All You (Don't) Need to Know about Deadly Brightshades

[Electroely]

I did some research & testing of the mechanics of Brightshade spawning after my friend's decoration plants spawned 11 Brightshades every wave, despite the fact that I was trying to get as many as I could and only ended up with, at most, 6 at a time. Thankfully, a patch made it so that each wave only contains three plants every wave. Still, here are my findings:

With the mechanics of Brightshade spawning, you're more likely to encounter higher numbers of Brightshades if you leave space between the plants you plant, like you would do when decorating with them. That is to say, decor plants generally get many more Brightshades than more optimized farm plants do. Eligible plants include saplings, grass tufts, berry bushes, juicy berry bushes and farm crops.

The short explanation is that the game groups plants into "herds" (or, more logically, gardens) and each plant in the garden might get a Brightshade on it as long as it's not too close (3 wall spaces) to another plant that's already getting a Brightshade this wave, as well as not too close (30 wall spaces) to an already-standing Brightshade. The selection is limited to herds, and herds are strict groups of 36 plants each. Brightshades only spawn if there's room for them to, so you can (accidentally OR intentionally) reduce the number of Brightshades you get by squeezing the plants close together:

Plants are put into the same group together until there's 36 of them, in which case they'll start a new group.

Spoiler

The plant "herds" use the same mechanics as Beefalo or Pengull herds. They have a maximum of 36 members, but they'll detect other plants to add to the herd from a 10-tile radius.

The Brightshades choose one of the 5 biggest herds they can find to spawn in (not counting withered plants or plants already occupied/near another occupied plant). This can include small herds if there isn't big enough large herds. This does not guarantee that the largest number of them spawn - like in my examples above, that's entirely dependent on the placement of the plants. 

For consistency, Dragon Fruit crops are the best plants to use as Brightshade bait - being spoiled does not count as being withered, so farm crops have the advantage of working year-round without an Ice Flingomatic. The Dragon Fruit Vine is also immune to fire, which makes it the best choice for this particular use. It also works out that 4 tiles of 9 dragonfruit crops adds up to 36.

As for the timing of the Brightshade waves...

As soon as the lunar rift reaches its maximum stage (as indicated by the glow at the top of the screen and the visibility on the map), the game selects a random number of waves to spawn, between 4 and 6. The first wave will be immediately queued up, and subsequent waves will be queued up every 2 days after that. A queued up wave can take anywhere between half a day to a day and a half to arrive. Once all waves have been sent, the rift closes.

The info here might change as the game gets updated. I could also be wrong about something despite all my testing (so take everything here with a grain of salt), but I wanted to write it anyway in case anybody was as confused about the seemingly arbitrary nature of these plants as I was.

[Pticman]

So by analysing this information, If I understand correctly you can create a 12 herd plant garden, and then there will be the big detection radius in that no more herds can appear. Can you use that to your advantage to stuck plants in the specific area, using it as "lighting rod" against other invasions around? 

[JazzyGames]

Wow, thank you for this.

[Juny Pear]

Oof. That is painful to learn in all honesty.

[lakhnish]

1 hour ago, Electroely said:

Space out your plants with at least 3 wall-spaces between all plants and you get this:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the range of the new bombs also 3 wall units?

Does that mean that each bomb craft is effectively only good for one bright shade since they'd be too far apart to do their AoE damage?

[ButterStuffed]

With the placement example I wonder if they are close enough for fire damage to hurt multiple bright shades. I’ve noticed they are not resistant to fire damage and have been testing methods to reduce their health using inexpensive methods. Fire damage is still abysmally low, so I don’t hold much hope for that being viable.

Also, Woodie’s moose form is surprisingly pretty good for clearing out clusters of bright shades like this.

Moose form’s damage resistance appears to ignore planar piercing and the charge attack is fast enough to hit multiple bright shades and avoid the retaliation attack.

It takes about 40 charges to kill a Brightshade, very tedious, but is a totally viable method to clear large clusters of them with very little resources.

[sudoku]

Seems like this is just boils down to being a tuning issue and they might need better logic for determining spawns. 

 

If im interpreting the code correctly:

It looks at whether an object on the screen is a plant.

Then it looks at whether it is naturally planted or player planted.

Then it looks at the space between each player planted plant.

And finally it spawns a brightshade if the space is within a large enough radius.

 

A solution to me is to maybe have instead like a brightshade queen that is a bigger variation of these plants and is responsible for spawning the smaller versions of brightshade

So that way the game can check if a brightshade queen is spawned within a certain radius of plants and if yes then no more plants would be spawned.

Then they can determine how many normal brightshades they want spaced around a queen. Or maybe have the queen spawn brightshades on a timer.

[Electroely]

5 hours ago, Pticman said:

So by analysing this information, If I understand correctly you can create a 12 herd plant garden, and then there will be the big detection radius in that no more herds can appear. Can you use that to your advantage to stuck plants in the specific area, using it as "lighting rod" against other invasions around? 

Unfortunately, no. Existing herds don't stop new herds from being created - you can (and probably do) have many herds of 12 plants or less in a small area at the same time.

 

4 hours ago, lakhnish said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the range of the new bombs also 3 wall units?

Does that mean that each bomb craft is effectively only good for one bright shade since they'd be too far apart to do their AoE damage?

If you throw the bomb between two Brightshades, you can hit both, since both plants will be closer than 3 units. I think the best you'll get is five saplings in a perfect pentagon - very difficult to plant without the use of mods or console commands. Four of them in a square are much easier to plant and still let you break even on husks, if you decide explosives are the best course of action.

If a bomb is thrown where the lantern is, all 5 saplings will be hit by the explosion.

   

3 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

With the placement example I wonder if they are close enough for fire damage to hurt multiple bright shades. I’ve noticed they are not resistant to fire damage and have been testing methods to reduce their health using inexpensive methods. Fire damage is still abysmally low, so I don’t hold much hope for that being viable.

The same principal above applies, But from what I can tell, Rope have a big enough burn radius to hurt 6 plants in a perfect hexagon, until it's spring (which reduces fire damage range) where you'd only be able to fit 5 plants.

31 minutes ago, sudoku said:

If im interpreting the code correctly:

It looks at whether an object on the screen is a plant.

Then it looks at whether it is naturally planted or player planted.

Then it looks at the space between each player planted plant.

And finally it spawns a brightshade if the space is within a large enough radius.

I'm not sure where you're getting this code from. The functionality I was able to interpret is:

- The game looks at a list of every plant herd that exists in the world. (Plant herds only exist for plants the player has placed.)
- It chooses the one with the highest number of plants that aren't withered and don't have a Brightshade.
- It goes through each plant in the herd, in a random order, and selects them to be a Brightshade target as long as no other plants in a 3-unit radius is also getting (or already has) a Brightshade.
- Once all the plants are selected, the Brightshades are released after 0-2 seconds.

The key differences here are that the game will select plants regardless of whether a player is near them or not, and the space between them doesn't matter for the actual selection process, only for whether or not the plant receives its own Brightshade.

The only "on screen" check I see are the ones used to save resources - If a plant isn't on-screen, it'll instantly receive its Brightshade, but if it's on-screen then the game will spawn the gestalt to go infest it so the player can witness it in action. 
 

[sudoku]

28 minutes ago, Electroely said:

 

I'm not sure where you're getting this code from. The functionality I was able to interpret is:

 

It was just my own interpretation based off what i read, but i understand better with your second explanation.

I was just thinking of an alternative for people who think that this is too many brightshades. But its hard to offer any solution when we dont really know klei's intentions or goals. 

[Electroely]

With the latest update, only 3 Brightshades will spawn per wave. They still respect the rules described in this post, but an additional limit was imposed so that no new Brightshades will be created within 15 wall units of any existing Brightshades.

[Electroely]

Also, the plants don't target farm crops anymore. So it's just limited to saplings, grass tufts and berry bushes.

[gamehun20]

Now it's a bit more manageable

[Electroely]

Just now, gamehun20 said:

Now it's a bit more manageable

It's very manageable now. Only three Brightshades will ever take up the same area now, and with the addition of exposed vine sections it's not a problem taking them out one-by-one. The increased drops also means that you can more easily afford to use Brightshade Husks for both the Brightshades and your own purposes. I've been having a great time using the Brightshade Staff on the Moonstorm invasion.

[QuartzBeam]

@ElectroelyIs there any limit to how far from the rift plants can be possessed as of the latest hotfix?

[Electroely]

1 hour ago, QuartzBeam said:

@ElectroelyIs there any limit to how far from the rift plants can be possessed as of the latest hotfix?

Not that I know of, no. The position of the rift itself has no bearing on the spawning of Brightshades whatsoever - it'll always choose gardens in a set, arbitrary order that (probably) gets shuffled on server restart, and it'll get to those gardens even if they're on the other side of the world or right next to the rift, provided they don't already have brightshades nearby.

[QuartzBeam]

10 minutes ago, Electroely said:

Not that I know of, no. The position of the rift itself has no bearing on the spawning of Brightshades whatsoever - it'll always choose gardens in a set, arbitrary order that (probably) gets shuffled on server restart, and it'll get to those gardens even if they're on the other side of the world or right next to the rift, provided they don't already have brightshades nearby.

Fun!

(Thanks for the answer though, such as it might be.)

[lakhnish]

On 4/13/2023 at 8:17 AM, Electroely said:

The short explanation is that the game groups plants into "herds" (or, more logically, gardens) and each plant in the garden might get a Brightshade on it as long as it's not too close (3 wall spaces) to another plant that's already getting a Brightshade this wave, as well as not too close (15 wall spaces) to an already-standing Brightshade.

I saw that the 15 number was changed to 30.

Is this supposed to mean that Brightshades won't spawn within 30 wall units next to an already existing brightshade?

Side question: Say you have 3 berry bushes that are 3 wall units apart, does that mean you can 3 brightshades to spawn next to each other when the wave starts, even though birghtshades won't spawn within the now 30 wall units from existing brightshades?

[maxwell_winters]

Just now, lakhnish said:

Is this supposed to mean that Brightshades won't spawn within 30 wall units next to an already existing brightshade?

 

Definitely not. I had 3 brightshades clustered in 2 squares (16 grass and 16 sapling right next to each other). Which took me by surprise because I thought they increased the distance between them.

[lakhnish]

1 minute ago, maxwell_winters said:

Definitely not. I had 3 brightshades clustered in 2 squares (16 grass and 16 sapling right next to each other). Which took me by surprise because I thought they increased the distance between them.

Is this in the live branch? They did a change in the number.

It could also be the answer to my 2nd question I had to edit in, where the waves would spawn 2-3 brightshades next to plants during the wave when brightshades did not yet exist that are 3 wall units apart, but a following wave wouldn't do that (or at least, that's what I'm trying to figure out.)

[maxwell_winters]

4 hours ago, lakhnish said:

Is this in the live branch? They did a change in the number.

Yeah, and it seems they reverted the distance between them to the way it was when the beta just dropped. I hope it was an error that they will fix in the next hotfix.
 

EDIT. On the second thought, it might have happened because it was a desert base and there wasn't anything else for them to infest in the area.

[Electroely]

6 hours ago, lakhnish said:

I saw that the 15 number was changed to 30.

Is this supposed to mean that Brightshades won't spawn within 30 wall units next to an already existing brightshade?

Side question: Say you have 3 berry bushes that are 3 wall units apart, does that mean you can 3 brightshades to spawn next to each other when the wave starts, even though birghtshades won't spawn within the now 30 wall units from existing brightshades?

Yeah, the Brightshades shouldn't spawn within 30 tiles of existing Brightshades.

As for the side question, yeah. The 30 unit check only applies to Brightshades that already existed. The 3 Brightshades from one wave can spawn as close to each other as they can fit.

[bloopah]

On 4/15/2023 at 9:24 AM, Electroely said:

Also, the plants don't target farm crops anymore. So it's just limited to saplings, grass tufts and berry bushes.

This definetly isn't the case anymore, as Wormwood I planted two seeds near a Rift to recover some sanity from jokingly eating Monster Meat and this happened:

 

[Electroely]

1 hour ago, bloopah said:

This definetly isn't the case anymore, as Wormwood I planted two seeds near a Rift to recover some sanity from jokingly eating Monster Meat and this happened:

 

They changed it back in the next beta patch. I didn't make a new reply because I didn't want to repeatedly bump my own post, but I should've edited that reply to clarify.

[Mike23Ua]

15 hours ago, Electroely said:

They changed it back in the next beta patch. I didn't make a new reply because I didn't want to repeatedly bump my own post, but I should've edited that reply to clarify.

I can say with absolute fact that at least on the Xbox version of the game they do indeed target farm plots, I didn’t even have crops growing in it, it just logically found the best soil and moved in- At first I struggled with these things and died like ALOT.. but after getting a DarkSword and then forcing it to stretch its tunneling vine as far outward as it can and then attacking the vulnerable middle part in between the plant and the vines end (attacking either of these is near instant death..) Attacking the Center half will Severe the Vine and leave the Brightshade itself Vulnerable to being attacked while it’s stun for 8 (10 if you want to be risky..) hits before it can Recover.

This thing decided to “Live” in my Garden Until I finally got up the courage to deal with it, after you can manage to kill 2 Brightshades they get laughably easy to deal with once you obtain a Brightshade Sword- It’ll only take 4 Hits to Severe the Tunneling Vine when using a BS Sword.. NOW I have these really good weapons and armor, the Sword atleast for now completely replaces the DarkSword (and no sanity drain while holding it either!) I had to deal with 2 of them relatively close to each other, but if you pay attention and attack them one at a time (while avoiding the others vine roots) you can deal with them Super Super Easily… like no Joke- it’s easier to fight this new “End Game” Mob then it is to fight a Moose/Goose.

[gamehun20]

15 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

it’s easier to fight this new “End Game” Mob then it is to fight a Moose/Goose.

It's supposedly one of the weaker ones to come from the portal so yeah