Ideas to make Lunar Rifts more bearable

[Szczuku]

Right now, they can spawn mostly anywhere, avoiding player-build structures (but not walls). They will grow, destroying everything near them and later spawn Deadly Brightshades, potentially covering up player's farms, decorations, setpieces.

Ideas to make this entire mechanic more bearable. Outside of Lunar Spillage (hi -Variant) I think that not every single one needs to be added.

-Lunar Spillage. The rifts shouldn't destroy anything and instead mutate stuff around them. Stuff that they can mutate, everything else is simply left alone. The moontations would include already existing stuff, such as saplings into their lunar variants, utilizing existing sprites, such as boulders into moonglass/moonrocks and lastly new additions, as the mainland offers a lot of potentially interesting changes, beehives becoming crystalized, berries turning bluish and blinking, new types of mutated birds landing around the rifts (and also retrofitted to inhabit the island): a mutated red bird, missing its head, with eyes on its wings and a beautiful flower-turned-bird.

Once the rift relocates, moontations and some crystal veins on the turf would be left behind, to slowly turn back to normal. Ideally, the healing process should take as long as the relocated rift's growing process. That way the world would always have one area healing after a rift and another one actively changing. I believe, that'd make the world feel more alive.

Depending on the number, eccentricity and potential usefulness of the new moontations Klei could add in a future update some sort of 'Altering Touch' item (crafted with pure brilliance and other stuff), which would act as an empowered lunar experiment, allowing players to cause rift's and regular moontations at will.

-Wilted Brightshades. As far as I know, brightshades will stick around after the rift is gone, creating an issue that the player should deal with. To make it easier for the players, after the rift disappears any remaining brightshades should look withered, which would cause them to lose planar defence and damage, thus making the cleanup process a bit easier. Or make them completely harmless, with only 100 hp. But then, once killed, they only have a 30% chance to drop a single husk. Therefore encouraging players to fight Brightshades while the rift is still around.

-Walls and fences counting as structures.

-Lunar beacon. Made with pure brilliance, a stack of moonglass and 20 nightmare fuel. A structure that looks like a giant chalice filled with nightmare fuel. I'm assuming that Shadow and Lunar magic can 'attract' each other like magnets. The beacon would have a 25% chance to attract the rift to spawn within its vicinity, and 10% for moonstorms. If it fails, the rift will try to find another beacon, increasing its chances to success, and if there are none, spawn the regular way. I'm sure that I explained the mechanic incomprehensibly but, essentially, the idea is that 4 beacons would guarantee that the rift will spawn near one of them. However, to prevent players from placing 4 beacons close together, each beacon would need to be a certain distance away from another becaon. Otherwise, the visual cue would be that the nightmare fuel inside the moonglass would stop thrashing around and the players sanity wouldn't be drained, indicating that the beacon isn't working.

The idea behind this... idea is that the players could be ceratin that the rift doesn't spawn where they don't want it but, even if all 4 beacons were built as closely as it's possible, the rift would still have basically an entire biome worth of space that it can spawn in, preventing it from becoming a stationary piece of content

Ending notes:

I understand that the majority of the ideas presented are probably too much for the devs to add in 5 days' time. So I suggest that, as a temporary fix, the rifts should be changed to not destroy anything.

[Antynomity]

Attracting the rifts or moonstorms would be the most boring solution to the problem of them spawning anywhere, i'd much rather something like a lightning rod for lightning but for the rifts.

[bloopah]

2 hours ago, yourAnty said:

Attracting the rifts or moonstorms would be the most boring solution to the problem of them spawning anywhere, i'd much rather something like a lightning rod for lightning but for the rifts.

We already have that, it's called "player-built structures". Lunar Rifts stay a 5-Tile distance away from them.

Building Signs 10 Tiles away from each other should keep them away from anything valuable, if not then Fire Pits will.

[Antynomity]

6 minutes ago, bloopah said:

We already have that, it's called "player-built structures". Lunar Rifts stay a 5-Tile distance away from them.

Building Signs 10 Tiles away from each other should keep them away from anything valuable, if not then Fire Pits will.

Not an elegant or intuitive solution.

[bloopah]

2 minutes ago, yourAnty said:

Not an elegant or intuitive solution.

A solution nonetheless.

[Frashaw27]

An idea I had is that you would be able to craft shadow and lunar seeds at alters and ancient psuedo science station respectfully for 10 seeds and 1 nightmare fuel and 1 glass shard respectfully. Each of these seeds would be able to be planted onto a turf and block the other type from spawning on that turf while replacing the spawns with the other type. For example if you were to shadowify a 3x3 square, lunar being would no longer be able to spawn there and instead be replaced by shadows if they were to spawn by something like the moonstorm. Another effect is that shadowified spaces would block these lunar roots from growing past it, sort of stopping them in there track. Granted this isn't a perfect solution but it does provide a solution that can appeal to megabasers wanting to protect their builds without ruining the aethetics.

[-Variant]

4 hours ago, Szczuku said:

(hi -Variant)

(Hi!)

[Mike23Ua]

Here’s the thing: this is the “First” mob spewing out these portals as the Entry point to new EndGame Content. We’re already suggesting ways to counter it when we don’t actually know WHAT Klei has fully planned for it..

I personally find that to be nonsense, and while yes we can only suggest things based on how things are right now.. We should wait to see the full picture before judging the Artists Artwork.

[Zeklo]

5 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

We’re already suggesting ways to counter it when we don’t actually know WHAT Klei has fully planned for it..

While true, and I agree, we are going to be stuck with the new content in it's current state for a while—and the 'true', 'genuine' solution might not come for some time.

There needs to be, at the very least, a temporary means of handling things in the now, so we're not just in a weird limbo state until then.

[Cassielu]

9 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

We’re already suggesting ways to counter it when we don’t actually know WHAT Klei has fully planned for it.

How many times and for how long have we been in this state  over the past four years? This is what people (including me) say every time something goes wrong. But in the end, few fixes were made. Sometimes updates can make problems worse or even break things that were already fine. Moonquay make ocean sailing even less popular, New materials lack uses but at the same time more and more of them are added with each update, Building a fully equipped boat will give you a weakness spot instead of a more usable vehicle. Just like each game update is designed by a different person, each of whom is concerned only with his/her own "genius idea" and don't cares about the whole game world as a whole. People's trust and confidence is consumed in these breakdown of expectations.

Unless Klei announces more and formally what they plan to do in the future, at least where what we have now fits into the overall plan, these arguments will never stop.

Although I support the Rift remaining as invasive as it is now. lol