williams_482

Fortunately both the lore and explicit statements from the devs have made clear that temporal storm rotbeasts will not be smashing your builds, stealing your stuff, or killing your livestock, because that sounds absolutely miserable to deal with. That's not a reason to endure a temporal storm, it's the exact opposite: a further punishment for trying to engage with the mechanic instead of shutting it off or sleeping though it. Temporal storms are no joke even for well equipped experienced players with prepared "safe" places to duck into for healing. A mechanic which forced the player to specifically defend their structures, crops, and livestock against functionally infinite swarms of drifters, starting a couple months in when the best weapon they can get is probably a copper spear? That's far and away more difficult than running around dodging hits and getting in the occasional kill. In a heavy storm with a large base full of valuable stuff it sounds outright hopeless.

I don't interact with the Discord on any regular basis, but I have to imagine it turns toxic cesspool very quickly around unpopular changes. That's the way of huge communities where the only barrier to having your voice heard is if you can type quickly enough. My sympathy to all who wade into those dark waters. Everyone on these boards (with very few, highly visible exceptions, none of whom I've seen lately) is here because they really like this game and what the developers have done with it overall. Criticism of choices planned for the coming update comes from a place of love, and a desire to make sure the game continues to add fun and interesting mechanics while maintaining a very high standard of quality. I think most posters issuing substantive criticisms make this care and appreciation clear, but not in every single post, and in conjunction with high volume overt negativity from other places it's easy to understand why even thoughtful criticism can start to grate. I'm curious to see what mechanical changes the devs make from here. I imagine this being a rc release means they intended for it to be feature complete, but there are a lot of directions they could tweak things in. Personally I'm not an expert on berry bush cultivation, and although I don't love the idea of needing to fertilize bushes, I'm not hugely bothered by it either. I am confused by the more convoluted seeming aspects of this (minimum soil quality and downgrading quality on growth), but they won't be game breaking in any case. Med fert soil is easy to find.

This is an extremely good suggestion. I think the recommended process works fine with workpiece temperatures visible, and I'd even argue that it should display a "live" shatter chance for quenching based on current temp. Hiding information just to make knowing something a relevant player skill doesn't usually sit well with me, and I also worry about the effects on folks with various types of visual impairments. I'll also argue that completely resetting the work piece is a wholly adequate punishment for overheating. Overheating is likely to be a really easy mistake to make because all it takes is wandering off at a bad time. Players would be annoyed enough at loosing all heat treating progress after being distracted from the forge by a rogue drifter, a forgotten lunch, or a temporal storm. Losing the work piece itself is excessive.

This setup sounds genuinely fun in a way that current storms and most suggestions don't. You're never "safe," which is clearly something the devs want, but you're also not constantly and unavoidably an unlucky split second away from being one-tapped. You can hide in the basement panning if you want and will avoid most of the danger, but still face the risk of being driven out. Monster spawns being more closely tied to rifts and fissures will cause them to naturally cluster around points other than "wherever you happen to be", giving more opportunity to either evade the mobs or throw yourself into trouble as you please. Finally, having something of value to be searching for as you dodge clusters of enemies is another reason to keep drinking in the scenery, and a balance to the inconvenience of dealing with this whole thing in the first place. Obvious spawn points and clustering of enemies also means less immediate punishments (and thus fewer learned un-fun habits) for new players trying to engage with this mechanic who don't really know what they are doing. Combine that with sharper differences in quality of monsters faced in light, medium, and heavy storms, and I think you'll get a lot more new players who approach the storms with appropriate caution and come away with a more positive outlook.

Apparently the devs agree that they overdid the damage nerf, so I look forward to seeing where and how much they correct upwards. And yes this definitely is a "nerf". The word doesn't mean make something bad, it means make it weaker than it was before. Which has clearly happened.

It's an oven, it fires itself!

I think this is correct, and it's downstream of the first storms being so incredibly punishing if the player tries to fight their way through. The game makes a rudimentary effort to give the player a gentle start by starting with the weakest temporal storm and ramping up, the problem is that even light storms are ridiculous. If light storms were much more manageable while still showing the correct type of dangers (fewer monsters and only T2 or below) while also conveying that things will get much, much worse in time, that lets the player make some less disastrous errors and learn things in less infuriating / automatically death spiraly ways. As far as lore explanations for the weaker storms, I'm spitballing without knowing what the devs have in mind but maybe the same temporal weirdness which put our character where they are also had a temporary chilling effect on the storms? That would explain why the first storm is weaker and they ramp up from there, despite the fact that we know storms are getting weaker over the much longer timescale of the world.

Regarding lore and the current implementation of storms: Do current NPCs do things that make sense with the way storms work now? I'm going to argue "not really". Spoilers, obviously: On that grounds I'll argue that I don't think the current storm implementation is supposed to be permanent, although it's also possible that the devs just didn't think through the tactical side of this very well.

Sure. That's relevant to anything I said... how? As far as I can find, no. If you'd actually read the post you just quoted, you would know that. Yes, implicitly but definitively, in the logs of prereleases in which they changed them. And then again in Discord when they said some of those changes were incomplete and would be changed further. If I understand you correctly, your augment is as follows: The only criterion by which we can judge how "immutable" something is 1. If the devs have explicitly said it's immutable, or barring that, 2. how long it's been in the game. Thus, because the devs have not (to my knowledge) made explicit statements about the mutability of either element, because berry bushes have been in the game for longer than lore content has, and because berry bushes are currently being changed, therefore lore must be something they are willing to change. Do I have that right? Because that's a wild pile of logical leaps behind a veneer of "objectivity" if ever I've seen one. I'd like to see that citation. I'd like to see that cited too. You can spell them out again if you like, but that won't make them make sense. "Importance to lore" isn't an objective criteria to begin with.

Even in winter, going romping through a local shrubland with shears will get you several stacks of sticks in a hurry. Just be careful to walk through the space of every broken branch blocks, as dropped sticks will hide under the snow.

I don't know what "sets the architecture" means, and certainly didn't use those words myself. The lore is central to the setting and the vibe of the game, and the various components connecting to that lore is a big part of what makes the game feel "alive." That's a subjective take which can't be proven or disproven, but it's hardly an absurd one and I'm far from alone in having it. I did not say that. I did not say that either. That's self evidently untrue. We know they don't consider berry bush mechanics "established and well founded" because they are currently changing them. I cannot prove definitely that the developers consider the lore currently in the game to be fixed. I have not, for example, found a quote along the lines of "every lore thing we put in the game will be there for ever and ever, suck it haters." Which is no surprise, because why would a reasonable person say that even if it were true? What I can say is this: 1. They put the word "story" right in the name of the game. They could have named this game anything; presumably they chose the name they did because they care about the story they are telling in the game. 2. They haven't made any meaningful changes to the lore they've established, while game mechanics change all the time. 3. People with a specific artistic vision who are actively implementing that vision are generally much more receptive to criticism and open to suggestions about how they can present that vision, than they are to being told that their vision itself is bad and needs to change. 1 and 2 have been repeated many times over. 3 I foolishly believed was obvious based on how I've felt about comparable things in my life, and how others around me behave regarding their own creative endeavors. As best as I can tell this is very typical of how people think about their own artistic intentions and creations. Creating stuff is hard. Sometimes (often?) the vision itself is bad and does need to change. That's clearly not the case here, the game is great with some flaws that are at least mostly the result of work-in-progress implementation. If I read your argument correctly you don't even think that the lore as exists is inherently bad, you just don't care about it, and you think it is difficult to make it mechanically align with the way you want to play the game. And you've been given the ability to play the stormless game you want, so I'm not really sure what the problem is.

Mechanics obviously aren't immutable, they change all the time. Spears got an overhaul in the latest update, along with berry bush mechanics, sheep behavior, fish spawning conditions and harvesting mechanics, and all manner of other things. All of those listed are things which the same development team implemented in the past and has decided to implement differently now. It's not the "EXACT same logic and EXACT same words" because storytelling and game design are not the same thing.

Obviously the story is not the "soul" of any given game. Clearly the developers care deeply about it in this game. You don't, that's fine, but trying to fight for something that clearly will not happen (changing the lore) instead of things that probably will (changing the mechanics of exactly how temporal storms function) is doing you no favors. The storms don't have to happen globally all at once, but they do have to happen unavoidably in any given place. There is a location where NPCs tell us they have to defend themselves from storms, and if storms could be avoided by living somewhere else, they obviously wouldn't have chosen a storm zone to settle in. I actually like the idea of storms as a local phenomena, leaving "run away" as an plausible option, and creating the possibility of running into a storm by accident while traveling. There's nothing in the lore which would rule that out.

I did not say that, and no that does not automatically follow. Because the lore is a story, something the creator surely has a connection with and emotional attachment to? Because they went out of their way to put "Story" right there in the title of the game? Because they've made clear that they care about this? Game mechanics are a core building block of this (and any) game. Important, but unlikely to evoke deep personal feelings in the creator, and much more likely to be temporary, tweaked and replaced as circumstances dictate. The story is the game's soul. There's no getting around that.

Seconding Shoom's take. That really looks like fire damage, and lightning is by far the most plausible cause.

20 in-game years to be down to 5% (notably not 0%) nutrient loss is an absurdly long time. Extrapolating from my 500-odd hours in a 6 year world, That's nearing 2,000 hours in-game. I'm actually surprised they're bothered about anything on that time horizon, as even obsessives will need multiple real world years of regular playing to see that much of a decline.

Frankly, as far as the development of this game is concerned, the lore is written by an immutable god. The developers clearly care about their lore, they clearly aren't going to make massive changes to it, and anyone asking them to do that is tilting at windmills. This is ultimately their project and they are only going to continue working on it if they feel free to make the changes they think are correct. The title of this thread is bang on. Temporal storms mostly suck to deal with, and the way they suck is especially punishing to new players. I don't think it's a coincidence that the staunchest defenders of this mechanic as currently constructed are also the highest volume posters and likely most experienced players. You guys are easily at the skill level required to make your first storm in a world manageable and even fun, without relying on unpleasant cheese strats like "cocoon yourself in dirt for 10 minutes and go read a book". You know all of the tricks of the game to help you win fights, stay alive, and crucially recover as well as possible from dying. New players largely don't, and are quite vulnerable to learning some extremely un-fun lessons in subjects like "how to get into a death loop and lose all your best stuff". You are well aware that getting one-shotted by a T4 drifter while panning in your home is quite unlikely, context that a newbie who just lost that low percentage die roll does not have and will assume the worst from. Etc, etc. That logic could be blindly extrapolated towards suggesting that any difficult mechanic should be dumbed down as to not make new players feel bad. I am emphatically not saying that. Some elements which are highly random (like start locations) could do with some optional cushioning, but that's very much a secondary issue. Temporal storms are on a whole 'nother level. There are lots of ways in which this mechanic can improve without detrimentally affecting the lore, many of which have been referenced with explicit approval by emphatically pro-storm LadyWYT in this thread. The reason these conversations keep happening, and feeling so frustratingly circular, is that none of these actions are taken by the development team which has so many things it could be doing and cannot possibly keep everyone happy, so we stay in the same place squabbling over exactly which parts of this badly implemented mechanic are precisely how bad in our very personal opinions. It's really quite a bother.

What if the mechanics for berry bushes gave you a choice between packing them densely and needing to fertilize, or spreading them out and getting full yields without maintenance? Perhaps they could draw nutrients from not just the block they are planted on but the eight adjacent blocks (or the four cardinally adjacent blocks) as well, and at optimal dispersal they would draw nutrients at the same rate the soil refreshes nutrients. Pineapples are an existing crop that grows so slowly relative to their nutrient consumption that they don't actually deplete the soil, so that part is already possible with the current game rules. So if you have a huge field to plant in and you spread berry bushes evenly across it, you can set and forget. If instead you want a densely packed set of hedges or a continuous field of berries, then you'll need to fertilize, more often depending on how densely you've packed them.

This is a result of a bug fix in when nutrients are consumed from the soil, and it sounds like that bug might have been unexpectedly load bearing? You really shouldn't need to fertilize a crop planted on max-nutrient med fert soil. Admittedly I don't mind the compression of the effective growing season given how easy it is to accumulate a huge amount of grain and vegetables, and in practice this is a nerf that limits capable players more than inexperienced ones because there should still be plenty of time for the first crop to be harvested even with a lateish start. Personally though I'd much rather see a reduction in vegetable yields per plant and the ability to get 2-3 harvests per year than this, because harvesting, rotating, and replanting is much more engaging than a single harvest year one and a choice between a single summer crop or two stunted cold weather crops in subsequent years. Plus, as you note, having the crops sitting there seemingly almost done for a month feels terrible. The primary reason nobody makes their own torch holder is that they're too expensive. 2 plates = 2 torch holders is a lousy deal when a bee farm or som bony soil panning and a few minutes mining quartz will upgrade that to two brighter, more versatile, and all around far superior lanterns. Torch holders should be a single ingot smithing recipe, and we'll see more players use them. Ideally they should be smithable with bronze and ferrous metals as well as brass, although I agree that copper would be too early.

Milking becoming fully reliable at gen 3 is not the problem. Large animals continuing to flee as late as gen 3 is both unrealistic and unfun, that's the problem.

Are you playing the latest unstable build?

Oops. You are correct. What I want to know is if trying to milk sheep is now as infuriating as milking goats is, or if a fenced in ewe will let you get close enough for that without fleeing in terror. As an aside, it's pretty ridiculous that a gen 3 goat is terrified of you for existing near her, but if you manage to grab her teats while she's actively fleeing she'll let you milk her no problem.

I don't understand why people think replacing the dirt is a good idea even now. Instead of digging up your field, just leave the existing field as it is (or plant a different nutrient on it) and start a new field with the dirt you were going to use to replace the existing field? Unless you insist on farming in a ravine or something you should have plenty of space, and you obviously aren't short on med fert soil because you keep replacing it. Is this a water problem, done by people who have water source movement off and also grow very little that isn't flax? On default settings dirt replacement just seems like a silly waste of time compared to the way the devs obviously intend players to manage their farms.

Build your fenced in chicken area large enough that there are at least 10 blocks between the outside of the fence and the nest boxes. This will ensure that predators (and you) won't spook the nesting chickens. If disrupting the roosting process is what you're worried about, that will fix the problem. If it's something else, like the noise of chickens getting spooked is annoying you, I don't have any suggestions. There's nothing in the game that makes foxes go away except for killing them, or chasing them into a pit somewhere.

Are the fertilizer and traits actually relevant to the very early game? It sounds like the early game is going to be pretty much the same as far as berry bushes are concerned: eat the wild ones that are ripe, and take a cutting while you're at it if you have inventory space. It means you won't get the extra convenient big late summer/early fall berry harvest you got under the old system, but you can go pick all the wild berries which are still out there because you didn't dig up the bushes, and by that time you should have enough veggies and grains to keep you stocked for a long time anyway. EDIT: I will say I hope berries are primarily N crops. Fertilizing with ground bonemeal every once in a while is no problem, but P fertilizer is more annoying and K would just be cruel.