Natural Disasters

From Wikipedia; “A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from natural processes of the Earth; examples include floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, and other geologic processes.”

I’d love to see the weather system made a little more exciting. 👀

This is mostly inspired by something that happens many times when I load up explore in a biome with an active weather event. The weather overlay will flash in sooner than the actual biome art itself, and for a split second, I’m greeted with an ominous dark rainy scene. This is momentarily thrilling! It’s a brief, but extremely effective moment that always makes me do a double-take as the screen loads. 

I think it would be amazing to have very rare extreme weather events for each biome that could randomly strike.

This could include overlays that highly impair vision while adding distant tornadoes, visible flooding, whiteout blizzard conditions, fire, etc depending on the biome. Regular explore flavor text would be replaced with warnings of danger, attempts to find shelter, noting debris flying by or just describing the nature of the situation. Encounters could be unique, and likely high risk, high reward in nature. 

The penalties to exploring in a biome being attacked by rare natural disaster weather could be great, such as encounters doing high damage to your lead, or draining double the usual amount of energy, but could also offer very lucrative rewards. 

Any thoughts?

That actually sounds super interesting 

Sounds fun!

sounds fun!

I think this would make for a really interesting event or set of events, actually! Wildfires in the summer, or floods in the spring, blizzards in the winter -- occurring as part of the regular weather rotation, but linked in some way to a completely unique set of encounters that only happen during that disaster weather, or possibly even to a sitewide event and the gathering of some kind of event currency. Given that weather's different from biome to biome, this could even encourage people to venture outside their usual biomes, chasing after disaster weather. (A storm-chaser's event, anyone?)

Ohhhhh, this would be a super cool rare random event to happen- I especially like the idea of it having its own unique encounters for each biome a lot too. Anything to spice up exploring would be nice, as it gets very mechanical and repetitive after a while. 

I’m glad to see folks liking this!

A storm-chaser event to highlight it could be awesome!

And I absolutely agree with spicing up explore. It starts out very exciting, but can quickly devolve to just pressing specific combos for specific rewards once you’ve played for a while and have most biome encounters memorized D: I feel like this would really help add a new layer of unpredictability and excitement to casual, everyday gameplay!

To be fair, I do think they plan to add more explore encounters - it's on their stated list of things they're planning to do. also i did NOT remember until i went looking for that list that events are something we're not allowed to suggest, oopse I just think this is a really neat idea for some of those possible future explore events

I’ve done the same thing before by accident on other suggestions ROFL— events are exciting! Since it isn’t the point of the main suggestion I don’t think it’s particularly harmful. Or at least I hope not OTL

I’m excited that updates are planned for explore! It is one of the primary, prominent features, so I’d imagine it would be a high level priority in development. Regarding the pinned thread, it might be important to note and reiterate that my idea in particular is regarding an upgrade to the weather system, and not necessarily requesting new explore content to coincide. I included that merely as a possibility!

Ofc, either way it would affect explore, in what I’d to be a good and exciting way that could offer new thrills to the experience! :D