Wild Rift Cycle

Rift Cycle is a mechanism exclusive to Don't Starve Together, introduced in From Beyond. 
==Lunar Rifts==
In a Forest World, Rifts will begin to spawn if the player gives an Enlightened Crown Shard to Wagstaff after he appears when defeating the Celestial Champion. They are currently the primary source for Pure Brilliance as well as the only source for Deadly Brightshades and their Brightshade Husks. (Brightshade Husks cannot be obtained from the rift itself, but rather from the Brightshades that spawn in the world after the rift has appeared.)
Lunar Rifts can appear in any Biome of the mainland. To spawn they require a circular area with a 12-Tile diameter, entirely covered by ground tiles, excluding Docks. The area must be clear of movement-blocking objects such as Ponds, Structures and transplanted Plants. However, naturally occurring plants, spider dens, rocks, boulders, and trees don't prevent rift spawning. A rift can not appear within 15 Tiles of another rift. Once it spawns, the Turf around the Rift slowly gets covered by its own, and is inhabited by Grazers. Ryftstals also frequently appear around the Rift. When a character is on the Rift's Turf, their Sanity is replaced with Enlightenment.
The Rift has three stages in total. Every 4-5 days after its initial appearance it advances to the next stage. The transition is accompanied by an explosion that deals 60 damage to all creatures in the area and destroys Structures. The stage determines the distance in which the Turf will spread, as well as the number of Grazers and Ryftstals that appear:
Phase	Size	 	
1 	1x1 	1	0
2 	3x3 	3	4
3 	6x6 	6	12
Every day, the Rift tries to increase its to the maximum possible at the current stage. If possible, after the timer expires, the area is covered with crystalline growths that break and form new cells of the lunar biome. Additionally, every 0.75-1.25 game days the Rift creates Ryftstals, unless the maximum amount of Ryftstals have been reached for the current stage.
As soon as the Rift reaches its final stage, it first chooses a number between 4 and 6 to determine how many Deadly Brightshade waves will be spawned before it closes. Afterwards it immediately sends the first wave to attack groups of plants it considers "gardens" and launches the remaining waves 2 days apart, after which it will close.
When the rift is activated, during frog rains there is a 60% chance that instead of a regular frog, a bright-eyed frog will fall from the sky. 
This is not the only effect the rift has on the weather: when the rift is active, a lunar hail may begin in the world, lasting up to 90 seconds. During this time, moon shards, both normal and infused, will fall from the sky, dealing 30 damage when they hit the character's head. The shards only damage the character and do not harm other creatures, and, unlike earthquakes, do not destroy items lying on the ground.
Normal and infused shards have a 25% chance of not breaking and remaining where they fall for 5 seconds, during which they can be picked up.
4-7 days after the rifts are opened in the world, abandoned junk will appear in a random place in the world, which is three mechanisms. Every 1-15 days after their appearance, a grainy transmission will appear near the character and run towards the location of the abandoned junk. It will come to the player 11 times in total, and each time there will be an increasing amount of time between its appearances.
If there is an active stage 3 rift, the Varg, Bearger, and Deerclops will leave behind their corpses upon death. The corpse can be burned using a torch or Willow's lighter to cause it to burn and disappear. If this is not done, a Brightshade Gestalt will appear off-screen from the corpse and possess the corpse, causing it to mutate and revive, causing said creatures to revive back as a Possessed Varg, Armored Bearger, and Crystal Deerclops, respectively.
Once one of the bosses is killed, a grainy transmission will appear and ask the player to kill the remaining two mutants on the list. Killing all three mutants is counted in a cycle, which will only go if all three mutants have not been repeated in it before. Thus, to complete a cycle, it is necessary to combine the kills of all three mutants in any case. When the first cycle is completed, the grainy transmission will thank the player and give him a spark ark. After that, it will give the player a spark ark for each subsequent kill of any of the three mutants, but only if the kills occur in a cycle. 
If the possessed varg is still alive in this cycle, then any suspicious dirt pile in the world will lead to a dangerous path and in any case will lead the player to either a varg or an ewecus, near which there will be meat of the koalefant they killed and, more rarely, its trunk. Thus, while the possessed varg is alive in the cycle, the player will not find a living koalefant in the world.
==Shadow Rifts==
In a Cave World, Rifts will begin to spawn if the player gives 5 Dreadstone to the Beckoning Hand after it appears when defeating the Ancient Fuelweaver. They are currently the primary source for Pure Horror as well as the only source for Dark Tatters in Don't Starve Together. (Dark Tatters cannot be obtained from the rift itself, but rather from the Ink Blights that spawn from a Dreadstone Outcrop after the rift has appeared.)
Shadow Rifts are exclusive to the following Biomes: Tall Stalagmite Terrain, Mushtree Forests, Rocky Plains, Stalagmite Terrain and the Wilds. To spawn they require a circular area with a 12-Tile diameter, entirely covered by ground tiles, and clear of movement-blocking objects such as Ponds, Structures and transplanted Plants. However, naturally occurring plants, spider dens, rocks, boulders, Stalagmites and trees don't prevent rift spawning. A rift can not appear within 15 Tiles of another rift. Once it spawns, it creates Miasma around it. 
The Rift has three stages in total. Every 4-5 days after its initial appearance it advances to the next stage. The transition is accompanied by an explosion that deals 60 damage to all creatures in the area and destroys Structures. The stage determines the distance in which the Miasma will spread, as well as the number of Fused Shadeling that appear:
Phase	 	Fused Shadeling Respawn
1 	1	4 min
2 	3	2 min
3 	5	1 min
15 in-game days after its appearance, the rift disappears, but then reappears after 5 days.
The Shadow Rift is dangerous not only because of miasma and Fused Shadelings. When it is active, normal rain in caves is replaced by acid rain. Acid rain is a far more dangerous weather condition compared to normal rain due to its strong negative effect on the environment and poor means of protection. During such rain, the places where the drops touch the ground smoke, showing the harmful toxic effect of the acid.
Rain takes away armor durability, accelerates the spoilage of food in the inventory and deals damage to the character. Mushtrees are affected too, getting covered in acid causing the caps to drop with lower freshness. The negative effect depends on the strength of the rain and every 1.5 seconds:
*deals up to 1 point of damage to the character.
*deals 3 points of damage to armor with protection from rain.
*reduces the durability of items with protection from rain.
*takes 1% of freshness from spoiling items.
Acid Rain also buffs Batilisks, increasing their speed by 25%, increasing their damage by 50%, and changing their loot to Batilisk Wing (50%), Guano (30%), Monster Meat (20%), and Nitre (20%). This is not the only effect Acid Rain has on Batilisks: in its enhanced form, Batilisk will knock out nitre from the character's inventory, and then eat it with a special and longer eating animation. Moreover, during Acid Rain, they will periodically raid the character, the frequency of which depends on the amount and quantity of nitre in his inventory. 
However, in addition to its harmful effects, Acid Rain has one useful property: it causes underground ponds to become covered with nitre formations, as a result of which 3 to 4 units of this resource can be mined from them.
Not only rains, but also earthquakes become more dangerous - after each earthquake, boulders will fall from the ceiling onto the character, like during an Antlion attack, but in smaller quantities. Also, these boulders will not destroy the character's base, and if he waits out the earthquake on it, the boulders will fall on the character as soon as he moves away from the buildings. All this can be avoided by using support pillars.
In addition to boulders, the character will also periodically be hit by Ickers - motionless masses of nightmare fuel with planar entity protection. When landing on the character's head, Icker will pull him into itself, deal damage and release him, taking a random item from his inventory inside. The item can be retrieved by hitting the creature with a weapon with enough dps to kill it. If you get too close to an Icker, it will pull the character into itself again.
Ickers fall mainly on narrow passages in caves in large numbers at once, blocking it. After this, no more Ickers will fall in this zone, but if all the fallen creatures are killed, the zone will go into rebound and after a while they will fall there again. Killing this creature is not so easy there - when it receives damage, it disintegrates into its component parts, which slow down the character and try to unite back into a single entity. It is impossible to kill Ickers with a regular weapon without planar damage in this case, because of planar entity protection, which lowers normal damage enough to let Icker regenerate its health qucker than lose it.
While the Icker's components are being collected, they can be collected into jars, receiving an Icker jar.
However, with a 20% chance, instead of Ickers, creatures with Void Masques on their faces appear in an amount of five to eight per screen from the character. These creatures can be spiders, spider warriors, dangling depth dwellers, bunnymen and rock lobsters.
If the Ickers spawn near shadow rifts, then the Void Masques will spawn from them in quantities of six to twelve, but only once per cycle. The masques fly off in different directions beyond the screen from the place of appearance and create captured creatures there, disappearing themselves. If they do not appear, then the next time the rift opens, they will appear in greater numbers. The player cannot interact with the Void Masques in any way. If they fall into his field of vision, the Void Masques will quickly fly away and disappear.
Creatures with masks on their heads stop behaving like their normal versions - the creatures become aggressive towards everyone except creatures with the same masks or creatures with masks of the Heralds of Tenebrau, have planar entity protection and planar damage, do not sleep, do not pick up food from the ground, and also begin to say certain phrases.
If a masked creature kills another creature, then when the latter dies, another Void Masque will appear, capture the corpse of the dead creature, and thus there will be two thralls. The same will happen to the player, from whom the captured corpse remains as an enemy.
When the rift is active, first nightmare fissure player approaches become overgrown with dreadstone, becoming a Dreadsote Outcrop. Such formations have their own defenders: Shriek, Jitters and Rasp and allow you to get up to three units of dreadstone, one for each defender. Three creatures attack the character in turn and will not go too far from the outcrop.
There's a 50% chance that three grimaces can emerge from the formation to replace the above-mentioned creatures, performing the same role.
After the death of these shadow creatures, the outcrop will close, and it will not be possible to extract the resource. Also, if the outcrop closes, all the Ink Blight will disappear along with its exposure.
Regarding the shadow creatures, this is not all - all Lurking Nightmares during rift cycle acquire planar entity protection and planar damage, and Mimicreeps begin to appear in the world, capable of copying any object lying on the ground. Such an object is in no way different from the original in appearance, but can't be disassembled with a staff of destruction or used directly (though, construction amulet can be used once before Mimicreep unmask itself). If player will try to actively use the object or take damage, the mimicreep will reveal itself, taking away 10 sanity from the character.
Lurking Nightmares and Resting Horrors, when rifts open, begin dropping pure horror instead of nightmare fuel upon death.
Another shadow creature with planar mechanics that appears after a rift opens is the Ornery Chest. With the opening of the first rift, about a third of the ornated chests found in caves will turn into ornery ones. After that, each new rift opened will turn one ornated chest into a Ornery Chest. Ornery Chests allow player to obtain Possessed Shadow Atrium for some Shadowcraft items.
vi:Rift
Category:Periodic Threat
Category:From Beyond
Category:Light Sources
Category:Don't Starve Together
Category:Mob Spawning Entities