The aspect of invasions that always irritated me most was how it's handled in MP specifically. Then again i might just be salty that one of my first multiplayer experiences was my friends finally talking me into joining them on this game only to get "you are being hunted" within my first 30 minutes on the server because my friends were already pretty far along (they were coming to pick me up and help me with the catch up part, but i still got nuked during that one even with 2 body guards lol, possibly because they told me to run and...i could not outrun the wolves that slipped past them. Pretty sure they were hoping I could make it out of event range while they handled it but that is ultimately not how it went).

In SP, it does end up trial and error mostly, but once you go through the learning process you sort of control how your raids progress to. Like I love my troll armor, but hate dealing with troll raids until I get iron for the masonry so I often actually skip elder until Ive already visited swamps for that purpose. Even without the key I can use stagbreaker to find at least one scrap pile and boom, that's usually enough to build in stone. For troll raids I need to have killed a troll, and the elder so until both happened i'm fine. Buuuut, no new player is gonna know all that yet, and is gonna eat a few troll raids as a result (trolls even surprise those who discover earth walls and trenches early because of their sheer reach and destructive power, been safe against everything so far and then suddenly a log explodes you in your kitchen out of nowhere, whoops, too close to the wall).