WalrusJones

Honestly if you wanted something like this it would work better as a sandbox option (Or a mod) rather than a default. Not to sure what the issue is with patching up a wounded ally before they totally expire.

I'd love if falx's had something meaningful on right click to distinguish them from spears since left click gaming is the biggest turn off for a weapon for me when its strictly single function.

I might need to run an experiment with these guys to see if I can get them out of the dirt shack they've been watching the water in for two years. I've done far more involved modding for other games so you don't need to post more tutorial, thank you for thinking of that much. (Even if many of my older works been buried by years of updates in other games.) I just wanted to share the story of the last two weeks because I'm sort of terrified of the rants I've been getting every morning of outside scary no resources worthless stab man has string. I've just seen this happen too many times for weeks on end.

I mean you are still farming them for the respawns though, so we still went that direction since otherwise its thousands of panning actions for this privilege. Alongside surviving wolf and bear attacks for larger pelts, etc etc. We already are in this gameplay loop if you don't want to spend hours staring at the water. That is, unless you see the twine and decide to do 200 hours of panning like my friends did. I figured that people being willing to fight and go outside instead of staring at the water if there was more of a reward: They were fine killing wolves, bears and the like to oil their pelts, but not drifters. Both farming mobs and 200 hours of panning are worse than going out, prospecting, and finding the bounty of nature, but one leads to people being less afraid of going outside and thus, makes it more likely they discover the proper way to play the game. Both are diseased ways of playing but one at least has a chance of recovering and having a good time with this game. Since this should be a game of you looking for natural resources instead of staring at the water, but people finding the combat unrewarding has lead to me waking up for two weeks with essays about how people hate the outside because they were enraged at seeing twine. (I even pointed out to these guys that you could often do what they were doing in game in 5 days if they were willing to leave their homes they refused to put light in... Yet the only thing I've seen people I know do is get scared of the outside completely and refuse to go there.)

One thing that I've noticed with the 3-4 players I've invited to the game is actually really simple: The plain-ish drifter drops has made them really adverse to investing into killing enemies even if the rare drops are reasonably good. Any joy in combat was extinguished by the gambling involved. While I was generally able to get satisfied by slowly turning the tables on them, most people probably want to feel rewarded for their efforts since there are three people screaming at me that they clearly only drop twine after years in game, which only could have happened if they so obsessively never fought that they didn't see the gear drop. The common story was panning big reward drifters never reward (When the drop rates are sort of the opposite of this) so I propose something very simple so players more readily discover the more intended gameplay loop (You farm the drifters for temporal gears) more consistently. Add more common rewards for killing drifters are items that reward a combat focused gameplay loop from panning: Flint arrow heads, knife blades, spear heads, and scrap, with some miscellaneous items like blue clay. This can be justified in that many of these items were stabbed into the drifter, the scrap is part of the metallic innards that we use falx's to penetrate (If I remember the journals well enough,) and their flesh sort of resembles blue clay. Part of this is to make it rewarding to find efficient ways to kill them, such as with a club, as being able to profit spear and arrow heads you can use to hunt is good. Small volumes of clay I thought about because one of the stresses my friends spoke about was running low on clay locally for skeps, having clay be a reward from drifter kills equates it to the emotion that you can sustainably reap the rewards of beekeeping if you more proactively defend your homestead. Scrap is a resource that isn't useful once you've found a surface copper vein, which is usually early. If it was twice as common as gears from enemy bodies, it would make the memey, low durability scrap weapons a fun reward for engaging in combat! Rare luxury items like a copper knife blade being ultra rare would be memorable while not meaningfully impacting progression. The last thing I'd like to recommend is a siftable slab like material "Tarnish". (As a general note, I've gotten reports of people finding upwards of 5 temporal gears with how much they've turned to panning instead of combat, while not mentioning finding any as a kill reward... I'm effectively the only person I know who hasn't fallen into an endless panning loop.) Tarnish is a slab which is siftable, giving 2-3 uses per block of tarnish. Tarnish damages your stability to touch or sift, but has better drop rates than regular gravel. The reason for the personal stability damage is twofold! One is that it helps you find stable regions when you damage your stability, you can gauge how much your stability meter is repaired after panning and find places that are optimal for your temporal health. The second is that destabilizing yourself does apparently help drifters spawn if I'm reading right, so you could hypothetically use tarnish to create a drifter fightclub if you so wished. The ultimate goal of tanish is to guarantee that drifters are "Slightly more valuable than panning for 100 hours straight." Bone arrows were a great first step, many of the concerns with drifters would be improving the combat feedback loop where drifters have a better established use to make engaging with the drifters better enable a more combat focused play-style. Since I doubt people camping in their basement for hundreds of hours panning is the intended gameplay experience. While I've more or less adapted to the fact that I need to accept I'll see empty bodies, seeing so many people engage in days of screensaver level activity staring at a wall is mind boggling. (I'm so glad I've mostly adapted to never need to pan, but hearing the stories of what they've chosen to do after hours and hours of gaslighting themselves into assuming there is no more loot elsewhere is gravely concerning.) You got the gameplay loop for fighting animals to be properly rewarding, I believe you can see my points here and figure out something better you can do than this.

Honestly one thing you could do is have the damage tiers of falxes scale faster than spears, that way the game lore is preserved. Falxes are for being can openers while spears are for anti-soft target duties (With the straight swords doubling down on this role of being anti-soft target.) The Falx exists and has value because it beats the metallic interiors of monsters, the spear exists because it does magnitudes better damage against wild animals. The various unique straightswords could have the arguable honor of having great durability for beating trash mobs. Other similar games have used verbs like blunt/piercing/chopping to give weapons conditional modifiers against monsters which could be useful for establishing enemies which are not best countered by simply killing them from outside their reach (Since they aren't hurt by a linear hole punching action much.) Say if falxes did sheering damage due to their can opener like design which was the verb of choice that is most affective against unnatural abominations (While having a mix of the chopping/piercing benefits otherwise.) Could also be used to benefit the armor system since then you could try to match armor to counter certain threats you run into (IE: Mail being barely more useful than a jerkin against blunt, moderately useful against pierce, great against chopping/sawing/biting. Padded brigandine being very weight efficient versus blunt due to being a good force spreader, but it has less to write home about against piercing as there are more gaps for projectiles to fine.) Not all armor would have to do this, with stuff like lamellar (Introductory level), and plate (Endgame) being an easy targets for not having any verbage modifiers. But you can see how this would benefit a wide range of mid-tier mid weight armors to be able to equip them to tailor your protection against certain threats instead of them all sort of filling the same nebulous space of manufacturing difficulty versus weight tradeoffs, since you have decisions based on what threats you actually are fearing in your next encounter and have a viable reason to collect them all.

So, before I bore you with my pathos behind the idea I'm going to go over the few basic bullet points of my proposals. Chunks average rift activity becomes a more actively prospect-able aspect rather than needing to interpret only your personal stability rising and lowering. Average rift intensity is often but not always thinner near spawn, thicker near ruins, this isn't always the case as too much uniformity is boring. To prospect rifts, you use a variety of gear like charms that vibrate in response to rift activity which can be held offhand. Different charms can have a larger radius or more stages of rift density they can prospect. Charms split between precise and area types so players can either find small pockets of heavenly very thin activity or a large zone where the worst activity is unlikely. A mapmode tracks the best prospecting you've done in an area with charms. Really good charms might start to glow instead of just vibrating when the local area is really, really bad. Disposable charms can be used in disposable rituals like hanging them off a flaming torch to relieve rift sickness during bad rift activity (Burning it away,) or strengthen the lights ability to suppress rift activity for a few chunks. Example of weirder effects: One could be used to draw out rarer rift monsters to farm rare rift drops. My reasoning for this is simple, having had four or so friends find the game and experience great frustrations with rifts so I figured it would be wise to make rifts something players proactively engage with since while I'm able to simply run at night and avoid spawns, its hard to sell new players on the nomadism that thoroughly beats rifts consistently (Since I've seen too many screenshots of them spawning in or on well lit houses now.) Interacting with and hunting for areas that are calm and safe adds an element of engagement where they are actually coming up with a solution to their troubles instead of simply turning them off. For a proposal on the progression, my idea for the first charm involves a "Thatch gear charm" that lets you identify when an area within 40 or so blocks of the area has more than medium (Lets call it serious) average activity using large amounts of thatch and sticks to make a gear idol, moving up to more exotic metal and temporal gear charms for precisely identifying your current chunk or identifying down to medium activity to much larger radius's. The reason I argue for charms to never be both highly sensitive AND wide area is actually simple though, it wouldn't be too useful to have both. A charm that's sensitive and wide area would practically always be going off, so the precision versus area tradeoff helps maximizing in how interesting the charm based prospecting system is (Finding an area that's not terribly unstable and searching for the nicest areas of it, making it so the prospecting happens in stages,) while also making sure the charms are meaningful and easily interpreted if you bring the right selection.

While the idea mostly doesn't hold water at examination I do have a funny one. You know the temporal storm nausea affect? What if that was canceled by booze, where as intoxication on a normal day makes long range shooting hard, it puts you in tune with the world distorted. Also makes me think of a CRPG I played recently where you used a poison cocktail to walk outside of reality in rift like anomalies sometimes since you needed the poison to function deep in the rifts....

It would be a great feature if flying birds were implemented in particular as something more interesting/difficult to hunt for feathers.

I'd love if brass was a copper tier material with modestly improved durability, given, its material properties are like very mildly improved copper. You might only use this weird interaction in 7% of worlds, but its one of those nice things that would make me feel clever whenever I had the chance to do it.

(Sorry for contributing to such an old thread, but I felt this might be better said in an existing post on a topic rather than a new topic.) While this is mostly good what I would like the sling to focus on a bit more is just being a very low maintenance ranged weapon, as this is one of the major strengths of sling bullets, simple manufacture. A bullet is one part as opposed to the larger supply chain you need for arrows. One thing I'd really like to contribute is that most clay sling bullets I've seen were not as big as a fist sized rock, so rather than being for a straight damage upgrade what I could see clay bullets doing well is being made in large batches, and flying fast with slightly reduced damage over a huge rock. This would make the sling more distinct by making it less about dps racing and much more the utility of having very inexpensively manufactured batch made ammo. This way, a few hits of clay will panning gives you some ability to hunt. This would be nice cause a cheap, fast, projectile might not be a great deterrent against monsters, but it can help with hunting things like rabbits and birds, which help you get the rest of the early ranged tech tree. Since an arrow is a can of worms, the 16 or so clay pellets you got out the clay from a pile of gravel is a lot of shooting on the cheap. (I would also love for maladict to have a trait for extra rocks/clay/lead from panning, as an extra roll, since the sling even without bullets encourages you to pan more for an ammo supply and having the panning work be less painful would be nice.) Its a survival game, it doesn't have to be about the dps race, utility for work in is a valid metric for a tool! (Even if proper cast bullets are extremely damaging from a sling due to the major casting metals being 7x-10x more dense then most rocks depending on the metal used. Looking at a range with copper on the low end/lead on the high end.)

I had different thoughts on the topic, hear me out. The ideal way for scaling difficulty would be to have danger/difficulty be an aspect you prospect, the rift presence has a thickness and worse monsters are going to be deeper or in surface zones with thicker rift density. Say you could make charms that react to thift rift presence and map out rift density, trying to find areas with thin rift activity to settle in to avoid the worst monsters being able to spawn in your house. Better charms are more sensitive and let you differentiate between areas of lower rift presence to find even better locations. With this, you could build in a little bit of leniency like how the game spawns you on a temperate area with easily knapped rocks, where a kilometer or so around spawns has a higher occurrence of thin rift presence zones. The reason I like this over a story progression or a time based system is that the passing of time/the story is irreversible, but migrations are regularly necessary to complete the tech tree, doing this brings the wonderful excitement of meeting worse enemies. Rift storms would still draw out worse monsters than are normally seen in your zone, but you would have some engagement finding a good place to live, especially as these places get rarer and rarer as you migrate out for exotic resources.