Disease Rework

[Kelloggs Dogfry]

Disease as it currently stands is an untelegraphed nuisance that can have some unsatisfactory consequences on longer running worlds. With a few changes to the mechanic, I think it can become a slightly more interactive mechanic, without a blunt and boring consequence of losing a plant forever. 
Ideas in Spoiler:

Spoiler

Telegraph: a plant that is beginning to get sick will slowly gain discoloration at the edges of the plant, and will have discolored produce if applicable (such as berries that are already stale). When fully diseased it will have the normal diseased look already present. Additionally, any adjacent plants have a chance to have contracted the disease but remain asymptomatic for a certain amount of time before becoming sick.

Combating Disease: Instead of destroying the plant, digging up a fully diseased one will return a fragment of the plant that can be replanted and will slowly regrow into the original plant and then go through the normal growth cycle. This will still punish for negligence, but not slowly destroy the world’s resource for someone who doesn’t want to bother with them at least for a while. Digging up a partially diseased plant has a 50/50 chance to return the full plant or a fragment, allowing players to gamble a little. 
The other method of fighting disease is through creating a spray that can cure a partially diseased/asymptomatic plant, and can make healthy plants strong and immune to disease for a number of days. The can can be created through gold, nitre, and corn. It will have X number of uses and can spray an area around the point of clicking. This creates a dynamic where planting near allows for easy spraying to defend, but also planting a bit further apart prevents disease from spreading to a bunch of plants at once. With the mechanics being less punishing, telegraphed, and more interactive, this can allow for things such as disease effecting all plants and just not transposed ones, and even things such as spring being a time when plants are more vulnerable.

Guano: Guano should keep its place as a very potent fertilizer, but it should also have a small small chance to cause illness in the plants that it is used in. Also, I believe that guano should gain additional functionality in being able to be refined into nitre to help with the new spray crafting and more. 
 

Bird Cage: To help with potential additional vulnerability, crafting cans, and to make farming more worthwhile, I think the birds can also use a slight touch up. Maybe certain birds can have a guaranteed chance of dropping two of a particular kind of seed when fed with the additional chance of a third/generic seed. 

Anybody have ideas how to improve these thoughts or a better idea for disease overall? I really would like for wildfires and disease to be slightly touched on as they are two of my very few complaints of the game.

[OMGkawaiiAngel]

I always leave this off, i won't even bother. Plus if there was some kind of medicine for the plants, yeah sure but still if you had to apply it on each and every one of them.. just leave it off instead 

[Sinister_Fang]

Disease is a relic of the resource rotating mechanic. It should have died with the rest of that system instead of being shoehorned in for no reason. It serves no purpose other then to destroy nonrenewable resources.

[NSAiswatchingus]

I always turn disease off, but I think people would be more okay it if there was some way to "cure" a diseased plant. Digging it up would still destroy it, but maybe something like Glommer Goop could make diseased plants healthy again. 

[Kelloggs Dogfry]

Yeah removal all together is a very feasible thing at this point, but I’m just more thinking if it were to stay. The smaller but still sizable gripe being how it’s just an invisible all of a sudden attack on resources, and the fact that it’s just gone for good after that.

[ShadowDuelist]

1 hour ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

Maybe something like Glommer Goop could make diseased plants healthy again. 

This please.

Or maybe as it was mentioned before, a potion to cure disease that we can splash several plants around the infected one, sort like a water baloon, but made out of a couple of ingredients (glommer goop does sound reasonable to be part of the ingredients). 
My settings in every world are always default, except for disease off in both caves and surface. If the way they implement to deal with disease is not simple enough, I'd continue to leave it off.

[Well-met]

Disease exists to reward players that actively adventure out there to gather what they need, each time. Shoveling the entire savana into your back garden shouldn't be a direct upgrade and disease is the proper trade-off.

[Mike23Ua]

25 minutes ago, Well-met said:

Disease exists to reward players that actively adventure out there to gather what they need, each time. Shoveling the entire savana into your back garden shouldn't be a direct upgrade and disease is the proper trade-off.

I play this game by going directly to an items source and plucking it there, I’ve never dig up every berry Bush in the entire game and planted them at my base.

5 or 6 bushes do just fine.

It Reduces lag in the area AND it makes the game more challenging.

Disease to me is no worse then Wildfires.. and If people are seriously suggesting Water Balloons as the cure, why the heck wouldn’t an Ice-Fling be able to provide the same results?

and at that point why have disease at all??? It’s just To me a reskinned version of Wildfires.

I always leave Wildfires on.. but Disease is meh..

MAYBE if it effected Batilisks and could infect humans, But that would sound too much like the worlds current real life problem sooooo yeah.

And Also Animal mobs still spontaneously combust on fire in Summer so- Disease would still serve very little purpose.

But maybe other people see it differently... it’s a GOOD alternative to Wildfires for CAVES.... because Fires don’t start in Caves..

But outside of that- Meh.

[OMGkawaiiAngel]

Just now, Mike23Ua said:

I play this game by going directly to an items source and plucking it there, I’ve never dig up every berry Bush in the entire game and planted them at my base.

5 or 6 bushes do just fine.

It Reduces lag in the area AND it makes the game more challenging.

Disease to me is no worse then Wildfires.. and If people are seriously suggesting Water Balloons as the cure, why the heck wouldn’t an Ice-Fling be able to provide the same results?

and at that point why have disease at all??? It’s just To me a reskinned version of Wildfires.

I always leave Wildfires on.. but Desease is meh..

MAYBE if it effected Batilisks and could infect humans, But that would sound too much like the worlds current real life problem sooooo yeah.

And Also Animal mobs still spontaneously combust on fire in Summer so- Disease would still serve very little purpose.

But maybe other people see it differently... it’s a GOOD alternative to Wildfires for CAVES.... because Fires don’t start in Caves..

But outside of that-

hey! do not jinx anything!

[Superlucas1231]

My problem with disease is just the fact that it's whole existence makes me feel either annoyed that I have to babysit the base or even more annoyed that it's a mechanic that's pointless to turn on in the first place. 

7 hours ago, Kelloggs Dogfry said:

Disease as it currently stands is an untelegraphed nuisance that can have some unsatisfactory consequences on longer running worlds. With a few changes to the mechanic, I think it can become a slightly more interactive mechanic, without a blunt and boring consequence of losing a plant forever. 
Ideas in Spoiler:

  Hide contents

Telegraph: a plant that is beginning to get sick will slowly gain discoloration at the edges of the plant, and will have discolored produce if applicable (such as berries that are already stale). When fully diseased it will have the normal diseased look already present. Additionally, any adjacent plants have a chance to have contracted the disease but remain asymptomatic for a certain amount of time before becoming sick.

Combating Disease: Instead of destroying the plant, digging up a fully diseased one will return a fragment of the plant that can be replanted and will slowly regrow into the original plant and then go through the normal growth cycle. This will still punish for negligence, but not slowly destroy the world’s resource for someone who doesn’t want to bother with them at least for a while. Digging up a partially diseased plant has a 50/50 chance to return the full plant or a fragment, allowing players to gamble a little. 
The other method of fighting disease is through creating a spray that can cure a partially diseased/asymptomatic plant, and can make healthy plants strong and immune to disease for a number of days. The can can be created through gold, nitre, and corn. It will have X number of uses and can spray an area around the point of clicking. This creates a dynamic where planting near allows for easy spraying to defend, but also planting a bit further apart prevents disease from spreading to a bunch of plants at once. With the mechanics being less punishing, telegraphed, and more interactive, this can allow for things such as disease effecting all plants and just not transposed ones, and even things such as spring being a time when plants are more vulnerable.

Guano: Guano should keep its place as a very potent fertilizer, but it should also have a small small chance to cause illness in the plants that it is used in. Also, I believe that guano should gain additional functionality in being able to be refined into nitre to help with the new spray crafting and more. 
 

Bird Cage: To help with potential additional vulnerability, crafting cans, and to make farming more worthwhile, I think the birds can also use a slight touch up. Maybe certain birds can have a guaranteed chance of dropping two of a particular kind of seed when fed with the additional chance of a third/generic seed. 

Anybody have ideas how to improve these thoughts or a better idea for disease overall? I really would like for wildfires and disease to be slightly touched on as they are two of my very few complaints of the game.

While this is a good idea, my issue is that disease doesn't feel like an actual challenge in later worlds, it just feels like an annoyance. If you can cure disease by using a spray that can crafted with, I dunno, some nitrogen and some type of milk or whatever, what's the point of the mechanic if it's literally just "prevent x by using y item?" I don't know about you, but it doesn't really sound all that challenging, or fun for that matter, when disease can be straight up ignored by having some sort of item on you or by being a base monkey. 

My idea of what disease should be

Spoiler

My idea is that disease should just be a random season event that forces some plant types to become disease at the beginning of the season and end at the end of the season. Also, disease would only be a 1 season per year event so that way you don't spend the whole year with diseased plants.  E.G. berry bushes and grass tufts become disease at the start of 2nd year fall, and stop becoming disease at the end of fall and will only become diseased again next year. 

While plants are diseased, they produce rot and twigs/grass when dug up,  and have different products when harvested. E.G. When Berry bushes are diseased, the produce poison berries that can be used to make poison weapons, eaten for some hunger but takes sanity and heath, and can be used for crock pot ingredients - counting as a monster food and as a fruit. (There could also be a part of the world where plants can be forced into disease mode)

These changes would make disease be less preventable, and in stead, forces the player to adapted to a different resource and play around with it. The fact that it starts during near the beginning of the 2nd year helps shake up end game to be more interesting by throwing a curve ball at managing your resources.

But it doesn't even have to be exactly, or even remotely, what I stated above. Disease really shouldn't just be a system that forces you to either babysit your base or completely trivialize the whole system by using a easy to get item. It just sets it up to be a generally annoying and pointless mechanic that doesn't offer anything to the game. 

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

and at that point why have disease at all??? It’s just To me a reskinned version of Wildfires.

I always leave Wildfires on.. but Disease is meh..

At least with wildfires, it's season locked and can be ignored by going into the caves, oasis, or a base with flingo. Sure, it makes every character ds alone willow and can easily cause the local Wickerbottom to curse out some Wendy that was standing a little too close to the reed trap for a little too long. But at least it encourage players to go explore the caves, so there's that. 

 

 

[ButterStuffed]

4 hours ago, Well-met said:

Disease exists to reward players that actively adventure out there to gather what they need, each time. Shoveling the entire savana into your back garden shouldn't be a direct upgrade and disease is the proper trade-off.

More like it punishes people who take the time to set up resource gardens.

[00petar00]

34 minutes ago, Superlucas1231 said:

My problem with disease is just the fact that it's whole existence makes me feel either annoyed that I have to babysit the base or even more annoyed that it's a mechanic that's pointless to turn on in the first place. 

While this is a good idea, my issue is that disease doesn't feel like an actual challenge in later worlds, it just feels like an annoyance. If you can cure disease by using a spray that can crafted with, I dunno, some nitrogen and some type of milk or whatever, what's the point of the mechanic if it's literally just "prevent x by using y item?" I don't know about you, but it doesn't really sound all that challenging, or fun for that matter, when disease can be straight up ignored by having some sort of item on you or by being a base monkey. 

My idea of what disease should be

  Reveal hidden contents

My idea is that disease should just be a random season event that forces some plant types to become disease at the beginning of the season and end at the end of the season. Also, disease would only be a 1 season per year event so that way you don't spend the whole year with diseased plants.  E.G. berry bushes and grass tufts become disease at the start of 2nd year fall, and stop becoming disease at the end of fall and will only become diseased again next year. 

While plants are diseased, they produce rot and twigs/grass when dug up,  and have different products when harvested. E.G. When Berry bushes are diseased, the produce poison berries that can be used to make poison weapons, eaten for some hunger but takes sanity and heath, and can be used for crock pot ingredients - counting as a monster food and as a fruit. (There could also be a part of the world where plants can be forced into disease mode)

These changes would make disease be less preventable, and in stead, forces the player to adapted to a different resource and play around with it. The fact that it starts during near the beginning of the 2nd year helps shake up end game to be more interesting by throwing a curve ball at managing your resources.

But it doesn't even have to be exactly, or even remotely, what I stated above. Disease really shouldn't just be a system that forces you to either babysit your base or completely trivialize the whole system by using a easy to get item. It just sets it up to be a generally annoying and pointless mechanic that doesn't offer anything to the game. 

At least with wildfires, it's season locked and can be ignored by going into the caves, oasis, or a base with flingo. Sure, it makes every character ds alone willow and can easily cause the local Wickerbottom to curse out some Wendy that was standing a little too close to the reed trap for a little too long. But at least it encourage players to go explore the caves, so there's that. 

 

 

I don't think you understand that DS is based around as you'd call them "annoyances". It is in the end time management game to the fullest, as any veteran player should know that you are making big food setups/bases is to cut down on the supply gathering that is wasting your time. Killing bosses and obtaining good loot to cut the troubles seasons bring to you, you'd also call temperature management "annoyance" with the way you think. Everything that takes your time so you can't focus on expanding the base would be an annoyance to you.

Darkness is literally prevented by using x item, temperature is the same just different items for different seasons. Is it fun having to make a torch every time?

How much time do you spend gathering twigs/grass? Is it fun?

Disease is a really bad unmanagable mechanic for big bases, it is not possible to manage unless you make a small base and not making big farms, also players don't want to be limited in the amount of stuff they can plant when they want to make the base look pretty.

[Canis]

Fun fact, Stone fruit bushes can get diseased. Granted, they are renewable, but only with like a 1% chance per stone fruit, and there is only like 2-40 bushes that spawn per world. Funnnnnnnn...

Here's my idea for disease:
- When Diseased, plants won't produce items and will always be in the "picked" state.
- Digging up diseased plants will give a diseased version of the item. Ex: "Diseased Grass Tuft", "Diseased Sapling", and "Diseased Berry Bush" as inventory items.
- A new craftable cure item exists in the survival tab, near the top of the list. The balance around the recipe should be based around the idea that "it's fairly easy to make individually, but starts becoming hard in bulk" to punish players that let disease freely run amok.

 

Im honestly surprised Klei hasn't done anything about disease yet, as it's probably the #1 thing advanced players complain about

[ArubaroBeefalo]

i would be happy with just an antidote item in the way of bug b'gone made by some sea monster's loot

[Scrimbles]

I'm okay with resources being permanently lost to disease, but I'm not okay with very binary mechanics with no depth.

Randomly over time you either you shovel diseased plants, or you don't and they destroy things. No mobs or events bring disease into the forefront, and to match there are no interesting ways to combat disease.

 

If there were to be an antidote I would definitely want it to be something more rare, requiring some decent effort to fix your mistake.

Something like 1 Salt, 1 Cactus Flower, and 2 spider glands for a couple of doses.

[Vultureneck]

18 hours ago, Sinister_Fang said:

Disease is a relic of the resource rotating mechanic. It should have died with the rest of that system instead of being shoehorned in for no reason. It serves no purpose other then to destroy nonrenewable resources.

I feel out of the loop here, what was the resource rotating mechanic and what did disease have to do with it?

[Owlrust]

20 hours ago, ShadowDuelist said:

a potion to cure disease

"Dungeons and Dragons would like to know your location".

[fimmatek]

4 hours ago, Vultureneck said:

I feel out of the loop here, what was the resource rotating mechanic and what did disease have to do with it?

Earlier there were only one main sources of twigs, grass and berries, these are saplings, grass tufts and bushes, respectively. The ANR updates(?) added their variants, twiggy trees, grass gekkos and juicy berry bushes. The original idea was, if I remember correctly, that these variants keep getting diseased and dying out, to be replaced by the other version, which later also dies out, getting replaced by the first one, and so on, forever. However, these resources don't respawn, despite the disease still being in DST.

[Mike23Ua]

What is this mechanics main intention anyway? Is it supposed to spread and kill stuff like a Wildfire?

Are Plants, animals and maybe even players supposed to get sick?? 

I don’t fully understand it as a Mechanic.

Isnt there a Flu in the Hamlet DLC? Maybe it’s an Unfinished idea based off that? Then again.. I’m sure no one wants to revisit an idea like that considering current real world circumstances.

I would just like to seriously know what the features purpose was meant to be..?

[ArubaroBeefalo]

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

What is this mechanics main intention anyway? Is it supposed to spread and kill stuff like a Wildfire?

Are Plants, animals and maybe even players supposed to get sick?? 

I don’t fully understand it as a Mechanic.

Isnt there a Flu in the Hamlet DLC? Maybe it’s an Unfinished idea based off that? Then again.. I’m sure no one wants to revisit an idea like that considering current real world circumstances.

I would just like to seriously know what the features purpose was meant to be..?

its made to add a penalty to grass, berries and twigs farms so you cant survive with the same replanted plants

i see it as a good idea but isnt deep enough

[Mike23Ua]

11 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

its made to add a penalty to grass, berries and twigs farms so you cant survive with the same replanted plants

i see it as a good idea but isnt deep enough

It just sounds too much like Wildfire spreading to me.. lol

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Just now, Mike23Ua said:

It just sounds too much like Wildfire spreading to me.. lol

no because it only affects to replanted vegetation, wilfires affects everything

[Mike23Ua]

No I mean that it’s purpose was to destroy all your twigs, grass, berry bushes etc.. 

Wildfires already do that, so why do we NEED Disease?

the only place Disease made sense to me was down in Caves... where Wildfires can never be...

so it was like the Cave version of Surface Wildfires.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

2 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

No I mean that it’s purpose was to destroy all your twigs, grass, berry bushes etc.. 

Wildfires already do that, so why do we NEED Disease?

the only place Disease made sense to me was down in Caves... where Wildfires can never be...

so it was like the Cave version of Surface Wildfires.

the purpose of wilfire is destroy your entire base, disease work is make you go out for more plants to your farms

[Kelloggs Dogfry]

9 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

the purpose of wilfire is destroy your entire base—

Yeah that in of itself is also an unfun mechanic with boring counterplay, but I don’t wanna make a whole concept for that since I kind of pitched my two cents for a change in my summer rework concept post :p. They both need some serious work.