Who would be the best for solo?

[Sicko Hog]

1 minute ago, Shosuko said:

3 - Collect all of your seeds, and poops you find and rush for advanced gardens.

- The reason I recommend rushing gardens is that you can get Dragon Fruit.  This is an easy crock pot recipe, just 1 dragon fruit and 3 sticks.  You don't need berries or anything else.  This heals health and hunger both well.  This should help you keep health tip top.  Wickerbottom can use her growth book to speed up the crops which should help you get some dragon fruit supply early.  If you aren't familiar with farms, let me know and I (or another person here) can explain a bit more to you.

Please, please don't tell a new player to rush farms. There are tons of better food sources you should be telling OP about, and by setting their mind on farms you're hindering them and possibly turning them away from the game.

1. Pigs, feeding two pigs meat and then making them attack each other will cause all the pigs to pick sides and start a little civil war. You'll get meat and pigskin from this.
2. Spiders, step on their webbing to trigger the spiders coming out, then lead them away from the webbing and start attacking them. If you hit them once, then back away while they attack, and repeat, then you'll be able to "kite" them without getting hit at all. You'll get monster meat, silk, and spider glands from this. But you don't want to eat that meat alone...
3. Berries, digging up berry bushes, planting them in your base, and fertilizing them (either with manure or rot) will make them periodically grow berries that you can pick. If you put 3 berries and 1 of any kind of meat in the crockpot, then you'll get meatballs, which is just under a day's worth of hunger when you eat it.

There are lots of other good recipes later on, but this is the simplest one and it's already great. Try out some other stuff on your own though! You should definitely experiment with the bird cage.

[Pyr0mrcow]

Oh, and Abi has a constant power buff in the caves. Lot of people seem to not be aware of that...
Much easier to take out depth worms solo with her.

 

4 hours ago, Josonic said:

Lots of people saying anyone is a good choice, but that's simply not true. If your goal is to survive as long as possible I would choose between Wolfgang or Wickerbottom.

There was actually a bit of a problem with the initial question in that if you've played enough to really bring out character's abilities and for character choice to matter much, you shouldn't face any threat of dying beyond making a mistake no matter who you pick.
IE if you're experienced enough to keep Wolfgang fully fed, ect. Wicker's only as good as your non-sleeping sanity management skills.
So it's more of a question of what you want to accomplish/how you want to play. Each character is best at something. Even Woodie has forgotten abilities that are terribly underused, with his follower buff.
Wendy being best for living on Splumonkey drops, if you want to sit back and relax while working on other stuff.

 

That said yea, WX+Wicker combo is one of the best. Maxwell is good for reading Wicker's books too, and has free sanity regen for afterward and shadow minions for getting other supplies that Wicker/WX would take a while to harvest, so it wouldn't hurt to get one if you add another player.

[Donke60]

We shouldn't tell new players anything unless they really need it experimenting is part of the fun 

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, JellyUltra said:

Please, please don't tell a new player to rush farms. There are tons of better food sources you should be telling OP about, and by setting their mind on farms you're hindering them and possibly turning them away from the game.

1. Pigs, feeding two pigs meat and then making them attack each other will cause all the pigs to pick sides and start a little civil war. You'll get meat and pigskin from this.
2. Spiders, step on their webbing to trigger the spiders coming out, then lead them away from the webbing and start attacking them. If you hit them once, then back away while they attack, and repeat, then you'll be able to "kite" them without getting hit at all. You'll get monster meat, silk, and spider glands from this. But you don't want to eat that meat alone...
3. Berries, digging up berry bushes, planting them in your base, and fertilizing them (either with manure or rot) will make them periodically grow berries that you can pick. If you put 3 berries and 1 of any kind of meat in the crockpot, then you'll get meatballs, which is just under a day's worth of hunger when you eat it.

There are lots of other good recipes later on, but this is the simplest one and it's already great. Try out some other stuff on your own though! You should definitely experiment with the bird cage.

If they aren't playing combat characters, they might not want to rely on combat for food.  If they are new to getting through seasons I assume they may be new to combat too.  The constant health boost from dragon fruit can help with this.  I'm recommending this for Wickerbottom as it compliments her books far better than pigs do.  You can't force-respawn pigs, and you can't heal from meatballs, but Wickerbottom can do both with farms.

Spiders and pigs aren't that great to base next to, so you're traveling to collect food which can waste a lot of time.  Granted they would want to hunt some spiders and some pigs as they get started anyway, but I would never consider them a "food source."  Too much effort.  They'll eventually get swamped by monster meats from hound waves anyway, so I wouldn't recommend wasting time re-locating these nearby.

Replanting berries is kinda worthless - I rarely ever move berries.  Base in the desert - pick cactus - never care about berries.  Cactus flesh recovers sanity as well as hunger, and can be used as filler just as easy.  After the first winter I stock pile enough ice that I don't care about filler, so I much prefer the sanity boost from cactus over worthless berries...  I don't have to worry about disease, or summer wilt either.  Disease is especially troublesome as I rarely return to harvest berries after winter, so I end up with a diseased mess while I'm busy with more fun aspects of the game.  Berries are a noob-trap, better to skip over them to more useful food stuffs.

The only argument I could see for NOT getting farms going quickly is just the resources it takes to really build 8 or 16 improved farms...  I'll recommend this as a "lower budget" options so to speak.  Still camp in desert (bonus if your desert and oasis are connected), this automatically removes the bother of digging / fertilizing berries.  Cactus really are so much better.  Then hammer a dozen mole worms and put them in a sizable pen.  Moleworms will dig new holes and respawn without nearly the material cost of pigs.  No full moon issues, and no daytime restriction for access.  1 small meat makes a meatball just the same - 2 small meat combo well with a monster meat and 1 honey to make a honey ham - Small meats cure faster on the rack, and stack to 40 so they are just as easy to pack around as large jerky - while large jerky recover a bit more health, small jerky recover better sanity which is more typically the issue.  This means you'd need honey for health recovery, or a butter fly farm.  Going honey means at least prepping a bee box pre-first winter, but I guess a butter fly farm is an option too.

[E0X745]

8 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Yeah if your friend liks WX - then I recommend Wickerbottom 100% now.  Once you guys get further in the game, enough to get science and magic unlocked and live through first winter, you can make the book that summons lightning to force-charge wx, he'll be a high speed lightbulb for days lol.

Anyway - what I would recommend to help you two out: (mind you, you may be doing some of this already)

1 - When you spawn, make backpacks for both of you two, and split up to cover more ground quicker.

2 - Look for Swamp biome, and Desert biome with tumble weed.

3 - Collect all of your seeds, and poops you find and rush for advanced gardens.

- The reason I recommend rushing gardens is that you can get Dragon Fruit.  This is an easy crock pot recipe, just 1 dragon fruit and 3 sticks.  You don't need berries or anything else.  This heals health and hunger both well.  This should help you keep health tip top.  Wickerbottom can use her growth book to speed up the crops which should help you get some dragon fruit supply early.  If you aren't familiar with farms, let me know and I (or another person here) can explain a bit more to you.

- The Swamp Biome is going to give you reeds so you can craft books, and get a bird cage.  The desert biome can give you a chance of gems, gears, and some other miscellaneous items that can be very helpful, in addition to the twigs / grass.  If you camp in the desert you typically don't need grass / twiggs to be planted early, this helps you focus on farms while also netting some gears / gems with luck.  Don't forget to bring those grave digger items to the pig king to cash in the gold nuggets.  Gold axes / pick axes / shoves can help as you expand your base and explore the world.

- If you are camping in the desert during winter you can go to the area the d-fly spawns and put heat rocks next to her magma pool.  there is a good range around them that will keep the rocks hot for you.  You can easily switch to a hot rock quickly if you base near here (how close is up to you, I don't base ON the magma, but it's just out of the screen)  If you want you can even build some extra heat rocks and create a permanent light zone that extends beyond the magma pool.  Fire pits can get you up to about 45 degrees heat, but the magma can go up to 70!  This gives you a much longer span of time away from base before you would worry about your temperature getting low.  Warning - at 70 degrees you will take damage from heat, so when you see the screen change color as a warning, you should step away haha.

Yeah, thats exactly what we do.

Sometimes I play with my other 3 friends that have it and they all want to be the robot lol

But yeah I saw a video on the charge and we wanna try to do it soon.

[E0X745]

8 hours ago, JellyUltra said:

Please, please don't tell a new player to rush farms. There are tons of better food sources you should be telling OP about, and by setting their mind on farms you're hindering them and possibly turning them away from the game.

1. Pigs, feeding two pigs meat and then making them attack each other will cause all the pigs to pick sides and start a little civil war. You'll get meat and pigskin from this.
2. Spiders, step on their webbing to trigger the spiders coming out, then lead them away from the webbing and start attacking them. If you hit them once, then back away while they attack, and repeat, then you'll be able to "kite" them without getting hit at all. You'll get monster meat, silk, and spider glands from this. But you don't want to eat that meat alone...
3. Berries, digging up berry bushes, planting them in your base, and fertilizing them (either with manure or rot) will make them periodically grow berries that you can pick. If you put 3 berries and 1 of any kind of meat in the crockpot, then you'll get meatballs, which is just under a day's worth of hunger when you eat it.

There are lots of other good recipes later on, but this is the simplest one and it's already great. Try out some other stuff on your own though! You should definitely experiment with the bird cage.

Also I'm not that new, I just needed to know who was the best character for solo.

What I like to do to get food is dig up berry bushes, save carrots for when we need them (near winter).

also I just figured out killing beefalo isn't that hard, so I do that for the wool,meat and possibly horn if it drops (for beefalo hat).

 

Also another friend I play with kinda does try to rush farms, and hes newer than me.. I try to tell him he should wait but he doesn't care sometimes. 

[FTR]

If you want to kill all bosses in reasonable time (without years of preparation), then it's definately Wolfgang. If you don't mind preparing tiny bit longer and just want more enjoyable experience and/or lazy playstyle then Wigfrid.

Wickerbottom is also really good to play solo but I would rather use her in coop games.

[JohnWatson]

10 hours ago, Shosuko said:

If they aren't playing combat characters, they might not want to rely on combat for food.

Utter nonsense. Just because you don't OHKO everything like Wolfgang can doesn't mean that you can't kill anything. Wendy and Wes players that are actually competent will still perform combat despite their ×0.75 damage multiplier. There's zero excuse to not use your F key.

10 hours ago, Shosuko said:

If they are new to getting through seasons I assume they may be new to combat too.

Combat can be learnt very quickly. It's just pressing your F key and remembering kiting patterns. Everyone needs to stop making new players think it's hard.

Combat is not some extreme strat that only elite professional elitist pros can do. Just grab armour and a weapon and you can kill anything.

10 hours ago, Shosuko said:

The constant health boost from dragon fruit can help with this.

There are better sources of healing than dragonfruits which don't require loads of set up time and maintenance. For example, trail mix, jerky, blue caps, honey, and butterflies.

And also, five butterflies heal as much as a dragonpie, yes they do. Dragonpie is overrated and require too much time investment for what they're worth.

10 hours ago, Shosuko said:

I'm recommending this for Wickerbottom as it compliments her books far better than pigs do.  You can't force-respawn pigs, and you can't heal from meatballs, but Wickerbottom can do both with farms.

Wickerbottom can do so many things and you choose to use her to rush dragonfruits? I'm not against making farmplots late-game, but farmplots shouldn't be your main source of food unless you're intentionally trying to make the game harder than it is.

Making new players rely on farmplots as a source of food will just slow down their improvement. Why use the hard way when there are easier methods?

10 hours ago, Shosuko said:

< the rest of it blablah >

I could agree with most, but if you want an actual good source of meat, then just use pigs or bunnymen instead of worms and rabbits.

Also, meatballs and honey ham are a waste of time in most situations. Just use meat for jerky and monster meat for bacon eggs. Jerky lasts very long and every four monster meats can be turned into bacon eggs.

[Josonic]

13 hours ago, Shosuko said:

If they aren't playing combat characters, they might not want to rely on combat for food.  If they are new to getting through seasons I assume they may be new to combat too.  The constant health boost from dragon fruit can help with this.  I'm recommending this for Wickerbottom as it compliments her books far better than pigs do.  You can't force-respawn pigs, and you can't heal from meatballs, but Wickerbottom can do both with farms.

Spiders and pigs aren't that great to base next to, so you're traveling to collect food which can waste a lot of time.  Granted they would want to hunt some spiders and some pigs as they get started anyway, but I would never consider them a "food source."  Too much effort.  They'll eventually get swamped by monster meats from hound waves anyway, so I wouldn't recommend wasting time re-locating these nearby.

Replanting berries is kinda worthless - I rarely ever move berries.  Base in the desert - pick cactus - never care about berries.  Cactus flesh recovers sanity as well as hunger, and can be used as filler just as easy.  After the first winter I stock pile enough ice that I don't care about filler, so I much prefer the sanity boost from cactus over worthless berries...  I don't have to worry about disease, or summer wilt either.  Disease is especially troublesome as I rarely return to harvest berries after winter, so I end up with a diseased mess while I'm busy with more fun aspects of the game.  Berries are a noob-trap, better to skip over them to more useful food stuffs.

The only argument I could see for NOT getting farms going quickly is just the resources it takes to really build 8 or 16 improved farms...  I'll recommend this as a "lower budget" options so to speak.  Still camp in desert (bonus if your desert and oasis are connected), this automatically removes the bother of digging / fertilizing berries.  Cactus really are so much better.  Then hammer a dozen mole worms and put them in a sizable pen.  Moleworms will dig new holes and respawn without nearly the material cost of pigs.  No full moon issues, and no daytime restriction for access.  1 small meat makes a meatball just the same - 2 small meat combo well with a monster meat and 1 honey to make a honey ham - Small meats cure faster on the rack, and stack to 40 so they are just as easy to pack around as large jerky - while large jerky recover a bit more health, small jerky recover better sanity which is more typically the issue.  This means you'd need honey for health recovery, or a butter fly farm.  Going honey means at least prepping a bee box pre-first winter, but I guess a butter fly farm is an option too.

There's absolutely no reason to not base next to pigs. If you wall in a food they want (pig skin works and won't spoil) they won't aggro on you or the walls even if they turn werepig

Replanting berries is pretty useless in DST with disease and all

Having a dragon fruit farm does make healing trivial, not that its difficult in the first place, but convincing the hivemind that farms can be good for certain play styles is a losing battle. It's one of the most argued discussions I've seen about game strategy and at sometime the consensus became 'farms are bad mmmkay'

[Pyr0mrcow]

Dragon Pie is great. There're equivalents that take less setup, but once the setup is done, it's good, easy, basically free food. The best available health-wise, other than Waffles and Mandrake Soup, with high hunger and a long freshness time

If anything, it's switching out conveniences and inconveniences as far as good spammable foods go. So, depends on what you want to manage.
Inconvenience of setting up farms/occasionally collecting manure, convenience of living on nothing but twigs and a bird.
For the others, you'll be doing similar activities. Meat management for any, bee management for Honey Ham, eggs for Bacon and Eggs/Pierogies.

 

...personally, I base near the ruins and kind of work through tiers. Monkeys spawn in large numbers, meaning that morsels and manure pile up, so I spam Meatballs early game (using shroom fields for health/sanity), Pierogies whenever I feel like going up to get a bird, then switch to Dragon Pie later if I make it that far before the server collapses.
Occasionally some recipes get switched out like Bacon using the monster meat that drops from depth worms and spiders, since that piles up, too, but the violent environment gives higher health foods more value to me.

[GiddyGuy]

On 6/8/2017 at 3:56 PM, Josonic said:

Some other good choices would be Wigfrid but all of these characters require some skill level, so if you're a complete beginner I'd avoid them

Wigfrid, skill?

Also a lot of players fail as Wolfgang cause they run into fights as wimpy cause they can't get into mighty easily. At least what I've seen.

[Rellimarual]

 

4 hours ago, Pyr0mrcow said:

Occasionally some recipes get switched out like Bacon using the monster meat that drops from depth worms and spiders, since that piles up, too, but the violent environment gives higher health foods more value to me.

Why would you not live off of pierogis down there? We can make 60 of them over the summer on monkey drops and lichen alone, and then wrap them up for boss fight heals. Although I still prefer small jerky for ruins life because it's such a sanity powerhouse.

In my early DS days playing Wilson, I struggled hard to get a dragon fruit plantation up and running before the first winter and usually neglected too many other important things to rush it. Then it was a squeeze trying to get the fruit and pies to last through the winter because they spoil so fast. I occasionally play with a noob friend who mains Wicker and once I told her about how to use a bird cage to do this, she, too started obsessing over living off dragon pies and is practically useless for the first year, it takes so much time. (First on the surface base, then in the caves.) It's been hard to get her off that kick.

So while I agree that the anti-farm faction goes way over the top sometimes, I do think that encouraging a newish player to survive on farms during the first year is not very helpful. It chains you to the base, among other things. Even if they don't want to do a lot of fighting, they can make traps for spiders and gather mushrooms and ice for pierogis.

[Josonic]

15 hours ago, GiddyGuy said:

Wigfrid, skill?

Also a lot of players fail as Wolfgang cause they run into fights as wimpy cause they can't get into mighty easily. At least what I've seen.

Beginners might find eating only meat to be very difficult, of course with a little experience it's trivial, but for beginners it can be quite the challenge, which is why I said that

[Pyr0mrcow]

14 hours ago, Rellimarual said:

Why would you not live off of pierogis down there? We can make 60 of them over the summer on monkey drops and lichen alone, and then wrap them up for boss fight heals.

That's what I do early-mid game till whenever I get around to spamming farms.
By that time there's more manure than I can use for quite a while and most likely a good bit of rot too, and not much reason left for ruins adventures.
Basically, by the time I start using Dragon Pies, part of the reason is that I'll be in base most of the time anyway focusing on making it look nice and organized and expanding into a sprawling throne room type area.

Occasionally passing Bunnymen is most of the reason for using it afterward. Could smash the houses, but I like leaving some natural stuff in tact when possible. Just feels right. That and I like building some without solid enclosures and letting them free-roam. It can get pretty lifeless down there.

[Rellimarual]

That makes sense, although monkeys remain a great source of nightmare fuel, so we still tend to spend the summer down there farming them late in the game.

[Pyr0mrcow]

Yeaaaa, I pile up on night fuel as soon as possible. Happens anyway since they're my main food/fuel (beard hair) source for a lot of the game, but still.
Night Armor and Dark Swords being your main equipment is a nice convenience. Couple with Bat Bats and sanity items of choice, and nothing can touch you as long as you don't get caught in a huge crowd or something.

Cept in pvp. Hehehehehe.
Mole Hat + Lazy Explorer + Pan Flute + Ice Staff = I AM THE BATMAN

[Sicko Hog]

On 6/10/2017 at 1:56 PM, Josonic said:

Beginners might find eating only meat to be very difficult

Then teach them how to easily get meat.

[Josonic]

2 hours ago, JellyUltra said:

Then teach them how to easily get meat.

Have you read the thread title?