DFlux

Bad luck/RNG, it can be anywhere from calm(no rifts or monsters spawning), "low"(1 rift) all the way to apocalyptic(6 and very close, and monsters with high spawn frequency). I find the best thing is to simply be indoors at night when rift activity is higher than low, and even on low if theres a rift nearby be ready to be indoors. Theres not much that can be done, unless you set the world to not have them, but then that can be boring as theres no monsters at night with them off entirely. Keep a distance from them, if they are in a spot thats inconvenient, leave the area and come back after a distance. Another thing to do is keep the area well lit; rifts cannot form where there is artificial light that is strong enough, and they cannot spawn monsters if they are themselves lit up directly if you put a torch under them(be careful/quick when doing this though and make sure rain won't put the torch out). Be mindful that as long as the rift activity is medium or higher that your going to have more than one rift, and also higher activity can cause monsters to spawn even in daytime periodicly, so keep armed when outdoors during high activity periods. Later in the game lanterns and torch holders can make keeping the area outdoors better lit more practical(be mindful both take metal plates and lanterns need bees wax for candles and also glass/clear quartz). Fence it off properly and make sure every area is lit and it'll make enemy spawns easier to manage during night time. I'd avoid trying to spam oil lamps for the job though, they are to dim to prevent mob spawns in larger areas. Once your outdoors yards are all lit and fenced though, the rifts won't be to much of a problem most nights, so long as monsters cannot also spawn inside the fenced areas. Rifts despawn if your far enough away and 'relocate' to be nearer your location based on activity and lighting, so you can 'reset' the positions if they are surrounding your house to much as long as everything is lit properly. Rift on top of your farm? Place a few packed dirt blocks down, place a torch on one and maybe have a block above it if it rains often, go about 100-150 blocks in a direction and run back, rift will likely be gone.

I can see some skills already being power houses as a min/maxer(I even consider min/maxing to be an art btw, and yeah I also say it shouldn't be used as a basis to restrict people) from what i'd seen in my latest world i'd started, I ended up deciding right away to focus on temporal adaptation and metalworker on the blackguard purely from seeing the potential for % stack multiplication against one another. Heck it seems to me temporal adaptation seems to be a "god stat" skill. But yeah class choice does seem more in line with playstyle rather than role pidgin-holing. Playing a hunter doesn't ban you from going into melee when its necessary like some games would, and nothing stops a blackguard from attempting to defeat enemies with ranged attacks. I think even XSkills though only goes so far, its only big problem is as you mention the mod can cause some people to fall behind on a power curve, which is a problem with the mod itself. Most games i'd played lately usually add mechanics to help people who aren't as active, like city of heroes has "patrol experience" which accumulates from offline time to grant extra experience, or wows old sleep mechanic(never played that one though, heard to many coming to CoH from WoW being to pushy about class roles, and CoH's community has always been with a stance against pidgin holing, especially with how its support classes are designed(flexible force-multiplication, not healing focused)). I'd suggest for xskills thread maybe a mechanic for servers to allow exp-bonuses for less active players. But thats a topic for that thread.

Responding a bit to the OP I personally think the classes are mostly fine being slightly better at some things, and only slightly worst at others, without "pidgeon holing" them into specific team-based functions that i'd seen in mmorpgs. But I also think that if there is a pidgeon holing problem being 'made' on multiplayer, thats also a player server problem, a community problem, rather than just a balance problem. As such a problem usually just leads to players leaving the server when they are excluded from specific activities because there class selection in any game. Or they just demand a reroll to another class if they are able to do so or bring an alt in the case of servers/games enabling more than one character. Then of course theres the "Everyone should have a min/maxed pre-made cookie cutter build or be excluded from all activities" problem that again, the classes baselines don't 100% scream like i've seen in some games(looking at guild wars, most mmorpgs that pushed this mentality). But really, if people are discouraging others from taking on certain functions purely because they want one specific person to do that job, based on having a mod like xskills and having maxed metal working or something, I'd be mighty concerned for the health of the community than the game. It means you have people treating the game like a business and also locking out opportunities which'd limit flexibility. Its like running a colony in rimworld and allowing only one colonist to do all the crafting, ignoring that theres 5-6 others who could be crafting, and then wondering why the colony is doomed when that one craftsman finally bites the big one and the other craftsmen are all below skill because you in the name of optimization only allowed the one craftsman to do all the crafting. And then theres the other problem I see and have seen happen: What happens when all the people qualified for a 'job' are not available and community-requirements get in the way creating a perma catch 22? I'd seen this happen to guild wars with heroes ascent and other content, where to participate required already having acquired high ranks that can only be acquired by having played the content to begin with. Such a catch-22 community imposed requirement is doomed to collapse sooner or later(and it did actually collapse sometime after I stopped playing that game). "Only Blackguards should be mining, all non-blackguards should be banned from mining!" What if theres no blackguard players on for weeks and you run out of metal? Does the server suddenly just decide they must all go back to stone tools? What about say a rule "Only malefactors and hunters are allowed to farm!" and no malefactors or hunter players are online for weeks streight? Whole server starve? It makes no sense to me. Seems to be a community problem, rather than a game problem. Now i'm thinking of starting another world and rolling hunter, and then picking mining and melee talents just to visit on a point with xskills. Even if something like that would be a bannable offense if I was on a server with a more "stop having fun!"-minded admin.

And if the RNG says no lime sources or borax and huge forests in all directions? Actually haven't played the new version yet. I usually do the same though I just setup pits everywhere that i'm remotely near forests, anywhere that bears could potentially sneak up on me. I may have to try putting oil lamps in pits I guess, though I often also like the hides so leaving the things alive isn't 'that' convenient either. My latest world in fact bears spawn very close to my home, so I litterally just lead them into the pit after saying a quick "WHY HALO THAR!"(my battlecry for I KNOW I WILL WIN AND YOU WILL DIE!) and then wearing it down with repeat spear stabs. I actually encountered more bears than wolves so far though. That its actually lead to the bears becoming trivial to deal with. It's become predictable and the majority of my leather in fact has been from bears due to a lack of any other animals in the area(this also lead to a lack of animal fat though, bears aren't able to provide enough by themselves).

Oh yes! On that hunters world the only lime is at layers 5-12, because RNG decided all metamorphic rock would be at BOTTOM of the world!

Followup on the nature of my luck as I kept the old save file and went back to it. I dug directly below the only borax mine I had mentioned in this post only to find a bountiful Hematite mine(Yes, likely everything is under that really huge body of water, theres also "decent" hematite on the exact polar opposite of that water but the ultra thick forests are nearly impassible and filled with wolves, and I had no leather for a REALLY long time and so I was dying near instantly to wolf ambushes in that world, so of course I use the super slow raft to bypass the ultra lethal forests everywhere). So I decided to continue it, and went north-west where I originally had NOTHING in prospecting hits, found Magnetite, i'm like "ok" when I see very high. Then I see ultra high as I keep digging shafts ever 20 blocks, before upping it to 25, it took me about 15 shafts in total to finally find magnetite that meant running rather than swimming/rafting across. All the while having taken a brown bear out, oh, the brown bear..... I encounter the bear on the way home from the mines, I make nerd pillar, get bow out, start shootin, and as i'm down to about 2 shots maybe even just 1 shot away from downing the thing, the game weather RNG decides I'm not killing it this time, and fogs the whole world up to a point I could not even see 3 meters in front of me! :(. So I run back for the night, craft up about 24 more iron arrows, kill a chicken or two before readying to return. I dig a proper bear pit trap for the brown bear who escaped, shoot him, he chases me, falls into the trap. Only two more arrows he goes down. Ok, cool. So I keep going back to the magnetite mines, after 15 attempts finally find magnetite. YIPPY! So i go home, check my linen stockpiles and decide to upgrade my helve hammer. Only problem, one, teeny problem, I needed 1 more resin to complete the upgrade to a 'dual windmill' helve hammer. So I go, run south, get one piece of resin from the south dockyard I know of and make home poste haste, I finish that upgrade but, oh, it works super well, YAY, but I need to make more iron. I try to process hematite and magnetite in same bloomery, nope, game wont let me do that, ok, so I just dump all the magnetite I mined into a few bloomeries.....Only Uh, the teeny problem now wind went to absolute ZERO when it was at over 50% earlier! So I wait a bit, spend more time gathering extra hematite from the south mines and return, wind is back, YAY! But oh, heavy temporal storm approaching -.-. I go into glass casket and afk for about 15 minutes, storm passes, wind back down to perfect zero :(. Oh yeah that brown bear respawned all in that mean time and I had to lead it into the trap a second time, I don't even think 10 days had passed, I was left thinking "Hey, didn't I kick your ass 10 days ago?". (In second screenshot, circles are magnetite searches, including the "decent" area that was a 'much' further trip from base)

I've personally nothing with the current power of bears, but instead I have an issue with how FREQUENT the damn things are. Anytime its forest area, I seem to encounter bears about a third as frequently as I encounter wolves. Sometimes in fact I end up encountering more BEARS than wolves! Which because the only good solution to them early on before your sporting full metal armor is trapping them in a pit, that practically means digging one up every 100-150 blocks distance whenever you even remotely suspect bears are in the area, because you have to be able to reach the bear trap pit in time before it inevitably kills you due to being FASTER than you. It also creates a class imbalance imo: only hunters and clockmakers can reliably outrun bears from what i've seen so far thanks to fleet footed. With bears being THAT frequent, that makes those two classes vastly superior to the other classes due to the insane frequency that bears spawn. My hunters world (about 200 hours, took 150 to find iron) had bears all over the place and my progress was stalled thanks to that and not being aware of just how quick the hunter was. My blackguards world(About 60-ish horus atm) also had them, and I ended up feeling the blackguard to be inferior inspite any advantages purely due to the prevelant frequency i'd constantly encounter bears everywhere even though I set forests to -25% purely because of how frequently i encountered bears on my hunter. It makes me think hunter is better, again, PURELY because they can better deal with bears. Bears are what tv tropes calls a "Demonic spider": An enemy overpowered and prevelent, so much so, the whole game and all gameplay ends up revolving around them. They are faster than you, take twenty arrows(yes, 20, if your stupid enough to use the crude bow+crude arrow like I did), about 20 hits from a stone spear from a blackguard(if its a brown bear), can take you down in 5-6 hits when your in leather armor, 2 hits without armor(or even 1 if its a lunge attack), and they spawn with such high frequency that they are just punishing for newer players like, well, me.

Latest world: Bears herded me towards an ultra rich copper vein by accident. So I decided to start a new world after having some frustration with my current save(numerous iron shafts and no iron, plus logistics nightmares of having to go across a huge body of water to get to it, plus no lime sources at all and only a single borax surface vein for leather making), I settled down near pink marble on the surface only for a bear to attack me. Seeing that its also a cold spawn location I decided to head south and built in a small forest, also bad idea, bear spawned right next to the second rammed earth hut so I ended up heading east to a large pond. A bear spawned on the small blue-clay island at the center of it inspite there being like no forests around, so I chased it off with some spears and clever use of rammed earth towers. took my entire supply of flint and bear still didn't die, he's now camping up over the hill opposite of my rammed earth house and contently out of view. I finally get copper from the bits on the ground and prospected around the pond, and very first propick search was very high copper and decent bismuthinite. Then found ultra-high copper and high bismuthinite just about 100 blocks east. I would NEVER have gone this far if not for the bears and weather and now i'm effectively set and I could even make bismuth bronze by just panning the sphelerite! Thanks bears!

On number 4, it was full blocks, but the outside corners were open air, turns out, bad idea. Never making that mistake again As for interior, it was a litteral coffin: 1 by 1 wide 2 tall, barely enough for me and nothing else in it. I think its the same kind of problem that happens in minecraft when you have a few dozen animals in such a small space that they are squishing one another, that they end up pushing animals out of the fences. The same happened with the drifters. One managed to clip into my house a few days later, so I fixed the mistake in the structure. Made another "hiding coffin" a few days after and then refined it, and added additional measures to ensures drifters cannot clip into it. Funnily, maybe due to the snow or something nothing spawned in the next temporal storm to arrive(deep into winter and snow is very thick, my biome rains almost non-stop and so it snows almost non-stop in winter, which seemed to have arrived in early november).

New player here, honestly I'd just like something at some point that could better forecast when a temporal storm hits. Nearly died entirely due to RNG, the leadup of bad RNG: 1: Place i started building at seems to have 'slightly' low temporal stability to begin with, and due to farms i'm commited to staying it until the season turns.(Planning on moving though for THIS reason alone). Its not unmanagable, a 'tiny' drain that lowers my stability by about 2-3% during a night. But it DOES prevent recovering stability after a mining trip. 2: Have not found copper veins of good quality or quantity before first and second storm, in fact, found copper of good quantity at start of autumn inspite 14 hours of searching for the stuff the entire summer even using prospecting pick as the video suggested. This was also due to disgustingly misleading information provided by the pick with "very low" copper veins near the llminite vein that i'm practically on top of. Due to no copper, cannot even use advantage of the high casserite density in area i was building in, yeah, RNG was giving me the middle finger at this point. 3: Found Casserite in a VERY temporal unstable area, enough that I lose about 25-30% on a short mining trip. 4: 2nd storm arrived at start of autumn, and the BS? Only 6 days passed since the last one, and "A medium temporal storm is approaching" and it was high rift activity night, I had no time to get my temporal stability raised. I hit sleep to pass a little time since I cannot recover temporal stability in my own home(see #1, sleeping at least doesn't lower temporal stability this way). I tried to make a little 'glass safe house' outside, and enemies CLIPPED INTO ONE OF THE BLOCKS AND ATTACKED ME FROM INSIDE THE GLASS BLOCK! I was forced to run inside after breaking the glass with about 1/3rd my health left. This glass safe room likewise was just in the safe to recover temporal stability, so them clipping into it screwed me over even harder. 5: Made emergency safe room in baking room(which is in the 'slightly low' temporal range to begin with), temporal storm hits and ends with me having about 1% temporal stability. All this thanks to RNG and a small oversight of lower than average temporal stability that. I'd just seriously appreciate better heads up and something to counter this RNG better.