How to Make Brightshades Spawn Where You Want Them To

[lakhnish]

Are the brightshades a thorn in your side? 
Do they keep targeting your farms and it’s getting on your nerves? 
Or do you want to ignore the Brightshades entirely?!? 

Well I’ve got the guide for you on how to manipulate where the brightshades spawn in your world!

Much thanks to @Electroely's post on this topic from the beta branch!

And here are some useful commands if you want to test in your own worlds!

Spoiler

Mod used to make that circle (Circular Placement):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2914336761

Useful server-side commands:

Locating where the domestic plant herd is:
c_gonext(“domesticplantherd”)

Finding the size of the domestic plant herd:
c_announce(c_find("domesticplantherd").components.herd:GetDebugString())

How long until the next rift spawns (but not when it will reach stage 2 or 3):
c_announce(TheWorld.components.riftspawner:GetDebugString())

How many waves are left once the rift has reached its max stage:
c_announce(TheWorld.components.lunarthrall_plantspawner:GetDebugString())
 

[YouKnowWho]

Brilliant work! You really make some of the best guides out there.

[Maxil20]

Very nice guide! Very nice to see info of this be wildly known : )

Bit of a tip, but you can actually take the farm setups a step further. If you build your setups next to an ocean, you can actually farm the brightshades much easier via winona's catpaults or houndius (Albiet the latter is much more costly to setup). Here is an example of one of those setups that is crudely done, but you get the picture:



2 nitre with a normal generator is enough to clear out 1 wave of brightshades. Alternatively you can use a GEMerator with 1 gem, if you have an excess.

Do keep in mind that if you want to be safe from one rift you will at minimum need 10 of these setups, so do be prepared for a bit of an investment. I do feel the payoff is worth it, though!

[Mike23Ua]

Video is 14 minutes long, I just want to know if the order I place my grass or twigs in has any effect at all on how they spawn & take them over?

[_zwb]

Those things are just tedious to fight. Just another reason why the whole lunar island content should be reworked or even removed. Good to see a way to contain them.

[Electroely]

1 hour ago, SleeplessRat said:

Those things are just tedious to fight. Just another reason why the whole lunar island content should be reworked or even removed. Good to see a way to contain them.

I've been enjoying fighting them. It's a refreshing bit of unique combat for a regular mob compared to all the kiting the rest of the game's combat consists of.

[Pticman]

Great video! I have the question > Are spoiled crops still considered to be targets for bright shades? Because if you build the bait farm using dragon fruits as you showed they will eventually spoil..

 

[_zwb]

9 minutes ago, Electroely said:

It's a refreshing bit of unique combat for a regular mob compared to all the kiting the rest of the game's combat consists of.

Its uniqueness is that it spawns randomly in your base with 0 cool down, spawning 3 so close together making it nearly unkitable, also it penetrates your armour so don't even think about tanking.

Nope thank you. I'd rather have something regular. Killing brightshades is simply chores. I'm here to play a game, not to do chores.

This thing really makes me want to base in the ruins. No lunar island bs. No noobs to revive. No chores to do

[lakhnish]

12 minutes ago, Pticman said:

Are spoiled crops still considered to be targets for bright shades? Because if you build the bait farm using dragon fruits as you showed they will eventually spoil..

Yes, spoiled crops will still get infected.

[Catteflyterpill]

4 minutes ago, SleeplessRat said:

Its uniqueness is that it spawns randomly in your base with 0 cool down, spawning 3 so close together making it nearly unkitable, also it penetrates your armour so don't even think about tanking.

Nope thank you. I'd rather have something regular. Killing brightshades is simply chores. I'm here to play a game, not to do chores.

This thing really makes me want to base in the ruins. No lunar island bs. No noobs to revive. No chores to do

Yeah, very uncalled for having us do tasks in a survival game. Maybe it's a translation error, but I don't know why you equate the rifts with the lunar island. You don't have to turn on rifts if you don't want to. The content is optional.

[Pticman]

5 minutes ago, lakhnish said:

Yes, spoiled crops will still get infected.

Btw isn't it more practical to make 12 bait farms, not 10? It will guarantee for you to collect all potential bright shades from 2 rifts, so dont have to clear it after each 1 rift

[Electroely]

8 minutes ago, Pticman said:

Btw isn't it more practical to make 12 bait farms, not 10? It will guarantee for you to collect all potential bright shades from 2 rifts, so dont have to clear it after each 1 rift

Well, for 2 rifts you'd need some 16 farms. Out of the 10 farms, 4 of them act more as a buffer than actual bait, because the rifts might select any of the 5 farms with the highest number of plants so you want to have 5 vacant farms for the last wave to make sure smaller groups don't get targeted.

[Pticman]

10 minutes ago, Electroely said:

Well, for 2 rifts you'd need some 16 farms. Out of the 10 farms, 4 of them act more as a buffer than actual bait, because the rifts might select any of the 5 farms with the highest number of plants so you want to have 5 vacant farms for the last wave to make sure smaller groups don't get targeted.

So the last potential 6 wave calculates in the same way as the first 5 waves? The rift selects additional 5 farms for it with the highest number of plants and choose one randomly?

 

[Electroely]

1 minute ago, Pticman said:

So the last potential 6 wave calculates in the same way as the first 5 waves? The rift selects additional 5 farms for it with the highest number of plants and choose one randomly?

 

That's right. So in order to keep the Brightshades away from everything else you want to have 5 farms for them to select. That's why you need 4 extra farms - one that'll actually get infected and 4 more to keep the rest of the world from being selected.

[Pticman]

Imagine building giant Brightshade farm, and all of the sudden it stops working after hottfix changing bright shades spawning mechanics. RIP

[Badarokey]

4 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Video is 14 minutes long, I just want to know if the order I place my grass or twigs in has any effect at all on how they spawn & take them over?

If you go to minute 9:24, he will explain that precisely xD

 

Btw I have turned this update off, mainly cause i heard  and saw that the rifts destroy structures and all(have the fix it for sure?!). I dont want my sweated early megabase to be disrupted... 

[Pticman]

22 minutes ago, Electroely said:

That's right. So in order to keep the Brightshades away from everything else you want to have 5 farms for them to select. That's why you need 4 extra farms - one that'll actually get infected and 4 more to keep the rest of the world from being selected.

What if I have only 3 domesticated herds on the map, how the last waves of bright shades are going to work? What if I don't have domesticated herds at all? Do they still have herd mechanism with wild plants, choosing the highest number of natural spawned plants?

[lakhnish]

29 minutes ago, Pticman said:

What if I have only 3 domesticated herds on the map, how the last waves of bright shades are going to work? What if I don't have domesticated herds at all? Do they still have herd mechanism with wild plants, choosing the highest number of natural spawned plants?

If your 3 domestic plant herds have enough distance from each other, the bright shades will go for all 3 of them.

Once there are no domesticplantherds, it will target wild plants it can find.

From what I can understand from the code, it tries to find 10 random(?) wild patches it can in the world and then amongst the 10, it gets the densest one, with the range of the density being a 5 tile radius based on the random point it chooses on the map?

Relevant Code with comments on what I understand is happening:

Spoiler

function Lunarthrall_plantspawner:FindWildPatch()
    local tries = {}
    --fill tries array with 10 items, getting a random point on the map and then adding those plants to an index
    while #tries < 10 do
        local plants = {}
        local pt = TheWorld.Map:FindRandomPointOnLand(40)
        if pt then
            -- LOOK FOR PLANTS 
            local ents = TheSim:FindEntities(pt.x,pt.y,pt.z, 20, PLANTS_MUST)
            for i, ent in ipairs(ents) do
                if not ent.lunarthrall_plant then
                    table.insert(plants,ent)
                end
            end
        end
        table.insert(tries,plants)
    end
   
   --go through the 10 we found and choose the one that is the biggest size
    local top = 0
    local choice = nil
    for i,try in ipairs(tries)do
        if #try > top then
            choice = i
            top = #try
        end
    end
    if choice then
        return tries[choice]
    end
end

 

 

43 minutes ago, Badarokey said:

Btw I have turned this update off, mainly cause i heard  and saw that the rifts destroy structures and all(have the fix it for sure?!). I dont want my sweated early megabase to be disrupted... 

They no longer destroy structures, but they will uproot plants and trees in your world. (I don't remember if they destroy boulders though).

They will also try to avoid transplanted plants you have in the world and they will also avoid spawning within a 6 tile range of structures (they do spread out to a 7 tile radius though, so keep that in mind when building)

[Baark0]

Very interesting stuff, and good to know for if I ever decide to work with plants again in the future, although I do wonder, what happens if you have a herd with more than 36 plants? Do brightshades still infect them or is that herd immune?

[lakhnish]

42 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

what happens if you have a herd with more than 36 plants? Do brightshades still infect them or is that herd immune?

You won't get a herd with more than 36 plants. What will instead happen is that a new herd is created. That herd can be infected, with the likelihood being what is the size of that new herd you made and the total number of herds in the world.

But you can get an immunity effect if you build around an already existing bright shade, as no other brightshades will spawn in a 7.5 tile radius from that said brightshade in future waves (10:54 is when I started with that part if you want to see it in effect).

[_zwb]

14 hours ago, Catteflyterpill said:

You don't have to turn on rifts if you don't want to. The content is optional.

What about public servers? Other players want to kill celestial champion and I can't do anything about it.

No it's not a translation error, the whole lunar island content sucks, it somehow managed to be more annoying than ruins content(shadow chess pieces - ag - fuel weaver), but also gives less rewards. Just think about the chores you need to do for pearl, wagstaff and crap king. Ugh, I'm sick of it already.

[Spino43]

What kind of quantum beefalo-manure mechanic I am watching here, damn.

[Pig Princess]

So if I want to do anything plant-related I have to choose between 3 options.

1. Make 10-bait setup. Dedicate whole biome to that, clear it every 20 days, including triple brightshade cases (even with catapults setup it's still a lot of time, space and resources wasted, plus it forces me to switch character - opposite of playstyle I like), so I can "be free" remaining few days before new wave. And I can't skip even 1 cleaning, or I'll have to build even bigger setup to have 40 days leeway; one way or the other I have to dedicate certain % of my playtime to this chore no matter what. On top of that I'll have to put structures across this whole sacrificial biome 6 tiles apart just so I can have at least this much protection. I also can't use real farms with more than 35 plants near.

2. Use 1-brightshade bait setup. Keep dead zone in the middle of base (goes against wildfire protection strategies, by the way), be unable to use bigger than 3*3 farm plots (so my usual 4*4 is not an option, and thus I have to farm really inefficiently when it comes to bigger scale because of both running around multiple small farm plots and casting more star callers for no reason). On top of that rifts would still uproot stuff, brightshades - infest important locations, eventually world would be covered entirely by these 7-tile-radius circles with a lot of even natural plants unusable.

3. Do nothing and be locked from plant-related activities at random times for half a season minimum, or even be unlucky enough so rift opens when my crops are ready to be picked, so they rot instead because brightshades block them.

Or I can just not do any plant-related activities and return to desease meta of living off meat exclusively and never replanting stuff. That way game would be interesting for me a bit longer, but soon I'll be bored, just like when desease was a thing and I just disabled it in every single world that I started. By the way, desease at least didn't target natural plants and didn't uproot stuff.

Or I could disable rifts entirely and enjoy the game like before, at least while it lasts until following updates. In that case I'll be locked from content of future updates though.

Seems like Klei tries to make me pick my punishment instead of playing game for joy. But I don't agree with that, and instead of going intended way - of picking my punishment - I would just drop the game. Because there is a limit of dissatisfaction I can tolerate due to being forced to turn things off.

[Neu7ral]

Interesting!

[Captain_Rage]

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

Or I can just not do any plant-related activities and return to desease meta of living off meat exclusively and never replanting stuff. That way game would be interesting for me a bit longer, but soon I'll be bored, just like when desease was a thing and I just disabled it in every single world that I started. By the way, desease at least didn't target natural plants and didn't uproot stuff.

Or I could disable rifts entirely and enjoy the game like before, at least while it lasts until following updates. In that case I'll be locked from content of future updates though.

Seems like Klei tries to make me pick my punishment instead of playing game for joy. But I don't agree with that, and instead of going intended way - of picking my punishment - I would just drop the game. Because there is a limit of dissatisfaction I can tolerate due to being forced to turn things off.

Head to a caves and find a spot with sunlight. They are easy to find. Geez.

Spoiler

Sometimes those sunny spots even have ponds without frogs which makes farming even more of a breeze.