Time travelling character idea

[blacknight7890]

Had an idea for a time traveler character, since time is funky in the constant it's not impossible that someone may be better at exploiting it than others.

First off, they would have to be single player, kinda hard to do this in multiplayer without messing with other players. They would also have a special clockwork device, that device would be their time machine.

The time machine would have several functions, the first being time travel, obviously. With the device, you can travel forward in time till a chosen time of day, or till a chosen amount of days has passed (up to a hard limit). Ideally, the world would act as if that amount of time had passed, like when sleeping, so you can skip the growth cycle of, whatever you want. When you use it like this, you need to wait that amount of time you traveled for you to do it again, so if you traveled 2 days in the future, you need to wait 2 days for it to recharge, you go forward half a day, you need to wait half a day.

Of course, going forward is all well and good, but that's not why you are here, you want to go backwards. You can do this in two ways, sending yourself backwards, or sending an item backwards. Sending yourself is simple, you can go backwards in time a set amount of days, and when you do the world will revert to how it was during that time, including what your stats were and what items you had. So if your base gets wrecked or you lose valuable items, then you can travel back to before it was wrecked and try again.

You may have noticed that I mentioned sending items into the past, well here's how it works. You can use the time machine on something to receive an item related to it. The item tends to be a good one and at full durability should that be applicable, but once you get the item, you can't receive any more items from the time machine. To get more items you have to feed your time machine that same item but at full durability/amount (likely requiring you to craft or acquire more of that item), which will send it to the past for you to obtain, a sort of time loop mechanic. You can send it any time after you receive the item, but you need to send it before you can receive another item. The items you get are context sensitive, if you use it on yourself, you will get a good item related to the season you are in (sans any boss items) you can also use it on yourself in a cave to get a good light item like a lantern or a bunch of light bulbs. Use it on a fridge and you will get a good food item, use it on a campfire and you will get a bunch of logs, things like that. You of course need to collect these items anyway and then send them away, so you're not actually getting free stuff.

Of course the realm between time is not one for mortal minds and your sanity will suffer harshly when time traveling. If you don't have enough sanity, then your character will refuse to use it. Receiving and sending items however is done sanity free.

Not sure what other down/up sides they would have, but I just wanted to share this neat idea I had to the world. If I could mod I would make it, but I can't. It isn't perfect obviously and I have no idea how hard it would be to code, but it be cool nonetheless.

[Canis]

I have mixed feelings about this. While yeh, it's cool to get a convenient item in a time of need, I feel like it'd be super duper easy to exploit the system and just break everything. 

For example, whats stopping you from doing the following?:

1- Use Time machine, get, lets say 20 logs.

2- Go back a minute

3- Repeat step 1 and 2 until you have hundreds of logs.

4 - Take 20 logs out of your hundreds and put into time machine.

[blacknight7890]

12 hours ago, Canis said:

I have mixed feelings about this. While yeh, it's cool to get a convenient item in a time of need, I feel like it'd be super duper easy to exploit the system and just break everything. 

For example, whats stopping you from doing the following?:

1- Use Time machine, get, lets say 20 logs.

2- Go back a minute

3- Repeat step 1 and 2 until you have hundreds of logs.

4 - Take 20 logs out of your hundreds and put into time machine.

The machine would remember that you got a boon from it even if you travel back, so idealy you wouldn't be able to do that. Plus you have to wait double that amount of time you went back, if you kept going back to that time after every recharge, the recharge time would grow exponentially till it reaches the limit. Actualy now that I think about it, I think it should just go back a set amout of days instead of a variable amount, it's probably better like that

Not sure how to handel traveling to the past honestly, it could just revert you to what you had and what your stats were at that time, like a rollback, which is probably easy. Or it could keep what you have when you traveled, but then you lose what you had before, unless it dropped everything except duplicates, but that could be easily exploited to get infinite items and would be hard to prevent. Theres also the option of doing that, but instead of replacing yourself, your past self is still going about doing what you did before, which would be cool, and there could be a sort of paradox mechanic thing, where messing with things that you will do, would do something bad, but that sound hard to make. Recording everything you did and messed with for a game that wasnt designed for that, can't be easy. So it would probably just be the first idea, using the time machine as a sort of singleplayer rollback. What do you think?

[Canis]

13 hours ago, blacknight7890 said:

The machine would remember that you got a boon from it even if you travel back, so idealy you wouldn't be able to do that. Plus you have to wait double that amount of time you went back, if you kept going back to that time after every recharge, the recharge time would grow exponentially till it reaches the limit. Actualy now that I think about it, I think it should just go back a set amout of days instead of a variable amount, it's probably better like that

Not sure how to handel traveling to the past honestly, it could just revert you to what you had and what your stats were at that time, like a rollback, which is probably easy. Or it could keep what you have when you traveled, but then you lose what you had before, unless it dropped everything except duplicates, but that could be easily exploited to get infinite items and would be hard to prevent. Theres also the option of doing that, but instead of replacing yourself, your past self is still going about doing what you did before, which would be cool, and there could be a sort of paradox mechanic thing, where messing with things that you will do, would do something bad, but that sound hard to make. Recording everything you did and messed with for a game that wasnt designed for that, can't be easy. So it would probably just be the first idea, using the time machine as a sort of singleplayer rollback. What do you think?

That sounds.... impossible.

[blacknight7890]

1 minute ago, Canis said:

That sounds.... impossible.

not impossible, other games have kind of done it before, but certainly hard, that's why i was thinking about it just being a rollback. don't starve together already has the rollback thing but you can't really do a character like this in DST so keeping the daily save the game makes for a bit longer, instead of whatever they do with it now, for this character shouldn't be *that* hard.

[G-Forces]

I like the forward travel part of this idea but not the backward travel part

[inferjus4]

Game would crash at some point because it would have to remember game states for every second. In DST you have only a few savepoints, there you would have a amount.