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A Few Suggestions


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I think DST needs a little more emphasis on the together part, and my experience has left me desiring a few new features.

 

New Items/Functions

 

Signal Fires: I think the ability to create signal fires would be extremely helpful. The first few days typically ends up with everyone running around looking for good base spots and valuable resources. Being able to pinpoint where something important is, etc, would be a wonderful quality of life change. 

 

Functionally it could be pretty simple, add X type of fuel or push it past the maximum fire level to make it a signal fire for a certain length of time. This might create a signal fire icon, similar to a player icon when they are near except it has no range. Alternatively, or in addition, it could add a blip on the mini-map.

 

Bouquet: The concept of gifts in DST sounds appealing to me, and an additional use for flowers could prove useful. A simple requirement of X flowers in order to make a bouquet that gives a small flat bonus of sanity when "given" (mechanically make them eat it)  to another player is fun.

 

Flower Arrangement: Furthering the concept of the bouquet, the next type of flower item could be a decoration that grants a sanity boost in a radius per minute. Being flowers they could decay over time, requiring new bouquets to refuel it.

 

New Mechanics

 

Character Interactions: Wickerbottom should shout for other players to be quiet when they click on objects too frequently and pop dialogue. Every character's comment about Wilson should change depending on his beard growth. Little things like this add a lot to a game.

 

Shared Sanity: Having individual sanity scores and multipliers is fine, but sanity in DST seems a little boring. It basically all comes from preparing food and sleeping items for the party and hoping your resource pool can sustain the hit or that there are no looming threats to prevent sleep.

 

I enjoy the way dying and becoming a ghost affects sanity of all the players, and I hope that more character specific methods of affecting sanity could be employed.

 

As far as characters go these few examples are illustrative of what I'm going for. 

  • Wilson, being the dapper gent he is, could grant a bonus to sanity per minute to players around him when he's clean shaven. This would give him an interesting choice between insulation and sanity during the winter.
  • Willow could inflict sanity penalties on other players when they witness her nervously start a fire.
  • Wendy's Abigail might have a mood meter that affects the sanity of players around her. When she's unhappy with players she could have a chance of 'haunting' them, applying a flat amount of sanity drain. She could be made happy via certain gifts. 
  • Wulfgang could grant a sanity boost when in his Mighty form, similar to Wilson, and a penalty when in his wimpy form.

 

Another part of this suggestion is to make certain actions impact other player's sanity. Picking flowers together, regular or evil, could impact both players' sanity levels. The specifics for this are up for debate but on a whole it has a better feeling to it than the current system. 

 

 

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Signal Fires! Yes, yes, this is what DST needs. A small blip on the map when someone starts a signal fire using a campfire anywhere on the map. The camp fire should be maxed and maybe require something else to trigger the signal fire. The blip on the map will stay as long as a character is signaling the fire. If the signaling player stops signaling or moves away from the camp fire, the blip will disappear from the map within the next few clock segments.
 
I also like your ideas with the flowers, great suggestions @IdleAltruism. Cheers!

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I really like the signal fires idea. (that's one where it's like "omg that's so ****ing perfect, how did I not think of that") They could make it show on the HUD like the player arrow, but with a little fire icon badged onto it like the ghost sanity drain icon, and show it globally.
 
 

  • Wilson, being the dapper gent he is, could grant a bonus to sanity per minute to players around him when he's clean shaven. This would give him an interesting choice between insulation and sanity during the winter.
  • Willow could inflict sanity penalties on other players when they witness her nervously start a fire.
  • Wendy's Abigail might have a mood meter that affects the sanity of players around her. When she's unhappy with players she could have a chance of 'haunting' them, applying a flat amount of sanity drain. She could be made happy via certain gifts.
  • Wulfgang could grant a sanity boost when in his Mighty form, similar to Wilson, and a penalty when in his wimpy form

 
Hmm, I like the Wilson idea. But this could make multi-Wilson strategies pretty overpowered-- I think it needs to be capped at one Wilson-effect, and the intensity shouldn't be any more than that of a garland.
Willow I think is bad enough in Together, and if anything needs a rework that will make her downsides less catastrophic for everyone around her. But reading your suggestion made me think-- what if instead of making a fire immediately, it smoldered like in RoG summer first, allowing other players to put it out? (Willows that were low enough to make the fire wouldn't be able to see the smoldering). And to give that back a bit of bite, you could also have it have a negative sanity aura.
I don't know about the Wendy and Wolfgang solutions, though. I think a damage bonus aura while mighty would be more appropriate for Wolfgang. I'm having trouble coming up with a counter-suggestion for Wendy, though...

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Hmm, I like the Wilson idea. But this could make multi-Wilson strategies pretty overpowered-- I think it needs to be capped at one Wilson-effect, and the intensity shouldn't be any more than that of a garland.

Willow I think is bad enough in Together, and if anything needs a rework that will make her downsides less catastrophic for everyone around her. But reading your suggestion made me think-- what if instead of making a fire immediately, it smoldered like in RoG summer first, allowing other players to put it out? (Willows that were low enough to make the fire wouldn't be able to see the smoldering). And to give that back a bit of bite, you could also have it have a negative sanity aura.

I don't know about the Wendy and Wolfgang solutions, though. I think a damage bonus aura while mighty would be more appropriate for Wolfgang. I'm having trouble coming up with a counter-suggestion for Wendy, though...

 

I probably should have stated my intent for making these quick suggestions as merely inspiration for a mini sanity overhaul for DST. I hinted at it but did not expressly state it. Simply adding more sanity gain/penalties to characters is not my goal with the ideas. Along with my suggestions for more sanity improving items, out of necessity, I want more sanity drain for a variety of things to counteract the benefits of various characters and the new items. 

 

I like your Willow idea; it is in the same vein I'm striking at. I want characters to have an impact on other players' sanity. 

 

I think, thematically--in a video-gamey type of way--Wolfgang could grant a damage buff aura, but ultimately that's not my goal with my suggestion. 

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