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The hunt for the famous double headed drifter


Saricane

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Since v1.16, a double headed drifter (enhanced version of the nightmare drifter) spawns every temporal storm. This one has even more health points than the basic nightmare drifter. And killing him is VERY interesting. The reward is juicy (temporal gear + a fistful of rusty gears). The challenge is to make sure he spawns. But we know that the more drifters you can kill during the storm, the better is the probability to make him spawn. Problem : killing them actively during the storm is very difficult. But you can kill them using a more clever and  passive way. Gravity is your friend.

Let's imagine a pit, deep enough to kill most of the drifters, but not enough to kill corrupt and nightmare drifters. Let's say you can easily guide them to this pit, so that the gravity kill the weakest ones. When the storm is over, you just have to go down the pit (using you own personal pit with ladders, ha ha ...), and kill the remaining corrupt and nightmare drifters using spears. This is the trap I use now, and it is very efficient. I trapped the double headed drifter 6 times out of 7, without being hit.

First, you build a temporal storm proofed cabin, using 2 chiseled blocks, closed by a door (placing the door can be tricky, you have to put a removable block above the moat, on the bottom-left corner on the following picture, then place the door, then remove the helping block).

Since v1.17, you can build the cabin out of glass, so you can safely enjoy the show of drifters falling, struggling against water flow, fighting themselves, and then ... falling into the pit.

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But now, there is a deep pit at the bottom of the moat. We could call this a "Darwin pit", that allows only the strongest to survive 😀. Mine is 35 blocks height, but you can add a little more height if you want to kill even corrupt drifters. To help the drifters to get close to the pit, you put a flowing water at the bottom of the moat, enough to cover all the moat, BUT not the pit itself, of course.

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To get sure the flowing water stops exactly before the pit, you have to dig 3 blocks at the opposite corner, and then place a water block at the end of this little tunnel.

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When the temporal storm begins, you lock yourself in your glass cabin, looking at the drifters trying to walk against the water and finally fall into the pit.

At the end of the storm, you go down the pit using another vertical chimney with ladders, and you kill the remaining drifters trapped behind the wooden gate.

The 'Z' shaped hallway is essential to ensure you can hit them without being harmed.

cabin4.thumb.png.10cf92f0cf0b2684952ecefebf9e3392.png

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I expect you could place a block above the gate, remove the gate and be able to safely kill drifters with a long blade. 

Nathan Wostrel created a drifter farm that funnels living drifters into a kill chamber using water mechanics then channels the drifter corpses toward a collection chamber.  All safely done without threat of damage by drifter.

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  • 8 months later...
On 3/17/2023 at 6:19 AM, Ruyeex said:

It's not beginner friendly since you can't acquire most of the materials do you need

You can accomplish much the same with a 2 deep 3x3 pit with a pit kiln in the center. If you think it through, you can design a 2 deep 1x1 that lets you stand below and just out of their reach but close enough that the shred each other. 

Personally I don't see the point,  other than to know you could if you wanted to. I guess if you wanted to do some extensive spelunking it would be nice to have a stack of gears but there is not really a good reason to do that,  either. 

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52 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

You can accomplish much the same with a 2 deep 3x3 pit with a pit kiln in the center. If you think it through, you can design a 2 deep 1x1 that lets you stand below and just out of their reach but close enough that the shred each other. 

Personally I don't see the point,  other than to know you could if you wanted to. I guess if you wanted to do some extensive spelunking it would be nice to have a stack of gears but there is not really a good reason to do that,  either. 

Can you share the design just bcs that I can't test right now

Also you can use mud bricks slab to replace the trapdoors

 

Edited by Ruyeex
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I don't use trapdoors at all. Or water, or a pick,  or anything else you might have difficulty sourcing on day 1. At most I use 1-way fences to force drifters towards me, or at least never retreat far.

As for design you have likely seen the rabbit/coon/both trap. Same thing except you remove the bottom block from the pillar, and the block below that, and that's where the pit kiln lives. You assume the role of the carrots or berries luring in your prey. Keep in mind your prey shoots back.

The 1x1 I'll leave as an exercise for the reader for the nonce. Just watch their behavior and you will spot their weakness. 

[EDIT]

Oh, and figure out the pathing of drifter rocks vs. their line of sight. In particular, the difference between them when you are sitting and when you are standing. Good stuff, Maynard. 

[/EDIT]

Edited by Thorfinn
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  • 5 weeks later...
On 3/19/2023 at 2:35 AM, Thorfinn said:

You can accomplish much the same with a 2 deep 3x3 pit with a pit kiln in the center.

No. The pit kiln will roast every drifter during the storm. At the end of the storm, dead drifters have already disappeared, leaving only the last of them on the grill. This trap does not sort drifters on their strength (based on health points). Sorting them by gravity allow you to keep the corrupt and nightmare alive while killing (and so despawning) the weakest ones. This way, the game generate more drifters.

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Oh, gotcha.

Back when I cheesed it, I would set myself up the 1x1, a variant based on the rabbit trap where I could butcher them as they died, so it didn't really matter. You didn't even need the kiln. They killed each other anyway. The kiln just made it a little quicker and finished them off when there was only 1 left alive.

Even with high rift activity you could get a gear every couple nights, no storm required, while you fill your time clayforming or crafting or whatever, butchering as they die. But you are talking about sitting out a storm completely, mopping up afterwards. What do you do with all the temporal gears? Sell them? Or do you find enough translocators to put them to use?

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On 4/18/2023 at 6:43 PM, Thorfinn said:

 What do you do with all the temporal gears? Sell them? Or do you find enough translocators to put them to use?

Yes, I use them to draw a  transportation network from north to south, to have access to the most climates as possible. I spend a long time  tracking every TL around my base, including those in "hidden" caves (caves that don't have any entrance, you must find them by hearing waterfall and drifters sounds). And now with the v1.18 and all the devices that use temporal gears as "fuel", you'll need always more of them.

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  • 4 months later...
On 3/19/2023 at 3:58 AM, Thorfinn said:

Oh, and figure out the pathing of drifter rocks vs. their line of sight. In particular, the difference between them when you are sitting and when you are standing. Good stuff, Maynard. 

Can you explain please ?

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So much depends on the specifics of the location you chose. You just want to figure out what kinds of blocks you can hide behind and be safe. Generally, if they are higher than you, you need to use a block to cover your chest, if they are below, you need one that covers your legs. Sometimes a slab is enough, particularly if you can force them to come at you at an angle instead of straight on. But that all depends on lateral distance, height difference, etc. By far, limiting them by angle is the easiest to fine tune.

Place a straw dummy where you think you are going to want to stand, go to where you think the drifters are going to be, and see what kinds of blocks prevent you from hitting your dummy with rocks. Not perfect, no, since they are much, much different than you in throwing ability. But at least you get a starting point.

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I've redesigned the trap a little bit:

- crawling drifters don't fall into 1 block wide pit - I've extended top drop space and drop shaft to 2 blocks wide and add two water sources to cover the bottom (see screen);

This design did have problem: drifters don't fall over edge to the deep pit - they moved around on the edge.

- so I redesigned it once more: I have removed all floor and extend fall pit to the size 5x5.

Another problem: drifters aren't lured to me when I'm standing in glass "storm proof" cage. It seems they don't see me at the distance. Only if drfiter is very near it see me, walk to me and fall down. So finally the trap doesn't work. The number of fallen drifters is very low and they are wandering top spawning platform all the time. Any idea why they don't see me ??? Any hint ???

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They don't see you because they consider the glass to be blocking line of sight due to it being a solid block. If you have some chiselled openings in it they may see you then. To avoid drifter spawn in the pit, add bright light sources like wall torches, a lot of candles, or lanterns at the bottom.

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Not in a storm. Indeed, that glass enclosure is not completely safe, though it might be OK with ladders on one wall. Have not verified one way or the other whether that works.

Now it would be very rare one would spawn in there with you. The furthest I think I've verified a spawn in a storm is 25 blocks, so that would be 51x51=2500 or so potential blocks to spawn on, and of those, only 1 would have something spawn in there with you, and then only if it was not a crawler. Not a huge risk, no, but if it's a double-headed... 

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On 8/31/2023 at 10:58 AM, Maelstrom said:

Those spikes do depressingly small damage.  Not worth the bother, basically.

I decided to look into this more after noticing they have "fallIntoDamageMul: 30" in the JSON. (Checking the source code, this number is multiplied by falling speed to get the resulting damage.)

Testing in creative, I noticed that drifters that die from this damage aren't crushed. In theory, this would mean that you could have them fall from a great height onto the spikes and they'd instantly die while still providing the full loot.

However, it looks like the damage calculation is bugged somehow. Most of the time, anything that lands on the spike (including the player) takes about at most 3 damage from the spike (regardless of height) and receives 0 falling damage!

Edited by Bumber
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On 9/14/2023 at 1:09 AM, Bumber said:

(including the player) takes about at most 3 damage from the spike (regardless of height) and receives 0 falling damage!

That could potentially be useful! It takes quite a while to descend a ladder that reaches to the clouds, but if I place a set of spikes one block away from the ladder...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Boiling water seems to kill reasonably fast. I built a setup that just kills all drifters and lets you loot them safely.

Creative mode prototype:

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There's a small opening on either side of the bottom block of glass that lets you butcher drifters while crouching. It seems small enough that you can attack them but they can't hit you back:

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It doesn't seem like you can butcher any wolves that wander in, due to their hitbox being shorter. Might be better to move the opening down a microvoxel or two. (Edit: Drifters can hit you if you do.)

You'll take heat damage if you walk against the wall facing the center of the pit (or stub your toe while entering through the door) without crouching, so I opted to add some extra panes of glass to prevent that. The bottom pane serves as the floor you stand on (and can be replaced with a solid block instead,) and prevents the toe-stubbing damage. The forward panes prevent the damage from walking against the wall. The panes are all 1 microvoxel thick, and the walls of the blocks are 2 microvoxels thick. A view of how it all fits together:

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Here's my survival mode build, in which I added a microblock to the intake to prevent anything in the hotspring (e.g., loose items) from flowing down into the pit. There's a convenient spot right above it to place a block to shut off the water to the pit:

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Edited by Bumber
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