Monsota

Allow me to present a joke hypothetical. I create this temporal microwave: a tempwave, if you will. As it goes with microwaves, I place food inside it. The food goes back in time and becomes more fresh. The food goes back in time. Items placed in the tempwave go back in time. From this logic, I develop terrible ideas. Using this technology, it could be possible to not just renew otherwise spoiling food, but so too to (accidentally or otherwise) unmake the food. It stands to reason in such a case it could unmake other items as well. A dark brown vessel (if you can fit it in there) is unfired, then rendered down into its clay components. A worn coat is placed within and its fibers renew and return to itself. I leave a stew with an egg cracked on top in for too long and finally discover what came first. And then I try to repair my pickaxe with it and the consequences probably resemble something like how microwaves usually respond to metal, just a lot more violently and angrily. Jokes aside, this seems like a fun niche tool that could help reduce how much of a burden keeping good food supply is, perhaps permitting the Seraph(s) to be a little more lazy and focus on other tasks. This could possibly allow a sufficiently skilled enough adventurer to earn the ability to sustain themselves off their unspoiling spoils of war rather than just going for the exploration focused playstyle on world creation.

What reading through this is telling me is that we need an NPC squire to hire to handle all our armor and weaponry needs for us. Hopefully we'll get the ability to negotiate with the rift dwellers and locusts to give us ten minutes so our squire can fit us into our armor and equip us so we may do battle with honor. Jokes aside, I like looking good. Evidently, other people like looking good. Coats over armor would be rad. I see no issue with the aesthetic idea at least. Though, in the interest of actually adding to the conversation, I do agree I should be punished at least a little more for wearing armor all the time, at least for medium armor. As far as I'm aware, you don't need much more than light armor and maybe a shield packed away to handle most defense on the surface outside of the occasional bear attack, so I do think it would be fairly reasonable to ask players to reserve the bigger guns for when they're planning on doing something more dangerous than having a picnic eight blocks away from a rift in daytime. I do have my reservations about my choice of helmet actively restricting my line of sight, but that's a personal thing. Realistically, if I'm going into battle with steel armor, I'm probably not going to feel it too much if some drifter nerd chucks a rock at me outside of my peripheral vision.

I do feel like there should be some kind of limit to the amount of enemies that a single rift can churn out, or at the least they should give you a sound cue something along the lines of, "Hey pal, I'm gonna spawn three Bowtorn and a Shiver now, and maybe a couple Drifters if I feel like it. Good luck." Maybe a louder sound so you can hear if a rift has opened up nearby to you? While I believe that rifts are a part of Vintage Story's progression challenges (building something that qualifies as a room and getting permanent light sources to help prevent their spawns) I can't deny it would be really nice if there was some early game way of handling the rifts—I imagine just by killing enemies spawned by the rift so you're still handling it manually (don't Drifter-type enemies restore stability when you kill them?). This would also make a more interesting (and potentially rewarding) option compared to the alternative of getting out of render distance to forcibly despawn them. It would also be nice if Drifters and Shivers weren't often dead silent when they decide to throw down with you. For Shivers maybe it could be turned into a mechanic that they'll stalk you (which could lead to some pretty decent spooks), but some of the annoyance comes a bit from how little warning there is beyond "oh dang, I was doing something unrelated and I got hit by a rock." At the same time, there's no accounting for what the game decides to do to you rift-wise what with apocalypse levels of spawn rates—full disclosure, I think this is just terrible luck. I think it would be perhaps more enjoyable if the game advertised how to keep them from invading your home and better preparing for temporal storms and the like—such as that drifter-type enemies don't like the light and are liable to flee from it, which has saved my hide once or twice from the use of a torch in the offhand. Anything to change the thinking of "okay there's just nothing I can do about this and I'm about to be made like a witch trial" which isn't a fun one. While it is still some fairly risky business to bust open holes in the wall when there's enemies spawning outside and you can at least make sure you see your opponents with a torch or lantern in your off-hand (a shield will likely block a good few projectiles even passively), I fully agree that the rifts should have at least a couple difficulty settings and some more warning as to what's about to come your way given how close you have to be to hear the rift creaking. As it stands, if you're close enough to hear the rift ambience, it's probably already too late to avoid or prepare for whatever's around it. Granted, a lot of this is coming from my disdain for completely dead silent enemies that just hit you out of nowhere, so maybe I'm biased in that way. Why do Drifters make no footsteps sounds? Shivers move that quick and you're gonna tell me I can't at least hear rustling in the bushes? Going on a walk through a forest only to take half my health in damage from a brown bear that just happened to be nearby, dooming me to a chase I have very little chance of escaping? At least Bowtorn make their cool shrieking sounds and you can probably react in time.

I agree that this should be toggleable, but given it's ragdolling on death it's not like it would hurt gameplay in any way. It's more about an aesthetic choice, of course: falling into a pit that's some fifty blocks down and dying on impact only to go from fear at the darkness around you to "oh, that's the Peter Griffin death pose" might break someone's immersion—assuming they care for that. Would be a funny April Fools thing, at the very least.

I'm imagining having to go from the darkness of the caves to the darkness of the ocean and I'm not sure which is more inescapable. I like this idea for the reason that the implications scare me. This would also give oxygen time a bit more importance if one suddenly has a bit more reason to check it out, in addition to the more natural goodies—is it possible to boil brine water to get a decent amount of salt out of it?

Myself, I'm never going to turn down the opportunity to earn quality of life tools in-game. However, I do feel like it should have some secondary use if at all possible, given that once you've made the molds you want it almost feels like a one-and-done thing. Perhaps this could come with the (probably largely aesthetic) ability to customize your own pots or vessels or bowls? In pairing with marmarmar34's glaze idea, this could be a fun task to make the things you use on the daily look quite nice.

The tedium of having to create some dozens of waypoints just to identify one instability hotspot is a big thing—for me, at least. You could absolutely go out of your way to do so, but it would take a fairly long time and make your map hard to work with. An actual tool/mechanic for this would be a fair bit more intuitive. The convenience angle is one I hadn't exactly considered. I do agree it would be a little powerful for the Seraph to seemingly develop a third eye and immediately identify all the instability within a hundred blocks rather than just a vague feeling (or whatever the cog represents in-lore). The idea of using actual tech to locate and mark unstable regions checks out with the rest of progression too. I realize I didn't clearly outline the main thing behind this. The main idea is to help you work around the unstable zones, or at least get a better sense of what you're going into. It's mostly a time saver though, so I also agree that this is fairly niche. Some applications off the top of my head would be... Plotting routes that do not go through low stability regions. Better home/base placement—are you about to place your new hovel down on an island of stability surrounded by an ocean of rust world influence? Generally assessing the danger level of an area of instability before moving into it, so one does not have to find out when it's already too late. Potentially, identifying how much stability is present around an ore deposit before digging a tunnel or mineshaft, allowing the player to better decide if it's worth their time (and save pickaxe durability). I do recognize that stability on the surface generally isn't a huge deal though. This easily could be interpreted as overkill, but I cannot immediately see any issue with giving the player an ultimately optional way of gathering more information on the surroundings they are exploring, especially if it has some small investment into it. Perhaps this would, indeed, be better as part of a rework to stability or the unstable zones themselves?

I'm not in the Discord, nor am I super familiar with these forums, so I apologize if this has already been requested and I just missed it. Given how big temporal stability is, it would be nice of having some way of visualizing on the map how unstable a given area is, such that you can plot better routes on the surface and help prevent accidentally building in a temporal dead zone or something. I doubt it would be feasible to represent them in a three-dimensional space (at least, not easily), so I imagine this would just be an overlay over your map that highlights instability on the surface, likely in the form of a heat map. Hypothetically, this could be also proper mechanic similar to prospecting. Dowsing rods spring to mind, perhaps serving a function like geiger counters of other games to help you mark out where instability starts and how intense it gets to develop your heat map. For players who want a challenge this could let them disable the stability gear entirely, encouraging them to rely on the rod for some exploration. Maybe using a dowsing rod on the ground below you could give you a vague warning as to how bad you should expect your stability to drop? I am aware that temporally unstable regions can be circumvented entirely by just disabling temporal stability as a game mechanic, but that's ignoring all the players who enjoy engaging with stability. Yes, there is also the blue gear at the bottom of your screen, but unless there's something I'm unaware of that's hardly a precise measurement given how drastically stability can change, and it doesn't actively map out unstable zones.