Frog rain is OP

[secXsQuared]

Hi,

Recently I started a vanilla solo survival server without mods, looking for a genuine DST experience. So during winter things went well, got my twig/grass farm set up and killed Dfly and BQueen.

When it got to spring however, on like day 2 it rained frogs for 2 days, which completely destroyed my DST experience.

I have two problems with frog rains:

1. Too easy to deal with, making food/giants in spring trivial: just go anywhere really, tallbirds, tentacles, beefalo, Goose, bees, etc. The frogs will make quick work of them. The result? Tons of frog legs and loots (meat, drumstick, fall feathers, tentacle spikes...). With a bird cage, stacks of frog legs can be converted to eggs and pierogis, even gold. And what really is the point of Goose Goose, to be killed by frogs for free loots? I rarely rarely had to fight it myself. I just wait for a frog rain and the poor mother and her babies will be slaughtered. 

2. inventory management: All those loots fill up inventory like crazy. If left unattended however, perishable stuff will turn into rot and slow down the server in the long run. Trust me, it's extremely annoying.

 

Admittedly there are minor annoyances, like having to leave the base and having to constantly not aggro frogs, however, these are REALLY MINOR, compared to what it brings to players. The point is, in my experience, DST is supposed to be challenging and food is supposed to be scarce. The player is expected to set up farms or constantly look for food/fight bosses. IMO frog rain is takes at least 75% challenges away from the game in spring.

 

Of course I have some suggestions to balance it:

1. Get rid of it (since Klei already spent time implement it, I highly doubt this will happen).

2. Get rid of the frog herd mentality. If one frog is attacked, don't make all other frogs attack the attacker. This is more practical.

3. Or make frogs automatically aggro onto the player instead of wandering off generating loots.

 

[Angibot]

I agree that frog rains aren't balanced but if you don't care about the game balance in itself and just want to enjoy solo game i'm pretty sure you can disable them via world generation options.

The easiest way to balance it would be to change the Frog in itself to make it eat food that drops from the ground but people would still use it as weapons.

Probably make Goose/Goose have an AOE or it's scream makes frog run away.

Another way would be to have frogs all disappear in ponds or die one day after they land, something like that.

[TheOwl]

Frog rains are just like pretty much anything in the game: certain !!FUN!! for beginners, and easy to cheese for experienced players.

 

I like your second idea, which I'd combine with another: fewer frogs. By removing herd mentality and having fewer frogs, you make it impossible to use them efficiently to get loot. By removing the herd mentality, you also make it impossible to kill them all easily, which is also part of why there would need to be fewer frogs: if they're gonna be an actual nightmare to manage (either only baiting a few of them at a time or waiting it out, getting rid of them as they come close to you over the days), you're gonna need fewer of them, because without the herd mentality and with over 100 frogs per rain, you'd be drowning in frogs for in-game weeks.

[Maxposting]

I just usually go in caves since only wetness sucks there.

[snugglysnootertoot]

6 hours ago, secXsQuared said:

1. Get rid of it (since Klei already spent time implement it, I highly doubt this will happen).

2. Get rid of the frog herd mentality. If one frog is attacked, don't make all other frogs attack the attacker. This is more practical.

3. Or make frogs automatically aggro onto the player instead of wandering off generating loots.

 

1. Outright remove a quirky feature in the game that fits in rather well with the overall theme, because "too easy to deal with" and "inventory management"? Might as well remove 90% of the game then because most of it falls under those two descriptions.

2. In other words, remove nearly all danger from frogs. If there is no herd mentality, there is no threat of getting swamped and stunlocked when you hit a frog. Hmm, no thanks.

3. So, what you're asking for here is essentially a hound wave with a frog skin on it. Frankly, I don't feel like that is what the game is missing.

[Well-met]

You said it yourself, the tons of frog legs is balanced out by them rotting in a couple days.

[Maxposting]

7 minutes ago, Hell-met said:

You said it yourself, the tons of frog legs is balanced out by them rotting in a couple days.

Bundle Wraps.

^{get rekt me with no friends to kill bee queen}

[MondayNight]

Almost no one genuinely sits there and kills frogs from frog rain with a bat or whatnot outside of meme boredom. And even if their mechanics would change in an absurd hypothetical case making them, don't know, maybe a bit more difficult to handle (though if you remove herd mentality they become small-fries) - people would do what they do with hound waves: hop caves or disconnect. There isn't any incentive to fight them aside, again, from "meme-ing". They aren't necessary for food intake, default worlds are virtually full of food and any player past newbie/noob level doesn't have any problem keeping their bellies full of junk. As some pointed above, you have from WorldGen preset the option to deactivate Frog Rain for a proper starving experience or what your lil heart desires - no need for devs to waste time on some non-issue when they already have problems managing the "pipelining" of new content, delays being quite the norm nowadays.

[Fill-Lips]

Its the only setting I disable, mainly due to my computer being unable to handle the constant mob spawns

[Well-met]

29 minutes ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

Bundle Wraps.

^{get rekt me with no friends to kill bee queen}

well, I'm sure Klei could easily make bundled food rot, so it's likely intended as a way to have bundled wrap not be completely pointless.

[BeliarBAD]

we had yesterday in the first 8 days of spiring 4x frograin. 3 Goose and tallbird setpiece got killed xD

we have therefor 70 dryingracks and chests full with bundled small jerky

[secXsQuared]

13 hours ago, Angibot said:

I agree that frog rains aren't balanced but if you don't care about the game balance in itself and just want to enjoy solo game i'm pretty sure you can disable them via world generation options.

The easiest way to balance it would be to change the Frog in itself to make it eat food that drops from the ground but people would still use it as weapons.

Probably make Goose/Goose have an AOE or it's scream makes frog run away.

Another way would be to have frogs all disappear in ponds or die one day after they land, something like that.

I like the idea of making geese have an AOE attack.

As for garbage collection, it's absurd that there is yet no mechanics in game to permanently remove some items such as figure sketches. They don't burn, they don't disappear after burning a backpack. The only hacky way I can think of is to take advantage of lure plants. But it shouldn't be that hard.

In minecraft, throwing stuff in lava permanently destroys them and things despawn after a while. Maybe in DST make perishable items disappear after a while? Or allow players to throw stuff into dragonfly lava pools?

5 hours ago, BeliarBAD said:

we had yesterday in the first 8 days of spiring 4x frograin. 3 Goose and tallbird setpiece got killed xD

we have therefor 70 dryingracks and chests full with bundled small jerky

Yep

8 hours ago, snugglysnootertoot said:

1. Outright remove a quirky feature in the game that fits in rather well with the overall theme, because "too easy to deal with" and "inventory management"? Might as well remove 90% of the game then because most of it falls under those two descriptions.

2. In other words, remove nearly all danger from frogs. If there is no herd mentality, there is no threat of getting swamped and stunlocked when you hit a frog. Hmm, no thanks.

3. So, what you're asking for here is essentially a hound wave with a frog skin on it. Frankly, I don't feel like that is what the game is missing.

1. Agreed. As I said, since Klei put effort into this, i don't expect it to happen at all.

 

2. I don't feel like frog rains are dangerous. I consider them "food feast". Ofc if one tries to kill a frog they become dangerous, and might stunlock and kill the player but that's not the game's fault? The point is if handled properly the risk vs award is ridiculously unproportional. At least no herd mentality makes, well all mobs/bosses/food in spring far less cheessable.  

 

3. Right that might not be a good suggestion. But I still stand by my point.

10 hours ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

I just usually go in caves since only wetness sucks there.

I do that for hounds most of the time in my mega base because I don't need more hound tooth and I hate them destroying walls. 

Yeah speaking of that, there is also this bug where if a player enters and exits a cave during hound warning, no hounds will spawn.

8 hours ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

Bundle Wraps.

^{get rekt me with no friends to kill bee queen}

Yeah the Bee Queen is a nasty boss - perhaps the only one requiring face tanking. I usually make loads of football helms and healing, then exploit the terrible path finding of her worker bees. Still it's nowhere near an enjoyable fight. The bundling wraps though are kinda essential to me since I hate constantly having to go down caves to get light bulbs.

[Sweaper]

1- c_cleanup = function(prefab) for k, v in pairs(Ents) do if v.prefab == prefab and v.components.inventoryitem and v.components.inventoryitem.owner == nil then v:Remove() end end end

2- c_cleanup"rot" 

 

[Obviousclone]

have you considered making large amounts of drying racks and putting that frog meat to good use

[NoscopeFelix]

2 hours ago, Obviousclone said:

have you considered making large amounts of drying racks and putting that frog meat to good use

[Marthan]

13 hours ago, secXsQuared said:

Yeah the Bee Queen is a nasty boss - perhaps the only one requiring face tanking. I usually make loads of football helms and healing, then exploit the terrible path finding of her worker bees. Still it's nowhere near an enjoyable fight. The bundling wraps though are kinda essential to me since I hate constantly having to go down caves to get light bulbs.

I normally use Catapults to help the fight or strait up use the tentacle cheese, no armor no healing, just watch it die.

(The BQ tentacle cheese could be nerfed by making the tentacles unable of aggro flying mobs...)

 

 

[CaptainChaotica]

Tooth or regular traps + lotsa drying racks = FOOD FOR THE REST OF SPRING!    It's also Wigfrid-Approved, and helps both sanity and health.

Unless you don't have enough resources to make a lot of traps yet, in which case...just keep running.  And hope they don't randomly attack you in a way you can't dodge.  (I randomise my seasons, so yeah, sometimes spring can sneak up on me.)

Speaking of frogs, REALLY DUMB QUESTION, that I'm sure has been asked before but I'm not sure where:  Lately, I've been getting live, whole frogs out of traps instead of just the legs.  Is anybody else getting this, and is it something to do with Wortox's souls?

...Notorious

[BeliarBAD]

1 hour ago, CaptainChaotica said:

Tooth or regular traps + lotsa drying racks = FOOD FOR THE REST OF SPRING!    It's also Wigfrid-Approved, and helps both sanity and health.

Unless you don't have enough resources to make a lot of traps yet, in which case...just keep running.  And hope they don't randomly attack you in a way you can't dodge.  (I randomise my seasons, so yeah, sometimes spring can sneak up on me.)

Speaking of frogs, REALLY DUMB QUESTION, that I'm sure has been asked before but I'm not sure where:  Lately, I've been getting live, whole frogs out of traps instead of just the legs.  Is anybody else getting this, and is it something to do with Wortox's souls?

...Notorious

 

 

so you have to fight them after picking the trap?

[CaptainChaotica]

No...I meant you get a whole frog _in your inventory_, same as when you trap a rabbit.  Now, with a rabbit, I get it--killing them gives you naughtiness points, also you might want them whole for earmuffs (as much sense as THAT makes.  : P) 

Okay, so I tried a completely unmodded, vanilla settings server and THIS time...normal frog legs.  Which tells me it must be a mod, but I have no idea which one or why this particular change.  But, you can see why I thought it might be something to do with Wortox--like, if he can murder a frog himself rather than having it already dead once it's in the trap, he could get its soul that way, right?

Anyway.  TL;DR:  I is a dumb.  : P

...Notorious

[Terra B Welch]

For frog rain against Goose I really feel like they should make Goose's melee AOE frogs and make her never use her honk against mobs, since the honk is only useful on players.

[BeliarBAD]

21 minutes ago, Terra M Welch said:

For frog rain against Goose I really feel like they should make Goose's melee AOE frogs and make her never use her honk against mobs, since the honk is only useful on players.

do hamlet guards?

[Terra B Welch]

13 minutes ago, BeliarBAD said:

do hamlet guards?

I was speaking more in the sense of DST, not hamlet.