Teh Pizza Lady

There is a reason Tyron put a "Rage Quit?" button on the death screen. It literally says that. You can argue all day that temporal storms are rough on new players, but that is the point. They are meant to be rough. It is no secret that a storm can and will catch a new player off guard. The only way through it is preparation. And new players will not prepare. I did not. My first storm was miserable. I ended up hiding in my basement, backed into a corner with no weapon because I died and could not get back to my gear. Since then, I keep a spare set of weapons and tools next to my respawn point. Later, when I crafted my first iron armor, I thought I was untouchable because bears could not kill me anymore. Then a tier 4 drifter ripped a chunk out of that armor and sent me limping back to camp with my proverbial tail between my legs. The question is not whether this is "great" game design. The question is whether the game is intentionally built to punish players who are unprepared. It is. The whole point of the storms is that do not have anywhere to run. No where is safe. How can it be when temporal forces permeate even the fabric of reality? If the storm politely stops at the walls of your home and knocks on the front door to ask for permission to enter, it stops being an unnatural disaster and starts being a scheduled event where you bunker down. It is no different from a blood moon from 7dtd that players will min max around. Minmaxing is not intended VS gameplay. Yes the game engine can detect rooms, cellars, greenhouses. It intentionally does not when determining where to spawn rotbeasts. The storm is not a mob wave, it is a tear in reality. It's supposed to violate your sense of security, keep you on edge, and wondering "Am I safe?". When reality warps, then the reality of the safety of your base warps with it. No where is safe. And I would also like to push back on the idea that this forces the players to play the way the devs want them to play. Preparation for a coming storm is not a single path. You can build fallback rooms, you can keep spare gear by your spawn point, you can go mobile and stay on the run until it's over, you can design kill corridors, you can focus on armor and shielding, you can focus on healing poultices and bandages or even a mix of all of these things. The game doesn't tell you how to survive. It just commands you to do so. Comparing it to 7dtd misses an important distinction. In 7dtd, the horde is a predictable siege that can be solved with engineering cheese. Temporal storms are unpredictable designed to disrupt your comfort. If your base becomes a hard safe zone, the pressure disappears and so does a large part of what make the mechanic work so well the way it does. As long as the storms stay true to the lore, I am open to any modification to them. However the lore dictates that the storms are not a polite environmental effect. They used to be worse. A LOT worse. They are fractures in reality that is slowly mending itself. The moment players can say "Oh just hide in your mansion and be fine", the storm has lost its teeth and becomes just an annoying decoration. I think there is an important distinction being missed here. "Because we have always done it that way" is an appeal to inertia. It implies no one thought about it, no one revisited it, and no deeper reasoning exists. "Because of the lore" in this case is not that. Tyron is not an immutable god, sure (sorry, buddy...). But the broader narrative has already been written. We are playing an early access build with only a fraction of that story exposed. When Chapter 2 released, some Chapter 1 lore entries were adjusted, not because the mechanics changed, but to avoid spoiling what comes later. That tells me the narrative backbone exists independently of moment to moment balance decisions. More importantly, mechanics have changed before without rewriting the world to justify them. When drifters were given the ability to throw rocks to counter sky highways and avoid rotbeasts and storms, the lore did not suddenly shift to accommodate that. The world did not rewrite itself. The mechanic was adjusted within the existing framework. So when someone says "because of the lore," it is not a sacred shield against criticism. It is a reminder that this setting is intentional. The storms, the rot, the lack of absolute safety, all of that fits within a vision of a world that is fundamentally unstable. Lore is not immutable, but it is deliberate. If something was built to reinforce the theme that reality itself is compromised, then removing that pressure should require more justification than player discomfort. Before we change something, it is fair to ask: what thematic role is this serving? What tension is it preserving? What would be lost if we sand it down? That is not the same as clinging to tradition. It is recognizing that design and narrative are intertwined here.

I agree, which is why I called it a harsh reality. If I had my way, temporal storms couldn't be turned off at all, but knowing they can be and knowing that Anego like to make things in this game as prototypes first and then flesh out the details later, I understand why temporal storms have the ability to be turned off. We have 6 more story chapters to figure out how via normal gameplay means. But the harsh reality is that they suck. However with any game mechanic there is a stark contrast between constructive criticism and venting frustration. It is wise to understand the difference and prudent to realize that the former tends to be the catalyst for change over the latter. There actually is a story location that shows the long-term consequences of prolonged exposure to the Rust World. It is completely devoid of animals and functionally a wasteland. The devastation you are looking for is there, just not exactly how you are describing it. That said, the storms themselves are not the root problem. They are a symptom of something much larger going wrong. In the lore, the storms were originally far more violent and frequent, and have gradually diminished over time. That detail alone suggests they are part of a broader temporal imbalance rather than the core threat. If you want Chapter 2 spoilers, see below.

Have you considered that we are only at chapter 2 of 8? It is heavily implied that the storms will eventually go away once everything is fixed. I see them as only a temporary inconvenience.

Easy. Lock Jonas part crafting behind temporal storms. You can only craft with Jonas tech while a storm is active. Done. People will love temporal storms now. Or hate them even more. There are no other options.

The harsh reality is that the temporal storm is neither a loot even nor a punishment for playing the game. It is a disruption. Its purpose is to force a shift in player activity for a short period of time. It has a lore-relevant reason for existing...and according to lore, the storms used to be more frequent and a lot worse. You cannot sleep through the storms by default, however systems exist to change that. That is intentional. The game is saying "You need to do something else right now." That something else does not need to be fighting. Panning is a solid option but it require preparation. You either need a saw to craft a bucket and move water indoors or you need to have build around a water source ahead of time. That is forethought and planning which the game requires in almost every gameplay loop. The impending storm pressures you to think ahead and plan for what to do when it comes instead of reacting at the last second. As for combat, temporal storms really should not be engaged seriously without at least tier 3 armor. Even then, tier 4 enemies will land wrecking blows that chew through both their health and armor durability. Players who try to farm storms aggressively will inevitably end up retreating early to heal or repair, which often costs more resources than they gained in loot unless they got lucky with a Jonas part drop. That is not a loot piñata. That is a high risk activity with marginal returns. The storms can be fought, and there is a small reward for those who do, but they shouldn't be treated as a "free loot!" situation. Problems arise when the storms are framed as either a mandatory combat event or a punishment that interrupts "real" gameplay. They are neither in my opinion. They are a forced shift in activity. Go inside, work on the forge, prep food, organize your storage, etc, or just simply wait it out. Not every system needs to be optimized into a reward fountain. Sometimes the intended response is a change of gears, or just hiding in a hole and making yourself a snack in the kitchen IRL while the storm rages in the game. If storms are converted into reliable loot events, they stop being the disruptive anomalies and become scheduled farming sessions. They become something to look forward to, which violates a core tenant of the lore which is that the storms are a bad thing. They are not good. At that point, the atmosphere, tension, and pacing of the game largely dissolves. Storms aren't broken because they're inconvenient. The inconvenience is the mechanic and what drives the player to engage with the story and figure out a way to fix it and stop them from happening.

I'm really hoping that later updates to the story allows us to peruse Jonas's library or something and find blueprints for the mechanisms so that we can effectively craft them.

I might try my hand at making a few mods that do this, mostly for my own gameplay. Adding chromite to meteoric iron in a proto-blast furnace might even simulate a type of stainless steel, but from what I can tell it requires a massive amount of fuel to do it right... I suppose that's a potential use for the coking oven aside from making cupronickel since that's all it *is* good for now. But, a shiny stainless steel reflector in a lantern might be a huge boon over the ones we have now.

Double check that you have the ports open on your PC, router, etc, and that the port isn't blocked by your ISP. They are notorious for blocking ports you think should be open. Suddenlink, for example, blocks ports 80, 8080, 443 and a couple of others on residential internet but they are open on their business package.

I'm now imagining someone developing on a side branch and making commits to the main branch which really angers Dave, so he causes a temporal storm while he executes git reset --hard HEAD~. This is now my head canon. Dave isn't just the Thunderlord. He is an irritated Senior Thunderlord trying to figure out which Junior Thunderlord keeps mucking up his main branch! Now I'm imagining a bunch of little Dave's running around monkeying with the code of the universe.

Meteoric iron is actually an iron-nickel alloy that ranges in composition from 5% - 65% nickel by mass. This property makes it corrosion-resistant and also allows it to polish quite nicely from normal use/wear. Meteoric iron is actually where the inspiration for stainless steel originated. You only need to add chromium to meteoric iron and you will have stainless steel. That is why the metal in-game looks bright and shiny compared to iron and steel which will begin to oxidize and lose their shine as they cool.

This really wouldn't be that difficult to do. It would just require someone to be present and paying attention so they can capture the announcement before the flood of people coming to complain about getting pinged on Discord. Why is ping raging such a thing there??!?

OH yeah like the one that spawned randomly while I was chasing a different bear and ended up running away from both while screaming for help that was never going to come? And then the stupid bear decided my dropped loot made a comfy napping spot. >_>

Oh I 100% totally agree. It would also make it slightly less dangerous to hunt wolves if you know they're not going to lead you straight to a sleeping bear.

I have yet to see bears attacking wolves. I want to witness it again before I submit a bug report, because I think it might be a creature AI bug, but the bears should definitely be hostile towards canines.

this is basically everything I had bouncing around in my head when I first saw this thread. Loud alarm bells started going off in my head so I had to make sure I understood all the implications of the suggestion. Seems we've found a more feasible solution that serves the needs of everyone involved!

1. Version 1.18, I believe after @LadyWYT hounded me for weeks to get the game. Then she got it for me for Christmas. I was at the tail end of a LONG Minecraft burnout, so I wasn't really interested in any other block games at the time, but she was so adamant and excited about it that I figured I might as well at least install it and see what the fuss was all about. 2. My first world I assumed you could just do things like you could in Minecraft. Punching trees did not work. I decided to just play around with the game mechanics and just give myself stuff in creative mode since I couldn't figure out basic things, like how to find flint, or how to really do anything. I spend a LOT of time in the handbook just trying to figure out how the game worked. 3. I think I became invested when my friend asked me if we could play together once I had started to get a grasp on the game's basics. We started a world together which I would open to LAN and let her connect. I think once I actually got into it and saw how all the game's systems interacted, I slowly started to realize that this wasn't just another modded Minecraft clone, but an actual game that was attempting to stand on its own. I couldn't find any faults with it no matter how hard I looked. Then I realized I was looking at it the wrong way. I was expecting to experience the doldrums of Minecraft and so because of that I was spending too much time looking for them. Once my perspective shifted, I actually started to have fun. The first time we actually made it to the end of the available story at the time was on an actual server that we could play on together which I host from my Linux machine under my desk. Now I'm working on a voice chat mod that doesn't completely break the game's sound engine when you boot it up. 4. I didn't know it existed. As I said before I expected to be bored. I ate a mushroom and DIED instantly. I rage quit. Then I realized that Minecraft hadn't ever made me rage quit, so I deleted that world and tried again. Then I realized it was fun.

I feel like this is probably the point where you could instead advocate that those announcements be moved to a more visible location, such as these forums, which simply require a game account to access and interact with.

Now I want to check and see if this is the case or not...

Including other players!

I can get behind this, though I doubt many would want to sign up for another account on another service, but they may be less resistant to such an idea as I am. I would probably do it, just to stay on top of the discussions in the mod development channels, but I wouldn't like it. Either way I don't think the discussion of breaking the Discord TOS should continue or be allowed.

then in that case you are breaking the Discord TOS and opening yourself to legal action by Discord. Discord’s TOS explicitly requires that you must create an account to use Discord’s services. Thus the bridge operator becomes the Discord user and the Matrix users become unauthorized sub-users. It's like subletting your apartment. When your landlord finds tenants that aren't on the lease, then you become legally liable for any repercussions of breaking the terms of the lease. The same thing applies with Discord and bridging it to Matrix. If you don't care about the Discord TOS and feel you should be allowed to violate it, then you should resign yourself to the fact that you just don't have access to the content on the platform. That is how subscription-based services work. If you want to use a platform, then you must abide by the rules of that platform.

Yes, I am following the thread and I see nothing but issues with this suggestion. Nothing against the platform, but the two systems are simply incompatible on many levels. Bridging the two creates moderation blind spots and introduces legal risks. A Matrix server admin running a bridge becomes: A data processor (translating encrypted Matrix messages to Discord plain-text and vice versa) A content relay (thus creating scenarios where a message deleted on one platform wouldn't necessarily be deleted on the other) Open to liability for: Copyright claims Harassment content Moderation disputes Law enforcement requests All without Discord’s legal shield that would handle many of these things before the server owner even knew of it. I do not wish to place this burden on the team over at Anego. I still do not see this as a good thing.

Still even having a button that brings up a window for you to choose the location and filename of your backup file would be great. Then you could name it however you wanted and store it wherever you wished and not have to worry about disk space on the drive where VS is located. A similar "restore from backup" option would be nice as well.

FUN FACT. You can also pet Tobias. He does not look amused.

The other major concern I have is having the information flow be splintered. A lot of the updates about the game come before Tyron even posts about them here because he has his game dev channel in the Discord where he talks about what he's working on and allows us to communicate with him about it. If people take to using Matrix over discord, then the flow of information becomes splintered rather than centralized. It becomes harder to manage and moderate. It also prevents the two groups from communicating with each other which fosters a "us vs them" mentality. I still do not see this as a good thing.