Fragile Clutter in Dungeons.

[Bruno Willis]

With the new dungeons, clutter is more easily accessed. It looks great, but doesn't feels rare anymore. If Clutter were delicate and likely to break, it could be used all through ruins and still be precious.

I've been looting dungeons for aged stone variants, which has caused me to A: have the most fun building I've had so far and B: burn through two pickaxes and a chisel on aesthetics in the very early game. I think both things are great for gameplay, but I've left behind an absolute mess in the looted ruins, (a worse sort of mess than before). I'm too early game to take any clutter, so it's just floating in defiance of time?/gravity. My looted dungeons look horrible now. 

To solve this, let's make clutter actually fragile:

• Have clutter disintegrate very quickly when mined without first gluing. (mine speed increased to something like that of haybales).
• Keep the slow mining speed once clutter is glued (to imply you are being very very careful with the repaired piece). 
• Give clutter a high chance to disintegrate if walked on (10% for rust-foes, 20% for malefactors, 50% blackguards, 30% everyone else).
• Let clutter be affected by gravity, and be guaranteed to disintegrate if it falls (With something like a 60% chance to survive falls after it's been glued up).
• Have clutter disintegrate if hit with an attack? (I don't know how attacks interact with the environment so please correct me if that wouldn't work)

That way when you enter a ruin and see the clutter you don't just gloss over it thinking, "I'll loot and clear this place out, and come back for the clutter later." You move cautiously around the ancient space, accidentally shattering old tables and rusted iron grates with the smallest touch, and when you see something special you make sure to glue it up quickly, before it gets destroyed on accident. That way you really value the clutter you glue up. It'd let you feel like an archeologist if you're careful, or a barbarian in a ceramics exhibit if you're not.

Also, imagine how satisfying it would be to fight a shiver in a dungeon, being nocked onto a crate, which shatters under you. You swing wildly, miss, and destroy a rotten table with a single blow...

[Zx573]

I quite like this idea, even a partial implementation would feel better than what we currently have. It's odd for clutter to supposedly be fragile and yet take as long as it does to break when you don't want it. Non floating clutter makes sense as well.

I could take or leave it breaking when stepped on, it makes sense but doesn't have the same gameplay boosts for me that I see from the other suggestions. 

I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult to mod this either. I might have to take a swing at it at some point.

.

[ifoz]

I think this could make sense for certain more fragile clutter, but if this was applied to all clutter in the game I can see it just being annoying and even a bit immersion-breaking.
Some things like ruined protective suits, locust/bell/Eidolon parts, and metal tanks I don't think should really require glue in the first place, and the fact they do only makes sense from a gameplay/unification perspective. Stepping on a lead-plated protective suit isn't going to make it disintegrate, same for stepping on a cast iron Eidolon limb.

I could see this making sense for things like ceramics and some wooden rubble, but even then it'd probably get a bit annoying hearing that snap sound effect over and over again when walking through a dungeon. Especially if it's from enemies spawning in other rooms and immediately breaking everything in sight before you can get in there. 

I do think it would be fun if cracked vessels would shatter when dropped from any height though, to make their excavation as a Malefactor more interesting. For other classes it wouldn't really mean much, since they get shattered 100% of the time regardless.

Things like wooden rubble having gravity would be nice though, to match up with how stone rubble has gravity. It would also be nice if wood rubble was flammable, even if other wooden clutter wasn't considering it'd probably require going in and setting properties for the thousand clutter items currently in the game.

[EDIT]: I also don't really agree with the mining speed change, just because I can see that annoying players when they accidentally misclick on something. I do think though that clutter should be mined faster with respective tools (wood clutter breaking faster with an axe rather than a pickaxe for example). Currently all clutter has the pickaxe as the fastest tool, which isn't very intuitive.

Edited May 24 by ifoz

[Bruno Willis]

2 hours ago, Zx573 said:

I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult to mod this either. I might have to take a swing at it at some point.

I'll do cover art for you if you want it

[LadyWYT]

38 minutes ago, ifoz said:

I think this could make sense for certain more fragile clutter, but if this was applied to all clutter in the game I can see it just being annoying and even a bit immersion-breaking.
Some things like ruined protective suits, locust/bell/Eidolon parts, and metal tanks I don't think should really require glue in the first place, and the fact they do only makes sense from a gameplay/unification perspective. Stepping on a lead-plated protective suit isn't going to make it disintegrate, same for stepping on a cast iron Eidolon limb.

I could see this making sense for things like ceramics and some wooden rubble, but even then it'd probably get a bit annoying hearing that snap sound effect over and over again when walking through a dungeon. Especially if it's from enemies spawning in other rooms and immediately breaking everything in sight before you can get in there. 

This is my general thoughts as well. Additionally, one common complaint I see regarding clutter is that by default, it needs to be glued before it can be picked up, so I doubt making clutter even more fragile is going to make it more appealing to players. It would be rather unsatisfying to find a piece of clutter you like, only to destroy it because you accidentally stepped on it or got thrown into it by a monster's attack.

The better option, I think, is to add more fragile structure that can collapse under a player's weight, or otherwise be stuff that the player can destroy in protected locations in order to open up a secret passage or something. These blocks could also be blocks that stronger monsters are capable of tearing through; imagine exploring a story location and seeing iron bars with the flavor text "Old, rusted, and lacking their former strength". It seems innocent enough until a deepsplit shiver or some other large nasty comes screeching out of the dark and rams through the bars like they were toothpicks. Of course, there's also the classic "cracked wall" section that the player could destroy to reveal a secret path leading to treasure, or collapsible floor that leads to a deadly drop/pit the player must find their way out of.

[Bruno Willis]

On 5/24/2026 at 3:35 PM, LadyWYT said:

This is my general thoughts as well. Additionally, one common complaint I see regarding clutter is that by default, it needs to be glued before it can be picked up, so I doubt making clutter even more fragile is going to make it more appealing to players. It would be rather unsatisfying to find a piece of clutter you like, only to destroy it because you accidentally stepped on it or got thrown into it by a monster's attack.

I think this is sort of missing the point. With the addition of dynamic dungeons it is very easy to find many many copies of bits of clutter. Clutter used to feel really special to me, and now most of it is just an obstacle which takes extra long to mine through. I would like it to feel special, and I think making it fragile would make clutter feel more realistically old, and make repairing clutter feel more like archeological preservation than rare collectable collecting. I want to feel like I'm rescuing delicate traces of the past before they're lost forever.

On 5/24/2026 at 2:46 PM, ifoz said:

I think this could make sense for certain more fragile clutter, but if this was applied to all clutter in the game I can see it just being annoying and even a bit immersion-breaking.
Some things like ruined protective suits, locust/bell/Eidolon parts, and metal tanks I don't think should really require glue in the first place, and the fact they do only makes sense from a gameplay/unification perspective. Stepping on a lead-plated protective suit isn't going to make it disintegrate, same for stepping on a cast iron Eidolon limb.

This is a good point, clutter fragility would need to be used selectively, probably applying to anything made of wood, cloth, ceramics, etc. It'd also probably need some more distinctive and fun sounds keyed to wood collapse, vs ceramics, etc. The current sound seems like it's designed to make you regret breaking that pile of rotten wood. If clutter were easier to break, and breaking it was somewhat intended behavior, I imagine the devs would make satisfying, not too invasive sounds to add to that feeling of being a heavy, clumsy fighter in a delicate space. 

On 5/24/2026 at 3:35 PM, LadyWYT said:

The better option, I think, is to add more fragile structure that can collapse under a player's weight, or otherwise be stuff that the player can destroy in protected locations in order to open up a secret passage or something.

This would be excellent too, adding to the experience of dungeon delving. I'd love to see rickety bridges with a slim chance to collapse, every time you use them. I'd also like to see the dynamic dungeons be smaller, but with more hidden areas. My concern here is that the real treasure of dungeons, at least for me, is the blocks they're made out of. They've really opened up building in stone for me. I'd like mechanics which meant either it's just not viable to spend time mining out the floors of dungeons because of a growing threat (so no nice blocks, but more risk vs reward looting gameplay), or mechanics which make mining out sections of dungeon not leave ugly floating ceramic crumbs and wood rubble There are now endless, easily accessible options to collect that sort of clutter. We can afford to accidentally break a bit of it. I think the devs would get the most out of making dynamic dungeons more survival mode friendly, and keeping the curated gameplay and exciting one-off set-pieces to story locations.

On 5/24/2026 at 2:46 PM, ifoz said:

Especially if it's from enemies spawning in other rooms and immediately breaking everything in sight before you can get in there.

I'd say this could be tuned well by setting a specific chance for foes to break clutter, somewhere very low but above 0%. What it would do though is add slight time pressure to preserving valuable artifacts once you've cracked open a historical site. That's realistic, and adds a bit of tension to a gameplay experience which is currently static. Not saying it's not fun to mark clutter, leave it for a year or two, then go collect it later, just that it might be more exciting if you felt like you needed to go get it quick or it might be destroyed. Wouldn't be an issue for clutter that's out of your regularly visited areas of course, and probably wouldn't be a real risk most of the time. In my experience, the good stuff is up against the walls, and it's rotten wood, anvil stumps, rusted iron bars and crates at risk of being stepped on by you or the foe.