Add a mechanism to let players stabilize surface areas.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

22 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

That's quite a long time to go without any warning, and once it sets in how, exactly, is the player supposed to figure out stable areas from unstable when the changes are that gradual?

The sound comes and goes depending on which direction the gear is spinning once you get to that point.

23 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Of course, you could simply change the current balance when removing the gear, and instead introduce effects that are immediately obvious, like the suggested visual and sound distortions, when one sets foot in an unstable area. However, since it's now painfully obvious, the player has to put up with that every time they're in an unstable area, and it's no longer possible for instability to be a creeping horror factor that can catch the player off-guard.

Not necessarily. I think you're imagining the visual and sound distortions to be immediately obvious, but I think at first, at full stability, there wouldn't be any noticeable difference at all. It's not until you spend a fair amount of time there that if you hear a chicken cluck or a wolf howl, that you realize, "Wait, that sounded different." It's not until you've spend a long time there that things would actually be noticeably different. It wouldn't be painfully obvious until the rust world starts creeping in as it already is in the base game, or until the distant landscape starts to wiggle a bit as if even your vision is being distorted by the instability. If players won't pay attention to a visual indicator that's right in their faces, they wouldn't pay attention to a different visual indicator or even an audible one. You just have to think in terms of "gradual changes over time" instead of walking into an area at full stability and being able to know instantly "Oh yeah this place is bad." Instead you walk in, think everything is fine and then start to feel uneasy as you start to notice that things aren't quite right.

29 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Maybe it's just me, but that sounds more annoying than spooky fun. I much prefer the subtle changes we have now, with the current gear to track it all, than something that's constantly going to be in my face with sounds and visuals like that.

What I just said above.

[LadyWYT]

33 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

You just have to think in terms of "gradual changes over time" instead of walking into an area at full stability and being able to know instantly "Oh yeah this place is bad." Instead you walk in, think everything is fine and then start to feel uneasy as you start to notice that things aren't quite right.

Sure, but all I really see happening here in terms of mechanics, is that it's similar to what we have now, but with even less data for the player to work with to figure out what's stable and what's not. The current system, all the player has to do is look at the gear and see which way it's spinning to determine if an area is stable or not, as well as look at the gear to determine roughly how long they can linger in an unstable area. If you take the gear away but still keep the "gradual changes over time" balance, then what happens is the player is going to have to play a lot of guessing games to figure out exactly what's stable and what isn't, which really doesn't solve the current issue of players managing to build in unstable areas in the first place. If anything, it makes that problem worse.

That's also why I say that in order to do something like remove the gear and introduce more visual/audio cues instead, those cues are pretty much going to have be immediately noticeable so the player can easily distinguish stable areas from unstable ones(otherwise they just end up building in unstable chunks by accident again), as well as have a way for the player to gauge their current remaining stability. Because I will note that the current threshold for audio cues is 60%, which is pretty low and leaves only 35% stability available to the player before they actually need to leave the area. If the audio only shifts if the player is at that 60% threshold when entering an unstable area, but there is no meter to check actual stability, all I see happening is that players are taught to avoid those areas entirely, when the reality is that it's okay to hang around them as long as the player leaves before stability becomes critical(25% or less).

In the event that visual/audio clues are implemented earlier...it's still a guessing game, but that provides more immediate feedback that the player can use to determine which areas are unstable and which aren't. However, as I've already said, the main flaw I see here is that's likely going to become quite irritating to deal with, as it's not uncommon to frequently need to do stuff in unstable chunks. Dealing with visual/audio hitching and glitching for a few minutes during a temporal storm is one thing, but if it's a constant factor then it really ceases to be spooky and becomes a mild irritation instead(I mean, think of how quickly it is to get used to drifters). 

I suppose the better way to put it, is I would much rather see a proof-of-concept as a mod first in order to see how the idea actually plays out in practice, given that most anything can be made to work on paper. Though I would also note that if the main argument for replacing the gear gauge with audio/visual cues is "realistic immersion", then logically, the same logic could be applied to the health bar and hunger bar too. A simple status bar may not be the most "realistically immersive" thing in the world, but status bars provide immediate critical data to players so they can make informed decisions(like whether to keep caving or head to the surface, whether or not they need that bowl of stew just yet, whether they need one bandage or several, etc).

Edited October 30, 2025 by LadyWYT
grammar

[Bumber]

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Incidentally, the other thing I have against distorting sounds or applying weird overlays in unstable areas, is not just that that kind of detail is reserved for majorly messed up areas/events, but also that...it would get very old, very fast. Imagine building your base in a stable chunk, with lots of unstable areas nearby. Now instead of just occasionally hearing distant Rust ambience when out hunting/foraging, you have to put up with "temporal storm light" each and every time.

We already kind of put up with this, as rifts pop up whenever and wherever they please. Maybe there could be smaller rifts that show up in addition to the normal ones. (They wouldn't spawn drifters, but you'd lose stability for standing directly in them as usual.)

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Those who are finding the location unstable are likely in a location of spotty stability, some positive, some negative, so the world never acted up until later when they were spending lots of time using the location they wanted for a smithy, instead of roaming around doing lots of tasks.

Even a base that is basically neutral can be bad if you return from spelunking with low stability. You need to recover before you can go underground again, but can't do so effectively while doing homesteading tasks. So you have to go out foraging and trading instead, defeating the purpose of having a base.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, Bumber said:

Even a base that is basically neutral can be bad if you return from spelunking with low stability.

That does not mean the base is bad, just that it's not good, at least for some things. What in life is not like that? You have no idea that a CVT transmission is going to crap out every 40k.. OK, but now what? Make the best of it? Trade it off?

A common theme of most of these kinds of complaints is a failure to prioritize on the game's terms. If you are spending giga-hours building your dream home before you have a solid grasp of the basic mechanics of the game, whose fault is that?

Edited October 31, 2025 by Thorfinn

[MKMoose]

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The simplest way to address most of the complaints I've seen about temporal stability mechanics, is to just add an option to disable surface instability while still keeping underground instability. Most players don't seem to mind dealing with it underground; they don't like dealing with it on the surface because it stops them from building wherever they want. 

Thank you for such a detailed response! Being able to simply disable surface instability indeed seems like the simplest option and I certainly wouldn't oppose it, but do keep in mind that my suggestions stem largely from the question of "how could we change surface stability so that people don't just ask for it to be removed". A mechanic that some people want gone may just need to be adjusted for them to enjoy it instead, and it may benefit all other players as well.

I should say, this will be a really long post, though the TLDR is that I agree with the counterpoints that feel like address what I said well, and there seem to be a few things that didn't quite land that I want to explain better.

 

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

19 hours ago, MKMoose said:

1. Player stability shouldn't fall all the way to 0% in every unstable area. Presumably implemented by restoring stability faster while it's low, this would make the mechanic less binary and allow to increase surface instability while making it easier to stay in "partially unstable" areas indefinitely if you can deal with the effects. Limiting "fully unstable" areas to below ground would also prevent new players from getting messed up if they don't notice that an area is unstable, because they won't get stuck in endless full-on storm-like effects.

Maybe, but that can also teach the player to start ignoring the stability mechanic, instead of paying attention. I think the current system is fine, as the drain to 0 will teach the player that stability loss is bad, and they should be careful how long they hang around in unstable areas. Most unstable areas on the surface, however, are also a slow drain, so the player will still be able to spend a decent amount of time there before they need to leave.

The counter suggestion I have to this idea is to restore a good chunk of stability should the player die with low stability(as far as I know, currently the gauge remains at whatever it was on death). Mechanically, it gives the player a brief grace period to improve their situation before they potentially die again, while also helping to alert them to the cause(the meter was empty, they took damage and things got weird, but now it's somewhat full and they're fine). From a lore standpoint, it makes some sense too, in that if the player is able to respawn, that indicates they have at least some stable grasp on the present timeline.

I don't know how common that really is, but I've seen a bunch of people start ignoring the stability mechanic because it didn't seem like it was doing anything, so I was thinking that making it do things more often as the player moves between areas of different stability would let people notice the gear earlier and pay more attention to what it does without the threat of going all the way to 0% stability. I guess it may be difficult to come to any reliable conclusion on whether stability closer to binary or more continuous is better, because even with a statistical advantage on either side there will always be a portion of people who start ignoring the mechanic.

A larger partially unstable area would essentially serve as a warning around a potentially fully unstable area inside of it (if those even appear on the surface - we could limit surface instability to solve a part of the "can't build here" problem).

I also don't see restoring a portion of stability after death as a counter-suggestion. I mean, it seems like a good suggestion that aims to achieve somewhat related goals, but they could work in tandem perfectly fine as well.

 

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

19 hours ago, MKMoose said:

3. Subtle clues could be added to the environment, like rust particles, slight dark fog, a bit sparser or discolored vegetation, reduced animal and insect density or just reduced commonness and volume of their sounds. The purpose of these is primarily to avoid pulling the the player's attention to the UI (especially if implemented alongside suggestion 2.) and instead encourage to analyze the environment critically. That said, it shouldn't be a fully consistent and reliable way of gauging instability.

Incidentally, the other thing I have against distorting sounds or applying weird overlays in unstable areas, is not just that that kind of detail is reserved for majorly messed up areas/events, but also that...it would get very old, very fast. Imagine building your base in a stable chunk, with lots of unstable areas nearby. Now instead of just occasionally hearing distant Rust ambience when out hunting/foraging, you have to put up with "temporal storm light" each and every time.

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Of course, you could simply change the current balance when removing the gear, and instead introduce effects that are immediately obvious, like the suggested visual and sound distortions, when one sets foot in an unstable area. However, since it's now painfully obvious, the player has to put up with that every time they're in an unstable area, and it's no longer possible for instability to be a creeping horror factor that can catch the player off-guard.

Oh, but I hate the effects of temporal storms, at least the visual ones. I had to turn them down in accessibility settings. And that's totally not what I'm suggesting.

This point largely revolves around the issue that temporal stability is almost entirely disconnected from the world (aside from lore reasons), and it only really has an effect on a meter in the UI, which only then causes a second-order interaction with the player. This is largely why some people have said that it feels arbitrary and tacked-on. And yes, it could be argued from a lore standpoint, but that really doesn't make the gamplay side of it better.

The way to solve this is not to introduce immediate visual distortions or something of the sort, because that's still focused on the player. Instead, make instability affect the world in subtle ways. Not drastic like a deadly disease hit the place or something, but just enough to get the player to think "there's something odd about this area, let me check if it's unstable".

Side note: stability could also be used when generating the density distributions for various berry bushes, wild crops and other useful items, to avoid attracting newer players into unstable areas that just happen to be bountiful in surface resources. In the same vein, areas like deserts and the like could have lower average stability than forests, since they're inherently less appealing to the player. It could easily even be argued through lore or through basic intuition. This is also part of the reason why I'm suggesting to make animals less common in unstable areas. Granted, these generation changes could have the effect of not exposing the player to enough unstable areas to get them to learn about instability, so there's a balance to be struck here.

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Though I would also note that if the main argument for replacing the gear gauge with audio/visual cues is "realistic immersion", then logically, the same logic could be applied to the health bar and hunger bar too. A simple status bar may not be the most "realistically immersive" thing in the world, but status bars provide immediate critical data to players so they can make informed decisions(like whether to keep caving or head to the surface, whether or not they need that bowl of stew just yet, whether they need one bandage or several, etc).

It's not necessarily about replacing the gear with audio or visual cues, because the spinning gear functionality can also be moved to in-world items that the player could craft or otherwise obtain. Either way, it would shift interaction with game systems away from the UI and into the game world, which is incomparably more immersive and engaging, and not because it's "realistic". It involves psychological factors that make the player feel like they are interacting with the game at a deeper level, and realism has little to do with this, even if it's helpful.

Granted, it could risk obscuring crucial information as you described, which is why it has to be done well (in conjunction with other changes) and shouldn't be carelessly extended to things like health and satiety. Do note, though, that the game already greatly benefits from this approach of putting things in the world instead of abstracting them away in several other areas, primarily in the various crafting systems. Also, health and hunger are currently much better placed in the game world than instability, because as the player gets hit, uses healing items, prepares and eats food, these are clear interactions between the character and their surroundings.

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Sure, but all I really see happening here in terms of mechanics, is that it's similar to what we have now, but with even less data for the player to work with to figure out what's stable and what's not. The current system, all the player has to do is look at the gear and see which way it's spinning to determine if an area is stable or not, as well as look at the gear to determine roughly how long they can linger in an unstable area. If you take the gear away but still keep the "gradual changes over time" balance, then what happens is the player is going to have to play a lot of guessing games to figure out exactly what's stable and what isn't, which really doesn't solve the current issue of players managing to build in unstable areas in the first place. If anything, it makes that problem worse.

Isn't having to figure out what's stable and what isn't kind of the point? If the goal is something like a creeping unsettling feeling as you mentioned at some point, then removing all direct and reliable indicators of instability seems like a necessity to me. I can't really be anxious or uneasy if the game outright tells me when I'm in an unstable area with absolute certainty and even allows to easily gauge roughly how much time I have before I need to leave. The two are largely just incompatible and favor completely different gameplay styles. If we want a more cautious, horror-like approach to instability, then I say the spinning gear goes out the window (or at least gets adjusted significantly in some ways), while in-world indicators (be it environmental or from devices and tools) have to be imprecise enough to retain a certain unknown element, or expensive or slow enough to make it impossible to accurately map out large areas.

The problem of wasting time building in unstable areas, I believe, cannot be addressed without adjusting how stability itself works in some fashion (or making those areas unappealing for other reasons, but we're on the same page that making unstable areas stick out is not what we want). No external change will magically make it possible to stay in an area which is designed to heavily punish the player for staying in it for too long.

 

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

19 hours ago, MKMoose said:

5. Slow instability fluctuations would be able to really, properly catch the player off-guard. Ideally, they should be tied to rift activity and temporal storms in some way, peaking during temporal storms. The fluctuations should change the shape of the instability distribution and not just reduce or increase it uniformly, and would have to be tuned appropriately to avoid kicking the player out of their home for an extended period of time. In a more extreme and sophisticated implementation, it could cause unstable areas to effectively move through the world in a way that can be observed and tracked. Overall, it would require more regular stability checks and on-the-fly adaptation from the player. They could also be cyclical, repeating around once a year or so.

I do like this idea, though rather than change the range of instability I would simply keep things as-is and perhaps just ramp up stability loss significantly in unstable chunks during temporal storms. I also think something like this would be critical if you're going to stop unstable chunks from draining stability entirely, as that way if the player gets complacent enough to build in one they're in for a very rude awakening later once a temporal storm hits.

My point here primarily aims to address the complaint that surface instability kind of just renders certain areas of the world unusable, by simply making it so that practically all areas of the world would face instability at least once in a while, though not excessively often. This necessarily means that not only would the range of instability change, but ideally the entire distribution would evolve over time. Each area would still probably have a constant component to represent the average stability in that place, but even the most unstable areas shouldn't be always unstable and should see periods of safety once in a while.

This shifting instability would allow much more building flexibility, since while some areas may still be less optimal on average, none or at least much fewer would be outright unusable. It would also put more focus on instability as a mechanic that everyone has to watch out for lest it catch them off-guard, instead of it being nearly irrelevant unless it happens to be close to an important spot.

And I will mention again that shifting surface instability implemented in this way would likely have to be tied to rift activity and temporal storms in some way (especially to the storms), because it would be plain stupid to have three mechanics which seem to be very closely related in lore but barely related at all in gameplay.

As for the second point, temporal storms already drain stability very quickly and I'm assuming that it's additive, so I was frankly taking it as a given that less stable areas should be more dangerous during temporal storms regardless of whatever other changes we might make to them, since in those areas the player would be able to stay in the storm for a shorter amount of time before their stability drops below the safe threshold. Granted, maybe it would require some balancing to land at the right numbers. Either way, the original goal is that the player can still stay there if they choose to in spite of the added risk, with hopefully clear enough consequences but without getting messed up by indefinite 0% stability.

[Bumber]

On 10/30/2025 at 5:57 PM, Thorfinn said:

That does not mean the base is bad, just that it's not good, at least for some things. What in life is not like that? You have no idea that a CVT transmission is going to crap out every 40k.. OK, but now what? Make the best of it? Trade it off?

A common theme of most of these kinds of complaints is a failure to prioritize on the game's terms. If you are spending giga-hours building your dream home before you have a solid grasp of the basic mechanics of the game, whose fault is that?

The issue is that there's no option to replace the transmission here, only build a new car from scratch. The suggestion in the thread's title is literally just to give us a way to fix up a bad area. (I.e., if your basement floods, install a sump pump. Don't make excuses that you can put up with a little water pooling around, and you really should've checked before you bought.) Jonas invented tech to block rifts, but apparently it has no effect on stability whatsoever?

Maybe it's not the player's first world, but they just happened to not have an unstable base before? You're acting like the mechanic is consistently obvious, an inevitability of game progression, when the entire problem is that it isn't. It's an invisible terrain feature placed by the RNG. You could go an entire playthrough without realizing that random spots on the surface have low stability, because you don't happen to spend much time in those places.

(This is my exact personal experience, BTW. I only know this mechanic exists because I've read about it on the forums. I started a primitive base in a cave, then relocated to the first interesting valley I saw. Both areas happened to be very stable. I don't look at the gear spin while I travel, and the meter has never depleted noticeably while doing so. I have no practical engagement with the mechanic, and no reason to know it exists, all through the whims of RNG.)

19 hours ago, MKMoose said:

It's not necessarily about replacing the gear with audio or visual cues, because the spinning gear functionality can also be moved to in-world items that the player could craft or otherwise obtain.

I don't see how that helps in the slightest. Not only would you need to know the mechanic exists, but then you need to obtain a tool to check? Is this tool likely to have prerequisites involving building a base, just to tell you if you if that base (already under construction) is in a good area?

It's like noticing there's a problem with players getting confused with a certain tutorial, and then proposing the handbook need to be crafted first to get to that tutorial.

Edited November 1, 2025 by Bumber

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, Bumber said:

23 hours ago, MKMoose said:

It's not necessarily about replacing the gear with audio or visual cues, because the spinning gear functionality can also be moved to in-world items that the player could craft or otherwise obtain.

I don't see how that helps in the slightest. Not only would you need to know the mechanic exists, but then you need to obtain a tool to check? Is this tool likely to have prerequisites involving building a base, just to tell you if you if that base (already under construction) is in a good area?

It's like noticing there's a problem with players getting confused with a certain tutorial, and then proposing the handbook need to be crafted first to get to that tutorial.

This suggestion was never meant to address the issue of building in unstable areas. The point here was (though phrasing wasn't ideal) that if we decide to remove the spinning gear for the sake of immersion or a more horror-like feel, then we don't have to entirely rely on environmental clues and the like to detect instability, because similar functionality to the spinning gear can be moved to in-world items or devices. If implemented this way, then environmental cues would serve a fundamentally different gameplay purpose from measurement devices.

I also specifically said a bit earlier when initially bringing up these tools or devices that it would require additional effort put into adjusting surface instability in such a way that it doesn't feel unfair before the player can reliably detect it. Frankly, I don't fault you for not connecting the two in these walls of text.

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, MKMoose said:

This suggestion was never meant to address the issue of building in unstable areas. The point here was (though phrasing wasn't ideal) that if we decide to remove the spinning gear for the sake of immersion or a more horror-like feel, then we don't have to entirely rely on environmental clues and the like to detect instability, because similar functionality to the spinning gear can be moved to in-world items or devices. If implemented this way, then environmental cues would serve a fundamentally different gameplay purpose from measurement devices.

I also specifically said a bit earlier when initially bringing up these tools or devices that it would require additional effort put into adjusting surface instability in such a way that it doesn't feel unfair before the player can reliably detect it. Frankly, I don't fault you for not connecting the two in these walls of text.

Apparently the guys behind the Temporal Symphony mod are looking into a way to remove the gear and make instability clues more immersive. Personally, I'm still skeptical about it all, as outside of a niche appeal, it seems like it's exchanging one meter that's easily noticed or ignored(however one wishes at the present time) for a system that isn't so easily tuned out when one wants to focus on other things. However, I do hope they can pull it off as an optional feature for their mod, as then there will be an actual proof-of-concept to test.

[Thorfinn]

12 hours ago, Bumber said:

You could go an entire playthrough without realizing that random spots on the surface have low stability, because you don't happen to spend much time in those places.

Right. I'm well aware of that. It was probably my 6th or 7th world before I noticed something was up. And how did I notice? By starting to build. I puttered around with sizes, redoing what my room layout was going to be, and before I even got the first floor blocked out, was getting the sepia thing. Took me only a few seconds to guess it must be similar to what happens while caving or mining. Somewhere in the mists of deleted worlds, that shell of a building that could have been still exists, a constant reminder to me. 

[Echo Weaver]

29 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Apparently the guys behind the Temporal Symphony mod are looking into a way to remove the gear and make instability clues more immersive. Personally, I'm still skeptical about it all, as outside of a niche appeal, it seems like it's exchanging one meter that's easily noticed or ignored(however one wishes at the present time) for a system that isn't so easily tuned out when one wants to focus on other things. However, I do hope they can pull it off as an optional feature for their mod, as then there will be an actual proof-of-concept to test.

Salty's not trying to increase usability. He's trying to make the game more immersive. So I'm sure the issue is not whether you remember to look at the gear but that the gear is not a natural part of the world. His approach might actually have fewer obvious cues, at least to start with.

[Zane Mordien]

44 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Right. I'm well aware of that. It was probably my 6th or 7th world before I noticed something was up. And how did I notice? By starting to build. I puttered around with sizes, redoing what my room layout was going to be, and before I even got the first floor blocked out, was getting the sepia thing. Took me only a few seconds to guess it must be similar to what happens while caving or mining. Somewhere in the mists of deleted worlds, that shell of a building that could have been still exists, a constant reminder to me. 

I can't imagine how long it would taken me to realize that. I watched a YouTuber before I bought the game so I knew that going in at least. 

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Salty's not trying to increase usability. He's trying to make the game more immersive. So I'm sure the issue is not whether you remember to look at the gear but that the gear is not a natural part of the world. His approach might actually have fewer obvious cues, at least to start with.

Right, but my point is that if Salty and co. succeed in their quest, then it's a proof-of-concept for whether or not it's a good idea to remove the gear in favor of visual/audio cues for instability instead.  Not so much whether making that kind of change makes instability easier for a player to notice. 

 

4 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

I can't imagine how long it would taken me to realize that. I watched a YouTuber before I bought the game so I knew that going in at least. 

Same, though I also spent a good chunk of my first several hours of playtime just reading through various sections of the handbook to see what all there was to grasp. One of those sections was the bit on temporal stability, so I figured out pretty early on the basics of figuring out what's a good spot to build in versus what isn't. 

 

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Right. I'm well aware of that. It was probably my 6th or 7th world before I noticed something was up. And how did I notice? By starting to build. I puttered around with sizes, redoing what my room layout was going to be, and before I even got the first floor blocked out, was getting the sepia thing. Took me only a few seconds to guess it must be similar to what happens while caving or mining. Somewhere in the mists of deleted worlds, that shell of a building that could have been still exists, a constant reminder to me. 

Even just going underground, walking into a rift, or a temporal storm should provide some immediate clue to what that bright teal gear in the middle of the screen indicates, given that instability is most noticeable in those instances and the gear is always spinning counterclockwise. In contrast, the gear tends to spin a little slower in stable areas, so aside from noticing that it's spinning the opposite direction, it might take a minute or two to figure out that the gauge is being refilled and not drained in that instance.

Of course, that's pure speculation on my part. The only time I can recall actually draining the gauge enough to trigger temporal storm effects, was when I was testing some of the new content at a certain story location, so it wasn't a big deal. But even then, I was hanging around the area for at least a couple in-game days before my stability dropped to such a critical level.

[Metalton]

10 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

 that the gear is not a natural part of the world

Always assumed the "gear" was a "temporal gear" and that Seraphs just start the game with one, that you're not allowed to drop or use for anything else..

Hmm.. It could also be a permanent part of Seraphs (or something internal, ever present in their peripheral vision), which may have some interesting story implications as to what Seraphs really are and where they come from..

Sure, it's not "natural", but it still might be a real thing, and not just an interface gauge..

[Thorfinn]

5 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Even just going underground, walking into a rift, or a temporal storm should provide some immediate clue to what that bright teal gear in the middle of the screen indicates

You are assuming a keen eye for detail. I thought it was just something decorating the HUD. It was some time after the house thing that I noticed sometimes it was teal, sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes it was partially teal. I was always a little too busy/distracted to notice that the direction of the spinning was related to a change in the appearance of the gear.

Kind of like @Bumber (I think) said in another thread (I think), people will either notice things or they won't. Not much point putting circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one if you are going to miss it anyway.

5 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I also spent a good chunk of my first several hours of playtime just reading through various sections of the handbook

Bah, humbug. Reading is for literates.

I avoided the handbook as much as possible. It wasn't until I tried everything I could think of to do with a cooking pot that I pulled it up and saw you needed to dig a hole to put it in. I stopped reading the handbook at that point, and the tooltips led me through just fine. I generally used the handbook only to see if there was any reason to keep stuff I picked up somewhere, or toss it into the next wandering sinkhole I happened upon.

My VS journey has been trial and mostly error. And it's been a blast!

 

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Metalton said:

Always assumed the "gear" was a "temporal gear" and that Seraphs just start the game with one, that you're not allowed to drop or use for anything else..

Hmm.. It could also be a permanent part of Seraphs (or something internal, ever present in their peripheral vision), which may have some interesting story implications as to what Seraphs really are and where they come from..

Sure, it's not "natural", but it still might be a real thing, and not just an interface gauge..

Oh, that's an interesting take on it. I could buy that. 

[Echo Weaver]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Same, though I also spent a good chunk of my first several hours of playtime just reading through various sections of the handbook to see what all there was to grasp. One of those sections was the bit on temporal stability, so I figured out pretty early on the basics of figuring out what's a good spot to build in versus what isn't.

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

You are assuming a keen eye for detail. I thought it was just something decorating the HUD. It was some time after the house thing that I noticed sometimes it was teal, sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes it was partially teal. I was always a little too busy/distracted to notice that the direction of the spinning was related to a change in the appearance of the gear.

I guess I did a medium amount of handbook reading, someplace between the two of you. I recall that I knew what the gear was supposed to signify, and I looked at it when I dug a deep mining column. I just tuned it out when I was running around on the surface because I didn't expect it to be relevant. Fortunately, I didn't build a base on an unstable spot. I just spent a bunch of time gathering resources on an unstable chunk and wondered why it kept sounding like drifters were near until I hit temporal storm effects.

Then I had to train my eye to notice when the gear was moving, and even then it took a bit to note WHICH DIRECTION it was moving. In my current world, the area around spawn is swiss-cheesed with instability. I carefully placed my hobbit hole on a spot where my gear wasn't moving at all. In retrospect, that was a bad thing -- I was moving in and out of stable areas, so when my gear wasn't moving backwards, it was moving forwards. I didn't clue in that there was a spectrum to positive stability. I knew I could lose stability at different rates, but I figured a stable spot was just stable. So, of course, the hobbit hole is in a spot that's perfectly neutral -- I don't lose stability there, but if my stability is low, I have to go someplace else to actually recover. Fortunately, that wasn't the permanent base. The house I'm just moving into is positively stable, though that's largely by chance.

(I wrote a longer version of my first run-in with surface instability someplace. I ought to find it and put it in the humorous story thread )

[Bumber]

On 11/1/2025 at 7:44 PM, Thorfinn said:

Kind of like @Bumber (I think) said in another thread (I think), people will either notice things or they won't. Not much point putting circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one if you are going to miss it anyway.

I believe it pertained to bears. If you missed the bear hiding in the foliage, you aren't going to notice the scratches on the bark.

That's not to say there isn't an effective way to get one's attention (e.g., a loud growling sound right behind them), but that conveying it through the same method that already failed is futile.
---

Likewise, no amount of text in the handbook explaining that surface areas can have different temporal stability will help anyone that isn't looking there. (I do hope it is explained there, at least. I read all the basic tutorials before playing and surely didn't remember it.)

The goal, IMO, should be to indicate that something's definitely wrong with an area. This either gives a player pause before building a base there, or (even better) gives enough of a clue as to what to input into the handbook search box. If the player can correlate the area effect with rifts or the stability UI element, then that's a major success.

The spinning UI gear comes close to this, but it isn't really noticeable unless the area is very unstable. Adding unique mini-rifts to low stability areas easily does its job of directing someone to a page on mini-rifts, which can redirect them to a page on surface instability.

Edited November 3, 2025 by Bumber

[Guimoute]

On 10/18/2025 at 4:09 AM, LadyWYT said:

I will note that the sky does already turn sepia in unstable areas

No it doesn't. It's having your temporal stability that colors the sky. 

[LadyWYT]

26 minutes ago, Guimoute said:

No it doesn't. It's having your temporal stability that colors the sky. 

Places with extreme instability, such as rifts, will have sepia-colored sky. Most unstable surface locations aren't that extreme though.

[MKMoose]

25 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Places with extreme instability, such as rifts, will have sepia-colored sky. Most unstable surface locations aren't that extreme though.

What do you mean by "most"? Are there any locations that cause the sky to turn sepia at all times? And it better not only be that one lore location that I haven't seen yet but which has been mentioned in every other conversation about instability.

Overall, what you say seems like a lore-driven interpretation. Purely in terms of gameplay, ambient surface temporal stability is almost entirely unrelated to rifts and temporal storms, and may even be argued to be separate from ambient underground stability. They are all essentially separate gameplay elements with different purposes that are only notably related through the player's temporal stability.

Bundling any of them together, though more accurate in some respects and more useful in some contexts, detracts from both the topic of the original post and the topic that the thread has largely shifted onto, as almost the entirety of this conversation is specifically focused on ambient surface instability.

[LadyWYT]

30 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

What do you mean by "most"? Are there any locations that cause the sky to turn sepia at all times? And it better not only be that one lore location that I haven't seen yet but which has been mentioned in every other conversation about instability.

Currently, it is only that one specific lore location, but there may very well be more added in the future. 

 

31 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Overall, what you say seems like a lore-driven interpretation. Purely in terms of gameplay, ambient surface temporal stability is almost entirely unrelated to rifts and temporal storms, and may even be argued to be separate from ambient underground stability. They are all essentially separate gameplay elements with different purposes that are only notably related through the player's temporal stability.

I am operating on a lore-based interpretation, yes, since gameplay needs to follow lore as closely as possible. Otherwise, it's difficult for the player to stay immersed in the world. It's like when a dragon attacks in Skyrim and even the grandmas run out with the kitchen knives to go fight it--yes, it's funny, but ultimately it's just a reminder that it's a videogame and not a world you're actually exploring.

There are different flavors of temporal stability in the game, yes, however they're also all related in that certain cataclysmic events of the past caused the current conditions of the present. The practical implementation of such is a meter to allow the player to easily track specific data, and having the worst instability relegated to specific areas like the deep underground or certain story locations(both of which aren't areas the player will be hanging around in long term). Surface instability, as a result, isn't really a huge deal, unless a player is doing like @Thorfinn says and hanging around in an unstable area for more than a day.

41 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Bundling any of them together, though more accurate in some respects and more useful in some contexts, detracts from both the topic of the original post and the topic that the thread has largely shifted onto, as almost the entirety of this conversation is specifically focused on ambient surface instability.

I've said multiple times, over the course of this thread and others, that a late game device to stabilize a surface region would be a great addition to the Jonas devices we have already. A decent alternative is just adding an option to the settings that allows players to toggle off surface instability but not underground; however, that would also likely require a major rewrite of the code. One premise I don't agree on is that unstable chunks need to be made more obvious, as there's already a meter that keeps the player informed of present stability status as well as sound/visual cues to ultimately force the player to notice that something is very wrong.

[Mac Mcleod]

On 11/4/2025 at 11:50 AM, MKMoose said:

What do you mean by "most"? Are there any locations that cause the sky to turn sepia at all times? And it better not only be that one lore location that I haven't seen yet but which has been mentioned in every other conversation about instability.

Overall, what you say seems like a lore-driven interpretation. Purely in terms of gameplay, ambient surface temporal stability is almost entirely unrelated to rifts and temporal storms, and may even be argued to be separate from ambient underground stability. They are all essentially separate gameplay elements with different purposes that are only notably related through the player's temporal stability.

Bundling any of them together, though more accurate in some respects and more useful in some contexts, detracts from both the topic of the original post and the topic that the thread has largely shifted onto, as almost the entirety of this conversation is specifically focused on ambient surface instability.

Currently, if you are standing within a half dozen blocks of a rift, the view turns sepia tone to warn you.

My original suggestion up above was to extend that warning to areas that are unstable as that would be more immersive.   If you read reports of the Bermuda Triangle, they often comment on how things looked weird.   (not saying it's real or not... just that people who had trouble in that area reported that it looked weird and unsettling).

FYI.

[Mac Mcleod]

On 11/4/2025 at 12:37 PM, LadyWYT said:

Currently, it is only that one specific lore location, but there may very well be more added in the future. 

 

I am operating on a lore-based interpretation, yes, since gameplay needs to follow lore as closely as possible. Otherwise, it's difficult for the player to stay immersed in the world. It's like when a dragon attacks in Skyrim and even the grandmas run out with the kitchen knives to go fight it--yes, it's funny, but ultimately it's just a reminder that it's a videogame and not a world you're actually exploring.

There are different flavors of temporal stability in the game, yes, however they're also all related in that certain cataclysmic events of the past caused the current conditions of the present. The practical implementation of such is a meter to allow the player to easily track specific data, and having the worst instability relegated to specific areas like the deep underground or certain story locations(both of which aren't areas the player will be hanging around in long term). Surface instability, as a result, isn't really a huge deal, unless a player is doing like @Thorfinn says and hanging around in an unstable area for more than a day.

I've said multiple times, over the course of this thread and others, that a late game device to stabilize a surface region would be a great addition to the Jonas devices we have already. A decent alternative is just adding an option to the settings that allows players to toggle off surface instability but not underground; however, that would also likely require a major rewrite of the code. One premise I don't agree on is that unstable chunks need to be made more obvious, as there's already a meter that keeps the player informed of present stability status as well as sound/visual cues to ultimately force the player to notice that something is very wrong.

As a programmer for a long time (1976) and a minecraft modder ( ~ 30 mods), adding a "Y altitude check" for stability should be pretty trivial.  One possible default value would be 110.  But you could also make it 100 so folks could have basements.

[Stralgaez]

On 11/6/2025 at 8:09 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

Currently, if you are standing within a half dozen blocks of a rift, the view turns sepia tone to warn you.

My original suggestion up above was to extend that warning to areas that are unstable as that would be more immersive.   If you read reports of the Bermuda Triangle, they often comment on how things looked weird.   (not saying it's real or not... just that people who had trouble in that area reported that it looked weird and unsettling).

FYI.

It could be something similar when you are on low health or far under your normal body temperature - The edges of the screen start to have effects on them that further seep into the middle the more severe it is. 

In this case, that could be something like a slow accumulation of a rust effect that builds up at the edge of the screen and slowly starts to go inwards the more the character loses stability. Up to a point where even the colors start to drain and the view slowly turns into a sepia tone. 

Edited November 9, 2025 by Stralgaez

[Bumber]

12 hours ago, Stralgaez said:

It could be something similar when you are on low health or far under your normal body temperature - The edges of the screen start to have effects on them that further seep into the middle the more severe it is. 

In this case, that could be something like a slow accumulation of a rust effect that builds up at the edge of the screen and slowly starts to go inwards the more the character loses stability. Up to a point where even the colors start to drain and the view slowly turns into a sepia tone. 

If those effects are tied to the stability meter, that doesn't help much. There's already distortions when you drop below certain thresholds.

The problem is that if you're near full but slowly draining, it could take several minutes of standing in one spot to even trigger the effect. If you're already at low stability when entering, you're already suffering the effect, and it could be several minutes before you realize you're actually not getting better. (Though you're likely to actively be checking the meter in the latter case, and might notice that the gear has stalled.)

If you tie it to the rate of change instead, then you get the issue of the screen effect showing up while you're traveling the world. There'd have to be a delay where the effect slowly fades in if you haven't touched a stable area in a minute. It might be worthwhile to avoid applying the effect underground, or increase the requirements for how bad it has to be. (Does surface instability stack with depth instability at all?)

Edited November 9, 2025 by Bumber