I have taken common complaints about the mod, not only from the discord but also from my own playtests, and made some tweaks.
Please review the changes and implement them into the mod when you have the time. For the time being, I will have a fork available.

This isn't included in the fork but one thing I would suggest is having the nightmare blade as an entitydrop rather than part of the skinning loot pool so it drops instantly on death. It needs to either be toned down or given crafting steps because having a BIS sword drop wholesale is downright disrespectful. It can be a small change, simple as needing the player to use a set of resources to adapt it to be usable. It would go a long way to not insult players who just made a new falx only to instantly have it worthless because they got lucky.

The mod itself is still usable, the drifters act as drifters, and are avoidant of the player, during the day, and aggressive at night. I have taken the time to test it on single player, though it appears as intended.

Though one thing strikes me as off, while the mod is usable, the only thing that is indeed usable is the sound bites that make them sound more aggressive than drunk and groaning zombies. Though they do not carry the intended texture changes, as the mod details.

This requires a bit of a fix just so the textures work. Thanks Mr1k3, your mods are great.

This looks pretty darn cool. I hope it gets an update sometime soon, I'd love to use it!

Had a chance to playtest them. Way too overpowered. Tone down the drops a lot. Tone down or remove the nightmare blade, it's literally stronger than a steel falx. Weapon drops being stronger than crafting weapons is cancerous game design and is a trope that needs to die. It completely invalidates the work I put in to just give me an uber weapon for free.

EDIT: Removing the flax twine and nightmare blade from the drop table fixed the balance. Not sure why you would work so hard to make such a well-balanced experience but then just randomly throw those two grotesquely overpowered drops in.

Yeah, they're too easy. I feel like my legs aren't even broken. :(

Still works. However, drifters will spawn inside well lit areas with this mod on. Even right on top of the player. The game also becomes a lot easier despite them looking a lot more threatening.
If they had a bit more attack range or walked a little faster they could actually do some damage. But as it is they're still not much of a threat, possibly even less so. I haven't actually been hit since installing the mod a few days ago.
Also the weapon you get from nightmare drifters has a bit too much durability for my liking. If you get one you can easily just use that single weapon until you get a new one. And with how strong it is, there's no reason to use anything else
But they look awesome and a lot more respectable as an actual enemy at their new sizes, and the pros outweigh the cons. Great for early- mid and late game

Edit: It seems like drifters REALLY don't want to attack you which is especially noticeable during the storms. With a few exceptions, none of them will try come to you and attack you unless you're inside their attack range or if they spawn on you. In fact, they'll run away from you 90% of the time when you do get near them. Even if you don't, they'll run as far away from you as they can to despawn. Something funky's definitely happening here and it makes them even easier enemies than they were before

1.17.8 - Messed around in a creative world with this mod and the drifters, doesn't seem to be broken.

Seems to work on 1.17.3, at least.

Can anyone confirm this works with 1.17.4 ? 

My only complaint is that Surface Drifters sound a little too threatening.
I'm not sure if it's possible to revert their growls into the iconic 'nnn'

Fixing the rock spam is yet another reason why this is a must-download.

Been using this mod for a little while now. It's a wonderful upgrade over the base game to the point that, aside perhaps from the droppable weapon, it should be included in the vanilla game. Drifters feel much less annoying now and the higher tier ones feel more dangerous. The new sounds are great too. I was a bit concerned about the droprates of material, but it turned out to not upset the vanilla progression balance too much.

Do you have any plans to make a configurable for this mod so one could tweak things? For example, increasing higher tier drifter damage (for people who like to have nightmares), reduce droprates of the weapon, reduce durability of the weapon, tweak material droprates etc.

I saw another drifter mod address the problem that the vanilla game spawns drifters where there visually doesn't look like there is much light, but light level is apparently too low. They reduced the light level at which drifters/portals could spawn. Would it be possible to add that tweak to this mod?

I know you are probably a bit busy and you have a ton of mods you have made and are updating. Thanks for sharing them with the community.

Currently works on 1.17, but has minor animation issues around the newly enabled crawling drifters so an update is in the works.

on the latest version at the time of writing this, 1.17, rc5 ive noticed a couple of minor bugs, crawler drifters constantly loop their death animations when killed.

also noticed that drifters rarely ever seem to play their idle sounds, they still play their hurt and death sounds but aside from that they're mostly silent.

Can you update to the latest version, even without adding new things? Just update xd

Pls add translation (rus)

Hello Mr1k3. I am really liking the mod. Cant wait to see it in the latest verson 🧐 No rush 

2.1.3-

• drifters swing sound replaced with a swoosh rather than a thump
• upped temporal stability gain on kill slightly
• adjusted deerhorn, nightmare, and double headed walk animations, now instead of clipping a bit into the ground they now drag their blades behind them when they walk, sort of like the pyramid head from silent hill
• health slightly lowered on all but double headed, and corrupt drifter which have had a slight increase
• reduced damage tiers to their vanilla counterparts, since I didn't know all protection values dropped by 1
• drifters now deal damage to you sooner in their swing, was 600ms now 500ms, vanilla is 400ms. adjusted animations.
• double headed drifter is now a bit slower, and attacks a little slower too
• stone throwing cooldowns have been reversed, lower tier drifters will throw stones more frequently than higher ones which will try to close the gap for a melee attack, minimum cooldown is set to at least 3x vanilla, so they wont spam them, still has the priority override to fix that too
• slightly lowered nightmare drifter speed
• AI changes- disabled "despair" idle since it had inherent animation issues, like drifters being able to hit you with no animation. Reduced wander priorities and added many cancel on hurt checks to other idle stuff, added new "evade" tactic for all but the double headed drifter, the chance for such is also higher the more dangerous the drifter, this evasion just means instead of mostly standing still/walking slowly around when getting hit until their attack is off cooldown, they should now start to move at their top move speed in some direction, this is the closest thing I can implement to them evading attacks and should make them a little more interesting to fight.
• tweaked around with some drop chances of flax fibers, should drop more commonly, but at same rate. removed it from corrupt and nightmare drifters which now have a much higher chance to give twine, should save on those precious 4 slots which if they go over all items show up as invisible when harvesting which is a game issue
• reduced normal and deep drifter max spawns by 1
• upped idle sound range, drifters now make more sound the more dangerous they are, reduced normal drifter idle sound chance. The primary amount of noise these guys make is their aggro sound which I cannot adjust the frequency of, only able to turn it on or off.
• reduced damage, range, and durability of nightmare blade, upped drop chance very slightly

2.1.2-

Major update to 1.16

• added double headed drifter to tweaks
• new nightmare drifter model
• re-balanced drop chances
• fix and tweak to stone throwing
• slight adjustments to various stats

Please could you update better drifters to 1.15.6

This dosen't fix the killaura and the fact they stand perfectly still after missing a hit, but it's still a huge step in the right direction for drifter combat. Especially the reduction in passive noise, GOD I hated that. This is a must-download for that reason alone.

2.0.2 changes:

Enabled new drifter sounds, should be much more pronounced so you can better tell when drifters are near. Also now they have a very distinct aggro sound so you can learn when one is about to charge.

Slightly reduced spawn sizes and chance for lesser drifters so hopefully constant swarms from nowhere are less likely, mixed with their buffs should still have similar difficulty.

Now uses a patch rather than a full file replace, hopefully everything works but sometimes the modmaker does wierd stuff so let me know if something isnt right. But as a plus other mods that modify drifters should work with this mod.