Teh Pizza Lady

Well... there is one... Sort of.

I would need to dial the mouse sensitivity up to what I had in WoW but I was pretty well practiced in flipping my camera 180 and pressing my hunter's disengage button to close non-combat gaps in raids. It can be done, it just needs to be practiced and... well... bears are HIGHLY unforgiving if you get it wrong. Plus it's been too long since I played WoW in any sort of capacity to call myself a raider again. Is this for real? I've never had to go out and fight, even in a heavy storm, but I choose to because of the off-chance that a Jonas part might drop! How long does it take in-game before the storms completely drain all stability?

I get that you're frustrated, but I think it's worth framing this as intentional humor rather than malice. When the player dies, Tyron gives them a choice: adapt and survive or rage quit. It's meant to be a funny jab. But at the same time it's also worth remembering that the game we're playing is the game that Tyron wants to play. Our opinions on whether it is good game design need to be put on hold until the story is complete, at the very least. As of right now, it's a work in progress and game mechanics are going to be designed around what he feels are engaging and less around what the community thinks is a polished work of art. Sure, no other game does what he's doing. But then, isn't that why we play his game rather than the others? As for the storms themselves, I think it's well established at this point that any existing mechanics that we have are either temporary, prototypes, or mostly implemented. Examples: rot beasts: I don't think drifters were ever supposed to be the only rotbeasts in the game. I think they are potentially placeholders for other rotbeast types. We have shivers and bowtorn now. Current mechanics surrounding crafting: We know that Tyron wants to leave behind the 3x3 crafting grid entirely in favor of a different kind of crafting method. It remains to be seen how he does this but smithing is a good example of a prototype system that is getting fleshed out more. Same for farming as it is somewhat getting extended to berry bushes soon. systems that are mostly implemented would be the major ones that involve the lore and story chapters. I think your argument of "on ramps" holds merit. A way for players to understand better how to interact with the game would see some use as more and more players join the game. However one of the fundamental tenets of game design is that you do not create your tutorial until the game is done. Otherwise you will spend too much time keeping your tutorial up to date that could be spend developing and polishing game mechanics. Tweaks of the existing systems are a good middle ground. I think we both agree on this, at least.

I think something like a protected radius around the player might be a good middle ground solution. Maybe something like 4-5 blocks radius where spawns are prevented during a storm. That would still allow enemies to appear nearby and keep the tension but it would stop the frustrating cases where things just pop into existence right inside your house or other building while you're just trying to do your thing. Think about how cramped the spaces are for the NPCs in the game. Perhaps they learned through trial and error what worked and what didn't and made adjustments.

Out of curiosity have you completed all the story chapters and read all the lorebooks? Not that I'm gatekeeping your opinions because you are certainly allowed to have them, but I am more curious just how deep you *have* dived into the lore for us to arrive at such opposite conclusions. EDIT: And I will say that perhaps a change to the storms is coming and if it does, it will be interesting to see how the devs improve upon it. I think they're fine the way they are now, not great, but just fine.

Yes you have stated that a few times now. Could you respond to the counterarguments that people make instead? I think that would help people understand you better instead of just repeating the same thing over and over.

So, you then? XD

The developer is the final authority over canon lore. In that sense it is immutable. But that does not mean discussion is pointless. It just means lore discussions will operate differently from mechanics discussions. Mechanics are systems that are designed to support the lore. They are tuned, balanced, iterated on, and frequently changed in response to player feedback. Spear damage, smithing loops, etc are all levers that can be adjusted as the devs get more experience with the systems they create. Lore on the other hand is world-framing. It establishes the tone, mystery, and thematic direction. When people say that it is written by an immutable god, then mean that canon facts are not democratically decided by a forum vote. No one argues with GRRM lest another one of their favorite characters get penned to death. The author decides. Period. Yet... Tyron leaves it open ended. He leaves the entire game available to be modded. He leaves it up to the player to decide a lot of things by only delivering fragments through ruins, lore books, and mysteries like the Thunderlord Dave and the general vibe of the environment. It invites interpretation, headcanon, and... even modding. So while the developer defines canon, the structure of the game is intentionally porous. To summarize: If lore were truly untouchable because it is 'written by an immutable god,' then discussion would be pointless. But Vintage Story's lore is intentionally fragmented and interpretive. It is designed to invite speculation, expansion, and even modification. The developer sets canon, yes. But the openness of that canon is part of the design. That makes discussion meaningful, not fallacious. And for what it's worth, temporal storm mechanics aren't the only part of the game where I will dig in my heels and resist changes because the lore doesn't support the kind of changes that people want. Halo? Call of Duty?? Without lore, those dissolve into "generic first person shooter with a single faction of bad guys". Without lore Vintage Story dissolves into "another block game with interesting crafting mechanics". That's not a soul, that's just the scaffolding used to support the story, a human body without personality. And it's not even just games, it's movies, too. Star Wars anyone? Pretty sure that was me? Or at least I sure thought it hard enough that someone read my mind and typed it. It also took centuries for the storms to weaken soooooooo... I'm pretty sure the 2-3 years the player spends in-game isn't going to have a significant effect on the duration or severity of the storms. The light storms at the beginning are the Sam's Club sampler, a wine tasting, the part where the player goes, "OH CRAP!" and whines about it on the forums and tries harder to be better prepared for it next time.

That might be cool. I'm not sure how it would affect the story pacing as currently you know nothing until you get to the chapter 1 location unless you manage to find a lore book or tapestry in a ruin somewhere. I can agree that the storms may need some adjustment, especially given how divided the playerbase is on them. However, I would argue that many of the players who dislike storms may be approaching VS as if it were a modded block game, rather than as a standalone title that simply shares similarities with other block games. There is some truth to this but I disagree with your conclusion. Yes, experienced players handle the storms better because they have experience. If you're expecting everything to be accessible without effort, then you are giving handouts which is fundamentally against the core design philosophies of VS. Experience lowers the friction in every system of every game. Farming, metallurgy, combat, food preservation, cave exploration, etc. All of those are significantly harder for someone who does not understand how the game works and storms are not unique in that regard. The difference is that storms compress the lessons to be learned into a short experience. A bad harvest teaches you slowly how to manage your farms better. A bad storm teaches you very quickly that you are woefully unprepared. But that does not mean that the temporal storm mechanic as a whole is inherently flawed. I new player getting caught in a death loop is not a flaw in the system, it is a flaw in the chosen path of gameplay. It is a signal that better, faster, and more thorough preparation is required and understanding in how it works is needed. Yet, you mention cocooning yourself in dirt as a cheese strat. That is still a player-driven solution. The game did not demand it. The handbook didn't mention it. Players just did it because they could. Player agency still exists even at the lower levels. As unfortunate as the T4 drifter one-shot experience is, it doesn't really happen all that often in the grand scheme of things. Yes it feels catastrophic. You are minding your own business and then the storm happens and bam you're dead with no way out. But that is also true of cave-ins, bear attacks or a temporal rift spawning on top of you because the game suddenly went from peaceful to cataclysmic in a breath. The game does not telegraph safety, it teaches caution and preparation. Shore up the walls before digging, get high ground before face-checking the bushes. Keep a high temporal stability so that a sudden rift doesn't mean death or worse. Veteran players aren't defending the storms because they know all the tricks to surviving them. We defend the storms because we approached them with the right mindset. I had a miserable experience in my first storm, but I survived despite a couple deaths and met the daylight with a grin on my face. That victory left me with a bloody nose and a crushed ego, but it was well earned. New players similarly having a rough first storm experience doesn't mean bad design. It just means they were unprepared.

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.