Aranyani

I think the wavy/nausea effect of alcohol should be completely removed ASAP. Or at least make it an accessibility toggle. Or something that only happens after drinking nothing less than an entire barrel of aged whiskey. The fact that the whole screen starts moving after just one sip is the most ridiculous and nauseating thing ever and makes fermented fruits in this game something I fear more than the rot itself. Alcohol manufacture could be such a great part of VS with fun taverns popping up everywhere, potion shops using them to make tinctures and battle enhancements, mining strength, running endurance, etc.

Or another option that keeps temporal stability as a mechanic but limits most of the drifter encounters to underground or during storms: rifts off

Trader Camps is a great mod if you're willing to make a new world or travel to new territory. It will still generate the single vanilla traders but you'll also find wagon camps of 2-3 traders together, usually in the old wagons. There's even the occasional abandoned wagon camp. You can sometimes find all three traders milling about around a campfire which is cool. Overall I think much more interesting and immersive than single traders evenly spread out across the landscape. Love the mod, wouldn't be surprised if something like it made its way into vanilla.

Algernon's Watersheds mod has a great discussion on world settings and what they do under the 'Setup' heading if you scroll down on the page. I like continents and oceans too, and after playing with world gen settings an unreasonable amount, this is my favorite that I have settled on: Plains & Valleys + Watersheds (optional but such a great mod) + Landcover 50%, Landcover Scale 150%, Upheaval 0%, Landform Scale 200%. If you want more ocean and less land (islands instead of continents) reduce landcover even more but you'll have less traders probably.

World settings seem to matter a lot as well. Make sure your landform scale is at least default (100%) if not higher. I have mine set at 200% and get a decent number of ruins in caves. Once you set landform scale less than default, you'll mostly have a bunch of short empty caves with no ruins in them. If you don't mind modding, there are several mods that make adjustments to ruins content and frequency. The mod called 'Better Ruins' has some very interesting new cave and surface POI ruin builds made by members of the community and you can find fun building blueprints in these as well.

There are plenty of mods that make various adjustments to drifters and animals, but none I can find that would allow for hostile drifters and passive (unless provoked) animals. This seems very logical and necessary to me to separate the two hostility settings but no one else seems to care. This is my top suggestion for the game and my first ever post. Hopefully I'm not alone out here wanting this lol.

I can't believe this whole thread happened and no one mentioned the fact that there is currently NO way to make only drifters automatically hostile. Why can I not have hostile drifters and animals that are only hostile if provoked? Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. THAT is why I play on passive. Sure makes cave and ruin exploration a breeze. With all the other options we have, you'd think combat would allow for animal/drifter differences in hostility. If there is a mod for this please someone let me know.