Don't Starve Together is Complex for Newbies

[minespatch]

Well... LEt me throw in something that happened in Oxygen Not Included:

The game was too hard for players, so they made shorts to explain some mechanics to the game as "tutorials".

[.]

7 hours ago, Sunset Skye said:

Regardless, you can turn events off in the world settings entirely.

The dst world is huge and getting hugger every update. Probably there is items even I didn't see before. One day we will have to active events and you just saying player should play all the game then he could play events. But meh just asked for a little thing.

Also where the hell edgy rick came to the topic lmao xD?

[Mike23Ua]

18 minutes ago, Slagger said:

The dst world is huge and getting hugger every update. Probably there is items even I didn't see before. One day we will have to active events and you just saying player should play all the game then he could play events. But meh just asked for a little thing.

Also where the hell edgy rick came to the topic lmao xD?

Personally my worlds don’t ever extend past like day 500 or so- The Xbox One version of the game can lag down so bad that it quite literally becomes unplayable at times, Long standing worlds with tons of things scattered around that world will lag it down that much faster.

But also I tend to just grow tired of a world once I find everything & have survived in it long enough that I just delete it & start a brand new world full of hostile things that hates me & wants me to die.

With only 5 available save slots I have to delete one or two of them each time I get bored of playing a particular character so I can start a new world as a another one.

Rarely ever have I used the Celestial Portal to swap characters in an already existing world- because my Mindset is that everything built in that world should be built by the character I am playing as that is their own particular story of survival & unless I’m doing some particular type of base building project- I don’t switch out characters & instead choose to just delete the world save & start fresh with a new choice.

In addition: Klei’s limited time content updates like Year of the Carrat have been known to completely freeze up & crash my Xbox One, like for example: if you had a world with YoTC stuff in it after YoTC ended and you put your Carrat onto the Podium thing to Inspect it’s stats Bam you just crashed the game for yourself and everyone else playing- So after learning this the hard way I hammered down & destroyed all YoTC related stuffs.

Lastly When Klei does new content updates i in particular do not like Retro-fitted content into existing worlds, while it is nice that this is an option for people who don’t want to lose their 2000+ day worlds, I tend to find that Retro-Fitting new content in my world adds that content in awkward ways, like placing Seaweeds, Crab King, etc way off at the edges of my world map someplace, Retro-Fitted versions of the content also seem to be in my experience smaller then their intended sizes should you have just opted to start a new world where that content was properly generated at the start.

These are my main reasons why my world day count never extends beyond 500 or so, and it’s also my reason I set my world Gen Settings to Random Seasons & Season Lengths so I can enjoy as much content as the game can offer, until my worlds meet the fate of their eventual expiration of day 500 or so to start a brand new save slot.

In fact: each time Klei releases a new Return of Them update one of my existing saves get axed so I can explore that new content in Non-Retro Fitted proper fashion.

[MrNaxeros]

1 hour ago, Slagger said:

The dst world is huge and getting hugger every update. Probably there is items even I didn't see before. One day we will have to active events and you just saying player should play all the game then he could play events. But meh just asked for a little thing.

Also where the hell edgy rick came to the topic lmao xD?

 

Heh, "hugger". I mean I know it's just english mistake, but now it makes me think of the entire constant trying to hug you xD

Anyway, I can agree with some sort of tutorial for the new players or maybe that "No Sweat" mode. I have the pleasure of teaching 3(!) of my friends whose skill never went past first winter. I tried it before and always lost my motivation to play after Deerclops ruined base. This time however I got stubborn. How can I play DST with friends if I just give up so easily? So I continued and kept explaining something every minute.
Over a few sessions my friends stopped dying and can take on most bosses. We are at day 500+ and going strong, although I'm afraid they will just abandon the game once we defeat the Fuelweaver, like one of my other friends I taught once. They get bored quickly and I have to keep coming up with tasks for them to do that doesn't involve just gathering resources.

Learning this game as a newbie is a massive barrier and I remember that I also had to make a few shots at the game, abandon it for a year and come back to it to finaly get good enough to be hooked.

Curse this game for being so addicting and well-made but nearly unapproachable for a new player.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

4 hours ago, Slagger said:

The dst world is huge and getting hugger every update. Probably there is items even I didn't see before. One day we will have to active events and you just saying player should play all the game then he could play events. But meh just asked for a little thing.

Also where the hell edgy rick came to the topic lmao xD?

If events disturb you when playing with friends for some reason, just turn them off before creating the world

 

[Well-met]

You ask for a guide OP and I shall bring it to you 

https://dontstarve.fandom.com/wiki/Don't_Starve_Together

Make sure to share it to your friends aswell.

Your problem is now solved. Have a fine day.

 

[Cheggf]

17 hours ago, Slagger said:

Problems and Solutiouns:

1) Everything is unknown

That's not a problem, that's the entire point of the game. The only difficulty in the game is figuring things out, once you know how everything works the game's super easy and many players find it boring and stop playing at that point.

I wish I could forget everything I know about the game and re-learn it all again. I can never get the feeling of trying to survive while figuring things out back.

17 hours ago, Slagger said:

Most of this problems can be solved with a quick new starter guide easily. I mean when u enter the game first time a screen can pop up and say "You look so new in DST, What about a guide tour that will make your gameplay more easier?" and player should able to pass it or give a try. In the trailer there should be little popup messages like "This is your sanity. Monsters, darkness or gross things like Wurt can make you insane immediatly". With that way game could help the player about basit things like cooking, eating, fighting, farming etc. without spoilers and all of us will be saved from babysitting.

The game already teaches you about all of those, it just doesn't obnoxiously pop boxes up all the time spelling it out for you. There's a little down arrow on sanity when it's dark or you're near something scary, and as it goes down further you get more and more effects until finally shadows attack you. Cooking & eating are pretty straightforward as long as you've eaten before in real life, which is a pretty safe bet. Farming is just putting a seed, which you've probably seen a lot of by the time you can make a farm, on a farm plot. Fighting is just holding down F and dodging attacks.

[DaZoul]

Isn't everything being unknown the point of DST? Figuring everything out on your own?

[ArubaroBeefalo]

9 hours ago, minespatch said:

Well... LEt me throw in something that happened in Oxygen Not Included:

The game was too hard for players, so they made shorts to explain some mechanics to the game as "tutorials".

That happens with ds and dst. If you watch the trailers and update posters (i miss them) most of the things are explained

 

I was able to know how to unlock the new recipes from the archives just watching the trailer

Another example was when they added krampus, in the poster can be read a hint, or the a new reing trailer that shows the moon rock event, etc

[Wardin25]

didnt klei make some sort of video where they talked about how when they told a new player "survive the night" the player would just focus on doing that and wouldnt take any risks,  which made the game boring so they decided to let the player figure out what to do for themselves

[Scrimbles]

19 hours ago, Slagger said:

1) Everything is unknown:
No matter whatever you think, this game have a crazy world which can be hard to understand sometimes. The persons which are gonna play this game without watching videos, should learn things by trying but at the last the person just gets paranoiac about everything and just stop to enjoy. I thought this was about my friends but when I look at steam reviews, I saw so much person complain about it. I really have a funny example for this. My brother just died bc of spiders then stoped fighting and went to gather wood but killed by treeguard. After that he just saw a mandrake that follows him and just calling me for killing it. He was running from it and I just was laughted so hard. He is doing that bc in dst world big creatures can ignore you and cute ones can attack you or both they can attack (or not). It's just not about creatures too, they don't know how sanity/health/hunger works and they don't know even how to and what to eat in dst. Maybe you just don't care about it but it's important for us too. The new players just join to the game without knowledge of what they can do. When I ask them why don't u practice at single, they just say we don't know even what to practice. This is a big problem for all of us.
>inb4 so don't play with news
1) Solution: 
Most of this problems can be solved with a quick new starter guide easily. I mean when u enter the game first time a screen can pop up and say "You look so new in DST, What about a guide tour that will make your gameplay more easier?" and player should able to pass it or give a try. In the trailer there should be little popup messages like "This is your sanity. Monsters, darkness or gross things like Wurt can make you insane immediatly". With that way game could help the player about basit things like cooking, eating, fighting, farming etc. without spoilers and all of us will be saved from babysitting.

Don't Starve is supposed to be a difficult, mysterious, trial and error type game. A lot of the intention (and enjoyment for a lot of people) is walking into a purposely strange world, discovering what things do, if things are hostile or friendly, and learning from all of it.


Most of the content in the game can ALWAYS be learned by trial and error, and basic experimentation. The Klei devs made a decision to not have any achievements, or tutorials, because it would ruin the mystery and discovery of the game, instead they focused on small nudges like tiered crafting tabs, crafting descriptions, and audio/visual indicators like when you are low on hunger and your characters stomach starts rumbling, or the sanity UI effects.

If you tutorialize the game, you RUIN the mystery for most players, because of course most players first instincts will be to just watch a tutorial and skip past the enjoyment of exploring and discovering content for themselves, but discovery is a core part of Don't Starves design.

 

19 hours ago, Slagger said:

2) Events make things more unknown: 
As you know events add things to the game like carrat for day of carrat, toys for halloween etc. My friend just picking those and keep asking me what is bat toy, what is the vampire tooths and it's just piss me of. I just said if you saw anything about halloween on ground, don't pick it. Then he just saw a walking cane and passed it bc he tought that was an another event thing. This is annoying. They just don't know the regular game.
2) Solution:
It's pretty easy to solve. All of event items' name should have a different colour. All winter items could be blue, hallowen could be purple and year of carrat orange maybe. In the guide tour, pop ups can teach players that too.
 

Now, the color coating suggestion is great, I think it would get across the point that certain items are an event exclusive thing, and that would click with players that something is clearly different, instead of thinking a lot of event content is part of the vanilla game. This suggestion is actually pretty easy to code too.

I honestly don't think a lot of the event content (and honestly a lot of the DST exclusive content from the new devs) really have enough small nudges to help you truly discover this stuff on your own.

Again I think a guide/tour would be a BAD idea, but small nudges could be good. At the very least, have something on the main menu during an event that describes a tiny bit about that event, like:

"Find trinkets scattered around the world and trade them in for Candy, and discover the art of potion crafting!"

or

"Enjoy treats scattered around the world, decorate a tree with ornaments and lights, and watch out for the terrifying feastclops!"

[TemporarySolutn]

22 hours ago, Slagger said:

Playing with my friends and others just let me see some problems about this game. Here is the problems and some solutiouns that i have found.

Problems and Solutiouns:

1) Everything is unknown:
No matter whatever you think, this game have a crazy world which can be hard to understand sometimes. The persons which are gonna play this game without watching videos, should learn things by trying but at the last the person just gets paranoiac about everything and just stop to enjoy. I thought this was about my friends but when I look at steam reviews, I saw so much person complain about it. I really have a funny example for this. My brother just died bc of spiders then stoped fighting and went to gather wood but killed by treeguard. After that he just saw a mandrake that follows him and just calling me for killing it. He was running from it and I just was laughted so hard. He is doing that bc in dst world big creatures can ignore you and cute ones can attack you or both they can attack (or not). It's just not about creatures too, they don't know how sanity/health/hunger works and they don't know even how to and what to eat in dst. Maybe you just don't care about it but it's important for us too. The new players just join to the game without knowledge of what they can do. When I ask them why don't u practice at single, they just say we don't know even what to practice. This is a big problem for all of us.
>inb4 so don't play with news
1) Solution: 
Most of this problems can be solved with a quick new starter guide easily. I mean when u enter the game first time a screen can pop up and say "You look so new in DST, What about a guide tour that will make your gameplay more easier?" and player should able to pass it or give a try. In the trailer there should be little popup messages like "This is your sanity. Monsters, darkness or gross things like Wurt can make you insane immediatly". With that way game could help the player about basit things like cooking, eating, fighting, farming etc. without spoilers and all of us will be saved from babysitting.

2) Events make things more unknown: 
As you know events add things to the game like carrat for day of carrat, toys for halloween etc. My friend just picking those and keep asking me what is bat toy, what is the vampire tooths and it's just piss me of. I just said if you saw anything about halloween on ground, don't pick it. Then he just saw a walking cane and passed it bc he tought that was an another event thing. This is annoying. They just don't know the regular game.
2) Solution:
It's pretty easy to solve. All of event items' name should have a different colour. All winter items could be blue, hallowen could be purple and year of carrat orange maybe. In the guide tour, pop ups can teach players that too.
 

First off even items already have icons, we don't need even more rarities to signify different events.

Sure the way trash is scattered for hollowed nights is kinda weird but that doesn't mean its horrible, its your fault he passed the walking cane because you told him not to touch anything that looked Halloween rather than letting him experiment with the garbage and letting him know what was useful and what wasn't.

A tutorial in this game would be super stupid imo, part of the game experience comes from learning and trial and error and anyone that doesn't want to deal with it can look up a 5 minute tutorial on how to survive better, its literally as simple as that. I know for a fact that Im glad I had the experience of learning how to do everything from scratch like "woah what does this do" rather then having it just straight up told to me

[CaptainChaotica]

Well, I can't be bothered to keep up with EVERYthing that's been said in this whole thread already, so I'll just say some newbie experience I've personally had, for some more examples.

Me, my way of starting kinda doesn't count or work anymore, since as people have been saying...the game keeps getting new stuff and mechanics added!  On the one hand, that's awesome.  On the other, it does make things _damn_ hard to keep track of. Do you have any idea HOW many _entire updates' worth_ of stuff I personally have never interacted with AT ALL?

Way too many.  At least three.  More than three probably.  And I'M an experienced player, who _does_ understand the world itself and how things work in general.

Anyway the way I learned was from watching gameplay videos on YouTube, but these were of vanilla singleplayer, and from like maybe 2014.  (I started off watching the videos to find out what the game was like, then it _became_ an informal tutorial once I got the game for myself.  Mind you, most of what I was watching taught me by _negative_ example:  DON'T do what they did.)  With this information I made it to the night of Day 37 on my first try, but the world I learned in was SO far removed from what the Together version is now...

Another newbie experience:  My brother's.  He's the one I gave my extra copy of the game too, and he apparently did NOT read the actual words for each character or thought they didn't mean anything, 'cos he picked _pre-rework_ Woodie AS HIS FIRST TIME PLAYING EVER.  Why?  "He's the only one with a beard!"    He flat out told me that he thought the characters were _completely_ cosmetic.  He didn't know yet that there are ACTUAL cosmetic-onlies in the game, but the characters aren't that.  He didn't even get that this was the type of game where characters MATTERED in terms of actual gameplay, at all--when in fact their differences are a _hecka_ big deal.  He was just like "I'm a beardy guy.  I'll play the beardy guy!"

I did my best to teach about stuff as well as I could when they came up, but some things I couldn't tell him about in time because he just...did them, without any warning.  Such as "I'm hungry.  This is meat.  Chomp" (MONSTER MEAT)  "You have to hit _cook_ for the Crockpot to do anything."  Apparently the word "Cook" wasn't lighting up for him 'cos he didn't have four things in there but he never mentioned that part, so he...SET FIRE TO IT.  To "cook" in any way at all.  Thankfully I put it right out (as, ironically, Willow) but...

The end result of all our playing together was that he learned tumbleweeds are good, gears are rare, worhmholes teleport you but hurt your sanity, and that every other season besides fall is SUCH _misery_ that why would anybody play this game at all.

This, good fellow forumites--THIS, is the attitude we gotta help newbies to combat.  Getting so frustrated by a game that they _might have liked_ that they decide it's misery rather than fun.  If it takes basic Starter Guides and/or a "no sweat" mode, I for one am all for it.

...Notorious

[Harrowick]

The original Don't Starve was complex, too. At least when you first start out. I find when you learn a game on your own/with little help it grows on you that much more because of the feeling of connecting two and two together.

In Don't Starve Together's case, that experience can be doubled, tripled even, depending on how many others you are learning with. 

[Mike23Ua]

I probably wouldn’t have ever liked this game if it had a step by step tutorial, the fun and adventure of it is exploring and figuring things out for yourself- Klei can look into my Klei ID if they want to and see that out of their 52+ food dishes I’ve only learned maybe 17ish? My point is: I still manage to make plenty of Wet Goop, When was the last time a forum Vet who knows pretty much everything EVER made Wet goop? Every failure is a learning experience- You learn NOT to Chop at Lunar Grotto tree’s when at very Low Health, you also learn that if your Already Low on health while in this biome as Wigfrid that you can’t reliably fight anything down here (Molebat) to get Meat to avoid your impending starvation without dying to whatever your trying to kill for meat.

Theres a TON of Content I have yet to experience- Malbatross, Crab King, FuelWeaver, Toadstool, Mysterious Moon Stone Event, RockJaw Shark attack etc etc etc..

Theres content that I Have experienced that my friends don’t even know exists at all yet like creating pets at a pet den, giving Pig King a Championship Title, Creating a fully decked out Boat, Visiting Pearls Hermit Island, Stepping foot onto Lunar Island and getting stabbed to death violently by Saladmander, Finding Lunar Grotto & Ancient Library, etc etc etc..

As you can see- People do not and more importantly are not expected to know every little thing about every part of the game- and really that’s the most beautiful thing about DS/DST..

Its a huge game slam full of so so much content (and keeps getting more & more each update) My friends may have never been to Lunar Island.. and I may have never even SEEN Toadstool or Crab King yet.. but the point is- That Content is still there, waiting for me and my friends to find & discover it at our own pace when we stumble upon it.

We shouldn’t be trying to take that experience away from anyone.. because for me personally I love the thrill of figuring things out for Myself-

And to cement that fact home: Wigfrids Rework has been out for quite awhile now and out of all her song books I’ve only managed to craft two of them (Weaponized & that weird S word one that requires purple Gem) The others.. I don’t even know where to get the INGREDIENTS to craft-

But.. I am also assuming that many less skilled players then Myself don’t even know how to make the Black Feather Pencil that is required as part of the crafting ingredients for every last one of her song books.

If We were expected to know every little feature and detail before we could make suggestions on these forums off content updates we would like to see- Then I and probably 75% of their fanbase wouldn’t be able to provide any idea’s or suggestions.

But each time I see a NEW forum member join here to suggest something they more often then not get lashed into hell for not knowing X feature or X strategy- 

To say the least on that: It’s just not right guys.. please stop.

I haven’t gotten a damn clue what use YELLOW, ORANGE or GREEN Gems are good for, But when I finally killed Dragonfly she dropped several of them.. you know what those things are currently being used for in my game? They’re currently being placed in a Circle around her Marble Statue like decorative Jewelry.

I guess my point here OP is that you should let your friends play the game and learn things their way, at their own pace- and if it frustrates you that they ask what X item or X feature is good for, maybe teach them or give them clues.. 

I learned how to Summon BeeQueen NOT from watching videos or having people on Forums tell me how.. but Rather because I just so HAPPENED to be playing as Willow at the time I Inspected Bee Queen, and I did exactly what Willows inspection quote dares the player to do & I regretted it Afterwards.

I think that if Anything: Klei could go a couple extra steps further in making things more accessible to the less knowledgeable, stuff like easier difficulties like no sweat mode, easier bosses, tons more in-game inspection quotes that provide hints at what to do such as Willow & BeeQueen example. More updates to the Compendium that details the effects of the foods you learn- maybe the compendium could even be updated to list weapon tiers, the mobs you encounter + their attack/behavior patterns and best weapon to use on them.

Basically Something like Spelunky’s Journal log, that only fills in content once YOU discover its best uses/kill it /die to it.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

So you want to klei to loose time and breaking the game experience adding a tutorial that is already in huge numbers on youtube?

If someone frustrates because he has no patience, there is guides and wiki but the game experience will drop if they add rhis kind of things

The other day, watching a stream, i just read a comment that says "i have 50h played and i can beat the game thanks of you". 50h when you can have fun for longer

This game is about learning not beating nothing. Isnt a skilled game, if you delete the discovering you lose 90% of the game experience

[GetNerfedOn]

Even now in my advanced experience Don't Starve remains a relatively complicated game with lots of tech to be discovered and honed to the finest bits of efficiency, and I'd prefer it that way. The complicatedness is supposed to be part of the hurdles in DST's game design one has to overcome.

To quote this link:

https://support.klei.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035456011-Intrinsic-vs-Extrinsic-rewards

Quote

In Don’t Starve, the player’s progression in the world closely follows their progress through the crafting menu. You collect stuff so that you can build things that let you collect more exotic stuff that leads to even better things. We don’t explicitly tell you that you should collect the ingredients build an axe so that you can chop down trees so that you can build a fire so that you can survive the night. We just present you with a prominent, navigable list of crafting recipes, and we kill you if you get caught outside for too long without a light source. Oh, and we also delete your saved game, because we’re kinda mean.

After a player experiences this loss first-hand a couple of times, they catch on. By the time they’ve figured out how to survive the first in-game night, they have a pretty good mental model of how the game works, and are busy coming up with their own goals for the next day. They have learned how to learn about the game, and hopefully their curiosity about its underlying systems has been piqued enough that they want to continue playing.

 

[DVGMedia]

 The game does kind of live off of being unknown honestly the most fun part is when the creators make something new that the players have to explore. This is why when Forge got released or when Gorge gets release or new expansion 2 single player gets released. This is the first time they get to experience the new environment usually even veteran players when that happens are usually careful with the unknown world because death is permanent and you lose that world gen. 

I remember my first couple of times playing the game I would hunt Mac Tusk to get teeth so that way I can have teeth traps to fight deerclops I never kited him with melee I just walked around reset the traps and kill them that way but over time you get braver as you play the game because you see others do the same and you want to enact that. Or maybe you find armor and you find out that you only take 15 damage from getting hit by deerclops while you wear it. And in in your mind you think okay I can take a 10 hits before I die from Full HP I know when this is going to happen so I'm going to prepare.

This is just a subtle nature of Don't Starve and I can understand for people who don't like roguelike games can be a little more frustrated but DST actually makes it much easier because you don't lose everything when you die you can learn from your mistakes and keep continuing the world especially in Endless.

The main gist of Don't Starve is that everything can and possibly will kill you. Just look at the oldest trailers and they even say it in them.

https://youtu.be/kPd2beIIjow

 

https://youtu.be/0UC3eGU7gyk

 

Because of the way the game teaches the player even me having 6 k hours am still learning new things about it. Which is really what gives the game it's charm

 

[Dark Wun]

Keeping a good game alive, bringing in new blood as they say.... everyone can chip in here. Support newer players by helping them learn this wonderful game. Answer questions, make suggestions. Too often I see experienced players berating and being condescending to newer players. It's the experienced players that will make the difference here.

[Scrubsbarry]

I think this game could definitely benefit from some accessibility options, but going about doing it would be extremely difficult to put into the game since its contradictory to its design as you've said of everything being unknown. I feel like the original DS showed this type of philosophy with death as since it was permanent and there was only a few methods of reviving which could only be accessed if you were lucky with worldgen or were skilled enough to make them. Since it was rare, dying was common for new players so you could start anew with what you learned and then repeat. With DST however, reviving is a lot more common and accessible thanks to the multiplayer aspect of it, so dying becomes more frustrating and less about what you would learn from it. I think that's clear when you see a new player get killed by a tentacle, get revived, then go back to get their stuff only to die again. The only way to truly die in DST is to get bored, which is strange considering all the content it has to offer that many players will never see.

 

And I think that's the big issue when it comes to DST new players, they aren't going to play on servers forever and will only play temporarily, as more often then not they'll get to the end of Autumn or Winter before logging off since that's ~2.5+ hours of nonstop play that they may get tired of. Dying won't matter in pubs either, since they can just leave and join another server to repeat the process while never seeing a majority of what the game has to offer. New players never play long enough to see what DST has to offer. Unless they're playing with friends or on a solo world they frequent, they will probably never learn about a lot of things without the use of a guide or a wiki, as a lot of events or unique interactions (Oasis, Moon Staff event, Ruins, and Raid Bosses) require you to go out of your way to do specific things in order to do them which would be impossible to figure out without them. There's a reason why a majority of YouTube videos about DST are solely tutorials about items or enemies, because new players have no idea what they're doing and are in an environment that prompts them to not need to learn, since they can just revive again and again or leave when something challenging happens.

 

No huge content update will be enough if getting there in the first place is too much for a new player to get too, just look at caves and see how many people go in there to get things that aren't lightbulbs for lanterns. Don't Starve has an excellent hook for getting new players in with its presentation and multiplayer aspects, but after that a majority fall off and don't look any deeper without a group that's committed for playing for a long time.

 

I don't think a tutorial is what the game needs, rather pushes for new players to explore the sandbox and everything it has to offer. The best way I can come up with that is probably not perfect are map markers like how the thucite medallion and message in a bottle point players to areas of interest, as its a small nudge for them to go to where interesting content is at the cost of some of the exploration aspects. I think more things like that that point to areas such as the Lunar Island, Ruins, or Boss Areas could be enough to entice new players to keep going while not directly telling them that they NEED to kill it or go there, but know that it exists.

[BezKa]

My experience with dst:

I wanted to play with friends. One of them already owned a multiplayer game called Don't Starve Together and told me it's pretty cool. We bought our other friend the bundle for birthday near the Christmas time and I bought the game for myself as well, so we can have some form of spending time when life won't let us meet in person (how predictive of us smh) 

We joined during the Winter feast event. Tried public servers, own hosted servers, never managed to survive long enough for Deerclops to spawn. We were confused, running around with winter hats and being scared of beefalos, dying to crawling horrors and struggling with character's perks and downsides (I went with Webber, birthday friend with Wormwood and the other friend with Woodie). 

We struggled through the event not doing a single thing related to it, except my friends dying to the gingerbread varg and I wasn't even there so I had no idea what they were talking about while they were screaming on vc. We didn't even see a single boss Christmas reskin. We heard about something called "Deerclops" and I dared to check the wiki to learn it comes in winter. 

 

We had to stop playing because school exists and siblings want the laptop too!

I kept playing because I own my dear pc and it's great. Played some DS, some dlcs, explored the year of the carrat event.

Survived my first winter, with many rollbacks and a lot of deaths to the terrorbeaks... Killed Deerclops with best strategy ever™ aka run around the forest and hope treeguards will spawn. 

Absolutely amazing experience. Learning everything slowly, setting our base on fire because "picking up my stuff by pressing space while I had a fire staff is a great idea" back when we didn't know rollbacks existed, killing spiders for monster meat to feed Wormwood and watch my friend get killed by insanity and not knowing how she went insane in the first place. Amazing. This game is wonderful, exactly because we had no idea what to do. Even when I was playing alone, discovering a werepig was an adventure like no other. Pointless if I had a box saying "Careful! Some creatures get affected by the full moon!" Showing up. Much more fun to be killed while crossing the forest hoping to not get hit by pigs for once. 

It is a hard game for newbies. Just like Sudoku. Or Minecraft. Or basically any game ever, this one doubling on the experience and making the whole thing so fun to discover and use the lack of knowledge as an upside, not a problem.

 I guess I just really love this game. 

[Yuuko]

My initial Don't Starve experience was pretty rough.  I didn't know how to build anything at first, and even once I learned how to make torches and campfires I didn't feel I had time to just sit there and read through the menus.  Also it can be tough to weigh up what you are up against sometimes, and as great as trial by doing is, I think without accessing the wiki its hard to really get a grip on the world.

What I would suggest they add inside the compendium an area with all of the build menus with some detail about what you can build so they can be reviewed while NOT under pressure to survive.  Let it be sorted by craft tier as well as a display all.  Also have a monster manual type area where you can review stats of monsters you've seen / defeated.  Give more general stats for seen, and more details stats for defeated.

I think just adding these two things to the compendium (and then pointing out in a new player tip that they can view these things in the compendium) would do a lot to help players onboarding.  I mean, wikis are great, but they can become outdated, get trolled, or be hard to access in different languages because its all up to the playerbase to build them.  If we can get the devs to pull at least some data from the game we can get reliable stats that can be localized reliably, and they can control what information is known / hidden if they wish to preserve the thematics of the game.

[minespatch]

I was wrong for suggesting the tutorials but I appreciate Klei made those tutorials in ONI. They were fun, short, and to the point.

[KeshS]

I think the situation you want to address isn't necessery what is the problem with new players having no clue about the game. The problem is with the skill gap difference.

As many of you pointed out, you had a great time not knowing a single thing and dying to the environment with a friend. You had one goal, and that is to survive, so you pretty much did dumb things equally. 

The problem with OP situation is he knows a lot about the game and his friend almost nothing. OP has a different mindset, he doesn't need to survive as his friend. The game becomes to them more of master vs student. The friend might feel uncomfortable having OP spoonfeed, and revive everytime.

It's the reason I refused to play with a noob friend. I have no problem explaining the game and even revive him a million times, but he will get bored eventually. It's not the same mystery of the unknown world, and how pigs are overpowered.

[sinisterrkid]

12 hours ago, KeshS said:

[snip]

You definitely have a good point, but keep in mind we are a very skewed and biased subset of players to take into comparisons. (Beware of survivorship bias!) Personally I'm still wondering about other aspects of the solo newbie experience and my main question offshoots from the OP's, and is:

Is there enough in the game to make most new players realize it is worth the initial trouble and frustration?

For example: does it even look right away like it's a big, complex game? The initial gameplay hasn't really changed in years, all new content focusing on us, experienced players. (Which, hey, I'm not complaining about).

The other thing I've been focusing on is the hassle of trying again (as a newbie): mostly you either lose max health cap, making subsequent play in that world more annoying, or you regen world, which takes a long time for a game you haven't even decided you liked yet.

Which is why I think Wilderness mode, which dodges all that, is best for learning, but it has a name and thumbnail image that actually detracts newbies from entering.

Wilderness is the actual Endless*, and changing its name to something more attractive to newbies is a simple solution that I would humbly suggest to the devs if it does turn out to increase retention. (no idea if it would, I'm just speculating)

 

*For newbies, after reviving a couple of times without knowing how to stockpile booster shots, endless is just another opportunity to start again at 20 health. Wilderness is losing progress that took you 10 minutes to make.