Temporal storms... just... why?

[ifoz]

The main problem for Jonas parts being the main incentive of storms is that ruins/story locations are just far better ways to obtain them. You can probably get almost all the parts you'd need to make at least one of the Jonas devices by completing all of the current story locations in the game, I know a certain location from chapter 2 likes having them as frequent loot. Underground ruins also offer many other rewards than just Jonas parts, so they're more worthwhile to be spending your time on as opposed to storms.
Jonastech being largely novelty items is another problem, but to a lesser extent since the terminus teleporter is still a handy item to have. 

I definitely hope Jonastech gets expanded at some point, as well as what I like to call "Seraphtech". The tuning spear and rift ward are more midgame focused than the other Jonas items, both have no reason to have been invented in the old world, and both require far less Jonas parts than the other Jonastech items to craft. This idea of somewhat unreliable cobbled-together midgame Jonas devices implied to be invented by the player Seraph could also be a fun thing to see expanded in my eyes.
(I always enjoy the idea of a midgame night vision alternative that is easier to create, but has a random chance to fizzle out and leave you without a light source. Very useful when caving, until the lights go out while you're in combat!) 

[MKMoose]

8 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

OK, but both systems are not at play at the same time, are they? IOW, do a storm's foes scale by your instability? I think that was the question.

From what I've seen, being below 0.25 stability can slightly increase the tier of monsters during storms as well, especially during low and medium storms. But I don't know exactly what proportion of spawns during storms come from the base spawning system, if any, making it difficult to properly estimate the impact. Either way, the effect probably will be rather minor, and it will not cause more double-headed drifters or deepsplit shivers to spawn as those come exclusively from the additional storm spawns.

[cjc813]

On 7/8/2024 at 7:10 PM, DuperSoupy said:

is it just me or does the whole temporal aspect of the game hurt the experience overall? 

Halfway agree.

I do think the enemies are a positive addition to the game, both for the sake of lore and for gameplay. The game would feel incomplete without monsters of some kind.

However... Temporal Storms are very poorly implemented, imo, and I'd bet most of the community agrees.

When they're enabled on my server, no one is ever jazzed when they show up. Most of the time, people log off and/or AFK thru them.

Three main problems:

1) They always feel like an interruption. People never want to stop what they're doing to go fight. 

2) They tend to start too soon on default settings. By day 10ish, it's tough to have the bronze armor and poultices needed to really put up a fight.

3) The loot isn't really worth the trouble. You can get Jonas Parts from ruins, and everything else by fighting at night or going underground.

So they're kind of a high risk, low reward scenario that you're forced into. It just feels bad.

I think being notified sooner (perhaps days in advance?) and giving players a reason to want to fight would go a long way toward making them actually fun.

[CastIronFabric]

12 hours ago, cjc813 said:

Halfway agree.

I do think the enemies are a positive addition to the game, both for the sake of lore and for gameplay. The game would feel incomplete without monsters of some kind.

However... Temporal Storms are very poorly implemented, imo, and I'd bet most of the community agrees.

When they're enabled on my server, no one is ever jazzed when they show up. Most of the time, people log off and/or AFK thru them.

Three main problems:

1) They always feel like an interruption. People never want to stop what they're doing to go fight. 

2) They tend to start too soon on default settings. By day 10ish, it's tough to have the bronze armor and poultices needed to really put up a fight.

3) The loot isn't really worth the trouble. You can get Jonas Parts from ruins, and everything else by fighting at night or going underground.

So they're kind of a high risk, low reward scenario that you're forced into. It just feels bad.

I think being notified sooner (perhaps days in advance?) and giving players a reason to want to fight would go a long way toward making them actually fun.

I think building games should boil down to one question.

Are we a tower defense game or not. If not, then make deeds that prevent monsters spawning on your property and create areas in which players go to the monster instead of the monster coming to them. I very much prefer that style of architecture personally.

I am willing to bet the number of people who engage in the storms regularly is really small. I also think the number of players who are looking for a fix to storms so that they would be compelled to engage is actually smaller than these conversations assume. Speaking personally,  I played 7 days to die for well over 1000 hours but I am done, I am not interested anymore. Anyone who desires tower defense mechanics in a block game really should try 7 days to die. I say that not to be dismissive about change suggestions here and I am not suggesting one should forget this game and play 7DTD I am just saying if that is something of intrest and you have not given it a shot, you gotta.

Regarding Lore, the game can still have storms. Just not have the storms spawn globally. Maybe storms only exist in areas that are unstable. That would not affect the Lore dialogue at all to make that simple change. Just do not have it happen on property, simple.

Its not a big deal to me as long as I can turn it off, but if I was the designer of this game I would have Deeds. I would do it almost EXACTLY the same way Wurm does.

 

 

 

Edited January 6 by CastIronFabric

[cjc813]

2 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

I think building games should boil down to one question.

Are we a tower defense game or not. If not, then make deeds that prevent monsters spawning on your property and create areas in which players go to the monster instead of the monster coming to them. I very much prefer that style of architecture personally.

I am willing to bet the number of people who engage in the storms regularly is really small. I also think the number of players who are looking for a fix to storms so that they would be compelled to engage is actually smaller than these conversations assume. Speaking personally,  I played 7 days to die for well over 1000 hours but I am done, I am not interested anymore. Anyone who desires tower defense mechanics in a block game really should try 7 days to die. I say that not to be dismissive about change suggestions here and I am not suggesting one should forget this game and play 7DTD I am just saying if that is something of intrest and you have not given it a shot, you gotta.

Regarding Lore, the game can still have storms. Just not have the storms spawn globally. Maybe storms only exist in areas that are unstable. That would not affect the Lore dialogue at all to make that simple change. Just do not have it happen on property, simple.

Its not a big deal to me as long as I can turn it off, but if I was the designer of this game I would have Deeds. I would do it almost EXACTLY the same way Wurm does.

As someone who would love to see storms "fixed," I like all of these ideas. I hadn't thought of localizing storms, but I *love* the idea.

Imagine:

X days before a storm hits, you get a notification in chat that a storm is on the way. Maybe your seraph gets a premonition or something.

You check the map and see an indicator of where the storm will pop up. If you choose to go fight, you can go fight. Otherwise, if it's far enough away, you can just ignore it. This will allow players to seek out the storms if they want, but ignore them (most of the time) if they don't.

You could even design it such that storms pop up most often within X blocks of player settlements, so that they remain somewhat impactful.

This, combined with  better rewards for actually fighting in storms, would actually make storms a "good" part of the game, instead of the net negative they currently are.

Combine all of this with Jonas Tech that allows you to spawn proof at least part of your base, even during a storm, and I'd call them 100% "fixed."

Edit: Another idea, you might make it to where players have the ability to "end" a temporal storm early, similar to how you had to close Oblivion gates in Oblivion. Maybe something like going into the middle of the storm and grabbing an item, killing a mob, or destroying a block, would end the storm, whereas it might last for a more extended amount of time on its own.

Edited January 6 by cjc813

[CastIronFabric]

8 minutes ago, cjc813 said:

As someone who would love to see storms "fixed," I like all of these ideas. I hadn't thought of localizing storms, but I *love* the idea.

Imagine:

X days before a storm hits, you get a notification in chat that a storm is on the way. Maybe your seraph gets a premonition or something.

You check the map and see an indicator of where the storm will pop up. If you choose to go fight, you can go fight. Otherwise, if it's far enough away, you can just ignore it. This will allow players to seek out the storms if they want, but ignore them (most of the time) if they don't.

You could even design it such that storms pop up most often within X blocks of player settlements, so that they remain somewhat impactful.

This, combined with  better rewards for actually fighting in storms, would actually make storms a "good" part of the game, instead of the net negative they currently are.

Combine all of this with Jonas Tech that allows you to spawn proof at least part of your base, even during a storm, and I'd call them 100% "fixed."

Edit: Another idea, you might make it to where players have the ability to "end" a temporal storm early, similar to how you had to close Oblivion gates in Oblivion. Maybe something like going into the middle of the storm and grabbing an item, killing a mob, or destroying a block, would end the storm, whereas it might last for a more extended amount of time on its own.

and for me, I personally would be more engaged in ideas of how to make the storms better if A. they did not happen at my base and B. it would be possible to get whatever high end loot is there but by other means. So for example, I have no problem selling tons of food and waiting for a trader to restock for more Temproral Gears instead of going into the storm. As an example.

 

[Thorfinn]

On 1/6/2026 at 7:41 AM, CastIronFabric said:

Are we a tower defense game or not. If not, then make deeds that prevent monsters spawning on your property and create areas in which players go to the monster instead of the monster coming to them.

Did you mean the other way around? If you force spawns outside your protected area, aren't you by definition creating a safe tower that you are defending?

In other news, I did see a streamer who may well take the storms head on. I don't know, as I'm only on episode 2. Almost didn't watch beyond the first few minutes, but there was something in his movement that made me stick around, if at 2x speed and skipping ahead here and there. At about the 40 minute mark on episode 2, though, he takes on a brown bear, and he's clearly better than I am at that. Got some practice sessions ahead of me before I can so nonchalantly dispatch a brown. 

 

[CastIronFabric]

48 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

 aren't you by definition creating a safe tower that you are defending?

 

 

no, monsters do not attack bases so no. This is not a new idea, its existed in Wurm for decades

 

Edited January 9 by CastIronFabric

[Thorfinn]

4 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

no, monsters do not attack bases so no. This is not a new idea, its existed in Wurm for decades

 

So kind of like the Cloak Invisible from Erik the Viking? They can't see you so they stand around impotently? Not much of an eldritch horror thing then, is it?

 

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

At about the 40 minute mark on episode 2, though, he takes on a brown bear, and he's clearly better than I am at that. Got some practice sessions ahead of me before I can so nonchalantly dispatch a brown. 

Starts at 43:45, to be specific. I'm not immediately confident about this video translating fully to vanilla. Nothing in the modlist seems to affect bears besides Butchering, but I'm not so certain about player speed (I'd have to look through more of the lead-up).

Don't know if I would call that fight nonchalant, frankly, with multiple close calls which may or may not have been avoided entirely by chance. I'm not entirely sure how the guy doesn't end up getting hit in a few moments like 44:10 and 45:08. Can't really tell if it's precise movement or just luck, but I've been unable to replicate it with sufficient consistency.

The difference between brown and black bears is pretty massive, keeping in mind the numbers from assets/survival/entities/animal/mammal/bear-adult.json:

movespeedByType: {
	"bear-sun-*": 0.01,
	"bear-black-*": 0.015,
	"bear-polar-*": 0.019,
	"bear-brown-*": 0.02,
	"bear-panda-*": 0.015,
},

Last I checked I couldn't find the exact player movespeed to compare numerically, but it seems to be something like 0.018. Black bears are easy to just run away from on almost any terrain, since they seem to be ~20% slower than the player. Brown bears, though, are ~10% faster than the player or right about exactly the same speed with the "fleetfooted" trait, so they can be pretty tough to fight even for the hunter and the clockmaker.

The only strategy that has consistently worked for brown bears for me without "fleetfooted" (besides the cheesy ones, like hiding underwater, hiding in a 1x1 hole, pillaring up, running backwards) was running around a small to medium pond, not unlike the guy in the video did, but even that tends to be a bit sketchy. Rough terrain and shrubbery can be very useful as well depending on how good you are at navigating it yourself, but can also be risky when there's too much of it, especially if you don't know the terrain beforehand.

I guess the short of it is that fighting in a good spot seems to me much more important than just skill and practice, not even counting cheesing.

 

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

At about the 40 minute mark on episode 2, though, he takes on a brown bear, and he's clearly better than I am at that. Got some practice sessions ahead of me before I can so nonchalantly dispatch a brown.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

Don't know if I would call that fight nonchalant, frankly, with multiple close calls which may or may not have been avoided entirely by chance. I'm not entirely sure how the guy doesn't end up getting hit in a few moments like 44:10 and 45:08. Can't really tell if it's precise movement or just luck, but I've been unable to replicate it with sufficient consistency.

After watching it, I would say the fight is fairly nonchalant, especially since he already knew the bear was there to begin with and thus had time to plan. Couple that with clear familiarity with the game, skill, and a little luck, and the outcome is quite spectacular.

It does seem like he should have been hit a time or two, however, I'm not sure if a bear's reach is quite as large as it seems. It's quite possible to scramble out of the way if you time your movement right. More likely though, the terrain is working to his advantage here. He's circling a large pond surrounded by brush and some steep terrain, which he can navigate faster than the bear. I'm thinking the bear keeps trying to pathfind to him through the water, which slows the beast just enough for him to stay a few steps ahead.

[Thorfinn]

On 1/9/2026 at 5:32 PM, LadyWYT said:

It's quite possible to scramble out of the way if you time your movement right. More likely though, the terrain is working to his advantage here.

Both are true. Bears are bad at maneuvering through brush, and you can time a sidestep, though I don't see much indication of the latter here. In order to do it, I have to have 3rd person camera running so I can watch his animation and hopefully sidestep just as he begins his attack. However, if I count on that, there is often a branchy leaves block beside me to mess it up. It really only works when you are on plains. And then there's no downside. If you don't try, you die. If you mess up the timing you die.

This particular spot has lots of places where the bear has to go over, because there are a lot of 1-wide spots, and that slows him down a lot.

 

On 1/9/2026 at 3:51 PM, MKMoose said:

but I'm not so certain about player speed

Fair. He could have nudged his run speed up. But putting distance on a brown through terrain like that is easy on pure vanilla. You just can't miss a lot of the jumps. Re: the close calls, pretty sure those are just that he strafed after the bear committed to the attack routine. I think the bear attacks a location, and if your hit box is not in that location when the attack happens (about 1/2 sec after he begins the attack animation?) you skate. Happens quite frequently when you turn around and run past the bear. You are out of range before his attack happens. I think that's what he did here. But I think his was intentional, while mine is always a panicked twitch reaction.