Can Drifters open doors?

[rowwie]

Sorry, I'm super new and I couldn't find an answer to this anywhere, even here. 

So, what can Drifters interact with? The wiki says ladders, but can they open doors and gates? Anything of that nature?

Cheers!

[Конит Инвиз]

I only watched the ascent up the stairs. I can say for sure that they cannot open doors ...

[Remote Viewer]

No they don´t open any doors, we use doors to keep them out and had no issues yet

[TheOrangeBottleCap]

my game is personally modded but they open doors now for me with the latest game update

[ifoz]

In the vanilla game drifters cannot open doors, fence gates or trapdoors.

[Vratislav]

I can confirm that they can climb ladders (in vanilla). Never went trough door, but they may spawn inside of base under some circumstances (temporal storm, rift).

Edited April 24, 2024 by Vratislav

[Coreplant]

I can also confirm them climbing ladders, and opening doors/gates - in fact, both of those open just by the Drifters going nearby. My game is modded though, so I am uncertain if this is an Update thing or a mod thing.

[ifoz]

7 hours ago, Coreplant said:

I can also confirm them climbing ladders, and opening doors/gates - in fact, both of those open just by the Drifters going nearby. My game is modded though, so I am uncertain if this is an Update thing or a mod thing.

This is a modded thing, drifters normally cannot open doors or gates in the vanilla game.

[TamTroll]

i feel like they might have a chance of glitching through walls and entering the house though.

I had a strong temporal storm going on, and suddenly there was a Drifter in my home two or three blocks away from me, right at the corner of the structure.

Had to lock myself in my bedroom before making a run to the new house i was building to hide in the basement there. died at least twice to the whole process.

[Thorfinn]

They don't glitch through walls during a storm, they spawn wherever they damn well please, even in your face, even under bright light, even violating whatever we think we know about spawning rules. If you can be there, sitting or whatever, they can spawn there. Some places where you can't be, the crawling ones can spawn. Contrary to popular belief, they can even spawn in a 2-high space with a bed on the floor.

[EDIT]

Incidentally, in a storm, running is your friend. Most drifters aren't worth the effort to kill -- just get far enough away that they wander away. The double-headed ones cannot be fought hand to hand. maybe ever, unless you are in steel plate or something, but a dozen or so flint spears can take them out, so long as you keep running.

[/EDIT]

Edited June 2, 2024 by Thorfinn

[TamTroll]

46 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

They don't glitch through walls during a storm, they spawn wherever they damn well please, even in your face, even under bright light, even violating whatever we think we know about spawning rules. If you can be there, sitting or whatever, they can spawn there. Some places where you can't be, the crawling ones can spawn. Contrary to popular belief, they can even spawn in a 2-high space with a bed on the floor.

[EDIT]

Incidentally, in a storm, running is your friend. Most drifters aren't worth the effort to kill -- just get far enough away that they wander away. The double-headed ones cannot be fought hand to hand. maybe ever, unless you are in steel plate or something, but a dozen or so flint spears can take them out, so long as you keep running.

[/EDIT]

... Well bugger, that ain't good.

Here i was thinking i was safe inside my home. guess not... Welp...

[idiomcritter]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Contrary to popular belief, they can even spawn in a 2-high space with a bed on the floor.

so the thing is, 1 air space still exists above the bed, which is a valid spawn space during a storm.  The trick that has worked for me so far, is to line the wall with a ladder, or do away with the bed, and replace with a ladder from floor to top.  

usually if not engaging the drifters during a storm (gotta get those double headed drifters for the blue gears), I'll sit/stand in a single space lined with ladders, usually built with glass and watch/wait out the storm...

[Thorfinn]

I wondered if that wouldn't work. It's always a question of whether they can't spawn there or if they just didn't select that tile. If they spawn anywhere in a 25 distance NESW of you, that's a square 51x51, or 2601 tiles, so the odds of any drifter who chooses a spot randomly would be 1 in 2601. You gotta wait out a lot of storms to have much confidence in whether it's safe, or you just didn't draw the short straw.

So obviously, the more tiles you can observe, the more confidence you can have. I had enough hay bales to make a good test arena with something like 450 beds, so 900 of the hypothetically 2601 possible spawn locations would be on a bed. And while there were a couple non-crawler spawns, most ended up on the roof.

I thought about trying it with ladders, but realized that if I were to try to make the same size arena, that would take 1800 ladders, or 4200 sticks. I didn't have anywhere near that, more like a couple stacks was all, and, of course, unlike the bed test, I couldn't just affix lanterns to the roof to light things up. Only answer I thought of was modding ladders into light sources, which might be a cool mod, anyway.

Ultimately I decided I didn't care enough about the answer to scrounge up another 60-some stacks of sticks so I could find out.

[idiomcritter]

6 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

If they spawn anywhere in a 25 distance NESW of you, that's a square 51x51, or 2601 tiles

interesting, had not considered the actual spawn area size, and then testing the solution i've been using.  

kind of discovered the ladder trick in one of my play sessions.  was mining deep underground when a storm began.  I had a straight 1x1 shaft 60+ blocks to the surface.  the surface hole was covered to prevent drifters from climbing down the shaft.  climbed the ladder mid way up, and waited out the storm with no spawns occurring in the shaft while I waited the storm out.  afterwords i set about to discover if no spawns on the shaft ladder was a fluke and came across a bit of information (somewhere here) that spoke about the need for a valid air space to be spawnable (with no obstruction,  ie ladders).

with your observation on the size of valid area, should be easy enough to test, hopping into creative, create a 2601 glass cube with a ladder lined hole. switch back to survival, and evoke the next storm command a few hundred times..... or not  lol

(once upon a time in the beginning i had thought trader wagons were safe from the storm, worked too, right up to that time when it didn't.  don't hide in trader wagons)

[StCatharines]

In vanilla, no.

 

With Dana's Tweaks mod, yes. Unless you disable it in the config or using ImGui (which I heartily recommend!)

[Coreplant]

On 5/31/2024 at 9:50 PM, ifoz said:

This is a modded thing, drifters normally cannot open doors or gates in the vanilla game.

Thank you, and I did track down which mod was doing it - Dana's Tweaks.

For anybody else who plays with that, you can lock doors with a padlock to keep them out after reinforcing the door using the plumb and square tool.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, Coreplant said:

Thank you, and I did track down which mod was doing it - Dana's Tweaks.

For anybody else who plays with that, you can lock doors with a padlock to keep them out after reinforcing the door using the plumb and square tool.

I believe you can just disable that part of DanaTweaks. I'm pretty sure @DanaCraluminum made those other config mods just so you could disable the parts you don't like. And, of course, in hopes that others would use that utility for their configs...

[Bannta]

On 6/6/2024 at 1:51 PM, StCatharines said:

In vanilla, no.

 

With Dana's Tweaks mod, yes. Unless you disable it in the config or using ImGui (which I heartily recommend!)

  "CreaturesOpenDoors": {
    "drifter-*": {
      "Enabled": true,   <---set to false
      "Cooldown": 5.0,
      "Range": 1.0
    }
  },

[Thorfinn]

Since this topic came up again, it is a somewhat cheaty way to find certain underground ruins. "Why am I hearing a door opening and closing all the time? I don't even have any doors." 

[Didsain]

On 6/24/2025 at 1:59 AM, Bannta said:

  "CreaturesOpenDoors": {
    "drifter-*": {
      "Enabled": true,   <---set to false
      "Cooldown": 5.0,
      "Range": 1.0
    }
  },

Thank you so much, from the future! I had this mod in a large list added to my server and drifters opening our doors was driving my friends and I insane! We had no idea that it wasn't part of vanilla, we thought it was just the stone age doors being crappy.