Omnifarious

On 8/2/2021 at 10:43 AM, Silent Shadow said:

Fences my friend, they are the key.

Isolate the tunnel in sections so no more than a few can spawn inside a section and you don't have to kill the entire tunnel population in one go. Build pit traps to corral those that do spawn so you can just walk past them without fighting. If you separate the caves so they cannot mob up, exploring and exploiting the cave/mine gets a lot safer, and if you cannot deal with the numbers, you can just fall back to your last fence barricade and grind them down from (relative) safety. To quickly kill large groups, dig a 1 wide drift with a 1 block deep, 3 block long hole line and put fences at either drop. Dig a shaft above the hole between the fences and you can drop anvils on large groups to kill tons of them at once. You can even set this up just outside of a large nexus and then dig out the wall to connect to it and entrap them.

Using light is a bit inefficient IMO, but you can use oil lamps early on if you want to knock down the spawn rate or to mark the main tunnel path (they never go out and are great for marking the tight turns thanks to their glow.) Later on, you can make brass (and only brass) torch holders to have torches burning forever, or you can make lanterns out of non-brass metals (best use for lead in the form of Molybdochalkos). If you want a safe room you can make it safe with these sources.

The key to safely exploring caves is preparation in the form of armor, meds, a decent weapon, some torches, and lots of fences. You can also abuse the spawn mechanic by just leaving and letting enemies reset. Once you get metal, you can make plank fences fairly easily with a saw. Sticks can be generated with shears fairly easily.

You can do it safely, but it will take some time to prepare and execute. Good Luck!

I mean yeah you can do that, but it's just not fun.

Players shouldn't be expected to use cheese strats like spamming fences and digging pits for the braindead AI to fall into and get stuck.

I love difficult games, thousands of hours in soulslike games and I play roguelikes all the time. What VS has currently isn't difficult it's just tedious. I'd much rather fight 3-4 extremely dangerous enemies at a time than fight a neverending flood of mindless AI that you either have the choice of spamming fences so they get stuck or spamming holes so they get stuck.

First time I descended down into a cave I was immediately greeted with no joke a bell a swarm of locust and about ten drifters of various types. I hadn't even been there for 5 seconds and it was already impossible to proceed in a **fun** way.

Everytime after that if I went away and came back later the results were similar.

If the play system actively encourages the player to just turn off creep spawn to have fun then the design of the spawning is fundamentally flawed.