In their current state, the bridges cant acomplish anything

[Malfario]

 

First to say, i am glad we are finally adressing movility on the caves, i am glad there has been put time and effort on solving this issue, however, after much testing i am sad to say that bridges are not the solution in their current state, and because an image is worth 1000 words.

On the picture below you can see a higlighted area, in this entire gap no bridges are allowed to be placed because there is not a straight gap of 3 tiles or less, for me to get from where my character is to that other branch of land, it  would require 2,3 minutes of walking with a speddy beefalo.

This is not a weird occureance but the problem goes deeper. As you can apreciate in the picture bellow, the bridges dont really allow you to connect areas of the caves, it only allows you to make shortcuts between masses of land that are already close to each other, i cant connect the sunken forest to the blue mushroom byome, i still need to travel all the distance and bridges at most will save seconds.

Void walk was primeraly used to go to the atrium, at time of writing no feature has been added to solve that, eventhought it was said the devs will talk about it. But even then, the biggest advantage of void walking was making the travel distance between points of interest in the caves a straight line.

The bridges are not capable of connect byomes, they dont make travel distances shorter, rather they are just able to fill up random gaps of land and, if you are lucky, connect byomes in an inconvient way.

And then there is the whole void situation, in all the trailers we´ve always seen the caves having walls, there are things like wanda not being able to hit enemies separated by void becase thematically there is a wall in the middle. I know the decision of making bridges rather than tunnels is probably a consecuence that the bridges share the same code as winonas vines, but even then i think this is not the correct way to implement the cave shortcuts.

I dont know if asking for a whole new mechanic is realistic or posible to do in the time of the beta, But I would rather to have a "drill" item to make tunnels, having to built pillars each x amount of tunnel tiles to avoid it collapsing. and have a freedom to create the paths we want between all the byomes. At the very least bridges been able to go over the void indefinetly and make turns

This could also lead to new interactions like a secret byome that can only be discovered by making a tunells/bridges to it, ravines with new minerals, maybe dreadstone ravines filled up with new shadow mosnters where we can extract large amounts of dreadstone etc.

Thats all i had to say about the bridges. Thanks for reading, hope these problems can be adressed.

[Arcwell]

Adding on to your point that 3 tiles is not enough, the bridges have a stubborn tendency of getting blocked by structures or even items dropped on the ground which limit the spots they can be placed in even more.

Example 1: There are 4 gaps here of length 3 or less, but only the bottom 2 tiles are usable because the rest are blocked by floor spikes.

Example 2: Can't place a bridge to cross this obelisk gate because it's being blocked by an ancient obelisk

I'd personally love to see the tunneling idea you suggested, I think it would be much more thematic and solve a lot of the issues that bridges unnecessarily introduce.

[abrocator]

18 hours ago, Malfario said:

This could also lead to new interactions like a secret byome that can only be discovered by making a tunells/bridges to it, ravines with new minerals, maybe dreadstone ravines filled up with new shadow mosnters where we can extract large amounts of dreadstone etc.

This is the perfect way to add unlockable areas!

[chirsg]

Just add stone bridges already

 

[-Nick-]

I think the max length should be increased. It reaching six tiles sounds good.

[Waywarbler]

19 hours ago, Malfario said:

I dont know if asking for a whole new mechanic is realistic or posible to do in the time of the beta, But I would rather to have a "drill" item to make tunnels, having to built pillars each x amount of tunnel tiles to avoid it collapsing. and have a freedom to create the paths we want between all the byomes. At the very least bridges been able to go over the void indefinetly and make turns

I've seen the drill/tunnel idea a few times. I feel like most players would question why they need to drill through empty space to get over a gap.

I get that it fits thematically, as the shorts show the caves having walls, and originally the caves back in singleplayer had walls during beta, but in-game it wouldn't make sense visually. Maybe if the "wall" you were digging through became partially visible as you drilled a hole through it?

Either way, I can't imagine Klei is going to just scrap bridges, Winona's ability to vine-bridge in the caves, and the new falling animations for this. I do agree that the bridges could use a range increase though. They're not as usable in the atrium as I thought they would be.

[Malfario]

20 minutes ago, -Nick- said:

I think the max length should be increased. It reaching six tiles sounds good.

why not making them go infinetly, in fact why dont make it like this, after x amount of tiles away from the land tile where the bridge started you need to make like a "checkpoint", a hanging platform from which you can expand the bridge the same lenght as the first segment in the other three cardinal directions.

 

The tile limit achieves nothing but making the bridges useless.

[Siren11]

18 minutes ago, Waywarbler said:

I've seen the drill/tunnel idea a few times. I feel like most players would question why they need to drill through empty space to get over a gap.

^^^^^ Gameplay-wise, it makes the most sense for it to be bridges. No one I play with had any idea what I was talking about when I mentioned cave walls even though I know they’ve seen the shorts. I think most people will assume it’s a void.

[-Nick-]

19 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

^^^^^ Gameplay-wise, it makes the most sense for it to be bridges. No one I play with had any idea what I was talking about when I mentioned cave walls even though I know they’ve seen the shorts. I think most people will assume it’s a void.

Void does exist aswell.

[NPCMaxwell]

1 minute ago, -Nick- said:

Void does exist aswell.

This frame is so cute!!! (tiny afraid Wilson ) I can't remember if I have ever seen it in one of Klei's animations (since I mostly have missed all of them until recently where I caught up with some of the newer ones) If anyone can tell me what video this one is from, I'd be so happy to watch it!

[Siren11]

Just now, -Nick- said:

Void does exist aswell.

Woah, is that a short? It must be pretty old. I thought I’d seen everything since like… 2016 at least.

Then bridges aren’t an issue anyways, especially if Klei increases the max to at least 5 or 6 tiles and maybe improves placement.

[-Nick-]

Just now, NPCMaxwell said:

This frame is so cute!!! (tiny afraid Wilson ) I can't remember if I have ever seen it in one of Klei's animations (since I mostly have missed all of them until recently where I caught up with some of the newer ones) If anyone can tell me what video this one is from, I'd be so happy to watch it!

here you go ^^

 

[NPCMaxwell]

6 minutes ago, -Nick- said:

here you go ^^

 

I'm so happy!!! Those old animations with the paper style cutout artstyle and the simple in-game footage in between are still my favourites :') (the "void" part looks even more adorable in motion) Thank you ^^

[Mike23Ua]

Maybe this is just me nitpicking here but the current cave bridges look way too long and stretched out in my opinion, which is weird, considering that we can make cobblestone road paths or the likes that are much more narrow, maybe they’re done this way for Beefalo???

Eitherway it looks super weird because they’re so gigantic in wideness..

Id prefer them becoming a little thinner (even if it’s only by a small margin) and to also maybe be able to extend 4-5 tiles.

In addition to that- Winona’s Vinebridges on Xbox SUCK HARD… they are entirely Situational, and rarely ever will you locate a spot to actually use them in…

 

see how huge and ugly that is?? I say we cut the size down to about half..

Like I said it’s a small nitpick, but these are Bridges… not Dock Tiles.

*Rant Over*

[gamehun20]

8 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

see how huge and ugly that is?? I say we cut the size down to about half..

Personally being cut down in size looks too thin like idk it's less support