Temporal storms are a bad implementation of a good idea.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Wait, does the game say drifters are rot beasts or is that typo for rust beasts? I've never thought of a drifter as a rot beast. The rot as I remember in the lore turns animals feral for lack of a better word, and then they try to kill everything sort of like a zombie. Then in the end the rot kills all living things leaving nothing behind. 

I'm sure they're the same thing, rot/rust beasts. The idea is that they come from the rust world, but other lore seems to suggest they were once human consumed by rot. We don't actually know what the rot does to people, only that once infected, they were sent away. But I've seen them called rotbeasts since early 2025 on these forums. I think you're the first I've seen calling them rustbeasts. Please feel free to share any lore tidbits you find either in the lore section of the forums or in my DMs.

[Zane Mordien]

25 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I'm sure they're the same thing, rot/rust beasts. The idea is that they come from the rust world, but other lore seems to suggest they were once human consumed by rot. We don't actually know what the rot does to people, only that once infected, they were sent away. But I've seen them called rotbeasts since early 2025 on these forums. I think you're the first I've seen calling them rustbeasts. Please feel free to share any lore tidbits you find either in the lore section of the forums or in my DMs.

Well I don't know if rust beast is the right term, but I have always considered the rust realm and the rot to be separate. Maybe related in that Jonas' playing around with the rust realm created the rot, but the creatures that come from the rust realm I have never considered to be "rot beasts". I've always thought they were warped versions of people who were transformed at the end when Jonas "threw the switch" at the end.

Edited March 6 by Zane Mordien

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I'm sure they're the same thing, rot/rust beasts. The idea is that they come from the rust world, but other lore seems to suggest they were once human consumed by rot. We don't actually know what the rot does to people, only that once infected, they were sent away. But I've seen them called rotbeasts since early 2025 on these forums. I think you're the first I've seen calling them rustbeasts. Please feel free to share any lore tidbits you find either in the lore section of the forums or in my DMs.

I mean, we do know what the Rot does to people. There are tapestries/other accounts the player can find that describe it.

That being said, I'm not sure that "rotbeast" is an actual in-game lore term, as much as it is a term coined by players to distinguish between the fleshy monsters and the rogue Jonas automatons. "Monster" could refer to any of the unnatural hostiles in the game, while "rotbeast" or "machine/robot/automaton" is a more clear classification of a general type of monster.

5 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

Well I don't know if rust beast is the right term, but I have always considered the rust realm and the rot to be separate. Maybe related in that Jonas' playing around with the rust realm created the rot, but the creatures that come from the rust realm I have never considered to be "rot beasts". I've always thought they were warped versions of people who were transformed at the end when Jonas "thew the switch" at the end.

I think this is mostly the case. It's not directly stated anywhere, to my knowledge, but it is implied rather heavily in certain portions of dialogue and lore. The Rot's exact origins are still unknown though, so most of it is still speculation.

[MKMoose]

8 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Wait, does the game say drifters are rot beasts or is that typo for rust beasts? I've never thought of a drifter as a rot beast. The rot as I remember in the lore turns animals feral for lack of a better word, and then they try to kill everything sort of like a zombie. Then in the end the rot kills all living things leaving nothing behind. 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

That being said, I'm not sure that "rotbeast" is an actual in-game lore term, as much as it is a term coined by players to distinguish between the fleshy monsters and the rogue Jonas automatons. "Monster" could refer to any of the unnatural hostiles in the game, while "rotbeast" or "machine/robot/automaton" is a more clear classification of a general type of monster.

The only explicit use of the word "rotbeast" in the game is in the name of one of the tapestries (the "Rotbeast" tapestry, unobtainable in survival unless I've missed something). "Rotbeast", as far as I can tell, is a purely or mostly community-given name meant to aggregate drifters, bowtorn and shivers into a more explicit package than "monsters". When asked in an interview a few months ago, Tyron said that they don't really have any internal name for them besides just "monsters".

Edited March 6 by MKMoose

[Ceridith]

14 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

So for now, the storms stay. Not saying you have to keep them on, but you are missing a large part of what makes the game what it is. It would be like playing 7DTD without the Bloodmoon, Valheim without the raids, or Subnautica without the threat of the deep. It's environmental tension rather than just a scheduled attack mechanic. Even the spacing of the storms is somewhat randomized.

It's interesting that you should bring up 7DTD actually. It's horde night mechanic is the closest thing to temporal storms in VS, so it's a fair comparison. But It's also one of the most divisive mechanics in the community for that game. The developers have made countless changes to many other aspects of the game to try to prop up said 'core mechanic' which have been largely disliked by the game's community.

For over a decade the devs of 7DTD have been actively at odds with their own player base by trying to force them to engage with the horde night mechanic. Upgrading the AI to have ridiculous pathing calculations, making zombies break defenses with ease, giving them the ability to dig through the ground to get to a player trying to hide in an underground base, amongst other things. All in an attempt to punish players who try to find ways to hide or fortify against hordes, trying to force players to actively fight the zombie horde as that seems to be the only acceptable option the devs wanted players to have. But these changes also arguably ended up going too far in an attempt to stop the min/maxers, that the majority of players were too harshly affected.

That might be the 'design vision' for the developers, and sure it's 'uncompromising', but for a huge chunk of the game's players it's simply not fun. I'd argue that most of the game's players like the game more for it being a sandbox zombie survival game, and the horde night mechanic is a side mechanic which many players actually dislike and either turn off or turn down. It's to the point where the devs of 7DTD have finally seemed to realize the unpopularly of the mechanic and related changes and are finally going to add options in the base game to disable most of the punitive changes they've made over the years, likely because many of the most popular player mods do just that.

I'd really rather not see Vintage Story go down that path. I can't speak for everyone, but to me my enjoyment of VS is primarily about it being a survival sandbox game with enjoyable survival and progression mechanics. I do still enjoy the story/lore elements, even the concept of temporal instability even if I think it's also poorly implemented. But they're not the main focus of what makes the game fun, they're thematic flavour that gives context to the setting of the game. VS has also been about being to overcome challenges in different ways, offering differing paths and solutions to issues. Temporal storms in their current form are in complete odds with this however, it's one of the few mechanics in the game that severely narrows down player choice and forces them to stop what they're doing and wait it out before continuing on.

[LadyWYT]

7 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

That might be the 'design vision' for the developers, and sure it's 'uncompromising', but for a huge chunk of the game's players it's simply not fun. I'd argue that most of the game's players like the game more for it being a sandbox zombie survival game, and the horde night mechanic is a side mechanic which many players actually dislike and either turn off or turn down. It's to the point where the devs of 7DTD have finally seemed to realize the unpopularly of the mechanic and related changes and are finally going to add options in the base game to disable most of the punitive changes they've made over the years, likely because many of the most popular player mods do just that.

I mean, overall, it's a balancing act. The creators of the game should be able to balance it how they see fit in order to achieve their intended vision, since having no interest in your own product leads to inferior results. However, for a game to be successful enough to make some money, it needs to be appealing enough that players will buy it and play it, though that doesn't mean that everyone has to be able to enjoy the game.

 

11 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

I'd really rather not see Vintage Story go down that path. I can't speak for everyone, but to me my enjoyment of VS is primarily about it being a survival sandbox game with enjoyable survival and progression mechanics. I do still enjoy the story/lore elements, even the concept of temporal instability even if I think it's also poorly implemented. But they're not the main focus of what makes the game fun, they're thematic flavour that gives context to the setting of the game. VS has also been about being to overcome challenges in different ways, offering differing paths and solutions to issues. Temporal storms in their current form are in complete odds with this however, it's one of the few mechanics in the game that severely narrows down player choice and forces them to stop what they're doing and wait it out before continuing on.

For Vintage Story, I think the best option is for the devs to implement the storms how they'd like, and then give the players as many options as is feasible in order to customize the experience, as well as make sure that it's a mechanic that's relatively easy to mod so that players can take the customization even further if the vanilla settings aren't enough. That way, the devs get to make the game they want, and players can season the result to their individual tastes. The mods just add even more ways to play the game outside of that, possibly resulting in some cool new game modes that aren't really feasible to develop for the vanilla game.

As for thematic flavor of storms...given that the Temporal tab of the world settings has plenty of space to work with, an option to keep the storms but disable the monster spawns entirely would probably be a good option to have. That way players can still have the flavor of the storms present in the world, but don't need to worry about having to drop what they're doing to run for cover, or things spawning in their house, etc. Additional options to filter what monsters can spawn in the storms might be good as well, so players who really don't want to deal with specific mob types during storms, don't have to.

[Ceridith]

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I mean, overall, it's a balancing act. The creators of the game should be able to balance it how they see fit in order to achieve their intended vision, since having no interest in your own product leads to inferior results. However, for a game to be successful enough to make some money, it needs to be appealing enough that players will buy it and play it, though that doesn't mean that everyone has to be able to enjoy the game.

  Oh absolutely. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some design vision that the developer aims for, but they also need to be aware of the fact that what they want won't necessarily be enjoyable for everyone. Not that it necessarily has to be either, but there needs to be some compromise along the way that if their vision is too narrow they'll end up alienating most of their player base. With regards to 7DTD they arguably did exactly that, as the developers spent so much time and effort focusing on the horde night mechanic and tweaked so many gameplay systems to try to force players into a singular path of 'acceptable' player interaction with it, that they ended up making the rest of the game unenjoyable for many players. The main reason the game has remained relatively popular is because of player made mods that overhaul the majority of the game to be more in line with what it used to be.

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For Vintage Story, I think the best option is for the devs to implement the storms how they'd like, and then give the players as many options as is feasible in order to customize the experience, as well as make sure that it's a mechanic that's relatively easy to mod so that players can take the customization even further if the vanilla settings aren't enough. That way, the devs get to make the game they want, and players can season the result to their individual tastes. The mods just add even more ways to play the game outside of that, possibly resulting in some cool new game modes that aren't really feasible to develop for the vanilla game.

As for thematic flavor of storms...given that the Temporal tab of the world settings has plenty of space to work with, an option to keep the storms but disable the monster spawns entirely would probably be a good option to have. That way players can still have the flavor of the storms present in the world, but don't need to worry about having to drop what they're doing to run for cover, or things spawning in their house, etc. Additional options to filter what monsters can spawn in the storms might be good as well, so players who really don't want to deal with specific mob types during storms, don't have to.

For sure, though my main worry is that I hope they don't fall into the same pitfall of obsessively tweaking the rest of the game to try and prop up what they think should be the singular 'correct' way to engage with the mechanic.

And it's not just the ability to disable temporal storms entirely. I'm not against engaging with a temporal storm mechanic, but the key point is actually engaging with them, which isn't really an option currently. It's not so much the having to run for cover aspect of them, that's fine and does add some tension. It's the 'and then sit around to wait for them to be over' part that's not fun. Particularly when things can spawn directly behind you in a well lit home, as you mentioned, which adds an extra level of irritation which limits what you can do during them.

Even if it's being able to build some kind of crude temporal stabilization device in the earlier game using a temporal gear that 'skips over' the storm, similar to how you can skip over the night by sleeping in a bed. Something that's easy enough to make earlier in the game, but not something that's too easily constructable on the spot or otherwise portable, so it forces players to have to run for cover in their base to activate it safely. To balance things out, maybe the crude device only works for weaker storms, and more elaborate devices are needed to have the same effect for stronger storms. Though the earlier devices should still provide some protection, if even just in a small area directly around them.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

27 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For Vintage Story, I think the best option is for the devs to implement the storms how they'd like, and then give the players as many options as is feasible in order to customize the experience, as well as make sure that it's a mechanic that's relatively easy to mod so that players can take the customization even further if the vanilla settings aren't enough. That way, the devs get to make the game they want, and players can season the result to their individual tastes.

It might cost us another version and 3 other features, but I think maybe a slider in the world config to set the value to a multiplier between 0x and 2x with the default in the middle. This slider then controls how many monsters spawn during storms so that players can tweak it however they want.

1 minute ago, Ceridith said:

It's the 'and then sit around to wait for them to be over' part that's not fun. Particularly when things can spawn directly behind you in a well lit home, as you mentioned, which adds an extra level of irritation which limits what you can do during them.

Personally, I see the need to sit around and wait for them to be over as a lack of preparation. If this offends you, please know that I mean zero offense towards anyone. I'm not judging you, just stating what I believe to be a fact as harsh as it sounds. An experienced player can prepare for the first storm. New players cannot. So if the new player is wholly unprepared, I can see an option to disable spawning in a radius around the player as a viable option either for an indispensable mod or just the base game itself as an option that players can enable if they so choose, but otherwise remains off by default to give the player the experience the devs want them to have -- which is, I believe, a harsh survival experience with a story to tell. Not everyone will enjoy it and I think they know this.

[Stralgaez]

42 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For Vintage Story, I think the best option is for the devs to implement the storms how they'd like, and then give the players as many options as is feasible in order to customize the experience, as well as make sure that it's a mechanic that's relatively easy to mod so that players can take the customization even further if the vanilla settings aren't enough. That way, the devs get to make the game they want, and players can season the result to their individual tastes. The mods just add even more ways to play the game outside of that, possibly resulting in some cool new game modes that aren't really feasible to develop for the vanilla game.

As for thematic flavor of storms...given that the Temporal tab of the world settings has plenty of space to work with, an option to keep the storms but disable the monster spawns entirely would probably be a good option to have. That way players can still have the flavor of the storms present in the world, but don't need to worry about having to drop what they're doing to run for cover, or things spawning in their house, etc. Additional options to filter what monsters can spawn in the storms might be good as well, so players who really don't want to deal with specific mob types during storms, don't have to.

And that's fair, though I would have expected a bit more from those storms when it comes to how engaging and deep it can be.

We have so many systems in place for mechanical power, smithing, cooking, taking cuts from berries/fruit trees, agriculture and a few others - And all the storm can give you is a trippy sepia filter and having monsters spawn inside your house. And as cool as Dave can be on the horizon, after the second storm the novelty wears off after you realize there is nothing else to gain when actively going outside and fight. Because a new player might be prepared enough by then, only to wear themselves out as nothing else to be found within the storm as they might think "There's GOT to be something out there that pays off going through all of this".

But there isn't.

A stark contrast to braving the Chapter 1/2 locations or going into caves to find abandoned teleporters, workshops and other ruins..

Edited March 6 by Stralgaez

[Blaiyze]

55 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

It's interesting that you should bring up 7DTD actually. It's horde night mechanic is the closest thing to temporal storms in VS, so it's a fair comparison. But It's also one of the most divisive mechanics in the community for that game. The developers have made countless changes to many other aspects of the game to try to prop up said 'core mechanic' which have been largely disliked by the game's community.

 

8 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

 For sure, though my main worry is that I hope they don't fall into the same pitfall of obsessively tweaking the rest of the game to try and prop up what they think should be the singular 'correct' way to engage with the mechanic.

This is exactly why I brought up 7dtd in my earlier posts.

Every discussion about Temporal Storms - specifically about how they're currently implemented, all the players commenting want to see the mechanic improved to encourage us to engage with it, rather than simply turn it off. It's a different kind of divisiveness compared to the 7dtd community, but it's here. I definitely don't want to see the TS mechanic become something that VS devs start trying to force the player base to engage with it in the way they feel we should be engaging with it - as I mentioned in previous comments. VS is largely a sandbox game with deep Lore that the player uncovers, unlike that other block game. But when creating specific mechanics in a sandbox game, some devs - looking at The Fun Pimps here - decide that there's only one way to engage with a mechanic and hyper focus all their development into trying to funnel/push the players down a specific pipeline, which led to them almost entirely ignoring the progress on the rest of the game. Ten years+ later, TFP have finally learned their lesson.

We don't want to see that with VS but unanimously most people agree that the TS's need some tweaking - it's not a horrible mechanic in an of itself, it can create longevity of play which ultimately, is what game devs focus on. We want to see the mechanic improved to the point that players are more willing to engage with it regularly, yes if that includes options on how to 'season' it as LadyWHT so eloquently described it, that's a good possibility. As the TS's currently stand however, look no further than peoples comments, a good chunk of people avoid the storms - either by burying themselves in a small hole and walk away from the game, sleep through them with that option on, or simply turn them off. It just begs that the mechanic should be looked at again by the devs - not to punish people for disengaging or trying to force players to engage in a specific manner, but to make the mechanic more compelling to engage with.

[LadyWYT]

40 minutes ago, Ceridith said:

For sure, though my main worry is that I hope they don't fall into the same pitfall of obsessively tweaking the rest of the game to try and prop up what they think should be the singular 'correct' way to engage with the mechanic.

From my standpoint I also look at it the opposite way--I don't want the devs to get so pressured by sections of the playerbase that they end up ditching their creative visions and start turning Vintage Story into something generic by just copying what works in other games. And that goes for more mechanics than just temporal storms. 

That's also not to say that successful mechanics from other games can't be looked at for inspiration. It's more that, to use Valheim and 7DTD as examples since they've already been cited in this thread, Vintage Story shouldn't necessarily use the same strategies as those games just because they work for those games. They're very different types of games, and what works fine there isn't necessarily going to be a very good fit when it comes to Vintage Story.

38 minutes ago, Stralgaez said:

And that's fair, though I would have expected a bit more from those storms when it comes to how engaging and deep it can be.

We have so many systems in place for mechanical power, smithing, cooking, taking cuts from berries/fruit trees, agriculture and a few others - And all the storm can give you is a trippy sepia filter and having monsters spawn inside your house. And as cool as Dave can be on the horizon, after the second storm the novelty wears off after you realize there is nothing else to gain when actively going outside and fight. Because a new player might be prepared enough by then, only to wear themselves out as nothing else to be found within the storm as they might think "There's GOT to be something out there that pays off going through all of this".

But there isn't.

A stark contrast to braving the Chapter 1/2 locations or going into caves to find abandoned teleporters, workshops and other ruins..

Which is a fair point. Though I think this is where it's also fair to point out that, despite Vintage Story being rather polished, it's still quite early in development and a lot of systems are still quite unfinished. In the case of temporal storms and certain other content, I think some of it is hard to improve at the moment given that the systems required for the best improvements...haven't been coded yet. I'll use hunting as an example here. Many players have commented that being able to down an animal in a single shot or two, or at least having a blood trail to follow or a weakened animal to deal with after wounding it would make hunting feel a lot better. However, there's not really a way to do that in the current iteration of the game without breaking balance in other areas. The better solution for that kind of thing would be a status effect system, which could see more practical uses than just making hunting a better experience, but it takes time to get such things coded, let alone polishing that code to make sure it's not breaking anything else.

Or in other words, there's a lot of things that are fine for what they are right now, and will be better in the future once there's more time to polish them and other systems in place to support needed changes.

[CastIronFabric]

43 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

 

This is exactly why I brought up 7dtd in my earlier posts.

Every discussion about Temporal Storms - specifically about how they're currently implemented, all the players commenting want to see the mechanic improved to encourage us to engage with it, rather than simply turn it off. It's a different kind of divisiveness compared to the 7dtd community, but it's here. I definitely don't want to see the TS mechanic become something that VS devs start trying to force the player base to engage with it in the way they feel we should be engaging with it - as I mentioned in previous comments. VS is largely a sandbox game with deep Lore that the player uncovers, unlike that other block game. But when creating specific mechanics in a sandbox game, some devs - looking at The Fun Pimps here - decide that there's only one way to engage with a mechanic and hyper focus all their development into trying to funnel/push the players down a specific pipeline, which led to them almost entirely ignoring the progress on the rest of the game. Ten years+ later, TFP have finally learned their lesson.

We don't want to see that with VS but unanimously most people agree that the TS's need some tweaking - it's not a horrible mechanic in an of itself, it can create longevity of play which ultimately, is what game devs focus on. We want to see the mechanic improved to the point that players are more willing to engage with it regularly, yes if that includes options on how to 'season' it as LadyWHT so eloquently described it, that's a good possibility. As the TS's currently stand however, look no further than peoples comments, a good chunk of people avoid the storms - either by burying themselves in a small hole and walk away from the game, sleep through them with that option on, or simply turn them off. It just begs that the mechanic should be looked at again by the devs - not to punish people for disengaging or trying to force players to engage in a specific manner, but to make the mechanic more compelling to engage with.

My assessment of 7 days to die as it relates to this game specifically:

I have a lot of complaints about 7dtd and I ended up leaving the game. Many of the points expressed here I agree with. With that said however, I want to point out how 7dtd relates to this game specifically.

7DTD is a pure 100% tower defense game in which you are ALWAYS running at a deficit. Build a city? likely never. Have a heart attack after 200 hours of stress and fighting to have 10 seconds to build something pretty? yes.

Do we really want this game to be extreme high action, always fighting, tower defense, non stop 100% of the time for 1000 hours of game play? Do we need another 7days to die building game?

I would leave this game if that ever became something that could not be overridden in the settings. There are nearly zero games of this depth that are not also stress/tower/interuption simulators. Can we just have a few that are not that please?

I would much rather have a building game in which 'uncompromising' means something other than having monsters smash your face. You know, uncompromising like if someone just dropped you off in the middle of a massive forest with no cell phone. It is possible to make a game very hard and very ' uncompromising' without monsters. real life is a good model for that.

 

Edited March 6 by CastIronFabric

[Blaiyze]

I said nothing of high action in any of my comments - consistently my statements have been about making the Temporal Storms more compelling to actually engage with, rather then sleep through them, shut them off, or bury yourself in a block hole and walk away during the duration of the storm.

My only comparison to 7dtd is the -relative- similarity of the events and highlight what bad game development does to a game mechanic, when the devs become hyper focused in forcing the playerbase to play a certain specific way, in a game that is predominantly a sandbox survival. I made mention of one area where they actually did something good with their development, by accomodating for it elsewhere, and the player base settled down after initial grumblings because it ended up working.

TS's already present a relative tower defense style, which is why I mentioned that. Regardless, they're an interruption that the player has to deal with, which that's fine. It's just we don't want enemies able to consistently spawn INSIDE our bases - we want some form of safety -at some point- with time investment. Especially considering the gameplay once you spawn into the world is focused on the player homesteading and prepping to cave spelunk and engage with the actual storyline. That begs that there should be SOME way of mitigating the storms, including in the earlier stages, besides walling ourselves in and walking away from the game, which is purely a bad game design choice. If you're designing your game for players to disengage and walk away from it, then you've not succeeded in creating a compelling mechanic that the players actually want to interact with, or a portion of them anyways.

All people want is more reason to engage with the storms - loot that is slightly more useful than a few pieces of flax fibers, and the occasional gear or Jonas part, which is useless in the early game anyways. This is an entirely different mentality than what has formed in the community of 7dtd, where the devs have focused on funneling their development into trying to force players to engage with a mechanic that, by design, will eventually render a gameworld impossible to play in - there is no cap on Bloodmoon intensity. Eventually, your gameworld will be so strong/levelled up, that surviving a Bloodmoon will become impossible - yes this can be very drawn out by adjusting when Bloodmoons happen and spawns etc, but it will eventually reach the point where your Horde base will suffer so much damage that the 'fun' of repairing it will be gone. 

Uncompromising doesn't have to mean no fun. Inducing ragequitting seems like a very poor motivation for creating game mechanics.

 

Edited March 6 by Blaiyze

[Teh Pizza Lady]

26 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

It is possible to make a game very hard and very ' uncompromising' without monsters. real life is a good model for that.

true.

But the monsters come from the lore so without that, you're just left with a generic building game that just has slightly different mechanics than other building games. I think mainly for those of us that are arguing that the storms stay as they are currently, are doing so because we don't want to see the storms become optional or a thing you can ignore. This is mainly coming from a lore standpoint because the storms aren't optional for the NPCs so it's very immersion breaking to live in a world where you know it's about to go to @#$% soon but in your corner, everything is fine and always will be because you decided it must be so. No, I'd rather the world be just as unforgiving for me, the player, as it is for the NPCs.

But I can still see value in allowing tweaks so that the storms are less severe or so that monsters don't just appear out of thin air in the same room as the player.

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

But the monsters come from the lore so without that, you're just left with a generic building game that just has slightly different mechanics than other building games.

I mean, this is why comments occasionally get made about Homo Sapiens mode feeling lackluster. It's a purely realistic survival experience, with absolutely no lore content, that makes it very clear in the description that the player is the only individual that has ever existed in this world. Thus, there won't be any trace of civilization to find, and the toughest enemy the player will ever have to face is whatever the biggest local wildlife is. Right now, that is bears, which are tier 2 enemies. Creatures like hippos and elephants could offer more threat, however, those creatures are also limited to specific climates. Likewise, the local wildlife isn't really going to have much interest in hunting down the player specifically, unless the player disturbs their personal space(which currently, wildlife is more aggressive than is really realistic, but if it were 100% realistic there'd be no wildlife posing much threat to the player in most circumstances).

[CastIronFabric]

16 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

true.

But the monsters come from the lore so without that, you're just left with a generic building game that just has slightly different mechanics than other building games. I think mainly for those of us that are arguing that the storms stay as they are currently, are doing so because we don't want to see the storms become optional or a thing you can ignore. This is mainly coming from a lore standpoint because the storms aren't optional for the NPCs so it's very immersion breaking to live in a world where you know it's about to go to @#$% soon but in your corner, everything is fine and always will be because you decided it must be so. No, I'd rather the world be just as unforgiving for me, the player, as it is for the NPCs.

But I can still see value in allowing tweaks so that the storms are less severe or so that monsters don't just appear out of thin air in the same room as the player.

well to recap what I have said many times, Lore is meaningless at the level of game play. full stop. I can not stress enough how much pulling the 'lore card' hold absolutely positively nothing for me. Lore is background at best, its not a foundation, not important. 

Edited March 6 by CastIronFabric

[CastIronFabric]

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I mean, this is why comments occasionally get made about Homo Sapiens mode feeling lackluster. It's a purely realistic survival experience, with absolutely no lore content, that makes it very clear in the description that the player is the only individual that has ever existed in this world. Thus, there won't be any trace of civilization to find, and the toughest enemy the player will ever have to face is whatever the biggest local wildlife is. Right now, that is bears, which are tier 2 enemies. Creatures like hippos and elephants could offer more threat, however, those creatures are also limited to specific climates. Likewise, the local wildlife isn't really going to have much interest in hunting down the player specifically, unless the player disturbs their personal space(which currently, wildlife is more aggressive than is really realistic, but if it were 100% realistic there'd be no wildlife posing much threat to the player in most circumstances).

The problem with Homo Sapiens is that it does not  have traders (even though that feature is so terrible I just spawn in my own traders to be fair), ruins or translocators.

That is why people do not play it.

[MKMoose]

Backreading this thread now, a lot of this discussion is really just silly in my eyes. Bad implementation of a good idea, good implementation of a good idea, bad implementation of a bad idea, tolerable implementation of a good idea, tolerable implementation of a bad idea, what does it matter?

Fact is, the mechanic is in a half-baked and controversial state in which the ability to disable it at near-zero opportunity cost is the only reason why the community ends up largely indifferent at the end of the day. The very moment that a person finds themselves dissatisfied with storms they can just nuke the whole thing without missing out on almost anything. Simply forcing the player interact with it is only a recipe for disaster, because it offers practically no reward for the player. If no significant changes are made, the mechanic will be stuck in a limbo similar to options like soil instability, cave-ins or fire from lightning - cool for those who like it, but unsuitable to be introduced as part of the core feature set (granted, temporal storms don't have as many and as drastic problems, but they share several of the same high-level issues).

My personal thought is that any changes to storms should focus on the immersive, tense, eldritch atmoshpere of them, and not focus on combat. Both danger and reward should be centered around localized temporal events or slow-roaming threats, not everpresent random spawning. The current state of the mechanic is extremely conflicted with itself in certain regards, by making the player often hide at all times due to five or ten rotbeasts chilling outside. Storms shouldn't be something immediately threatening that makes the player hide at all times - they should keep the player on their toes, sure, and make them hide if they see a beast prowling the area or a temporal anomaly distorting the nearby space, or something of the sort. It should be a high-risk situation at all or almost all stages of the game, requiring the player to avoid extremely dangerous monsters or anomalies and potentially fight weaker ones. Right now it's an extremely predictable, initially certain-death situation that actually turns out to be quite easy to survive with experience and decent gear, and ends up mostly just tedious and not challenging with the current combat system.

The worst part of the storm for me is that it's entirely binary, and that's largely what makes it extremely boring. Either it's on, or it's off. You can keep chilling as long as the storm is "imminent", then you have to bolt once the visuals start getting funky at risk of getting one-tapped. Then it ends as if nothing happened, and you just have to watch out for a few stragglers. If you want to see what it should look like, simply look no further than real storms. Temporal Symphony does make some improvements, but they're only audiovisual and not functional.

 

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I think mainly for those of us that are arguing that the storms stay as they are currently, are doing so because we don't want to see the storms become optional or a thing you can ignore. This is mainly coming from a lore standpoint because the storms aren't optional for the NPCs so it's very immersion breaking to live in a world where you know it's about to go to @#$% soon but in your corner, everything is fine and always will be because you decided it must be so. No, I'd rather the world be just as unforgiving for me, the player, as it is for the NPCs.

Putting aside whether the lore argument is sufficient, I would argue (seemingly echoing a lot of other people's views) that the problem with storms is that they already are optional, but largely pointless and disruptive as well. The player is given free choice of whether to interact with the storm, but very little reason to ever do so. Combined with very high risks, the player is just disincentivized from interacting with a massive part of the game for the storm's duration to avoid death, and given no compensation or unique activities to do instead. While you can argue that limiting player agency is to an extent exactly the point, it is unavoidable that excessively limiting player agency (and storms do cross that threshold for many people) is objectively detrimental from a design perspective and rarely works outside of specific story-driven circumstances.

Edited March 6 by MKMoose

[Blaiyze]

14 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Backreading this thread now, a lot of this discussion is really just silly in my eyes. Bad implementation of a good idea, good implementation of a good idea, bad implementation of a bad idea, tolerable implementation of a good idea, tolerable implementation of a bad idea, what does it matter?

Fact is, the mechanic is in a half-baked and controversial state in which the ability to disable it at near-zero opportunity cost is the only reason why the community ends up largely indifferent at the end of the day. The very moment that a person finds themselves dissatisfied with storms they can just nuke the whole thing without missing out on almost anything. Simply forcing the player interact with it is only a recipe for disaster, because it offers practically no reward for the player. If no significant changes are made, the mechanic will be stuck in a limbo similar to options like soil instability, cave-ins or fire from lightning - cool for those who like it, but unsuitable to be introduced as part of the core feature set (granted, temporal storms don't have as many and as drastic problems, but they share several of the same high-level issues).

My personal thought is that any changes to storms should focus on the immersive, tense, eldritch atmoshpere of them, and not focus on combat. Both danger and reward should be localized large-scale temporal events or slow-roaming threats, not everpresent random spawning. The current state of the mechanic is extremely conflicted with itself in certain regards, by making the player often hide at all times due to five or ten rotbeasts chilling outside. Storms shouldn't be something immediately threatening that makes the player hide at all times - they should keep the player on their toes, sure, and make them hide if they see a beast prowling the area or a temporal anomaly distorting the nearby space, or something of the sort. It should be a high-risk situation at all or almost all stages of the game, requiring the player to avoid extremely dangerous monsters or anomalies and potentially fight weaker ones. Right now it's an extremely predictable, initially certain-death situation that actually turns out to be quite easy to survive with experience and decent gear, and ends up mostly just tedious and not challenging with the current combat system.

The worst part of the storm for me is that it's entirely binary, and that's largely what makes it extremely boring. Either it's on, or it's off. You can keep chilling as long as the storm is "imminent", then you have to bolt once the visuals start getting funky at risk of getting one-tapped. Then it ends as if nothing happened, and you just have to watch out for a few stragglers. If you want to see what it should look like, simply look no further than real storms. Temporal Symphony does make some improvements, but they're only audiovisual and not functional.

 

Putting aside whether the lore argument is sufficient, I would argue (seemingly echoing a lot of other people's views) that the problem with storms is that they already are optional, but largely pointless and disruptive as well. The player is given free choice of whether to interact with the storm, but very little reason to ever do so. Combined with very high risks, the player is just disincentivized from interacting with a massive part of the game for the storm's duration to avoid death, and given no compensation or unique activities to do instead. While you can argue that limiting player agency is to an extent exactly the point, it is unavoidable that excessively limiting player agency (and storms do cross that threshold for many people) is objectively detrimental from a design perspective and rarely works outside of specific story-driven circumstances.

THIS

The mere fact that the player -can- turn the TS's off and NOT LOSE ANYTHING in terms of the main function of the game and the Lore - renders them a moot mechanic. Given that the Temporal Storms are lauded as a critical Lore important -thing- then the aforementioned is egregious.

We're not talking about loot cannoning goodies to the player.

We're discussing functionality of gameplay of the mechanic itself.

When I first heard of the Temporal Storms, I thought that would mean that it would spawn Rifts, and from those Rifts would spawn the enemies. Instead, we get visual wibbly wobbly that makes it difficult to -do- anything (yes, you can turn these effects down - aka *season* their effects for preferred gameplay) and enemies that spawn anywhere, with no bounds, no rules, and the player has to deal with them after being surprised. And then there's no post effect TO the storms, they just up and end and bleh.

Dave is a fantastic piece in the background that leans into the existential horror of the storms, but after a handful of storms, you stop paying attention. The Storms spawning Rifts would make more sense to the monsters spawning inside our bases, give a bit of a cooldown after spawn so that the player has a moment to go "oh f-ck!" and get a weapon/prep, and deal with whatever comes out of the Rift. When the storm ends, the baddies from the Rift weaken and have some way of removing the Rift or have it despawn in a certain period of time. 

Just a spitballed idea off the top of my head, but this makes the event more engaging, gives the player a chance to prepare if they were initially just hiding inside, gives the player the choice to decide on how to respond - as opposed to storm happens, enemy spawns quietly behind you with no preparation possible, one taps you from behind scaring the bejesus out of you, and then death spiral initiates. 

Edited March 6 by Blaiyze

[CastIronFabric]

16 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

THIS

The mere fact that the player -can- turn the TS's off and NOT LOSE ANYTHING in terms of the main function of the game and the Lore - renders them a moot mechanic.

Let me suggest a thought experiment.

There is more 'reward' system in the greater game play experience for Storms than there is doing combat in Call of Duty.

I spend hours making my house pretty, there is no in game reward system for me doing so, its not that much different than a COD player getting a dopamine spike from killing a drifter...oh I mean Not zs.

So perhaps its not a question of reward vs risk at all, perhaps its just not fun. MORE SPECIFICALLY, maybe its just not fun at that very specific time because at that exact time we all are working on a long list of to-do items that we want to do and if we wanted to be interrupted by a phone call we would likely not even be playing the game at all in the first place.

OR...maybe this game is not for COD players? or maybe its just not super refined combat sim enough.

It could be both of those possibilities at the same time actually

does that make sense?

The bottom line to my point though, is I do not think a long term reward system is always a requirement for enjoyable game play

Edited March 6 by CastIronFabric

[LadyWYT]

19 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

My personal thought is that any changes to storms should focus on the immersive, tense, eldritch atmoshpere of them, and not focus on combat. Both danger and reward should be centered around localized temporal events or slow-roaming threats, not everpresent random spawning. The current state of the mechanic is extremely conflicted with itself in certain regards, by making the player often hide at all times due to five or ten rotbeasts chilling outside. Storms shouldn't be something immediately threatening that makes the player hide at all times - they should keep the player on their toes, sure, and make them hide if they see a beast prowling the area or a temporal anomaly distorting the nearby space, or something of the sort. It should be a high-risk situation at all or almost all stages of the game, requiring the player to avoid extremely dangerous monsters or anomalies and potentially fight weaker ones. Right now it's an extremely predictable, initially certain-death situation that actually turns out to be quite easy to survive with experience and decent gear, and ends up mostly just tedious and not challenging with the current combat system.

Given that temporal storms are, essentially, the result of two separate realities trying to occupy the same space, I don't really think it makes sense to make them localized events. Or at the very least, it feels like a disservice to the mechanic.

One thing I've been chewing on regarding the loot drops feeling underwhelming for combat: loot could potentially be turned up specifically for monsters killed during temporal storms. That way monsters in general remain the environmental hazards they are, but the player could get a nice haul of rusty gears and flax fibers at the least, and perhaps more Jonas parts as well, provided of course that they're willing to risk themselves by going out and fighting. In that case, players who play with storms turned on can get a bit more benefit in a balanced way, without players who prefer to play with storms turned off feeling like they're sabotaging themselves.

25 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Temporal Symphony does make some improvements, but they're only audiovisual and not functional.

I think Temporal Symphony could be taken a bit further, really. Instead of just one warning for an approaching storm, and another warning for an imminent storm, there really ought to be more periodic cues. It doesn't need to be too drastic, since too much salt ruins the dish so to speak, but the ground could stand to rumble and shake at least a couple more times before the storm actually hits. In that case it's also something that will disrupt whatever the player is doing and get their attention, without being too disruptive, if you get my meaning.

 

15 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

Dave is a fantastic piece in the background that leads into the existential horror of the storms, but after a handful of storms, you stop paying attention. The Storms spawning Rifts would make more sense to the monsters spawning inside our bases, give a bit of a cooldown after spawn so that the player has a moment to go "oh f-ck!" and get a weapon/prep, and deal with whatever comes out of the Rift. When the storm ends, the baddies from the Rift weaken and have some way of removing the Rift or have it despawn in a certain period of time. 

There was a mod, I think, that tried to tie rift activity more to temporal storms, in that rift activity would be calmer post-storm and start to get worse as a storm approached. I want to say it also tried to tweak the spawns and storms so that monsters would only spawn from the rifts during temporal storms, and the player could shorten the storms to some extent by killing monsters.

I don't know that I'm quite sold on either feature being the best solution, but they don't really strike me as bad ideas either.

[Blaiyze]

11 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

Let me suggest a thought experiment.

There is more 'reward' system in the greater game play experience for Storms than there is doing combat in Call of Duty.

I spend hours making my house pretty, there is no in game reward system for me doing so, its not that much different than a COD player getting a dopamine spike from killing a drifter...oh I mean Not zs.

So perhaps its not a question of reward vs risk at all, perhaps its just not fun. MORE SPECIFICALLY, maybe its just not fun at that very specific time because at that exact time we all are working on a long list of to-do items that we want to do and if we wanted to be interrupted by a phone call we would likely not even be playing the game at all in the first place.

OR...maybe this game is not for COD players? or maybe its just not super refined combat sim enough.

It could be both of those possibilities at the same time actually

does that make sense?

The bottom line to my point though, is I do not think a long term reward system is always a requirement for enjoyable game play

The reward for spending hours making your house pretty is your enjoyment of it - that -is- the game reward. 

There is -no- game relevant reward to the Temporal Storms presently aside from some components that may or may not be useful to the player depending on where they are timeline wise in their playthrough, hence the arguments against being able to turn them off and just never engage with them. It doesn't have to be a specifically lootable reward. The reward can and should be with the experience of the mechanic itself - whether that be choosing to engage in with the baddies and get some pieces of loot that are potentially useful, or the process of the mechanic be fun to actually interact with.

At the present, the TS's don't provide -enough- of that feedback to a chunk of players, to the point that the mechanic can be bypassed entirely without having a direct impact on the rest of the game itself. Suggestions have varied from making loot a bit more useful, suggestions for making the actual event itself more fun or even more challenging, to having some aftereffect to them as a lingering reminder of wtf is going on in the gameworld. At present, rust baddies can simply spawn quietly behind you within the confines of your base, with no warning to properly prep - unless they spawn in another room/other level and you can at least hear them wandering about. If they spawn right behind you you're likely to be near one-tapped without notice.

[Blaiyze]

9 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

There was a mod, I think, that tried to tie rift activity more to temporal storms, in that rift activity would be calmer post-storm and start to get worse as a storm approached. I want to say it also tried to tweak the spawns and storms so that monsters would only spawn from the rifts during temporal storms, and the player could shorten the storms to some extent by killing monsters.

I don't know that I'm quite sold on either feature being the best solution, but they don't really strike me as bad ideas either.

Yes, I linked to it earlier. I want to give it a try and see if it resolves the issues I've personally been having with the TS's.

[kal_culated]

There's definitely that balance to strike of involved vs annoying. I like temporal storms and think they're neat, especially paired with salty's storm warning mod that really makes their approach feel spooky. 

 

As is they do feel rather lack luster, like an idea implemented as a starting point but not developed. Should always be sble to wait them out , but i wouldn't mind say rarer monsters, exclusive materials, ect appearing during them. Something to make you go out into the storm. Or even different types of storms, ones that make it dark or swarm your base or extremely change temperature during the storm. 

 

If we had more temporal gear functions, they being able to increase storm frequency would be neat. Temporal block agimg machine, anyone ?

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, Blaiyze said:

Yes, I linked to it earlier. I want to give it a try and see if it resolves the issues I've personally been having with the TS's.

No, that wasn't the mod I was thinking of. I think it was Temporal Tempest: https://mods.vintagestory.at/temporaltempest

There's also "Temporal Storms Require a Fight" which does similar: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/36080

I can appreciate that a mod like Temporality Plus exists, but it changes too many things about temporal storms(and things unrelated to temporal mechanics) to be of much interest to me. The earlier half of the mod's comment section is also a good example of why adding monsters that go through walls and force players into combat isn't really the best of ideas.

7 minutes ago, kal_culated said:

If we had more temporal gear functions, they being able to increase storm frequency would be neat. Temporal block agimg machine, anyone ?

I think it would be interesting as a mod, but from a lore standpoint, the player should really be trying to figure out a way to fix whatever is causing the temporal storms to occur, not figuring out ways to make them worse.