balance Enemies should drop better loot durring Temporal Storms or give us better loot

[DUCATISLO]

I have recently been using Better Loot mod on my server, and it's surprisingly pretty balanced and doesn't break the game much also makes using rusty gears on traders more frequent. Maybe it does make building an underground mob farm more of a thing, but people do that in vanilla too, especially for Xskills modded worlds.

 

I'm just tired of getting ONLY flax fibers, rusty gears, and temporal gears with an occasional Jonas part at least give us scrap metals since they have a rusty metal skeleton frame since atm rusty metal can be only found in ruins, and by that time you find them you most likely have a copper or bronze tools making the rusty tools worthless apart from the axe... I do know we have mechanical enemies but those are much rarer.

Currently, temporal storms are only good to look for the 2H drifters but that's about it there is no reward for doing them. maybe make the loot drop better during the temporal storms so there is a reason to go out and kill stuff and not just wait inside or run around till you find a 2H drifter.

Idk why Tyrone gets so hissy fit over a bit of unbalance so much, the game needs to be fun and rewarding too you know, and not just high risk - low reward...if underground mob farms scare you maybe tweak it so enemies won't be spawning in the same area for some time if they keep getting killed over and over? idk

In short, make temporal storms rewarding to go out and kill shit.

[Maethius]

Totally agree. Even if you can obtain some metal scraps, metal parts, chunks of iron, or the like, that would be a great adjustment during storms.

[DUCATISLO]

9 hours ago, Maethius said:

Totally agree. Even if you can obtain some metal scraps, metal parts, chunks of iron, or the like, that would be a great adjustment during storms.

Most of the humanoid enemies are made from cloth n metal i dont see why we cant get any extra stuff out of it we alredy get gears why not scrap metal...hell maybe we can even smelt for something. and make it so temporal storms are rewarding for once...

[Thorfinn]

I think you can infer from both the current drops and the lore that fighting is not the intent of the game. At least fighting the low level monsters. You only need to battle the top tiers; they are the only reliable source of jonas parts, though you might have noticed that jonas tech isn't exactly game-breaking.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with making the game your own by rebalancing loot, it's just that self-evidently, that's not the story they are trying to tell. It would be extremely weird if Tyron hadn't realized that combat with the eldritch is pretty much a vanity project. Every time you engage, you lose, if only in terms of durability. He could have set the balance differently -- hunting is almost always net gain, which puts the eldritch in stark contrast. Why?

[Zane Mordien]

I still agree as I've stated in many other threads. The game isn't supposed to be about combat I've been told, but there is a lot of requirement for combat in the game.

Temporal storms  are just a time sink that are not fun or rewarding. Meaningful cave exploration is the same, fighting lots of trash mobs for no gain. From listening to Tyron's interview I sort of understand he wants it to be hard, but in the end it's a game. 

I'm just not a fan of constant rebalancing game mechanics. If it's game breaking, sure rebalance it, but there is nothing game breaking that you can get from combat. I think it's more out of balance that you can get a copper pickaxe from a cracked vessel. That actually accelerates your progress. Same for any of the copper or tin bronze tools you can get. That means something. Temporal gears and Jonas parts just don't break the game. So what you can teleport somewhere and if you are extremely lucky maybe you can build a Jonas device... maybe.  

 

No, I'm not going to mod the game for loot. I'm giving feedback, because without feedback people tend to think everything is great. Hey, maybe I'm the minority and 99% of players think its all great the way it is. That's for them to decide. 

[VaelophisNyx]

Personally I think the game not being "About combat" is a moot point

we aren't asking for it to be a drifter slaughtering simulator, just that we're rewarded sufficiently for bothering with them other than just hiding in a 1x2 box until storms pass

if I'm out there dealing with hordes of nightmare drifters I definitely feel like more than 3 flax twine and a single temporal gear is at least agreeable

 

...also adding more bosses that require combat to kill for story progression is...well about combat....soo pick one, Tyron

Edited March 3, 2025 by VaelophisNyx

[Maethius]

I totally agree that VS is more about survival at first, but then it becomes much more about exploration... being far from home, away from your home resources, and having to to fend off not only Rust creatures but other deadly forces as well. The other day I was caught in a thicker forest and was jumped by a brown bear, and I'm glad I was carrying a triad of meteoric iron spears and had a mod to also carry a steel claymore. As it was, the bear took me down a quarter health through my steel chain armor but knocked my elk down to 10 points! Combat isn't the focus of the game, but you ignore the need for it at the expense of your (or your elk's!) life!

[DUCATISLO]

15 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

...also adding more bosses that require combat to kill for story progression is...well about combat....soo pick one, Tyron

our lord and savior Tyrone is in a weird loop but ig depends on his mood

[Thorfinn]

These are all fair takes. I'd just point out that this game now takes a much more Sun Tzu approach to battle. That was not true in 1.19, where except for the sawblade, you could pretty easily bully your way through, and just despawn the guys that weren't worth it.. And even him, once you learned his attack patterns. Once you got a temporal gear, by whatever means, there simply wasn't much point in farming foes whose drops were largely for end-game gear. Gear which was not very impressive, nor could you reliably get the parts for the one you wanted without intensive grinding. But if you wanted your Cabinet of Jonas Curiosities, you just had to suck it up. That's what being a vanity project means.

For any who play wargames (or who study warfare), the term is Area Denial. There's nothing at all cheesy about using dragon's teeth to channel tanks to come at you only from a direction of your choice. Or with calling in air strikes or artillery barrages, if those are options. The game gives you easily implemented force multipliers. It's rather foolish not to take advantage of them.

[Zane Mordien]

If that is the intent. We will see during the next rebalance when they stop the next mob farms strat from working. Game AI can always be exploited and someone will figure it out. 

 

If it is as you say @Thorfinn, then it's  working as intended or maybe this isn't what they expected and they may tune it again. Time will tell.

 

I still think reducing the drop rate would have kept the game fun during storms... for me.

[Maethius]

I think there is a gamer expectation to experience some kind of higher reward for higher risk. Surviving a horde of enemies that give you enough flax to make a string isn't much incentive to fight the horde. Having to challenge a deadly foe like a nightmare-level drifter, bowtorn, or shiver shouldn't always drop something, but knowing there is a CHANCE of a rarer drop makes it feel worth the fight. I got swarmed in a Better Ruins location (the library is frickin' AMAZING work!) but walked out with flax. Now, the location provided excellent, useful and aesthetic loot that wall well within the exploration/survival/lore seeking theme of the game, but when you have to crush a pair of bell-head shivers amid a half-dozen corrupted and nightmare drifters and tanking a pair of bowtorns at the same time, it would be nice if something dropped... say... an electrum nugget.

 

[Thorfinn]

Agreed there is a gamer expectation that risk should be tied to reward. At least sometimes. Rarely does anyone insist that walking on a parapet he built demand that he be rewarded for the risk he took of certain death if he fell.

But there is also the incentive structure to consider. Self-evidently, they do not want to incentivize monster farming, or they would have given more loot. It's hard to argue that Tyron does not understand that concept when everyone and his dog seems to understand it. The logical conclusion is that the standard carrots sticks model is not what he's going for, not that he's a moron.

Some people agree with you, BTW, @Maethius,  which is why there are mods out there that rebalance loot drops to incentivize fighting random encounters. They do not seem to be terribly popular. A couple thousand downloads. One of the more popular of them not only adds some more or less trivial drops, like up to iron bits, but also increases the difficulty of the encounters.

It's great that we need go no further than ModDB to tweak the game closer to our preferences, is it not? As easy as it might be to make those tweaks ourselves, someone has taken that little extra effort of uploading his vision of rebalanced encounters.

[LadyWYT]

Ironically, the lack of monster loot is a feature I've come to enjoy when compared to other games, mostly because then I'm free to just carve my way through enemies as needed without worrying about missing anything. Plus I'm not getting saddled with a bunch of stuff I just don't need either. The other block game was a big offender in that department; it's not that the monsters didn't drop useful stuff...I just didn't need all that much and eventually it just becomes annoying inventory clutter that I have to deal with. In games like Skyrim and Oblivion, it's nice that enemies drop loot as a reward, but I've learned to ignore most of it as the majority of it falls into the "inventory clutter" category once more. The gear I have is usually already better, and it's not worth dragging the stuff back to town to sell, because I already have more money than I know what to do with.

As I've already mentioned elsewhere as well, I get the sense that combat in general is something you want to avoid in Vintage Story, if you can, and the monsters are meant more as an obstacle to your goals than something intended to be hunted. Want to complete the story? You'll need to deal with the monsters. Need to go mining? Depending on how you go about it, you may end up dealing with some monsters. Exploring for ruins underground? Expect more vicious encounters the deeper you go. Don't want to sleep through the night? There's no penalty for forgoing sleep, but you may end up dealing with whatever goes bump in the night if you choose not to sleep.

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It's great that we need go no further than ModDB to tweak the game closer to our preferences, is it not? As easy as it might be to make those tweaks ourselves, someone has taken that little extra effort of uploading his vision of rebalanced encounters.

Pretty much this. I did actually consider downloading the one that added ore bits to the monster loot table, but ended up deciding against that when I realized it would trivialize the early game and lessen the need to scout for ore in the late game. By having to go out and interact with stuff in the world, there's a bigger risk factor and it keeps me from getting too complacent.

[Thorfinn]

24 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I did actually consider downloading the one that added ore bits to the monster loot table,

On my current server, that one did get requested, as did the more challenging monsters, so I ended up taking @DejFidOFF's (?) mod (the one I think you are talking about) and making a standalone to buff the baddies. I did end up patching his mod to hand out a little more loot yet to make up for the fact that Deeps were now one-hits before armor and nutrition. (Except bowtorn -- I left them at 2-hit.) Though the drops were mostly goofy stuff.-- loose stones, various pottery, tool heads (mostly knapped, but a few metal, small clutter, etc. The idea was just something that reminded them of their previous life.)  

Edited March 8, 2025 by Thorfinn

[DUCATISLO]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Ironically, the lack of monster loot is a feature I've come to enjoy when compared to other games, mostly because then I'm free to just carve my way through enemies as needed without worrying about missing anything. Plus I'm not getting saddled with a bunch of stuff I just don't need either. The other block game was a big offender in that department; it's not that the monsters didn't drop useful stuff...I just didn't need all that much and eventually it just becomes annoying inventory clutter that I have to deal with. In games like Skyrim and Oblivion, it's nice that enemies drop loot as a reward, but I've learned to ignore most of it as the majority of it falls into the "inventory clutter" category once more. The gear I have is usually already better, and it's not worth dragging the stuff back to town to sell, because I already have more money than I know what to do with.

As I've already mentioned elsewhere as well, I get the sense that combat in general is something you want to avoid in Vintage Story, if you can, and the monsters are meant more as an obstacle to your goals than something intended to be hunted. Want to complete the story? You'll need to deal with the monsters. Need to go mining? Depending on how you go about it, you may end up dealing with some monsters. Exploring for ruins underground? Expect more vicious encounters the deeper you go. Don't want to sleep through the night? There's no penalty for forgoing sleep, but you may end up dealing with whatever goes bump in the night if you choose not to sleep.

Pretty much this. I did actually consider downloading the one that added ore bits to the monster loot table, but ended up deciding against that when I realized it would trivialize the early game and lessen the need to scout for ore in the late game. By having to go out and interact with stuff in the world, there's a bigger risk factor and it keeps me from getting too complacent.

it dosent even give you that much lol just makes killing stuff rewarding for once I WANT MY DOPAMEMES

[Maethius]

On 3/7/2025 at 12:15 PM, Thorfinn said:

Some people agree with you, BTW, @Maethius,  which is why there are mods out there that rebalance loot drops to incentivize fighting random encounters. They do not seem to be terribly popular. A couple thousand downloads. One of the more popular of them not only adds some more or less trivial drops, like up to iron bits, but also increases the difficulty of the encounters.

It's great that we need go no further than ModDB to tweak the game closer to our preferences, is it not? As easy as it might be to make those tweaks ourselves, someone has taken that little extra effort of uploading his vision of rebalanced encounters.

Totally agree! One of the difficulties of creating any game is that one cannot please everyone all the time; some people love the survival/exploration of games like VS but they also want a combat engine or an RPG, which VS is clearly not! While I am fully aware that there are many mods to balance parts of the game, I also feel that there can be some base level tweaking of the core product. Besides, I've found that modding is a risky business as the github issue tracker indicates with a constant flow of reports for crashes, freezes, and compromised assets. Every machine is different, of course, but my VS (with about a dozen large and small mods) takes roughly 10 minutes to load and crashes at least once each play. I often have to reload the world 3 times to play it once... at the cost of losing 1-2 in game hours per attempt.

The idea that it is unreasonable to expect a risk/reward model is... a unique take in the world of gaming; virtually any game. The entire point of the last VS update was to entice players to strike out vast distances and explore more of the world; for many of those players juicy pieces of lore that help build the ambiance of the game is plenty. I, personally, LOVE finding more about the lore, even if we never get definitive answers. Hell, in many ways I hope that we don't! VS isn't a game about finishing the story with a bang... not that I know of. It is about surviving in the world left behind, with glimpses into that world. However, the idea of traveling 25 kilometers through rugged terrain FEELS like it should carry three kinds or reward; 1) the experience of a new environment that stands apart from the rest of the world (the Archives did a great job of this!), 2) gaining unique insight to the lore of the world, (again, RA was fully designed to do this in spades! There was only one disappointment for me in that I expected to hear some bits and pieces using the Resonator, but it was still an excellent experience!) and 3) something unique to take home as either a memento for one's personal museum or something uniquely useful, even if it were short lived (a piece of armor that protects while maintaining a lesser impact on healing, hunger, aiming, and such... BUT which cannot be repaired or replaced).

This is mostly a brain dump for me, but I am hoping some of the ideas can leak into the core game eventually.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Maethius said:

The idea that it is unreasonable to expect a risk/reward model is... a unique take in the world of gaming; virtually any game.

Thing is, though, the small numbers of people downloading rebalance mods is a pretty good indication that most are fine with it. There are a lot of decor-only mods with vastly more downloads. Immersive-type mods are also much more popular. Like 4-5x more popular, or even more.

Some of the data from downloads surprises me, but a lot of it is right in-line with what I hear from people on my server.

1 hour ago, Maethius said:

my VS (with about a dozen large and small mods) takes roughly 10 minutes to load and crashes at least once each play. I often have to reload the world 3 times to play it once... at the cost of losing 1-2 in game hours per attempt.

Voof. And I'm complaining about losing 10 game minutes or so loading what I think of as mod-heavy. It would be nice if the server didn't start ticking until you actually finish the load process.

[Maethius]

Yeah, I've actually started switching to creative mode before I save because after a few botched runs I can be logging into my world in the dead of night with a very high temporal instability event going on!

That reminds me about posting another new topic about something that happened to me recently!

[Thorfinn]

2 minutes ago, Maethius said:

switching to creative mode before I save

That's an awesome idea! Maybe a macro that both switches to creative and stops time?

[Maethius]

Maybe a time-stop would be helpful in the in the end. Would it remain stopped on startup, so I would also require a macro for once things are actually loaded and stable? A sort of, "pause/save" and "load/run" macro solution? My system is just too laggy and uncertain when it starts. I know I need to upgrade my card, ultimately, but for now I'm just glad I wear steel armor!