Thorfinn

You can absolutely do that, @JAGIELSKI. Easy peasy. It's just not a great answer, as you have to keep your mods updated in every instance. If you want a copy to run on a server still on 1.18, you have to make sure none of the updated mods get in there. This is just a way of maintaining separate instances without having to know all that much about your directory structure. Click on Mod Manager, make sure everything is copacetic, and you are off to the races.

I agree the new creatures are pretty tough. A lot to take in while still learning the game mechanics. They do have an aggro sound, though. Shivers sound something like dragging a stick across a rough concrete sidewalk. Bowtorn sound kind of like a rusty brake rotor, followed by a "clunk". They also have idle noises you need to learn to listen for. Weather and music and the like are all well and good, but default settings makes it hard to hear these warnings. The new monsters make it really important to place a lot of torches. You must make sure there are no floors more than 6 from any torch or 3 from an oil lamp. Figure out now much light is needed after you are done building, or build with you lighting plan already figured out. And either have a good fast way to get the heck out of dodge or to slow or stop the enemies from pursuing. Re: healing, you can grab horsetail pretty safely on the edges of forests. Lots of times it extends quite a ways from the trees, if you patiently scout the edge of the forest.

A small enough "forested" region as defined by the mapgen does not necessarily spawn trees. It just sets the percentage chance for a tree to be generated. RNG can still end up without spawning them. Offhand, I think it only requires a 20% forest, so if you cleared a small copse of a half-dozen trees on an otherwise treeless plain, that maybe the ONLY place with sufficient "forestation" to spawn them. And, yes, that's exploitable, if you take the time to analyze terrain first. It's also possible to find plains where the only place sheep can spawn is one smallish hill.

Where do you draw the line? Was having a "base" cheese? Lighting up your smithy to prevent spawns? Those eliminated risk to you from drifters entirely. Now, granted, a lot of us never bothered building much of anything until winter -- a fence around your farm, a "roof" over the top of your pit kilns, firepits, molds and forge, that was about it. Is anything more than that cheese? Which the creative team just did. People were cheesing the storms by running around lobbing spears. The drifters were not a credible threat. Many of us fought through them in our skivvies -- no need for armor and no point in getting your clothes damaged by silly little 1 HP rocks. To foil that "ultimate cheesing method", they introduced creatures it would not work on. There's no reason you can't disable the new monsters in the storms, or change their spawn rates to whatever you like. mobextraspawn.json. If you find something that appeals to you, bundle it into a patch mod and upload it.

Try it, then. Just change the leap chance from .01 to .2 in (I believe) 3 files in the entities\land directory: female wolf, male wolf and bear. Once you decide what the right percentage is, bundle it up as a patch mod and upload it to ModDB.

Should go without saying, but arenas need not be anything more than you need. There's no need for those who have end-game equipment to have any more arena than a fence around the arena so you can corner the buggers. As is often said, storms are more hassle than they are worth, unless maybe for a completionist trying to build all the end-game tech. But if you are less OCD, at present, all they do is squander your resources. Drifters should spawn in every storm, just not necessarily very many of them. Well, obviously the intent is that you can't run around like you used to, or they would not have designed foes that counter that style. Seems to me it's either to sleep through them or have end-game equipment. Oh, or maybe it's to learn about the weaknesses of those new monsters and find a way to intelligently use that to your advantage? I believe what you are dismissing as "cheesing"? Never fear, if Tyron thinks your strategies are too cheesy, he will change that in a future version. Happened with everyone placing rocks all over the place to prevent spawns, didn't it?

The forge is coded differently than the firepit where you can see the effect of higher temperature fuel. I do not know why, other than to make sure the forge requires coal or higher, to be hot enough to soften iron and steel. There is a reason that the Iron Age had to wait for charcoal. Looking at the code, it is intended. There is no attempt to adjust anything, other than burn temperature is at least 1000. Re: coal being worth it, if you have ore blasting bombs, you might as well if you found some. I wouldn't go out of my way. But there are a lot who find charcoal way too tedious.

Used to be able to do it with a saw.

Nice way to do it, @Michael Gates! If there's only 1 space between your door and the dirt, I suspect you could also sit on the floor and poke out the bottom door, since I don't think crawlers can make that corner. Sitting might even prevent rocks from hitting you, if you made the block in front of the door 2-high so they can't get the angle.

For the nonce, you could just turn down the volume of weather sounds and replace one block somewhere in your house with a ladder or a trapdoor. You will get the "comforting noise of the rain" whenever it's raining. You could even use the mod Accessibility Tweaks to turn down ONLY the rain, if you like.

There is a way to disable authentication that requires nothing more than a text editor. It does leave you wide open if any of those users has an active internet connection. As in, introducing rogue .dlls into your network. If you are going to consider it, I strongly advise air-gapping your LAN from the internet while playing. Check the 'tubes. I'm sure it's on there.

Incidentally, if you keep multiple installs, DO NOT INSTALL THE UPDATE FROM THE IN-GAME PROMPT. Maybe it chooses the right directory, maybe it doesn't. Not worth it. Download it and install it as usual, even/especially if you just want to update an existing instance.

Yes, I believe everything flees when it gets down around a quarter of the HP. And, like you say, kitted out, they are quite a bit faster. Build a fence around your arena. Nothing goes over fences (maybe in winter if there's snow on the ground -- don't know if that got patched or not) but then you can chase them into the corners. Maybe put little pens around the outside so you can chase them in, close the gates, then open up a can of whoop-@ss,

Yes. It's only a 1% chance, so on average it should take being chased 70 times to have a 50% chance of seeing it at least once. Bears have one as well.

@Ashantin goes into creative and adds some teleporter blocks. Not exactly the same thing, no, but arguably better? She as several Youtubes, Ashantin3, Ashantin5, etc.

Welcome to the forums, @Emma Bones

Wolves do have a lunge. I don't know about shivers. All I know about them is you are best off either keeping them at range or giving them the slip. They are not worth fighting. [EDIT] If you have learned how to escape brown bears, shivers should be easy, now that they are slower.

Have you found any sedimentary layers yet? It's not unusual at all to find chalk, limestone or marble under them. But once you get to igneous rock might as well stop.

I still don't get what's wrong with a hole in the ground. For all practical purposes, it's scalable to whatever you need. And with scythe and shears, it's easy to feed.

Well, go back to slinging from your elk. I'm sure that's far less silly.

Lamps are only brightness 11, so the floor 2 tiles below the lamp is light level 9. The coop looks to be, what, 9x12? If they are all wall-mounted, they only spawn-proof the 2 outer tiles, and that's assuming you have them every 3rd wall section, so around 12 lamps. And of course, the center 5x8 is not protected at all. If you put the lamps on the floor, you get by with far fewer -- a lamp in the center of a room spawn-proofs a 7x7 area. To get almost the same area, tow lamps would light a 7x14.

I think the damage is fine, @Irulana. As you note, their size more than compensates. Particularly in a cave situation, just placing one or two fenceposts stops them, allowing you to safely kill them. Or better yet, take up the spawn slot. And on the surface, you have plenty of time to prepare for storms. @Zane Mordien, they only do 20. Filling two nutrition bars is trivial, starting a third protects you from being one-shotted, even without armor. IIRC, you can tank a single hit with no nutrition bars with just improvised armor, so long as he gets a body hit. That's without a shield. But you are right the reward is not worth it. So... figure out how not to have to fight them? We used to do that in storms, going after only the double-headed. Since that equivalent does not exist outside of storms (so far as I know) there is literally nothing worth killing in the caverns if you can just avoid them.

Is this the world where you have a cellar full of sealed crocks that are nearing their "Sell By" date?

The official server does not at present (or at least when I last checked) take uploaded worlds, nor does it allow mods. So, yeah, you will need some 3rd party server. Unless maybe one of you has an old i5 sitting around you don't know what to do with. On board video for a server is fine. Probably $100 between an SSD and RAM and you are good to go.

Inside was a design choice. Under forest canopy, maybe not, but if rain SFX persisted, woods would be deadly. You wouldn't hear wolves, probably not even bears aggroing. If it's a bug, I'd like to see it retained.