TFT

There's room to improve it and temporal stuff as a whole. Aside from combat it's one of the weakest parts of the game, which is a shame given how much emphasis it is on the game's identity. From reading this thread and many like it, the most common denominator for why many players find it unfair or unfun is the RNG spawning with nothing the player can do about it. If this were resolved then TS would turn from a contentious mechanic to something decent. The veterans and sweat experience doesn't matter since they're already used to it. New player experience of this mechanic sucks ass and all it takes is bad RNG to give them a bad impression. Just because one personally never experienced it doesn't mean it isn't a problem for many others. Trader dialogue and a handbook entry should be written. The "Sometimes you will encounter temporal storms on the surface, which have the same effect as having low temporal stability." line is factually incorrect, buried inside a wall of text, doesn't actually tell you anything about the storm and its danger, and it is the only visible bit of information about storms in game period. Elaborating that storms spawn high level monsters anywhere and that you are not safe isn't holding their hand, it's a courtesy so they understand what's happening so that it feels just slightly less bullshit when RNG sends them back to spawn in a death spiral. Tell the new players that they can either: hide in a 1x2 coffin, go fight it lol, or stay inside and pretend it isn't real and hope you dont get sent back to spawn by RNG. As it stands, this is what the mechanic does. The solution is very simple. Any extra features or functions or mechanics is irrelevant to solving this. 1. Temporal stability during the temporal storm should equal relative safety. 2. If you are stable then monsters will not spawn around you. 3. Storms drain stability, the rate growing with longer heavier storms. 4. Low stability means the nightmares can enter your home and you are no longer safe. If you are stable then storms can be safely weathered. The new player can hole up in their dirt hut and not be ganked by several tier 4 monsters. The experienced player can pan, cook, chisel, smith, etc. and not get ganked by several tier 4 monsters. Later in the game you cannot do this for free as storms will drain your stability faster and the monsters get in before the storm ends. You must either spend temporal gears to regain your stability and your safety bubble, or gear up and go fight monsters for the same effect. The gear draining at a steady pace like a ticking clock could also give some of that tension others talked about. Having spawn protection also justifies why the traders and nadians haven't been blended already by nightmare whatevers spawning in their wagons and fort. This is the simplest solution to the most common grievance about TS without any extra. Other than tryhard stick in the muds feeling it would casualize the game, I don't see how this a bad suggestion to start mending a poor implementation to an okay one.

Yeah, it's a given in anything and someone will find a way to exploit, so why be afraid of it? Min-maxers are great for finding bugs and unintended mechanics, but they're not the people you're making a game for. Normal players aren't engaging in cheese unless it's a poorly designed system. It's not a bad thing to think ahead for implications of a change, but an endless cycle of "but what if" is a waste of time because everything can and will be exploited no matter how hard you try to anticipate. Here, let me do a similar hypothetical. How many fences will it take to negate a portal? How many times will you have to repeat that over a day of high rift activity? How much material is wasted making all those fences? How much time and hunger is spent running around to negate rifts? How much time and tool durability is spent cleaning up all the fences leftover from despawned rifts? Not tough to see where this all ends Sisyphus. I can respect being against suggestions because you dont like change, but being against the idea of monsters popping out of rifts because you're afraid that someone will fence them to stop monsters is silly. Yeah, so what if someone puts a fence to block a portal? You're trying to bubble wrap an idea that only a minority of min-maxxers are going to do (and might not given the effort and negligible gain) and everyone else has to suffer for it. Monsters can break fences, blocks, and chiseled blocks because you dont want this imagined player exploiting rifts in this specific way. "Admin he's playing my block game the wrong way ban him now!"

A traversible rust world would be nice if only that the game could then have the infrastructure to handle dimensions and subworlds for modders to make their own. As for how it'd fit into the game, I'd make it very late game/story content. Horror never lasts forever, you eventually get used to it and any unease is sanded down by understanding mechanics. The feeling is already gone for experienced players who knows how spawning works so they can spawnproof their base. Making it one of the last things you do means you're at the point you have functionally mastered the game and its systems so pulling back the curtain isn't detrimental as it is a formality at that point. Either way something like that looks like it's being worked on if I am not misunderstanding the roadmap plans. "Version 1.23 will be the next major lore update where we will make more extensive use of the new dimension mechanics."

If surface stability had something meaningful like being an indicator for more frequent ruins or dungeons then I'd be fine with it. Like mining it becomes a time limit on how long you can spend looting and exploring before needing to stabilize. But as it is, it's a "you cant build here because you just cant okay!" sign. That is if you're paying attention and aren't halfway into a build before you notice the obvious effects from low stability. Wouldn't be such an annoyance if it actually did something, but it affects the player and only the player. I see the argument made that "bro it's just like polluted land or something you just gotta put up with it bro!" but animals and traders are just fine. What does it really accomplish in its current implementation besides be a noob trap? Bigger in your face effects as has been suggested would be pretty cool and a draw of its own, but that would need a rework to how surface stability is generated since it would make it very ugly to see mini devastations pockmarking your world in random patches. Maybe scrap the current implementation and rework it as it's own biome or landform. Probably so you can take your time and experience the story content without having to feel like you need to speedrun through it before you become instable, or miss the unique music tracks that play in those locations because it's overridden by the ambient droning from low stability. I dont think the library of the resonance archives would've had the intended awe factor if the whole thing was overlaid with tempstab-drain.ogg.

From my understanding of it gourmand is a pita since you have to chase down every type and variation of food in a checklist, and something like expanded foods makes this even more of a headache. Whereas novelty is an incentive for some variance and changing things up as opposed to eating nothing but hearty red meat cabbage stew and meat pies.

The bowl is too hot so you burn yourself and take damage holding it, but as long as you have some tongs you can eat boiling hot food no problem. Makes sense to me.

Technically already does by having an attack tier. Spears have 0 no matter what material, but since only players have an armor tier the only time it matters is in pvp. Monsters having an armor tier matching their attack would incentivize bringing a falx and keeping up with its upgrades. On paper, reach sounds important but in practice it doesn't matter. There's a lot more going on than just raw damage numbers as well. An extra 30% on harder hitting spears sounds pretty good, but wont change that the things you want dead fast ignore the range advantage and close the distance regardless. Bears are very fast and hit like a truck, and brown bears have the speed and reach to make any kind of melee suicidal. If you're still afraid of spear damage being too OP then consider if monsters had some intrinsic armor then any cheese with spears would fall flat and your extra damage wont be helping much. All this is also ignoring that spears attack slower than a falx, which makes having a falx preferable to have as a blackguard for mulching things up in your face several seconds faster than with an equivalent spear. Another thing is the new quenching mechanics can greatly increase damage from any melee weapon which is going to benefit blackguards a lot more than having spears have damage parity with falxes. Swords getting crit chance from sharpening also benefits blackguards. Hunters on the otherhand get nothing to synergize with. Balance should be done around the commoner as a baseline. I don't see a problem with the melee fighter being really good at melee.

Only if you push it with repeated quenchings. There's no percentage chance on the tool before you cool it so it's zero risk. And if you are still worried about that then you can work the tool below 800 C which is the start of the temperature range for quenching and applying bonuses/shatter chance. You'll have a completely normal tool head.

I've only tried with an iron axe that's been quenched a few times already so it might be an edge case, but the issue is the result in the craft flickers for a fraction of a second before vanishing and cant be picked. I can see the covered in clay tooltip before the item vanishes so it would work if it wasn't bugged.

The quenching and tempering seems promising. It's quite finicky right now to get it to actually register when it's being quenched or tempered as sometimes there is no change after doing either. It's also more of a mid-late game thing as it only applies to iron and above. One or two quenches already gives you a nice bonus for very little risk. There is also mention in the handbook of other quenchants than water (only water for 1.22), so later on we'll likely see others such as the oil we can now press. From my testing getting to three quenches is where the risk of breaking tools is noticeable, and once you do have a tool like that you have a +25% boost to tool speed and damage. Covering the tool in clay to quench for durability instead of sharpness doesn't seem to work right now as the craft is bugged, but I imagine it'll work the exact same as hardening with the same scaling per quench. What sucks is not getting anything back from a broken tool and that material vanishes into the aether, but we also make chisels by wasting most of the ingot like making a toothpick from a whole tree. By the time you get iron you have it in abundance, so it's not so much the loss of resource as it is a middle finger for your effort and time when you lose at what amounts to gambling. I expect this is another thing for smithing plus to change where you get some bits back to recycle after it shatters as a consolation prize. Either way smiths will like this. A bit more "craft" involved now that you can refine tools like this. And it's not like you have to engage with it and risk losing tools every time you make one. Iron still has a good speed and durability and these bonuses are just that, bonuses. I'd like to see similar expansion to copper and bronze like cold forging and work hardening.

With the direction things are going you cant really stack animal hides as you could. Seal them for leather whenever you can since it's going to be incredibly unlikely you'll get a full barrel of one specific animal's hide before it starts rotting. At least it converts to generic hides after scraping.

The way I see it storms are a global rift of sorts as your stability drains inside it and monsters spawn. It's meant to be a big exception to the rules so having them spawn everywhere in stronger variants is fair game, and it's a serious enough event to force a change of plans and keep it in mind. The issue a lot of people take with them is you're either ready or not, and if you're not you go to your time out closet which isn't fun. It's why people either turn them off, sleep through them, or log out in multiplayer because the only way to engage is to go fighting and not everyone is a fighter. Otherwise it's a pretty cool mechanic that needs more polish and iron out common grievances. I like them but they need work. What Toroic said is accurate. It's supposed to be a world shattering event so spawn rules being broken is fair game, but that's not to say you cant do something about it. I don't think monsters should spawn near you if you're stable, so for lighter storms you are pretty safe inside your house but as they get heavier and longer you either need to kill monsters or burn a gear to remain stable. Long and heavy storms later in the world would incentivize combat which you should have good gear for by then, or if you're not a fighter you can build some jonas machine to prevent spawning or mitigate the storm's effects within its area. Adding that to the rift ward would fill that latter niche and give it an actual use since it's a worthless vanity item (like the rest of jonas tech) by the time you get it as lanterns do the same thing significantly cheaper and far earlier.

Applying armor tiers to overcome could do the same. Spears already have an attack tier of zero, so requiring a falx to do appreciable damage to deeper monsters would incentivize making them, would solve the problem of OP spears, and would fit the lore of falx's being purpose made to fight them. That falxes now autoloot monsters is a great addition and puts them above choosing iron or steel spears from a convenience point alone when against monsters. Spears then stick to a niche of dealing with animals and other surface threats, and I don't see a problem with having a harder hitting spear for skewering wolves and bears. As is the falx has established it's niche to be worth taking underground and especially for storms, and iron or steel spear variants wont change that much. Suggestions? On the suggestions forum? Perish the thought. There are mods already yes, but it's important to discuss the game as it is and how it can improve. It's an early access game and we are allowed to question design decisions or why this or that, just as you are allowed to justify that everything is perfect as is. Otherwise we'd still have only pit kilns because a mod for them existed and asking for an improved process is 'insisting on playing the game to our liking'. What isn't helpful is burying your head in the sand and getting passive aggressive when someone brings up a valid point, one that's getting a look at next version.

To pull my comment on STALKER again this is basically that. After surviving the cosmic dangerous weather event you can run outside and go searching for anomalies since they are most plentiful right after an emission. It's just hard to find a "what" that's meaningful to the context of VS without just inventing some magic doodlydoo contrivance whether that's an item or an activity unique to storms. I dunno, could enchant rusty gears to temporal gears by killing monsters around it. I like the idea of speeding up time based processes, like a bottle of time from some MC mod, and sacrifice stability to do so. Maybe a nether equivalent dimension you can only hop into during a storm for whatever resources/lore. Whatever it is, it shouldn't be free or easy since this is an unnatural disaster event. You're either killing monsters, risking your life, and otherwise spending something not easy to get back fast like health and stability which the storm will drain one way or another. Just literally something to do or gain besides kill monsters for chump change or hide in a hole for your five to ten minute timeout. I dont mind difficulty or tedium if it actually produces something for my efforts, after all, we're playing a video game. I dont see the downside to expanding the temporal/eldritch horror stuff to be its own set of gameplay to make storms meaningful.

Combat Overhaul is a bloated poorly executed mod thrown into modlists because its popular, much like how Create is shoehorned into most MC modpacks regardless of if it fits. And for a while it was only used because it was a required full package dependency for firearms/crossbows/bullseye. It sure is an overhaul, but apart from changing hit detection it adds nothing to combat. Only thing I can think it's good for is if you really really like pvp. On that same vein, vanilla combat is serviceable, just needs better hit detection. Yes, because nothing says great mechanic than telling the player "well you just cant build here because you just cant okay!". I think it's overall a pretty cool system, but I would just like the bullshit cut which boils down to surface stability and temporal storms spawning things next to you. I often see this too. Some underbaked or placeholder stuff becomes some bespoke thing for the players who gaslit themselves into believing it's some sacred cow.