Origins of the Drifters | Vintage Story Lore 

Can confirm seeing the drifters occasionally hunching down and clutching or shaking their heads, looking at their arms suddenly and apparently becoming distressed, all very human movements. The traders also have a dialogue about them being lost souls, ones who strayed so far they can't or won't come back so they lash out in their misery. These being made out of flax (anagram of Falx really a coincidence?) and metal pieces could be a result of the 'cure' for the Rot that Falx seems to regret in his writings. A less probable but more fun theory was indirectly posed by Solstin in his Temporal Institute tutorial videos. By glitching into footage of drifter waves overtaking a Minecraft stronghold, the implication is that the Rot and the temporal instabilities actually happened to the Minecraft world (a kind of digital Atlantis), which could make sense with all the portals and dimension hopping (and tech/magic modding) that goes on there. It was just a brief hint, so I don't have this story fully fleshed out in my head, but I love the idea.

When the world needed him the most, he returned

Here's some wild speculation: The theory of the world of the Seraphs and the Rust world being opposites to each other, and that being the reason the human traders are unaffected by Rust world intrusions (Seraphim are just more sensitive to the whole thing), makes even more sense if you see rust as the "Materia Finalis" to Falx' Prima Materia. (Makes total sense if you know that iron is the only element immutable by fission and fusion, and thus stuff can only ever turn into it, and nothing can be made from it) Perhaps Falx' machine could reverse the flow of time to undo the Rot, but in doing so he pulled something from the end of everything to the present. Perhaps the world of the seraphs is the dawn of all things, and the people resurrected into Seraphs were sent back to that time by the machine. Perhaps the reversal of time takes people who have been dead to the rot for millenia (and are thus in the future, the rust world) and forces them to live again as drifters, drifters not through dimensions, but through time. Just so, recently(relatively) dead people could be sent back to the dawn time, forcing them to live again as seraphs. That would explain some things about the loading screen text, I think, and about why Seraphs are motivated to come to this place and save it. They were the people that lived here, after all! And you could handwave the memory loss as being a side effect of long-span time travel. The temporal storms could actually be the machine wirring to life, distorting the flow of time everywhere, and then reversing what it just did immediately afterwards, setting itself up to wir to life again days later. I will call this the Botched Time Travel Theory. Another thing the Botched Time Travel Theory covers is why the underground ruins aren't interconnected anymore: The repeated shifts in the flow of time from area to area could see some of the tunnels reverted all the way back to a time before they were dug out, see other areas that were caved in miraculously uncovered, and see yet other areas aged rapidly to be more decomposed than other sections of the tunnels. Something @resemblelife said in their comment also can be exlpained in a few ways by this theory. They mention Falx and Flax being an anagram is probably not a coincidence, and the drifters being covered in the stuff definitely fits that suspicion. Here's the two ideas on why the name and the plant might be so similar. Firstly, and more likely, Falx might've chosen a material for the machine to cover the "Rescued" people with, and chosen specifically something that sounds nearly like his own name. This being at a time before activating the machine, before he becomes so remorseful, and while still thinking himself the greatest mind that ever was. Egomaniacally hinting at his own hand in the salvation of mankind through his choice of materials was certainly not beyond him. Alternatively, and honestly a ridiculous reach, drifters were sent back to a time long before all this, where people took them apart, discovering the strength of flax fiber (Yes, alternate history where people hadn't figured that out yet before the Latin alphabet, I did say this is a ridiculous reach), and naming the plant after the engravings on the drifters' internal machinery. Maybe even, the introduction of drifters to a medieval society could've kickstarted a greater interest in science and all things mechanical, leading to the education of Falx, who would then go to send the drifters back in time, forming a frankly scrumptious closed timeloop. I'm actually confident about some of this stuff I've written here, and I also think other parts are grasping at straws, but hey there's my two cents... Or twenty...

Can't wait for a lore video on Dave!

when 1.20 / 1.21 comes out i will be happy to see your videos on it.

this game does not get nearly as much attraction as it deserves tbh

One of the journals you can find describes “golems” that Falx created as laborers to work on his machine (the one that was meant to save humanity from the rot), which are at first docile but at one point killed a human. I assume those are the drifters, and he didn’t actually create them, he summoned them from the other dimension during his experiments and then lost control of them as the world got less temporary stable, and now they are aggressive (but have occasional flashes of intelligence/regret when they pray/cry) and move freely through the dimensional rifts.

Damm this guy is great! I wish I could meet him!

Again, awesome video, looking forward to more!

I don't intend on buying Vintage Story (not just yet anyway) and I love these videos. I never heard of it until I saw your other video. You kinda got me invested

but what about dave? yk the big giant walking thing we see when our stability gets to low or during a temporal storm

I think Jonas ascended to a higher state of being and created the Seraphs in order to restore order and life to the world. The Seraphs have temporal gears in their bodies (which is why you can use the ones that are found via a knife) to keep them anchored to the real world. The way the item texts describe things makes it seem like someone with greater knowledge of the world is telling you about it directly.

Good theory. What if IRL is the 3rd plane of existence. You speak of it would explain why we show up to the world with little to no knowledge and some of us show up with vastly more knowledge than we should.

My theory is based on the lore that I've found in game, particularly Return parts 1 and 2. The rot was unleashed on the world somehow, though my suspicion is that if was done by Falx himself. He then spent himself up trying to fix that mistake. It is the rot that turns regular humans into drifters, corrupted by the temporal energy that is raw. But towards the end of the plague Falx discovered a way to purify the temporal energy. This purified form of energy turns humans into seraphim. It's the purified temporal gears that are also a clue. Drifters sometimes drop them, which to me is evidence of an attempt at a cure. Seraphim need them to regain stability, which suggests that they're far more sensitive to the rust world than regular humans. In the end, they're all forms of humans after that plague.

next update is a lore update i hear cant wait for you to make a vid on it

I can’t wait to see all kinds of new content from you!!

Thanks for doing these lore videos.

You new lore video just dropped and it is a banger !

Great video! All the lore! Thank you for this!

Drifters look like that one smelly kid in school who wears the same hoodie everyday lol

Me and my black bronze pike have ended quite a bit of suffering, I have to say.

You should do a series on lore it's sick

That last theory part is nice, but even the tapestrys in game are somewhat saying that seraphs are humans infused with prima materia, which makes them funky colored and have some special abilities like telekenisis and that

would love to see more lore videos, even reading the books etc, explaining the tapestrys, and an other written lore

Amazing video

epic video! nice script, would show this to a friend for sure.

im all for this, but i got no clue wtf this is very cool though :]

My personal theory is that whoever / whatever brought the Seraph to the overworld, did so because they're going to essentially be a replacement for humanity. Like, eventually the few remaining humans will die out, and the seraph will inherit the...I was gonna say 'earth' but i'm fairly certain the world of vintage story isn't earth.

new lore vid

New Vintage Story Lore rahhhh

I always thought the temporal stability meter was more of a Sanity meter. Why I think this? It only usually drains from PLAYER actions, like being hurt or being in areas that might unease the character due to the higher chance of temporal rifts, and even being near one too long makes it go down! Also, it goes down in the underground and (due to it being abundant underground) darkness. I mostly based the underground one on why I thought the temporal stability mechanic was basically a sanity meter, because Don't Starve.. eh...

Yes! I’ve waited too long!

i find the drifters' in-game model frankly adorable. seeing their interpretation in the 'ghosts' story more realized in the 'intended' look of vintage story outside of the stylization of the game gave me a chuckle though. like oh theyre these kind of hulking worm guys. my current view of drifters is that they're automaton beings, corrupt in the same way the locusts and eidolons grew corrupted. (some have what look like bits of rebar and metal sticking out of them, they also drop gears, the flax skin and twine gives me the visualization of them being stitched together to hide mechanical insides).... surface drifters are just dirty little cloth boys to me LOL. especially since ol dave AND our mysterious new entity teased for 1.20 also look somewhat mechanical (that Thing also looks like it has rebar coming out of it) as for seraphs i feel pretty confident theyre reincarnated humans from the underground extinction era. the various class descriptions as well as their clothing seems to really heavily imply that, not to mention the voice in the resonance archives seeming 'familiar' to them. were they the intended result of falxs' machinations or a contingency plan, or a happy accident? that i'm not sure about, especially since humanity itself did not go extinct in spite of the rot. either way i headcanon my various seraphs as such, without much memory from that time aside from fleeting glimpses. it torments some of them, others decide their ignorance is a blessing in disguise and do not seek further knowledge. but those are just my little guys who live in my head while i play the game lol.

Is "the machine" sound effect from godzilla 2019 movie but distorted? It kinda reminds me of that. I also remember hearing the "Muto" sound effect in the Lore video.

the last theory makes the least sense, as it has been confirmed seraphs were once humans, and tobias, the guy that crawled out of his "grave" during the ressurgence was a seraphim, a severely mangled one. and also, the drifters have a greater chance of dropping temporal gears than rusty ones.

AAHAHAAAH MOOOORE!!! YESS

I'm surprised you didn't show the picture in "ghosts" which shows possibly an outdated drawing of Drifters. Basically they look like muscled people with a fleshy eldritch maw replacing their face. The story also states they smell vaguely metallic. The falx weapon has a description of their blood running like sludge and their flesh having metallic bits within it hence the need for a different type of blade. As for what I think the Drifters are? Failed proto Seraphs or just rot victims. I suspect the Seraphs are a form of artificial human or golem created through Prime Materia based upon the Scrolls I've seen. Have to go to work will fill out thoughts later if i remember.

4:25 The drifters are actually NOT the only beings from the rust world that are visible. Enter the rift in a flat area and have your view distance at 400+. You will see another being. (Weird you don't mention it considering you show in the video, but I thought I'd comment)

My personal theory is that the rust world and the overworld are parallel universe or dimensions. The reason you enter the rust world and it looks the same if not a bit warped as the overworld is because they are alternate versions of the same world. I believe that the rust world is the original world that Jonas is from. I believe that because I think the reason that you take damage overtime in the rust world is because of the rot. It’s also the reason the place is so dark and yucky. Jonas was said to have created several automatons, and I think the drifters are one of them, like the big robot guy in the archives. I think in a desperate attempt to escape their dying world Jonas tried to escape to a parallel world or dimension, but when trying to do so, he tore apart the fabric of reality, causing the world to warp further and causing a bleed through into the overworld. I think the seraphim are some of the few humans who were warped from the travel to the overworld from the rust world. I think that all of the temporal instability in the rust world caused the automatons to be driven to a form of insanity. The reason the drifters come from the rust world is because that’s where they were originally created. My explanations for the ruins under the surface is probably small pockets of the last remaining human civilizations that were teleported to the overworld and chunks of the rust world getting thrown over. The temporal archives were transported to wholly intact because it was one of the sites of such intense temporal fuckery. There is still so much lore that has yet to come out so I await it with bated breath. So thank you for coming to my ted talk. P.S. I just got vintage story myself today 😁😁😁

:3

I remember reading the comment that inspired this. No time then to further think about it. What if ... there are only two sides of a coin. Yin and yang. One side is the world we as a seraph reenter and rediscover, after a catastrophy triggered by technology gone wrong. Metal things, rusted and rotten, taking over human bodies. Making strange things out of flesh, with a spark remaining, the longing for a heaven they cannot see anymore, without eyes to see, ears to hear, brains to understand. All rotten and rusted. There's only one thing left: wrath. Kill what we once were to kill the memory, kill the pain, kill the longing, the desperation. Not so far from some people's behaviour. This one story early on, the thing that crawls out of the darkness, the underground, with no limbs, after an age of agony. Who, what is that? A drifter? Something else? It enters a new world, full of life, sunshine, things long forgotten. Does not really sound like a drifter. Sounds like there was an aftermath to the cataclysm, where the world was dark. Where everybody hid below the surface, facing the rot rather than the world above. The apocalypse, radation, whatever. And then maybe one being, altered, but not dead, able to feel, to see, entered a new world. The world we as seraphs live in. Who is this being? Do we know it? Is it hiding somewhere? Will we meet it one day? Are we this thing? It's offspring? Are we a new generation, after the damage, free of the rot that changed everything and every body? Learning to live again in a world without this technology that went wrong? Back to the basics? Starting a new life, a new world, a new dream? Not from zero, but with the knowledge how to do things. And without the knowledge that lead to catastrophe. The knowledge of Faulx, whatever that was. There were goggles. Looking into the rust world. And change, so there were no goggles needed anymore. And the rust world taking over the ones who got too close. Who dug too deep. Who woke the Balrog. 😂

When’s the next one coming out?

When’s the next one coming out

what's the thing in the middle of the archives?

First

all I'm saying is I better see more vids from you

Drifters are the souls of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine on Vladimir Putin's game to stay in power at the expense of his own people.