New enemy: Stalker

[Frepo]

Name: Stalker

Looks: A black, semi-transparent, hound-like creature with glowing orange eyes.

Behavior: Stalks the player when you are not looking at it (when out of your FOV). When close enough it lashes out. While in your FOV it stops moving and lays low, until attacked or you get too close. Spawned stalkers avoid sunlight when dawn comes, seeking out dark areas such as a cave. 

Spawning: At any Y-level, but only during night (when it's dark enough). So spawning is not governed by the time of day, but rather the amount of sunlight. So you can expect more of them during winter when the days are shorter.

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This creature might not fit in thematically. But that can always be fixed, adding some rusty metal spikes to it's back, giving it's eyes the green/blue temporal color etc.
The important thing here is the bahavior, every new creature added should have it's own unique behavior.

[Ruyeex]

That would be a very easy entity to kill or just a annoyance to deal with

[Frepo]

39 minutes ago, Ruyeex said:

That would be a very easy entity to kill or just a annoyance to deal with

I guess they are....

Edited February 28, 2023 by Frepo

[Jameh]

I like this idea, has a kind of Hounds of Tindalos feel to it which would work along with the other Lovecraftian themes in the game. +1

[Yeetiee]

I could be interesting but what I think the game miss is some entity that destroys blocks when in a vicinity of a player. I know the first thing that comes to mind is an all known green cucumber with legs and nasty expression on its head but we can get more creative and make it more theme like.

For example it could self-destruct and mess with temporal stability in its radius (2,3 blocks) and:

Make a player starve by reducing their satiety to 10%

Turn all rock blocks into gravel

Turn all soil blocks into sand

Turn all wooden blocks into rot or ash

Gravel and sand as a gravity affected blocks would crumble the structure. 

The entity could come from rifts, actively seek players and be unaffected by sun.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Yeetiee

[Frepo]

I agree! The game surely lacks an enemy with some sort of world destructive ability. Your idea of a "temporal creeper" is interesting. Hehe it would be cool if it created a new rift when it blows up. This entity feels like some sort of "artillery" unit, using itself as the ammunition
I would pair it with a more basic enemy, perhaps a more beefy variant of a drifter, with hammers as hands, that simply just start breaking your house walls if it senses you inside. This encourages you to build your base in stronger materials, even reinforce the blocks (don't know how this works, but as far as I understood it's only relevant for PvP).

[Yeetiee]

Tbh the idea isn't mine we have one blow-up-er in "that other block game" and I saw once that someone on this forum mentioned similar creature with temporal-themed powers. 

I think that with rift-blocking machinery and general protectiveness given by buildings we need something that can threaten us in our safe havens if we are not careful enough when we are leaving them.

Imagine: you have a farmland almost ready for harvest with wooden fence and gate. You leave and here it comes, quietly, and bam! You are starving, your painstakingly collected terra preta is now sand, grain rotten and part of that fence also gone. And you must act quick or hares will come through that hole and eat rest of your harvest.

Similar thing will happen with part of your stone wall or fence- now a heap of gravel or little stones waiting for bears and wolves to invite themselves for a feast with your animals on the menu.

It would be the most fearsome creature on the surface.

[maibock]

Definitely feel like a more fleshed out version of the creeeper would be a great addition to this game, especially a monster related to the rot considering that it has very little in game presence outside of lorebooks and tapestries. 

[Frepo]

This is awesome! Generally, I'm for anything that makes survival harder! Themed or not, making sense or not, I don't care that much
I haven't gotten into creating new entities, not skilled enough yet. But everything I've modded for our server so far is ONLY to make gameplay more of a struggle (although not as fun as a rot-creeper). Less meat drops from animals. Lower nutrition levels in soil. More fall damage. Can't sleep in rain or too cold envinronment, or when too hungry. Much more costly recipes. Standard rock blocks can crack and fall when mining nearby blocks. Lose half your inventory upon death. Can't mine ruins with hands. More blocks have the FallingBlock behavior. Drfiters spawn everywhere where it's dark enough. Less nutrition gained from redmeat in meals. Etc etc etc. Settings are (of course) set to increased monster strength and no coordinates or map.

New and harder (and preferably interesting) enemies is a big thing if fell we're really lacking.

[Yeetiee]

We will see what the devs will come up with but I hope for a creature like that. 

Everyone will leave their safe spots with fear and no rift blocker will mean a probability of this mob spawning in the middle of your house. The only requirement for it to detonate the time-bomb should be proximity to the player and time - 1 or 2 block and ~1-1.5s. It will give time to escape or fight it from a distance.

It shouldn't explode from damage cuz players will simply run from it to despawn it rather that deal with it on the spot. 

[Hells Razer]

51 minutes ago, Yeetiee said:

 

Imagine: you have a farmland almost ready for harvest with wooden fence and gate. You leave and here it comes, quietly, and bam! You are starving, your painstakingly collected terra preta is now sand, grain rotten and part of that fence also gone. And you must act quick or hares will come through that hole and eat rest of your harvest.

Yyyyyeaaaahhh no. That does not sound fun. That sounds like the opposite of fun. Also trying to get more similar to That Other Block Game seems to be at cross purpose with making the game not seem like a clone of that one.

Tel you what though: that sounds like an amazing creature for a mod to contain.

[maibock]

44 minutes ago, Hells Razer said:

That Other Block Game seems to be at cross purpose with making the game not seem like a clone of that one

Well, the creeper works completely differently, only directly attacking with the intent of killing the player with environmental damage being a byproduct of the attempt at killing. 

Pretty sure this suggestion has the enemy in question trying to indirectly harm the player via destruction of barriers, etc. instead of direct damage.

[Yeetiee]

4 minutes ago, Hells Razer said:

Yyyyyeaaaahhh no. That does not sound fun. That sounds like the opposite of fun.

Like bears? Those are practicaly a miniboss. And there is always an option for passive mobs. It is a beauty of this game: tweakability

[Yeetiee]

56 minutes ago, maibock said:

Pretty sure this suggestion has the enemy in question trying to indirectly harm the player via destruction of barriers, etc. instead of direct damage.

The real damage would be lack of satiety. And maybe, as mentioned before by Frepo, a rift spawning 2-3 drifters to make hard decisions - eat, fight or rebuild. Or run for your life

Edited March 8, 2023 by Yeetiee

[Maelstrom]

Pardon me while I roll my eyes at yet another creeper like derivative.  Vintage Story does NOT need something creeper-like.  Howz about reading some Lovecraft and developing a creature with destructive capabilities based on the source of inspiration for this game?

What if a meteor crashes into the ground (creating a crater) and from the suevite emerges a critter that fades in and out of the world but creates high negative temporal stability within say 100 blocks of it's location?  Now to be less creative lets make this a tall black critter with purple eyes that picks up a single block, shall we?  HELL NO!  Instead, let's make this critter degrade the soil fertility within the temporally instable area it creates?  Soil goes from Terra Preta to high fertility soil to medium fertility, low fertility and finally barren.  Maybe it then changes into sand as the final stage?  What does it look like?  How about a nebulous, pulsating ellipsoid of shimmering color?  

All of those are characteristics drawn directly from Lovecrafts stories.

[Yeetiee]

3 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Instead, let's make this critter degrade the soil fertility within the temporally instable area it creates?  Soil goes from Terra Preta to high fertility soil to medium fertility, low fertility and finally barren.  Maybe it then changes into sand as the final stage?  What does it look like?

Like a melted CPU that is why I proposed a critter that changes blocks in a small radius only once near a player. And it was added that it could spawn a rift. So nothing go bum in a creeper-like fashion. And it doesn't even need to be a critter. It could be an effect of going to the rust world: for example it is not the player that loose health but the enviroment in some radius  fast fowards with said effects and after that player's stability resets. 

[LJim]

7 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Pardon me while I roll my eyes at yet another creeper like derivative.  Vintage Story does NOT need something creeper-like.  Howz about reading some Lovecraft and developing a creature with destructive capabilities based on the source of inspiration for this game?

What if a meteor crashes into the ground (creating a crater) and from the suevite emerges a critter that fades in and out of the world but creates high negative temporal stability within say 100 blocks of it's location?  Now to be less creative lets make this a tall black critter with purple eyes that picks up a single block, shall we?  HELL NO!  Instead, let's make this critter degrade the soil fertility within the temporally instable area it creates?  Soil goes from Terra Preta to high fertility soil to medium fertility, low fertility and finally barren.  Maybe it then changes into sand as the final stage?  What does it look like?  How about a nebulous, pulsating ellipsoid of shimmering color?  

All of those are characteristics drawn directly from Lovecrafts stories.

More Lovecraft/Howard/Smith-type monsters would be so badass. Drive you mad just looking at them. 

[Frepo]

This abomination could be a lump of flesh and bones, covered in pulsating blisters, and crawling around on mechanical legs. And when it gets close enough to the player it pops, releasing corrosive/infectious gas/acid/spores, causing the discussed effects.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Frepo