Add a mechanism to let players stabilize surface areas.

[Mac Mcleod]

This could simply be a matter of counting the number of cobble stone blocks in a chunk...
all the way to a janos "Reality Anchor" similar to a "Rift Ward".  The RA would provide a 30 game days of stability for any area above 105 (sea level -5) for one temporal gear.

I've seen too many people find a perfect place to build a castle... just spectacular looking hill with a cliff or something like that ... only to get run off by the lack of stability.

Also suggest you sepia tone the sky in unstable areas (like during a temporal storm) to make it more obvious the area is unstable.   

And really suggest you relabel the player's "stability" as their "sanity".   A lot of players assume that.  It's the intuitive choice.

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

This could simply be a matter of counting the number of cobble stone blocks in a chunk...
all the way to a janos "Reality Anchor" similar to a "Rift Ward".  The RA would provide a 30 game days of stability for any area above 105 (sea level -5) for one temporal gear.

I do like the idea of a Jonas contraption that stabilizes the surface area within a certain radius, as it opens up more building options and serves as a late game goal. There's no need to count cobblestone or anything for it though.

 

3 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Also suggest you sepia tone the sky in unstable areas (like during a temporal storm) to make it more obvious the area is unstable. 

I disagree here. The stability gauge already keeps the player informed of their own stability level, as well as whether or not the local area is stable or unstable. I will note that the sky does already turn sepia in unstable areas, however, it takes a massive amount of instability to cause that effect.

 

3 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

And really suggest you relabel the player's "stability" as their "sanity".   A lot of players assume that.  It's the intuitive choice.

Except it's not sanity though, it's temporal stability. The player isn't going insane when the meter drops, but rather, they're losing their foothold in the present space and time. Sanity and stability are not the same thing, and in order to switch stability for sanity, pretty much the entire story would need to be rewritten. It would also be much less unique, since sanity is the generic go-to for a lot of survival horror games.

[Echo Weaver]

+1 on the jonas device for surface stability. 

[Mac Mcleod]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Except it's not sanity though, it's temporal stability. The player isn't going insane when the meter drops, but rather, they're losing their foothold in the present space and time. Sanity and stability are not the same thing, and in order to switch stability for sanity, pretty much the entire story would need to be rewritten. It would also be much less unique, since sanity is the generic go-to for a lot of survival horror games.

Yea... meanwhile many players refer to it as as sanity and not many people refer to it as stability/instability.   It's intuitively a sanity meter.   
And lots of folks don't notice the gear turning left or right for surprisingly long in play.  Especially if it is slow.   IMO, the game would be immersive if the sky looked increasingly rusty / temporal stormy in increasingly unstable areas.   Looking at a spinning green gear is not immersive nor intuitive.

[Bumber]

I feel like the rift ward should just do this on top of its normal thing. You're already spending the resource.

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

13 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Also suggest you sepia tone the sky in unstable areas (like during a temporal storm) to make it more obvious the area is unstable. 

I disagree here. The stability gauge already keeps the player informed of their own stability level, as well as whether or not the local area is stable or unstable. I will note that the sky does already turn sepia in unstable areas, however, it takes a massive amount of instability to cause that effect.

4 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

And lots of folks don't notice the gear turning left or right for surprisingly long in play.  Especially if it is slow.   IMO, the game would be immersive if the sky looked increasingly rusty / temporal stormy in increasingly unstable areas.   Looking at a spinning green gear is not immersive nor intuitive.

I have to agree with the take that some in-world feedback would be arguably much better than having to look at the spinning gear. Sky turning to sepia in unstable areas isn't really a proper thing, in the sense that it's caused by the player's low temporal stability and not unstable areas directly.

Here's a suggestion, though: sparse and warped vegetation. Also lack of regular animals and erratic animal behavior if brought into the area. Doesn't have to be a drastic effect like a deadly disease hit the place, but just enough to slightly change the vibe and make the player feel like something's off. Perhaps also some dark mist and smoke or strange stone intrusions, maybe some mutated or glitchy insects, or anything in that vein, to enhance the unnaturalness in the areas and also introduce some underground indications of especially unstable places, not just surface ones.

 

4 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Yea... meanwhile many players refer to it as as sanity and not many people refer to it as stability/instability.   It's intuitively a sanity meter.

I don't know how many people actually refer to it as "sanity", but I've never once felt like it would be more intuitive myself. Either way, even if it's a large portion of people, I don't think that's a good reason to just rebrand it to sanity. If anything, I'd prefer that the feature be expanded to be more distinct from typical sanity mechanics and have more impact on the world, rather than just on the player.

Granted, the current effects of low temporal stability - glitchiness and waveyness, texture overlay, massive gears turning, nightmarish monsters - do kind of give sanity vibes and arguably are not very good visually (I had to turn some of them down in accessibility settings, just couldn't really play with them normally).

 

6 minutes ago, Bumber said:

I feel like the rift ward should just do this on top of its normal thing. You're already spending the resource.

Full support on that, I was personally kind of surprised that the rift ward doesn't already just increase players' temporal stability slowly to counterbalance temporal storms and low-stability areas. The exact balancing is up for debate. Big changes kind of feel like they could justify a name change as well, although even a very surface-level glance makes me feel like blocking rifts and improving temporal stability are probably a pretty similar thing lore-wise.

Still, a separate device could be a bit better gameplay-wise, mainly because it should arguably last longer than a rift ward and act in a larger area.

[Bumber]

11 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Still, a separate device could be a bit better gameplay-wise, mainly because it should arguably last longer than a rift ward and act in a larger area.

The rift ward was buffed a bit just recently. 40 → 50 blocks, 14 → 21 days.

The issue with making it separate is that the player already has to put up with the mechanic in their base for the entire time until they get access to the tech. At that point it's of dubious worth to spend gears just to get rid of that one effect. Getting rid of rifts, but also your stability is as good as anywhere else, is a nice selling point.

Edited October 18, 2025 by Bumber

[MKMoose]

3 minutes ago, Bumber said:

The issue with making it separate is that the player already has to put up with the mechanic in their base for the entire time until they get access to the tech. At that point it's of dubious worth to spend gears just to get rid of that one effect.

Fair enough, and I'm now also thinking that cases where a player would specifically want one of the effects and not the other are rare enough that a common strategy could likely be to just place both devices next to each other. If anything, there's still an option to make it configurable with a checkbox or two, or diegetic levers.

It would also probably just be easier for the devs to add a second effect to something that already exists.

[Lollard]

Surface temporal instability should be disabled entirely until gameplay mechanics around it are added. The only thing it "adds" to gameplay right now is making desirable building locations unusable.

Edited October 18, 2025 by Lollard

[Thorfinn]

44 minutes ago, Lollard said:

The only thing it "adds" to gameplay right now is making desirable building locations unusable.

Areas with low stability are, by your own reckoning, not desirable locations.

"This house is in a great location!

What are you talking about? The planes taking off go only a couple hundred feet right over it. Most of the time you can't hear music even if you crank it to 11."

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Lollard said:

Surface temporal instability should be disabled entirely until gameplay mechanics around it are added. The only thing it "adds" to gameplay right now is making desirable building locations unusable.

 

10 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Areas with low stability are, by your own reckoning, not desirable locations.

This is also why there's an option to disable the instability mechanic. Otherwise, the purpose is to help illustrate just how much of a disaster certain past events were, as well as provide an extra challenge to the player when picking a spot to settle down. 

[Lollard]

13 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Areas with low stability are, by your own reckoning, not desirable locations.

"This house is in a great location!

What are you talking about? The planes taking off go only a couple hundred feet right over it. Most of the time you can't hear music even if you crank it to 11."

Instability in caves introduces resource management to gameplay, you have to fight or expend temporal gears to raise it and it encourages you to hurry, and it also makes the atmosphere heavier and more oppressive. That's nice. Instability on the surface is too slow to really do anything except punish people for settling there. I don't see the point. It's not a challenge, just pure inconvenience. It's clear the devs want to expand upon stability mechanics, but until then disabling instability from working above a certain height seems sensible to me.

[Zane Mordien]

18 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Yea... meanwhile many players refer to it as as sanity and not many people refer to it as stability/instability.   It's intuitively a sanity meter. 

I don't really get how it is intuitively a sanity meter. In real life do people go insane and sane depending on where they stand or how deep they go into a cave? I would say there is nothing intuitive about it. Some Youtubers call it a sanity meter and that has caught hold of some people. 

 

 

[Bumber]

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Otherwise, the purpose is to help illustrate just how much of a disaster certain past events were, as well as provide an extra challenge to the player when picking a spot to settle down. 

I think the Devastation does that. It would be more meaningful to have small, visible pockets like that. (Basically rifts, but less temporary.)

Part of the problem is that low stability zones are barely noticeable at first. Players realize hours later that their stability doesn't recover well at base, then ask why on the forums. Maybe some never even make the connection that the location is doing it, with stability recovering better when they're out gathering resources. Gear animation slowly rocking back and forth isn't so obvious to begin with.

Edited October 19, 2025 by Bumber

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Bumber said:

Part of the problem is that low stability zones are barely noticeable at first.

True dat. But the Devastation is an extreme case. Mostly instability seems to only affect seraphs. The appropriate place to convey that info is the HUD, similar to the way it conveys hunger and damage. I'd propose changing the gear to yellow for more or less neutral and sepia for negative.

FWIW, it was like the 4th or 5th game before I realized that gear was conveying any useful information at all.

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Bumber said:

I think the Devastation does that. It would be more meaningful to have small, visible pockets like that. (Basically rifts, but less temporary.)

Yeah, as @Thorfinn said, the Devastation is an extreme case, as it's permanently changed the land itself and essentially one giant rift. General surface/subsurface stability is incredibly mild in comparison, and like Thorfinn also noted, seems to mostly only affect seraphs. Presumably, seraphs are the most affected since their foothold in the present is tenuous.

I also feel that temporal stability is meant to be something that can easily catch players off guard if they aren't careful, regardless of whether the player is new or a veteran.

 

39 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I'd propose changing the gear to yellow for more or less neutral and sepia for negative.

This is a better change, if there's going to be one.

 

4 hours ago, Bumber said:

Part of the problem is that low stability zones are barely noticeable at first. Players realize hours later that their stability doesn't recover well at base, then ask why on the forums. Maybe some never even make the connection that the location is doing it, with stability recovering better when they're out gathering resources. Gear animation slowly rocking back and forth isn't so obvious to begin with.

 

40 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

FWIW, it was like the 4th or 5th game before I realized that gear was conveying any useful information at all.

Or perhaps the player needs to be taught about temporal stability in the tutorial? The gear spin is fairly obvious, and when it ticks lower that suggests something bad, but it's not otherwise obvious exactly what that gauge is trying to inform the player of unless they read the temporal stability section of the handbook.

[Thorfinn]

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Or perhaps the player needs to be taught about temporal stability in the tutorial?

Yeah, that's a better answer. I didn't say anything about that because I've never gone through the tutorial. The bigger problem I see is that people build in more or less neutral places (which is most of the world, so far as I can tell) so are complaining about not restoring stability no matter how long they spend in their houses. Because you wouldn't get much built before noticing if it were negative.

[LadyWYT]

27 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The bigger problem I see is that people build in more or less neutral places (which is most of the world, so far as I can tell) so are complaining about not restoring stability no matter how long they spend in their houses. Because you wouldn't get much built before noticing if it were negative.

Honestly, I'm not sure that it's building in neutral places, as much as it is perhaps just a lapse in attention. Maybe they're new players, maybe they typically play with stability off and decided to turn it on, maybe they're a veteran player that just wasn't paying attention for whatever. Hard to say for sure. I kinda look at it like food; it's easy enough to avoid starving to death in the game, yet it doesn't seem to be an incredibly uncommon occurrence for players to starve. Suffering the consequences doesn't mean the mechanic is bad, or working improperly, but does mean the player probably needs to put a little more diligence into certain areas of gameplay.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

I'd propose changing the gear to yellow for more or less neutral and sepia for negative.

Tweaking my earlier comment--maybe instead of changing the entire color, just have the gear keep spinning regardless of how full/empty the meter is, so that the player can tell the stability of an area even while the meter is completely full/empty. While the meter is recharging, highlight it in a glowing teal outline to help illustrate that something positive is happening, and outline it in red to indicate when it's draining.

[Steel General]

It occurs to me that the fluid inside the gear could show motion, whirling clockwise to indicate positive stability when the gear is full, whirling counterclockwise for instability - always a little faster than the gear turns.

[Mac Mcleod]

On 10/18/2025 at 8:15 PM, Zane Mordien said:

I don't really get how it is intuitively a sanity meter. In real life do people go insane and sane depending on where they stand or how deep they go into a cave? I would say there is nothing intuitive about it. Some Youtubers call it a sanity meter and that has caught hold of some people. 

People were calling it a sanity meter before Youtubers called it that.    They don't read all the documentation, crazy things happen when the green gear gets low, normal rules of reality are set aside... In caves and during their first storm people think, "this is crazy... that green gear must represent my sanity percentage."   And so they start calling it a "sanity" meter.   Given other games with sanity mechanisms, it's much more intuitive than thinking it's a "temporal stability" meter.  

As for insanity in caves... while it's kinda beside the point... but since you asked... yes, people do go insane in caves depending on where they are in them.  Distance from the surface and ability to leave the cave both have an impact on people becoming less sane (to the point of catatonic states).

Source: StartCaving.Uk.Co

• Michel Siffre's Experiments (1960s–1970s): The French speleologist conducted multiple experiments isolating himself in caves for months to study the effects on the human body clock (circadian rhythm).

  • During one 205-day isolation experiment, Siffre reported his thoughts becoming disorganized, his memory failing, and at one point, his profound loneliness drove him to try (unsuccessfully) to befriend a mouse for company.

• Real-Life Rescue Situations: People who are lost or trapped in caves for more than a couple of days often exhibit signs of extreme mental distress and confusion. Survival stories frequently reference:

  • Irrational Behavior: Becoming obsessed with a simple, irrelevant task.

  • Breakdown in Communication: In a recorded incident after an underground collapse, one survivor reportedly became completely unresponsive, while others in the group started yelling and acting erratically due to the emotional and physical stress.

Anyway...

I think having a visual hint that something is *not right* with the area you are in would be intuitive and immersive.   I know a significant group of people have strong difficulties with the visual distortion, blinking, flashing, warping so I suggested washing out the colors to be more sepia toned. 

Basically toned down versions of the temporal storm appearance with the same options to turn off all the visual distortions available to people who are distressed by them.    Actually, very similar to the color change that *already* happens if you get to close to a rift.

But it's just my own humble opinion and a suggestion for people to discuss and consider.   I've already seen virtually every suggestion made has a mixture of people who like it and dislike it.   I don't expect unanimity.   And the devs are gonna do what the devs are gonna do in the end.

 

• •  

Edited October 20, 2025 by Mac Mcleod
a few grammar changes.

[Mac Mcleod]

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

While the meter is recharging, highlight it in a glowing teal outline to help illustrate that something positive is happening, and outline it in red to indicate when it's draining.

Blue/green/red color blindness is pretty common.  You also need some kind of pattern/contrast change for those folks.

[Facethief]

3 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Blue/green/red color blindness is pretty common.  You also need some kind of pattern/contrast change for those folks.

If you have blue, green, AND red color blindness, I don’t think you’d be able to see anything on a computer. As for a pattern, I’d have a generic glow for stability increase (I prefer stability) and the rift halo effect for decreasing stability.

[Diff]

15 minutes ago, Facethief said:

If you have blue, green, AND red color blindness, I don’t think you’d be able to see anything on a computer. As for a pattern, I’d have a generic glow for stability increase (I prefer stability) and the rift halo effect for decreasing stability.

People intentionally use grayscale filters on their computers all the time. I've got one running in my web browser as I type, and I use one on my phone to signal when it's time to start winding down. The majority of accessible websites use additional signals alongside color to indicate... whatever it is they're wanting to indicate. I don't use them while playing games, but people with monochromacy have no problem using computers. Human vision leans heavily on luminance, that's how we get away with chroma subsampling.

On temporal stability, what about clock hands? A second hand could spin clockwise/counterclockwise to show increase/decrease, and an hour hand could show the stability. Both stop when fully de/stabilized, but the gear keeps turning.

[Facethief]

50 minutes ago, Diff said:

On temporal stability, what about clock hands? A second hand could spin clockwise/counterclockwise to show increase/decrease, and an hour hand could show the stability. Both stop when fully de/stabilized, but the gear keeps turning.

Hmmm. That sounds like overcomplicating it. I personally think the gear itself shouldn’t have any sub-elements, as if the player wasn’t going to notice the gear spinning, they might just not notice… but maybe you’re onto something with some kind of angle indicator on the gear.

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Blue/green/red color blindness is pretty common.  You also need some kind of pattern/contrast change for those folks.

It's probably simple enough to put some kind of colorblind option into the Accessibility settings. However, I think a bright teal would show up a very light color, while a dark red would show up as a darker color, so I'd expect there to be some definite contrast anyway in the event of colorblindness.