WalrusJones Posted July 13, 2025 Report Posted July 13, 2025 (edited) So, before I bore you with my pathos behind the idea I'm going to go over the few basic bullet points of my proposals. Chunks average rift activity becomes a more actively prospect-able aspect rather than needing to interpret only your personal stability rising and lowering. Average rift intensity is often but not always thinner near spawn, thicker near ruins, this isn't always the case as too much uniformity is boring. To prospect rifts, you use a variety of gear like charms that vibrate in response to rift activity which can be held offhand. Different charms can have a larger radius or more stages of rift density they can prospect. Charms split between precise and area types so players can either find small pockets of heavenly very thin activity or a large zone where the worst activity is unlikely. A mapmode tracks the best prospecting you've done in an area with charms. Really good charms might start to glow instead of just vibrating when the local area is really, really bad. Disposable charms can be used in disposable rituals like hanging them off a flaming torch to relieve rift sickness during bad rift activity (Burning it away,) or strengthen the lights ability to suppress rift activity for a few chunks. Example of weirder effects: One could be used to draw out rarer rift monsters to farm rare rift drops. My reasoning for this is simple, having had four or so friends find the game and experience great frustrations with rifts so I figured it would be wise to make rifts something players proactively engage with since while I'm able to simply run at night and avoid spawns, its hard to sell new players on the nomadism that thoroughly beats rifts consistently (Since I've seen too many screenshots of them spawning in or on well lit houses now.) Interacting with and hunting for areas that are calm and safe adds an element of engagement where they are actually coming up with a solution to their troubles instead of simply turning them off. For a proposal on the progression, my idea for the first charm involves a "Thatch gear charm" that lets you identify when an area within 40 or so blocks of the area has more than medium (Lets call it serious) average activity using large amounts of thatch and sticks to make a gear idol, moving up to more exotic metal and temporal gear charms for precisely identifying your current chunk or identifying down to medium activity to much larger radius's. The reason I argue for charms to never be both highly sensitive AND wide area is actually simple though, it wouldn't be too useful to have both. A charm that's sensitive and wide area would practically always be going off, so the precision versus area tradeoff helps maximizing in how interesting the charm based prospecting system is (Finding an area that's not terribly unstable and searching for the nicest areas of it, making it so the prospecting happens in stages,) while also making sure the charms are meaningful and easily interpreted if you bring the right selection. Edited July 13, 2025 by WalrusJones 1
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