Finally a new ramble lmao, hopefully I won't be doing alot of negative ramblings but this one is like, harmless lol.
Terraria's Sandstorms are very bad and annoying for quite a few reasons. Just want to ramble about why and suggest some ways to fix them. Even if I know (and honest to god hope) no devs will ever read this lmao.
Spawning condition and duration: To even get a chance to have a sandstorm spawn, the wind speed has to exceed 30 mph and even then you have to wait for a very small chance every in-game tick for a sandstorm to even occure. This wouldn't be too bad, but the duration of a sandstorm isn't set and can be ended seconds after occuring if the wind speed goes below 30 mph. If you aren't in a desert it can also be very hard to even tell if a sandstorm is occuring with the only way of actually knowing for sure if one is happening is if you pay very close attention to the Weather Radio item. Which you probably aren't if you're enjoying the video game.
One suggestion I'd have for this is to make it a guaranteed spawn whenever wind speeds go above 30 mph, or maybe even 20 mph, this way whenever the windy day event starts it is always accompanied by a sandstorm. This is comparible to rain events always having blizzards occur in the tundra biome.
Pre-Hardmode: Sandstorms do absolutly nothing in pre-hardmode besides be annoying with the Strong Wind debuff, making it miserable to travse. They also only make one single new enemy appear, the Angry Tumblers, that drop nothing but Nachos. I guess if you're desperate for food items and there happens to be sandstorm you could "farm" Tumblers for a 3% Nacho chance. One solution for this is to have Angry Tumblers behave a bit similary to Don't Starve's Tumbleweed where Angry Tumblers, when killed, have a massive loot table of a bunch of random items. Could be anything from wood and alchemy seeds to ores and gemstones. This would make Sandstorms, especially early game, very lucrative to farm.
Hardmode: This is when Sandstorms get actual cool new enemies and become an absolute nightmare to be in. Between wicked fast Dune Splicers, Sand Sharks and Sand Elementals (haha hello lol haha) the Sandstorm event is super dangerous. This isn't a bad thing really, as this is where you can get a bunch of really good equipment like the Forbidden Armor and Forbidden Fragment weapons. But the issue really lies in getting Forbidden Fragments in the first place and just how many you need to craft everything and how the game wants you to get these in early hardmode. To craft the full armor set, the new summon weapon, Ruinous Staff and the Spirit Flame, you need 7 Forbidden Fragments, which you can only get from a fairly rare enemy, the Sand Elemental, in an event spawns very rarely, that can also disappear a few seconds after starting. I'll just refer back to my suggestion of having Sandstorms guaranteed to spawn during Windy Days and that'll fix this issue completely.
luv me terraria, 'ate sandstorms, simple as.
2 new piece on Art Board, one is apparently a very big brain worm lmao