Looking for feedback on nighttime in survival mode

[Luk]

Hey guys, I'd love to hear your current thoughts on the state of survival mode at night. I have my own opinion on it, but I'll wait until we get some votes in to share it, so as not to skew the results one way or the other. 

If you feel like including more than just your vote, here are a few more questions that don't really fit into the multiple choice format.

What do you usually do at night? (In the context of the game!)

If you were to start a new game, what would you do at night before reaching the late copper age?

Do you mostly play solo, or do you play online? Do you think that makes a difference for you regarding nighttime stuff?

Do you ever use creative mode commands to make things easier?

[Balduranne]

Goddess yes. If I'm on a server, I usually just log out and do something else until night is over. 

I can't see anything at night, and the wandering Drifters and occasional wolf out of nowhere mean I usually just sit on top of a dirt pillar and throw rocks at things. Daytime feels really short, and night is just a bore. I've yet to find any bees, so even around my own house it's too dark to really do anything other than knapping more tools for the next day... And smelting is so wood intensive that I don't do it at night (Since I can't go out and chop treees).

There's really no motivation to go out at night - Drifters are just a nuisance that will only erode your health and break weapons. They only drop one item, whose functional should be tied in with something else. 

I do use commands for items sometimes, but if there's one for skipping night, I'll have to start using it. 

Even without any monsters to bother you, it's still really damn hard to see anything at night. 

[Milo Christiansen]

I only have a problem during new or crescent moons. On DarkAgeCraft where the day is much longer it tends to be worse, but with vanilla settings there is always something to do inside or in lighted areas.

[Stroam]

@Balduranne /time set morning

At night I go mining at places I've already scoped out, work on a fairly secure farm, or stay indoors crafting, smelting, and working the anvil. 

I play almost exclusively online. Yes, it makes a difference because I can't sleep the night away.

No, I don't use commands to make it easier but I do set it to 60 hours in a day so it's half an hour of light, half an hour of dark. 

I do like how dark it is. I don't see why people don't walk around with a torch since there is dynamic lighting. I always carry a torch and place it down when I need to do something else at night though it'd be nice to have two hands so you can carry your torch in the off hand. 

Right now one of the issues with night is no one looks forward to the night. Sure the sky is beautiful and the fireflies are nice and the very first time you see it with the full moon and everything it's beautiful. Then it gets darker and the drifters come. It's not bad enough they have high spawns while caving so that you have to kill 10 or more on your way out, they also knock nonstop on your door all night long and the moaning. If you trap them then you just have to eliminate them the next day because they can't run off.

I get they are the creatures from the lore that come out at night and has all the villagers scared and that the girl fights off but after so long it just becomes a chore. They become no longer dangerous and it takes a good 3 or more hits to kill one. You can light up the area to stop them but oil lamps aren't bright enough to cover a large area so you need tons of them or to replace your torches every three days and each time you log back on. The new boolean for blocks to stop spawning is going to help out a lot in that regard, but let's face it. Anything you do not want to do and have to stop and take care of immediately, that happens frequently and repetitively is going to grind down anyone. It's like in Skyrim when you are decked out in amazing gear, have slain numerous dragons, and heroic feats that everyone in the land would have heard of, yet bandits still think they can take you on as you stroll through the countryside. Drifters need to be more powerful, spawn less often, spawn more often in groups that act like a group, and to stop running into the wall and instead if they can't get to you directly and are running into a wall, use the left or right-hand rule where they follow the wall that direction in hopes they can get to you.

What the game needs is night specific stuff. Let's face it, you don't go into some ruins just to clear out the monsters, you do so for the loot. There need to be nighttime activities. I suggest useful insects or creatures that only come out at night or mushrooms that are difficult to see during the day but glow at night. Having the stars not move or move slowly and being able to trace out constellations you can add to the journal and makeup stories or use them to decipher texts you found in ruins, or something to do with maps would be neat. A minigame to just pass the time inside by the fire while drinking some mead. Some sort of restful bonus to encourage people on servers to go to bed at night. Tie it in with alchemy, must be brewed under the light of a full moon. There was stuff like that in old medicine books because religion and healing weren't separate. Instead of a medicine book saying wait five minutes, it may say recite 5 hail marys. 

As cooking, leather and textile processing, weaving, and other stuff gets added there will be a lot more to do at the base which means more to do at night. 

[redram]

I pretty much only do multiplayer now that that is an option.  I'm never really bored at night normally.  Post-copper I'm usually working on my house, working on crops, working on upping my ingot stock, smelting/smithing etc.  Pre-copper I'm usually rushing pretty hard to copper.  That means that during the day I might be harvesting trees or exploring for resources, but I always try to stay within a day of base and keep the time of day in mind.  If it's a bright night I'll work at night, possibly, but often what I do is either dip into a cave to explore, or go underground mining.  Once I have plenty of iron and coal, mining becomes much less an activity.  

In the end the only time I'm bored usually is if I'm out prospecting or exploring, it's a dark night, and I find myself in an area with no caves or no ores I want in the caves.  It can happen, but for me it's pretty rare.

[Elwood]

I find i run out of time in daytime and nighttime activities.  default day and night is too short.  On the darkagecraft server they doubled the time for both.

So at night i find indoor activities to do like smelting, crafting, bees.  Daytime is for exploring. 

Doubling both i think is a good balance.  MC suffers from the same problem.   Especially when you have mods that are nighttime specific you always seem rushed.

[redram]

I'm skeptical of a lot of ideas about 'nighttime activities'.  For instance animals or plants that only show up at night, how many of those will you really need?  It's only a viable nighttime activity if it's fairly constant, imo.  Personally I would save glowing mushrooms for underground caves, not above ground.  The underground should have an otherworldly feel all it's own imo.   The alchemy under a full moon thing is a good idea, but I think that whatever it is needs to 'make sense' within the lore, not feel shoehorned in to occupy the player at night.  And again, will *all* alchemy need to take place at night, or just a couple things?  How often will you need to do those couple things?  This is one area where I think the fidelity to realism really hamstrings the game.  It'd be pretty easy to incorporate all kinds of mysticism and magic stuff that's night based.  

I do think the idea of the player scanning the stars might have some potential.  For one thing it would give another avenue for use of glass blowing/working (for telescope lenses).  If events in the world were somehow linked to something that changes in the night sky, that influences events on the ground, this would give an ongoing potential for the player to scan the sky at down times of the night.  At first they start out just looking, but as they get better and better telescopes maybe they can discern more and more layers of detail.  In terms of trying to stick to 'realistic/believable' stuff, certain lunar events may indicate impending natural disasters.  Drought, locusts, hail, volcanic eruptions, etc.  So long as the player has means to prepare for the disasters, it might be worthwhile for them to check on this stuff once in awhile.   A horse conceived during a certain alignment will have extra-special stats.  Sows bred during another event will have double size litters.  Conversely animals bread during another event - which lasts many days - will give birth to sickly progeny, that will die or yield little.  With enough events it will always be worth the player's time to spend a bit of time checking on at least the events relative to the things the player does.

If the game had more mystic aspects, you have things like ley lines which are only visible at night, and when viewed through certain gems/aparati.    You could possibly do something similar though for ore deposits.  Say that during certain lunar cycles, the player can place gems in the world, perhaps in a special apparatus, and depending on how close they are to a certain ore (or how nearly directly above it?) the gem will slowly accumulate a subtle glow, which is only visible at night, with exposure to the open sky.  This would also serve the dual purpose of giving a more proximity based ore detection method (proximity at the expense of a lot of time).

[Stroam]

I really really like that idea with the stars @redram. 

• natural disasters make the world feel alive.
• gives you a reason to be out at night
• It matches with the mysticism of the time. Lots of civilizations were obsessed with the stars which is why you have things like stone henge.
• adds depth to the game. Things at first appear random and then you learn it's not

That idea should be added to the suggestions forum. It's gold. Maybe put leylines in a different suggestion. It's not so golden.