Primitive Survival for Vintage Story 1.22: Irrigation, Traps, Fishing and the Living Dead
Checked on 14 October 2026 against Primitive Survival 5.1.4 and Vintage Story 1.22.7.
Primitive Survival by SpearAndFang is one of the most installed mods on the official Mod DB, with about 996,000 downloads. Release 5.1.4 came out on 19 September 2026 and is listed for every 1.22 version from the first pre-release through 1.22.7. It needs no other mod, and it runs on both sides: the server and every player load it. The numbers below come from the mod's own files and default settings, so they describe what a fresh install does. Most of them can be changed in the config file covered at the end.
Short answer: bury an irrigation vessel in the middle of a 3x3 bed and fill it with fresh water, and it keeps the eight plots around it at full moisture. Hold Shift and right-click farmland with a hoe to cut furrows that carry water from a pond along your fields. The Living Dead spawn only in the dark, deep underground, and hit for twice the health a player starts with. On a server, install the mod once: players download it when they join.
What Primitive Survival adds
| System | What you build or meet |
|---|---|
| Fishing | Fish baskets, weir traps, limb lines and trotlines, fishing hooks knapped from flint or stone, carved from bone or cast in metal, and cast metal fishing lures |
| Trapping | Stone deadfalls, snares, wood spikes with a camouflaged pit cover, and Bed-O-Nails spike plates cast in metal |
| Farming | Furrowed farmland, the irrigation vessel, nightcrawlers and earthworm castings |
| Food | Red meat, bushmeat and fish jerky that cures over time, a meat smoker, snake and crab meat |
| Creatures | The Living Dead, four snakes (the pit viper and the chain viper are venomous), land crabs and Bairdi crabs, will-o'-wisps, fireflies and glowing water creatures |
| Getting around | The monkey bridge, a rope bridge between two trees or two blocks stacked two high, and the mod's own raft |
| World | Tree hollows that hold loot and refill over time |
The mod's in-game quick start lists fireworks, fuses, explosives and spear fishing on top of these.
The irrigation vessel: full moisture for a 3x3 bed
- Making one. Put a fired storage vessel in a row with a hammer and a chisel in the crafting grid; there is one for every storage vessel colour. Resin and an irrigation vessel together turn it back into a storage vessel.
- Placing it. Sneak and right-click to place it, in the middle of the bed and at the same height as the farmland around it.
- Burying it. Right-click the vessel with a block of soil. It then looks like farmland. The soil keeps its fertility, and you get that soil block back when you break the vessel.
- Filling it. It holds 50 litres; pour fresh water in with a bucket or any other liquid container. When it is buried and filled it reports This irrigation vessel is fully functional. Other liquids show Farmland can only be kept moist with water. Salt water is the catch: the vessel still says it is fully functional, but it waters nothing.
- What it does. Every 40 seconds, while that area is loaded, it waters each of the eight farmland blocks around it on the same level. Within a couple of minutes they are at full moisture, and it keeps them there. Some of that water also reaches the farmland next to those eight.
- How long the water lasts. Once the eight plots are moist, the vessel uses about 3.6 litres per hour of loaded time, so a full vessel lasts around 14 hours. Wetting dry soil the first time takes a little more.
A buried, filled vessel also counts as water for the game's own moisture rule, which keeps farmland at least 75% moist one block from water, 50% at two blocks and 25% at three, so the beds beyond the first ring get that minimum too. A plain water block in the same spot would give the inner ring only those 75%, not 100%. Our agriculture guide shows how moisture changes crop speed.
Furrowed farmland: channels that carry water
- Cutting a furrow. Hold a hoe, hold Shift and right-click a farmland block with nothing planted on it. It becomes Furrowed Farmland and the hoe loses one point of durability. Soil still tills into farmland as usual; the furrow is a second hoe action on farmland you have already tilled. The furrow is a water channel, so plant on the farmland beside it, not in it.
- Getting water in. A furrow fills when there is water directly above it, or when a block beside it (north, south, east or west) holds a full water source block, such as the edge of a pond. A filled furrow holds a full block of water itself, so the next furrow along fills too. That is how a line of furrows carries water away from the pond.
- What it waters. Every 2 minutes, a furrow holding fresh water raises the moisture of the farmland around it: the eight blocks beside it, on the same level, up to 85%, and farmland two blocks away up to 60%. Its water also counts for the game's own rule, so those minimums of 75%, 50% and 25% apply as well; the furrow adds 10 points at one and two blocks.
- Salt water and ice. Salt water runs along furrows too, but it waters nothing, and like any salt water near farmland it damages the crops around it. Keep salt water out of your channels. A frozen furrow does not fill.
- Debris. At each 2-minute check, a furrow has a 0.05% chance of clogging with sticks, dry grass or rot (Debris is causing a problem with irrigation.). Its water drains away. Right-click the furrow to clear the debris and it refills from its neighbours. On average each furrow clogs once in about 67 hours of loaded time, so a 20-block channel clogs somewhere about every 3 hours. A furrow with a block on top of it never clogs, and neither does one inside a fully enclosed room, such as a sealed greenhouse.
Nightcrawlers and earthworm castings
- Finding them. They do not spawn on their own: you find them by picking things up. Picking up a stick or a flint has a 10% chance of turning up a nightcrawler, and picking up a loose rock 1%. One you have put down can be picked up again with a right-click.
- Using them. Eat one for a little protein, bait a hook, basket or trap with it, or put it down on farmland.
- Making castings. Sneak and right-click to put a nightcrawler down on farmland; for castings, the mod's guide suggests a hole in fertile soil. On farmland it waters the plot a little and slowly adds slow release nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. When all three reach 150, the cap, the plot turns into a block of Earthworm Castings.
- What you get. Breaking that block drops 16 Earthworm Castings. Each one is a fertilizer of 10 N, 10 P and 10 K, an even mix, where compost gives 40 N, 8 P and 8 K and bone meal 3 N and 30 P.
- Keeping worms alive. A nightcrawler dies at 0 °C or below and at 35 °C or above. Inside a fully enclosed room those limits move to minus 5 °C and 40 °C. It also has a small chance of dying at each step, so put several down rather than one.
Fishing without a rod: baskets, weirs and trotlines
| Method | How to set it up | Catch chance per check | Checks every |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fish basket | Sticks and cordage. Place it in water with open water all around it. | 5%, or 10% baited. A caught fish has a 15% chance of escaping at each check, and bait a 5% chance of being stolen. | 2.2 minutes |
| Weir trap | Stakes around a patch of water with open water in the middle, in the water or at its edge. Right-click the stake on the far side; when the stakes form an M, the trap is active. | 2%, with a 15% chance of escape at each check | 5 minutes |
| Limb line or trotline | With cordage in hand, face the water and click a tree, a block or a stake at its edge. For a trotline, put a second block straight across the water first. Then click hooks onto the line above the water. | 1% on a bare hook, 3% baited or with a metal lure, 6% with both. Bait has a 5% chance of being stolen. | 2.4 minutes |
The check times are real minutes while the area is loaded. A line needs far less open water than a basket.
Fish run out. Every catch makes the next one in that chunk 10% less likely, until the chunk is at most 95% depleted. A fish that escapes or is released puts the same 10% back, the chunk recovers 1% every 20 real minutes, and dropping fertile fish eggs into its water restores 10%. Filleting a fish gives eggs 20% of the time, half of them fertile. On a busy server, spread the traps over several chunks.
Vanilla 1.22 has its own fishing pole, which works as described in our 1.22 fishing guide. The mod adds one crafting recipe to it: a pole and a nightcrawler together in the grid, to bait the pole with the worm.
Traps: deadfalls, snares and spike pits
- Deadfall. Built from andesite, basalt, granite, obsidian or peridotite. It seriously hurts only animals with an eye height of 0.7 blocks or less, which the mod's notes put at foxes or smaller: up to 10 damage when set, 20 when baited.
- Snare. More work to build, but it seriously hurts animals up to an eye height of 0.8, pigs or smaller: up to 12 damage set, 24 baited.
- The odds. When an animal sets off a deadfall or a snare, there is a 10% chance it trips without doing damage, and a 10% chance the bait is simply stolen. Bait a trap by clicking it with food in your hand, replace bait that has gone rotten, and right-click a tripped trap to set it again.
- Spike pits. Sharpen sticks into wood spikes and push them into soft ground, ideally at the bottom of a pit. The same spikes make a camouflage cover for the pit, and animals come to investigate it. Damage grows with the speed of the fall: the multiplier is 25 for wood spikes and 80 for Bed-O-Nails, metal spike plates cast from a mold, which can sit on any surface.
The Living Dead
- Where they spawn. Only in darkness (light level 5 or lower) and deep underground: no higher than 40% of the way from the bottom of the world to sea level. On a default 256-block-high world, sea level is at Y 110, so that means Y 44 or lower. The game allows two in the world with one player online, and raises that cap as more players join.
- How dangerous they are. They have 100 health and go after any player within 20 blocks, unprovoked. One hit does 30 damage at tier 4, and a player starts with 15 health, so go down there in armor.
- What they drop. Harvesting a body always gives a temporal gear, and there is a 25% chance of a hand, a 25% chance of a skull and a 35% chance of a pair of pants. Temporal gears are what our temporal mechanics guide covers.
- Turning them down or off. On a server, set
SpawnMultiplierLivingDeadto 0 to stop new ones spawning, or above 1 to make them more common. Every snake, crab, wisp and glowing water creature has a multiplier of its own.
Running Primitive Survival on a server
- Install it on the server only. Put
primitivesurvival_5.1.4.zipin the server'sModsfolder and restart (see installing mods). Players do not need to install it: when they join, the game offers to download it from the Mod DB. If that fails, our mod sync fix covers each message. - Find the config file. The first start with the mod writes
ModConfig/primitivesurvival5.jsonin the server's data folder, with every trap, fishing, furrow and spawn setting. The irrigation vessel's timings and the creatures' health and damage are fixed in the mod and not in the file. Stop the server, edit the file, start it again. - The server's settings win. The server sends its values to every player when they join, so a player's own copy of the file does not change the rules on your server.
- A typo resets everything. If the mod cannot read the file, it writes a fresh file of defaults over it at the next start, and your changes are gone. Keep a copy before you edit, and check the commas and quotes.
- Config Lib is optional. The mod ships a settings page for Config Lib, so with Config Lib installed the same settings appear in game. Check which Config Lib releases are safe before you add it.
- Existing worlds work. You can add the mod to a world you already have. Tree hollows, though, are placed only when a chunk is first generated, so they appear only in land nobody has explored yet. The creatures spawn anywhere their conditions are met.
- Game updates. The 5.1 releases are listed for 1.22. Before you update the game, check that the Mod DB lists a Primitive Survival release for the new version, and back up the world (see updating a server safely).
Settings worth knowing
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
SpawnMultiplierLivingDead | 1.0 | Multiplies the Living Dead spawn chance. 0 stops new spawns. |
FurrowedLandEnabled | true | false stops hoes making furrows. The mod's own note suggests it for players who prefer the Better Hoe mod. |
RaftEnabled | true | false removes the mod's raft. |
MonkeyBridgeMaxLength | 120 | The longest monkey bridge in blocks. The setting's own description still says 60, but 120 is the default the mod uses. |
FishChunkDepletionRate | 10 | How much less likely the next catch in a chunk gets, in percent. |
FishChunkRepletionMinutes | 20 | Real minutes between each 1% recovery of a chunk's fish. |
FurrowedLandBlockageChancePercent | 0.05 | The chance of debris at each furrow check. 0 means furrows never clog. |
TreeHollowsSpawnProbability | 0.15 | The chance of a tree hollow in each newly generated chunk, at most TreeHollowsMaxPerChunk (1). |
WormFoundPercentStickFlint | 10 | The chance of a nightcrawler when picking up a stick or flint. WormFoundPercentRock (1) does the same for rocks. |
Primitive Survival is a big overhaul, so it suits a long-running world more than a quick one. Our best mods for 2026 lists what pairs well with it. On a Supercraft Vintage Story server, the panel's mod browser installs it straight from the Mod DB.
Frequently asked questions
What is Primitive Survival in Vintage Story?
A survival overhaul mod by SpearAndFang on the official Mod DB, with about 996,000 downloads. It adds fish baskets, weir traps and trotlines, deadfalls, snares and spike pits, irrigation with furrows and the irrigation vessel, nightcrawlers and worm castings, jerky and a smoker, new creatures including the Living Dead, the monkey bridge, a raft and tree hollows. Release 5.1.4 is listed for Vintage Story 1.22 through 1.22.7.
How does the irrigation vessel work in Primitive Survival?
Make it from a fired storage vessel with a hammer and a chisel, sneak to place it in the middle of a 3x3 bed, bury it by right-clicking it with a block of soil, then fill it with up to 50 litres of fresh water. Every 40 seconds it waters the eight farmland blocks around it, on the same level, and keeps them at full moisture. Once they are moist it uses about 3.6 litres an hour, so a full vessel lasts around 14 hours while the area is loaded.
How does furrowed farmland work?
Sneak and right-click empty farmland with a hoe to turn it into Furrowed Farmland. A furrow fills from water above it or from a full water source block beside it, and passes that water on to the next furrow. Every 2 minutes it waters the farmland beside it up to 85% moisture and farmland two blocks away up to 60%. Now and then debris clogs a furrow; right-click it to clear it.
Where do the Living Dead spawn?
Only in darkness, at light level 5 or lower, deep underground: no higher than 40% of the way from the bottom of the world to sea level, which is Y 44 or lower on a default 256-block-high world. The game allows two in the world with one player online, and more as players join. They have 100 health and hit for 30 damage, twice a starting player's health, and each body gives a temporal gear when harvested.
How do I make worm castings?
Put a nightcrawler down on farmland by sneaking and right-clicking. It slowly adds slow release nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and when all three reach 150 the plot becomes a block of Earthworm Castings. Break it for 16 castings, each a fertilizer of 10 N, 10 P and 10 K. Nightcrawlers die at 0 °C or below and at 35 °C or above.
Do players need to install Primitive Survival to join a server?
Not by hand. The mod runs on both sides, but when a player joins a server that runs it, the game offers to download it from the Mod DB. The server's settings apply to everyone, because the server sends them to each player who joins.
How do I turn off the Living Dead?
Stop the server, open ModConfig/primitivesurvival5.json in its data folder, set SpawnMultiplierLivingDead to 0 and start the server again. That stops new ones spawning. Keep a copy of the file first: if the mod cannot read it, it replaces it with the defaults.