Stumbling through the in-depth crafting system, spending what feels like hours searching for clay deposits in the soil, and slowly approaching the point where I may be able to soon, one day, perhaps, smelt the loose copper I've found lying around into my first pickaxe.
Then a bear showed up.
I'm digging out pit kilns in a flat area next to my "house" (a cobblestone skeleton of a church that I've filled out with packed dirt), minding my own business, then I look up and a bear just walks right up and stares at me. Now, I have literally never had a positive interaction with any animal in this game, but hey, it was just chilling there, I was just trying to fire some clay crock pots or whatever, I figure what's the worst that can happen. I go back to my kilns.
It one-shots me. A single growl, and then I'm re-emerging from the stone quarry I was birthed from (or something--this game apparently has lore; I don't know), and I'm running back across the mountains, rivers, and plains between there and where I decided to build my hovel. And, you know, I've died in this game before. Been killed even.
One time, I was walking around at night and something called a "surface drifter" (some kind of hunchback zombie-thing) just started throwing rocks at me. I'd never seen one before, but it was trying to kill me, so I just stabbed it with trusty spear until it died. Hovering over the body, I saw a familiar prompt, so I took out my knife and harvested flax fiber from the corpse (normal Vintage Story things). Afterward, I looked up there were four more of those. Long story short, I got one, then I had to run from the quarry, across mountains/rivers/etc to get back to my corpse. But the other drifters had moved on by that point, letting me get my stuff! So surely the bear would move on too, right?
Not even a little. I get back to my stuff, there's a roar, I look over, two hits and I'm dead (wasn't bringing its A-game that time). So now I'm stuck. The thought occurs to me: maybe that's the bear's house now? The only reason I built my house out there in the first place is because the first direction I walked in ended in a boar killing me, so it wouldn't be the first time I left. But I already had those clay pots firing, so I figured I might as well fight for it.
There's tons of loose stones in the quarry and the path home takes me through a forest with plently of loose sticks, so I'm able to craft about five spears in the time it takes me to return to my hovel. As I crest the last hill, I see that the bear is sleeping a little ways away from the house--I have my chance. I sneak back to the spot the bear killed me the first time and grab the five other spears I had on me at the time (I'm big on spears), as well as my trusty stack of packed dirt. At this point, the bear has woken up and noticed me, but I'm already three blocks into the air.
Not high enough. It nearly one-shots me yet again, but I manage to build two blocks higher, taking myself out of reach as it circles my pillar of dirt below. From my high vantage point, I throw down literally all of my spears, and it is still standing. I start to panic, but then it finally succumbs to its wounds and rolls over. I go back to my kilns: I am now the proud owner of four clay crock pots.
Can't use them. They're part of the food preservation system, and I literally cannot conceive of a world where I have so much food that I need to store some rather than eat everything within a day of getting it. Even my feast of bear meat doesn't last me beyond the next night.
Really looking forward to winter.