Rift Spawns Seem Odd..

[Wuatt]

Howdy all, I'm pretty new to the game (around 13 hours played), and I love almost everything about it. I came from TerraFirma, so this just feels like a much much better, dedicated version of that.

The only thing that I find to be really annoying, and weird is rift spawns, and light levels for enemy spawns. It's been seeming that I rarely have rift activity lower than medium, and even at medium I usually have 4+ rifts open all very close to the front door of my base, which makes getting anything done feel like a Sisyphean task.

But worse than that, I seem to constantly have enemies spawning inside my base. I have what feels like plenty of light down, but if there's even a somewhat dimly lit area, enemies spawn in it while I'm outside my house smithing, or tending to my bees and farms.

Is that a bug? or or enemies intended to spawn literally anywhere that isn't brighter than the sun?

Something that may be a contributing factor is that I carved my base out of a mountain, so It is mostly underground. But all the walls and ceiling are covered with wattle and daub, so I figured the game wouldn't see it as a spawnable area.

Any help would be appreciated,   

 

Thanks!

[Maelstrom]

Weeeelllll...   Rift spawning behavior is complex.  Patch notes for 1.21 have indicated Tyron has been... tweaking? I might say monkeying,myself. with rift spawn mechanics.  Here's what I can tell you.

As rift activity increases so do the chances rifts will spawn drifters during the day.  Yesterday I was chopping some trees, noticed a rift appear in my periphereal vision, but sun was an hour or two from setting so no biggie.  Until I saw a literal army of all kinds of drifters pop into existence!  I checked the activity and sure enough Apocalyptic.  I'd guess there were probably a dozen that spawned from that one rift.  Mostly drifters, but I know I caught sight of at least one slither and one or two bowtorns.

Artificial light seems to have great success with preventing drifter spawns, but light level needs to be at least 7 to do so.

Drifters also won't spawn within about a dozen blocks of you in my experience.  The aforementioned rift spawn was about 20-25 blocks away.

 

Of course, all bets are off when a temporal storm throws all rift spawning rules down a hole.

PS - Welcome to the forums!

Edited October 31, 2025 by Maelstrom

[Straille]

2 hours ago, Wuatt said:

But all the walls and ceiling are covered with wattle and daub

what about the floor?

[GeekFather]

Do you still have a crude door? Or open spots for windows? I'm pretty sure that and plenty of light effects making a room secured from spawns if you are away. I also make pit traps outside my doors with a trap door so most just fall in alowing me to stabby stab with a spear and collect extra linen for the inventory sacks early game.

Not an expert only been playing a month, but Plenty of starts and stops rerolling worlds trying to figure out world gen options and only one main world with 15 hours of game play. (After a dismal first world of 10 hours) terrain was way to up and down. With were I spawned with normal world options.

[Shoom]

Some light sources are deceptively bad at spawn proofing, namely oil lamps and candles. Lanterns are the best and what you really want to get rid of those pests (except for a full chandelier but good luck finding a steady supply of those)

Still, even with a lantern, enough clutter and blocks inside a room can cause some block in a corner somewhere to drop it's light level just low enough to allow drifter's to spawn on it, so even a small change to a room could result in a drifter spawning somewhere in your house a few days later, and since those bastards tend to run around like they own the place it's seldom clear exactly where they decided to suddenly start existing, it's kind of an endless battle, until you build a rift ward I suppose, but by the time you can build one of those you can probably kill mantle-tier drifters in your sleep.

[Wuatt]

13 hours ago, Straille said:

what about the floor?

Floor is wood slabs