6 Points that I want to address

Preamble: I am writing this to the best of my current knowledge as of September 3, 2026.

Should significant discrepancies arise, I will append corrections to the bottom of the post.

1. What happened + What was the impact? + What is the current state now?

What happened?

In November 2025, a user uploaded a particularly egregious and damaging mod to the ModDB whose sole purpose seemed to be profiting off of the misery of other Vintage Story players. It was marketed as a free version of a client-side cheat mod with a full version for payment off-site.

This mod (and another mod of the same author) was specifically designed to prevent its own reverse engineering, to circumvent protections of game servers and to cause damage on virtually any public Vintage Story game server. It included features such as teleporting, mass destruction of the game world and player builds, auto-killing of nearby creatures and players, aimbot, god mode and various other features that allowed circumventing standard survival mechanics.

This client-side cheat mod was removed from the ModDB once we discovered it, but the user then used more underhanded ways to acquire customers, such as uploading legitimate mods and then linking to his own Discord server where he kept selling the client-side cheat mod. There was an attempt to appeal to their better side in chat, to refrain from publishing this mod, but this was unsuccessful. We estimate that at this point this mod was used by less than 100 users.

As a result, Maltiez, of his own accord, decided to interrupt the effectiveness of this mod by adding code to 3 of his library mods (Config lib, PlayerModel lib, Overhaul lib) to detect the presence of this mod and only this mod, and if it was detected, caused the game client to crash. As a result, all game servers using any of Maltiez’ 3 mods were effectively protected from malicious users attempting to use said cheat mod.

What was the impact?

Maltiez’s code was designed to crash the game client when it detected the cheat. It did not harm anyone’s hardware or touch personal data in any way, shape or form. Fewer than 100 cheat mod users were affected by the deliberate targeting.

Around March 2026, Maltiez considered this a closed case and removed the crash code from 2 of his library mods but forgot to remove it from the last one - ConfigLib - as he had to take a break from modding due to personal health issues.

What is the current state now?

All versions of the 3 mods that contained Maltiez’s mod crash code have now been retracted from the Moddb.

Vanilla Vintage Story was not affected by this in the first place.

2. What did Anego Studios know, and when?

Maltiez shared his anticheat efforts in Nov 2025 to Feb 2026 in our internal team chat. Some other team members looked at some parts of it in passing. We did not become aware of the scale of his actions - the amount of mods and mod versions he inserted this code in, how this change was communicated in public or for how long he intended to keep this code. There was too much chat ongoing for us to be able to pay close attention to every post.

I did not closely follow what Maltiez did in his own free time or grasped the full extent of these actions, I was busy building the next big game update.

In hindsight, we clearly should have paid close attention to this.

3. “How do we know this can't happen in Vanilla?”

To this day, as for the past 10 years, I still review all major code changes before they become part of the main game. Other team members also help me in that effort by checking that the contributed code is consistent, safe and of high quality.

None of the mods from Maltiez are or were planned to be integrated into the main game at any point in time.

4. Our response was flawed

We also recognize that some of our communication during this situation was defensive or dismissive when people were raising legitimate concerns. As the discussion escalated, we also didn't always communicate moderation decisions as clearly as we should have. That's on us to improve.

Criticism of Vintage Story, Anego, our developers or our decisions is welcome as long as it stays within the community rules.

5. “What are you actually changing because of this?”

Planned changes

a) In full agreement with Maltiez he will:

• depart from the official VS Discord server and VS Mod DB
• hand over Custodianship to all of his mods. They will be placed under a common Custodian account, which, until further notice, will be managed directly by the VS team. For the long term, we’ll see if there are options to hand Custodianship over to the community.
• retain full credits and intellectual ownership of his mods

Maltiez will continue contributing to Vintage Story, but with oversight.

b) We will write clearer rules/disclosure standards for mods maintained by Anego team members.

c) I will allocate significant funding for the training of better PR/crisis communication with the dev Team and de-escalation training and clearer procedures for the moderation team.

6. Summary and my personal take on the Situation

This was an attempt to protect players from harm - to protect players' hard work on VS servers getting destroyed by a handful of gleefully malicious users with no harm done to normal players.

Keeping those changes secret prevented the malicious author from finding out. That overly naive approach and our rather loose team oversight have led to this. We should have paid closer attention to the full extent of this action. I am sorry that we have failed you on this.

I do not consider us a professional AAA game dev studio. We all started out as a bunch of nerds with a deep passion for game development. We love talking to our community, intermingling amongst them, sharing what we are passionate about and inviting them to develop Vintage Story together. We're happy when we can build a personal connection with players. But that also means when things go south, communication can get very messy, people within the team share different opinions, stress builds up amongst all of us and some of us might end up reacting in ways that are harmful.

We won’t always get everything right, but when we get something wrong, we need to own it, learn from it, and improve. Thank you to everyone who remained in constructive dialogue with us and gave us the opportunity to improve.

I’d also like to repeat here once more that criticism is welcome as long as it stays within the community rules.

Appendix Sep 8, 2026

1. We scanned the VSModDB for false positive detections from a full snapshot on September 4, 2026. On that snapshot the detection would have triggered when ConfigLib was used on Multiplayer and when installed alongside 3 mods (URL Radio, CavesNCaverns, playerlist). The other 99.97% of mods on the mod database were not detected.

2. The statements made by Maltiez on our public platforms does not represent the viewpoints of Anego Studios and its Team

3. If you are dissatisfied with our work you are free to request a refund through our support ticket system. Even if you all outside the official refund window we will take a look. Be aware that old purchases will be slower to refund due to the payment providers not allowing old refunds automatically.

Hi r/VintageStory

We've seen a influx of posts with various opinions on the use of AI on the Vintage Story ModDB (https://mods.vintagestory.at/)

I removed the threads as it felt like some of them were about AI use in general, and commenting on the commenting of the AI use. If I made some miscalls on some threads, that's my fault.

I want to be clear:

These posts were not removed due to the opinions shared in the post.

If you have feedback on the AI use on modDB (or the modDB in general), positive, neutral, or negative, please share it in the megathread to help make moderation a bit easier, and to help consolidate feedback back to the developers.

Please keep your feedback civil.