The Lerf

I don't think we're going to see 'improvements' to Temporal Storms as much as we're going to be seeing improvements to all the systems surrounding them. Things like enemy AI, the enemy sandbox, more Jonas tech constructs like the Rift Ward, etc. Unless AI pathing becomes more than 'seek player position', you'll be mobbed. Unless there's more enemy variety beyond 'melee damage focused unit', you'll be mobbed. Unless spawns become something other than instant apparitions, you won't be able to react to something spawning on top of you. Unless enemy strength is tuned, you'll be one-shot. Unless enemy health is tuned, a copper falx will not be able to handle a medium storm. We simply do not have the tools in game for players to engage with storms in a way that's satisfying and in spirit with developer intentions. And the start of storm changing should begin focusing on the new player experience. Tutorialization of the mechanics is fine during the first weak Temporal Storm, but realistically what ways does any player have to prepare for them? Beyond putting on your highest tier armor and weapons, or your broom closet, or your cheese strat? I'd like preparation to come in the form of constructed defenses; things to pull aggro, things to slow enemies, things to blind them, lower their health, etc. Straight up, why are we engaging with the rustbeasts on an even playing field with swords? We have technology, and maybe eventually we'll get simple traps and mid-game forged mechanisms and late-game Jonas constructs to help deal with storms, but the game is still unfinished.

Are you playing modded or vanilla? You don't need to crush quartz in order to make glass blocks in unmodded VS. You can put quartz chunks directly into the bloomery.

Right, but what do you need to pulverize in the early game? The only things that are pulverizable are the ingredients for refractory bricks and dyes. Refractory bricks are a late game item, and dyes are kind of a mid-game customization option.

Per your description, are you imagining a full goethite block that gets collected with a shovel? Would the regeneration of said block just be a spontaneous regeneration of the block in the same spot? I'd like to suggest an alternative for you, something similar to the pine tree resin blocks, or how flint is extracted from full rock blocks. A specialized soil block called "iron rich soil" or something, that when long clicked with empty hands, would provide however many iron/goethite bits (ideally using the same little animation extracting flint does). Full destruction of the block would behave just like destroying pine resin blocks - you wouldn't want to do that. It's a bit easier on the coding side to do, especially if one were to take this up as a mod.

I'd first ask what the point of a manual pulverizer is, from a game design perspective. Is there anything that it solves that the regular hammer or quern can't? I feel like the suggestion here could be reframed as adding a manual hand crank to add off an axle to power a single machine, albeit slowly. Like manually turning the quern.

>Pablo Escobar when he plays VS

This is what I resonate with. Vintage Story has a simplicity surrounding every single mechanic, that makes you feel the authenticity of the actions performing it, even if it's not 1-to-1 with real life. Obviously things are going to be much more complicated in real life compared to how we do it in game, but there is a line to draw on "how simplified should it be?" The 1.22 pre release just moved that line for smithing, and with the game still in development, I hope other systems get that too. I'm not sure if you're suggesting that an alcoholic blackout is too realistic for VS, but hallucinogenic mushrooms were just added, so it's feeling less out of the realm of possibility now. I do think drinking wines out of bowls is weird too, but it works as a solution for "how to transfer this liquid into my mouth without a 10L bucket". I hope goblets get added eventually specifically for alcohols.

Personally I'd like to see the drunk effects get worse. Someone mentioned it before, but drinking alcohols with a bucket makes a seraph consume it in 1L increments at a time. I say increase drunkenness effects, add tripping and falling, and a "blackout" state identical to sleep if you consume the whole bucket. Reinforce responsible consumption using bowls. Increase satiety from alcohols with this change, because otherwise the time/productivity loss is too great. Turning berries into wine for preservation doesn't need to be that inefficient if there's a significant downside to drinking it as alcohol. Even brining vegetables is what, 30% loss of satiety? Alcohols should make the tradeoff of 'preservation' vs 'ability to be productive' instead of 'preservation' vs 'satiety'. This makes them more likely to be invested in during the late game when players are self sufficient. Hell, I'd even go so far as to make Distilled alcohols have more satiety than their raw ingredients altogether considering the time and effort involved to make them, and that you're turning multiple barrels of berries into a single jug...

I wish that the bronze age lasted a fair bit longer. It feels like a half-step to Iron, despite having 3 different bronze alloys in the game. Though I don't actually have any ideas on how to fix that... unless you make the saw unable to be forged out of copper, moving the 'planks upgrade' part of the game locked behind bronze, which would delay players not rushing progression... but game design/balance is hard. I feel like this also plays into OP's nitpick about lower tier armors straight up being pointless investments, because you're at the copper/bronze age for such a comparatively short amount of time, and you're encountering enemies that invalidate those armor tiers pretty often (bears, temporal storms, and caving). I don't see the amount of metal needed to be bad, per se... but maybe lower tier armors, if they aren't going to be nearly as good, don't need an equivalent amount of ingots to making iron/steel armors. Making lamellar armor more accessible with less ingots needed might make it more worthwhile. The opportunity cost is way to great with current amounts, as lamellar chest armor takes 19 whole ingots at a point in the game where you're still blowing through tools every other outing, have a potentially limited amount of alloy material, and need to invest in a bronze anvil. The biggest bottleneck to progression at that stage is finding iron, not combat endurance... so perhaps making iron more easily found via caving? Encouraging locust hives to spawn near iron? Is this a fun change though? I'm not sure. We've also got what, 40+ varieties of mushrooms now, and after the agricultural revolution they kind of fall off. Less satiation than other vegetables, yet harder to find is a confusing combo, especially in the early game when foraging really matters. I also kind of wish that there were more variants of ruins and they were more lucrative for decor-type finds. Super rarely I'll find a decorative object in a ruin that I didn't even know was in the game, like a damaged locust or something neat that doesn't need glue to grab. I want more of that, more "Oh neat, nice find!" moments in ruins that aren't about like, cabbage seeds or a blackguard cuirass.

I think he means that you can eat nothing but red meat pie and hefty turnip stew, and more or less max out your satiation stats for meat, vegetable and grain. There's no benefit for consuming a poultry soup or a pumpkin porridge instead, all you're doing is losing out on the maximum possible hunger pause bonus. This idea seeks to give a reason for consuming multiple different meal types within each food category, beyond just role-playing. I'm all for it. Once you achieve pies, porridge becomes an obsolete meal, and this idea could expand to include wines and brandy which also see limited use in game. Although I'm not sure if revising the naming convention of satiation is necessary. Meat, vegetable, gain, fruit, and dairy are easy enough to understand, and while very simplistic I think it gets the point across of diet variance. "Micronutrients" as an extra bar interests me, but I'm not too keen on the name.

I forget who it was or where in the thread, but someone mentioned that the mobs are treated more like environmental hazards than a farmable enemy. I actually wish that this was more true than how it is right now. The rules for enemy spawns do not feel consistent at all during the course of the game. Rifts spawn enemies, which is simple enough. And rifts can't appear inside rooms, that's great! Except that enemies can spawn in dark rooms without a rift present...which is a bit questionable with the established rift rule, but okay. Rifts bad, rooms good, keep them lighted. Except if you're underground, where there are no rifts, but more enemies than you've ever seen on the surface. And then there's Temporal Storms, where the rules no longer matter. They can spawn anywhere with no warning, even right on top of you if you're unlucky. So even if there was a hypothetical way to defend against mobs normally, it's thrown out in the unruled chaos of a Temporal Storm. So do rifts even matter? Outside of Temporal Storms and above ground, enemy spawns should only happen from rifts, and have their spawn radius tightened up immensely so that spawns appear from within the rift. Maybe a little entrance animation too, i dunno have fun with it. Maybe instead of randomly appearing and disappearing, groups of rifts carve a long path through the world, making long chains of rifts that spawn enemies, asking the player to fight through them or find a way around. Enemies would have to stay closer to their spawn point for this to work with it's intended effect of being an environmental hazard. Aggro range for enemies in general feels way too big, in my opinion. Storms are when you can start having fun with the established rules, instead of getting rid of them. I really dislike the 'spawn from nothing' that currently happens during storms. Unfortunately, rifts wouldn't happen during storms, so unless we go the route of having them walk in from far away, we'd need another way for mobs to appear. I really like the idea of increasing aggro range to infinite during storms, so you can get that feeling of a really aggressive enemy presence hunting you down, but there are other options. A spawner mob, or other supernatural effect, rising out of the ground... I'm down for anything other than blinking into existence. Perhaps more environmental constructs to combat the environmental threats? expounding on the Rift Ward, a construct that lowers their health, or other effects like blinding or pulling aggro. It almost feels like the Rift Ward is part of an unfinished system, and maybe when there's an enemy/storm overhaul we'll get other constructs to build to defend against mobs, making it feel more like a tower defense than a kite fest. Who knows. These are all just ideas. ------ Yep! You're so right man, Sorry to have disagreed with you!

You can choose not to agree, and interpret the game however you want, but the developer intent and literal programming remains the same. Don't put words in my mouth. I don't think that storms are well designed, but there's nothing wrong with making them a global event. You just don't like it. It being a fact about the world is the literal programming of the game, Temporal Storms happen and you can't avoid it. And until the developer recants on that, it's part of the game. The solution to the problem, as a player, should be to deal with in in whatever way. You want a way to avoid it, there isn't one. Plan for it then. Or get a mod. There's no logical fallacy, it's the developer's vision for the game to have storms. I'd like them to be better and more fun, but you want them functionally off by default so you don't have to be inconvenienced. The dev has provided you with a solution, turn them off or sleep through them. But you're complaining because your 'ideal' solution of never wanting to consider them isn't the default option. It's derailing threads about constructive solutions and a discussion dead-end. Yes, but what I'm suggesting is that the two don't have to be different and separate systems, when having zero stability is a functional equivalency to being in a storm. Merge the two systems, so that when a Temporal Storm hits, global area stability drops, your personal stability drops to zero and the storm proceeds as usual.

Uh, yeah. That's the nature of the game. It's a fact about the world. When I go to explore a new area but I forgot to keep food in my inventory, I have to walk all the way back to my cellar. When I want to build, but don't have a reserve of clay, I have to dig some. If I don't track the time between storms, I get interrupted. It sounds like you're not accounting for Temporal Storms in the slightest, and getting upset because that's not what you want to do. That's not the game's fault, and it isn't a design flaw. You're not looking at it objectively, because if you were, you'd realize that it's a consistent, repeatable, predictable event. You're looking at it the most subjectively, because you are being inconvenienced by it. You're asking for it's removal, and asserting it's an improvement because it's different. If the devs wanted you to never be inconvenienced or interrupted or uncomfortable, they'd have made a different game. And some people enjoy that. You are not in control of this world, and it will continue without you. You are simply surviving in it.

I've discussed a fair bit in other threads on ways to improve Temporal Storms, but I don't think I've yet talked about any ideas concerning mitigation or straight avoidance of storms. Personally, I like that they are unavoidable, predictable, and challenging. Though, I recognize why other don't like them for those same reasons. But has anyone brought up before the idea of merging of your personal temporal stability (i.e. the spinning gear on you UI) and the world stability (Temporal Storms, area instability)? At the moment, the game treats them as separate things, where your personal temporal stability is only affected by areas of instability, and storms have no effect on your personal stability. So, the game treats Temporal Storms fundamentally differently from reaching zero stability. But, these things could be merged together, unifying the mechanics and even provide an immersive warning layer to storms. In this hypothetical, storms would mechanically change to a decrease of area stability globally, keeping their unavoidable nature, but linking it to your personal stability. Now when you would see the stability gear spin down, you would have to ask yourself, "Am I in a bad area, or is this a storm?" Because it's a global decrease, Temporal Storms still happen on a schedule, but now it decreases your stability down until Rust effects start to happen. What does a change such as this do for the player? Well, now that Temporal Storms are 'entered' based on your personal stability, it means they can be mitigated by the 'slicing your arm and inserting a Temporal Gear' mechanic. Hypothetically, you could turn a heavy storm to a light storm, or avoid a storm altogether if you had enough Temporal Gears to sacrifice. I think spawn rates for Temporal Gears should be increased during storms, so if a player doesn't have enough (such as if they are very early game, or are storm avoidant), they could gain Temporal Gears with minor work. (Personally, the first time I played VS it took me so long to get a Temporal Gear to set my spawn point in my base, it was frustrating). I'd like to see more uses for Temporal Gears too, so it becomes a choice between avoiding a storm or whatever other use a TG could have. ---- We're in early access though, so I think we need refocus on the development of implemented features, and not their removal. In regards to the discussion of allowing the player to 'choose when and where danger happens', I hope that never happens. The simple answer is that VS isn't that kind of game. Vintage Story is an "uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game" and clearly the devs have a vision where the danger 'comes to you'. This isn't about player choice, and 'being accommodating to other play styles'. This is a fundamental part of the game. And part of it is that the world is dangerous, there will be struggle. Turning the world to Peaceful Mode with PvE zones is not a solution. A solution is already provided by the dev for those who do not want enemies. Use it, or a mod. Suggesting that a fundamental aspect of the game changes so that you can be inconvenienced less is not constructive. This is a game where you are inconvenienced by hunger, weather, wildlife, geography, time, and everything else. I would suggest you start seeing Temporal Storms as the same thing, and you may understand the dev's vision better.

Ah, that's kind of unfortunate. I understand why, of course. I just feel some of these things, (incentivizing cheesing with ugly workarounds, inadvertently creating undesired incentives like running away from home for the duration of the storm), are situations we already face with the current implementation. Some situations, I argue, are maybe worse (Death loops and community opposition). One thing that I do want to say though (bringing it back to Minecraft), is that if it wasn't already in the game, the Creeper would never be added with the modern mindset of Mojang/Microsoft. Because it's a similar idea of a mob that can damage player placed blocks and kind of has to be considered and engaged with. And I don't think there's nearly any pushback against the Creeper in the Minecraft community calling for it's removal. I get the sentiment behind 'don't mess with the player's creation', but I think that forgetting 'the player can and should creatively use countermeasures' understates the influence that the Creeper had on Minecraft's development and community. And personally, I think it's a stance that's way too risk-averse for VS, that markets itself as a uncompromising, hardcore survival game before as a homesteading one. I would argue that there aren't that many instances of consequences in VS. From what I can think of, is losing your satiation/total health points on death, or losing your dropped inventory to the despawn timer, or not having a spare hammer and getting sent back to the copper age, or losing your domesticated animals to predators/lighting. And this form of loss is what I want to focus in on, because it's so similar to having a creeper blow up your walls. It demands the player prepare with fences or a lightning rod, or potentially suffer losses. Should predator attacks be removed from the game? Or why is that acceptable, but a monster doing the same isn't? On a greater level, I think the question becomes "Why, if something bad happens, is it bad?" (These aren't accusatory/hostile questions, but meant to inspire discussion, as on reread it sounds a bit harsh) One of the things I worry about with creating more incentive via loot, is the emotion around storms becoming one of excitement of what you could find rather than one of worry about what you might lose. We already have valuable and unique loot spawn in storms, but how much more does there need to be until it's deemed acceptable, and players who hide will start to participate? Can you suggest a different incentive that could be implemented that positively reinforces participation over hiding? To me, hiding needs to be disincentivized because it's a neutral outcome. But participating in storms as they are currently usually results in a negative outcome. Disincentivizing hiding would go hand-in-hand with incentivizing participating, and changing the way storms work; I am absolutely not suggesting one or the other because that's not how changing behaviors works. Listen, I'm gonna play a card here that's kind of hypothetical, should a player who ignored the coming winter not suffer any consequences? We could be having a discussion about how there's not enough animals spawning during winter, and players would like to be able to hunt to survive it easier. I haven't actually, I'm not much into mods because of how often they seem to trivialize certain aspects of the game, or become overly centralizing. I may look into it though, just to see how it feels. It might inspire more ideas about how Storms work. I like your ideas about storms, but I don't think it would change anything fundamental about them. I agree that the simplicity of mob behavior causes some strategies to work too well, aka farms and such, but I think it directly goes back to some things you bring up here. I've spoken about it in another thread, but the majority of mobs in this game follow the same code of "pathfind to player and melee attack", making swarming the player with high numbers of mobs the easiest way to overwhelm them. If different mob AI behaviors could be programmed in, maybe enemies could be made tougher without increasing their numbers to a ridiculous degree, meaning you could have periods of panic and periods of calm during storms instead of just one overly long kiting fight. I think that the monster spawning rules changing during storms is a game design mistake, and would instead like to see areas where many rifts open and enemies spawn specifically near them, rather than just about anywhere. Ultimately, I don't think hiding can be discouraged without punishing the player, and I don't think that loot for storms should reach the point where the hiders come out, because the real problem is with participating usually being a negative outcome for the player. Until that changes, players will continue to enter the feedback loop of Temporal Storms removing their food buffs just to die, and then hide/skip them.

Of course, part of the idea refinement process is disagreement. I mean, I don't even think that what I've offered up is a complete solution, because I agree with this. My angle focuses more on immersion and integration with other gameplay systems, but he's right that the core problem is some players don't want to be interrupted just to hide for 10 minutes, or to die. But like, I don't know if that can really be helped. Temporal Storms are supposed to interrupt you, and make you say oh ****, I'm in the middle of something that I could absolutely die if I don't stop and prepare (or at least, that's how I react to them). If a player doesn't like that, I don't think there's a solution beyond turning them off... like, is the core of the problem that you've been interrupted, or that you don't like fighting mobs, or that the punishment for dying is too high? Some of these have real, tangible solutions that can be introduced, and some of them can't. And narrowing down the exact reason why players aren't enjoying them is part of it. I just don't think that players who are upset at the interruption can be helped. It's the nature of the storm, and the desire of the developers for them to be this way. At the very least, they can be tracked and predicted, so I think that providing ways that the player can either skip (by sleeping) or shortening the storm (by a new storm mechanic involving prep work or actively killing things) is a step in the right direction. Some players don't actually want better storms, they just want them gone. And that's already in the game. Their actual complaint is that turning off storms turns off all story/lore stuff. And that's a completely different topic, one that I don't think I want to entertain in this one.

Is that frequent enough to justify adding damage types? Those are the situations where such a system would shine. The overwhelming majority of the game has you dealing with only one type of enemy at a time.

I'd forgotten completely about Locusts. And you know, that might be the only situation in game where two different enemy types can meet and be fought against simultaneously.

If there was a mixture of enemies that had weaknesses to different weapons, I'd support it. But as the game is now, damage types as you describe just removes the reason to use any weapon you want. If you're going caving, why would you bring a spear if a Falx gets bonus damage on everything you meet? You've put yourself at a disadvantage without it. We just don't have any situations in game where there would be a mix of enemies weak to these different damage types, that would benefit from the added complexity.

It's an idea to prompt engagement, and encourage players to participate in storms. If they find themselves annoyed by their base being altered, then they must fight the enemies off. If they cheese it by chiseling, it would actually make storms harder since there's no structures to pull aggro from the player. To that, I shrug and say suit yourself. There's no cheese-proof plan without literally forcing the player out via temporal instability drain, and then if a player isn't ready they will surely die. It provides a choice of active involvement of defense, or preparing and repairing. And I think you overestimate how many players will cheese a mechanic that adds immersiveness and something to do, even if it's annoying. Personally, I like playing with cave-ins, and a portion of the community loves loose soil/sticky soil, along with every other mod that adds the strangest of minutiae. The broken bits could be cosmetic, they could not. It doesn't really matter to me, because what matters is that frustration from the player who didn't bother to defend and now has consequences for it. If your goats and chickens were at risk, would you fight them? If your cozy cabin got splotches of rust all over it, would you defend it? These questions are interesting to me, because if a player says 'well, I'd rather not...' then there's already an option for them. Turning Temporal Storms off. But for others, it means you can do something if the fight doesn't go your way, or you're unprepared. Alright, this is new to me. I haven't made it to the village yet, because it's literally a 30 minute boat ride away and I would rather play the game than do that. Pffft, I dunno. I'm just some guy, not a programmer. I imagine some mobs would be designated to aggro the player on spawn, and some would be designated to attack structures. And then once they destroy a block (or multiple?) then they would aggro towards the player. Or maybe destroying a block takes the whole time of the storm, to allow the player to intervene. If they can't reach the player, they attack structures/roam. I don't know how much destruction would be appropriate, but I was not thinking that you'd walk outside to a completely demolished base. Just like a few parts of your base that had signs of damage. Figuring out the code for it isn't my job though, but I doubt it's impossible if you're coding to create the illusion of it.

The end goal of all of this is to reimagine Temporal Storms in a way where despite not being well equipped, players in the early game will still be able to participate in storms without hiding. In this hypothetical scenario, imagine the storm being rebalanced in the early game so fighting without falling into a death spiral is possible, and hard enough in the endgame so that the losses suffered by hiding become a setback. Drifters and Shivers are capable of it sure, but restricting this broken door mechanic specifically to Temporal Storms is the purpose. I would not want each night to require the same level of vigilance that a storm would need with this. Besides, you wouldn't need a bar on the door... gotta think like a player would. Dropping any blocks in front of the door would stop anything from entering because I'm not giving them the ability to destroy blocks like the player can. And to me, that sounds like barricading the doors for invasion. We're already in a situation where players are gaming such a system, and I think that's unavoidable. The same min-maxxers who will chisel every block of their structure are most likely the same ones with a surface-to-mantle farm, so I'm willing to overlook it. It's not a mechanic that I envision as bad as Valheim, but more like how you have to replace bricks in the cementation furnace. I don't imagine these 'broken' structures losing their functionality though, just be cosmetic in nature. When a drifter would damage a fence, the fence model would change to a broken one, and it would still be 1.5 blocks tall and prevent pathfinding through it. Maybe if it was done to cobblestone block, it would just add the mold or rust overlays found in ruins to it. This could be a way to collect previously unattainable clutter, or could be farmed to create an older, grosser aesthetic build. Maybe the hammer gets a functional use without the chisel in the off hand, and becomes the optimal way of repairing things without replacing them. The idea of base repair would only come into play if you ignored the storm and hid. To say, look what you allowed to happen through inaction or fear, which I feel resonates with the lore a bit. And if you were away from home when a Temporal Storm hits, well then your base is in an unloaded chunk and it doesn't really matter. The goal of these ideas is to disincentivize hiding or ignoring storms, and I don't think that you can provide too much positive reinforcement (loot) without making farms too lucrative. So yes, I think there should be a bit of extra work involved if you don't bother to defend yourself. With a determined set of spawns, the devs could specifically say that, for example, heavy storms get 3 top tier enemies, or even set that to increase as more time passes in the world. This would solve one RNG layer, and let your chances to get Jonas parts be determined by your rolls on when you harvest them. This is all just spitballing, by the way. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of these things. Edit: elaborating on broken door mechanic

Well it doesn't sound like the storms are too easy... you're saying they're too easy to disengage with and ignore. So I'm not sure about the source for this, but more than a few times I've heard that the devs want Temporal Storms to feel like tower defense. Obviously, they haven't nailed that yet, but there are ways we can go about changing or adding things about storms to make it feel defensive, and less able to be ignored. Something I would really like to hear people's opinions on is the introduction of consequences to ignoring Temporal Storms. I have a few ideas floating around in my head about it, that absolutely should not all be implemented at the same time for the health of the game, but that I think would add an interesting set of decisions to make about storms. The first is giving mobs the ability to open/break down doors, given enough time. Or alternatively, a new specific monster type that is the only one who can open doors, and only spawns during storms. With enemies being able to gain access to your home under the right circumstances, we'd want to remove the ability for them to spawn inside rooms (and given that the game is already programmed to define rooms, that shouldn't be too hard). This means that you must now patrol your home in order to keep it safe, but as long as you do, you will be guaranteed safety, given you've built it right. It also means that how you build your base from then on will be a factor you consider: Do you have too many entrances and exits to defend? Will your courtyard be the reason your base falls? And so on. The second is limited destruction of player placed structures. Minecraft devs had this concept in it's infancy with Endermen moving blocks, but they were too worried about annoying players. I have no such reservations, and would love to see a portion of spawned enemies make efforts to destroy fences and weak building blocks. This would reduce the amount of enemies that aggro to the player, and give some flavor during and after the storm. In my head, these blocks aren't straight up destroyed, but replaced with damaged clutter like we have already in the game, so that way the player can know what got destroyed and where, in order to replace it. Ignoring enemies during storms would mean you need to dedicate time to repairing and replacing things around the outside of your base. A third idea is kind of a system to tack on to the side of either of the previous ones. But a quota of enemies to kill in order to prevent consequences from happening to you, or to end the storms faster. With storms being used to farm flax, gears, and Jonas tech, I know this isn't ideal. But perhaps the storms can have a definite number of enemy spawns that can happen, say 30 mobs. You kill 30 mobs, and the storm ends. If you don't kill 30 mobs, the storm continues until some reasonable amount of time later. This is flexible, of course, I haven't thought to hard about these things or have the modding skill to try them out. But man would I love to see Temporal Storms improve in literally any way, because I don't hate them either. They're just badly implemented at the moment.

You're right, I like to refer to it's balancing as the old RPG style, where it's the player's responsibility to turn around when they encounter a threat beyond their ability, or they die. I believe the first 3? Temporal Storms a player gets are actually weaker than normal to account for early game, but I think that the difficulty spike and scaling of storms gets a bit out of hand until late game. In regards to the player's ability to retreat, it's not something that you're really allowed to do during Temporal Storms, which is why hiding or sleep skipping is so common among newer players. That, and they don't have the equipment or game knowledge to deal with it yet. But the lack of 'game knowledge' isn't solved by reading the wiki, it's solved by the player learning the cheese strats of kiting backwards and pillaring. An unfamiliar player might die during their first few temporal storms, and the game design goal should be for them to learn how to deal with storms by playing them. Storms as they're currently implemented is such a huge barrier that without cheese strats, being outside is almost always a guarantee to die. And after the first death during a storm, it usually spirals into a death loop because you don't have your weapons and equipment, you have a smaller health bar, and you haven't found a temporal gear for a spawn point at home so you gotta run back, and then there's 3 monsters camping your corpse, and repeat. I remember my first storm, lol. By the end of the storm, your original death marker is no longer on your map, and you may have lost all your gear. I can completely understand why newer players will avoid every single storm from that point, or just drop the game. The first hill is tremendous with a pitfall back to day 3. That being said, Temporal Storms aren't a game skill/knowledge check, which is what I mean by that. The battle during a storm is hard, but not because of players not knowing the cheese. They're hard because they're poorly designed with an enemy sandbox that's too deadly to play against with honest tactics, and too high a penalty for inevitable failure. I don't think that the difficulty is justifiable just because if you're new you can cheese, and if you want challenge you can cheesen't.

Here's the thing though, I don't think that unfamiliarity with the game and it's AI is an adequate justification for these things. Playing the game is the same as learning the game, and the difficulty spike of Temporal Storms forcing players to hide is an issue, but it's not because they haven't learned the most effective tactics. Temporal Storms became unbearable with the addition of Bowtorns, and I don't feel like they've been tuned correctly for the situations Storms put you in. I think their projectile speed and accuracy is too high to make dodging or blocking a reliable way to avoid damage, and when you get a Bowtorn Storm it's suicide to try and fight when there's so many of them at all angles around you. I don't see a no-win situation as difficulty, because then the most effective tactic to survive is to hide. And if players are hiding, it's because they recognize these situations. Sure, I could stop kiting drifters (I don't personally pillar), but where does this line of thinking stop? Should I restrict my use of weapons too? At what point have I stopped playing the game in the way I want to play it, just to get more variation out of an incredibly simple system? I'm not seeking more difficulty, or artificial difficulty by tying my right arm behind my back. I'm seeking more ways to think and react to combat in VS. I want to sprint in combat to dodge attacks and be mobile, I want to have the best weapons to defend myself with, I want the list of choices to be larger than kite, pillar, hide. That's why I think the best way to improve it is by changing enemy behavior from being heatseeking meatball missiles to things that would make kiting and pillaring less effective.

Oh I definitely agree, some posters are... overzealous with their ideas, but I understand it comes from a place of wanting to enjoy VS more. It's the challenge of dictating what is within the realm of vanilla, versus what's better left up to mods... and that's really only a decision that can be made by the devs. Players are all trying to interpret the future of their vision based on what we have in our hands, all based on our own personal tastes. It's the different interpretations of art and discussion surrounding it that really interests me, and I always wonder if they also expect the same level of commitment applied to things like making cheese or plank cutting. I think a certain level of simplicity is expected in vanilla VS, and I don't see anything wrong with that. But with so many different systems and the game still under development, there is an inconsistency we currently face. I like the variation and choice between plate, mail, brig, and gambeson armors, along with the falx vs spear vs bow arms. Even the rust enemies as I said before have three distinct archetypes, slow vs fast vs ranged; but the systems where they interact with the player are too simple. They reduce player health by running at you via the shortest possible path (excluding bowtorn). And it's this area where I'd like to see more development work before I start to hope for more complicated combat features like dual wielding or stealth takedowns. Not to say that I am hoping for those, but you get what I mean. I want to see current systems all brought to a similar level of verisimilitude before committing to brand new ones, if that makes sense. I agree, and think that status effects like poison, blinding, and hallucination are within vanilla's 'feel', and can introduce some decision making and target priority during fights without feeling too complicated. Maybe we don't even need to overhaul the point-and-click combat if it feels right after adding. It's all up to dreams and developers, and thankfully they're pro-modding, but I just find something special about playing vanilla as someone's undiluted idea as art.