Good summation Kirona !

This effect cascades out of control when in larger modpacks (more variants are added when new block types are added, at one point it was contributing over 20,000 blocks just for the stairs). If you're experiencing long load times with Primitive Survival in your modpack then you should consider using this fix and the Connected Stairs mod as it adds connected stairs without the variant count issues.

That's not so bad, but I guess quite a bit considering the low value of those steps. As soon as you get a chisel you get kinda the same functionality.

DarkThoughts I ran a test just now because I was curious as well.

I generated a new world with Primitive Survival loaded - no other mods. Default settings. Then I saved and quit, restarted the client, and reloaded this world. 5571MB in use by Vintage Story.

Closed out, added this mod, restarted the client, and loaded the world again. This time Vintage Story is using 4695MB, a reduction of 876MB. So to answer, it's not several gigabytes, but still enough to have quite the impact for people with relatively lower-end systems.

When I first started doing this test I hadn't disabled my other mods though, and this made me realize that I might want to curate my mod collection a bit more since my default setup uses over 12GB when loading into a fresh world xD

How ram intensive are they? Are we talking several gigabytes here just by being loaded?