Hail 2 electric boogalu and the bright beaked bird, they are great aditions but there are issues around them

[Malfario]

-Hail no longer kills you, its not a bad thing but its not a good thing either-

Starting by acknowledging the elephant on the room, while the new hail mechanic is infenetly better designed with much more interesting interactions in gameplay that it never had before, the fact that the only "enviromental threat" from the lunnar rift aside from brighthsades was removed raised some concerns.

I think it should also be adressed how personally i dont mind this at all and that may make me biased, the new hail mechanic efectevly adds a whole new way of farming moonglass and charged moonglas, converting it in a biproduct of wood/marble farming. Now post rifts, my big farming sessions are incetivated by a completly original new mechanic with an actual reward at the end of it. I think this new version of the hail has its issues but the fact it move on from being an earthquake reskin with little ways to actually avoid it, its not one of them.

However i think there is an argument to be made that the hail not oppsing a threat to the player its, not concerning, but dissapointing to many. Again, this is the very first time, the rifts have impacted how i play the game in a manner that doesn´t feel forced on me and trully makes the playthro feel diferent than a pre rift world. The Hail change its trully the first thing that, for me at least, felt like those world changing events the rifts were suposed to be. However, this doesnt mean its flawless. (I am not gonna go into detail because this is already long enough, just said it completly changed how i aproach the timing for resource farming sessions, please more of this, the idea of weather events changing the resources you get from trees, mineral and stuff is magnificent)

Of course the non being a threat to players its what most people seems to be talking about, and while i agree to an extent, i dont think the way it was before was particulary brilliant. Let´s be honest, hail was just surface earthquakes and a little extra charged moonglass pasive income, nothing wrong with that, but me personally was always more interested in the sheltering mechanics hail was suposed to introduce, actually building infrastructure to protect ouselfs from the enviroment, which i supose are now not gonna be introduced. The fact that hail was "a threat" didn´t mean it was a "good threat", it only had one real way to get deal with and was extremely simple, just plug the umbralla.

If the hail really needs to be able to kill you, completly fine with that, but make it better than just eartquakes, something that can reasonably happen and be dealt with while you are fighting, building or sailing in the surface, that changes the way we play and has an impact in the world, something we need to prepared for, or that players with better skills can actually survive with no gear. Make it something i can´t ignore and that i wanna engage with.

-Birds are a very good idea but some stuff needs to be rethought-

Now, the other issue i do have with the hail is, the rewards, the point for why we care about it if you will. Starting with the bird, i like it, its original, it gets one of the oldest mechanics in the game as bird caging and give it a fun twist. No real problem with the implementation desgin wise. But the current ultra compoluted rng calculation is quite off putting.

My understanding of this is that players are only meant to get brilliance from the bird 2-3 times for feeding until they reset, couldn´t we made it so there was a fixed amount of moonglass we have to give to the bird to get the brilliance, after which the bird will refuse to accept more glass until we can get the brilliance again ? Its extremly non intuitive as well as frustrating to figure out, and as always rng based systems feel fundamentally worse to interact with than non rng based systems.

Other notes about the bird, i do agree to an extent to cap the amount of brilliance you can get per bird in a time spam, so you have to make areas with a lot of birds to increase how much brilliance you can get per farm session. I like the idea of a late game brilliance farm thats a bird sanctuary, super unique dst style weird farm concepts i just love it. But again the rng based systeam across each individual bird makes it so you loose a lot of charged glass for argubly not that much brilliance, this aspect makes the bird simply not worth it over lunnar wilson and i think it could be fixed by the birds acepting a fixed amount of glass per brilliance, with a limit of how much brilliance you can get per day. It still would be worse than wilson because initial set up, but at least then it would be as reliable as wilson, in fact i think the glass to brilliance rate should be the same for this exact reason.

Also the mutated birds should be inmortal, think about it they are a precious resource you can not farm them you just can wait to get more of them, and they will die quickly in birdcages unless you feed them constantly or bundle them, and its not like you can keep them bundled up until you need to trade 3 million glass, because they can only get you a bit per day. This amounts to you being forced to feed them every time they reset which is extremly annoying, it doesnt really allow you to stay more than a couple of days without checking in unless you spent an absurd amount of rope to bundle them, which adds up to the cost of that brilliance and makes wilson be just better. Make the birds not starve (after all mutated bosses seem to indicate they dont need sleeping or food to survive) or maybe, allow us to put birds and critters in ickers preserve kits, just saying, it would make the item 9 times better.

As a last two points about the bird, could we maybe make it so if we gave it regular glass there is achance of it pooping charged glass, i will trade 3 moonglass for a charge moonglass every day of the week just saying. And Alfred Hitchcok, linking this with the first point, i am sure there is something in a hitchconian murder of moon posssed crows that can work for a threat associated with the hail mechanic.

-Moonglass, a lot of it and little to do with it-

And now, the other thing about the rewards of lunnar hail. the glass, At this point moonglass is stupidly easy to get, its probably the resource that acumulates the most in long term worlds other than rot, there are 4 distinct methods to farm it, all of whcih will give you multiple stacks with minimal effort. And we simply dont have enough uses for it.

I am not gonna spent as long on this as the other topics, because this is not really a problem with the hail as much as its a problem with moonglass. I just think its important to point out than this resource desperatly needs items that call for it, and not only structures or items like the bearger bin of which you only need to craft 1 in the world, argubly 2 if you play warly. The moon glass cutter changes will probably help this in a great quantity, but only until the player gets riftt gear. And obviously this wont get adressed in this beta, because this is the good ol clasic "i want more content" complain that really doesnt contribute to anything to the development of a beta.

But, i think its important to ask for more uses of moon glass in the long run, if the devs are reading this, as i know they are because they read every coment posted in this site (I dont know how you do it, seriously i cant thank you enough and be sorry enough for the work we put you thro). Please consider thinking of items and mechanics that eat thro moonglass, the T.I.N.G.L.E nodes were a fantastic adition in this department but we need more, maybe the celestial tab gets a lot of new recepies to be on pair with the pseudoscience station and said recepies call for a lot of moonglass. Moon glass walls would be greatly welcomed, maybe and item that needs to be charged with moonglass.

 

Thank you for reading this unholy long post, i think this is all i have to say about the recent changes, as i expected this beta its been greatly fun to play with, and i like how everything added, in tandem with the introduction of warbot last update, now properly feels like the big update the lunnar finale was suposed to be. As always, Thank a lot to the amazing people who make this game. Excited to see what comes next.

Edited July 29, 2025 by Malfario