Make it harder: Allow one new prototype for every one day survived

[Isosurface]

Suggestion: Limit the total number of items+structures you can prototype & unlock by the number of days you have survived in the current life. When you die and get resurrected, the counter is reset, and you forget all the recipes you have unlocked in your previous life.

 

Why?

0. Death is discouraged.

1. The world is persistent, but brain is not.

2. It encourages players to work together and share their recipes.

3. It slows down the game in a non-grinding way.

4. People have to plan ahead. Its takes about 1 year to learn all science machine recipes, another year for alchemy machine recipes (in a vanilla game, if you don't share).

 

Further suggestions:

1. All resurrection methods except the touchstone reset the day-survived counter.

2. Alchemy machine, Prestihatitator and Shadow Manipulator cost more days to prototype (10, 20, 30 days).

3. If one unlock per day is not hard enough for your elite team, make it 3 days, or 10 days if you wish.

[Auth]

So, once you get the super expensive materials, run back to your base, and find out you need to wait another 40 days for it to unlock?

 

Nah.

[Silentdarkness1]

Nah.

 

You see, this idea is quite sufficiently hardcore, but this is literally the part where you make the game so hard it becomes PUNISHING, not difficult. That's not fun.

[Halved]

No

[Midnight Tea]

Nah.

 

You see, this idea is quite sufficiently hardcore, but this is literally the part where you make the game so hard it becomes PUNISHING, not difficult. That's not fun.

 

This, basically. What the OP is suggesting isn't "difficult", just frustrating and punishing. That said, this sort of idea does work well with, say, a turn-based strategy game. But one of the main draws to getting skilled in Don't Starve is just how much you can widen what felt like a bottleneck when you were first starting out.

[samus84]

That's too much. The game is somewhat difficult as it is. 

[J192]

365 days to craft a Backpack?

no pls

[Midnight Tea]

It should also be noted that a blueprint bottleneck already exists -- the sanity boost you get from prototyping can arguably be very useful in the early game and you have to weigh whether you want to prototype everything in one go and waste it.

 

My rule of thumb is that good difficulty increases or even requires more important decisions to be made. Bad difficulty  *coughcoughsummer* strips away interesting decisions or complexity.