Moonrock Idol Should Require Opals To Craft

[Swanky Psammead]

I feel the low cost of the Moonrock Idol makes picking your character too small of a commitment, particularly now, given the strength of Winona's catapult cheese. It's so easy to play a character with strong generalist stats and utility like Wolfgang, WX, Maxwell, or Wigfrid for most of the game, and still have all the situational advantages of Wickerbottom (and now Winona) by dipping into them briefly to set up catapults, farm a Krampus sack with Birds of the World+Sleepytime Stories, gather 1000+ reeds from a lureplanted reed trap setpiece, make tentacle traps, etc. In single-player DS, changing your character required you to explore the world, gather the Things, and world hop, which made for a pretty emotionally and intellectually engaging journey. Sacrificing one of the hundreds of moonrocks obtainable from meteor showers and the Moon Stone event, and two of the hundreds of gems available from farming hounds/hound mounds/trapped vargs, is sort of a paltry replacement.

I would like for the Moonrock Idol to include a crafting ingredient that is somewhat rare and cannot be easily farmed in large quantities, so that the decision to change characters has some real weight. Opal/iridescent gem seems like the obvious answer since it's moon-themed just like the Celestial Portal, it's rare, and it has no other use right now. Other options of similar rarity could be deerclops' eye (cyclopian eye-themed, like the Portal), 2-3 pairs of glommer's wings (moon-themed), 2-3 glommer's flowers (moon-themed), shadow atrium (new moon-themed), deerclops' sketch, bearger's sketch, lavae egg, bee queen crown, bone helm, bone armor, shadow thurible, or 2-3 walrus tusks.