shiver + bowtorn + storm = frustration

[Marotte]

In a vacuum, the shivers and bowtorn are unique and fun new enemies to encounter. 
But I have occasionally been annoyed by how often and with how much speed they run away. Nothing too bad on its own and in small numbers.
However I recently faced a heavy temporal storm that spawned nightmare shivers and bowtorn and it was the most unpleasant combat so far.
I didn't want to hide because i was fully kitted in steel gear, so i went out to fight. But it was incredibly frustrating to fight them because they kept running away from me, and i could never catch them. and its not really a mater of difficulty, because i was virtually unkillable in my armor from their harassment. if i had taken my armor off i would have died near instantly so taking the armor off to chase them is out of the question.
yes i know hiding is an option but if I'm not scared or threatened by anything I shouldn't need to hide, nor should I hide out of annoyance.
so maybe during storms their behavior could change? shivers could be more aggressive, and bowtorn could hold their ground or move slower?
personally I would prefer getting swarmed and being killed over getting harassed and having to chase them around and never killing any of them. because at least having the risk of getting killed makes me feel justified in hiding. and its not like I can have a ranged fight with them during a storm on account of the distortion.

has anyone else had similar experiences?

Edited February 14, 2025 by Marotte
spelling

[Thorfinn]

Yes, I believe everything flees when it gets down around a quarter of the HP. And, like you say, kitted out, they are quite a bit faster.

Build a fence around your arena. Nothing goes over fences (maybe in winter if there's snow on the ground -- don't know if that got patched or not) but then you can chase them into the corners. Maybe put little pens around the outside so you can chase them in, close the gates, then open up a can of whoop-@ss,  

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Build a fence around your arena. Nothing goes over fences (maybe in winter if there's snow on the ground -- don't know if that got patched or not) but then you can chase them into the corners. Maybe put little pens around the outside so you can chase them in, close the gates, then open up a can of whoop-@ss,  

I'm actually debating borrowing from a certain design and making a prison-type structure instead of tinkering with an arena. A designated arena is great, because you can ensure you have a lot of space to easily run around, as well as add obstacles to slow down enemies. However, I think with a prison, you could build yourself a safe room to wait/heal in, and have a series of large cells for enemies to spawn in. Then just open the cells at your leisure and slaughter whatever's inside, without it being able to get away.

9 hours ago, Marotte said:

so maybe during storms their behavior could change? shivers could be more aggressive, and bowtorn could hold their ground or move slower?

Could work, but the main drawback I see to this is that you'll have much fewer chances to run away and attempt to get to safety, should you need to. Not that dying is much of an issue, but each time you do it not only drains your nutrition significantly, but also wears out your armor and clothing a LOT faster. I think it would also end up discouraging players from risking the storms until they have top-tier equipment, which may or may not be an ideal thing to do.

Personally, I like what we have now. There's a better chance to get to safety should you be in dire straits or caught unawares, and unless you're sporting full plate armor it's somewhat simple to chase down the monsters in many cases.

Shivers, in my experience, tend to employ a hit-and-run tactic. They like to run up, chomp you a couple of times, and then run away for a few moments before trying to ambush you again. So if they run away and you don't want to chase, they'll likely return soon enough. Or they might decide to spaz out on the spot, which makes killing them a lot easier.

As for bowtorn, you'll need to either avoid packs of them, or be willing to dive right into the middle of the pack and scatter them. In the case of the latter, that will involve chasing them down, but since they're slow, that's not hard to do either. They also cannot take punishment, so it doesn't take many hits to kill them.

[Marotte]

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm actually debating borrowing from a certain design and making a prison-type structure instead of tinkering with an arena. A designated arena is great, because you can ensure you have a lot of space to easily run around, as well as add obstacles to slow down enemies. However, I think with a prison, you could build yourself a safe room to wait/heal in, and have a series of large cells for enemies to spawn in. Then just open the cells at your leisure and slaughter whatever's inside, without it being able to get away.

Could work, but the main drawback I see to this is that you'll have much fewer chances to run away and attempt to get to safety, should you need to. Not that dying is much of an issue, but each time you do it not only drains your nutrition significantly, but also wears out your armor and clothing a LOT faster. I think it would also end up discouraging players from risking the storms until they have top-tier equipment, which may or may not be an ideal thing to do.

Personally, I like what we have now. There's a better chance to get to safety should you be in dire straits or caught unawares, and unless you're sporting full plate armor it's somewhat simple to chase down the monsters in many cases.

Shivers, in my experience, tend to employ a hit-and-run tactic. They like to run up, chomp you a couple of times, and then run away for a few moments before trying to ambush you again. So if they run away and you don't want to chase, they'll likely return soon enough. Or they might decide to spaz out on the spot, which makes killing them a lot easier.

As for bowtorn, you'll need to either avoid packs of them, or be willing to dive right into the middle of the pack and scatter them. In the case of the latter, that will involve chasing them down, but since they're slow, that's not hard to do either. They also cannot take punishment, so it doesn't take many hits to kill them.

personally, making a dedicated arena or trap feels wrong. it feels like making a terraria arena or minecraft mob farm, which feels gross, especially in this game. feels like cheese and ai exploitation. also i haven't seen bowtorn cluster like other people have, they just wander the outskirts of my base.

also, i don't think it would discourage risking storms, because early tier armor is still useful early game. and I've never really benefitted from bowtorn being so fickle. shivers, maybe it gives you time to recompose if you are fighting them one on one, but if you are fighting multiple enemies during a storm it is actively unhelpful, because it spreads the damage you deal and lets you get distracted by the others to open you up for an easy hit (and they are fast enough when fleeing that chasing them is almost pointless).
also the only reason i am being hyper aggressive is because i have the highest possible tier of armor, i wouldn't be if this wasn't the case. and it made me realize that you (or maybe just I) cant have fun fighting aggressively in a heavy temporal storm (atrocious visibility) against nightmare shivers and/or nightmare bowtorn. any other circumstances, i feel, are trivial.
it kinda sucks if i don't need to run away and want to fight them and use my armor that i spent so much to make to not die.

i think in the moment i was just exited to use my awesome gear to slay some monsters only to be like "GET BACK HERE AND LET ME ****ING KILL YOU!".
i think i would have been happy if in addition to everything else, some drifters spawned so i could have had at least something to actually fight.
maybe that is the answer, always spawn at least some drifters? i don't think that would be very disruptive.

[TFT]

2 hours ago, Marotte said:

personally, making a dedicated arena or trap feels wrong. it feels like making a terraria arena or minecraft mob farm, which feels gross, especially in this game. feels like cheese and ai exploitation.

This is how I feel about it. Previously, storms were doable running laps around my base in bronze and iron equipment and doing my best to not get cornered. Cheesing was an option, now it's almost a requirement. It's like you either need to make some special bunker farm setup to reap any rewards, design your base for storms, or have iron plate armor and above to not die every other minute. I don't think it would be so bad if Bowtorn damage didn't start at 5 per shot. Their little wind up sound cue is cute and all, but it's drowned out by general storm ambiance which leads to you getting hit without warning. Armor helps, but you're too slow to chase them effectively since while you're chasing one, several more shoot you in the back while Shivers nip at your heels.

It begs the question on what the intended way to face storms is? Storms are no go if you don't have armor since a basic Bowtorn will quarter your HP every few seconds, and you're hit so often by them that any armor you do have only delays the inevitable. Armor is an expensive investment and losing half its durability (for bronze anyway) each storm for a handful of flax fibers and a chance for a temporal gear seems like a terrible exchange. At the moment the balance feels out of wack, because either you refuse to engage with the mechanic and wait it out, you die trying to engage with the mechanic, or you cheese the mechanic. You're obviously meant to engage with it since sleeping through it is not enabled by default, Caves and story areas feel much safer and are far more lucrative in comparison.

It feels like Shivers and Bowtorn should be treated as rarer deadly mobs rather than a normal mob interchangeable with a Drifter. Shivers are bigger, scarier, and tankier Drifters, and Bowtorn are glass cannons. As you said, it's not so bad when they're in small numbers such that you can prioritize them, but if they are just as common as Drifters then it becomes a treadmill exercise since you can never fully get rid of them all.

[Thorfinn]

Should go without saying, but arenas need not be anything more than you need. There's no need for those who  have end-game equipment to have any more arena than a fence around the arena so you can corner the buggers.

As is often said, storms are more hassle than they are worth, unless maybe  for a completionist trying to build all the end-game tech. But if you are less OCD, at present, all they do is squander your resources.

18 hours ago, Marotte said:

i think i would have been happy if in addition to everything else, some drifters spawned

Drifters should spawn in every storm, just not necessarily very many of them.

Spoiler

Each storm spawnPattern assigns a group Weight to deifters, though not necessarily very many of them. In the shiver/bowtorn pattern, for example, drifters should be outnumberd the others by 3:1. And the others are designed to hold your attention, while drifters tend to wander off if they are out of range.

           spawnPatterns: {
                "default": { weight: 5, groupWeights: { drifter: 0.5, shiver: 0.25, bowtorn: 0.25 } },
                "drifterstorm": { weight: 1, groupWeights: { drifter: 1, shiver: 0, bowtorn: 0 } },
                "shiverstorm": { weight: 1, groupWeights: { drifter: 0.5, shiver: 0.5, bowtorn: 0 } },
                "bowtornstorm": { weight: 1, groupWeights: { drifter: 0.5, shiver: 0, bowtorn: 0.5 } },
                "shiverbowtornstorm": { weight: 1, groupWeights: { drifter: 0.25, shiver: 0.375, bowtorn: 0.375 } },
                "driftershiverstorm": { weight: 1, groupWeights: { drifter: 0.5, shiver: 0.5, bowtorn: 0 } },
 

 

14 hours ago, TFT said:

It begs the question on what the intended way to face storms is?

Well, obviously the intent is that you can't run around like you used to, or they would not have designed foes that counter that style. Seems to me it's either to sleep through them or have end-game equipment. Oh, or maybe it's to learn about the weaknesses of those new monsters and find a way to intelligently use that to your advantage? I believe what you are dismissing as "cheesing"?

Never fear, if Tyron thinks your strategies are too cheesy, he will change that in a future version. Happened with everyone placing rocks all over the place to prevent spawns, didn't it?

 

[Zane Mordien]

19 hours ago, Marotte said:

personally, making a dedicated arena or trap feels wrong. it feels like making a terraria arena or minecraft mob farm, which feels gross, especially in this game. feels like cheese and ai exploitation. also i haven't seen bowtorn cluster like other people have, they just wander the outskirts of my base.

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH STRATEGY FIGHTING (CHEESING) THE STORMS. WHATEVER MAKES THE GAME FUN TO YOU IS GREAT!

I 100% agree, I feel like I have to learn how to cheese it. This is a bit of a broken record coming from me I understand, see my other cranky posts. In the 1.19 storms people either ran around and speared, hide, slept or cheesed (boiler room, firepits and fighting rooms). In 1.20 I feel like its Hide, sleep or cheese; so whatever the point of updated storms is a fail to me.

At least when I ran around and speared them I took some kind of risk, which made it fun for me. Now that option is gone and I have to resort to going afk during the storm or try to find some cheesing method. As other's have stated the loot from the storms is worthless for the most part. I just found it fun. Someone is going to create a ultimate cheesing method and post it online and everyone is going to farm the storms to death again and the creative team is right back to trying to beat the new meta. I feel like the old storms were fine. If it gave too much loot that should have been adjusted. Maybe sprinkle in a few new mobs to cause havoc to your best laid plans, but instead the new mobs overrun the storms. I have not done a storm since the last 1.20.3 update so maybe that is different, but I highly doubt it.

Another important thing. I LOVE THE GAME. Don't let my cranky self ruin if for you. If you love fighting the storms the way you are doing it, again that is great. 

[Thorfinn]

2 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

I feel like I have to learn how to cheese it.

Where do you draw the line? Was having a "base" cheese? Lighting up your smithy to prevent spawns? Those eliminated risk to you from drifters entirely. Now, granted, a lot of us never bothered building much of anything until winter -- a fence around your farm, a "roof" over the top of your pit kilns, firepits, molds and forge, that was about it. Is anything more than that cheese?

31 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

Someone is going to create a ultimate cheesing method and post it online and everyone is going to farm the storms to death again and the creative team is right back to trying to beat the new meta.

Which the creative team just did. People were cheesing the storms by running around lobbing spears. The drifters were not a credible threat. Many of us fought through them in our skivvies -- no need for armor and no point in getting your clothes damaged by silly little 1 HP rocks. To foil that "ultimate cheesing method", they introduced creatures it would not work on.

There's no reason you can't disable the new monsters in the storms, or change their spawn rates to whatever you like. mobextraspawn.json. If you find something that appeals to you, bundle it into a patch mod and upload it.

[Marotte]

39 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Where do you draw the line? Was having a "base" cheese? Lighting up your smithy to prevent spawns? Those eliminated risk to you from drifters entirely. Now, granted, a lot of us never bothered building much of anything until winter -- a fence around your farm, a "roof" over the top of your pit kilns, firepits, molds and forge, that was about it. Is anything more than that cheese?

Which the creative team just did. People were cheesing the storms by running around lobbing spears. The drifters were not a credible threat. Many of us fought through them in our skivvies -- no need for armor and no point in getting your clothes damaged by silly little 1 HP rocks. To foil that "ultimate cheesing method", they introduced creatures it would not work on.

There's no reason you can't disable the new monsters in the storms, or change their spawn rates to whatever you like. mobextraspawn.json. If you find something that appeals to you, bundle it into a patch mod and upload it.

the cheese is specifically the cheesing of the enemies. for me something is cheese if it puts you at virtually zero risk with very little investment and still gives you rewards. traps are cheese (if you can kill all the victims at zero risk to yourself). building a fence isn't cheese per se, but it is exploiting pathfinding somewhat. 
building bases and putting fences around your crops and pens isn't cheese because you don't necessarily do it with storms in mind.
i have fences all over my base, mostly to keep pests away and livestock in. and yes enemies get stuck on them, but to me it is coincidence, i don't focus on maximizing that happening. i used to do something that was cheesy, put fences next to my doors so i could attack drifters through the gap. but i have stopped doing that because it wasn't very fun and felt dirty.

i didn't realize that drifters always spawn in storms, there have been several were i haven't seen any. so there probably isn't enough or i have been unlucky.
i agree that drifters on their own are not a credible threat. i still think they are valuable enemies, they can offer moderate area denial, encouraging the player to retreat or kite. and somewhat discouraging stationary defensive combat, though choke points can give you back some ability to manage them defensively. essentially they are beaten by mobility.

bowtorn discourages running around out in the open (also area denial), unless you are armored enough to withstand their shots, however they are defeated by closing the distance, which is harder when armored because of their fleeing. they are a situational awareness and target prioritization challenge. but unless you can lure them into confined spaces, the only way to defeat them is to go out in the open and chase them down, the best(fun) case scenario is fighting in a town (doesn't exist naturally obviously) where there are a mixture of long, medium and short sightlines, and opportunities for cover. 
shivers also discourage running around in the open, but not as area denial, more as punishing kiting and chasing, because they are so fast. so you should pause your focus on drifters to prioritize shivers when a window opens, like when they come in to attack or when they are stunned, or retreat to a choke point position. so they are also a situational awareness and target prioritization challenge. 

the mixture of bowtorn and shivers in larger numbers however can strain the fun, because they don't synergize very well in large quantities. you are punished for being out in the open by bowtorn, you are punished for chasing bowtorn by other bowtorn and shivers, and you are punished by focusing on shivers by bowtorn (unless you have a confined space with line of sight broken from most angles) and by other shivers who will disrupt focus and spread damage, opening you to more attacks.

thank you for sharing about mobextraspawn.json, i didn't realize i could just configure these things. but i still wanted to discuss this because i think it could be improved in vanilla. 

[Zane Mordien]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Where do you draw the line? Was having a "base" cheese? Lighting up your smithy to prevent spawns? Those eliminated risk to you from drifters entirely. Now, granted, a lot of us never bothered building much of anything until winter -- a fence around your farm, a "roof" over the top of your pit kilns, firepits, molds and forge, that was about it. Is anything more than that cheese?

Which the creative team just did. People were cheesing the storms by running around lobbing spears. The drifters were not a credible threat. Many of us fought through them in our skivvies -- no need for armor and no point in getting your clothes damaged by silly little 1 HP rocks. To foil that "ultimate cheesing method", they introduced creatures it would not work on.

There's no reason you can't disable the new monsters in the storms, or change their spawn rates to whatever you like. mobextraspawn.json. If you find something that appeals to you, bundle it into a patch mod and upload it.

I think normal mob spawning and temporal storms are different animals. The temporal storm as I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), you are not supposed to be able to stop spawns at all in a perfectly coded world. Now there are still ways to stop spawns somewhat, but as I understand that is not the intent of the creative team. They want you to be fully exposed to the spawns with no way to hide. That tells me they want you to be forced to actively "fight" the storm without hiding, but then spawning 50 bowtorns that turn you into a pin cushion just doesn't make sense unless they want you to die over and over and be frustrated. I assume that isn't the case so maybe they want us to build a fighting arena as you have posted before since I don't think it makes sense otherwise. 

 

Now as far as running and throwing spears with no credible threat. For my playstyle: That is why I think it would have been a better idea to toss in a few bowtorns and shivers to make you have to deal with them while dodging the drifters. They would have been more like mini-bosses during a fight. You have to watch out and deal with them before they destroy you while still avoiding the nightmare drifters that can clean your temporal clock. 

[TFT]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Oh, or maybe it's to learn about the weaknesses of those new monsters and find a way to intelligently use that to your advantage?

Weaknesses such as: too big to fit through doors and a pushover at short range. Both taken advantage of by… Boiler rooms! (and other assorted Drifter traps) The same things many players were using before to farm storms. Which is to say the answer is to ignore the new enemies and blow through storms like normal in a bunker or arena designed to make the new mobs glorified drifters.

Storms should not be like they used to where all you needed were flint spears, and you're right in that the new mobs counter that way of fighting storms, but if chainmail or lamellar can't cut it for even light storms then I think it went too far in the opposite direction. For vanilla default settings, there's simply too many as Marotte went into detail on. And in specific I think it's the Bowtorn that need the most tweaking.
It's also just been barely a month since stable 1.20, I imagine there's a lot of room for fine tuning and rebalancing.

[Dilan Rona]

bowtorns are cowards, that is true. but while you are trying to chase a few, the ones behind you use you as a Seraph pin cushion, and get some target practice in.

[Thorfinn]

19 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

The temporal storm as I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), you are not supposed to be able to stop spawns at all in a perfectly coded world.

Sort of. The spawn location has to be physically capable of them. So a bowtorn absolutely requires a 1x3x1 space, so you are absolutely secure from them in your 1x2x1 hidey hole. Shivers require (I think, but never verified) a 2x2x2 space, again absolutely secure. You also cannot be visited by crawling drifters, nor by (I think) the current iteration of double-headed. You can have a nightmare drifter spawn in there with you. It's just very, very unlikely.

19 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

[The creative team] want you to be fully exposed to the spawns with no way to hide.

Doubtful. If that were the case, there was no reason to make the collision box larger than your seraph's. The fact that the big bad scary things in this game, bears, bowtorn, shivers, etc.,. the things that are typically met with ceaseless complaints, do have such limits is a pretty strong argument that they didn't intend for you to have to encounter them with your butt swinging in the breeze.

 

19 hours ago, Marotte said:

building a fence isn't cheese per se, but it is exploiting pathfinding somewhat. 
building bases and putting fences around your crops and pens isn't cheese because you don't necessarily do it with storms in mind.

It seems to me your criteria for cheese is doing something exclusively to safely exploit an enemy's weakness? I don't think I'm taking that too far out of context. But isn't that just intelligent strategic combat? I'm not saying I disagree. I do not enjoy hiding behind a post or 6 and stabbety-stabbing from safety.

But the AI specifically flees when reduced to less than 30% of HP, so they are doing exactly the same thing. Surface variants with their 12 HP don't HAVE to flee (but might anyway) until they are reduced to 4 HP, so depending on your weapon choice, they may not ever flee. But you will have to chase the higher level ones, or they will flee to outside despawn range.

 

11 hours ago, TFT said:

Both taken advantage of by… Boiler rooms!

So don't build a boiler room? It reduces loot to minimal, anyway, so it's not even good cheese. 

There's no reason you need to exploit it to the point of cheese. FWIW, I'd just give the baddies immunity to heat damage and call it a wrap.

 

11 hours ago, TFT said:

I think it's the Bowtorn that need the most tweaking.

I'm sympathetic to that. But I also do not think it is either necessary nor likely. They are only Tier 0. The shivers are the ones who go up to Tier 4 and pierce all but the best armors.

Edited February 17, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Marotte]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

It seems to me your criteria for cheese is doing something exclusively to safely exploit an enemy's weakness? I don't think I'm taking that too far out of context. But isn't that just intelligent strategic combat? I'm not saying I disagree. I do not enjoy hiding behind a post or 6 and stabbety-stabbing from safety.

But the AI specifically flees when reduced to less than 30% of HP, so they are doing exactly the same thing. Surface variants with their 12 HP don't HAVE to flee (but might anyway) until they are reduced to 4 HP, so depending on your weapon choice, they may not ever flee. But you will have to chase the higher level ones, or they will flee to outside despawn range.

cheese is not necessarily exploiting an enemy specific weakness. cheese is the trivialization of enemies with minimal effort (and/or little investment), virtually zero risk and still being rewarded for it. its not just about safety it is about effort and reward too. i am very safe (not perfectly) in my steel armor and at minimal risk, but i went through the trouble of making it. i can also hide, exposing myself to no risk with minimal effort, but no reward either.
cheese and strategy are not actually incompatible. cheese is just strategies that trivialize gameplay by bypassing mechanics or challenges. cheese can be intelligent and clever, but it isn't necessarily always the case, and it spreads so people don't always come up with it themselves.

also, my problem isn't with cheese specifically. it was that i don't want to have to use cheese to not be frustrated. it wasn't frustration with challenge it was frustration with evasive enemies. and i want the reward (no matter how pathetic it is).

by the time they are fleeing from being damaged, i am usually right next to them so its less of an issue, and they don't draw you as far away. also they may still attack you if you are close enough or hit them again, so you can keep them from disengaging. not so much with shivers because they are so fast. also they don't flee forever, i think it is around 10 seconds? so you can catch up to them if you want to chase them, and it is not like they immediately turn around to shoot you the moment you stop chasing them. so it is different.

also there are higher tier bowtorn variants. not just tier zero. 

Edited February 17, 2025 by Marotte

[Thorfinn]

I think we just define "cheese" a little differently. I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting a fence around wherever you seek to do battle. Turn it into Thunderdome. Either you kill them all or they kill you. No running away. I don't find that at all cheesy, and would hate to have the shivers nerfed so badly that they are not able to run away from an armored seraph. That was kind of the point of adding them. Slow them down and they are just a reskin of drifters.

Someone else wants to cheese it? Fine. I don't care. Makes absolutely no difference to my enjoyment. It's not like I lose my good armor because someone built a boiler.  I simply could not care less if cheese is widely shared. If the devs agree that it is cheese, it will be patched out.

You are correct about higher tier bowtorn. No idea if that was always the case, and I was thinking about some other creature, or if they have been butched in order to remain somewhat of a challenge to endgame gear.

I participate in cheese discussions not to implement any off them, but because I know there are people who don't even hold my definition of cheese.

[Marotte]

11 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I think we just define "cheese" a little differently. I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting a fence around wherever you seek to do battle. Turn it into Thunderdome. Either you kill them all or they kill you. No running away. I don't find that at all cheesy, and would hate to have the shivers nerfed so badly that they are not able to run away from an armored seraph. That was kind of the point of adding them. Slow them down and they are just a reskin of drifters.

Someone else wants to cheese it? Fine. I don't care. Makes absolutely no difference to my enjoyment. It's not like I lose my good armor because someone built a boiler.  I simply could not care less if cheese is widely shared. If the devs agree that it is cheese, it will be patched out.

You are correct about higher tier bowtorn. No idea if that was always the case, and I was thinking about some other creature, or if they have been butched in order to remain somewhat of a challenge to endgame gear.

I participate in cheese discussions not to implement any off them, but because I know there are people who don't even hold my definition of cheese.

your right that a thunderdome isn't very cheesy, it would have to be massive to allow bowtorn to spawn in it and not outside it. i agree that shivers are mostly fine, i dont want them to be slower, and i don't want it to be viable to chase them. but i think bowtorn should be slower in storms or not as flighty or make ranged combat viable during storms. because you pretty much have to be armored during heavy storms, and because of that bowtorns are basically unreachable.

[Dilan Rona]

i just bunker down and wait it out. or if i'm in a secure enough area, do some crafting at the base, and take care of the occational mob that spawns in my base.

[cjc813]

On 2/15/2025 at 4:07 PM, Marotte said:

personally, making a dedicated arena or trap feels wrong. it feels like making a terraria arena or minecraft mob farm, which feels gross, especially in this game. feels like cheese and ai exploitation. also i haven't seen bowtorn cluster like other people have, they just wander the outskirts of my base.

 

On 2/15/2025 at 9:08 PM, TFT said:

This is how I feel about it. Previously, storms were doable running laps around my base in bronze and iron equipment and doing my best to not get cornered. Cheesing was an option, now it's almost a requirement.

Gotta respectfully disagree with y'all here. Building just a hole and standing outside of it to stab them with spears? Yeah, that feels a bit cheap. And building a "boiler room" over a hot spring to cook mobs automatically? Yeah, that's pretty cheesy. But building arenas, forts, etc? That's not cheese, bro. That's just being creative and prepared.

The sandbox has changed. Combat has changed. (IMO, for the better.) Ya gotta adapt. My "house" has an upper level with windows I can shoot out of, and I lit up the surrounding ground and cut all the grass so I could see 100% clearly for a whole area. That alone has covered all my bases. Surrounded by bowtorn? Head upstairs and get into a shoot out. Lots of drifters? Head down stairs and go to town. Get caught with my pants down by a nightmare shiver? Run inside to heal up and re-engage. I got my bases covered. I think of it as strategy, not cheese. It's a building game. Why wouldn't you use building to prepare for temporal storms?

And dude, my first bowtorn storm was heee-larious! I'd pop into the window to snipe 'em one at a time. And all you'd hear is SCREAMSCREAMSCREAMSCREAMSCREAM, and then about a second later, after I'd darted out of sight, just THUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNK.

Got done, and the entire side wall of my base/house/fort was just RIDDLED with spikes. It was a blasty-blast.

(As an aside, ya wanna know what *is* cheese? Spawning with 76 of your buddies and filling a lone enemy with spikes. The mobs are the cheesy ones! )

[Marotte]

1 hour ago, cjc813 said:

 

Gotta respectfully disagree with y'all here. Building just a hole and standing outside of it to stab them with spears? Yeah, that feels a bit cheap. And building a "boiler room" over a hot spring to cook mobs automatically? Yeah, that's pretty cheesy. But building arenas, forts, etc? That's not cheese, bro. That's just being creative and prepared.

The sandbox has changed. Combat has changed. (IMO, for the better.) Ya gotta adapt. My "house" has an upper level with windows I can shoot out of, and I lit up the surrounding ground and cut all the grass so I could see 100% clearly for a whole area. That alone has covered all my bases. Surrounded by bowtorn? Head upstairs and get into a shoot out. Lots of drifters? Head down stairs and go to town. Get caught with my pants down by a nightmare shiver? Run inside to heal up and re-engage. I got my bases covered. I think of it as strategy, not cheese. It's a building game. Why wouldn't you use building to prepare for temporal storms?

And dude, my first bowtorn storm was heee-larious! I'd pop into the window to snipe 'em one at a time. And all you'd hear is SCREAMSCREAMSCREAMSCREAMSCREAM, and then about a second later, after I'd darted out of sight, just THUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNK.

Got done, and the entire side wall of my base/house/fort was just RIDDLED with spikes. It was a blasty-blast.

(As an aside, ya wanna know what *is* cheese? Spawning with 76 of your buddies and filling a lone enemy with spikes. The mobs are the cheesy ones! )

if you have steel plate armor, you are the fortress, you don't need defenses. its not difficult, in my 100 hour world, i still haven't died once, the most dangerous thing in the entire game is my own elk deciding to attack me with my armor off when im working around it. what i am talking about, is that it is annoying to chase around nightmare+ bowtorn in a heavy temporal storm. and as far as I'm concerned you cant do ranged combat in a heavy storm when the world wobbles like jelly. 

what im talking about is getting the kills and the loot (without cheese). bowtorn don't really spawn in arenas unless your arena is huge enough, which kind of defeats the purpose of an arena. building fortifications is all fine and dandy until you cant hit anything in a heavy storm or you want to finish enemies off. also, more recently after my original post, i have been finding enemies behaving very complacently, sometimes just meandering around even when I'm in line of sight, sometimes walking away without even taking damage, and only around 60% of the time actually seeking me. anything less than a heavy storm is trivial, and chasing around nightmare bowtorn in heavy armor is incredibly annoying. i want to get swarmed, not doing constant goose chases. obviously i can hunker down, but it feels like nothing comes when i do. I feel like i have to go out and get them. and i really would rather shoot at bowtorn, but again, that is not an option in heavy storms. 

[cjc813]

20 hours ago, Marotte said:

if you have steel plate armor, you are the fortress, you don't need defenses.

I think this is the crux of the issue, tbh.

My gut response is, "don't wear plate." Which isn't really a very good response, to be honest, because (a) it's in the game, it should have a purpose, and (b) you put in the effort and should get value out of it.

And I think you're right on that point, honestly. Vintage Story as a game is all about putting in effort and getting a satisfying payoff. That's kinda the whole point. We don't *like* pounding out 40 braziillion plates to make armor, but we do it assuming that it'll pay off and we'll get to have fun with it. And, honestly, it seems like that's not currently how the game works. With the way the mobs currently are, it makes more sense to wear chainmail than plate, and that makes plate kind of irrelevant. Chain is better. And I could be a douche and just be like, "hurr, just wear chain, dummy," but at the end of the day, it doesn't sound like the game provides a great experience for people who went through the trouble of making plate.