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The Sneak action says that invisible creatures become Sensed when they perform any action that isn't Hide or Sneak. That makes enough sense assuming they are still making an appreciable amount of sound. However, the silence spell causes you to create no sound. If a creature is invisible and silent while taking an action to pull something out of a pack, what is giving them away to make them Sensed? This is assuming the opposing creature has no special senses, like blindsense, tremorsense, or scent. If this interaction between invisibility and silence is too powerful, that's fine, make it somehow incompatible. The current interaction doesn't make sense.
Also, with the changes to the Sneak action, Sneak is pretty clearly about moving without being heard. If you stay out of cover/concealment for long enough (past the end of a Sneak action, normally) you are spotted, but you always must make a Stealth roll, even when cover/concealment haven't yet come into the equation. Why is it, then, that invisibility gives a natural 20 on Stealth checks (which once again allows a low level spell to mostly replace a skill; it'd be better for it to be removed entirely if there's no better alternative) and Silence gives no explicit benefit to Sneak? I think it'd be better if invisibility gave a bonus/automatic result on Hide and removed the need for cover/concealment from Sneak, and Silence gave the bonus/automatic result on Sneak.
The Sneak action says that invisible creatures become Sensed when they perform any action that isn't Hide or Sneak. That makes enough sense assuming they are still making an appreciable amount of sound. However, the silence spell causes you to create no sound. If a creature is invisible and silent while taking an action to pull something out of a pack, what is giving them away to make them Sensed? This is assuming the opposing creature has no special senses, like blindsense, tremorsense, or scent. If this interaction between invisibility and silence is too powerful, that's fine, make it somehow incompatible. The current interaction doesn't make sense.
Also, with the changes to the Sneak action, Sneak is pretty clearly about moving without being heard. If you stay out of cover/concealment for long enough (past the end of a Sneak action, normally) you are spotted, but you always must make a Stealth roll, even when cover/concealment haven't yet come into the equation. Why is it, then, that invisibility gives a natural 20 on Stealth checks (which once again allows a low level spell to mostly replace a skill; it'd be better for it to be removed entirely if there's no better alternative) and Silence gives no explicit benefit to Sneak? I think it'd be better if invisibility gave a bonus/automatic result on Hide and removed the need for cover/concealment from Sneak, and Silence gave the bonus/automatic result on Sneak.
I think you are correct that silence+invisibility should be pretty hard to break short of things like leaving foot prints. I can see the other objection since sneaking seems to be mostly about moving quitely, but I don't really want invisibility to provide a flat numerical bonus though. That never sat well with me because it doesn't affect so many other stealth factors.
One interesting thing about the current rules though is that being invisible doesn't do anything to boost your stealth DC, which means that while you can almost certainly won't be noticed by someone who is just standing on guard who doesn't know to look for an invisible creature, and you will definitely be able to sneak on your turn mid-combat, anyone actively looking for you with Seek actions can still potentially hear your breathing, see the impressions your feet are making, etc. There's a certain plausibility to that, and it is certainly an interesting starting point for play purposes.
I agree that if you're displacing some visible while invisible, like with footprints, water, being covered in flour, etc, it makes sense to be able to sense you. The problem is there are so many environments and situations where that isn't a viable explanation as to why you're immediately sensed when you take most actions.
I agree that ideally, invisibility would only affect vision-based stealth factors. That's why I was suggesting that invisibility's stealth advantage, whether that is an automatic result or a flat bonus, only applies to Hide against creatures using visual senses. It already satisfies Sneak's requirement for concealment or cover, which is also good. If you're Sneaking, which is mostly auditory, invisibility wouldn't help you make Stealth checks, and if a creature is using a nonvisual sense to Seek you, it would do nothing. I think that both models what is happening in the world better and adds some badly needed counterplay against invisibility.
Invisibility providing an automatic 20 on a Stealth check but not increasing your Stealth DC by 10 (which does effectively the same thing) is a bad thing in my book. I want rolling a Perception check against a Stealth DC and rolling a Stealth check against a Perception DC to mean the same thing. Otherwise, it becomes confusing what each actually represents, and you end up with players begging to do/not do the roll, depending on which gives them an advantage.
At the end of the day, this whole Stealth/invisibility/silence issue comes down to game design philosophy. Invisibility and silence would render a human unable to pinpoint a creature in most circumstances. If everything needs to have accessible counterplay, then that is a bad thing, and either more counterplay needs to be added or those effects should be removed. If less common or no counterplay (such as needing a spell from a small list to counter something) is acceptable, then silence and invisibility should render you effectively undetectable. Right now we're in this weird place where the action limits of Sneak ensure there is always accessibly counterplay, but that counterplay doesn't have a basis in the game's world once a few spells are added in. It'd be better to remove the effects that demand that counterplay, invisibility etc, than to leave something so deeply unintuitive and immersion-breaking in the rules.
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There are innumerable environment factors, but I don't see that as a reason to not comprehensively handle the two locating senses that PCs are guaranteed to have and then handle exceptions from there. Something like
"It is often not possible to Sense a creature who is both invisible and silent, but environmental factors like footprints, displaced water, or being covered in flour may allow the creature to still be Sensed."
The problem with the rules as they are is that they mandate that a creature who takes any action other than Hide or Sneak will always be Sensed, even when no environmental factors provide a reason for that. You can end up stuck between following the rules and the game world being consistent and intuitive. If you assume that invisible, silent creature cannot be Sensed unless an appropriate environmental factor is present, environmental factors still work like they should but you don't end up in that situation with rules with no in-world explanation.
This approach would not require covering each possible interaction. What I wrote above is probably close to sufficient. However, some common cases like incorporeal creatures should probably be covered so that we know what the dev's intent was when building those creatures. The poltergeist from the playtest is what caused me to make this thread.