In minecraft, if you wanna mine some iron, you punch a tree, use the wood to slap out a wooden pickaxe, grab some stone with it, then make a stone pickaxe, and you can mine it.

In vintage story you can’t mine rock until you have a pickaxe, the lowest level of which is copper. You have to knap stone tools from rocks you find on the ground, and you can’t make wood into planks until you have a saw (also needs metal). To get started with metalworking you have to explore and find copper bits sitting on the ground untill you have a lot, make crucibles and molds out of clay and fire them in a pit kiln, burn wood into charcoal in a pit (because wood doesn’t burn hot enough to melt copper), and then you can melt and pour your copper into a mold. Do that with a pickaxe head mold, put it on a stick, and now you can mine stone. Then go find some more metals and do that some more because to mine iron you actually need a bronze pickaxe.

I’m sold…“No marketplace. No loot boxes. No microtransactions. No paid DLC. No hidden fees. No pay2win. No ads. No user data monetization. No software patents. No shareholders. No publisher. No NFTs. No BlockChain. No 3rd party interests.”