Streamline Moonstorm Farming

[chaosmonkey]

The climax of the Return of Them story arc brought massive changes to DST in that we now have a way to achieve infinite light in glowcaps. Infinite light is granted by deconstructing the Enlightened Crown dropped by the Celestial Champion and placing the resulting shards into Glowcaps. Summoning CC requires the player to farm moonstorms, a new dungeon-crawler-like event on the surface world.

For base builders, moonstorm farming becomes a key activity done very regularly.  In my current megabase world, I have personally done the Wagstaff defense over 150 times. Notable megabasers like Glermz even have dedicated farmers (hi Kirby) specifically to gather resources from the moonstorms, just to be able to make 15 glowcaps/year. All that to say, it has become a core part of the game and required farming.

Unlike other farming activities, moonstorm farming has a very large minimum time component: the Wagstaff defense. I posit that the required minimum time of completing the Wagstaff defense contributes greatly to the overall dissatisfaction among some players with the activities required to illuminate a large base.

To farm the moonstorms, the player must do a few things:

1. Activation: The moonstorms are activated by building all 3 celestial stations in close proximity on the moon island.
2. Travel: Between each Wagstaff defense, the player travels to wherever the moonstorm is active, and seeks out wagstaff until he plops down his science experiment.
3. Wagstaff defense: This is the main activity where waves of mutated birds and gestalts attack, moon gleams dance, lighting strikes to create charged glass, and the player must provide Wagstaff his tools.

The activation task may be amortized across an entire farming session; it does not contribute greatly to the overall time required to farm moonstorms.

The travel task must be completed once per Wagstaff defense. This task benefits from mastery and preparation in that the player may optimize their world by building roads, salt licks for beefalo, wanda portals, etc. in order to reduce the travel time required to an absolute minimum.

Finally, we get to the Wagstaff defense. This is the meat and potatoes of the moonstorm farming, and it _does not_ benefit from mastery. Preparation and practice serve to make them easier, but such mastery does not make them go faster. Reviewing the Lua, we can see there are large minimum times between Wagstaff asking for tools and even the initial tools spawning in.

Consider The Ruins for a moment. This is a dungeon-crawler area in the caves which, as the player gets better, is more prepared, etc., can be cleared faster and faster. I remember my first time going to the ruins. It was exciting, and scary! It took forever just to clear one little room. After lots of practice, combat lasts very little time. Warly spices make the mining and hammering faster.  These days, I can clear a large ruins in a few in-game days, and it's still a lot of fun.

The Wagstaff defense can be made easier: the player can use Wendy to trivialize the bird killing. The player can be partially insane to make the gestalts go away. The player can wear a rain coat to eliminate risk of the gleams.

But, the Wagstaff defense cannot be made faster. If the player does all of the above and is absolutely smashing Wagstaff defense? The reward is to **sit around and wait** for him to ask for the next tool.

In various discussions on Discord, I have heard a dissatisfaction from numerous builders with the state of moonstorm farming. It's way too much of a time sink for how much the reward is. But I'm not here to discuss changes to the cost of summoning CC -- that can be saved for another thread.

What I am here to propose is making moonstorm farming benefit more from mastery and thus **give the player more agency** over how much time it takes to farm crown shards.  Make the Wagstaff defense more responsive to the player's clearing speed. Such a change will make the moonstorm farming feel much less tedious and more on par with activities like clearing the ruins.

Some ideas that have come to mind on how to achieve this would include:

• Spawn all the Wagstaff tools once he starts asking for them so that the player isn't waiting for the final tool to spawn just to give him the first one of the event.
• Tie tool requests to waves of birds killed, and spawn bird waves faster after they die.

I'm sure many folks reading this are interested in having the material costs changed in some way for summoning CC, but please let's refrain from discussing that in this thread. I believe that if the Wagstaff event gets to a better place in terms of responding to player aptitude (ie, not requiring a minimum time per restrained static), that we would be in a much better position to review the cost of summoning CC.

Thanks to everyone for reading and to Klei for your consideration.