What's The Point Of The Cave Day/night Cycle?

[Armentia]

Effects from it include mushrooms hiding, fireflies not showing, and natural light not coming in. The lack of natural light during the night cycle makes sense on a realism factor, but everything else seems moot and I'm quite curious as to why they decided to incorporate this into the most recent update. Are they planning other features? If not I'll probably break into the data/scripts/map/levels/map.lua and uncomment out

-- {"day",                      "onlynight"},

because frankly I imagine that's the only change to create this 'feature' and I don't think it's worth it.

[the truthseeker]

I think it was done mainly to get rid of the (formerly) permanent patch of light at the entrance. 

[xSadoro]

I think their plan is to sync the clock on the surface to the underground world ^^

 

Or so I thought I've heard

[Acet]

It is mostly a PITA, especially since night is much longer than outside. It forces one to gather a lot of fuel for a firepit (if doing tasks on a cave base, a firepit is far better than other light sources) which before wasn't needed.

 

What we really could do with is some way of making mushrooms grow back in the Caves.

 

I think their plan is to sync the clock on the surface to the underground world ^^

 

Or so I thought I've heard

That seems to be correct. The release notes say something about the caves day-night cycle not yet being synchronised with the one above.

 

While the idea of having day-night cycles is good (it just felt wrong before, as if it was always day outside), it could do with a little balancing and maybe some kind of upside to go with the downsides.

[Sporb]

While the idea of having day-night cycles is good (it just felt wrong before, as if it was always day outside), it could do with a little balancing and maybe some kind of upside to go with the downsides.

 

I think that syncing it with the outside cycle would be a nice upside by itself. I dread leaving caves and not knowing what's gonna be outside. Being surrounded by bats in the middle of the night with the hounds baying in the distance is just awful, ugh.

[Boar Head]

I'm just hoping that during the day the cave spiders go to their nests. Sick of having them constantly wandering around and never going away.

[Armentia]

I watch a lot of DS Twitch streaming, and one streamer in particular, Dirty Sauce, spends a lot of time in the caves. I've seen him play as much as the day 1000+ guys, but on the surface he is only at around day 300. I imagine this is just an elaborate way of saying, "Hey, we've got a bug here that we're still working on fixing, but we're gonna call it a new feature!" The bug being that the caves times aren't synchronized with the surface. 

 

I believe that there needs to be some sort of ups and downs to every feature, and this cave day cycle is just downs. I might have to try to put out a hotfix mod to make mushrooms and fireflies stay out during the day cycle. 

[FDru]

I'm just hoping that during the day the cave spiders go to their nests. Sick of having them constantly wandering around and never going away.

They do.

 

Also, bunnymen go to sleep during the day. This isn't terribly useful but it lets you wander through their territory safely if you're carrying meat. Also, if you destroy/lure them away from their homes they become easy to kill since when they get low on health they will run away a bit and fall asleep so you can walk up and hit them again.

 

There's also no sanity drain during the day. Which makes no sense since the caves are supposed to be dark all the time and presumably the nighttime sanity loss is due to the darkness. But whatever, right?

 

So there are some upsides. However I find that the night is so short that it makes gathering night stuff a hassle (mushrooms, fireflies, light bulbs). I tend to pass up a lot of mushrooms during the day and forget where they were, and I really can't be bothered to put landmarks everywhere... I have better things to do than chop logs constantly.

[Anelyn]

It actually makes Abigail to act like outside. If it's not dusk / night in the caves, her damage is patethic instead of all times super powerful which makes Wendy players keep tracking of time (despite no clock gives us a good measure inside of caves, pretty much if you're not near a light hole only thing giving it away is Wendy saying night will come soon I must prepare).

 

It's not a bad change, but we need the clock inside caves / ruins to act like on surface, to give us an accurate time sense. Also, you can't use tents to sleep in the cave if it's the "day" cycle - your character will say: It's too bright outside and will refuse to sleep in tent. Sleeping rolls work regardless however.

[Gigahappytown]

So players can live in caves if they are not manly enough to face winter head on.

[Orima-Kazooie]

I think it's generally agreed caves shouldn't have a day/night cycle at all until the proof of concept is solid because at this stage all it does is rin the caves; before the reason caves felt so different and alien is because it *was* permanight; nothing else in the game is completely constant and totally lacking any cycles. At this point it just seems like a vaguely disquieting murk.

 

I feel like there are plans here that weren't well thought out or otherwise somebody wasn't paying attention to the brains; 

 

Bunnymen/bats/mushrooms/spiders/etc/etc sleeping (this would be the biggest problem;) it just doesn't make sense for them to be on any schedule when there's no clear indicator for them either (actually how does the character know night is coming below ground anyway?); I think mushrooms should be put on a cycle and everything else exempt.

We can use pigs and beeboxes now.

Lack of sanity loss and Abigail debuff in the daytime make no real sense where the drain and buff respectively are explicitly due to the darkness,

 

The simplest solution I can see is having the caves go through a Night>cave_day>cave_dusk>night cycle that syncs up with the aboveground standard day/night cycle, so that ambient surface lights and mushroom popups can be cycled, and perhaps, just an idea, instead of having spiders ever totally return to the nests, at dusk have them "change shifts;" all the spiders that were wandering about should seek to return to their nests and different spiders come out to take charge of hunting. You could artificially induce surface type spider cycles by killing off one shift of spiders.

Bunnymen would only sleep during the day, not the cave day, same for bats. Pigs and bees would return to previous functionality; do not put them in the caves.

 

There's my fifty cents anyways

[Cynical Cynicist]

All I want is for caves to regenerate fireflies.

 

Also, for fireflies to be able to fully recharge a mining hat.

[the truthseeker]

I think it's generally agreed caves shouldn't have a day/night cycle at all until the proof of concept is solid because at this stage all it does is rin the caves; before the reason caves felt so different and alien is because it *was* permanight; nothing else in the game is completely constant and totally lacking any cycles. At this point it just seems like a vaguely disquieting murk.

 

I feel like there are plans here that weren't well thought out or otherwise somebody wasn't paying attention to the brains; 

 

Bunnymen/bats/mushrooms/spiders/etc/etc sleeping (this would be the biggest problem;) it just doesn't make sense for them to be on any schedule when there's no clear indicator for them either (actually how does the character know night is coming below ground anyway?); I think mushrooms should be put on a cycle and everything else exempt.

We can use pigs and beeboxes now.

Lack of sanity loss and Abigail debuff in the daytime make no real sense where the drain and buff respectively are explicitly due to the darkness,

 

The simplest solution I can see is having the caves go through a Night>cave_day>cave_dusk>night cycle that syncs up with the aboveground standard day/night cycle, so that ambient surface lights and mushroom popups can be cycled, and perhaps, just an idea, instead of having spiders ever totally return to the nests, at dusk have them "change shifts;" all the spiders that were wandering about should seek to return to their nests and different spiders come out to take charge of hunting. You could artificially induce surface type spider cycles by killing off one shift of spiders.

Bunnymen would only sleep during the day, not the cave day, same for bats. Pigs and bees would return to previous functionality; do not put them in the caves.

 

There's my fifty cents anyways

Until it's synched, fully agree.