Enemy spawn conditions are unbalanced

[McFrugal]

Basically, mob spawn height ranges overlap, resulting in larger groups at certain elevations instead of a smooth progression of difficulty.  The most common situation to run into is where Deep Drifters can spawn near the surface alongside the larger packs of Surface Drifters, which create an encounter far harder than what you'd get deeper in where just Deep Drifters spawn.  Secondly, at y=22-23%, all three of the deeper drifter types can spawn!  I'd suggest completely changing the spawning mechanics, actually.  Instead of every mob type having an independent spawn rate, mobs should spawn in specified groups.  Like, one spawn group would include a bowtorn alongside drifters, one spawn group would have a shiver and drifters, another group would just be two bowtorn or one shiver...  That sort of thing.  Spawns which happen in deeper caves would include harder mobs, of course.  This means we'd have intentionally-designed mob mixes instead of this system which is vaguely defined, hard to balance, and impossible for the user to predict unless they look at the code.

If you don't want to make a drastic change like that, you should at least remove most of the overlap.  I'd be ok with the hard drifters spawning in deep caves without so many easier drifters spawning alongside them and creating big groups of mixed types.

[McFrugal]

Oh god it's worse than I thought.  At the depths where Nightmare drifters can spawn, there are like 3 different Shivers that can also spawn, two of which are equivalent in danger to Nigthmare Drifters.  So if you include Bowtorn that's FOUR TIMES the number of ultra-dangerous mobs spawning at deep levels!

[Thorfinn]

I think I'd avoid defined groups, as it makes it much more difficult to add new creatures. You end up having to incorporate things like global spawn rate sliders to accommodate those who use multiple foe mods.

What I would prefer is that the check for spawn be made, a tile selected, then add up the weights of creatures that can exist on that tile, and figure out which one it is. 

[McFrugal]

Alright, instead of defined groups, it'd probably be better to have a weighted spawn limit.  Like, currently the game has no sanity checks as for how many high tier enemies can be spawned at once, aside from the per-type limits.  All Shivers have a limit of 1, but that's per type, and there are EIGHT different types, so you can potentially have three different shivers on top of you alongside a bunch of drifters and a bowtorn or two, or even three because bowtorns can spawn more than one in a pack despite the spawn limit being 1.

The weighted spawn limit would work like, the maximum total "weight" of mobs would be 50 and Nightmare tier monsters take up 20 of that.  Surface drifters would be 5, surface shivers and bowtorns would be 10.  That way you'd get around five surface drifters spawned alongside one bowtorn and one shiver, or two bowtorns and less drifters.  The tiers in between would have different rates of course.

[BearWrestler]

IMO first of all they should restrict drifter spawn to challenge areas that have better loot, think the corrupted zones in Terraria. That would make figuring out proper spawning mechanics less of an emergency since the player wouldn't be spammed anymore whenever they put a toe underground. I seriously miss spelunking beautiful caves in Minecraft in relative peace, and it puts me off returning to this game despite the interesting crafting mechanics and nice overworld generation. There's an eventual cave update on the roadmap, but "richer caves" are going to be wasted if you have to play constant tower defense in them or "redecorate" them with fences and dirt blocks to stem the tide of garbage spawns.

[Stroomschok]

VS fixing it's poor enemy progression gameplay by taking a page out of Terraria would be a nice way of fixing it. Problem however is that VS has very limited depth to play around with for linking of increasingly challenging monsters, gate-keeper loot and biome progression. In this regard the game is quite heavily handicapped by its conventional realism.

Edited February 20, 2025 by Stroomschok