are freezing to death and starving!
Also make sure to mark everything of interest on the map with waypoints, who knows what you'll need later on! And grab some resin along the way!
Here is a good starting device order. You may find you need one of the other machines earlier on, but this is a good starting point. You will also want some groundwires and electric junctions - need a large amount of copper, bronze, and brass on hand!
- Screwdriver - you'll need this a lot!
- Primitive Electric Generator - you can't use electrical devices without electricity!
- Metal Plate Press - you could make a case to go for the macerator first, but you will need a lot of machine plates which are super easy to smith from plates. Plus you will want plates for a lot of other things in Vintage Story.
- Macerator - the macerator will get you a lot of extra materials and is just all around useful, one of the handiest machines in qptech!
- Battery - if you can afford it this is handy to store excess power, and also very handy to provide a temporary boost as you probalby can't afford multiple generators at the start
- Hardened Metal Press Metal Plates - this will replace your old plate press and can make you all plates up to and including steel
- Soft Metal Press Rods - you're making a lot of rods at this point, and you're probably super tired of smithing screws, so lets start working on making this easier!
- Soft Metal Press Screws - finally never smith those (brass) screws again! Thank god! OMG.
So the setup for screws is:
container → plate press → container → rod press → container → screw press.
Put two heated brass ingots into the first container and eventually a bunch of screws will come out the other side. I would just make parts as needed, sometimes you will want just rods, and sometimes you will want plates, and sometimes you want screws. What you don't want is, for exampe, to send all your brass all the way thru and end up with all screws!
You don't have to put these in order like i have either, you may choose to keep them separate to prevent soul crushing accidents. But if they are in order switching them off until you need them will also help to prevent this. Early game expect to do a lot of picking machines up and placing them down, moving stuff around as you probably won't have enough wire or containers to keep everything setup all the time.
Also at this point you are probably tired of constantly keeping the generator watered and fueled, so it's time to make some utility things:
- Bronze Industrial Oven - this replaces the firepit, but gets hot enough to use peat as a fuel source for the generator. WARNING DO NOT TRY AND SMELT IRON IN THIS THING, IT WILL CRASH THE GAME!
- Firepit Stoker - this will keep your bronze industrial oven fueled as necessary
- make one (at least) bronze pipe
- create the water tower and feed it into the top of the generator - you will have more water than you need. (Note that the center of the water tower must always have direct access to the sky)
Hey, don't forget to take a break from chasing tech, and make sure you've done lots of exploring, animal husbandry, farming, beekeeping etc. At this point you'll have a nice bit of tech to fuel or Vintage Story gameplay.
Also start working towards steel, which is quite challenging. You'll need at least three steel cooks to progress beyond the vanilla way of making steel!