Marotte

Oh wow, what a coincidence! cheers! does this include monsters too?

footstep sounds are not exactly critical for gameplay, but they really can improve the gameplay experience. vintage story is not the first game where the absence of footstep sounds significantly detracted from my experience, it has also been the case in quasimorph, where enemies outside of your vision sector make no sounds (or used to, I haven't played in a while). to be fair, it has way more catastrophic consequences in quasimorph then it does in vintage story. but the comparison remains, because its not about not dying, its that it made me appreciate just how much situational awareness from audio cues adds to the experience. it gives you more agency. when you can hear things happening on screen but not the sound of an enemy closing in behind you (when within all reason you should) it really messes with your brain. it conditions paranoia, because you genuinely should be able to hear that. now if you normally could hear footstep sounds it would make specifically silent enemies fulfill a stealth attack niche. this just seems like basic good game design. the only downside is lessening the opportunities for enemies to be sneaky and ambush you, but that can be remedied by giving some creatures deliberate stalking behaviors where it would make sense that they would be quiet. it would add more complexity, but i think less sneaky creatures is a fair tradeoff for being able to hear movement at all. I know there are mods that add sound to creatures, but that's not what I'm talking about. really, I'm asking why is this not already in the game, it feels like an easy win. Is the lack deliberate? is it a performance problem? is it a design decision? it seems like a basic thing to have absent for all this time. It feels strange to be asking now. the only reason why it may not be egregious is that usually creatures make some sort of vocalization randomly to signal their presence, which is the only way of knowing without visual contact. I suppose this happens often enough that you aren't completely robbed of auditory awareness. what else to say? I guess its a glaring gap in the soundscape when you become aware of it. like being aware of your own breathing. I guess that is not a good analogy, because it would be more like noticing other people's lack of breathing...

if you have steel plate armor, you are the fortress, you don't need defenses. its not difficult, in my 100 hour world, i still haven't died once, the most dangerous thing in the entire game is my own elk deciding to attack me with my armor off when im working around it. what i am talking about, is that it is annoying to chase around nightmare+ bowtorn in a heavy temporal storm. and as far as I'm concerned you cant do ranged combat in a heavy storm when the world wobbles like jelly. what im talking about is getting the kills and the loot (without cheese). bowtorn don't really spawn in arenas unless your arena is huge enough, which kind of defeats the purpose of an arena. building fortifications is all fine and dandy until you cant hit anything in a heavy storm or you want to finish enemies off. also, more recently after my original post, i have been finding enemies behaving very complacently, sometimes just meandering around even when I'm in line of sight, sometimes walking away without even taking damage, and only around 60% of the time actually seeking me. anything less than a heavy storm is trivial, and chasing around nightmare bowtorn in heavy armor is incredibly annoying. i want to get swarmed, not doing constant goose chases. obviously i can hunker down, but it feels like nothing comes when i do. I feel like i have to go out and get them. and i really would rather shoot at bowtorn, but again, that is not an option in heavy storms.

doesn't this make it unusable in crafting though, because it becomes a chiseled block?

your right that a thunderdome isn't very cheesy, it would have to be massive to allow bowtorn to spawn in it and not outside it. i agree that shivers are mostly fine, i dont want them to be slower, and i don't want it to be viable to chase them. but i think bowtorn should be slower in storms or not as flighty or make ranged combat viable during storms. because you pretty much have to be armored during heavy storms, and because of that bowtorns are basically unreachable.

cheese is not necessarily exploiting an enemy specific weakness. cheese is the trivialization of enemies with minimal effort (and/or little investment), virtually zero risk and still being rewarded for it. its not just about safety it is about effort and reward too. i am very safe (not perfectly) in my steel armor and at minimal risk, but i went through the trouble of making it. i can also hide, exposing myself to no risk with minimal effort, but no reward either. cheese and strategy are not actually incompatible. cheese is just strategies that trivialize gameplay by bypassing mechanics or challenges. cheese can be intelligent and clever, but it isn't necessarily always the case, and it spreads so people don't always come up with it themselves. also, my problem isn't with cheese specifically. it was that i don't want to have to use cheese to not be frustrated. it wasn't frustration with challenge it was frustration with evasive enemies. and i want the reward (no matter how pathetic it is). by the time they are fleeing from being damaged, i am usually right next to them so its less of an issue, and they don't draw you as far away. also they may still attack you if you are close enough or hit them again, so you can keep them from disengaging. not so much with shivers because they are so fast. also they don't flee forever, i think it is around 10 seconds? so you can catch up to them if you want to chase them, and it is not like they immediately turn around to shoot you the moment you stop chasing them. so it is different. also there are higher tier bowtorn variants. not just tier zero.

the cheese is specifically the cheesing of the enemies. for me something is cheese if it puts you at virtually zero risk with very little investment and still gives you rewards. traps are cheese (if you can kill all the victims at zero risk to yourself). building a fence isn't cheese per se, but it is exploiting pathfinding somewhat. building bases and putting fences around your crops and pens isn't cheese because you don't necessarily do it with storms in mind. i have fences all over my base, mostly to keep pests away and livestock in. and yes enemies get stuck on them, but to me it is coincidence, i don't focus on maximizing that happening. i used to do something that was cheesy, put fences next to my doors so i could attack drifters through the gap. but i have stopped doing that because it wasn't very fun and felt dirty. i didn't realize that drifters always spawn in storms, there have been several were i haven't seen any. so there probably isn't enough or i have been unlucky. i agree that drifters on their own are not a credible threat. i still think they are valuable enemies, they can offer moderate area denial, encouraging the player to retreat or kite. and somewhat discouraging stationary defensive combat, though choke points can give you back some ability to manage them defensively. essentially they are beaten by mobility. bowtorn discourages running around out in the open (also area denial), unless you are armored enough to withstand their shots, however they are defeated by closing the distance, which is harder when armored because of their fleeing. they are a situational awareness and target prioritization challenge. but unless you can lure them into confined spaces, the only way to defeat them is to go out in the open and chase them down, the best(fun) case scenario is fighting in a town (doesn't exist naturally obviously) where there are a mixture of long, medium and short sightlines, and opportunities for cover. shivers also discourage running around in the open, but not as area denial, more as punishing kiting and chasing, because they are so fast. so you should pause your focus on drifters to prioritize shivers when a window opens, like when they come in to attack or when they are stunned, or retreat to a choke point position. so they are also a situational awareness and target prioritization challenge. the mixture of bowtorn and shivers in larger numbers however can strain the fun, because they don't synergize very well in large quantities. you are punished for being out in the open by bowtorn, you are punished for chasing bowtorn by other bowtorn and shivers, and you are punished by focusing on shivers by bowtorn (unless you have a confined space with line of sight broken from most angles) and by other shivers who will disrupt focus and spread damage, opening you to more attacks. thank you for sharing about mobextraspawn.json, i didn't realize i could just configure these things. but i still wanted to discuss this because i think it could be improved in vanilla.

1%?? why on earth is that so low? i would have imagined it be more like 20%? that would seem reasonable. it might make it harder just ignore and run right past them all the time. i wonder if their lunge give you an even stronger damage boost.

personally, making a dedicated arena or trap feels wrong. it feels like making a terraria arena or minecraft mob farm, which feels gross, especially in this game. feels like cheese and ai exploitation. also i haven't seen bowtorn cluster like other people have, they just wander the outskirts of my base. also, i don't think it would discourage risking storms, because early tier armor is still useful early game. and I've never really benefitted from bowtorn being so fickle. shivers, maybe it gives you time to recompose if you are fighting them one on one, but if you are fighting multiple enemies during a storm it is actively unhelpful, because it spreads the damage you deal and lets you get distracted by the others to open you up for an easy hit (and they are fast enough when fleeing that chasing them is almost pointless). also the only reason i am being hyper aggressive is because i have the highest possible tier of armor, i wouldn't be if this wasn't the case. and it made me realize that you (or maybe just I) cant have fun fighting aggressively in a heavy temporal storm (atrocious visibility) against nightmare shivers and/or nightmare bowtorn. any other circumstances, i feel, are trivial. it kinda sucks if i don't need to run away and want to fight them and use my armor that i spent so much to make to not die. i think in the moment i was just exited to use my awesome gear to slay some monsters only to be like "GET BACK HERE AND LET ME ****ING KILL YOU!". i think i would have been happy if in addition to everything else, some drifters spawned so i could have had at least something to actually fight. maybe that is the answer, always spawn at least some drifters? i don't think that would be very disruptive.

In a vacuum, the shivers and bowtorn are unique and fun new enemies to encounter. But I have occasionally been annoyed by how often and with how much speed they run away. Nothing too bad on its own and in small numbers. However I recently faced a heavy temporal storm that spawned nightmare shivers and bowtorn and it was the most unpleasant combat so far. I didn't want to hide because i was fully kitted in steel gear, so i went out to fight. But it was incredibly frustrating to fight them because they kept running away from me, and i could never catch them. and its not really a mater of difficulty, because i was virtually unkillable in my armor from their harassment. if i had taken my armor off i would have died near instantly so taking the armor off to chase them is out of the question. yes i know hiding is an option but if I'm not scared or threatened by anything I shouldn't need to hide, nor should I hide out of annoyance. so maybe during storms their behavior could change? shivers could be more aggressive, and bowtorn could hold their ground or move slower? personally I would prefer getting swarmed and being killed over getting harassed and having to chase them around and never killing any of them. because at least having the risk of getting killed makes me feel justified in hiding. and its not like I can have a ranged fight with them during a storm on account of the distortion. has anyone else had similar experiences?

that is a fair point, i didn't think about that. there must be some way to balance this better... the current solution feels very bandaid-y maybe we could cap the temperature that certain smeltable non-metal materials can reach to slightly above their smelting temperatures (+5 degrees maybe)? so you can prevent a large buffer temperature from building. or maybe it could take much longer to heat large stacks of items? that would probably feel realistic that it is right now.

ah thanks. what was the idea behind making the temperature reset?

now that you need to smelt flint to reliably make fireclay, i have noticed that smelting a stack of flint takes massive amounts of charcoal to make. this is because when one flint finishes, it cools off all other items in the stack to base temperature, which takes a while to re-heat. so i find myself babysitting the flints and removing them when one gets close to finishing to preserve their temperature, to make it faster and more fuel efficient. this also seems to be the case for lime, and cooking meat but it is much less noticeable when cooking because cooking temperatures are so low. is this a bug? is there a work around that doesn't involve babysitting? or a mod to fix this? (i couldn't find any on first search)