Isolated game environments: every playthrough gets its own mods, settings, game version, and account.

What an instance is

An instance is a separate copy of the game environment inside the launcher data directory’s instances/ folder. Each instance has its own:

• game version (from those installed in Game Versions);
• Vintage Story account;
• mods and their enabled/disabled state;
• game settings (clientsettings.json), mod configs, saves;
• launch arguments;
• playtime statistics and launch logs.

Instances are isolated from each other: changes in one never affect the others. The filesystem is the source of truth for installed files.

Library

The Library section lists all instances. From here you can create, configure, launch, clone, and delete instances, and jump to their mods and packages.

Create and clone

• Create — a new instance: pick a name, game version, and account.
• Clone — a copy of an existing instance with all its mods and settings. Great for experiments: the original stays untouched.

Launching

The Play button injects the selected account’s session data into clientsettings.json (only for the duration of the game session — see Accounts & sign-in) and starts the game. Launches for a single instance are serialized so credential injection stays deterministic.

Related features

• Mods & ModDB — installing and updating an instance’s mods.
• Backups & recovery — instance snapshots and rollback.
• Instance packages — export and import with private-data sanitization.