Temporal Storm Rebalance

[LadyWYT]

1. Monsters drop loot when they despawn at the end of a storm.

The loot acts similar to dropped items, in that it only lasts for a short time before it despawns. Likewise, if a player leaves the area, the loot will also despawn in order to avoid cluttering up the world. Players will need to do their scavenging immediately after a storm in order to collect this loot. Possible loot is the same as what players can get by killing monsters(with metal scrap added as a potential drop), however, certain drops(like Jonas parts) are much more rare. The average loot one could expect just from post-storm scavenging is a handful of flax fibers, a couple of rusty gears, a couple of metal scraps, and the rare temporal gear if they're lucky. As for Jonas parts, they can drop, but the player shouldn't be finding more than one or two per year if they're relying purely on post-storm scavenging.

The main idea behind this change is to keep the temporal storms as the unnatural disasters that they should be, while still offering some reward for players who aren't yet equipped to deal with them, or that prefer a more passive playstyle, without feeling like they're being punished for not risking their lives. Rusty gears are good for purchasing necessities from traders, while metal scraps make improvised weaponry a more attractive choice for the early game. The passive loot should also help point new players towards interacting with the storms once they have better equipment, in hopes of better loot, instead of being a pure obstacle to progress. I also figure a change like this would help encourage more passive players to try playing with temporal storms enabled and enjoy part of the challenge, when they might otherwise disable the mechanic entirely.

2. Killing a certain number of monsters in a storm will guarantee a special monster spawn.

By this I mean that if a player kills something like 10 monsters(the tier or type of monster doesn't matter), then a special monster(double-headed drifter, deepslit shiver, etc) is guaranteed to spawn nearby. Special monsters will still be a random rare spawn, however, this change gives the player the incentive to participate in the storms and kill as many monsters as they can in order to have more chances at rare loot(Jonas parts, temporal gears) in addition to getting more mundane loot drops(flax fibers, rusty gears, metal scrap). In order to keep it balanced and avoid encouraging things like mob grinders, the killing blow must be from a player(or player pet/follower) in order to count towards the special monster spawn.

For multiplayer instances, it doesn't matter which player lands the killing blow--all legitimate monster kills add to the kill counter, making working as a team a very lucrative prospect. The guaranteed special spawns will spawn near one of the players who landed a killing blow, helping to ensure that the special monsters actually spawn near the players trying to fight them and not the ones just waiting out the storm. As for servers where players are more spread out and operating independently...I'm not really sure how to balance this mechanic for that scenario, other than maybe adding an optional server configuration to make the kill counter specific to individual players instead of counting kills as a collective.

In any case, the main idea with this change is to offer a better reward for players who are willing to risk their lives in the temporal storms. They'll still be able to scavenge loot from the monsters that despawn after the storm, of course, but will have much more, better loot than if they had just safely waited out the storm in a bunker.

3. Monsters can drop metal scraps as loot.

As stated before, it seems like a fitting drop, and helps make scrap weapons a more attractive choice as an early-mid game weapon. Otherwise, I didn't want to touch the loot tables too much, since the current offerings feel fair, and will be a lot more exciting once late game tech receives an update.

TL;DR: Passive players can scavenge some loot after temporal storms, so they don't feel punished for choosing safer options with the mechanic enabled. Players who risk their lives in the storms and fight well are rewarded for that risk with better loot, and more of it.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

20 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

without feeling like they're being punished for not risking their lives

FOMO is not a punishment. It is literally cashing a check before RNG has a chance to write it. "I might have lost out on 5 flax fibers!" Or... the mobs might not have dropped anything and you would have wasted your time and effort.

 

23 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The main idea behind this change is to keep the temporal storms as the unnatural disasters that they should be

Sounds like we disagree on what temporal storms are then. I see it as the world briefly merging with the rust world where are temporal rifts are literal connections between our world and the rust world. This is why some of the monsters are faded as if they aren't quite there all the way and are part of another dimension and when the storm ends, none of them should die, and instead just disappear and go back to their own world and leave yours as it was before. Temporal rifts act more like connections between the worlds allowing the mobs to actually traverse the barrier and physically enter our world. This can be observed when they suddenly despawn at the end of a storm (except for some of the more pesky mobs that resemble tall chickens with crossbows), but when a rift collapses, anything spawned by it remains.

But if you want to imagine that the temporal storm is literally the world getting engulfed by a giant temporal rift or the barrier just disappearing altogether for a moment, then I can see how this would work. We may need an official explanation from the dev team on just what exactly a temporal storm even is.

30 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

2. Killing a certain number of monsters in a storm will guarantee a special monster spawn.

we're assuming this doesn't happen already. Have you looked into the code to see what the spawn conditions of the rare mobs are during a storm?

 

Personally I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but I can see some merit in it. I think the passive loot should be a fraction of what you'd reasonably expect to get if you had killed a bunch of mobs during the storm. Remember... risk = reward, and the classic Jamestown saying, "He that doesn't work, doesn't eat."

[LadyWYT]

12 minutes ago, traugdor said:

FOMO is not a punishment. It is literally cashing a check before RNG has a chance to write it. "I might have lost out on 5 flax fibers!" Or... the mobs might not have dropped anything and you would have wasted your time and effort.

Personally I think the temporal storms are fine as-is. However, it's a subject that frequently gets brought up here on the forums, so I thought I'd take a crack at a rebalance that offers a bit more flexibility in terms of choice. With the current storms, the two main choices are either play it safe and get nothing, or go fight and get some loot(which really isn't a good idea in the early game). My goal with this rebalance was to make early game storms less of a hassle(you get a handful of useful things to scavenge if you play it safe), while making later storms more rewarding once you're equipped(you get more and better loot for being a good monster hunter).

18 minutes ago, traugdor said:

Sounds like we disagree on what temporal storms are then. I see it as the world briefly merging with the rust world where are temporal rifts are literal connections between our world and the rust world. This is why some of the monsters are faded as if they aren't quite there all the way and are part of another dimension and when the storm ends, none of them should die, and instead just disappear and go back to their own world and leave yours as it was before. Temporal rifts act more like connections between the worlds allowing the mobs to actually traverse the barrier and physically enter our world. This can be observed when they suddenly despawn at the end of a storm (except for some of the more pesky mobs that resemble tall chickens with crossbows), but when a rift collapses, anything spawned by it remains.

But if you want to imagine that the temporal storm is literally the world getting engulfed by a giant temporal rift or the barrier just disappearing altogether for a moment, then I can see how this would work. We may need an official explanation from the dev team on just what exactly a temporal storm even is.

I generally look at temporal storms as a sort of giant rift, where the barrier between the Rust world and reality becomes very thin. Given the state of a certain spoiler location, it seems plausible that some odds and ends could be dropped by monsters before they disappear back to the Rust world(or wherever they came from). 

 

22 minutes ago, traugdor said:

we're assuming this doesn't happen already. Have you looked into the code to see what the spawn conditions of the rare mobs are during a storm?

Nope, just speaking from my general experience. I've had some storms where special monsters practically spawned on top of each other, and other storms where I've not seen a single special monster no matter how many other monsters I killed. Generally, I only see one special monster per storm, regardless of my kill count, so it doesn't seem to be something currently influenced by the number of monsters a player kills.

 

25 minutes ago, traugdor said:

Personally I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but I can see some merit in it. I think the passive loot should be a fraction of what you'd reasonably expect to get if you had killed a bunch of mobs during the storm. Remember... risk = reward, and the classic Jamestown saying, "He that doesn't work, doesn't eat."

Right, hence why I said the average loot for post-storm scavenging is a handful of flax fibers and the odd couple of rusty gears or metal scraps. Stuff that's still useful, but nothing particularly rare unless you get incredibly lucky. To get things like temporal gears or Jonas parts with any kind of regularity or within a reasonable time frame, you'll need to take a risk and actually go fight the monsters during the storm, instead of waiting it out safely in a bunker. The better you fight, the better your reward.

[Michael Gates]

This seems plausible to me? Having SOME kind of reason to turn these on might be interesting; right now I just shut 'em off during world creation.

[Oto Nokyo]

41 minutes ago, Michael Gates said:

This seems plausible to me? Having SOME kind of reason to turn these on might be interesting; right now I just shut 'em off during world creation.

They feel excessive for how little gain it is for actually standing out in a storm battling monsters. Currently the only strategy for me is to stand in a 2x1 hut with a door on it afk until the storm blows over. 

[Zane Mordien]

Maybe they will think of something outside the melee path where you collect items from ruins and build something that has the passive effect you are talking about. 

In my current playthrough I am in  December and I still haven't bothered setting up to fight a storm. Im about out if smithing that needs to be done, so thats usually when I bother with it.

[LadyWYT]

I just went through a heavy temporal storm...only got around 16 flax fibers and a couple of rusty gears for my efforts, despite killing around 20 or so monsters. No specials.  It's the kind of drops I'd expect for passive scavenging loot post-storm with this kind of rebalance, but not from a storm where I'm really putting in the effort to get my goodies. With the proposed kill tracker I could have had at least one or two special monsters and gotten some better stuff.  Oh well!

[Oto Nokyo]

34 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I just went through a heavy temporal storm...only got around 16 flax fibers and a couple of rusty gears for my efforts, despite killing around 20 or so monsters. No specials.  It's the kind of drops I'd expect for passive scavenging loot post-storm with this kind of rebalance, but not from a storm where I'm really putting in the effort to get my goodies. With the proposed kill tracker I could have had at least one or two special monsters and gotten some better stuff.  Oh well!

About how it goes. Only some pocket change, pocket lint, and a bent paperclip at the cost of armor durability + time in wasted each storm. Maybe a temporal gear but have found more of those off regular drifters than anything storms have thrown.

[DFlux]

New player here, honestly I'd just like something at some point that could better forecast when a temporal storm hits.  Nearly died entirely due to RNG, the leadup of bad RNG:

1: Place i started building at seems to have 'slightly' low temporal stability to begin with, and due to farms i'm commited to staying it until the season turns.(Planning on moving though for THIS reason alone).  Its not unmanagable, a 'tiny' drain that lowers my stability by about 2-3% during a night.  But it DOES prevent recovering stability after a mining trip.

2:  Have not found copper veins of good quality or quantity before first and second storm, in fact, found copper of good quantity at start of autumn inspite 14 hours of searching for the stuff the entire summer even using prospecting pick as the video suggested.  This was also due to disgustingly misleading information provided by the pick with "very low" copper veins near the llminite vein that i'm practically on top of.  Due to no copper, cannot even use advantage of the high casserite density in area i was building in, yeah, RNG was giving me the middle finger at this point.
3: Found Casserite in a VERY temporal unstable area, enough that I lose about 25-30% on a short mining trip.
4: 2nd storm arrived at start of autumn, and the BS?  Only 6 days passed since the last one, and "A medium temporal storm is approaching" and it was high rift activity night, I had no time to get my temporal stability raised. I hit sleep to pass a little time since I cannot recover temporal stability in my own home(see #1, sleeping at least doesn't lower temporal stability this way).

I tried to make a little 'glass safe house' outside, and enemies CLIPPED INTO ONE OF THE BLOCKS AND ATTACKED ME FROM INSIDE THE GLASS BLOCK!  I was forced to run inside after breaking the glass with about 1/3rd my health left.  This glass safe room likewise was just in the safe to recover temporal stability, so them clipping into it screwed me over even harder.

5: Made emergency safe room in baking room(which is in the 'slightly low' temporal range to begin with), temporal storm hits and ends with me having about 1% temporal stability.

All this thanks to RNG and a small oversight of lower than average temporal stability that.  I'd just seriously appreciate better heads up and something to counter this RNG better.

[DefinitelyWorth]

ngl getting pieces of flax fibers most of the times and not even from every drifter feels almost the same as you used to get a feathers from zombies in Minecraft beta version - doesn’t really feel rewarding since planting flax is not a problem and even sometimes makes you ask yourself „why flax?”. Other thing when drifter happens to drop rusty gear or blue one - although from lv 0 and lv 1 drifters probability is so low that you usually don’t even want to waste your time for them. Many reasons why a lot of people play the game modded since vanilla is still missing tons of stuff.

[Zane Mordien]

@DFlux

2. The most popular prospecting video is so misleading on what readings you need to find ore.

4. What type of room did you create? Did you use half blocks or full? I'm curious because I've heard of this being a problem, but I've never experienced it myself.

[Echo Weaver]

Is there any way to get temporal gears without killing drifters?

I think a rebalance like this is a great idea. This is never going to be a combat-free game, but I like having options. As I've said on other threads, I'm not really in a game like this for combat. I'm already monkeying around with various ways to trap and at least partially neutralize drifters in temporal storms so that I can kill and harvest them with a minimum of risk. I wouldn't want access to a fully automated kind of drifter harvesting, but having an alternative built around trying to trap as many in one location as possible so that I could sweep in to gather as much loot as possible before it disappears. 

As @LadyWYT said, it shouldn't be as effective as running around with spears, but it would give some access to higher-order drifter drops to players who just don't like that kind of play.

[LadyWYT]

Just now, Echo Weaver said:

Is there any way to get temporal gears without killing drifters?

In the current game? Yes. You can find them in certain story locations, maybe ruins as well though I'm not sure(I've found the occasional Jonas part or two in a ruin). Temporal gears are also a rare drop from panning; I think it can be gravel, sand, or bony soil, although I'm not sure. I tend to see them drop more often from bony soil when I get then from panning, but I'm pretty certain I've gotten a couple from normal gravel as well. It's still a very rare drop though--killing monsters is the fastest way to get them.

Regarding my rebalance proposal, I see temporal gears being possible as part of the passive loot table, but still very rare. That way a player could get lucky and find one very early in the game, without needing to do a lot of panning or risk their lives against monsters. However, if one relies only on the passive post-storm scavenging, I wouldn't expect them to get more than a small handful of temporal gears a year. While temporal gears don't have much use now, I'm guessing that small handful won't be a sufficient supply to rely on once more Jonas tech items are implemented.

6 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I wouldn't want access to a fully automated kind of drifter harvesting, but having an alternative built around trying to trap as many in one location as possible so that I could sweep in to gather as much loot as possible before it disappears. 

Hmmmm, sneaky. I hadn't considered this.  That being said, if a player goes to that trouble...eh, why not let them have the payout? I don't think it would break anything given the last-hit rule proposed for the more active loot system, and it sounds like it'd be a fun challenge for a more passive playthrough.

[Zane Mordien]

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

Is there any way to get temporal gears without killing drifters?

 

The treasure hunter trader will also sell them occasionally for about 4 gears. 

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

In the current game? Yes. You can find them in certain story locations, maybe ruins as well though I'm not sure(I've found the occasional Jonas part or two in a ruin). Temporal gears are also a rare drop from panning; I think it can be gravel, sand, or bony soil, although I'm not sure. I tend to see them drop more often from bony soil when I get then from panning, but I'm pretty certain I've gotten a couple from normal gravel as well. It's still a very rare drop though--killing monsters is the fastest way to get them.

OK. I have found a couple of rusty gears outside of drifter loot, but I've never found a temporal gear or a jonas part. Since temporal gears are required to reset your spawn and repair translocators, if you don't want to fight, it's hard to get to some important parts of the setting.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Hmmmm, sneaky. I hadn't considered this.  That being said, if a player goes to that trouble...eh, why not let them have the payout? I don't think it would break anything given the last-hit rule proposed for the more active loot system, and it sounds like it'd be a fun challenge for a more passive playthrough.

It's just how my devious mind works. In part, in a setting like this, I enjoy the head canon that rust creatures are more dangerous than they are. In addition to just enjoying figuring out ways to avoid combat, creeping around and avoiding direct confrontation feels like more of a horror style to me.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't think it would break anything given the last-hit rule proposed for the more active loot system, and it sounds like it'd be a fun challenge for a more passive playthrough.

Oh, I meant to ask about the last hit rule. I haven't seen that discussion. What is being considered for an active loot system?

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Zane Mordien said:

The treasure hunter trader will also sell them occasionally for about 4 gears. 

I forgot about that.

 

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

OK. I have found a couple of rusty gears outside of drifter loot, but I've never found a temporal gear or a jonas part. Since temporal gears are required to reset your spawn and repair translocators, if you don't want to fight, it's hard to get to some important parts of the setting.

It's just how my devious mind works. In part, in a setting like this, I enjoy the head canon that rust creatures are more dangerous than they are. In addition to just enjoying figuring out ways to avoid combat, creeping around and avoiding direct confrontation feels like more of a horror style to me.

Oh yeah, for sure. To me, certain important parts being harder to acquire is the trade-off for taking the less-risky paths. It'll take a player longer to get stuff like temporal gears and Jonas parts that way, but it's still a viable option if they're willing to put in the time.

 

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

Oh, I meant to ask about the last hit rule. I haven't seen that discussion. What is being considered for an active loot system?

I tried to explain it in my initial post, but I think it's also a bit tricky to really explain without some kind of demonstration. Essentially, all it is, is a requirement that the monster is killed by a player directly(or a player-owned pet/ally) in order to count towards spawning a guaranteed special monster. After a player kills around 10-15(haven't pinpointed a number, but it seems a fair range), a special monster(such as a double-headed drifter) will spawn near the player.

That is, no boiling drifters alive in a hot spring, getting them to kill each other, or killing them via fall damage or some other indirect method. I'm sure there's still a way to build a sort of grinder, that still ensures the player can get the last hit on monsters so the kills qualify towards a special spawn, which is fine in my book. It would be quite a bit of effort to do that(and players are very good about figuring out workarounds for things like that regardless), so I don't really see it being an issue if they can find a way to build such a thing.

As for multiplayer, I figure that all monsters killed by players will count towards the special spawns, making it rather lucrative for players to fight together instead of separately. In that case, when enough kills are reached to trigger a special spawn, it will spawn near one of the players who contributed to the kills in order to ensure it spawns near someone actively hunting said monster, and not someone who just wants to wait out the storm. Ideally, I figure a change like this would result in at least a small handful of chances for a player to get a lot of good loot, instead of the current system of just hoping for a special monster to spawn. Special monsters will still spawn at random too, as they do now, but with that kind of change players can also influence how many they encounter during a storm.

As for changes to loot...I didn't really want to go adding anything to the current loot tables, aside from metal scraps. Current loot is a bit underwhelming in some ways, though I chalk that up to there being not enough uses for temporal gears and Jonas parts at present.

[Echo Weaver]

36 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Oh yeah, for sure. To me, certain important parts being harder to acquire is the trade-off for taking the less-risky paths. It'll take a player longer to get stuff like temporal gears and Jonas parts that way, but it's still a viable option if they're willing to put in the time.

Yeah, I totally agree with that reasoning.

 

36 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

a requirement that the monster is killed by a player directly(or a player-owned pet/ally) in order to count towards spawning a guaranteed special monster. After a player kills around 10-15(haven't pinpointed a number, but it seems a fair range), a special monster(such as a double-headed drifter) will spawn near the player.

That is, no boiling drifters alive in a hot spring, getting them to kill each other, or killing them via fall damage or some other indirect method. I'm sure there's still a way to build a sort of grinder, that still ensures the player can get the last hit on monsters so the kills qualify towards a special spawn, which is fine in my book. It would be quite a bit of effort to do that(and players are very good about figuring out workarounds for things like that regardless), so I don't really see it being an issue if they can find a way to build such a thing.

Oh, now I see.

FWIW, I haven't even found a hot spring, but I tried a kill zone for a while that dropped drifters onto a burning pit kiln. It was effective in killing drifters, but absolutely terrible for harvesting them, and I lost most of the loot.

If one is going engineer a kill system, it should definitely be difficult.

39 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

As for multiplayer, I figure that all monsters killed by players will count towards the special spawns, making it rather lucrative for players to fight together instead of separately. In that case, when enough kills are reached to trigger a special spawn, it will spawn near one of the players who contributed to the kills in order to ensure it spawns near someone actively hunting said monster, and not someone who just wants to wait out the storm. Ideally, I figure a change like this would result in at least a small handful of chances for a player to get a lot of good loot, instead of the current system of just hoping for a special monster to spawn. Special monsters will still spawn at random too, as they do now, but with that kind of change players can also influence how many they encounter during a storm.

As for changes to loot...I didn't really want to go adding anything to the current loot tables, aside from metal scraps. Current loot is a bit underwhelming in some ways, though I chalk that up to there being not enough uses for temporal gears and Jonas parts at present.

I absolutely love this. Incentives for collaborative play in multiplayer is right up my alley.

And I agree that there's just too much flax in drops for even fairly high-level drifters.

[dakko]

5 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Temporal gears are also a rare drop from panning; I think it can be gravel, sand, or bony soil, although I'm not sure.

Can confirm: I've gotten temporal gears from normal panning (sand and/or gravel, don't recall atm).

I like the proposed idea, speaking as someone that is completely inept at fighting.

[DFlux]

21 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

@DFlux

2. The most popular prospecting video is so misleading on what readings you need to find ore.

4. What type of room did you create? Did you use half blocks or full? I'm curious because I've heard of this being a problem, but I've never experienced it myself.

On number 4, it was full blocks, but the outside corners were open air, turns out, bad idea.  Never making that mistake again   As for interior, it was a litteral coffin: 1 by 1 wide 2 tall, barely enough for me and nothing else in it.

I think its the same kind of problem that happens in minecraft when you have a few dozen animals in such a small space that they are squishing one another, that they end up pushing animals out of the fences.  The same happened with the drifters.  One managed to clip into my house a few days later, so I fixed the mistake in the structure.

Made another "hiding coffin" a few days after and then refined it, and added additional measures to ensures drifters cannot clip into it.  Funnily, maybe due to the snow or something nothing spawned in the next temporal storm to arrive(deep into winter and snow is very thick, my biome rains almost non-stop and so it snows almost non-stop in winter, which seemed to have arrived in early november).