Epilepsy Accessibility — Toggle to remove "flashing" effect on enemies that spawn during Temporal Storms

[Spyromancy]

First forum post, hi everyone!

I want to show my partner this game and see if they'll play with me, but my partner's epilepsy makes a certain aspect of the game pretty dangerous both in-game and IRL: temporal storms. Not for the twisting geometry (and besides, there's already a toggle to turn that off) but rather for the way enemies that spawn during these storms flash/flicker. I've never seen this happen to enemies that spawn normally, only during temporal storms. I would love if this toggle was available; I'm sure the effect is there to denote storm-spawned enemies from regular ones, and also to add to the disorienting effect that storms have (very fun immersion!), but having a way to turn it off like we can turn off the distortion (and independently of the distortion, because the distortion is pretty cool and not as bothersome as the enemies' flickering) would be amazing.

Of course an answer to this would be to disable temporal storms entirely, but I really love the temporal storm mechanic and the sense of urgency and fear it instills, and I think it adds so much to the game (plus it's very good for farming temporal gears early on). So a toggle would be great! I did find one mod that reduces a few flashing things in the game, but couldn't find any info on whether it worked on the enemies during storms.

[Thorfinn]

Check the mod Accessibility Tweaks. I don't know whether or not it does this, but it handles scads of other similar effects. Seems to me there are a couple others that adjust graphics settings like that, but AT is the one I'd look at first.

Edited May 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Lordkit1]

This needs more visabillity, My partner can't experience temporal storms because the flickering is too bad!

[ikexplosion]

I agree with this suggestion. Yes mods may exist that can help with letting those with epilepsy enjoy Vintage Story, but having the flickering on a switch in the settings would just be nice to have implemented in the base game, especially since temporal storms are a core mechanic to the game as a whole.

[Krougal]

Yes, even for some of us who don't have epilepsy, it is still headache inducing.

I feel the same as op in that the storms add a lot to the game but their execution needs improvement. You can change the world settings via cmdline to turn them off when you play with them and back on when you play by yourself.

I had a girlfriend with epilepsy when I was young, so I know what it is like having to worry about them, I feel for y'all.

Edited September 12, 2025 by Krougal

[Spyromancy]

I really appreciate the renewed interest on this! Thank you all for weighing in. None of the mods I've tried thus far have successfully turned off the flickering unfortunately, so in the meantime I did just disable storms entirely, but for sure I'd love a base-game solution at some point.

[Guimoute]

Hi,
If you want to remove that flickering, you can go in
C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\Vintagestory\assets\survival\entities\bell.json, bowtorn.json, driter.json, shiver.json
and look for glitchAffected: true and change it to false.

Edited September 12, 2025 by Guimoute

[Krougal]

21 minutes ago, Guimoute said:

Hi,
If you want to remove that flickering, you can go in
C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\Vintagestory\assets\survival\entities\bell.json, bowtorn.json, driter.json, shiver.json
and look for glitchAffected: true and change it to false.

You are a hero!

Shouldn't it be made into a mod though? (going to go do that right now)

I have never seen a Bell in a TS, is that a thing later on? Scary!

New path for 1.21 though, \entities\lore\

Also are you sure it is glitchAffected and not glitchFlicker?

Edited September 12, 2025 by Krougal

[Krougal]

Draft version. Completely untested. I just had a temporal storm in my current game so not having one any time soon.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/30130#tab-description

[Professor Dragon]

Does anyone else think that the cattail reeds "flicker" more on 1.21.n than 1.20 when harvested?

[Broccoli Clock]

14 hours ago, Guimoute said:

Hi,
If you want to remove that flickering, you can go in
C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\Vintagestory\assets\survival\entities\bell.json, bowtorn.json, driter.json, shiver.json
and look for glitchAffected: true and change it to false.

Thanks for that, I might use it even though I don't suffer sensory issues with the flicker. Personally I just think it looks very amateurish. That's no shade at the dev(s), they've done a great job all over the board so it's harsh to damn them for this one thing, but I would really really like them to differentiate between levels based on something else. 

[Guimoute]

14 hours ago, Krougal said:

Also are you sure it is glitchAffected and not glitchFlicker?

I did not realize there were two attributes. It's probably safe to disable both, we don't want glitch-anything anyway. 

 

14 hours ago, Krougal said:

New path for 1.21 though, \entities\lore\

Sorry about that, I am still on 1.20. 

 

13 minutes ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Thanks for that, I might use it even though I don't suffer sensory issues with the flicker.

We agree. I don't find it particularly interesting visually. The rippling shader is sufficient (and often too strong), we don't need the camera to glitch nor the drifters to flicker. 

To be perfectly honest and slightly off-topic, I have disabled temporal storms like 12 in-game years ago. I'll re-enable them once it's a true weather pattern roaming the world and bringing monsters with it, not just a fixed 10 minutes of having monsters spawn ON YOU, ignoring light level and fortifications entirely. 

[Krougal]

Ok, finally got another T-storm and it looks like glitchaffected does the trick, so moving from draft to published.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/30130

Now if only we could make the terrain not look so shitty.

[FairyKairi]

As a fellow Epileptic, I wish I could do this without mods.  I BARELY have the system requirements to even run the game, so mods are a no-go.  As others have said, Temporal Storms currently have no real purpose.  I have them turned off for that reason as well as medical issues.

[Diff]

24 minutes ago, FairyKairi said:

As a fellow Epileptic, I wish I could do this without mods.  I BARELY have the system requirements to even run the game, so mods are a no-go.  As others have said, Temporal Storms currently have no real purpose.  I have them turned off for that reason as well as medical issues.

This is a feature than 100% should be in the base game, but you should know that if you need any other tweaks like this in the future, those kinds of mods shouldn't impact performance at all. Big mods like Primitive Survival can really impact RAM and disk usage, but minor changes in existing content should be virtually unmeasurable.

[Spyromancy]

Thank you all SO much for setting this up as a mod! It's deeply appreciated!