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Poison Birchnut Trees are easy to fight


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Unpopular opinion go go go!

Prologue:

A lot of people are upset that Woodie's rework will include a higher chance to get leifs and poison birchnuts. That got me wondering if tree guards really are that bad. Leifs (evergreen guards) can easily be outrun, and by the time they catch up, Woodie will be done with that side of the forest and can go back to where the leif came from and chop the rest of the trees there. But Poison Birchnuts?

Playtest:

I had never fought a Poison Birchnut in DST before, so I spawned one in just a few minutes ago to see what it's like. I gave myself Wood Armour, an Axe, and a Tentacle Spike.

Turns out tentacle spikes one-shot the drake minions, so most of the fight was just 1) whack drake with tentacle spike 2) dodge thorny root 3) chop a few times 4) repeat. The only hits I took was early on, when the birchnut released a drake wave. But with the ability to one-shot them as they jump at me, it was only marginally more difficult than fighting a group of spiders.

Thus, I decided to try a less prepared fight: Wood Armour, Axe, Spear;

Slow as they may be, drakes have a ridiculous attack range, dodging them is basically impossible. Luckily, they deal very little damage, so I could just face-tank them, so long as I dodged the much more dangerous thorny roots. I still got hit by those on occasion, but emerged victorious nevertheless, with half of the log suit used up, but less than 50 health points lost.

Additional Insights:

The health loss is not so bad. Trail Mix can be cooked using two of the birchnuts dropped by the drakes, and two berries, (one birchnut can be swapped with a twig as filler, which are also dropped by drakes), granting me a total of 150 healing via food in my second playtest. In fact, I now entertain the possibility of keeping a Poison Birchnut Tree around for mass-producing birchnuts during all seasons.

Poison Birchnut Trees can only spawn from medium-sized birchnut trees, within 8 ground tiles of the chopped tree, and only if those have leaves. This could be helpful for avoiding the Poison Birchnuts altogether.

Conclusion:

A Poison Birchnut Tree is not particularly difficult to fight, and can be dodged easily unless it gets provoked to release the drake wave. Further, I speculate a second player would make the fight a cakewalk. However, when just trying to gather some logs, it is more annoying than a Leif because it is stationary, and it is less helpful than Leifs because it is instantly destroyed by most giants.

 

Please let me know what you think!

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19 minutes ago, Mooagain said:

Poison Birchnut trees despawn if you walk away from them.

You're right, I did not know this. Reading the code, it seems that only works roughly 3 to 5 minutes after they spawned. So about half an in-game day.

With this insight, I must confess, these fellows seem entirely harmless. If one wants the living log, one can fight them. Else, ignore them and go away a bit. Even with the drakes, it only reaches for two to three ground tiles, so one can safely chop almost all the surrounding trees. Should the drakes try to attack, outrunning them is no problem. How laughable.

Thank you for this information, Mooagain! :love_heart:

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2 hours ago, Ezaroth said:

Try fighting 3 Poison Birchnuts at once.

This.

To me at least (and im not sure if I have bad luck) but i tend to always get at least 2, and sometimes 3 poison birchnut trees, which usually forces me to leave the area altogether until they despawn.

I think woodie will now have a hard time harvesting birchnut trees for wood, specially in the late game. 

But on the bright side, you could summon them just to kill the tiny birchnutters over and over, and get alot of seeds for the trail mix, which is not that bad of a drawback.

Spoiler

If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, eh?

 

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My thing is that they're not hard to fight - they're annoying to deal with.

Considering how:

  • you can't really fight them off without taking some damage
  • they have a higher spawn rate in autumn (3% on days 4- 20 and up to 16% on 71+. note: treeguards only has a 1.33% chance from spawning on days 4-20)
  • they emerge in groups 
  • annoying to chop down if you don't want to face tank
  • can't be pacified
  • etc.

 

TL;DR Poison birchnuts suck

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5 hours ago, ShadowDuelist said:

But on the bright side, you could summon them just to kill the tiny birchnutters over and over, and get alot of seeds for the trail mix, which is not that bad of a drawback.

This though.
If I'm doing multiple things in the area, I try and get other mobs to enter the warzone. Walk by now and then, pick up the loot. Great if pigs or spiders are nearby. Heck, the tree even kills unlucky birds with its roots sometimes.

They're a bit of an inconvenience of course, but it's a trade-off. The Werebeaver can take them down fairly quickly with enhanced 'chopping'; this might be built upon further with the update, depending on how the various forms work. Same also applies to Glass Axe or Warly honey crystal shenanigans; chop chop, then they drop. Hyuyu.
Safety is traded for speed in handling, as opposed to a regular Treeguard, which has a very safe kiting pattern, but is more time consuming.

 

...of course, if you just want it to go away, there's always Willow's way.

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18 minutes ago, minespatch said:

Crazy but great weapon.

...it's honestly really satisfying to use. One of the great pleasures of a decently established world is just
piling up weather pains to spam
and watching anything that dares to stand in the path to progress  s u f f e r

But yea, they are pretty great for the angery weeds.

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Well harvesting poison birchnut trees with Woodie is kindoff a funny case you see. If you are already in beaver and chopping trees. You can see the poison birchnut trees pop up and do their little screeching animation. But while they are mid animation you can walk right up to them and gnaw them down before they do much more than spawn maybe a few nutters. If you are VERY fast and the tree happens to spawn on top of you. I remember being able to gnaw it down before it can even spawn in any nutters at all. It just depends on how fast you react. However new Woodie/beaver may make this different so we'll see.

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While I agree that poison birchnut trees aren't the most difficult thing in the world...

10 hours ago, Mobbstar said:

I had never fought a Poison Birchnut in DST before, so I spawned one in just a few minutes ago to see what it's like.

This is rarely ever a good environment for testing how things will work in an actual gameplay session. Spawning in a poison birchnut tree allows you to fight it in a very controlled environment, where you don't have to worry about anything except the fight. It doesn't take into account stuff like rain, sanity, what day you're on, the time of day (poison birchnuts are hell to deal with during the night), the amount of players, the season, the fact that multiple poison birchnuts will likely awaken at once, the material cost for weapons and armor, etc etc. "This is too easy because I did it in a test world" is the reasoning everyone gave for wanting Winona's catapults to be nerfed, despite taking effort to craft, build, and arguably to fuel in actual gameplay.

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16 hours ago, Mobbstar said:

Unpopular opinion go go go!

Prologue:

A lot of people are upset that Woodie's rework will include a higher chance to get leifs and poison birchnuts. That got me wondering if tree guards really are that bad. Leifs (evergreen guards) can easily be outrun, and by the time they catch up, Woodie will be done with that side of the forest and can go back to where the leif came from and chop the rest of the trees there. But Poison Birchnuts?

Playtest:

I had never fought a Poison Birchnut in DST before, so I spawned one in just a few minutes ago to see what it's like. I gave myself Wood Armour, an Axe, and a Tentacle Spike.

Turns out tentacle spikes one-shot the drake minions, so most of the fight was just 1) whack drake with tentacle spike 2) dodge thorny root 3) chop a few times 4) repeat. The only hits I took was early on, when the birchnut released a drake wave. But with the ability to one-shot them as they jump at me, it was only marginally more difficult than fighting a group of spiders.

Thus, I decided to try a less prepared fight: Wood Armour, Axe, Spear;

Slow as they may be, drakes have a ridiculous attack range, dodging them is basically impossible. Luckily, they deal very little damage, so I could just face-tank them, so long as I dodged the much more dangerous thorny roots. I still got hit by those on occasion, but emerged victorious nevertheless, with half of the log suit used up, but less than 50 health points lost.

Additional Insights:

The health loss is not so bad. Trail Mix can be cooked using two of the birchnuts dropped by the drakes, and two berries, (one birchnut can be swapped with a twig as filler, which are also dropped by drakes), granting me a total of 150 healing via food in my second playtest. In fact, I now entertain the possibility of keeping a Poison Birchnut Tree around for mass-producing birchnuts during all seasons.

Poison Birchnut Trees can only spawn from medium-sized birchnut trees, within 8 ground tiles of the chopped tree, and only if those have leaves. This could be helpful for avoiding the Poison Birchnuts altogether.

Conclusion:

A Poison Birchnut Tree is not particularly difficult to fight, and can be dodged easily unless it gets provoked to release the drake wave. Further, I speculate a second player would make the fight a cakewalk. However, when just trying to gather some logs, it is more annoying than a Leif because it is stationary, and it is less helpful than Leifs because it is instantly destroyed by most giants.

 

Please let me know what you think!

Or just be woodie and kill it in 3 gnaws. *sip*

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Poison Birchnuts?  You mean unprocessed charcoal?  I despise them so much I just don't chop them. I use them solely for charcoal.  Can't be a pain to fight if you never give them the chance to spawn.  When starting a new world and I hit that Deciduous biome from exploration, boy oh its like a California Wildfire.

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They're too dangerous for Maxwell's puppets. If you don't run away fast enough when it appears you can kiss your puppets goodbye. Really not worth to fight as Max for only 2 living logs.

Everyone else might fair alright against PBs but they're still way more annoying than Treeguards and not as safe to kill.

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1 minute ago, SouthTom said:

They're too dangerous for Maxwell's puppets.

Ok, yea, this I get. As Max, I have a tendency to just...slowly dwindle away the Birch population. Cut or burn them all over time. Plant any Birchnuts I happen to get in one tight area, light it up whenever I want a stack or two of Char.
The Shadow Puppets have really dumb pathing and it's just easier to maneuver them around Treeguards.

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