Incentives for combat and Temporal Storms

[darraghd5]

Right now temporal storms are very hindering to deal with especially in the early-mid game and combat with the monsters can feel often pointless and unrewarding due to mainly only getting flax twine. Also the enemies seem to respawn very quickly (mainly drifters) and is especially noticeable during crowding of your base while you're smithing for example.

I know the falx is being upgraded to auto-loot to make this less tedious however instead of flax twine there should be a unique hide or other unique component dropped only by monsters/drifters. This could be used to make unique armour or a disguise of sorts to prevent or hinder drifters from attacking/detecting the player.

As for temporal storm incentives I think there should be risky loot deposits where the player can find some sort of crystal or other reward, similar to extreme storms in no man's sky allowing the player to get rare storm crystals which sell for currency.

[Krougal]

So far the falx looting is...very disappointing to be brutally honest. It seems like it only works sometimes and I'm still left with piles of corpses that I have to go and clear with a knife.

The mod I was using before which just made them drop their loot on death and vanish almost instantly after was a lot better.

The corpse wouldn't be so bad if they actually hindered the drifters as much as they hinder the player, but it doesn't seem to bother them at all.

I also agree the loot is absolutely pathetic for the risk vs reward.

Edited July 30, 2025 by Krougal

[Tom Cantine]

Personally I do not see a need for this, as I don't think the temporal storms are meant to be a loot opportunity so much as a survival challenge. Storms are not difficult to survive if you prepare properly, and they can even be a source of some loot, but in the game universe, they're meant to be a bad thing. The drifters and bowtorn and shivers are pathetic, miserable beings corrupted by something unspeakable, consumed with hate for seraphs and all they stand for, and have nothing to live for but vengeance; we shouldn't expect them to be delivering presents. The reward for surviving a storm is that you survived.

[Krougal]

13 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

Personally I do not see a need for this, as I don't think the temporal storms are meant to be a loot opportunity so much as a survival challenge. Storms are not difficult to survive if you prepare properly, and they can even be a source of some loot, but in the game universe, they're meant to be a bad thing. The drifters and bowtorn and shivers are pathetic, miserable beings corrupted by something unspeakable, consumed with hate for seraphs and all they stand for, and have nothing to live for but vengeance; we shouldn't expect them to be delivering presents. The reward for surviving a storm is that you survived.

Oh, I suppose you are right. I mean I currently despise 7DTD because it has turned into such a gamey game and stopped being a survival sandbox ages ago, so I'd hate to see VS turn into something like it.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

Personally I do not see a need for this, as I don't think the temporal storms are meant to be a loot opportunity so much as a survival challenge. Storms are not difficult to survive if you prepare properly, and they can even be a source of some loot, but in the game universe, they're meant to be a bad thing. The drifters and bowtorn and shivers are pathetic, miserable beings corrupted by something unspeakable, consumed with hate for seraphs and all they stand for, and have nothing to live for but vengeance; we shouldn't expect them to be delivering presents. The reward for surviving a storm is that you survived.

Pretty much this. The temporal storms and associated monsters can be a little tedious, sure, but they're meant to be supernatural environmental disasters/hazards that you have to occasionally deal with in order to accomplish your goals. There are reasons to brave the storms(temporal gears, Jonas parts), that will likely be more attractive reasons once more late game tech is added, but otherwise monsters are not something the player is supposed to be actively hunting for goodies. If you make monster drops particularly lucrative, then they stop being hazards that could wreck your day and start being...mobile loot boxes, essentially.

As for avoiding the tedium of temporal storms, there's already the option to sleep through them, or disable them entirely. Both options are disabled by default, so you'd need to either enable them at world creation, or run the appropriate command and reload the world.

And as a final note on monster loot...that is one advantage of having robust mod support. There are several out there that adjust the monster loot tables, and it's also relatively easy to make a new mod if there's nothing currently in existence to do the job.

[Lugh Crow-Slave]

I would rather they not be overly incentivised it's not really the point. You aren't supposed to be going out and grinding them. The incentive they provide is either to better secure and prepare in the case of storms and base spawns and the loot they guard in caves.

Storms especially shouldn't be something you're wanting to have happen for loot but something you're frantically trying to prepare for before they hit. 

[Lingam]

I'm not sure I agree with the above assumed intention of Temporal Storms just being a storm we have to prepare for and just endure / survive. Why shouldn't we expect a silver-lining from the difficult experience? Vintage Story could be improved by making temporal storms a little more rewarding and interesting.. not just an annoying and disturbing pause in our productivity with a high chance of flax string and rare chance of temporal gears and rusted gears. Since VS is still a pre-release game, I'm hoping temporal storms are an unfinished event that will be polished more.  

[Bomboclaat]

In order to incentivize going out during Temporal Storms, mob drop rates should be increased, maybe doubled.
And also I only seen a double drifter once and that was during my first Temporal Storm maybe 80 irl hours before in my current world, i've never seen the other top tier temporal storm enemies once.

TSs also remind me of Blood Moons/Solar Eclipses from Terraria, they give chances at exclusive loot that could be useful for the rest of the game.

[Tom Cantine]

37 minutes ago, Bomboclaat said:

In order to incentivize going out during Temporal Storms, mob drop rates should be increased, maybe doubled.

What is the purpose of an incentive? It's to encourage people to do something you want them to do. So why do we want people to go out during temporal storms? 

I don't. I don't particularly care if they go out or stay in, but that's my point: I don't think the game developers really want to tell you you should or shouldn't go out in a temporal storm, either. You can if you want.

Incentives in-game emerge organically. If you want to build something, you have an incentive to acquire materials. If you want not to starve or freeze, you have an incentive to go find food or fuel. And sometimes if you need Jonas parts or temporal gears, you have an incentive to brave a temporal storm.

I think what you're asking for is not an incentive but a reward for something you already want to do. Killing drifters is how you want to spend time in the game, and you want it to be profitable to play that way. Okay, I get that desire. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for giving bony soil a proper religious burial, rather than panning it for valuables. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for serving a meal paired with just the right wine. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for mugging traders. But if these are things I WANT to do in game, my desire to do them shouldn't need to be reinforced by the game mechanics. Sometimes you can just do something difficult or dangerous for the bragging rights. If it becomes simply a rational economic choice, that kinda cheapens it.

[Katherine K]

1 hour ago, Tom Cantine said:

I don't. I don't particularly care if they go out or stay in, but that's my point: I don't think the game developers really want to tell you you should or shouldn't go out in a temporal storm, either. You can if you want.

Because currently the game rewards you for packing yourself into a 1x2x1 hole and going to the kitchen to make a snack until the storm passes. And a game rewarding you for not playing it is not generally good game design.

As currently implemented, best default setting for the temporal storms is off. And that's a good reason to discuss if they can be improved to change that or possibly really be off by default.

And the thing is, the fix doesn't have to be necessarily to make you want to face the monsters. I saw a review of VS recently, and the author made a good point of distinguishing between a survival sandbox game and a thriving sandbox game. A good example of the latter is Terraria, where you get Blood Moon which rewards you for going out and fighting zombie hordes with both the unique loot and a huge supply of currency. If you can build a grinder, you're excited for when it happens. BM stops being a horror, a threat to survival, and instead becomes a lucrative timed event. This doesn't have to be the case in the survival game. In fact, it probably shouldn't. The idea that a temporal storm makes you go, "Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no," but with more colorful language is great. If it sabotages your plans for the day, it makes you make hard choices between tending your crops and live stock today and risk, and so on, fantastic. That's survival. But that only works if you are still engaged with the game.

If your best option as a player is to just go, "I guess I'm not playing the game for next 10 minutes," the game failed. Your survival is not at risk. Just your fun.

Giving a player a strong reason to keep moving could be a way to overcome that. Simplest would be to just put a timer on how long you can stay in one place and you start losing health if you don't move, perhaps even just using existing drowning or freezing mechanics, but that will result in players making series of hiding holes they move between, so now you still have the player not playing the game, and they can't go make a sandwich. So then maybe having penalty be applied to your base, and needing the player to move around maintaining something to prevent corruption/damage to structures, crops, and livestock. But then the solution is for the player to travel far enough to unload the chunks before the storm hits and still hide in a hole.

Giving a player a reward for facing the storm is the simplest way to engage the player. I'm not saying it's the correct way to handle it, but it's worth discussing along with any punitive mechanics that encourage participation.

The point is that something needs to change. The rest is up to discussion, and this is all this thread really is.

 

Edit: P.S. Part of the problem is that enemies just sense you within a range. Having some stealth elements, besides simply changing detection radius with sneak, could create way more options. But you almost have to go to Alien: Isolation lengths to really make it work. And there still has to be a reason you can't just hide in a dirt hole. But some options there, at least.

Edited August 1, 2025 by Katherine K

[Tom Cantine]

52 minutes ago, Katherine K said:

Because currently the game rewards you for packing yourself into a 1x2x1 hole and going to the kitchen to make a snack until the storm passes. And a game rewarding you for not playing it is not generally good game design.

That's not what the game rewards. The game rewards you for being prepared, including being prepared to quickly improvise with whatever you have available. Your rewards would be even greater if, instead of digging your 1x2x1 hole, you'd prepared a secure base with water you could stand in to pan stacks of gravel you'd collected in advance, or a quern so you could grind limestone while waiting for the storm to break, or with a means to trap and safely dispatch drifters, etc. etc. 

I don't really object to enhancing the drops of some of the mobs, within reason. I very much like that they're having bowtorn drop bone arrows, for example. But I don't think that rewards should be tailored around the idea that fighting temporal nasties is normative. There are lots of stupid things you can do that do not deserve rewards commensurate with the risk. I tend to think that running out to fight otherworldly monstrosities is one of them. That's not to say there might not occasionally be really good reasons for doing so, but I'm okay with the current reward balance as it is. At least with respect to temporal storms.

[Krougal]

5 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

That's not what the game rewards. The game rewards you for being prepared, including being prepared to quickly improvise with whatever you have available. Your rewards would be even greater if, instead of digging your 1x2x1 hole, you'd prepared a secure base with water you could stand in to pan stacks of gravel you'd collected in advance, or a quern so you could grind limestone while waiting for the storm to break, or with a means to trap and safely dispatch drifters, etc. etc. 

I don't really object to enhancing the drops of some of the mobs, within reason. I very much like that they're having bowtorn drop bone arrows, for example. But I don't think that rewards should be tailored around the idea that fighting temporal nasties is normative. There are lots of stupid things you can do that do not deserve rewards commensurate with the risk. I tend to think that running out to fight otherworldly monstrosities is one of them. That's not to say there might not occasionally be really good reasons for doing so, but I'm okay with the current reward balance as it is. At least with respect to temporal storms.

Panning gravel, exciting!

Turning a quern by hand, almost as exciting!

  

5 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

I don't really object to enhancing the drops of some of the mobs, within reason. I very much like that they're having bowtorn drop bone arrows, for example. But I don't think that rewards should be tailored around the idea that fighting temporal nasties is normative. There are lots of stupid things you can do that do not deserve rewards commensurate with the risk. I tend to think that running out to fight otherworldly monstrosities is one of them. That's not to say there might not occasionally be really good reasons for doing so, but I'm okay with the current reward balance as it is. At least with respect to temporal storms.

Ok, while initially I was of the other camp, I am starting to agree with all y'all who say reward doesn't have to match risk. (See! A man can change his mind, I have to run and tell my wife, she will never believe it)

While there are things I don't like about this game (I'd love to find a middle road for the prospecting between vanilla and blatant cheating with a scanner), I do want it to remain a difficult survival game, and not turn into another bland rpg in a sea of bland rpgs (and no, I don't want to have a discussion on what constitutes and rpg or not, fuckin rpers, get off my lawn!)

 

Edited August 2, 2025 by Krougal

[Katherine K]

2 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

you'd prepared a secure base with water you could stand in to pan stacks of gravel you'd collected in advance, or a quern so you could grind limestone while waiting for the storm to break

I don't know how y'all play the game, but when I was playing with temporal storms on, by the second one I'd have bronze, and by the third one I'd have a small windmill. Just one set of sails, but it was turning the quern for me.

So I have one storm worth of panning, and one worth of querning, and then there's the rest of the game.

2 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

or with a means to trap and safely dispatch drifters, etc. etc.

I can make a drifter grinder without needing a storm. All you do is dig out a section of a cave and set up some water channels. You stand there until your temporal stability drops enough and the hatman drifters start appearing in numbers. All the benefits of the storm, none of the inconvenience.

But it's boring and not fun to play that way. Mob grinders work fine in games where you build an industry out of it. And at that point, it's no longer a survival game.

 

So after all that, I'm still just better off surrounding myself with dirt, waiting for the storm to pass, and then do whatever I was going to do anyways. Just ten minutes later.

I started disabling the storms all together and I'm having a much better time playing the game. And I'll recommend to anyone to play the game with temporal storms disabled. They add nothing of value to the game as they are right now. Not as any sort of a dig against the dev team - I get the concept, and I'm sure there will be further improvements. But right now, the game's a better game without them.

 

I'm much more split on temporal stability and rifts. These feel like they add to the game. They just happen to not be adding something I personally want, so I keep them off, and turn up some of the other survival aspects to compensate. But I get why a lot of people consider them to be core of the experience. Storms are, at best, just there.

[Facethief]

While I play with lore disabled and no temp stability, this is a very interesting discussion. I have to agree that being prepared, regardless of what for, should be rewarded with everything ingame. If you want to go doomslayer during the next storm, it’s easier to do so if you have enough weapons to do so. If you want to ignore the storm, there should be some way to have a decently large “storm shelter.” Maybe a large pile of rusty gears can “upgrade” x amount of low-tier drifter spawns in a certain radius into one higher tier one.

[Thorfinn]

31 minutes ago, Facethief said:

there should be some way to have a decently large “storm shelter.”

Define "decently large". I generally don't fight through storms unless I have a hankering to fix a translocator, I instead use a fairly small (4x5, maybe?) platform with mostly exits to do smithing, knapping, clayforming, etc. The smaller you make it, the less likely anything will spawn in there with you, and if it does, it's almost always one of the easy guys anyway. Or take one of the exits, run around to draw them out or despawn them, and get back in. Storms come in waves, so you only have to pay attention 5 or 6 times in the whole storm. (Never counted, TBH. Might vary. A light might have fewer waves than a heavy, for example.) The only goofy thing is that smithing and clayforming are a little tricky with the world moving around like it does, so knapping the next set of axes and spears, or making up parts for the next automation process works out better, provided you saved enough of that to do during storms and didn't waste your perfectly nice days doing that kind of stuff.

An alternative, if you saved enough to do during stormy days, is to fence yourself into a tiny space that to my knowledge is completely unspawnable (1.5x1.5x1.5) with access to a few trunks and machines. You can, in complete (I think) safety, squeeze honey, juice berries, cook meals, including pies, that kind of thing. It's just a matter of planning ahead, and more importantly, planning flexibly. 

[Zane Mordien]

One of my favorite topics!!!

 

Seriously though, the storms are just a time out to most players or as someone else stated, they go make snacks or just turn them off. I've only done a couple light storms in 1.21 and so far they seem more reasonable on bowtorns, which is a step in the right direction.  Or maybe I just got lucky on those storms. 

[Krougal]

I have set the accessibility settings for "camera shake" (because I hate it in general, not 100% if it changes anything for storms) and "glitch strength waviness" to minimum and that makes the storms...bearable.

I really love the concept but I really hate the effects, they are headache inducing.

[Bomboclaat]

On 8/1/2025 at 5:18 PM, Tom Cantine said:

What is the purpose of an incentive? It's to encourage people to do something you want them to do. So why do we want people to go out during temporal storms? 

I don't. I don't particularly care if they go out or stay in, but that's my point: I don't think the game developers really want to tell you you should or shouldn't go out in a temporal storm, either. You can if you want.

I like going out in Temporal Storms because I guess I'm crazy. I jump in the large lake behind my house to pick and choose the baddies floating around in the water to hunt with my Iron Flax. I did try fighting them on flat land during the last storm I was in but the only way I managed to survive after getting jumped a bunch of times was by hiding in a corner indoors and waiting for them to come to me every so often, not the best experience, but I guess that's how storms work. The worst part was that I barely got any loot out of it, and that's the only reason I go out during Temporal Storms. All I got was lowered armor durability.

Perhaps the number of higher tier enemies spawning should correlate to the strength of the storm? Or places with higher light levels such a players house/base should only let weaker versions spawn in vise versa so theres a nearly guaranteed chance for Double Headed Drifters and what not to spawn in complete darkness or lower down by the mantle? I would like a more reliable way to find Jonas Parts. I'm just spit balling some ideas here. I'm trying to cover all of my sore points when it comes to temporal storms so they could be worthwhile and fun for everyone.

[Blaiyze]

Experiencing my first Temporal Storm was fun and very creepy, and Dave scared TF out of me.

Now? They're beyond frustrating and just annoying, to the point I simply turn them off. What's the point of building myself a nice base, if the baddies can just spawn inside and mess me up while I'm baking bread? I feel like the mechanic is intended to be a base defence situation, which I don't dislike. But it needs some tweaking to move out of the realm of being an annoyance for little benefit. I don't really care about the loot, perhaps increase what you DO get just a little, so you're not left with empty corpses that you have to clean up manually. 

I'm a fan of building fortifications and traps, but that can very easily spill over into aforementioned factory rust enemy grinder, and then becomes less of a survival game entirely. Some fortifications would be lovely. They don't need to be beating down the walls like in 7dtd, or dropping super lucrative loots. But for the love of Pete, they need to not spawn inside my base and scare the bejesus out of me while I'm just trying to hide away from the storm.

Until that happens, I turn them off. It's an annoying half baked mechanic in my perspective atm.

[Bruno Willis]

When I first heard 'temporal storm approaching' I thought cool! Maybe I'll see what the world looked like before the cataclysm! 

What I was imagining was being able to run around - in the horrible warping monster-filled madness - and see structures from the ancient times flickering into existence. I'd love to camp out near a particularly impressive ruin and wait for the storm to start, then run out and explore the cathedral in its final moments. You'd get to see what the complete structure looked like, see worshipers struck down and transformed into drifters, perhaps you might climb stairs which fell long ago into a tower which doesn't exist in your time, and steal something precious from the past, only for it to disappear when the temporal storm ends (or not disappear if you're lucky?) 

I don't know if that would be coding intensive or not, although I'm sure it'd be hard work. I'd imagine you would make unbroken versions of surface ruins and have them replace ruins during storms. Admittedly, that would suck if you'd built your base in a beautiful ruin. 

The storms as they are right now did start to drag for me, until I got good armor and weapons. Now I bake a pie, then invite a drifter in, repeat, and sometimes I get lucky and my guest has two heads and wants the whole pie for themselves. 

[Entaris]

RE: Team Incentive:

...and what, precisely is the reward for surviving, say, a tornado IRL?

@Bruno Willis has a good idea, though: A rework of the effective nature of a temporal storm so it at least has some point rather than yet another Blood Moon, but with no regard for defenses. 

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

What I was imagining was being able to run around - in the horrible warping monster-filled madness - and see structures from the ancient times flickering into existence. I'd love to camp out near a particularly impressive ruin and wait for the storm to start, then run out and explore the cathedral in its final moments. You'd get to see what the complete structure looked like, see worshipers struck down and transformed into drifters, perhaps you might climb stairs which fell long ago into a tower which doesn't exist in your time, and steal something precious from the past, only for it to disappear when the temporal storm ends (or not disappear if you're lucky?) 

I don't know if that would be coding intensive or not, although I'm sure it'd be hard work. I'd imagine you would make unbroken versions of surface ruins and have them replace ruins during storms. Admittedly, that would suck if you'd built your base in a beautiful ruin. 

Actually, this is somewhat of a thing...but reserved for specific story location events and not a general random encounter. I don't know that it's really possible or practical to implement as a random event, given the amount of work that goes into making past and present versions of the same place, in addition to enabling the ability to switch back and forth and the protections needed to prevent cheating on the puzzles.

In any case, just keep playing through the main story and you'll see what I mean soon enough. I will also note that only two chapters are implemented out of a planned eight, so it's possible we could see more shenanigans like this in future story points, or concepts and puzzles as equally trippy.

[Toroic]

4 hours ago, Entaris said:

RE: Team Incentive:

...and what, precisely is the reward for surviving, say, a tornado IRL?

@Bruno Willis has a good idea, though: A rework of the effective nature of a temporal storm so it at least has some point rather than yet another Blood Moon, but with no regard for defenses. 

The first thing you need to remember is that this is a game, engagement is optional.

Material reward isn’t necessary to motivate players to engage with the world, things can just be fun.

The problem is that a lot of players find that the most fun way to deal with temporal storms is to not play vintage story for ten minutes until they go away.

People do not need material rewards proportional to the effort to beat the Resonance Archives, and the glider definitely wouldn’t qualify.

Temporal storms aren’t fun to engage with, nor are they rewarding, and are also fairly low-effort to ignore.

Many survival games present challenges, but also rewards for overcoming them.  Ignoring them and staring at a wall typically is not rewarded.

[Phantom72]

Funny thing... As I was starting my first game, I quickly went through the options and misread "Temporal Gear Uses"...
I interpreted it as: "Hey, some temporal gear, as in equipment, drops during the storms!!"

So maybe there's an idea: drop special gear, super powerful, during storms.

Some rudimentary ideas:

• The gear expires after the next storm.
  • So no hoarding, but you can at least have fun with it until the end of the next storm.
• The gear expires 2 days after taking its first durability hit, or until it's reaches 0 durability (where applicable)
• Randomly within 1000 blocks of they player there can be an active zone with 10x the drop chance... for the brave!

Great! Mine at double the speed, wield a falx with double damage, use a shield with double mitigation, carry a lantern with double the light radius... you get the idea  

I understand that introducing entirely new gear (armor + weps) would be a lot of work, so an alternative could be to drop something like enchanted gear(* - round thingie), with an affinity, allowing it to be applied to a designate piece of gear.

----

As for the status quo - storms are only useful to me at the moment for sourcing gears, I'm not that keen on mob farms, tbh.

Edited September 1, 2025 by Phantom77