LittleBigA Posted July 15, 2025 Report Posted July 15, 2025 Note: I am referring to normal spawning, not temporal storms. The way drifter spawning currently works is, at least to me, extremely frustrating. To a point where I will probably turn of lore content for my next playthrough(they don't have a separate toggle), which would be quite sad as I like both the lore content as well as the idea of hiding in your home at night because "scary things" are outside(in practice wolves, bears and the like are much more scary but I could at least pretend). The main issue right now is how little of an area is spawnproved by a single lightsource, in particular torches as I haven't found any bees for candles (and with those lanterns (and chandeliers), which would still be affected by these issues). A single torch if placed on the floor in the center would cover a 7 by 7 room. Now obviously torches don't light up a square area (well they do but one that is at an 45 degree angle to the block grid) and should cover an area roughly twice as big if my high school math isn't failing me entirely, though most houses tend to have square/ rectangle rooms. However if placed in a torch holder(for obvious reasons), they cannot be placed on the floor (they also look quite bad if placed there in my opinion) and need to to be placed on a wall, halving their area unless you are willing to place a block in the middle of the room to place the torch holder onto. If the torch holder is placed not on the floor level but one or two blocks above for aesthetic reasons, it will reduce its range even further. This means that lighting up any non-claustrophobic room requires multiple somewhat expensive torch holders or slightly less but more expensive lanterns as they do not have that much bigger of a range, as well as both looking kinda "ugly" if there's to many them, or a few/maybe even one chandelier if the rooms design allows for it, which are somewhat hard to obtain. My Idea: Have drifters only spawn below a block if its light level 0, and under open sky at the previous 7. This would not affect surface spawning at night, nor caves unless their tiny in which case it wouldn't make sense for them to spawn there "lorewise" anyways, but buff the range of lightsources by roughly 50-100%. This would work in caves as well (unless the "old" system was used below a certain height), though I don't think this would have much of an impact anyway. A worldsetting for the burn duration of torches would also be highly appreciated. Sorry if grammar, spelling, sentence structure,overall structure or logic are bad, I am not a native speaker and have always struggled extremely with writing any decent sized text(this one took me two hours).
Lugh Crow-Slave Posted July 24, 2025 Report Posted July 24, 2025 The way they currently work is the only real reason to work towards better lights. It's one thing iv like about this game. In MC I never really think about light beyond one torch per room and I don't think I have ever used anything other than torches. In vintage lanterns are always an early goal for me and a satisfying part of progression. I think the bigger issue is one that hits on a lot of aspects of the game for new players. And that is until you really know what you're looking for it can be a pain to even find bees and once you do you need to then work out an the mechanics involved in transport and maintaining them. This causes a lot of people to put them off for dozens if not hundreds of hours and causes frustrating bottlenecks. Problem is I don't really know how to alleviate this without also having an negative effect on the experience for those who have figured it out. Beyond adding a radius beyond when you can normally hear them that you could see the small bee particals flying around to find hives easier.
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