Night light, thermal measurer and rainometer

[mranon245]

How do the devs feel about them? Will they ever be truly worth crafting for a regular use? I know someone will make a claim that the night light is a decent end game cave light source but! A lot of end game players use the lantern glitch to just bypass any possible light issues anyway. I'm not going to even start with the other two structures so I would just like to know if there is hope for these structures or not.

[CaptainChaotica]

Yeah...especially the thermal measurer. The night light takes a valuable resource to keep lit, so what's the point, and the rainometer does indeed tell you when it's going to rain. The thermal measurer, however...it'd be much more useful if, instead of just remarking something about the device itself, your character said something about "It's getting warmer/colder.  (Season) is probably nearby".  

After all, a good ways into the game you can start to lose track of the numbers.  (As when I was startled by winter and had to light a forest on fire to keep me warm on a good chunk of the way home.)  Especially helpful if you have seasons set to random.  Or in my case, set to "What the hell is going on, am I time travelling?!"

...Notorious

[mranon245]

7 hours ago, CaptainChaotica said:

Yeah...especially the thermal measurer. The night light takes a valuable resource to keep lit, so what's the point, and the rainometer does indeed tell you when it's going to rain. The thermal measurer, however...it'd be much more useful if, instead of just remarking something about the device itself, your character said something about "It's getting warmer/colder.  (Season) is probably nearby".  

After all, a good ways into the game you can start to lose track of the numbers.  (As when I was startled by winter and had to light a forest on fire to keep me warm on a good chunk of the way home.)  Especially helpful if you have seasons set to random.  Or in my case, set to "What the hell is going on, am I time travelling?!"

...Notorious

From what I remember, the rainometer only tells you your current weather status, much like the thermal measurer. I couldn't agree more with your idea. I myself lose track of ingame days sometimes and it ends up sometimes gimping me. I just don't know what the thought process of the devs was, "Hey, lets make a building which tells us that the grass is green." Like what the hell? 

[DarkXero]

Klei certainly looked at the winterometer and the rainometer. They received sounds. When you place the first one you get a "thump" sound. And when you place the second you get a "plop" sound.

The rainometer shows you a calculation of some weather values. Basically, in the next day it will start raining if the arrow is about to enter the blue block. So depending on how far the arrow is, you can throw a guess for how long it takes until it rains, depending on the season. Pretty pointless, because if you leave your base and can't afford to get wet, you just spend a inventory slot for umbrella / eyebrella. Even more pointless for winter and summer. Although during winter, it rains in caves, so you can put it there.

The thermal measurer shows you the world temperature. It goes from freezing to overheating temperatures. So if you see it at the very low, it means that winter got the freezing air around, or at the very top, it means that summer got the overheating air around. In autumn, you should see the bar filled a bit about over the half, then when it's about half of that, then you got like half the season. Half of that and you got like 5 days. Because the not freezing air of winter lasts around the first two days, and the last two, you can't tell a bit after the start or mid winter how much it is going to last.

I suggest you make a server, give yourself godmode, spawn a thermometer, and then use LongUpdate(480) to see how the temperature fluctuates. The world temperature goes from a mid point to a extreme as the season passes, it doesn't go from 0 to 20 in a second. Also spawn a rainometer, so you can see the arrow fluctuate slowly during summer, to just reach autumn and rain the next days.

But yeah, waste of time when you can't carry those things along and just have installed rezecib's Status mod.

[CaptainChaotica]

"How long it takes to start raining depends on the season"--in Spring, you can pretty much assume the answer is:  always.

As for the thermal measurer, maybe there could be different messages for how close you are to the next one, such as:

(barely over the mid-way hump of the current season) "I think we're past the hottest part, now."

(3/4 of the way through) "Brrr!  It's getting chilly these days."

(almost there) "Is that a seedling?  I think it's almost spring!"

Or, if the devs don't want to give us THAT much information, maybe just one message letting you know when you're in the early part of the season, and one letting you know when you're past the midway point. (shrug)

You can pretty much already tell this kind of thing by (a) getting to know how the game's seasons work really well, and then (b) doing what our ancient ancestors did, and just watching really carefully how early the sun sets and the moon rises every day, and and how that is progressing as the days go by.  For example, as soon as the days in summer no longer only ONE segment of dusk, I breathe a little sigh of relief.  It's still hot of course, but FALL IS COMING THANK GODS.

...the game's seasons don't always line up with real-life ones, anyway--I mean the days in spring are shorter than in _winter_, what the hell?

For those playing with non-standard seasons lengths, my above messages would still be useful.  With the normal ones, well, then, what DarkXero said.  Especially with random season lengths, 'cos then you really DON'T know.

Of course, Wes would just "say" gestures for everything anyway.  : P

...Notorious

[NeddoFreddo]

The Night Light, (I'm pretty sure anyway), is intended for those people who are chillin' in the Ruins and have endless amounts of nightmare fuel. There are only so many things you can build with nightmares, after a while there's just a lot sitting around. (yes I realise that some of the nightmare tools and other things that use nightmare fuel run out of durability but sometimes you just have so much you can fuel a Night Light _and_ keep rebuilding tools.)

The rainometer I find a bit useless. Like @DarkXero said, you can just bring an umbrella/eyebrella and you'll be fine.