Electric fence makes me kinda worried about the future of the Rift process

[Cassielu]

After a week of testing, I believe everyone has seen how powerful and influential the electric fence is. Its impact on the game far exceeds that of almost every Rift items, especially for later game.

But the Rift (which is obviously later game content) never had something like an electric fence that really brought about a huge change. We have a bunch of better version of Axe, Spear, Ice Box, but none of them is like this. Since Dev is willing to add items like this, why not do such a same thing for Rift?

If the Rift doesn't have something truly influential like this, then how can it become a game content worth experiencing?

I'm not saying that the electric fence should be moved to the Rift. I think it's in a good position now (after all scrappy werepig also needs these rewards and influence). I just hope the Rift can get something similar. After all, it's been two years now and people still have no reason to open it.

[lowercase skye]

44 minutes ago, Cassielu said:

But the Rift (which is obviously later game content) never had something like an electric fence that really brought about a huge change.

Brightshade staff.

[mkemal23]

Only thing electric fence did was giving us a legit way of avoiding the already mostly cheesed parts of the game. Like; bee queen minions, moonstone event or any farms with docks + Statues etc.

I think the main reason klei allowed such a 'powerfull' mechanic this time is because I belive they wanted give us a intended Statue wall strat. So I think this is a one time thing and its fine.

[Maxil20]

1 hour ago, Cassielu said:

it's been two years now and people still have no reason to open it.

Rifts already add immense QoL to day to day life, though.

The bearger bin is the best example of this. Everyone I know who has opened the rifts runs a polar bearger bin for lategame connivence of being able to hold several crockpot dishes with significantly longer spoilage rates than pre bin, allowing a lot of crockpot dishes which got overshadowed due to short spoilage times to shine thanks to the bin. Icker preserves, which have a number of QoL aspects on their own (I personally keep quite a few in boss arenas to store the resulting meat/other drops I get until I’m able to do a 4 stack bundle,  compliment the bin nicely as well, allowing you to easily upkeep stockpiles of foods in the bin, particularly in the case of buff foods, where you normally don’t want to carry a stack of them at a time for one reason or another.

  Rift gear is also a pretty decent upside. Apart from the weapons, tools like the brightshade smasher are an excellent help when doing base building. The amount of hammers I have saved when I need to redo a section of a build I don’t like by using the smasher is probably in the dozens by now. Items like the brightshade staff/howlitzer/gloomerang also allow for ranged options outside of Walter to have genuine contending points, while still keeping the melee weapons more practical in terms of resource efficiency/cost.

There are incentives to open the rifts and snag the gear from them in a long term world. It does come with its downsides, but for the most part can be reasonably managed by a bit of planning in return for a lot of nice benefits. The only one I genuinely have issues with are masques, and that’s just because their behavior to attack everything does not play well with pen setups whatsoever.

[Sephirona]

I used to think the rifts weren't something I wanted to deal with. In fact, I didn't open them at all in my world until just last month even though I was around when they were first released. I do think they are worth it even if having to place walls/chairs around the world to control where they spawned was a pain (didn't want my non renewable spiky trees and boulders to be destroyed lol). Elasticized chests have removed a ton of the work that used to be necessary managing storage, especially with winbots, and the bearger bin and icker preserves have saved me a ton of time that would have been spent wrapping and unwrapping bundles and gathering grass for rope. The gloomerang also makes it much simpler to kite bosses so farming CC for glowcap lights has become simpler. I do have to say I like shadow gear more than lunar gear just because I don't really use the brightshade staff (it's a little too indiscriminate with what it hits for me) but having the brightshade helm serve as both defense against damage, charlie, and as a sandstorm/moonstorm visor is still pretty great since it saves space. It's hard for me to imagine going back to the time before I opened the rifts now when thinking about the amount of work I no longer have to deal with. 

I think the thing I dislike the most about rifts is not being able to stop brightshades from spawning - they're not hard to fight, but if I don't clear them from the bait pens they will eventually start showing up elsewhere. In a sense I guess I've traded time spent wrapping and unwrapping/sorting through chests with time spent clearing brightshades out and I kinda wish there was a cap on how many could spawn at a time in the world. I did plan to build in the caves eventually so yeah, agree with Maxil about the masques being annoying too.

[Semind]

27 minutes ago, Sephirona said:

I think the thing I dislike the most about rifts is not being able to stop brightshades from spawning - they're not hard to fight, but if I don't clear them from the bait pens they will eventually start showing up elsewhere. In a sense I guess I've traded time spent wrapping and unwrapping/sorting through chests with time spent clearing brightshades out and I kinda wish there was a cap on how many could spawn at a time in the world. I did plan to build in the caves eventually so yeah, agree with Maxil about the masques being annoying too.

There's a trick that dramatically lessens the brightshade infestation issue but it is kind of the text book definition of cheese and almost functionally removes them from things you interact with if that matters to you. If you've already seen it, then you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Spoilered if you're averse to mechanical exploits.
 

Spoiler

Plant Dragonfruit right up against dfly's magma pools. That's it. Dragonfruit have immunity from burning so Brightshade Plants will invade them and automatically die from fire damage while leaving behind their drops intact. Plant enough Dragonfruit and there should be minimal, if any, Brightshade plants showing up anywhere else. Barring your own planted farms. Those still get infested sometimes. But as far as random, out wherever in the world plant infestations, those tend to be drastically reduced. There's another different trick that lets you have a farm immune to infestation but I'll leave that out for now since it's out of the scope of this specific thing.

 

[Sephirona]

2 hours ago, Semind said:

There's a trick that dramatically lessens the brightshade infestation issue but it is kind of the text book definition of cheese and almost functionally removes them from things you interact with if that matters to you. If you've already seen it, then you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Spoilered if you're averse to mechanical exploits.
 

  Hide contents

Plant Dragonfruit right up against dfly's magma pools. That's it. Dragonfruit have immunity from burning so Brightshade Plants will invade them and automatically die from fire damage while leaving behind their drops intact. Plant enough Dragonfruit and there should be minimal, if any, Brightshade plants showing up anywhere else. Barring your own planted farms. Those still get infested sometimes. But as far as random, out wherever in the world plant infestations, those tend to be drastically reduced. There's another different trick that lets you have a farm immune to infestation but I'll leave that out for now since it's out of the scope of this specific thing.

 

Hi, I appreciate your response. I have already implemented fruit next to the lava ponds as well as ten bait pens 11 tiles away from each other on the map. Unfortunately, even this is not enough to stem the flow of brightshades indefinitely, they spawn a little faster than the ponds can kill them especially in the spring when the water prevents them from dying as quickly. They always eventually move out. It's still better than nothing so it's not like I'm constantly killing brightshades - more of a once every few hours thing, but still kinda annoying since there are other seasonal things I prefer scheduling (bosses, building when the floor isn't obscured, etc) every few hours also. It's still a decent tradeoff compared to constantly wrapping/unwrapping and shuffling things around in chests though so I don't regret opening the surface rifts, but at this point I have over a thousand brightshade husks and nothing to do with them lol. I don't use brightshade repair kits as much as I use shadow repair kits. It's more of a thing where at first it's really not that big of a deal, but over time it does add up to a lot of time spent on something I don't really need anymore when it comes to a long term world. At least it's a regular source of leafy meat I suppose.

[WendyHater9000]

On 8/16/2025 at 6:38 AM, Sephirona said:

 

I think the thing I dislike the most about rifts is not being able to stop brightshades from spawning - they're not hard to fight, but if I don't clear them from the bait pens they will eventually start showing up elsewhere. In a sense I guess I've traded time spent wrapping and unwrapping/sorting through chests with time spent clearing brightshades out and I kinda wish there was a cap on how many could spawn at a time in the world. I did plan to build in the caves eventually so yeah, agree with Maxil about the masques being annoying too.

Just build brightshade preventer, you can watch tutorial on youtube. Also there's a client mod called range indicator on workshop to show it's protecting range.

 

[ZeRoboButler]

On 7/29/2025 at 5:02 AM, Cassielu said:

After all, it's been two years now and people still have no reason to open it.

What? Okay if you don't want the rifts open and have no interest in what is made available to the player by this point, I would be surprised if anything could sway that perspective. 

What exactly are you hoping for out of the rifts?