Andael

I'm guessing this kind of exploitation is exactly why chiseling is disabled in "Wilderness Survival"? I'm a little sad that I can't chisel some detailing, but I can imagine that I might slide down that slippery slope even though I generally avoid exploits.

Yes, a storm with only Nightmares. As I described, the only non-Nightmare were there before the storm due to the adjacent rift. And afterward, the pile of corpses were all Nightmares and at least 10 were chasing me -- very clearly visible in the light of dawn and without temporal gliches. During the storm, Nightmares were the exclusive spawn, and it seemed they spawned at a higher rate than any other spawn situation I've had. I've only experienced around 30-ish heavy storms across all playthroughs. Any other heavy storm I've had a mix, and particularly of note: I'd be able to at least harvest some double-headed drifters. I'm still on v0.19.8. Playing Wilderness Survival completely vanilla with no custom settings. The new "patterns" to the storms did have me do a mental double-check that I didn't somehow update to a newer version, and I didn't. Because this seemed like the kind of variant I might expect based on that feature hint.

I haven't seen mention of this peculiarity, but I just had a pure-Nightmare storm, and they were flowing into my world, or I intersected with a nightmare-pit of the Rust... however it goes. I roughly counted at least 12 active at any one time -- hard to be sure with trying to avoid rocks and stretchy arms and the severe glichness. Many more corpses were piled, mostly from infighting as I only have copper spears and a copper falx... paired with improvised armor and a crude shield (having a rough go). I mostly huddled in a small squat tower. I got one-shot, as they sometimes push onto each other and they can then reach. Early on there were a few lower-class drifters because there was a rift right beside the tower and activity was high -- so before the storm I already had a cadre of heavy breathers. Once the storm began though, it quickly became all Nightmares and stayed that way. No double-headed. After the storm passed, trying to leave the area I was chased by a horde which was too reminiscent of Helldivers. I only managed to loot about 1/5th of the corpses... must've been more than 30 through the night. First time I'm playing on Wilderness Survival. Y'know... watch a youtube video of someone playing and it doesn't look so bad... they find a trader with chests for sale, easy ores even though one must take care of cave-ins... So I try: cursed. Into late November and not even properly "bronze age", had 5 heavy and 3 medium storms. Three traders found: all agriculture, offering what I already have (crazy since I have nothing!) and buying things I can't make. Caves have mostly been vertical shafts into nests... short on ores, ruins, or translocators. This is actually my fourth area in this world -- I couldn't get a temporal gear to anchor myself earlier. My first was going well -- had good amounts of copper and clays; bismuth-bronze soon, nice region... but as I crested a small hill: surprise-wolf-chomp. Then an ill-fated respawn with nothing at night before a heavy storm... killed by a Nightmare doing the step-up-and-reach off of a buddy. Surprise! But not really surprising... Next life also cut short in the stone-age, by a bear in dense foliage. Anyway... Nightmare storm! Anyone else experience this? Most who keep storms active seem to only do it for farming double-headed drifters. This seems like a big middle-finger to them. I am keeping storms and glitches to play "as designed". I kinda like some of the idea... but in practice rather hate the storms as they are. I'm cultivating a list of thoughts/ideas about them.

I'm playing Wilderness Survival... and been having a tough roll. Copper (and most other early ore) has been scarce. It's the first time I made a copper anvil though, because I couldn't find any tin or bismuth. I've now found some meagre tin (24 nuggets)... but needed to recycle the copper anvil for enough bronze to make a new anvil (I've found sources of iron, so a bronze anvil, hammer, and pick will get me past this struggle). Well, I didn't expect the anvil to break into 8 copper ingots. I did expect to use up the copper chisel (more precious copper gone). But now I don't think I can do anything with the ingots. Can't smelt them, no chisel to break them down to smelt, no way to make a chisel now that I have no anvil. Effectively, breaking the copper anvil left me with less copper (usable copper in my current state). Or is there a way to fix this? Without just finding enough copper nuggets for the anvil -- because that's the only path I see now. And a frustrating one in this locale... half of my copper was obtained through panning. I've found 3 small surface deposits and one "minuscule" prospecting reading. Whereas I've found plenty of hematite and three meteors. If there's no alternative, the harsh lesson is "build two chisels, or one of bronze, if you actually want to upgrade copper->bronze anvil".

Shoot... I'm guessing that since you're suggesting a mod we're stuck with either always-hostile or always-passive drifters, without mods? I might just enable aggression. At 5yo the boy's favorite biome in Valheim was the Swamp... I suspect he might've just been unnerved here by the sounds of the temporal rifts and the cacophony of heavy breathing. If it doesn't work out I'll look into mods! Thanks!

My 8yo nephew wanted to try this game I was playing... He took to it, but was creeped out by the rifts and almost paralyzed by fear of the drifters. So after buying a copy for him to play on a shared world he preferred the sound of "Explorer" mode. The wildlife at least fights back when injured, but the drifters are always passive... which he doesn't like now that he's gotten more comfortable. And it really does feel bad that these things littering the landscape and sounding all ominous are completely passive. The world configuration seems to only have the one setting for all hostility, with three states: aggressive/passive/off. Does "passive" mean that wildlife fights back but drifters never do? Or does Explore-mode have a finer distinction where drifters are set to "hostility=off"? I've been hesitant to experiment in case I can't re-set back to the Explorer default. I think "aggressive" might be too much for him, especially at the rate that wolves spawn. (Really, these baying nuisances can be too much... In my own world: 36 hides in 3 days, from around my home which I am constantly trying to keep clear of wolves? I've started to let hides rot... I'm overflowing in mostly-wolf leather.)

Swimming is a pretty safe way to travel it seems. Except it was still as cold as -20 while I was doing this journey... so I tried to avoid getting wet. When I did, I had to dig a little shelter from the wind and snow/sleet for a campfire to dry and warm-up. I keep forgetting to try a raft!

I finally found bauxite. Almost exactly 10000 blocks away from origin, to the north-northeast. With the advice here I decided to commit to a long run I'd probably die on... goal being bauxite or death. So I went lean, with only one old hunter's backpack, no heavier armor, old gear, and three sliced up pies (I should've taken more... got lucky with a lot of frozen berries though -- it was March and northerly). Because I was hedging my bet and traveling light, yet managed to return home safely... I had to make another trip -- properly equipped (with two mining sacks). You ain't kiddin'. From the translocator I started from, heading away from "home"... the world soon turned to granite, and granite... and granite. While I crossed fields of granite gravel... shorelines of only granite sand, and nothing exposed but granite beneath the thinnest topsoil... I kept thinking back to your comment. But I didn't have much choice in direction from this translocator, else I'd be headed toward explored territory. I went 11k blocks and still granite, so I began to loop back... and on that large loop I finally found the bauxite. In my initial searching I was trying to sweep "breadth-first", hoping to find the closest bauxite to home. I also didn't want to risk losing gear days away from spawn. But sometimes you need to clear large spans of a particular geology... so maybe better to just pick a direction and keep going, fast.

I find plenty of sconces in underground ruins. However, you might be thinking of lighting a larger base than I am. Base layout... it seems in every game I build into the environment. Never the same twice. In this case, I started in a tunnel: walled off the two openings, added doors. Over time fixed things up. Main room functions as the kitchen, still kept most of the natural sandstone and granite cave walls. Bedroom in an alcove. A slightly lower area for crafting: crucible and clay. Front porch has crates of stone, barrels for compost, and some garden tools leaning. Blue clay shingles extend from the natural cave opening. I have a small cellar (3x2) of ashlar blocks beside the kitchen area -- convenient to access for cooking, or for grabbing a meal from a crock. A tunnel runs through the mountain ridge I'm built into... which passes through a larger 7x7 room for tanning, brining, fruit juice, and distilling. This room formed as a side-effect of mining out granite blocks. Deeper along the tunnel I have a "temporal storm arena" with weapons, armor, and spawn-prevention except inside a fenced pit. Other side of the tunnel (south facing) exits into a greenhouse which I open during the summer for rainfall. A pigfarm is also nearby. A ladder goes up from the main room to the mechanized forge. Powered Quern, Helve Hammer, and Pulverizer. An iron anvil for smithing. From this raised forge, the windmill tower extends a bit higher. Elevation of the upper sails is only about 160 (I favor a reasonable aesthetic). I have two sails up there, plus one rigged directly into the forge's large-gear. The forge area is built into a natural ledge of the mountain slope -- basically I dug upward from my home until I emerged, then leveled it off, walled it up and added the shingled roof to match the roof down below. Having the forge area raised means I can barely hear the machinery working from the main room, plus the mechanical losses are less. Overall look from outside is kind of like some mountain monastery integrated into the rock. I get drifters moaning outside -- often get rifts up on the mountain slope above me, with drifters raining down. Annoying. I only get drifters inside in the prepared arena pit. Though during a storm I need to be in there to avoid getting ganked by something spawning behind me (twice I've had a corrupt do that in my kitchen -- I mean, spawning on my pie table!? Jerk).

Thank-you. Then I will avoid such caverns unless I know there's something I want. Or, if I want to explore nearby but with some peace rather than having my thoughts impeded by a blaring Bell.

I've felt somewhat encouraged to resume the search -- to just load up on pies and travel overland forever... but waiting until winter passes again so I don't have snow obscuring things. To bide my time, I'm again searching for translocators. Only found one more so far, but nothing immediately interesting on the other end -- I'll probably use it as the launch-point for my later walkabout. On the speculations of where to find translocators... I've wondered if rusty gears in caves could be a hint? I could easily be seeing coincidence, since a rusty gear leads me to search more thoroughly. So far, four translocators in my world are within about 300 blocks of home (which is right at 0, 0). So they do seem fairly common. I've been trying to find and fully explore every cave during this winter... except the deep occupied caverns I'm not comfortable tackling. It's what I'd like steel plate for. My iron chain gets shredded too easily. About those particularly bad caverns with nests, bells, and everything spawning... I've only cleared two, but there wasn't really anything worthwhile to gain aside from access to more cavern -- ultimately deadends and the usual loot drops of nests and bells. They don't seem very worthwhile to tackle compared to the resources to repair armor and make new weapons. So I'm wondering if I'm missing something of value there or have just been unlucky?

It can't be found under other sedimentary layers? It seems my world has endless strata of claystone/limestone/sandstone/shale overlapping each other, sometimes with soil on top. Thick enough that steep cliffsides are often just the sedimentary rock without any visible metamorphic layer. After struggling to find any visible bauxite I started boring holes until I find the underlying metamorphic. Or am I wrong here and bauxite will only be on top aside from soil or igneous?

Ha, okay thanks for that. I've been checking a commodity trader on occasion, just in case. I've repaired five translocators, and made use of them to extend my reach. I keep checking caves for more. But it's getting to the point where I have to range far even to explore new caves. Is there a rough "density" of translocators to be expected? Two of mine are about a 15min run away. I imagine there must be many more closer. Also, are they guaranteed to be connected to caves? I found a ruin structure completely sealed underground, at something like y=-60. Only found it because of a drifter sloshing around in water surrounding the ruin in it's sealed chamber. It might be neat to have a Jonas-type device you could make which resonated with other such machinery, like a dowsing rod. That would certainly be something I'd invest some effort into in this world to help my otherwise blind and desperate search. Every time I find a translocator, that's been the hope! Only to feel that hope drain away into misery over the course of the following game-week as I explore around and eventually make the trek home the long-way, overland. All of my destinations have been very similar/familar, except one with redwoods which was nice. Still with rocks like "home" though.

Someone has to be worst-case. It's one of the things about statistics... a specific sample case isn't guaranteed to fall into normal, and *someone* will be an outlier. Perhaps I have more running to do. Some of this terrain is so arduous. Like swiss-cheese mountains having vertical pits extending deep below sealevel. I imagine the terrain generation parameters at some extremes.

Thanks for the tip about granite, I hadn't seen that before. The world I got had me starting in sandstone with underlying granite and andesite. Traveling out from here most directions gets me hills and plains of thick claystone, limestone, or shale. I'll burrow 40 blocks before I hit granite or andesite (checking in case bauxite has been hiding beneath all this sedimentary layering). Really, it seems like my situation should be ideal -- the sedimentary layers are so thick and layered; I need to dig deep to even find the underlying hard rock. Just hasn't been any bauxite in the mix. Plenty of every other sedimentary rock. When I went through translocators I basically find more of the same. Two of them exited deep under limestone hills. I can only imagine that those having trouble finding limestone must be living on top of bauxite or something, being my karmic complement. I've had no end of limestone. I imagine borax can be a problem, since you pretty much have to stumble into it. With that I've been lucky in three worlds -- finding borax rather early in caves, and then more later. I've rarely found ores in caves, as many recommend. Instead I find brown coal, sulfur, saltpeter, and borax. Ores I've been getting almost entirely by prospecting and vertical shafts.