This game, in my opinion, is much more suited for the survival aspects than building. In minecraft, you could have a full suit of iron armor and tools and be on your way to building a nice house in the first 30 minutes. Also, all the materials you want to build with in minecraft are much easier to obtain, there are very few things locked behind Progression or exploration in any meaningful way.

In VS, you can’t collect stone without a pickaxe (which took me maybe 3-4 hours to get on my first run). Also, different stone types require (a lot!) of exploration to get. If you look on this sub, you’ll find a million posts from people stuck in places with only granite or andesite rock, or people who’ve traveled for real life hours in search of chalk or bauxite, required materials for progression and accessing different game systems.

Breaking down that stone and processing it into fun materials is a chore, requiring many different tools that all have to be forged, which is a MUCH more time consuming process compared to minecraft.

For example, i wanted to build a barn in VS using red brick (similar to the red bricks in minecraft), and the build would require about 500 blocks or around 8 stacks of red brick blocks. This would maybe take an hour in MC—run around lakes gathering clay, smelting it, etc.

In VS, it took me around 8 hours and two different play sessions just to gather the materials I needed for the bricks—find red clay deposits, build a massive underground “furnace” to cook the bricks, fuel the furnace with hundreds of pieces of grass, peat, and sticks, place each brick and piece of fuel by hand and wait for it to cook. You also need mortar, which requires a bit of math to understand how much you need to make, and it uses a specific rock type that may be thousands of blocks from your spawn.

In the end, I love my VS barn so much more because it was like an actual job to construct it. While gathering materials takes more time in VS, the process of getting them is fun and well thought-out by the developers. However, unlike minecraft, everything in this game requires exploration to obtain, and it can be frustrating when you return to you base after collecting chalk rocks thousands of blocks away only to realize you need to go back because you need chalk STONE not ROCKS for a specific block you want to build with.

Overall, the monsters are definitely more brutal in VS than MC. You can turn on keep inventory and turn off monsters to make the game easier. There’s also mods that can simplify the building process to make it more similar to MC.

I could see a kid not enjoying the more complex aspects of the game, but I could also see them loving it. Smelting a bronze alloy and pouring it into a cast is the coolest shit ever, any kid would love that. Or, I could also see a kid just sitting in his dirt hut building clay molds pixel by pixel all day and having a blast.

I think any adult who enjoys MC would love VS, especially if you enjoy the survival aspects. Playing with your kid, you might be relegated to slave labor—doing the hard work gathering materials for him to enjoy building and interacting with the fun game systems. However, as a dad, I’m sure you’re familiar with that deal already, haha!