Greetings. I’ve been very busy! You can follow my bsky or join my patreon for regular updates (and to give me money because I’m unemployed and broke!) but tl;dr if you only ever look at this website, there is new Emptiness Effigied coming in July. So look forward to that! In the mean time, a quick blog post about my most played game ever and some experiences you can have with it to see if you like it too.
I love VRChat, I’ve played 525 hours of it, it’s my most played game on Steam. I wanted to make a list of cool VRChat worlds to get started with. Lately, I’ve managed to get a lot of friends and some of my followers to play VRChat, and it is always a bit of a challenge to give them cool stuff to see and show them why I love the game. To me the best way is to have a good variety of maps to start playing with.
Before we start, some quick asides:
You do not need a VR set to play VRChat. You can play VRChat right now and any PC from the past five years (or more!) can absolutely handle VRChat’s PC client. You can get the PC client on Steam, and you can play it as a fun hangout/exploration game with friends. It has tons of variety of little experiences for you to walking simulator through, and it’s a great way to feel embodied with long distance friends.
I strongly recommend you play with a friend in a private instance. Public lobbies are total chaos, and I prefer the atmosphere of exploring and hanging out with people you already like. If you need a pitch to someone to make it sound more interesting, drop the phrase “digital urbexing” and see how they react.
Or maybe you embrace the chaos. It’s not me, but hey, this is a game about making your own fun! Just know what you’re getting into, it’s a free game!
Anyway.
Here is a list of worlds with links so you can find them in VRChat:
Prismic’s Avatar Search: Avatars are the character skin you are using when you play VRChat. The game comes with some basic avatars, but why use those when you can be Nicole from Genshin Impact? Prismic’s is a simple world where you go up to the little console, type in a search term, and then a bunch of avatar cards appear. Click one to wear it. You have a big mirror so you can see what you look like. You can type in anything into the search, but I recommend typing in franchises or characters you like. You’ll find basically any 3D game model, Hatsune Miku is in there, etc.
Aquarius: A beautiful Aquarium with a variety of independently moving ocean creatures that can be viewed in a couple of different venues, as well as a frequent companion to every VRChat player: bedrooms that you can fool around in. This is a great, simple introduction to what makes VRChat special. It’s aesthetically pleasing, there’s neat stuff to look at, and its leisurely, without overt storytelling.
District Roboto: This world was also made by Fins, the same creator who made Aquarius. It is a good step up from Aquarius because it is a visual storytelling map, but it is short and sweet with tons of charm. This is a good introduction to the fact that VRChat supports scripting. District Roboto has NPCs with text box dialog. You can explore, find collectibles, or just talk to all the robots. It’s very pretty, also.
I could spend a ton of this list just talking about every Fins map. I love all of their work. But I won’t. You should click their profile and discover them all!
A Place To Eat Cereal: VRChat is a social app– it’s in the name. While there is a lot of cool digital exploration and visual storytelling you can experience, at its heart, VRChat is about hanging out with your pals. I love this map for intimate little hangouts with a friend or two. It’s small, moody, and tight, with great atmosphere. I’ve told my friend Esther stuff in this map that made us both cry. That’s the vibe. While exploring, you’ll run into a lot of little places like this. Let yourself feel embodied, and chat a bit. Try it at least once, even if you’re not the type to do so!
Analog Horror Nights: This is a social map that fits a much higher player count than A Place To Eat Cereal more comfortably, and you can all watch Midwest Angelica and Marble Hornets and Kane Pixel’s Backrooms and Monument Mythos and so on, while you’re here. By popping physics enabled VHS tapes into a little VHS player that will pop up a projector screen video on the wall. It’s just neat!
Sensory Rooms: Alright, you’ve had a couple of escapades. You might have even told your friend something relationship-upgradingly gay in that goddamn cereal place. Now it’s time to party like it’s 1998 in here. Sensory Rooms is a visual storytelling experience where you explore old web aesthetics, look at cute little gifs and jpgs, talk to little freaks who say weird shit to you, and collect pixel art for reasons that are frankly unknown to me. This one has much more developed collectible gameplay than some other maps, and I don’t know what it all does. But it is cool to look at.
Bus to Nowhere: A bus ride full of Project Moon and internet horror references, and various other things. You hang out on a moving bus, and every so often the scenery changes, and random events trigger. VRChat supports scripting, so there are maps that can spook you and scare you. This is on the lighter end of those, as the jumpscares are very silly, and some of the other events are very cute. But it’s good preparation for the fact that yes, horror experiences do exist in VRChat!
Exoplanet Journey: Super visually appealing hangout world. You are on a little spaceship room and there are planets and stars and other stuff in the foreground that make for grandiose viewing while saying something gay to your friend again. There are little couches super close to the edge of the black hole for you!
Qoo H Bocuma International Airport: Huh. Well I’m sure that’s all totally normal.
Japanese vending machines museum: A museum of japanese vending machines ranging from the expected to the unconventional. These have all been captured from real life objects and made 3D using photogrammetry, and they’re all charmingly weird and uncanny looking, but as far as photogrammetry maps go in VRChat this is a work of the utmost art. There are many worlds made the same way that look much worse!
Silent Hill 2: It’s Silent Hill 2, but in VRChat. So like you walk up to the setpieces and scary audio plays. Sometimes the actors are even there. I think a Pyramid Head spawns in a few places? It’s super janky but very charming to me. It’s exclusively a novelty, but it’s very funny that this sort of thing can even exist in the form it does.
Russian Entrance: SUPER moody and vibesy hangout map, representing a fully furnished modern Siberian apartment in an old “commie block” type building, with Viktor Tsoi songs and a gaming PC that has counterstrike on it and you know? All the stuff. I am the sort of person who goes crazy for this so I had to include it. If you want a more “realistic” place to hang out, give this one a try.
Ritual: Now that you’ve seen a bunch of different stuff, you understand the various things VRChat can show you. I left this one at the end because I think it’s important to know that you can do a lot of stuff in VRChat before you explore something really deep and impressive. This is a long, involved, intense and visually unique storytelling experience, that might take you upwards of an hour or three to explore.
And that’s it, while I could post so many more maps, this is a good spread to start with. Look at the authors of each of these maps, they usually have more stuff you can look at to widen your horizons further without too much work. Ultimately, I am hoping to get you in the door and understanding what’s out there so you can curate your own experience and find what your own tastes are. There’s a lot!
ADDITIONAL TIPS FROM A 525 HOURS VRCHAT AUNTIE
1. Search for random words that interest you in the VRChat world search! If you search “Greek” or “Bath” you might stumble into something like Greek Thermal Baths! Other people who like the things you do might be on VRChat creating cool maps! Try like “Models,” “Hotel,” “Backrooms,” etc, anything you are into!
2. Keep an eye out for Virtual Market! This is a twice yearly limited time event with gorgeous worlds intended to show off the 3D assets that people have for sale for use by avatars and in world creation. If you balk at the commercial aspect, that’s okay, but these are genuinely super fun and aesthetically interesting experiences that have gotten even more complex and entertaining every year. I recommend at least checking out the Parareal worlds and the Horror experience in this year’s event.
3. VRChat themselves runs events every so often like Space Jam and Halloween Jam that showcase a big bundle of community made maps that are worth exploring! They’ll appear on your Worlds menu as a colorful tab that draws attention to itself, so keep an eye out, and give these events a chance for new experiences!
4. In my experience the VRChat development team are not particularly evil as a company, and if you want to throw them walking around money, VRC+ has some funny little cosmetic goodies and some quality of life that’s alright. However it is a complete and totally fine experience without paying any amount of money. I only bought VRC+ in the past because I really liked VRChat and wanted to support it.
5. If you want to make a custom avatar for use in VRChat, and you like a project, then download the VRChat SDK, check out Booth for base avatars and accessories, and look for resources on non-destructive avatar workflows using stuff like Modular Avatar. There’s a lot you can do, and a lot of resources out there!
And that’s it! Now I can link this thing to people instead of hemming and hawing about how I wish I had a list to link to people! Anyway, I hope you all have fun running around in one bedroom flats with pink decor that have seen amounts of digital lesbian sex on a daily basis that you wouldn’t even believe are possible.