I haven't sunk my fangs too deeply into vampire survival game V Rising yet, but my enterprising little nosferatu already has a bunch of cool powers and abilities. I can turn into a wolf, which lets me run faster and be completely ignored by other animals that would typically attack me. I can blink through space leaving a little decoy of myself behind to befuddle my foes. I can turn my enemies into ice cubes with a projectile, pound the ground to create a magic shockwave, and even enchant humans to become mindless servants back at my castle.
But there's one power my little vampire has that even Dracula himself would spend a weekend sunbathing to get.
I can pick up and move storage crates around in my castle. Even if they're full of junk.
What dark magic is this? Well, it's not some arcane spell, it's just an extremely thoughtful feature the developer, Stunlock Studios, included in V Rising's base-building systems. I can craft a crate, put it down, fill it to the brim with crafting resources—and then simply pick the whole thing up and move it somewhere else. Same goes for all my crafting benches and the other workstations or furniture I can place in build mode. No need to destroy things and rebuild 'em. You can just move 'em.
And I often need to move stuff around. One of the issues with base-building games is that when I begin building walls and floors and objects I usually have no idea where I'll end up. As I progress through a game I'm given access to new crafting benches I didn't know I'd have, new furniture I don't have room for, and bulky new items that need to be squeezed into places I didn't anticipate. One of the first things I do is build a crate, plop it down somewhere, and start chucking stuff into it: lumber, ore, fiber, herbs, gems, spare weapons and armor. And at some point I'll fill it completely and have to create additional storage crates for more stuff. Invariably, as my base grows, what was my main entrance becomes my living room, and I can't have a bunch of crates scattered around. I need to move them somewhere else.
And in just about every other crafting game I can think of, this means building new, empty crates in another part of the base, and then painstakingly emptying the original crates, dumping all the crap I've collected into the new ones, and then bashing the original boxes to splinters. It's a hassle. Not in V Rising. Just pick up the entire crate and put it down where you want it. Beautiful.
It's the most convenient system I've seen in a game since Elden Ring's developers decided that your horse should just materialize right under your butt. You don't need to call it, then look around for wherever it spawned, then run toward it while it runs toward you, and then climb onto it. Just a magic horse appearing right between your legs. One less problem to deal with.
I do have to point out that there's a big inconvenience in V Rising, however, when it comes to using a waygate to teleport. Whereas a game like Valheim prohibits you teleporting with ore, V Rising won't let you teleport with any crafting materials at all. Not even basic, bottom-level resources. You can only 'port with weapons and empty pockets, which means it's a whole different story if you want to move your whole base and not just some crates. When it comes to teleporting, the devs haven't been quite so thoughtful.
But I'll forgive them for that. As long as I don't have to take everything out of a box, smash it to splinters, rebuild it and restock it all just so I can scootch it over a few feet, I'm one happy vampire.
