Vintage Story 1.22 Update Guide | Vintage Story Wiki

Vintage Story 1.22 Update Guide: Everything New in the April 2026 Release

Checked on 14 October 2026 against the official 1.22 release notes and the Vintage Story 1.22.7 game files.

Vintage Story 1.22, officially titled "Fishing, Mechanisms, Metalworking and More!", bundles over 700 individual features, tweaks and fixes into a release that adds depth to metallurgy, gives the lakes and seas their first real activity (fishing), introduces dynamic dungeons to world generation, and modernises storage with the new cabinet voxel-placement system. Version 1.22.0 shipped on 21 April 2026 and 1.22.1 followed on 29 April 2026. The line has kept moving since: the current stable build is 1.22.7, released on 16 August 2026, and every release from 1.22.0 to 1.22.7 has a server download of its own. This guide covers every major change, what each 1.22.x patch fixed, what migrates into existing saves, what breaks for mod authors, how to update a dedicated server without losing your world, and what the developers have said about 1.23.

What's new in 1.22 (TL;DR)

If you only have one paragraph: 1.22 adds a full fishing system with over 20 freshwater species, bait, and a bobber; a quenching and tempering system that improves either a tool's durability or its damage, at the risk of shattering it; a grinding wheel that sharpens swords for critical hits; cabinets that accept items at voxel precision instead of fixed slots; a reworked berry-bush life cycle (knife cuttings, 4 to 8 months to mature, fertilization, 8 rare traits); the first dynamic dungeons, roughly every 1,500 blocks; a large metal windmill rotor and the first waterwheels, which need rapids; iron and steel spears alongside doubled spear windup; mannequins for clothing display; new crops (fennel, licorice), flowers, and mushrooms; warthog and red river hog variants; and a move to .NET 10, replacing the .NET 8 requirement of the 1.21 line.

Fishing

Fishing finally arrives as a real mechanic with depth. Craft a fishing pole from sticks or bamboo stakes with rope (flax twine works too since 1.22.1), bait it, and cast: the bobber floats and dips with a splash when something bites, and the fish stays on the line until you reel. Over 20 freshwater fish species live in the world, each only in its own climate range and only in some regions. Bait decides which species can bite: earthworms come from the new worm grunting stick (worms depend on rainfall and temperature and run out if you over-harvest a spot), and stinkbait is cooked in a pot from fennel or licorice root, water, and meat, fish or dough. Our fishing guide has the full bait table and the reasons fishing can seem not to work.

Behaviour is a step up too. Fish flee very quickly when melee-attacked, which kills the old "just stab them in the shallows" strategy. Arapaimas, pike, piranhas and sheatfish may attack players if cornered, and red-bellied piranhas are especially aggressive towards injured players. Fishing the same spot depletes it, so a single pond will not sustain a base; rotation matters. Caught fish can be preserved by taxidermy: seal a raw fish in a barrel with a litre of diluted borax for 18 hours, or of zinc sulfate (cooked from sulfuric acid and crushed sphalerite) for 12 hours, and display it on the wall mount (the old antler mount, renamed). You can also very rarely fish up one of 8 rare collectibles. Anchovies no longer spawn (for now) because they were too small to flay, and small fish can be placed four to a block.

Metalworking: quenching, tempering, and the forge rework

The forge model is updated, reaching higher temperatures now requires a bellows, and fuel quality sets how hot and how long the forge burns. Tongs now lose 1 durability per item picked up, and the new metal tongs last 10 to 100 times longer than wooden ones (1.22.1 cut wooden tong durability by a further 30%), so smithing campaigns no longer eat through tongs at the same rate as tools.

The headline metallurgy addition is the quenching and tempering loop. Only iron, meteoric iron, and steel tool and weapon heads can be quenched. The mechanic works in two stages. Quenching: heat the head into the quenching range shown in its tooltip, then toss it into water or right click a block of water or a barrel of water (water is the only quenchant in 1.22), so it drops below 100 °C quickly. Coat the item in fire clay first and it gains durability; without clay it gains power (damage and mining speed). The first quench adds 20% durability or 10% power, and each later one adds a little less. Every quench, the first included, can shatter the head: the chance starts at 5% and rises 5 points with each quench, and a shattered head loses all its metal. Tempering is the slower, gentler counterpart: reheat the tool to the lower tempering range and let it cool in air. Each temper cuts the shatter chance by about a fifth and the power bonus by 8%, while durability gains are preserved, and you cannot temper an item more times than it has been quenched. The result is a real metallurgy minigame where you spec a tool toward either durability or damage, accepting some risk of breakage along the way. Our smithing guide covers the anvil side.

The new grinding wheel adds a sharpening workflow that runs parallel to quenching. It is built from a grindstone (cut from chert, claystone or sandstone with a hammer and chisel), a wooden axle, planks and metal nails and strips, with a hammer and saw on the grid, and it runs on mechanical power. In 1.22.7 only swords can be sharpened: each moment on the turning wheel adds 1% critical hit chance, up to 10%, at a small cost in durability, and the edge lasts for a quarter of the sword's durability. A critical hit does double damage, and it stacks with quench-power bonuses. The quern now displays its grinding outputs directly in the in-game handbook.

Iron and steel spears are new in 1.22, each spear has its own head model, and the lower-tier spears were weakened. Spear windup takes twice as long across the board, which shifts the optimal opening-attack timing: spear users now either commit earlier or switch to a faster blade for opportunistic strikes. Shields can now be hung on wall mounts for display.

Mechanical power: large mills, in-wall axles, and the ignite rule that did not ship

1.22 substantially expands the mechanical power system added in earlier versions. The new metal windmill rotor is the large windmill: up to 10 sail sets for up to 250 kN, against 5 sets and 100 kN for the wooden rotor. Windmills were also nerfed: each causes turbulence within 1.5 times its sail diameter, so two maxed windmills need 15 blocks between them. Waterwheels are new and must sit on rapids, the new fast-flowing water; since 1.22.3 a waterwheel warns you when there is no rapid water and refuses to build where its turn would be blocked. In-wall axles and spur gears let you route mechanical power through walls without exposed shafts, which dramatically improves what can be built into a closed workshop. The helve hammer no longer has an exponential power cost as speed goes up. Our mechanical power guide has the numbers.

One rule you may have read about did not ship: the 1.22 change list says mechanical power blocks would smoke and then ignite if they turn too fast, but the 1.22.0 release post lists metal-tier mechanical power, and with it wood parts igniting at speed, as content still to come. Nothing in 1.22.7 catches fire from over-speed, so you can size a power network without that risk for now.

Storage: cabinets, mannequins, and improved ground storage

Cabinets are the flagship storage addition. They accept mixed contents at voxel precision rather than fixed slots, so a book on the top shelf, a stack of clothing in the middle, and chiseled figurines at the front are finally possible. Every 1.21 storable item carries over, plus new categories: books, clothing pieces and chiseled figurines. Cabinets are wood-typed, use metal nails and strips, and can be upgraded with cabinet doors, so storage finish can match the rest of the base.

Mannequins were added in four survival-craftable types: full-body, leg, head, and torso. Clothing display becomes a deliberate base-decoration system rather than chests full of unused gear. Ground storage also takes more items, such as the new small lanterns (which can take linings and colored glass while placed) and the reworked oil lamps, and small items like small fish and chain mail can be placed four to a block.

Berry bushes (fully reworked)

Berry bushes are arguably the most disruptive 1.22 change for existing worlds. The old propagation system is replaced. Bushes can only be propagated by taking a cutting with a knife, which takes 4 to 8 months of in-game time to mature into a new fruiting bush once planted. Propagated bushes that reach maturity require fertilization or they stop bearing fruit entirely; nutrient use tapers off by 15% per year, so a bush uses about 5% of its original demand after 20 years, and the developers note that some bone meal each year is enough for a decent harvest.

8 rare traits were added, 4 positive and 4 negative, each with a chance to appear on any berry bush, and they carry over to cuttings, so selective breeding is a real loop now. World generation randomises the fruiting stage of naturally-spawned bushes, so wild bushes you discover are at various points in their cycle, and bushes now have a bare winter model. Bushes already in your save become legacy blocks: they keep working the old way, but the old bush is no longer in the creative inventory.

World generation: dynamic dungeons, traders, and rapids

The first, proof-of-concept dynamic dungeon arrived in 1.22, spawning in Survival mode roughly every 1,500 blocks (1.22.3 fixed dungeons ignoring their minimum distance from story locations and other structures). Trader outposts are fully rebuilt and individualized to their trader, and traders have new models with climate-specific clothing: a desert trader wears appropriate sun protection, a cold-climate trader is dressed for cold, and so on. A new type of rivulet, the rapids, adds fast-flowing water, which is what waterwheels need. Breaking a block next to or below flowing water can now let the water flow into the gap.

New structures, dungeons and rapids only appear in parts of the map generated after the update; traders already living in your world switch to the new models.

Flora and fauna additions

New farmable crops: fennel and licorice, both found in the wild and both used for fishing stinkbait; fennel is also an edible vegetable, licorice is not. Four new flowers: bluebell, mugwort, ghost pipe and daffodils. Ghost pipe grows in small clumps under trees in forests with cool to mild climates and decent rainfall, mostly white, more rarely pink and very rarely red; it lives off tree roots, so breaking it gives you nothing and it cannot be transplanted. Eight new rare mushrooms (honey mushroom, blue meanie, fool's conecap, gold cap, liberty cap, sickener, wavy cap and laughing jim), most of them with visual side effects when eaten, which adds a real risk layer to wild-mushroom foraging. Creatures: the boar model is overhauled with a huge boar variant, warthogs, and red river hogs; the bighorn sheep model is reworked and mouflon sheep are added; wolves and bears gained footstep sounds; fish behaviour was reworked across the board. Six new hair colours were added to character creation. Travertine is a new rock type that can be made into ashlar and tiles. Survival-mode craftable clay tiles, a snow shovel, and a crowbar (for removing wooden beams) round out the toolkit additions.

Mod compatibility: what breaks in 1.22, what works

1.22 requires .NET 10, up from .NET 8 in the 1.21 line. On Windows the game client wants the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime; a dedicated server is headless and needs only the plain .NET 10 Runtime, which is the only one that exists on Linux anyway. The developers moved their own projects to .NET 10 and warned modders that the engine and game content changed significantly. Code mods built for 1.21 meet renamed members (InventoryPlayerBackPacks is now InventoryPlayerBackpacks, IWorldManagerAPI.CurrentWorldName is now CurrentWorldFilepath) and a changed method signature (CollectibleBehavior.OnHandbookRecipeRender gained a ref EnumHandling argument). Content mods can break too: item-crushed-leadoxide is now item-crushed-galena, and a duplicated landform code now stops the game at startup. That is why many mods needed a new release for 1.22. Source-mode mods compiled by the loader at runtime cope with the new runtime on their own, but not with a renamed member.

Other API changes are additions that existing mods can ignore. A new tag condition matching system supports complex disjunctive and conjunctive logic, and tags can now be used in all crafting recipes. The transform editor dialog includes firepit support. Spawner blocks can define rain and temperature conditions. A new MouseWheelMove input event is exposed. A texture bleeding system enables seamless block transitions. Creature sounds can now be bound to exact animation frames, which is how the new bear and wolf footsteps were added.

Changes mod authors should check: Entity.ServerPos now simply redirects to Entity.Pos; update references during your 1.22 port. Some IRecipeIngredient properties moved to a new IRecipeIngredientBase, with no practical change for code that only uses them. Many CollectibleObject fields became more moddable. World generation code was moved from the survival mod to the essentials mod so that total-conversion mods can use it, so any worldgen mod hooking into the old path needs a port.

Working out which of your mods this affects is the awkward part, because the runtime break only hits mods that ship a compiled binary and nothing in the mod list tells you which those are. Drop your Mods folder into our Vintage Story modpack doctor: it reads each zip in your browser (nothing is uploaded), checks every mod against the official Mod DB for a release that covers the version you want to run, flags the ones that carry a .dll and have no 1.22 release, and hands back an upgrade manifest naming exactly what to update and to what.

How to update your Vintage Story server to 1.22

If you run a Vintage Story server on Supercraft, use Change version in the server panel: choose the stable branch and 1.22.7 (or Latest), confirm that you have a backup, and the server's game files are reinstalled while your world and configuration are kept; then start the server again. Older 1.21 and 1.22 builds stay available in the same list if your mods are not ready yet, and the server installs the .NET 10 runtime it needs by itself.

For self-hosted servers: take a manual backup of your save folder before updating; install the .NET 10 Runtime on the host machine, not the Desktop Runtime, which is a Windows client package; download the current 1.22.x server build from your official Vintage Story account page; stop the current server cleanly; replace server files; start the new server and watch the console on first boot. Mods that fail to load against .NET 10 are logged and skipped. Update those mods from their authors or remove them temporarily. The wiki page at Vintage Story dedicated server setup covers self-host setup details. Existing worlds carry over: old berry bushes stay as working legacy blocks, newly generated chunks use 1.22 worldgen, and cabinets and grinding wheels can be crafted in any existing world immediately.

Known issues and the dev team's fix timeline

After 1.22.0 the developers shipped quick fixes for two weeks, a maintenance patch at the end of May, three July releases built around server safety, and an auction house update in August. Dates below come from the developers' release posts and download server.

1.22.4 to 1.22.6 closed exploits that let players grief multiplayer servers, so a public or community server should be on 1.22.7.

1.21 to 1.22 changelog summary

For context, 1.21, "Story Chapter 2 Redux" (25 August 2025), was mostly a polish update with ocean content: coral reefs, over 30 kinds of ocean fish, large waves, sailboat upgrades (naming, shields, furling the sails), elk taming and riding, bear hide trophy armor, a slow healing system, volumetric clouds and more ground storage. It needed .NET 8. 1.22 gives those lakes and seas their first real activity (fishing), tightens the day-to-day storage and crafting loops, and adds genuine depth to metallurgy. Its 700+ individual changes include performance work that matters for server operators: recipe matching is faster with less memory use, which removes lag spikes when crafting or opening the handbook, and unpacking chunks and creating network packets costs less CPU, which mainly helps multiplayer servers.

What's coming next: 1.23 preview

The developers' June 2026 development update names combat as the focus of 1.23: tighter, more visceral hit detection, more varied attack animations, possibly reworked armor and weapon tiers, and a few more weapon types. An armor rework is under way that keeps 3 armor slots but lets each piece be built up in layers, and the team mentioned over 200 new inventory sounds, more berry bush variants and new foliage, without promising which of these make 1.23. The story team is preparing 1.24, which is to bring lore chapter 3. There is no release date for either 1.23 or 1.24, and as of 14 October 2026 the official version list shows no 1.23 test build. The 1.22.0 release post also listed content that might arrive in a smaller update before 1.23: inventory item sounds, more procedural dungeon content, mechanically powered bellows, a visual rework of barrel and crate contents, and metal-tier mechanical power.

For now, 1.22.7 is the version to run, especially on a multiplayer server. New players starting today should start on 1.22 directly, since fishing, cabinets, grinding wheels, and quenching substantially change the early-to-mid-game experience and you do not want to migrate later. Existing players on 1.21 can move when their mods are ready, which was the developers' own advice for 1.22.0; back up the world first.

Related Vintage Story wiki pages

• Vintage Story dedicated server setup
• Vintage Story Admin Commands Reference
• Vintage Story Agriculture and Farming Guide
• Vintage Story Food Preservation Guide
• Vintage Story Mechanical Power Guide
• Vintage Story Metallurgy Guide
• Vintage Story Server Port Configuration
• Vintage Story Survival Strategies
• Vintage Story Temporal Stability