The best Vintage Story mods start with quality-of-life staples like Carry On and ProspectTogether, then branch into deep survival overhauls, bigger kitchens, better windmills and hundreds of new ruins to explore. The 25 below are among the most downloaded and most followed mods on the official Vintage Story mod database, grouped by what they change. We checked every entry against its creator’s page on September 21, 2026: each one is free, still downloadable, and has a release built for Vintage Story 1.22, the current stable branch (1.22.7 is the latest stable build on the official download servers).
Two setup facts matter. Vintage Story is sold directly by Anego Studios rather than on Steam, so there is no Workshop: mods come from mods.vintagestory.at as zip files that go, still zipped, into your Mods folder, and some mod pages point to a one-click install option on the database. Every mod page lists the exact game versions each file supports, and the jump from 1.21 to 1.22 retired a lot of older releases, which is why a few long-time favorites are missing below. On a multiplayer server, most mods must be installed on the server as well as on each player’s client.
Essentials and Quality of Life
These are the mods that turn up in nearly every modded save, because they cut busywork without changing what the game is.
1. Carry On
Carry On lets you pick up blocks, including chests and other containers with everything still inside, and carry them in your hands or on your back. Moving a base stops meaning an hour of emptying and refilling storage. It has passed a million downloads, and its latest stable release lists every 1.22 version up to 1.22.6, with a 2.0 rework in testing that its page marks as use at your own risk. Creator: NerdScurvy. Download: Carry On on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
2. ProspectTogether
ProspectTogether records every reading your prospecting pick takes in density search mode and paints it onto the map, chunk by chunk, with a heatmap option for a single ore. That makes finding iron or tin a planning job instead of guesswork. It works in single player, and on a server it can share your group’s readings automatically. Its latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: Wooza. Download: ProspectTogether on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
3. Auto Map Markers
Auto Map Markers drops a waypoint on your map when you harvest or break things you will want to find again: berry bushes, resin, surface ore bits, deep ore, clay, beehives, traders, translocators and more. You choose exactly which categories it tracks. Its page notes the mod is disabled on first install, so open its settings with Ctrl+Shift+M and enable it. The latest release lists 1.22.0 to 1.22.3. Creator: egocarib. Download: Auto Map Markers on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
4. Knapster
Knapster makes knapping, clay forming and smithing easier, built for players with low manual dexterity who find placing voxels one click at a time painful or impractical. It is also popular with anyone who has knapped their hundredth arrowhead and would rather be exploring. Its page lists optional extras for cooking mods like A Culinary Artillery, and the latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: Apache. Download: Knapster on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
Storage and Building
Vintage Story bases fill up with chests fast. These mods give your gear a proper home and give builders better tools.
5. Purposeful Storage
Purposeful Storage adds display storage for specific item types: wardrobes and hat racks for clothing, spear racks and sword pedestals for weapons, gear racks, glider racks, resource bins and rope racks. Hover over a block in your inventory to see what it holds. Its page warns that version 2.0 is incompatible with earlier versions, so back up your world before updating. The latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: SONZINA. Download: Purposeful Storage on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
6. Food Shelves
Food Shelves adds shelves built for specific foods, like bread, eggs, pies and cheese, plus jars and barrel racks that help with drying and curing. It also adds a cooling mechanic: a cooling cabinet or meat freezer stocked with ice keeps food fresh longer, which matters in a game where spoilage can end a winter. Version 3.0 is incompatible with older saves, per its page, and the latest release lists 1.22.0 to 1.22.5. Creator: SONZINA. Download: Food Shelves on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
7. VS Roofing Mod
VS Roofing Mod, the successor to OneRoof, builds sloped roofs from a frame you fill in with vanilla materials, with no crafting grid involved. Early frames use sticks or bamboo, later ones boards or metal rods, and the handbook covers every roof type, including many new ones. It is one of the fastest-rising mods on the database, with more than 270,000 downloads since late 2025, and supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: tui_smuggler. Download: VS Roofing Mod on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
8. QP’s Chisel Tools
QP’s Chisel Tools gives chiseling the tools a serious builder wants. The Pantograph and Portfolio copy, paste and save designs across worlds and servers, while a hand planer, paint scraper and hand wedge strip, clean up, rotate and mirror shapes. It also makes chiseled ladders, multiblock doors and functional chiseled chests. Most modes work in survival, per its page, and the latest release targets 1.22.7. Creator: QPTech. Download: QP’s Chisel Tools on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
Survival and Hunting
For players who think the base game is not hard enough yet, these mods add new ways to stay alive and new ways to die.
9. Primitive Survival
Primitive Survival is one of the oldest and most loved content mods for the game. Its author built it to make the early game feel more like real wilderness survival: deadfalls and snares, weir traps, fishing with limb lines and trotlines, rafts, floating docks, firefly jars and plenty of new meat to cook. The in-game handbook includes a quick-start guide. With close to a million downloads, it supports every 1.22 build through 1.22.7. Creator: SpearAndFang. Download: Primitive Survival on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
10. Hydrate or Diedrate
Hydrate or Diedrate adds a thirst bar that drains faster in hot climates. Clothing gains a cooling stat, being wet or in shade helps, every food and drink has a hydration value, and you can drink straight from water sources. Dehydration is dangerous: its page says it deals roughly double the damage of starvation. It pairs naturally with long trips south, and the latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: Chronolegionaire. Download: Hydrate or Diedrate on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
11. Butchering
Butchering replaces the quick knife harvest with a real process. The fast method yields less, so you haul the carcass home, where it takes up backpack space and slows you down, and work it on butchery hooks and tables for the full return, including sinew and new cuts of meat. Its page says it is deliberately harder and balanced that way. The latest release targets 1.22.7. Creator: CaptainOats. Download: Butchering on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
12. Blood Trail
Blood Trail makes animals you wound with a weapon leave a visible trail of blood, so a deer that bolts is no longer a lost kill. Faster movement leaves more blood, rain washes it away sooner, and lore creatures like drifters do not bleed. It is fully configurable, lists compatibility with a long run of creature mods, and can be removed mid-playthrough, per its page. It supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: Aylor. Download: Blood Trail on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
13. Animal Cages
Animal Cages adds small and medium cages for catching, moving and releasing animals, and each cage shows the generation of the animal inside. Small animals go straight in, while bigger ones must be domesticated or under half health. It solves the old problem of walking a nervous herd home across the map, much like the taming headaches our Valheim boar taming guide covers in another survival game. The latest release lists 1.22 builds through 1.22.6. Creator: Gerste. Download: Animal Cages on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
Food and Farming
Cooking is already deep in Vintage Story. These mods make it the center of a save.
14. Expanded Foods
Expanded Foods is the biggest cooking overhaul on the database: bushmeat meals, vinegar, new ways to preserve food, candies, sauces, sushi, noodles, aged alcohol, desserts and more. Its current 2.0 build is a work-in-progress developer release split into modules, and its page asks you to back up saves before updating. It supports 1.22.3 through 1.22.7. Creator: l33tmaan. Needs: A Culinary Artillery (same creator). Download: Expanded Foods on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
15. From Golden Combs
From Golden Combs deepens beekeeping. Instead of rebuilding skeps after every harvest, you move up to ceramic hives and multi-box Langstroth hives with bee frames for repeatable harvests and much higher output, in a huge range of colors. Bees also get a temperature tolerance, so where you place a hive matters. It has more than half a million downloads, and the latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: Vinter_Nacht. Download: From Golden Combs on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
16. Stone Bake Oven
Stone Bake Oven lets you build a modular stone oven from heat sources, heat distribution pieces, baking spaces and cooking spaces, in plain stone, cobble or brick for every vanilla rock type. It bakes anything the clay oven can, handles large batches and takes a cooking pot, saving fuel and time. Per its page, the baking space works with XSkills but the cooking space does not. It targets 1.22.7. Creator: CaptainOats. Download: Stone Bake Oven on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
Crafting and Technology
These mods reward the players who spend more time at the anvil and the windmill than out in the wild.
17. Millwright
Millwright expands mechanical power with reinforced rotors, better sails and vertical axis windmills. Its page says the new sails are more than twice as efficient as vanilla ones, and a reinforced rotor can hold up to twice as many, for quadruple the output or more. You can also recover the linen from old sails. It is the easy pick for anyone running quern and helve hammer networks, and supports every 1.22 build through 1.22.7. Creator: SpearAndFang. Download: Millwright on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
18. Smithing Plus
Smithing Plus fixes smithing’s most frustrating moment: a misplaced voxel. You can add heated metal bits back onto a work item, smith with bits and native nuggets, recover bits when splitting, and repair broken tool heads on the anvil. Arrows drop a metal bit when they break, and iron blooms always yield enough for an ingot. Its latest release is a release candidate that lists 1.22.0 to 1.22.2. Creator: jayu. Download: Smithing Plus on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
19. Alchemy
Alchemy lets you brew potions from flowers and herbs, ground with a mortar and pestle and distilled into bases. There are flasks for archery, melee, mining and speed, oils for healing and poison, pheromones that draw animals in and scent masks that hide you, in weak, medium and strong tiers. You can drink them, throw them or coat weapons. The latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: llama3013. Download: Alchemy on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
20. Vinconomy
Vinconomy turns a multiplayer server into a market. Players set up stalls to sell to each other with no chat commands: clothing stands, trade mats, produce crates, purchase crates for buying in bulk, meal stalls, shop shelves, tool racks and more. Trade passes can limit who shops at your stalls. It is a natural fit for the groups in our best PC co-op games of 2026 list. It supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.7. Creator: SeveredSkullz. Needs: Commercially (since version 6.0). Download: Vinconomy on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
Worldgen and Exploration
Most of these only affect terrain generated after you install them, so they are best added when starting a new world.
21. BetterRuins
BetterRuins is the most downloaded mod on the database, at over 1.1 million. It adds more than 600 handcrafted structures, from graves and small ruins to underground areas, villages and story locations with maps, trader dialogue, lore and loot. Collectible blueprints unlock rare blocks and items you cannot get otherwise. Exploration becomes worth the trip, and the latest release targets 1.22.7. Creator: NiclAss. Download: BetterRuins on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
22. Ancient Dungeons (Th3Dungeon)
Th3Dungeon adds three procedurally generated dungeon types, each with several tilesets, surface entrances you can spot from a distance, tougher enemy spawns and loot placed behind fights. Since version 1.0, it builds on the vanilla dungeon system introduced in Vintage Story 1.22, which its page calls more stable and future-proof. New dungeons appear only in newly generated chunks. The latest release lists 1.22.0 to 1.22.4. Creator: Th3Dilli. Download: Ancient Dungeons on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
23. BetterTraders
BetterTraders, from the BetterRuins team, adds new trader building variants, including ones designed for very cold climates, alongside the vanilla trader camps rather than replacing them. The traders themselves are unchanged, so it adds variety without touching balance. It is fully server-side, so players joining a server that runs it do not need to download anything. The latest release targets 1.22.7. Creator: NiclAss. Download: BetterTraders on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
24. Terra Prety
Terra Prety is a full worldgen overhaul. Its 7.11 update reorganized continents into coherent landmasses, with milder plains at the center, surrounding hills and mountain ranges, gentler coastlines, and islands, archipelagos and atolls offshore. It runs server-side, and its page asks you to back up and remove old config files before starting a new world with the current version. The latest release supports 1.22.0 through 1.22.6. Creator: Nephelangelo. Download: Terra Prety on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
25. Rivers
Rivers adds flowing rivers that run from inland out to the ocean, with lakes at their ends. Its page describes flow data used for rendering moving water and for physics, so rivers read as real waterways rather than long lakes, and they give rafts and boats natural routes to follow. Its page says oceans must be enabled in world settings for rivers to appear, and suggests 300 to 500 percent landcover scale with 50 percent landcover. The latest release lists 1.22.6. Creator: sneezerstein. Download: Rivers on the Vintage Story Mod DB.
How We Chose These Mods
We started from the most downloaded and most followed mods on the official Vintage Story mod database, left out pure code libraries that do nothing on their own, then checked each remaining mod on its page on September 21, 2026 for three things: that it is free and still downloadable, that its newest release is built for Vintage Story 1.22, and that the download comes from its creator. That cut some classics that have not been updated past 1.21, including XSkills, Stone Quarry and Player Corpse, even though they remain hugely popular; check their pages for 1.22 releases before adding them to a new world. It is the same approach we took with our Valheim mods and our 50 best Sims 4 mods.
Only download from the mod pages linked above. Re-upload sites and bundled mod packs are the most common way players end up with outdated or malicious files, and version mismatches are the most common cause of crashes. Always back up your world before adding or updating a mod, especially worldgen and storage mods, several of whose pages warn that major updates are not save compatible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do you download Vintage Story mods? From the official mod database at mods.vintagestory.at, run by the game’s developer. Put the downloaded zip, still zipped, into your Mods folder, then restart the game.
Are Vintage Story mods safe? Mods from the official database are uploaded by their creators and are the safest option. Avoid re-upload sites, and back up your saves before installing anything.
Why did my mods stop working after an update? Each mod file is built for specific game versions, and the 1.22 update retired many older releases. Check each mod page for a file tagged with your version; small patch differences often still work, per some creators’ pages, but major version jumps usually do not.
Do Vintage Story mods work in multiplayer? Yes. Most need to be installed on the server and on every client, though some, like BetterTraders and Terra Prety, are server-side only. Each mod page shows which side it runs on.
Are these mods free? Yes. Every mod on this list is free on the official mod database. Some creators accept donations, but none of these picks are paywalled. If you split your survival time with another game, our Valheim hub collects every guide we have for it.