Do we need a new season?

[Catteflyterpill]

I've seen plenty of people discussing the need for more challenge and variety to DST and others who think that the game shouldn't be more of a challenge, as its steep learning curve takes a while to climb over. I think that if we added a new season, maybe something after summer this could be at a point where players have to be experienced to make it that far into the game and doesn't make the game complicated for new players. It could also give more veteran players a new experience that they need to prepare for, like with freezing or hounds. With DST's magical elements I'm sure there's a lot of types of 'seasons' that could fit into the game. 

So what do you guys think?

[Thomas Die]

do you mean new types of seasons or more intense seasons, personally i would want the seasons to progressively become more harsh as time passes, or do you mean having a new magical season like the ones in hamlet ?

[Brago-sama]

I'll never turn down free new stuff..... buuuut adding a new season? I don't know. After having our 4 seasons it doesn't feel right to meddle with something so core to the game.

How about, with this new lunar island, it could have new tougher seasons completely separate from the mainland. Satisfies both ends of the spectrum.

[Catteflyterpill]

3 minutes ago, Brago-sama said:

I'll never turn down free new stuff..... buuuut adding a new season? I don't know. After having our 4 seasons it doesn't feel right to meddle with something so core to the game.

How about, with this new lunar island, it could have new tougher seasons completely separate from the mainland. Satisfies both ends of the spectrum.

4 season are actually not core to the game, by literal definition. Don't Starve only has two season, Reign of Giants introduced Spring and Summer (well the intense summer). If they added more before then why not add more now?

[Brago-sama]

7 minutes ago, Catteflyterpill said:

4 season are actually not core to the game, by literal definition. Don't Starve only has two season, Reign of Giants introduced Spring and Summer (well the intense summer). If they added more before then why not add more now?

 

My opinion is that the 4 seasons we have now mesh well with the world. Itd have to be a really in depth season if it were to be added.

I have no counters to this other then I guess I'm just used to what we have now. 

[minespatch]

Ohhhhhhhhh I thought "season" like New Reign.

As for the topic, no idea. I'll have to see what the devs have in mind for the future.

[seffard]

I've always thought that after the atrium gate is open again the world should change somehow, like a trigger to make things more difficult. After all, that's what Fuelweaver has been warning the players about and he's optional anyway. 

For a change in the season I imagine no day phase, only small dusk and longer nights where "them" lurk in the dark. Almost lights out part of the standard mode. 

[Scrimbles]

More challenges being added to subsequent seasons would be preferable.

That way newer players wont be punished harder and veteran players will have something to do after completing a year or two, other than... base building... ugh.

 

(I'm kinda working on a mod that does this shh don't steal my idea)

 

[Ezaroth]

8 minutes ago, Ogrecakes said:

More challenges being added to subsequent seasons would be preferable.

Second this idea. We can imagine a harsher winter with blizzard, harsher spring with flooding/strong winds, and... summer is hard enough.

[SinancoTheBest]

Actually I like the idea to have different seasons off shore. Like after sailing significant distance from the mainland, seasons transforming from autumn winter spring and summer to mild, hurricane, monsoon and dry seasons we have in shipwrecked. It'd add an interesting twist to the upcoming island adventures in my opinion, fittingly giving them more tropic, island seasons over regular mainland seasons. Otherwise I wouldn't like a fifth season after summer.

[Sindex]

I am not sure honestly.  The already established seasons ramping up over a year period I can see that happening (as others have pointed out before).  One of the things I do is turn up lightning in the world modifications section.  Which is interesting where it causes a lightning snow storm combo in winter at times.

[X-lem]

I was actually thinking about this the other day. Glad I'm not the only one. Here's my idea.

 

What about a new Lunar season (to keep with the theme). The difference is it's not consistent. Meaning it doesn't always appear after summer for example. Maybe there's a 5-10% chance a Lunar season can appear in between each season. Maybe weird creatures come to Lunar island and start to build a civalization or something.

[CaptainChaotica]

An  entire other season? I dunno...how would that work, exactly? If it's after summer and is cooler, we'd assume it was part of fall, and if it was even HOTTER (like that Summer of Death I had once in singleplayer*, which I still assume was some kind of glitch), we'd assume it was a nastier branch of summer.  Basically any time the temperature changes it's gonna seem like the game just changed to a different _regular_ season.

The most I can think of is that we could add a new EFFECT to an already existing season, and then players might sometimes call it "the (blank) season" as a nickname...but it wouldn't actually be a seperate thing, if you see what I mean?  For example, we already have "rainy season", although the game files call it "spring". (Aka where the "RAIN of Giants" joke came from.)  So, if we say added some allergy effects that COULD happen _sometimes_ on worse springs, we'd call it "allergy season" like in Hamlet, but it'd still _be_ spring, just a nastier one.  Winds ala Shipwrecked?  I can't really think anywhere else that'd work except spring either. But again, we'd CALL it "the windy season" but it wouldn't _be_ a new season, just a new name.  Blizzards for occasional winters, etc. 

It'd also be neat if there were subtle _hints_ that the upcoming season was gonna be one of the nastier variants and not the regular kind, that experienced players could learn to pick up on.  Stuff like...I dunno, maybe tree branches start blowing around more than usual but it doesn't have an effect on your stuff--YET--shortly before a windy-style spring, or white rabbits start showing up while the lighting, music etc. is still fall, so you know to start preparing for blizzards, that kind of thing.  Like, in real life, if you saw certain animals making extra-thick (not "thicc") walls on their dens, it meant "Get ready for a longer/colder winter than usual"?  Like that.

Of course, I could be biased towards this kind of thing since I play this way already--I _randomise_ my season lengths (and a possible legit length is "zero", so, a season can be entirely skipped, meaning that spring doesn't necessarily ALWAYS follow winter at all!) and love to figure out what's going to happen by just looking at clues from "nature", such as keeping an eye on the birch trees.  But that's just me.  I'm kind of a hippie.

So...I'm not sure how we'd fit in an entirely NEW season into the calendar and have it make sense, but _variations_ on the existing ones, which can only start showing up after the first year?  Sure why not.  : P  Oh, and the seasons changing to the Shipwrecked ones once you get out into the islands?  YES, definitely!  Although I think they should change into their equivalents, rather than random.  LIke, winter becomes monsoon once you're officially Out to Sea, etc.

...Notorious

*I HAD damn thermal stones and endo fires. There were still three of my own corpses in the same area.  THREE CORPSES!  It's like the heat had been turned up from "normal" RoG summer, to "lol we're actually on the surface of Venus and forgot to tell you.  OUR BAD!" or something.

[Scrimbles]

3 hours ago, Ezaroth said:

Second this idea. We can imagine a harsher winter with blizzard, harsher spring with flooding/strong winds, and... summer is hard enough.

Could actually get a giant for summer.

[Maxposting]

2 hours ago, Ogrecakes said:

Could actually get a giant for summer.

Antlion/ Optional Dragonfly...

[Ezaroth]

2 hours ago, Ogrecakes said:

Could actually get a giant for summer.

Antlion emerging in our base instead of making sinkholes.

[Boomsl0l]

I like the idea. Perhaps an event that could be manually triggered to cause the climate to change and morphs existing mobs into more sinister and powerful ones, kind of like werepigs on a full moon.

[Scrimbles]

40 minutes ago, Boomsl0l said:

I like the idea. Perhaps an event that could be manually triggered to cause the climate to change and morphs existing mobs into more sinister and powerful ones, kind of like werepigs on a full moon.

Ugh no more manually triggered difficulty.

The only hard parts of dst are the completely optional bosses and events.

We need more stuff like disease, pertrification, and Antlion sinkholes.

 

Edit: autocorrecting petrification to certification

[Boomsl0l]

I can see your point, and I definitely agree there needs to be more content that you CAN'T avoid/turn on and off, rather than making it optional. Nonetheless I think that an event that would require you to complete a DIFFICULT task to access with unique loot and one that would give the player more goals would be still be cool and healthy for the game.

[Scrimbles]

4 minutes ago, Boomsl0l said:

I can see your point, and I definitely agree there needs to be more content that you CAN'T avoid/turn on and off, rather than making it optional. Nonetheless I think that an event that would require you to complete a DIFFICULT task to access with unique loot and would give the player more goals would be still be cool and healthy for the game.

If it's going to be manually activated I just want it to be like the Antlion, where you can choose to fight it instead of giving it gifts, and the reward is mostly just the fact that it won't cause trouble and waste precious time for the rest of the season.

Take a risk where the payout is survival, not just op loot that is just a trophy more than anything.

[ADM]

Hey... that's actually something good (i just have a little (big) problem with it and I'll tell about it at the end)

Like how they managed to add a new season that is not accessible from the season cycle loop in Hamlet with the Aporkalypse, it could be possible to add a kinda hidden season avalide after reaching an island or something like that, from what is RoT so far, it could be possible.

I think we can have many suggestions to make some big content but... as I said, that thing I'm very concerned about is the world cycle, if a new season appear : the moon and season cycle will be desynchronized from the one we managed to live with and the only way to fix this issue could be to stop the time.

Spoiler

 

When you start your world it's the New Moon, next year on first autumn day, it's a full moon, next one, new moon... You get it,

so unless you active a Winter Trap (And I guarantee you that the first one that open this chest on my sight is gonna having a rough time) your world will always follow this cycle

[Owlrust]

Hmm... Not sure how I feel about that on the surface. However, having seasons in the Caves respective to the outside would be pretty cool though; like a "Damp" season, a "Rocky" season etc. Instead of adding more bosses and difficulty spikes in other areas, why not just make an "End Game" world that's only accessible once you complete long-term challenges? That would give veterans something to look forward to, and would help not to YEET new players that might stop playing the game (or generating as much income to Klei) because the game is to difficult to enjoy.

[Terra B Welch]

I could imagine a season that would occur not by normal means, as in not naturally.

Rather for a set amount of days it would take the place of the current seasons after say... defeating a boss.

During this time the game would still remember what season it should be, so when the event season ends it will resume at whatever day in the season it should be.

Example: Say this special season lasted 30 days and it's day 5 of autumn, you trigger the special season, after the special season ends it would be like... the last day of winter? If not day 1 of spring. Sorry I'm bad at counting days. >.<

[Maxposting]

55 minutes ago, Terra M Welch said:

 

During this time the game would still remember what season it should be, so when the event season ends it will resume at whatever day in the season it should be.

It could be possible to stop every seasonal effect, let the seasons progress in background and then they just reactivate the effects.

[JimmyJam]

I don't think we should add new seasons. But add new things to the seasons we have. Blizzards, mud slides and lots of other stuff.