Diversifying drifter drops for fewer empty kills.

[WalrusJones]

One thing that I've noticed with the 3-4 players I've invited to the game is actually really simple: The plain-ish drifter drops has made them really adverse to investing into killing enemies even if the rare drops are reasonably good. Any joy in combat was extinguished by the gambling involved.
While I was generally able to get satisfied by slowly turning the tables on them, most people probably want to feel rewarded for their efforts since there are three people screaming at me that they clearly only drop twine after years in game, which only could have happened if they so obsessively never fought that they didn't see the gear drop.
The common story was panning big reward drifters never reward (When the drop rates are sort of the opposite of this) so I propose something very simple so players more readily discover the more intended gameplay loop (You farm the drifters for temporal gears) more consistently.

Add more common rewards for killing drifters are items that reward a combat focused gameplay loop from panning: Flint arrow heads, knife blades, spear heads, and scrap, with some miscellaneous items like blue clay.
This can be justified in that many of these items were stabbed into the drifter, the scrap is part of the metallic innards that we use falx's to penetrate (If I remember the journals well enough,) and their flesh sort of resembles blue clay.

• Part of this is to make it rewarding to find efficient ways to kill them, such as with a club, as being able to profit spear and arrow heads you can use to hunt is good.
• Small volumes of clay I thought about because one of the stresses my friends spoke about was running low on clay locally for skeps, having clay be a reward from drifter kills equates it to the emotion that you can sustainably reap the rewards of beekeeping if you more proactively defend your homestead.
• Scrap is a resource that isn't useful once you've found a surface copper vein, which is usually early. If it was twice as common as gears from enemy bodies, it would make the memey, low durability scrap weapons a fun reward for engaging in combat!
• Rare luxury items like a copper knife blade being ultra rare would be memorable while not meaningfully impacting progression.

The last thing I'd like to recommend is a siftable slab like material "Tarnish".

• (As a general note, I've gotten reports of people finding upwards of 5 temporal gears with how much they've turned to panning instead of combat, while not mentioning finding any as a kill reward... I'm effectively the only person I know who hasn't fallen into an endless panning loop.)
• Tarnish is a slab which is siftable, giving 2-3 uses per block of tarnish.
• Tarnish damages your stability to touch or sift, but has better drop rates than regular gravel.
  • The reason for the personal stability damage is twofold!
  • One is that it helps you find stable regions when you damage your stability, you can gauge how much your stability meter is repaired after panning and find places that are optimal for your temporal health.
  • The second is that destabilizing yourself does apparently help drifters spawn if I'm reading right, so you could hypothetically use tarnish to create a drifter fightclub if you so wished.
• The ultimate goal of tanish is to guarantee that drifters are "Slightly more valuable than panning for 100 hours straight."

Bone arrows were a great first step, many of the concerns with drifters would be improving the combat feedback loop where drifters have a better established use to make engaging with the drifters better enable a more combat focused play-style. Since I doubt people camping in their basement for hundreds of hours panning is the intended gameplay experience.
While I've more or less adapted to the fact that I need to accept I'll see empty bodies, seeing so many people engage in days of screensaver level activity staring at a wall is mind boggling.
(I'm so glad I've mostly adapted to never need to pan, but hearing the stories of what they've chosen to do after hours and hours of gaslighting themselves into assuming there is no more loot elsewhere is gravely concerning.)

You got the gameplay loop for fighting animals to be properly rewarding, I believe you can see my points here and figure out something better you can do than this.

Edited July 15, 2025 by WalrusJones
Condensing it and making it get more to the point + Fixing one statement that was confusing.

[Thorfinn]

It would have been simplicity itself to add drops to make this a combat game. They chose not to. Here's the bit for surface drifter drops:

			{ code: "harvestable", duration: 2, fixedweight: true, dropsByType: {
				"*-normal": [
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "gear-temporal",
						quantity: { avg: 0.02666, var: 0 }
					},
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "flaxfibers",
						quantity: { avg: 0.2, var: 0 }
					},
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "gear-rusty",
						dropModbyStat: "rustyGearDropRate",
						quantity: { avg: 0.01, var: 0 }
					}
				],
	

Would not have been difficult to change the item dropped, or the average quantity, or both.

Obviously, the game they intended to create does not involve grinding creatures, like Terraria. Not that you can't easily mod it to become yet another Terraria, but in 3-D. But that is not the direction the game seeks to head.

[WalrusJones]

I mean you are still farming them for the respawns though, so we still went that direction since otherwise its thousands of panning actions for this privilege. Alongside surviving wolf and bear attacks for larger pelts, etc etc.

We already are in this gameplay loop if you don't want to spend hours staring at the water. That is, unless you see the twine and decide to do 200 hours of panning like my friends did.
I figured that people being willing to fight and go outside instead of staring at the water if there was more of a reward: 
They were fine killing wolves, bears and the like to oil their pelts, but not drifters.

Both farming mobs and 200 hours of panning are worse than going out, prospecting, and finding the bounty of nature, but one leads to people being less afraid of going outside and thus, makes it more likely they discover the proper way to play the game. Both are diseased ways of playing but one at least has a chance of recovering and having a good time with this game. Since this should be a game of you looking for natural resources instead of staring at the water, but people finding the combat unrewarding has lead to me waking up for two weeks with essays about how people hate the outside because they were enraged at seeing twine.

(I even pointed out to these guys that you could often do what they were doing in game in 5 days if they were willing to leave their homes they refused to put light in... Yet the only thing I've seen people I know do is get scared of the outside completely and refuse to go there.)

Edited July 15, 2025 by WalrusJones

[Thorfinn]

Let me get you started. Take the basic drifter.json that I listed above, skip down to that section, change 

quantity: { avg: 0.02666, var: 0 }

to 

quantity: { avg: 0.2666, var: 0 }

Now, on average, you get one temporal gear for every 4 drifters.

Or take that section and insert additional drops in whatever trips your trigger.

			{ code: "harvestable", duration: 2, fixedweight: true, dropsByType: {
				"*-normal": [
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "gear-temporal",
						quantity: { avg: 0.02666, var: 0 }
					},
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "flaxfibers",
						quantity: { avg: 0.2, var: 0 }
					},
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "arrowhead-gold",
						quantity: { avg: 1.2, var: 0 }
					},
					{
						type: "item",
						code: "gear-rusty",
						dropModbyStat: "rustyGearDropRate",
						quantity: { avg: 0.01, var: 0 }
					}
				],
	

Now you get 1 golden arrowhead for sure per kill, and a 20% chance of a second one.

See how easy it would have been for them to do that?

Make the game the one you want to play. Don't insist that they change it on everyone.

[EDIT]

Because of the loot popup, you are limited to only 4 drops. That can be changed, too. But making grinding profitable was obviously not the intent.

Edited July 15, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Enjen]

In an interview, Tyron actually suggested people can edit the VS Survival Mod to do stuff exactly like this haha! It's incredible that I'm seeing this right after watching that. Super helpful explanation Thorfinn. Ty much! o7

[WalrusJones]

I might need to run an experiment with these guys to see if I can get them out of the dirt shack they've been watching the water in for two years. 
I've done far more involved modding for other games so you don't need to post more tutorial, thank you for thinking of that much. (Even if many of my older works been buried by years of updates in other games.)

I just wanted to share the story of the last two weeks because I'm sort of terrified of the rants I've been getting every morning of outside scary no resources worthless stab man has string.

I've just seen this happen too many times for weeks on end.

Edited July 15, 2025 by WalrusJones

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Flax can be had from farming. Rusty gears can be had by selling crafted goods to traders. Everything else can be had by exploring, digging, crafting etc... the game literally hands you a world chock full of resources. Drifters and the like weren't ever really intended to be a viable source of those things.

When I first started the game, I was much like your friends, scared to leave the house, scared to go out and explore, scared I might get eaten by a bear or a wolf. If rift activity was anything other than calm, I got nervous.

Now, when I see that Apocalyptic rift activity, I turn on the disco lights and welcome my new friends to a dance party (with more stabbing than usual). It's just something that takes time to acclimate to. What I had to help me was a friend who wasn't an enabler. She didn't cater to me. She didn't make the game easier. She just showed me how to play it as it is.

And I'm better for it.

[Facethief]

Diversifying drifter drops to deescalate dearth of doodads.

[Tom Cantine]

I do not see farming drifters for loot as an "intended gameplay loop". I have always seen the Rust world nasties as intentionally a Bad Thing, something to be avoided or mitigated, and if you CAN get something useful out of it, great, but most of the time they're a net negative.

It is, of course, possible to farm them, but it's possible to come up with all sorts of ways to capitalize on hidden opportunities. There are dedicated mob farms that produce quite respectable quantities of loot, but like anything else it takes a fair bit of planning, resources and risk to construct an effective one where the more lucrative mobs spawn. And I think that's entirely appropriate.

[LadyWYT]

13 hours ago, WalrusJones said:

I might need to run an experiment with these guys to see if I can get them out of the dirt shack they've been watching the water in for two years. 
I've done far more involved modding for other games so you don't need to post more tutorial, thank you for thinking of that much. (Even if many of my older works been buried by years of updates in other games.)

I just wanted to share the story of the last two weeks because I'm sort of terrified of the rants I've been getting every morning of outside scary no resources worthless stab man has string.

I've just seen this happen too many times for weeks on end.

Out of curiosity, have you tried giving them more things to fight instead, since they seem to prefer combat? Fauna of the Stone Age has a great selection of dangerous beasts, and a different mod author has been adding dinosaurs to the game. Others have added different kinds of monsters too to help flesh out the current roster more.

Otherwise, you might try mods like the following:

Better Loot: https://mods.vintagestory.at/betterloot

Drifters Have Loot: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/14762

Battle Towers: https://mods.vintagestory.at/battletowers

There are others, but those are just some suggestions to increase the drops and loot variety. Something like Battle Towers gives them structures to actively seek out, both for the monsters themselves as well as the treasures the monsters may be guarding.

Edited July 15, 2025 by LadyWYT