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Wow, this game got hard!


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Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining...

 

It has been some time since I last played Don't Starve, and coming back after such a long time, I've found myself completely bowled over by its new difficulty. There's so much new stuff I am unfamiliar with, and even some of the stuff I was familiar with has changed in some way, throwing me off balance as well.

 

So I thought I might stop by the ol' forums and see if I can pick up a few pointers. Advice for establishing a long lasting camp under these new conditions, thoughts and opinions on what's good and/or bad to do first, second and last, and just how difficult it can be to maintain a stable, long term camp as well as hunger, health and sanity.

 

I'm not after a step by step guide, just more of an idea of an idea which direction to head in the darkness rather than stumbling around totally blind.

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Random things:

- Get Glommer (because he's cute). And his sanity boost is cool and he poops fuel with high heating value.

- Don't leave the Old Bell where moles can get to it (if they pick it up, it will ring and Bigfoot will destroy your camp)

 

Spring

- Beef are always mating and all bees (even your beebox) turn hostile.

- Frog rain

- More rain (everything grows faster though)

- Random flowers respawn

- The rain also means humidity/wetness and lower sanity. If the humidity gets too much, you drop items equipped. (Weapons! Take note! You might end up punching hounds without noticing.)

- Rain also means longer drying time and faster food spoilage. But the frog rain and faster crops also mean more food. And the angry cows means protection from other creatures if you have a beefalo hat with you.

- I hated frog rain at first, but if you place some traps around you, you get lots of free meat.

 

Summer is like Winter except everything burns.

- Things smolder then burn when you're onscreen. :( Flowers, saplings, your berry farm, your science machine.... When you walk out to explore, even trees will burst into flames. There's no solution for this yet except to hunker down in your camp or avoid staying in grass/forest biomes during Summer.

- To avoid burning your camp, you need to make a Flingomatic. It needs gears and ice so you need to mine ice in Winter. (There's also some leftover ice in Spring.) It throws snowballs to extinguish fires. IF your camp is large you might need more than one.

- Saplings and grass tufts wither during Summer. You have to fertilize them again if you want them to regrow during Summer. But they will "undry" in Autumn if you leave them alone. Withered tufts/saplings within the range of your flingomatic are revived automatically, as long as your Flingo has fuel.

- There are items you can make to be able to walk around before overheating (umbrella, eyebrella from Deerclops eye, straw hat, summer frest, etc).

- You can also build endothermic fires. You stand near them to get cooler. But you need nitre. So nitre just got more useful now.

- You can chill the heat/thermal stone in the fridge/snow chester/beside endothermic fire so you carry cold stones while exploring.

- You can build a mini-camp in the desert where everything is just rocks and bones and buzzards. This way you won't end up permanently damaging your world (like when you camp in grasslands and the non-renewable tufts burn up). Desert also has lots of cactus there for food. And you can bait buzzards with food and whack them when they land for a bite.

 

The giants... the giants deserve their own post. There's one giant per season now. If you really want to be spoiled about them, you can check other posts or wiki. :D

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@Silvador,

 

In base DS, all characters have unique and new properties. Find the one you can handle the best!

Also, caves. (check the other cave-related trailers!)

If you still have questions, just watch more trailers here (official YT channel)

 

In RoG, you're gonna die. Don't question it, you'll die. Try to live past the first giant and you're good at survival.

 

EDIT: In DS Together... wait if you've got beta access I'll flip a table, just for good measure. (see the new forums for further information)

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When did you last play? During DS beta, during the 6 months of content update, or post-content but pre-Reign Of Giants? That might helps us point you in the right direction, understanding what you were once familiar with vs. how the game is now.

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Oh wow, it's been a while then!

 

Applebottom's post covered a lot of good stuff in relation to the DLC Reign of Giants, where there are all 4 seasons and changes to mechanics. If you're going to play vanilla, you'll only have 2 seasons, and a single giant. If you last played when the Teleportato was introduced, you've got some catching up to do, so I'd honestly recommend vanilla for the time being so you can get your bearings again. Or, you could take a look at the Version History page on the Wiki, users have kept tabs on the update cycle pretty well. You're looking for "January 29, 2013 - Progress!, and then would work your way up.

 

There's no longer a research machine, the tiered crafting machines are built-in to the game. There's a Winter giant who actively wants to kill you. There's several characters to unlock and play with, and a quest challenge called Adventure Mode that you can try as many times as you want. There's a lower level world called the Caves, and an even lower-level world than that called The Ruins. There's many new mobs in the game that often want to kill you... however, sometimes they also want to kill each other. You can use this to your advantage when something sinister comes along.

 

It's definitely possible to sustain a long-lasting camp! There's quite a number of "show me your base" threads that'll prove it ;) To get there though, you've gotta survive, of course.

 

First and foremost, obvs, don't starve. I don't worry too much about long-term sustainability for at least my first 10 days on the map. I pick berries and carrots and seeds wherever I find them, and I survive just fine. I explore the map to uncover as much as I can so I can decide where I want to settle. By explore, I really mean explore. I make a torch each night and continue running around, I don't stop to make a fire unless I really have to (need to cook my food before it spoils). Typically by day 15 I've uncovered the majority of the map, and am deciding where I want to make my camp at based on all the resources I've found.

 

Managing sanity is pretty easy, honestly. There's no way to tell you just how easy without spoilers:

 

 

  • Pick flowers to make a garland early-game. Each pick of a flower restores your sanity, and wearing the garland continues it over time.
  • Pick green mushrooms, and cook them. Cooked green mushrooms hurt your health a little, but restore 15 sanity each.
  • Collect spider silk and make a top hat (requires a Tier 1 Science Machine to craft).
  • Once you make a crock pot (Tier 2 Alchemy Engine), your cooked meals will give you 5 sanity.
  • Once you make drying racks (Tier 2 Alchemy Engine), your dried jerky gives you 15 sanity.
  • There are nightmare monsters that appear when your sanity is too low. Killing them will restore 15.
  • Once you kill a special winter mob, you might get lucky enough to get his clothing:
His name is MacTusk, and he's a walrus who hunts with his son and 2 hounds. When he dies, he always play an animation of dropping his hat from his head. Sometimes he dies and drops 2, which means you get one. It's called the Tam-o-Shanter, and is easily the best item in the game. Restores warmth and TONS of sanity while worn. The other awesome item he drops is a tusk, which you can use to craft a Walking Cane. Speed boost!

 

 

Health can be restored by eating food (a couple raw, but mostly cooked) and making healing potions. Eating is the most common way though, as you can always cook over a fire, and there are a variety of crockpot dishes that impact your health differently. 2 favorites for health are Bacon & Eggs and Honey Ham. A favorite for hunger, if your health is fine, is Meaty Stew. An easy middle-ground early on in your cooking spree is Meatballs.

 

EDIT: forgot the simplest health/hunger restore... butterflies! Punch those things to death and eat their wings.

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If you're going to play vanilla, you'll only have 2 seasons, and a single giant.

There's no longer a research machine, the tiered crafting machines are built-in to the game. There's a Winter giant who actively wants to kill you. There's several characters to unlock and play with, [...]

 

[...]

 

EDIT: forgot the simplest health/hunger restore... butterflies! Punch those things to death and eat their wings.

 

lol I'm sure the OP hasn't been gone for that long, since their avatar features deerclops eyes. (but also the old rot texture)

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lol I'm sure the OP hasn't been gone for that long, since their avatar features deerclops eyes. (but also the old rot texture)

 

Well, portals to other worlds is about the last thing I remember coming in. Food spoilage and piggies... It's so long ago it's all a bit of a blur as to exactly when I last played. As for the deerclops eyes, I remember that name. Never came across it myself. But, yeah, it has been a while since I played. Definitely before Reign of Giants, I know that much.

 

EDIT: Oh, and thanks for the tips, guys. :grin:

 

EDIT EDIT: Looking at the version history, all the way down the bottom. Feb 26, 2013, A Winter's Tale,  might've been the last update I saw. If not, just before it. Rain was most definitely not in when I last played, so after that point I was away from DS.

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