What's The Hardest Season?

[GetRektKids]

I've always wondered this because alot of people have different issues with other seasons that others may not. For me Summer is my worst season

Here's Why:

I think summer is the worst. Mostly because you have three options. Make flingomatics and be tethered to them at all times to make sure they don't run out of fuel, stay in the oasis (This is an okay method) But in my opinion, it's grody unless there are useful biomes nearby, Or Cave base which is my favorite but it also requires an entirely new base. Therefore it gets rid of exploration (Excluding caves) because you are always overheating (Unless ice Chester, or that weird summer jacket thing but the good one) It just seem like to many steps to be able to live, that's why I think it's the hardest.

 

Discuss:

[ArubaroBeefalo]

you can also carry nitre, grass and a thermal stone with eyebrella

luxury fan its also a good choice to turn off wildfire and cold yourself

[1bubbainpa]

Summer is not hard, it’s just irritatingly boring to the point where we reserve cave exploration until then.

[Terra B Welch]

39 minutes ago, 1bubbainpa said:

Summer is not hard, it’s just irritatingly boring to the point where we reserve cave exploration until then.

ikr, when I get really late into a world I just want to build. >.<

What else am I going to do with that giant stockpile of wood I got from bearger tearing a forest to shreds?

But summer be wanting to burn it all to the ground.

[GetNerfedOn]

The worst part for me about summer is having to deal with all the spoiling stuff in your iceboxes.

Only in Summer do you have to do this.

[MrNaxeros]

I kinda like summer... I don't really know why. Maybe because caves are safe from rain and freezing. There's already enough things to worry about down there. Also, I like fighting the Antlion. I turn bully into bullied and laugh at his attempts to destroy my stuff. Still, I always turn off wildfires and hate maintaining that one flingomatic to keep my plants from withering.

I despise spring though. I am essentialy locked to eyebrella, can't really go to caves and frogs just force me out of my base and any mob farm.

[GetRektKids]

I agree with pretty much everyone here. Summer isn't hard, it's just the hardest season out of all of them. 

[Sweaper]

It's autumn, too many people alive. People equals trouble. Change my mind.

[Well-met]

I find most players don't really know how to handle summer because there's caves. They've never learned it since they can just click on the nearest sinkhole and bypass it all. Every single time.

no-caves are the best servers.

[NSAiswatchingus]

Summer on the surface is the most difficult, but since one can just retreat to the caves it's no issue. 

That's why I voted for Spring. Unless you took down Deerclops in Winter, GOOD LUCK with the rain! Even in my main world I still fear frog rains wiping out my Houndious(s). And don't even get me started on the yearly Goosemoosecaboose genocide each year to save my walls. Spring is definitely the hardest, or at least most annoying, season. 

[Eggceptional]

Summer, by a long shot. Not too difficult, just boring as your exploration options are limited. Of all the summer options caving is the most viable, but it takes a bit of courage for a new player. 

Also if you're like me, constantly moving around and stuck playing DST on a potato half the time, you tend to turn off the caves half the time, which inevitably means you're stuck on the surface until your goldfish brain gets the better of you and you start a new server but i digress lol

[ArubaroBeefalo]

20 minutes ago, Well-met said:

I find most players don't really know how to handle summer because there's caves. They've never learned it since they can just click on the nearest sinkhole and bypass it all. Every single time.

no-caves are the best servers.

i deal with summer stuff when im not farming cool stuff in the ruins 

[Ezaroth]

Summer because there's just too many stuffs going on. Overheating, smoldering, Antlion, plants wilting, fire hounds, increased food spoilage...

[Axelocke]

The hardest season must be winter since nobody ever wants to stay for it! /s 

[CameoAppearance]

Summer is somewhat harder to deal with than winter because of the sandstorm and the antlion, plus the whole wildfire thing, but what really makes it more grueling than winter is that all it really has going for it is cactus flowers and blueprints for the Lazy Deserter whereas winter has MacTusks and, if you like farming blowdart materials, snowbird feathers. At least the music's nice.

[Maxil20]

Honestly most of the seasons have something that forces you to play in a way that’s fun the first time and not so much 2000+ days in.

Fall

• The only season that has nothing related to the weather getting in your way by a significant amount. Rain happens, but I’ve never had issues of it being a torrent like spring, and unlike spring you can’t get frogs from it.
• Fire hounds, which means having one die in a decorative area by a mob is going to have huge consequences if something is flammable in there. It’s still manageable though, since you get 30 seconds in advance.

Winter

• You better hope you have zero plans for building or turf digging for the next 2 hours once autumn ends, otherwise those plans will be massively more difficult (unless you use a mod, which while I don’t use I know of people who use it just to remove the white blanket, since it’s a massive strain on the eyes and another issue of winter in general).
• The natural season of Deerclops, who will make you regret forgetting a timer, and also the fact this is the only time you can get it’s eyeball for crafting so you really can’t miss it either.
• Pretty much the entire existence of pengulls, the bane of land edge wall decor.

Spring

• The entirety of moose goose arriving and destroying mobs + walls within an 8 meter radius, also not mentioning the fact that these spawned moose goose’s can move away from the nest and smack things far further then they normally can. They also can cause desyncs in rain cycles because of how the eggs trigger a lightning bolt when they spawn.
• Lureplants can spawn, gobbling up items you left on natural turf and are one of the primary reasons I don’t use much natural turf (the other being world regrowth).
• Frog rain, which is easily one of my least favorite mechanics in the game. Aside from forcing you to annoyingly move and drop items if you don’t these guys are capable of wanting to lick everything alive. I’ve lost clockworks from this, and I really like keeping clockworks around for the late game, since they do look neat and they are some fun endgame decor.
• Lightning strikes, and while it’s entirely possible to divert these with the good ranges of the lightning rod is not enough to prevent the random road strikes, and if you forget you can potentially lose stacks of flammable items. They are also pretty infamous for ruining goat pens when you don’t notice it.

Summer

• You are practically restricted to caves or the oasis, especially if you don’t plan on playing with flingos or the reliability of lureplants.
• Antlion’s sinkholes can cause major issues, especially in the oasis itself. Thankfully it is one of the few issues that you can dispatch pretty easily, so that’s something.
• If you decide to use the oasis you have to deal with the sandstorm, which is harassing and not having them will massively cripple any oasis activity.
• Fire hounds are boosted in this season by 50%, raising their total to 75% of all of the hounds to be fire hounds. (Fun fact, this is the only time in the game where the elemental hound chance is augmented in some way, by default it’s 50% past day 100+). This makes them a far greater risk, but if it’s summer you probably are not near anything important anyways, and it synergies well with darts.

I think I got most of my issues down. In general, 3/4 of the seasons have problems that while are not too are still a massive block in some ways or another. If I had to choose, it would probably be summer. I can’t stand the constant fear of smoldering incidents hitting something important and having it entirely go ablaze. Spring is definitely my main gripe one, but that’s mainly because I have had poor experiences with it quite a bit, especially with lureplants.

[Lennard]

I have about 419 hours on DST and to me, it's winter. Now sure, if you are playing alone or with some good friends pretty much any season is easy. But I play on public servers a lot and winters are really brutal. People usually get their base going on the 10th-15th day. Most people can't grow the first batch of grass, berries or saplings they planted. People have a very bad shortage of twigs and grass most of the time. Wick can't just grow limitless food with characters like wormwood and everyone is usually just stuck at having no insulation at all. Oh and we never have enough thermals for everyone.

[Mike23Ua]

I can’t answer this question fairly because I don’t play this game with default settings.

For example my Summer goes like this- Theres No Ice to build Ice Chester, Ice-Flingo-Matic, Deerclops is turned Off so your not Relying on its Eye for help either, Oh and cave basing?? Forget it, Caves are toggled off too.

Why? Because I actually LIKE a challenge- and the game could use more options for that, not FORCED Content that you have no choice in dealing with.

[PigsonReal]

I get bored out of my mind in Spring since it's just raining most of the time, and I rarely even get lureplants to play around with

[-Variant]

No season for me is hard, because I'm a god at the game.

[Rinkusan]

I dunno. "No season for me is hard, because I'm a god at the game" sounds like a pretty hard season. 

[SinancoTheBest]

Autumn is plain, Winter is slow and kinda boring, Summer is fun and challenging, Spring is Infuriating.

Spring in DST is the worst season imo, not necessarily because it's hard- after all just an umbrella and a football helmet will end all your worries about wetness, it also makes plants grow insanely fast and everything is weak to electric damage. But the unending rain, occasional frog rains and the fact that every animal in the nature hates you in this season is awful; worst, unlike Summer and Winter, it's a 20 day season on the default setting.

I just board a boat and do my seafaring adventures in this season, that is the best way to spend it imo, certainly not the most efficient way to spend it as realistically you should be farming  at least you'll be far away from the annoying shenanigans of the season.

[GetRektKids]

Hmm...... 

I hate to say it, but these arguments are valid. You guys are ALMOST swaying my opinion. I still think Summer is the hardest season, but it looks like spring is a close 2nd!

 

I can see why it can be the most annoying because of frog rain, and Moosey Goosey and her Mooselings. 

 

Moose Goose: I don't base near Moose Goose spawns, and I don't make "megabases" very often so that's not a worry. 

 

Frog Rain: The past 237 times I've made it to spring, I've had frog rain maybe once or twice? The last frog rain I remember was last year sometime. Guess I just get lucky \__("/)__/

[Seot]

Winter since its the hardest to prepare for with lots of ppl and it has the most dangerous giant. Summer you have the caves

[CaptainChaotica]

On 1/31/2020 at 11:57 AM, NSAiswatchingus said:

Summer on the surface is the most difficult, but since one can just retreat to the caves it's no issue. 

That's why I voted for Spring. Unless you took down Deerclops in Winter, GOOD LUCK with the rain!

Umbrella and football hat.  I know it's not as cool as having an eyebrella, but it works.

On 1/31/2020 at 1:50 PM, Maxil20 said:

• You are practically restricted to caves or the oasis, especially if you don’t plan on playing with flingos or the reliability of lureplants.
• Fire hounds are boosted in this season by 50%, raising their total to 75% of all of the hounds to be fire hounds.

Nope.  I just had a 25 (? I think?) day summer and I dealt with not having a flingomatic by going walkabouts on the surface the entire time.  My food all spoiled, my bird died  and I almost ran out of crucial supplies myself a few times, but it was oddly kinda fun.  DEADLY ROAD-TRIP, WHOOO! (You can tell I actually kinda _enjoyed_ it in a contrary kind of way, if you look at pages 72 and 73 of the Screenshot Showcase thread.  I ended up with about 20 screenshots from the same summer.)

Story about fire hounds in the summer:

Spoiler

I'd totally believe that about on the hounds, though.  Hoo, boy.  Did I ever tell you guys about the time it was just striking a really-short summer dusk when the hounds attacked, and I just BARELY managed to lead them to two large spider nests, then got out of there by lighter-light and made a blue fire where I _thought_ was far enough away...only to be STARTLED OUT OF MY WITS when a hound just _chomped_ me straight out of the darkness, and after I got done audibly "AAA!"ing in real life, I realised _six_ hounds were left after the battle with the spiders and ALL of them--ALL!--were fire hounds?

Well I've told you now.  : P

(Fortunately there were also beefalo just to the northeast.  These guys picked the WRONG savannah to attack.)

Not EVERYbody goes to the caves the second it gets hot!  I don't know how well it works with more than one player on the server at a time, but grass and nitre + umbrella + thermal stone will see ya through.  If you're careful. 

(story here about how I almost died last summer because stupid)

Spoiler

Me, on my recent Long Summer, I was being _so careful_ about the GRASS component of that, since, ya know, withering, that I somehow lost track of the _nitre_ and suddenly found myself getting a heat haze around me IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT, under a cherry tree, with a straw hat (and no umbrella since I had to use the lighter).  I'm pretty damn sure that if I hadn't been playing as Willow _and_ been incredibly lucky to find a nitre-bearing rock in the Cherry Forest itself, I WOULD have died.

I have enough flingos to cover my base and the surrounding burnables now...I THINK.  It's kind of a shame, though, in a way.  The wandering travelogue summers are more _fun_ . But at least I'll be on hand to feed the poor bird.

On 1/31/2020 at 2:04 PM, Mike23Ua said:

I can’t answer this question fairly because I don’t play this game with default settings.

For example my Summer goes like this- Theres No Ice to build Ice Chester, Ice-Flingo-Matic, Deerclops is turned Off so your not Relying on its Eye for help either, Oh and cave basing?? Forget it, Caves are toggled off too.

Why? Because I actually LIKE a challenge- and the game could use more options for that, not FORCED Content that you have no choice in dealing with.

I think you and I are vaguely both on the same page, or at least reading the same chapter, when it comes to the kinds of challenges we prefer--the whole person-versus-NATURE kinda deal.  I do leave ice (but rarely find GEARS for a fling-o before the first summer kicks in), caves (which I rarely even use) and Deerclops (whom I tend to spawn away from my camp and forget unless I think I have a good chance of actually killing him) on, but I randomise the seasons in the world options at the beginning, then use a mod to make them randomise AGAIN every year. 

(How to Deal with Randomised Seasons, the Chaotica Way)

Spoiler

Since "0" is a valid number and birch trees are technically green in both spring and summer, you can jump straight from freezing to overheating sometimes!  You gotta be clever and not only keep birch trees near camp, but do stuff like noticing how many days in to the next season you're still overheating/freezing sometimes, or how close to the _end_ of a season you start doing that, and how long the dusks are getting...I knew I was in for something special recently when I _shivered_ on the first two nights of summer and it took MANY days for the dusk to even _start_ being super-short.  

Still, for all my problems with DST summer, I've kinda come to a grudging respect for it. It's like, "Okay, I see you, Mother Nature.  I get it.  You gotta be you.  I respect that."

On 2/4/2020 at 12:18 AM, Rinkusan said:

I dunno. "No season for me is hard, because I'm a god at the game" sounds like a pretty hard season. 

See, that's the SECRET _fifth_ season.  Only the coolest of players have any idea how to get to the part of the world-settings menu where it resides.  I am not one of those cool players.  : P

("Camp One-Foot-in-the-Grave" and its epic (?) springs:)

Spoiler

Now, Spring...I know I've mentioned my favourite old server ("Camp One-Foot-in-the-Grave") where I randomised the seasons only the once that the unmodded game does...do you know what kind of springs I ended up with?  FIFTY.  DAYS. Every single year.  It was cold.  And rainy. And froggy and lureplanty.  (The damn things kept eating my tooth traps until I finally put carpet under them!)  And yes, ANNOYING.  But it got to the point where after a while, it felt like the spring neutral mobs acted _knew_ me and didn't back away at all when I went by.  (I know this isn't a real mechanic, but it was still funny.)  Did I mention I was playing as Wigfrid and usually also had a spear out?  XD 

This world was also my current best, however, at a total of 613 days and it only ended because glitch.  AND it had 40 day winters every year, the very longest THAT season can naturally be, so that tells you how I do with winter.  (Autumn and summer were both totally normal.)  So I guess overall that "planet"'s climate skewed more towards the cold/wet.  (Insert joke about your favourite rainy location to joke about here.)

(Random spring ramblings)

Spoiler

Spring is also the season that FIGHTS ITSELF!--like, every single thing is out to kill every other thing, or just _looking_ for the first opportunity to get mad at them.  The number of screenshots I've taken where mutliple-species chaos is happening on-screen possibly also amidst rain and/or lightning that could just be called "Ah, spring!" is...well, a LOT of my spring screenshots.  

This can be to your advantage, however, especially if you're playing alone and caught away from base when  hounds attack--you have your _choice_ of what to lead them to, and almost all of them will dispatch the hounds as soon as they come in range.  This is also why I leave Mama Goose alive, if she's far enough away from base not to be a direct/constant nuisance...she is an AMAZING hound-removal service, and works all season long, for free. 

Spring is ALSO also the season of the most INSANE scenes where so many things are going wrong/crazy at once that it's HILARIOUS, and you gotta laugh even while you're dying.  I remember this one pair of Let's Players' first encounter with full-force spring, and even as their base was coming down in shambles around them they were lauging their heads off!  My most Epic Death Ever happened in spring, with a number of bad things all happening at once that was so high, it was _cartoonish_.  Spring is, at least, never dull!  For me anyway.  And my own most recent frog rain happened on the _very_ last day of the season, meaning I started my 25-day summer with "The Frogs of Summer" squelching around my camp.

When I came back there were a BUNCH of spoiling frog legs amongst the tooth traps.  XD

But my vote still goes to summer 'cos even though spring still has way harsher weather than you'd think, being "Oh, phew, we're done with winter, it's gonna warm up now, right?"  (tosses winter coat in closet)...it doesn't have wildfires.  Deerclops doesn't burn down half the map when he smashes things, and neither does Bearger.  So my final vote is still gonna have to be summer.

...Notorious