Rainbow Fresh

I don't know about lore implications and I can obviously not speak for the actual developer's reasoning, but I can try argue as to why it makes sense to me and why I do not agree with some points you brought up in order to try and reason as to why this mechanic might be how it is. You mentioned the game's progression requiring going further out being a contradiction to the respawn model that heavily penalizes ever moving more than 1000 blocks from world spawn. I don't see that as a contradiction but rather the chosen attempt at being a challenge. Death should be penalized. Of course there should also be options to make the penalty weaker or remove it alltogether because not everybody likes to play the same level of challenge and not everyone might be capable of dealing with it - which there are in difficulty options and mods - but ultimately, by design, there needs to be some form of penalty to make a challenge. Give people infinite respawns anytime they sleep, turn on keepInventory and boom you have players happily running into a bear on purpose cause it gets them back home faster than walking 5000 blocks back. I know that, because it pisses me off everytime I have to allow this behavior on server I administrate. So following this logic, death needs to be a challenging penalty, as most of the game's challenging elements revolve around... not dying. You start out near spawn, and slowly move your way outwards. As you progress you unlock new means of defense, of travel. You get the ability to set your spawn elsewhere, but only as long as you keep supplying it with temporal gears (or... don't die that often). Deliberately setting your spawn point is a choice of whethere it is worth investing that somewhat rare temporal gear or not. You could carry one around and set spawn when you get to a clearly dangerous location - but is it worth it? Is it worth risking to die elsewhere with your spawnpoint now set here until you return home and reset it? Are you better off marking the location down and coming back later when you are prepared for what lies inside? You also get better gear to survive bigger threats. You get more resources so that losing some of that gear when dying doesn't matter as much as if you run out in your first ever plate armor using up all your remaining ingots. It's a naturally scaling challenge that works the same no matter your phase of the game. It penalizes risky play and incentivises planning, carefulness and preparation. It introduces a passive linear progression system into an otherwise open world sandbox. So seeing that Vintage Story sells itself as an "uncompromising wilderness survival" experience, it makes sense that the default way to play means dying is bad, potentially really bad, and you should avoid it at all cost. Not try and kite a bear with a flint spear just for the fun of trying it and then dying and walking off like nothing happened. Also, I feel like this is a bit of an overreaction. Why would you go and delete the entire world just because you died in the early game? At that point it doesn't sound like you lost much of anything to begin with as you didn't have anything yet. Making it less devestating and more of a learning experience. If course yes, wolves and bears are kinda jank and somewhat frustrating at times right now, but that isn't a fault of the death mechanic imo.

It has officially been 100h that I have spent on this world! (add 3h cause my PC softlocked and so the world was last auto-saved but the playtime did not update when shutting it down) Spanning already 2 major game versions (1.21.6 - 1.22.2), being loaded with an ever-growing (and shifting) modlist of over 50 mods and subjecting it to one or another of my stubborn playstyle decisions I have certainly left my mark on this blocky world - I just hope that my building of a growing village is a positive one. Which is what I want to share today, as I have certainly been inspired by other people's shared builds around here. Being settled on the ruins of my predecessors, the location I settled down in was what already seems to once have been the onset of a community. A ruined tower, atleast 2 discernable house ruins and a small plot of farmland next to a pond. Seeing the tragic state of this world, I wanted to fulfil their vision and grow this rather beautiful space of land into a flourishing settlement (maybe with actual NPCs modded in later, if my PC doesn't explode.) The first building to get a glowup was the one most salvagably discernible - and became my personal house which is housing me and my hoarder tendencies to this very day. A cozy little cottage with a now unused outside nook, which previously housed my smithing setup. Next up was a, probably way too extravagant, stable area for the one horse that was roaming the area when I arrived and has become my trusty steed on many an exploration so far. There was surely more need for more important things, but this type of stable design is the one thing I know by heart from my many lives in TOBG. (Yes, I still need to finish chiseling the other half but dayum that is repetetive) What actually housed me before the main cottage was livable, was the tower ruin as it was most sealably intact. It was very much clear to me from the get-go though that it shall eventually become a windmill tower to get access to mechanical power. Not much of the original ruin is left at this point, but the realization of how much flax a windmill consumes has thrown me back in progress quite a bit. Saw the rapid field expansion at the beginning? Yeah, that's gonna be flax only. Finally the newest addition to my corner of the world is the new smithy. My first attempts at dipping deeper into the world of chisel magic - not quite 100% sure how well the design turned out but I invested too much time and effort to just scrap it now. Got nothing to show on the inside yet, cause it is empty, cause I learned all the cool decoration stuff is locked behind blueprints with BetterRuins. Atleast that gives me more reasons to explore the new 1.22 terrain now. From here on out, soon having to face winter again and prepping for the third year, I want to add a fishing pier to the lake, a tavern to the village - cause what settlement is complete without a place for weary survivors to rest - a greenhouse and eventually put a big defensive medieval wall around it; plus whatever other building I find the need/inspiration for. I'd also like a harbor for a sailboat but sadly, the ocean is 5000 blocks away and constructing a road there is gonna be the end of me. I have always been bad with choosing material colors that go well together (and am also kinda limited in wood types for now), and I got a ways to go learning about the powerful art of using beams for detailing, so if anyone has suggestions for improvements I can try out, feel free to share them!

...of course, you just need to publicly complain. Update: Rain just hit my base. I repeat, rain just hit my base. For the sake of making this not just a silly display of bad luck and impatience, I still wanna know if there is a way to debug weather in case something someday actually goes wrong?

I know, at the end of the day, this is all RNG and in an RNG-driven system there are no guarantees, ever. I know VS's weather system is a fair bit more complex than TOBG's timer to plunge the entire world into rain. But gambler's fallacy exists for a reason, and I'm losing faith in the odds. I have also carried this world from 1.21 to 1.22 springing a few mods, so while none of those should have touched or altered the weather system I am growing incresingly concerned something is actually broken. My base is in a "Very Common" rainfall area. Throughout my first in-game year this has also proven very accurate - I could count the times it wasn't raining, let alone the one where I could see the sun through the clouds, way easier than the times it just constantly rained. Throughout the first winter, it was as equally frequently snowing. But it is mid-July now. And I haven't seen a singular drop of rain ever since the snow melted. Not once were my crops watered by nature. I recently went out on an exploration trip and wandered through a rain cell. I came back home to a rain cell very close to my base, thinking the curse was finally lifted just for the rain to very conveniently stop about 30 blocks from my home. Last thing I witnessed yesterday before going to bed was another dark cloud cell drifting by, causing rain in the not-so-far distance, but just by looking at the sky I can tell it'll once again miss my actual base and fields by that much. Am I cursed? Cursed by extremly bad luck making any and all "very common" roll just fail to produce rain at my base? Or is something actually wrong with my home chunks? And is there any way to debug something like this?

Lemme see here what I remember from the last 80 hours of the game... - Picking up shiny rocks and not marking it down until later reading the tooltip and going "...oh."? Yep, done that. - Carrying too much shit everywhere and never have space? Well that's what mods are for, right? - Overusing coal to forge? Still do that today, actually! I once wasted like 10 minutes waiting for my ore to smelt, thinking I could squeeze it through with the last possible rest of cooling down buffer just to see that bar plummet back to 0 before I could even react. Never under-fuled anything ever since. - "Keeping every lore book"? Hey, those are decoration! - "Having my smithing area open air"? I want things to cool, today, thank you very much! - "Not planting crops until November"? Lemme go one further. Not planting crops, for the entire first year. "I can prepare a nice big field to use earliest opportunity next spring!". "Berries are too OP, don't need much right now." "Winter is only 3 months, ez pz, this stack of grain and those 5 crockpots of soup and stew will sustain me, maybe I need to hunt the last month a bit". They did, in fact, not sustain past the point where winter officially started. - I guess building up on that - using some of my little winter rations to feed my chickens. - Which, to build up on THAT, I settled too close to my house so for the first 2 generations I had to sneak around the furthest possible wall inside as to not disturb the brooding hen. Did I bother moving them? No! I just sucked it up cause "They'll lose startle range with each sucessful generation!" But hey, atleast I can proudly say I never faced problems with burning anything down! Or being mauled by vicious wildlife.

What type of rock did you use for the tavern? Is that chalk, white marble or the new 1.22 one?

I am outside and was still unroofed at that point in time, but it hasn't rained since winter ended (which I am getting incresingly concerned about). I also made a final 2 more ingots after this post, of which once again reliably the (I think) first I picked up was instantly cold and the second I picked up retained its temperature and didn't stack. Haven't had any issues with smithing those 6 ingots later though.

It is true that any form of ladder becomes a non-investment latest by midgame; chop down one big oak tree with ~10 stacks of logs and you can craft more ladders than you will ever need.The difference here, however, is that midgame mark. As you yourself, too, said that making lots of ropes is hard at the beginning but only becomes trivial later. If all you needed is a singular rope (or even multiple) to free-style climb down any drop this hurdle of entry is removed, making excessive cave diving possible day 1. Why anyone would voluntarily go placed they can't do anything without the proper tool and will get horribly murdered by high-tier enemies I don't know, but assuming respawns are infinite you can freely scout at cost of obtaining a rope or 2 and leaving your corpse behind. Atleast with ladders you still need to actively invest otherwise useful resources in notable quantities, over and over again, and then properly place the ladders and climb them back up without falling (or getting knocked) off.

It might not be "that hard" to implement, but I also don't think it is a good idea to implement it in the first place. Rather, having some more varied cave generation that isn't 90% "vertical shafts directly to hell" would solve the same "issue" rappeling would solve without the need to generally just trivialize any sort of vertical traversal. Caves are generally meant to be dangerous. The deeper you go, the higher the enemy tier that spawns. The faster your temporal stability drains. Locust nests are down there. But besides the hostility of the cave inhabitants, the thing making caves dangerous is exactly how hard they are to traverse for the unprepared. Fall down 2 blocks with no pickaxe? Well, hope you better have enough sticks on you to make ladders. If you could just deploy a rope to get down and then back up, dipping in and out of caves would be trivial. In which case they lose all their meaning, considering there isn't much in them aside from a chance for a more-or-less valueable ruin or the chance for an exposed ore vein.

There is already an old topic discussion this suggestion in more detail

So I am literally playing and smelting tin bronze ingots right now, in sets of 4, and in both batches 2 of the ingots retained their temperature and 2 were immediately "no temperature" items. So something might actually be off. ...I am also playing modded so take that with a grain of salt. (If you found halite yet, that is.)

Are all the forges still fueled and hot when you take the blooms off? I'm pretty sure the temperature freezing mechanic is not tied to placing something on the anvil but rather, like with the campfire too, depending on when last the outside temperature was equal to or higher than the item. Meaning blooms taken from a forge that still kept them a toasty 700 degrees would retain that for a bit whereas those on a colder forge already started ticking that freeze timer and might start cooling earlier after taking them out. If not, might actually be a bug.

It seems there is no option specifically for crops, or atleast I don't know of one, so your only bet is using mods. https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/44983

A question for all of them fancy schmancy builders and chisel wizard of you out there. I was recently noticing (the hard way) a severe lack of quality signs. The kind you can write letters on to say "This is mah smithy." "This is mah storage". If I am not blind there is only one, not even wood-typed, sign block in the game which can do a whopping three things: Stand on the ground rotated, attach to a solid surface wall, or float and assert dominance. (Maybe the last one was due to me testing in creative). That's not alot of options to write things on my buildings, especially since I was hoping for a little more "dangly from a beam" kinda thing. There doesn't even seem to be mods rectifying this problem, certainly not for 1.22 and clearly not for hanging signs. So I thought to myself "with the unlimited power making a multi-texture chisel block abomination like artist of custom paintings do, surely I can chisel a hanging-esque sign". And sure enough, I can. Only problem, if I don't want to make a 3x2 billboard protruding from my smithy, even writing as little as "SMITHY" is not possible. Does anyone have any tips on how to add fancy looking but also compact yet still legible signage to my buildings? Or am I doomed to stick to either tiny icons or vanilla signs on the wall?

So I was happily chiseling away in my singleplayer world on a new house, trying out a fancy new design using the unlimited power of 16x16 free-style block shaping. What started with just round wood logs quickly made me realize I would need to chisel basically every single block of every single wall to make it fit with the missing corners. Or alternatively cheat by only rounding unconnected outside visible corners and leave the rest chonky and blocky. Which then made me remember "Wait, chiseled blocks cost more performance than normal blocks, cause alot more individual vertices need to be tracked." I know people are building ungodly chiseled masterpieces and 1to1 replicas of real things, but I felt like those were deliberately done just for the look of it in a creative world, not for actually playing. Those use-cases don't mind having only 5FPS and your PC burning cause you set the render distance up to max is worth that one amazing screenshot. But for little ol' me in my happily played singleplayer survival world of currently 100h, packing already roundabout 50 mods, how much chiseling is too much chiseling? When will I need to genuinely consider the performance impact of using a 16x16 canvas on every block in a type of game that over in Minecraft land already falls apart in basic vanilla without optimization mods? House blueprint is about 7x7 so 9x9 chiseled walls across two floors. Is that bad? Will it get bad if I go and decide to build a second, third, fifth chiseled house later on?

As things are right now, for most intents and purposes there are only two metallic tiers: the combined Copper/Bronze tier and the combined Iron/Steel tier - atleast that's how I see it. Since, as correctly brough up as topic here, bronze is just Copper but... better (stat-wise) and Steel is just Iron but... better (stat-wise). There may be the one singular odd recipe that only bronze but not copper can do or steel but not iron, and steel atleast requires doing something to achieve whereas the sole difference between copper and bronze (going off of the easiest tin bronze variant) is simply adding a second rock to the crucible. That's it. However, to follow along the original discussion - that, by all means, doesn't mean bronze is in the need for something special. Atleast to me it doesn't. Iron will always be the ultimate goal (until steel becomes more useful later in the game's development) so no matter how much previous unlocks either copper or bronze give, getting to iron will always give it all and be the final goal in progression to achieve. Which will always result in some players, who choose to speedrun progression, will directly aim for iron and not collect any more copper and tin than necessary to make a pickaxe, hammer and anvil. Unless we go the brass route and actively lock exclusive recipes to a tier, i.e. copper and bronze respectively being able to craft something the other, and iron too, can't produce. But that is a bad idea, as I already hate that brass exists for the singular sole purpose to make torch holders. This kind of exclusivity forcing you to make an otherwise useless material seems dumb and I do NOT want more of it in the game. Anyway, to get back to the point - copper here is the one getting the short straw rather than bronze. Sure, bronze doesn't add much in terms of unlocks over copper (atleast without mods) and is otherwise only required to make the anvil to use iron; but bronze is just overall better than copper and can be as easily made while not requiring to ever pick up any copper tool to begin with. The copper age itself is entirely skipable by just starting out with the stronger copper (bronze). Furthermore, bronze comes in 3 swanky variants (tin, bizmuth and black) to be more enticing decoratively than copper aswell. So any and all discussion about how much the bronze age adds vs. the iron age should include all copper unlocks aswell. And then we are at the point of the further comments about it actually being the iron and steel age that need more, considering the copper/bronze age hybrid unlocks over half the game while iron just adds colored pottery and the necessities for steel. And steel adds... more durability than iron. But then again, there will be more content in the future seeing as there is one or another thing on the official roadmap that would certainly classify as steel age additions. And finally, the helve hammer (which I didn't even know is bronze+ only?) certainly has a viable use. Not entirely sure about the pulverizer but once you start making big, thicc plate armor (either for the wearing thereof or just the display collection) or just when you have alot of iron (or steel) blooms to process it becomes rather invaluable real quick. Or just in general when you want to spam a million lanterns all over your base, cause manually smithing plates gets tedious real quick, not to mention the unholy consumption of hammers and their durability.

Welcome to the forums! Do you have a backup of your world? Before messing with data like that it is always a good idea to make a backup. Even if your backup is very old, all you are looking for is the location of your base which - unless you moved bases since then - should be somewhere in either player location (if you created the backup while logged out at home) or waypoints. Teleporting to entities in your base would probably require the chunks of your base to be loaded in, in which case you are near it anyway. Teleporting to waypoints would be much easier if you have one set to home, but I assume they are also gone with the player data?

I am not sure to what extent, if any, the game "catch-up" calculates snow or ice - but seeing this and the discussions about slow melting ice makes me thing it's not. In that case, there will only be snow in parts of the world where you actively load in chunks while it is snowing. Same with snow melting, with you potentially running into snowy chunks in the middle of 30+°C summer because the chunk was never updated and so snow melting never processed until then.

Yes please! The way it currently is feels about as stupid as the flat hunger penalty for using your left hand (that I already complained about in great detail in another thread).

I mean, you can already create your own classes through simple content mods. This allows anyone to do exactly what you suggest, minus it being an in-game option. The difference being, because it is a mod it's the duty and responsibility of the modder to balance things and hand them out on a server. If this were to be an in-game editor, you'd need a big multiplayer-synced framework for anyone to create a class that gets recognized by any other player at any time, reworking the entire class system to begin with. It would then also fall onto developers to come up with a fair way to balance these classes, which will then only spring forth mods again that allow bypassing this. I've played Project Zomboid before, which has exactly this free-style character creator with "class" perks, positive and negative, to choose from. The more good you take, the more bad you need to take to balance it. Would I agree with how many point some of these traits cost? Not necessarily. Did I immediately go into the difficulty settings and uncapped points so I could, theoretically, take all positive traits as I deem many of them necessary while many of the negative, "balanced" counter-parts feel gamebreakingly annoying to me? Yep. So why go through all this trouble implementing such an in-depth system if it will eventually just lead to the same results? When the current options already cover what you need with little more work involved for yourself?

Don't we... already have a Glider in-game? That is, like LadyWYT suggested, locked behind story location(s) and a rather crude, short-distance form of travel (I genuinely don't know what it can do, haven't gone do any story locations yet) which makes it much more balanced. But to re-iterate on this comment: I do agree that any such item needs insanely careful balancing. Minecraft, as mentioned earlier in LadyWYT's post, is a very forewarning example. Elytra in that game completely change the game to the point even in your casual-ass survival world with no big ambitions, it would be worth it to go the stronghold early, maybe even use the Piston glitch to outright skip the end dragon boss fight and then just grab a pair of Elytra, store your stuff in an Ender Chest and go respawn at home - because it's worth it. Elytra change the way you treat the whole world in-game, have no drawbacks other than needing a mending book and occasional repair, and outclass literally everything if you got some gunpowder for rockets. Horse? Is nice but why bother looking for one with decent stats when you can fly. Happy Ghast? Why does this even exist. For the survival-creative-hybrid approach to building, I presume, but meh. Minecart tracks? Way too expensive and so 2015. Boat? May I remind you flying works on water aswell. Boat with Chest? Elytra + Shulker boxes. The Glider we already have, from what I expect it to be able to do, fixes this already by just not offering the option for infinite flight. Because it's a glider, not a powered flying machine. You can go greater horizontal distances than just falling but still need height to sacrifice making it only really useful when climbing up and jumping from mountains or a base-built high tower. Situational, balanced. If we were to introduce a literal, powered flying machine that allows you to go purely horizontal in the air, let alone further up, that would be a genuine shift in balance. As such, if such a thing were to ever exist, it would need to be an end-/post-game gizmo. Something only obtained at a point where none of the challenges it skips exist anymore (because you solved world hunger and are decked out in near-immortality levels of gear) for those that just want something else to achieve and love simply exploring the world. But at that point I feel like this drops into the same reign as previous discussions about the addition to actual trains to the game. Not just some crude rails with a minecart pushed along them, proper steam locomotive train at reasonably scaled size and reasonably realistic resource requirements to build. It would certainly sound really cool, it would certainly open up one or another mainly MP server-focused RP component. But from a mere gameplay perspective, especially considering the amount of coding effort needed to make it happen? Doesn't really feel worth it. With this train example, consider how long it takes to make steel in plate armor quantities. Now compare a set of plate armor to any steam locomotive. Would anyone, genuinely, want to put in that much work to build on? Not even including the amount needed to build rails for a couple thousand blocks. Just so you can move yourself, and probably sailboat-style your trusty elk and one or another chest of goodies between two fixed points? The boat can freely sail any amount of water in any direction. You can explore new areas with it. Such a train would only go places you have already been and probably consumes all the resources along the way in order to be built. Now granted, a flying machine would more fall into the category of the sailboat. It can go anywhere - cause it can fly - as long as you have the space to land it safely. Which, knowing VS's terrain generation, can be its very own self-"balancing" issue. But on top of needing metric tons of flax to make, it would need a powered engine to run. Such level of technology seems somewhat unfitting for the game considering the official roadmap includes steam power at best. The airship mod LadyWYT mentioned solves this rather with temporal gears; which is a simple crutch to avoid having to introduce proper powered engines but then in turn seems to easy for how late-game such a flying machine would need to be. Speaking of airships - they would make much more sense. Even a primitive airship would also be much more stable technologically compared to a Wright Flyer-esque flying machine. As it mostly just uses hot air, and burning coal to power a furnace to make hot air seems much more in-line and achievable in the world of Vintage Story. And seeing as airships are much more easily scable than plane-style flying machines, one could even go as far as to make mobile bases. You know, if using the sailboat mechanic but in the air isn't enough, could make a walkable surface you can build on for flying bases. That would be an interesting concept for an alternate style of survival experience, paired with altered "flying islands" world generation - but the problem is, there are other games out there for exactly that concept. For Vintage Story, this seems rather unfitting. The uses for airships past "sailboat but in the air" travel don't really fit into the world, and the unbalanced OP nature of free air travel required balancing pushing the availability of such technology so late in the game that there is no real content left to use this newfound ability on. So I think this is better suited for mods if people want to change Vintage Story into a different game's experience.

Only possible thing is reading the mod description/changelog to see if they say anything about the new version being incompatible with the previous one.

I'd like to think the traders are just fellow, lone survivors of the apocalypse that seems to have happened and just so happen to trade with anyone who happens to pass by because capitalism is the one thing surely surviving any apocalypse. Then again, I haven gotten more than 3 random lore books and haven't been to the first story location yet so I don't know what state the current world (outside of what is physically implemented) is supposed to be in.

Oh for sure, it is a place to bring up ideas and then other people give their opinion on the idea and ideally, at the end of the day, all opinions together can help come up with the best version of the idea. The problem here is just, so far with only your idea and my opinion of it, I don't quite see that perfect idea. I totally agree that in general, clay could be made more interesting and engaging in some way? But what that way could be, I honestly don't know. Because I too like to play the game slow and comfy, but that doesn't mean I have to be forced to do so by mechanics turned into a deliberately slower process just for the sake of slowing you down. Cause you say and my immediate reaction is "please god no, they already ruined smithing with this". Back in 1.21.6 I played with the "Sally's Manual Quenching" mod and the "Grindstones" mod. The former is a nice, "immersive" QoL addition that lets you dunk your smithed pieces into a bucket of water to save you several minutes of watching a number go down. The latter let's you repair tools at a crafted grindstone at the cost of sinking max durability. An addition I see somewhat direly necessary as just upping universal durability seems unfair but certain high-use tools (like hammer and chisel) break like they are made out of wood still. Then 1.22 came around and the patchnotes said they added both quenching and grinding to the base game and I was very hyped and then - Grinding might as well not exist that's how utterly useless it is and quenching isn't just a QoL feature, it is a gamble where you can up tool stats at the cost of it randomly exploding into thin air. Is that more realistic? Maybe. Is that an overall more elaborate and engaging gameplay mechanic? Yes. Do I still want my old, easy, modded functionality back? Also yes. So please, don't make clay randomly explode for not reason aswell. On another note, what I'd like to see personally in addtion of clay mechanics is an in-between of the pit kiln and beehive kiln. The pit kiln is nice and simple but it feels kinda weird having to shove clay, grass, sticks and fuel into a hole all the way into the Steel age. Sure, that's what the beehive kiln is *supposed* to be for but in my eyes that's just a fancy late-game gizmo for people caring about the color of their ceramics. It's incredibly expensive to build, equally as incredibly expensive (compared to the pit kiln) to run and its only advantage is to be able to fire up more clay items simulatenously (which the average player at that stage of the game should have no more need for) and turn it funky colors. I have no idea if there is any "realistic" example of such a thing, but some sort of small-scale Bloomery-esque upgraded/re-usable pit kiln sounds nice. Overall slightly cheaper to run (if run several, several times) or maybe just less tedious to set up, maybe slightly faster? But not beehive kiln multi-block structure of doom levels overkill.

Temporal stability is the metric indicated by the teal temporal gear in the top middle of your hotbar. It's, for all intents and purposes, just a value that goes from 100% to 0%. 100% is good, 0% is bad as you will see weird stuff, spawn high level monsters randomly around you and take constant damage. What influences this value comes in many forms - one of which is the "temporal stability" of an area. On world generation, any part of the world is randomly assigned a temporal stability value. Meaning, while wandering through the world you will have areas where your own temporal stability (spinny wheel on your hotbar) goes up towards 100% at varying speeds, down towards 0% at varying speeds, or just not change at all. Other more predictable and much more notable factors are: Coming too close to a temporal rift makes your temporal stability drop real fast. Temporal storms makes your temporal stability constantly drop at a usually non-threatening but certainly notable rate no matter where you are. Being underground (below sea level, aka. in caves, man-made or natural) makes your temporal stability drop no matter what at speeds increasing the deeper you go. Independent from that is the Rift activity. That is just a number that gets rerolled at random and solely determines how frequently Rifts will spawn around you (and I think monsters underground aswell?) and changes, with no way to influence it, at the great Random Number Generator's whimsy.