I have to take some time to address the terra firma tamper and lack of landscaping other than just turfs.

[chirsg]

I have a thread about this I will link later in this post suggesting more crafts in landscaping, but i'll plead my case in depth here.

Landscaping is more than just lawn and ground, it's planting, tending to plants and making gardens look pleasing.

Having just turfs, while being extremely helpful and being something I look forward to when forbidden knowledge goes live for everyone, I can't help but think landscaping needs more than turf.

Having the ability to craft grass tufts, 3 types of berry bushes and saplings would further do the landscaping tab justice. The process is pretty arduous and something that a lot of players will probably not do more than once or twice in casual playthroughs, so this is something that BIG TIME rewards the vets, and I'll wager that they'd appreciate craftable plants.

While we're in the beta, I think it's a good opportunity to test this because who knows when landscaping will get any attention in the future. 

SUPER SUPER SUPER implore the devs to explore this. If I knew how to tag them and get their attention, I would do it.

Link to thread here.

 

 

[Owlrust]

Here's a couple ideas for it that I don't have much confidence in:

Why not give it the ability to grind fruits and veggies for a better seed-drop chance than a birdcage? Shouldn't take away from the cage much since you still use the cage for eggs, and would certainly prove to be a great late-game farming tool (plus it would help to give some much needed attention back to improved farms).

Instead of the former idea, the tamper may be able to transform normal seeds that are given to it into a random crop seed. A bit less powerful but still pretty niche in my opinion.

[Kur0u]

I don't think we need the ability to "craft" those, heck I have more than 100 bushes and grass tufts in a chest, they keep spawning after every spring and that's a lot more than I'd ever need.

If you add the ability to transplant anything in the world, then I'm with you. I wish there was a special tool made from ancient knowledge (REALLY END GAME) that would let me dig up reeds, banana trees, light flowers, lureplants, mandrakes, mushtrees and lichen. Of course it would need to be planted on their respective turf for them to properly grow for balance measure.

What I think we should have with this update are skins for turfs, now that they are craftable. Colored carpets, ash/walnut/white wooden flooring and so on. Money for them, more variety for us.

[Mike23Ua]

5 minutes ago, Kuro_kira said:

I don't think we need the ability to "craft" those, heck I have more than 100 bushes and grass tufts in a chest, they keep spawning after every spring and that's a lot more than I'd ever need.

If you add the ability to transplant anything in the world, then I'm with you. I wish there was a special tool made from ancient knowledge (REALLY END GAME) that would let me dig up reeds, banana trees, light flowers, lureplants, mandrakes, mushtrees and lichen. Of course it would need to be planted on their respective turf for them to properly grow for balance measure.

What I think we should have with this update are skins for turfs, now that they are craftable. Colored carpets, ash/walnut/white wooden flooring and so on. Money for them, more variety for us.

All this translates into for me is- You can use the Alternate Batmobile skins you bought for the Seasons pass in Arkham Knight but only after you’ve beaten the game.

.... What was even the point? There’s nothing left to do!

[Zeklo]

I do agree that the lost knowledge is a bit underwhelming.

A way of slowly getting Thulecite without reseting ruins.
A compass to Altar pieces that are useless on there own.
And a crafting station for aesthetic purposes.

Naturally, the latter being the least useful for typical survival purposes (assuming the second eventually leads to something worthwhile).

[chirsg]

48 minutes ago, Kuro_kira said:

I don't think we need the ability to "craft" those, heck I have more than 100 bushes and grass tufts in a chest, they keep spawning after every spring and that's a lot more than I'd ever need.

 

They do not respawn in survival.

[Kur0u]

4 minutes ago, chirsg said:

They do not respawn in survival.

My bad then, I guess I play too much endless. How about a small chance to have saplings or seeds for when you gather? Or following your idea, destroy the bushes or tufts from the landscaping tab to harvest 3 berry bush saplings and grass seeds respectively.

[chirsg]

I definitely want more kinds of berry bushes. I don't ever use replanted berry bushes to eat. I will only eat them wild because the way I play, food is abundant enough without replanting bushes. It's not something I find extremely valuable as a food source.

As a decoration, I want them very badly. It's literally up to chance for your world to generate with spiky bushes and more often than not, you will only have 1 kind of berry bush in your world. That's very depressing for long term worlds and I do not come to terms with just spawning them in.

It's a landscaping tab. I seriously believe that planting berry bushes, grass tufts and saplings falls under the category of landscaping.

There's also great value in having a source of tufts. One red hound wave and boom, your plantation is literally dust in the wind like the song from the band kansas. The lead was singing about red hounds.

And this would be a little remedy for disease. You lose plants from it. It's so easy to forget to redig what's infected and just slowly lose your garden to it because there is no way to renew tufts, saplings or bushes.

Forgive me, but it's a little strange this is controversial.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

5 hours ago, Owlrus said:

Here's a couple ideas for it that I don't have much confidence in:

Why not give it the ability to grind fruits and veggies for a better seed-drop chance than a birdcage? Shouldn't take away from the cage much since you still use the cage for eggs, and would certainly prove to be a great late-game farming tool (plus it would help to give some much needed attention back to improved farms).

Instead of the former idea, the tamper may be able to transform normal seeds that are given to it into a random crop seed. A bit less powerful but still pretty niche in my opinion.

By that time you already have 40 seeds of each if you play with a crop dependent character

[AlternateMew]

On 10/18/2020 at 2:52 AM, chirsg said:

As a decoration, I want them very badly. It's literally up to chance for your world to generate with spiky bushes and more often than not, you will only have 1 kind of berry bush in your world. That's very depressing for long term worlds and I do not come to terms with just spawning them in.

This is the very reason I was happy to discover that random wild bushes and MooseGoose bushes can be different kinds, and one of the defining reasons I'm keeping the world I got I that in. Which also has the special Pig Village bushes that aren't a guaranteed spawn.

 

On 10/18/2020 at 2:52 AM, chirsg said:

And this would be a little remedy for disease. You lose plants from it. It's so easy to forget to redig what's infected and just slowly lose your garden to it because there is no way to renew tufts, saplings or bushes.

And despite being against the idea of tampering with world settings, this is the reason I gave in and turned off disease. For me I feel like Endless is cheating, so I play in Survival despite calling the world permanent. It's up to me to keep the world permanent. But disease takes away non-replaceable plants in an unpreventable, unrecoverable manner.

Spoiler

 

So count me in for this being a good idea. Craftable berry bushes as a late game reward sounds great.

[chirsg]

not many people seem to agree. they abhor idea and do not want it in the game. I have no faith in the judgement of others

[AlternateMew]

10 hours ago, chirsg said:

not many people seem to agree. they abhor idea and do not want it in the game. I have no faith in the judgement of others

Well, then they should stop cheating with Endless mode and play a REAL unmodified long-term survival game with no rollbacks and watch all their grass and berries slowly cease to exist by no fault of their own.

(I'm joking. Kind of. But also kind of not?)

[Notecja]

5 hours ago, AlternateMew said:

Well, then they should stop cheating with Endless mode and play a REAL unmodified long-term survival game with no rollbacks and watch all their grass and berries slowly cease to exist by no fault of their own.

(I'm joking. Kind of. But also kind of not?)

Even modified survival can lost resources - usually due to wildfires outside of base. Very slowly if played carefuly and alone. Very fast if party of newbies is making grass and berry farm outside fligo range. Like... 50 grass tufts and saplings just gone forever in a moment. 

[Maxil20]

5 hours ago, AlternateMew said:

Well, then they should stop cheating with Endless mode and play a REAL unmodified long-term survival game with no rollbacks and watch all their grass and berries slowly cease to exist by no fault of their own.

(I'm joking. Kind of. But also kind of not?)

This feels a bit rude, in my opinion. I have an 8000+ day world where I rollbacked only once because otherwise I literally couldn't boot up the game without hard client crashing otherwise, and I have taken precautions to make sure my grass and twigs don't rot away from disease, even if I do play on endless.

The point is even if some gameplay mechanics are tweaked to endless's favor, you still are going to preform core gameplay mechanics. If you lose your grass + twig fields, you are going to be waiting a very long time to recover all of the plants you lost, since endless regrowth is also pretty slow. It's also why I have them a considerable amount of distance away from my base, so disease doesn't impact them as much either.

In addition, survival already has a core issue where you can literally lose the entire world if you don't res in 2 minutes, and it really doesn't help that admins have a button that can launch it immediately even if it's on accident. Even in DS the world at least makes you cycle through all of your res methods before it deletes the world, while in DST that is not the case. Even if I take extreme precautions to the point where I've never died in my endless world, I don't want to even try to risk it.

I'm not trying to be rude and say that this shouldn't happen (since I think a change like this could be neat, especially for the Pig Village berry bushes). I just feel like undermining an entire group of people for playing endless feels a bit sour.

[MondayNight]

"Terra firma" is Latin for "solid earth"; also can be interpreted as firm/steady or otherwise dry land. Thus it implies soil, aka turf elements. While indeed is fairly underwhelming an end-game Ruins-type item can make.. what Workshop mods did from-the-get-go for years, is still an item tied by name to soil. Plants are adjacent elements. And frankly it pretty much subtracts from the Survival aspect of the game if one would be able to mass-produce plants imo. And, by this point in DST's life, is pretty clear the Survival facet was fairly diminished in favor of a more Sandbox base-building orientation. Likewise I don't think in current state of the game there truly are any experienced players for whom Grass Tufts, Saplings, and/or Berry Bushes have gone extinct in their Survival worlds for any reason imaginable. Would be comfortably convenient to have such option? Yes. Would be adding to the Survival aspect of the game? No imo.

Still, as a compromise and to add to general background atmosphere of the game on same vein as Stone Fruit Bushes and their 1% Sproutings do, perhaps there could be an homologous mechanic (with better percentages, as Berry Bushes/Saplings/Gras Tufts aren't that productive as Stone Fruit Bushes) where upon picking Berries/Grass/Twigs there's a chance (<3%/5%) to also get a Sprouting Seed variant of them. Only an idea.

[AlternateMew]

16 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

This feels a bit rude, in my opinion.

It is, and intentionally so. Suppose I could have been a bit more obvious that that part was the joking part I'm not that much of a purest. DST is demonstrably more casual and endless mode even existing outside of mods is proof on its own. It's fine that some people want a more relaxed experience where there's no risk of losing the world.

16 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

In addition, survival already has a core issue where you can literally lose the entire world if you don't res in 2 minutes

That's not an issue. That's just Don't Starve being Don't Starve. That's the survival bit, right there. If you're not prepared to die, you're not prepared to live.

Plus core DS is far less forgiving than DST there. Three ways to cheat death. 1) A Touchstone that you have personally found and activated beforehand. It's gone forever after one use. 2) A WORN life-giving amulet. Just carrying one isn't enough. You gotta sacrifice an equip slot and wear it, or it's worthless. 3) Meat Effigies that cut your health by existing.

Every single res method in DS has a big drawback. Compared to DST where you don't need to activate touchstones, meat effigies don't cost a chunk of your life by existing, and life amulets are basically portable touchstones.

But it looks like overall we're on the same side. My shade just didn't come off as intended. The only part that was serious was the grass and bushes slowly ceasing to exist.

 

16 hours ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

"Terra firma" is Latin for "solid earth"; also can be interpreted as firm/steady or otherwise dry land. Thus it implies soil, aka turf elements. While indeed is fairly underwhelming an end-game Ruins-type item can make.. what Workshop mods did from-the-get-go for years, is still an item tied by name to soil. Plants are adjacent elements.

I... huh. That's actually logical? Well. Um... yeah, no arguments against that at all. You're right.

16 hours ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

And frankly it pretty much subtracts from the Survival aspect of the game if one would be able to mass-produce plants imo.

I have one argument. It does not take away from survival any more than this vanilla with no DLC object does:

Spoiler

 

[MondayNight]

11 minutes ago, AlternateMew said:

I have one argument. It does not take away from survival any more than this vanilla with no DLC object does:

  Hide contents

 

Perhaps; yet debatable. One can establish some equivalence - general function-wise - between and end-game Tamper with its relative, intrinsic dangers to be acquired and the occasional risk that comes from manual Bunnyman farming (quite a number of advanced players are caught "pants down" when accidentally picking meat in presence of consistent bunnymen numbers inside their farming-pen or misclick and hit one hopping randomly around). Still the principle behind Tamper - mashing ingredients to create soil, evidence by its very form - cannot translate well into also manufacturing plants, at least from lore stand-point. That's why my alternative idea: having an <5% chance upon harvesting for wild plants to drop their respective seedlings (that maybe are immune to diseases too, similar to Stone Fruit Sproutings mechanic, essentially making "wild transplanted plants" a reality). Again, an idea.

[Blue Moth]

It would be cool if we could use it to plant spiky trees, mushtrees, cave banana trees, light flowers, and reeds, that would make this a much more useful item for both function and building.