A multiplayer mod for Vintage Story that lets players create visual pings in the 3D world, improving cooperation and co-presence.
Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game. Similar to Minecraft but with a much deeper focus on realism, immersion, metallurgy, and complex crafting mechanics, it provides a gritty survival experience and has an amazing modding community.
While playing multiplayer, I really missed the ability to easily point things out to other players without having to type out coordinates or explain exactly what tree I was looking at. I decided to fix this by adding a ping system similar to coop FPS games.
Ping Markers allows players to create visual map markers directly in the 3D world by pressing a binded key. This simple but highly requested feature greatly improves cooperation and the sense of co-presence when playing with others.
By default, it pings the whole server, which is intended for smaller communities. However, if a player is in an active group, the ping is smartly broadcast only to their group members.
I built this mod in April 2025 over a few days of my free time. It was an excellent practical test of both my multiplayer game development and shader development skills.
To make the pings work seamlessly, I had to write logic for both the client and server, synchronizing the ping data efficiently over the network. Because the pings are a 3D UI overlay, it required getting my hands dirty with custom shaders to ensure the markers render properly over varying distances and geometries. It was a great project for learning how to inject custom logic into an existing game engine safely.
The mod turned out to be quite popular within the community. Over a year later, it is still being actively used. Following persistent requests from players, I recently returned to the codebase to update it to work seamlessly with the newest version of the game running on .NET 10 and while doing that I added some more features (like dynamic entity tracking and custom coloring).
Press V to ping (rebindable in Settings > Controls)
The mod provides robust customization through its JSON config files, allowing server admins and players to tailor the ping system to their preferences and playstyle.
Check the mod page for more info.