Drifter and Temporal Storm Proofing

[EmperorPingu]

So I saw a topic from a few years back and I'm still none-the-wiser...

How can I make a 100% safe space that drifters cannot spawn into under any circumstances?

More specifically I guess I should be asking "What are the specific mechanics and conditions by which drifters (or other hostile mobs for that matter) spawn?" and "To what extent are these mechanics effected by phenomena such as Temporal Strorms and low Temporal Stability*?"

Is it possible to make such a space? How big can we make such a space?

I'm running with the theory that the only way to achieve something like this is to have a base in which every single block (including apparent "air blocks") is filled with something so as to prevent drifter spawns from occuring. If we was to layer the floor in rocks or pelts, this would not prevent spawns as the block above would be a complete air block - unless that block was a "chisselled cieling" for example. Perhaps a 2 wide corridor where each side had a side slab or oil lamp?

Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas! Is there a grinder to these things as well? Other than the "Boiler" that is?

[Streetwind]

In my 1.18 playthrough I managed to successfully hide in a closet. 2x1x1, with a door on the inside so it occupied part of the inside space. I could stand inside, close the door, and nothing spawned on top of me.

That said, the team is constantly engaged in removing methods of achieving total safety during temporal storms, so I can't say whether or not that still works in 1.19/1.20.

Additionally, temporal storms can be quite profitable after you've gotten to a certain level of armor and weapons. Go out there, get slayin'! Killing one or more double-headed drifters gets you some nice stuff.

[idiomcritter]

example of my panic chamber

[Thorfinn]

Same as @Streetwind, but I think it was 1.17 and instead of a door, the back wall was ladders.

But a method is only 100% guaranteed until it fails. I don't believe I've ever had one spawn exactly on top of me, though a tile or maybe two behind, definitely. If they spawn within 25 of you, that's a 51x51 square. If it chooses a "randomly", there is only a 1/2601 chance of it materializing on top of you. That means you hit even odds of having at least one materialize with you in your 1x1 after 1803 spawns. 50-ish heavy storms. Probably close enough to guaranteed, if those are the rules.  If.

[EDIT]

Yeah, like @idiomcritters. But just a 3-deep hole that I plugged the top so there was always 1 full, solid block between me and them from any direction.

Edited November 1, 2024 by Thorfinn

[EmperorPingu]

On 11/1/2024 at 11:53 AM, Streetwind said:

In my 1.18 playthrough I managed to successfully hide in a closet. 2x1x1, with a door on the inside so it occupied part of the inside space. I could stand inside, close the door, and nothing spawned on top of me.

That said, the team is constantly engaged in removing methods of achieving total safety during temporal storms, so I can't say whether or not that still works in 1.19/1.20.

Additionally, temporal storms can be quite profitable after you've gotten to a certain level of armor and weapons. Go out there, get slayin'! Killing one or more double-headed drifters gets you some nice stuff.

Hey, yeh I do exactly the same xd. I just have a panic room with the plan being to make a grinding setup (or maybe fight?) once I get far enough into the game to do that. Problem is, I suck at fighting - my whole survival strat is based on hyper-preparedness and exploiting the mechanics to work for me so I don't have to fight. Other problem is I play on perma death and progression is so slow its a practical age before being able to get passed crude wooden armor.

I did get that impression that the devs were trying to do this. I can get why they want to do this, but I honestly hate it. I've kept temporal storms because I want to harvest BUT I very much want to kill the drifters in my own way. I think (to use the obvious comparison) this is one of the few strengths minecraft does have on Vintage Story because MC very much allows players to play in their own way and style (fighters, artists, redstoners etc.) - in the very least I wouldn't mind being able to fight these eldrich horrors in my own way (which is by completely surrounding myself in a protective box and killing them off from a distance). If they absolutely must force the Temporal Storms then I need base defenses!

[Thorfinn]

Well, permadeath is a choice...

"Fear is the mind-killer..." You don't really have to be all that good at combat. You have to be good at understanding their AI. Once you grok that, you no longer fear them.

Just prepare a large enough flat area so you can run far enough that the ones you don't need to fight wander away, and you only have to deal with the double-headeds. Probably be a good idea to get good at it before 1.20 drops and missiles aren't just puny rocks.

Grinding setups are doomed to fail, eventually, and when they do, you have no escape. You can't count on harvesting -- the higher ones outreach your knife. The best you can probably do is one of the guides that kills everything but the double-headed with fall damage, lock yourself in a 1x1x2 and pray they can't materialize with you, and kill the 2-H after the storm is over. To the best of my knowledge, this still works.

 

[Echo Weaver]

Doesn't lighting up your base affect drifter spawns during temporal storms?

I read something in one of the 1.20-pre release notes that seemed to indicate that was a feature that was being refined.

[EmperorPingu]

On 11/3/2024 at 4:40 PM, Thorfinn said:

Well, permadeath is a choice...

"Fear is the mind-killer..." You don't really have to be all that good at combat. You have to be good at understanding their AI. Once you grok that, you no longer fear them.

Just prepare a large enough flat area so you can run far enough that the ones you don't need to fight wander away, and you only have to deal with the double-headeds. Probably be a good idea to get good at it before 1.20 drops and missiles aren't just puny rocks.

Grinding setups are doomed to fail, eventually, and when they do, you have no escape. You can't count on harvesting -- the higher ones outreach your knife. The best you can probably do is one of the guides that kills everything but the double-headed with fall damage, lock yourself in a 1x1x2 and pray they can't materialize with you, and kill the 2-H after the storm is over. To the best of my knowledge, this still works.

 

Hey! Thanks for the guide, I'll have to check it out.

Yeh, perma-death is a choice - but dying is not an option >:0

I have to get gud I guess T-T

[EmperorPingu]

16 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Doesn't lighting up your base affect drifter spawns during temporal storms?

I read something in one of the 1.20-pre release notes that seemed to indicate that was a feature that was being refined.

They still spawn into my own base for me - it's nowhere near as bad if it isn't lit up mind so it clearly does something but the effect isn't total I've noticed

[Maelstrom]

22 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Doesn't lighting up your base affect drifter spawns during temporal storms?

I read something in one of the 1.20-pre release notes that seemed to indicate that was a feature that was being refined.

Normal spawn rules basically don't exist during temporal storms.  About the only spawn rule you can count on is occupying a space that is too small for a drifter to occupy.

I've lit up my base with numerous lanterns so that even on nights of apocalyptic rift activity I don't have any drifters spawn but during a storm drifters are popping out of the woodwork (almost literally! )

[Echo Weaver]

4 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Normal spawn rules basically don't exist during temporal storms.  About the only spawn rule you can count on is occupying a space that is too small for a drifter to occupy.

I've lit up my base with numerous lanterns so that even on nights of apocalyptic rift activity I don't have any drifters spawn but during a storm drifters are popping out of the woodwork (almost literally! )

Oh, thanks for letting me know. I just moved from my dirt hovel to my nicer base (which I already realize I made too small. Argh). It's easy to arrange the hovel to have no 2-block-tall spaces except where I stand. I weathered the last storm in my base and apparently lucked out. I figured it might be a good idea to keep the hovel, and I guess that's where I'll weather future storms.

Unless....

@Thorfinn you've talked about a drifter trap scheme where you light a pit kiln in the middle of a 3x3x2 pit and then dispatch drifters during the storm as they catch fire and burn up. Is there a coward-friendly way to engineer this such that someone with poor real-time combat coordination won't get slaughtered? It sounds much more fun than waiting inside for the storm to subside, and potentially more profitable too.

[Thorfinn]

@Echo Weaver, sort of, but if there is still anything alive bigger than Deep (I think) they outreach your knife, so you have to let them all die before you harvest. I doubt there is time between the waves for the 2Hs to die if you get them in back-to-back waves -- fire damage is pretty slow, maybe a half point a second. I suppose you could speed things along with a spear, and it is possible for them to do serious infighting. I don't have any idea how the new missile guys work in 1.20, though. If their missiles originate in the top half of the model, it should?

The problem is that making a space big enough to be able to both stay out of reach and harvest all the carcasses was not spawn-proof. I've had a half-formed idea for a while. Maybe I'll make a mockup of what I'm thinking and you can test it. 

[Echo Weaver]

24 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

@Echo Weaver, sort of, but if there is still anything alive bigger than Deep (I think) they outreach your knife, so you have to let them all die before you harvest. I doubt there is time between the waves for the 2Hs to die if you get them in back-to-back waves -- fire damage is pretty slow, maybe a half point a second. I suppose you could speed things along with a spear, and it is possible for them to do serious infighting. I don't have any idea how the new missile guys work in 1.20, though. If their missiles originate in the top half of the model, it should?

The problem is that making a space big enough to be able to both stay out of reach and harvest all the carcasses was not spawn-proof. I've had a half-formed idea for a while. Maybe I'll make a mockup of what I'm thinking and you can test it. 

This sounds interesting. I'd be willing to try it, and I'm happy to speed things up with a spear. I'm not completely incapable of hitting things. I'm just not someone who has the reflexes to kite a foe backwards while throwing spears or whatnot. I prefer my fights to be as unfair in my favor as possible.

[Thorfinn]

Here's the first model I think I'd try. It weeds out the crawlers, so you only have to deal with the types that are 2-high.

Looking back towards the entrance to the downstairs. Every space but one has something filling it. I'd put a couple ladders or something, hoping that they can't spawn into a ladder.

 

Standing just behind that open tile that you might want to put a ladder, in the tile with the ladder to the surface. Walls are vertical slabs, sandstone fence 2 high in front. In the back is the pit kiln.

 

View from above. Roach motel.Shaft drops onto dirt block right next to pit kiln.

 

Ready to fry.

Edited November 6, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

How deep does the shaft go?

Is there a reason why you built the trap up on the surface instead of digging down?

[Maelstrom]

One thing to remember, drifter drops drop dramatically if killed by another drifter.  Not sure if is the same with non-player kills, like kilns.

[Thorfinn]

@Echo Weaver, the shaft is only maybe 3 deep. It only goes as deep as the soil was there.

I set as a design constraint that it had to be a day 1 construction, so could not dig into stone, so it had to build up. The rammed earth was because I forgot I was playing Standard, where gravity does not affect regular old dirt.

While diddling around trying the water pushing critters around thing, while that still can be a day 1 in sufficiently deep water, it's non-trivial to get them forced into the pit in the middle. Water is weird. I thought it only flowed 4, but in testing, it was going 8. 

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

One thing to remember, drifter drops drop dramatically if killed by another drifter.

Are we sure about that? I had just the basic drifter-kills-drifter thing going in 1.19.?, on an Apoc night when I was busy doing a bunch of clayforming, (kind of similar to above, but by accident and without the pit kiln) and loot seemed pretty typical. No temporal gears, but plenty of fiber and two rusty gears.

[Maelstrom]

Yes.  I went nothing for 15 harvesting drifters that attacked each other. Every time l let drifters kill each other I get maybe a flax fiber once in a great while.

[Echo Weaver]

I killed my first double-headed drifter after the last temporal storm. Wow, they really do have impressive loot.

[Echo Weaver]

It's hard to tell. I often get nothing from drifters I have definitely killed myself. And, of course, it's usually a combination of the strikes from me and their strikes on each other.

[Maelstrom]

Drifters up through tier 2 or 3 usually don't have drops even if they are player killed.  Not until tainted and above is there a consistent drop but even then they're almost always flax with sporadic rusty gears and rarely a temporal gear.

[Thorfinn]

0-10, even 0-15 is not that unusual. 90% of the time, you should get at least 1 fiber for every 10 surface drifters, but that still means 10% of the time you won't get at least one fiber. 4% of the time, you won't get a single fiber with 15 kills.

I'm not saying there is no abatement for drifter-killed drifters. Pretty sure there must be one for fox-killed hares, for example. I just have not spent enough time looking at the drops code to know for sure. That amount of under-the-hood knowledge would take a lot of the fun out of it for me. But if someone were to say he read the code and saw it with his own eyes, I would not doubt it. It's just as an engineer, I know many of the limits of applied statistics. 

[Thorfinn]

@EmperorPingu, had another thought about a structure that probably is spawn proof, as it has exactly no full tiles, and does not count on hoping ladders and such don't prevent spawning.

X - Blocck
L - Left Vertical Slab
R - Right Vertical Slab

XXXX
XLRX
XXXX

There is room for you between the two slabs, but no one tile should read as spawnable.

Not that you can do anything from there other than wait out a storm. I think you could probably do the bait thing, but despawn range has changed -- it's now 30 seconds at  20 blocks (I think) so if you drop them enough to kill off all but the double-headed, you don't have a lot of time to get down there before he despawns at end of  the storm.

[EDIT]

With as carefully tuned as all those parameters are, 35 drop, 20 for both despawning and aggro, you would now have to be fairly particular in build. You would probably be like that Monty Python sketch watching drifters falling past your window.

[EDIT2]

Thinking about it a bit more, make this LR passage 5 long so you could get out of reach of nightmares, and you could put one of the traps from a few posts up on each end of it.

If chiseled blocks count as non-spawnable space, you could put 4 of them around a set of LRs arranged in a "+".

If this works, count on it being patched soon.  

 

Edited November 8, 2024 by Thorfinn

[EmperorPingu]

man this is tough, I worked out the idea of like a pseudo-1 block wide corridor by putting slabs on sides of walls, but I've also worked out being able to have a kind of 2 high room if you put something like pelts on the floor and a chiselled cieling for example.

My next stage has been trying to work out which blocks can be "walked through" and "chiselled". Ideally, we want an "any-size" room but it's just not practical to have it fillwed up with bushes and leaves - even though you can walk through them you can't see through them! The problem with pretty much every other block is that they are hard and can't be walked through so you'll always bump into them a little bit.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, EmperorPingu said:

My next stage has been trying to work out which blocks can be "walked through" and "chiselled". Ideally, we want an "any-size" room but it's just not practical to have it fillwed up with bushes and leaves - even though you can walk through them you can't see through them! The problem with pretty much every other block is that they are hard and can't be walked through so you'll always bump into them a little bit.

The guy who introduced me to the game put stone pieces on the floor. Those can be walked over and have negligible effect on visuals.

I've adapted my 4x3x2 dirt hovel from early game with some blocks to narrow the space, baskets on the wall, and stones on the floor. It has worked like a charm SO FAR, but since spawn location is random, it's hard to say if it's 100%.