[Toodee]

There is also a command that tells you which intersection the Mist is currently centered around. Unfortunately, I can’t find the documentation for it or remember what I typed. I found it on accident. I’d be curious how it compares to the visual map.

‘weather’. Funnily enough, testing it right now says the mist center is at Birch and Blackstone, whereas the map would have you think it is at Birch and Lake, 2 blocks away. Not sure which is most accurate.

[Toodee]

Regarding being mindful of your angle of approach, we’re verging on the line between clarifying mechanics and advising optimization, so all I’ll say is that you can deterministically avoid or minimize dangerous/invisible noncardinal spawns by carefully choosing how you approach the mist. This will also solve your problem most of the time if you think nothing is spawning. It is spawning, it’s just spawning on the other side of a wall somewhere.

I understand what you are talking about, and I have adopted similar strategies to minimizing the risk. Mostly, it boils down to: Stay on the streets, avoid alleys, NEVER queue room movements in the mist, always backpedal as soon as you see the ‘You hear something moving’ message, and only then consider looking in that direction to see the number of foes (combat seems to only start at 3+ rooms of distance if you look in the direction of enemies, otherwise they try to ‘sneak’ up on you). I am a very optimization-minded person, however, and I can imagine for others none of this comes naturally, or intuitively.

Doom stack spawns only happen if you’re very near to the absolute center of the mist. Difficulty does indeed scale the further you go into ‘wreathed’. Another idea might be having more levels of description for how deep you are, but this might detract from the difficult but very thematic loss of understanding which way the mist thins. Doom stacks only normally happen if you’re way overambitious, crash near dead center in the mist, walk out of a building into near dead center, or the mist’s center sneaks up on top of you when you’re not paying attention.

This one I have to say, is not what my experience has been. I wish I had a map of what the mist looked like in the website, but yesterday, I was getting stacks of 4-5 monsters two or three blocks away from the center. So I will just draw a rough sketch: The blue X is where the mist petered off to waist/ankle height, roughly. The red X is where I was getting groups of 4-5 mobs whenever I stepped on that intersection. The yellow X is roughly where the mist center was located, according to the map. Castle Haven marked for reference (fun fact, Castle Haven is a safe spot in the mist. Very thematic for its drawbridge and gatehouse. I was using it to avoid said doomstacks.)

Again, this varies a lot each day and I think it has to do with mist levels rising/falling, but you can absolutely run into doom stacks just one block away from where the mist says ‘waist-high’.

[Toodee]

Bonus points:

10. Mobs can’t spawn on top of you, but they sure can spawn around corners. On a bad day, I’ve stepped on an intersection to be greeted by 2 minotaurs and a golem sitting at [1N], like some Tom & Jerry episode.

11. CXP gains being tied to damage dealt creates sort of a ‘noob trap’ phenomena, where if you don’t invest your initial 150k CXP correctly as a new player, it becomes insanely slow to climb up. Basically, it is always the right move to max out a melee discipline + striking/grappling first, so that you can actually generate good CXP just by sparring, which as a sub 250k~ CXP player, is your only reliable source of CXP, since kobolds and rats give nothing, and stepping further in has the real chance of spawning a griffon or gargoyle that will just end your career. I no longer have any of these issues, but I know some people who got seriously frustrated by the combat system as a whole in part because of this.

[Toodee]

I have been hunting pretty extensively solo. It is true a lot of the jankiness from the launch has been fixed, however there are a few things which feel a little off and I will try to explain them here.

1. While mobs no longer spawn on top of you, they do absolutely spawn in front of you, usually 3 rooms in front. The delay between mobs spawning and combat starting is usually so tight that you can get dragged into combat as soon as you get a ‘You hear something in the mist’ message. Mix with the right mobs (medusae, satyrs), maybe an unfortunate stacked cardinal movement, or a ranged snare – it can quickly become something of an unfair situation. All of this generally isn’t a problem because mob spawns tend to scale appropriately to number of players, except when…

2. Except when they don’t. Normally when I’m hunting alone in the ‘deep’ mist, I’ll spawn 1-2 mobs. Their actual strength seems a bit random but 1-2 is a fair number, and its exceedingly rare to get a combination that gives me trouble. However, there are days, and I suspect this has to do with the weather/mist level, where walking around in deep mist will spawn 4-5 mobs 3 rooms in front of you. Basically what this means is that while the ‘look’ command caps out at ‘This area is wreathed in mist’, it seems likely that the mist level can rise beyond that in the code and start spawning absolute doom stacks on people. This was happening to me some 16 hours ago as of writing this.

3. Mob stagger is miserable. Granted, this is coming from someone who prefers melee and short-medium range. In the aforementioned situations where 4-5 mobs can spawn, it is entirely unwinnable because mobs start attacking from 100 distance and every attack, no matter the damage, builds up 10 stagger. Combine with the fact it takes a minimum of two attacks from you to kill any single mob, and you have a serious stagger economy problem whenever 3+ mobs are attacking you.

3.1. Similarly, mob status conditions are also miserable. Wooden women can snare you once every other attack. A goddamn rat will snare you for a full round. I’ve been chain stunned by a living trees in melee combat, which was just enough to give me a mild wound. In isolated scenarios, 1v1, 1v2? These are entirely fine. Where it gets really out of control is when the mob spawns get out of control and you get 4-5 monsters per person, same as with stagger.

4. A niche problem I had is that ranged mobs can and will phase through a shop door, while you are trying to engage them on the streets. Because automatic doors cannot be opened or passed through by players during combat, this essentially lets that mob cheese you if you were trying to engage in melee. I’ve had this happen with a Medusa (the one that deals 60 ranged damage) and it was very much not fun.

5. People have reported that in some abduction cases, mobs in dens respawn non-stop and on top of people attempting a rescue. I haven’t personally had this issue, infact when clearing a very weak den of just one frog man, this didn’t happen, but it was enough of a problem that it got most of a faction and a society put into the hospital with severe wounds.

6. Butchering is super tedious and actively discourages ‘hunting parties’, on top of scaled mob spawns also discouraging hunting parties. Whenever I want to butcher something, if I respect my own time at all, I basically have to lift the corpse and drag it to the nearest shop/office to sit still for 7+ minutes. Then go out, repeat. If I try to do this with a group, we waste so much time fighting exponentially more mobs, and the kill ownership system means the task of butchering cannot even be offloaded to someone specialized in occult knowledge.

7. Mist level should show up in brief descriptions. Period. I’ve crashed a car before because I stepped out of my apartment a dozen blocks away from the mist, just for it to be misty weather throughout the entire city, causing me to instantly crash. All because I had brief room descs turned on and didn’t notice it was ankle-level mist outside.

8. The map could be more accurate in reporting where the mist is. Sometimes it lags behind and takes 30+ minutes to update for a drastic shift in the mist’s center, sometimes it doesn’t account for risen mist levels causing the mist to affect a full extra block.

That’s all the feedback I have. Keep in mind, this is as an entirely green player. I joined for H7.

[Author]

Posts