u/killermvp1

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I've got 300+ hours in Vintage Story, both modded and unmodded, and I recently came back after taking about a 4-month break. I still really like the game — the atmosphere, exploration, survival, collecting huge amounts of resources, building up a base, and eventually becoming self-sufficient are all things I love.

But I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated with the amount of manual processing and babysitting required once you start operating at a larger scale.

For example:

* Large amounts of grain → flour → dough → bread

* Berry/fruit pressing

* Metallurgy when you're producing large quantities

* Even machines with automation often stop because their output side is blocked or their inventory is full. Meaning if u want any sort of automation u need 4 funnels and a ton of pipes just to have the quern not loop back on the process I find it some times takes up to 4 processes just to drop the item.

None of these processes are particularly difficult. They're just incredibly repetitive when you're doing them in bulk.

What frustrates me is that there doesn't seem to be much of a transition from "I'm a survivor doing everything myself" to "I've established a large, self-sufficient settlement with machinery, Especially post iron.

The game even has the lore to support more advanced technology. We know the world had much more advanced machinery and infrastructure before things went to shit. Yet in the late game I'm still manually moving ingredients around and standing there babysitting individual batches.

I'm not looking for Factorio-level automation. I don't want to automate every aspect of the game or have machines magically create things.

I just want basic material handling

If I've built the machinery and supplied the power/resources, I'd really like to be able to walk away and let it process a large batch instead of personally interacting with every step.

I've been experimenting with Vintage Kinematics, and some of it is exactly what I'm looking for. The automated berry/fruit extractor is awesome, and the belts, funnels, fluid handling, automated quern, etc. are really cool. But the mod also feels unfinished, doesn't have an automated cooking solution, and doesn't integrate with Culinary Artillery, so I'm not sure it's something I want to build a new world around.

I've also looked at Electrical Progressive, but I don't really want to run two competing industrial systems just to get the pieces I need.

So I'm wondering:

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Have other people reached the point where the manual processing starts becoming a bigger annoyance than the actual survival gameplay?

And more importantly, are there any mods/mod combinations I'm missing that provide this kind of "light automation" without turning Vintage Story into Factorio?

I'm specifically looking for things like conveyors/chutes, automated input/output, automated cooking, bulk processing, fluid handling, etc. — basically anything that lets established infrastructure handle repetitive processing.

I'm really interested in hearing what other people who have hundreds of hours in the game do about this, because I'd love to keep playing but the micro-management is starting to kill it for me.