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I don't understand why hound/depth worm wave mechanics are in the game


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As other stated, OP, point of Hounds/Worms is to kill you/pose a serious (relative meaning, as most experienced players have planned-ahead counter-measures to deal with such threats and more) RNG-based periodical danger.

If you really don't fancy them and aren't interested in "getting good" vs such mobs, on your personal servers - as you yourself already stated this - can just turn them off from settings. On dedicated servers you can simply de-log and/or enter/exit caves to "unwind" their actual spawning after you receive the sound warning.

Purely regarding Worms, there are 3 more strategies that will assure more-or-less your easy survival:

     1) when sound warning is played, go into a tight (1-2 tiles wide) but long area (like a "bridge" between 2 land-masses) - you will spawn none or at most 1-2 worms even in late-game;

     2) you can simply outrun Worms - they will remain in the general 1-screen-distance from their original spawn space;

     3) exploit the "gate to abyss" glitch - this not only negates any Worms spawn (as game checks solely landmasses for players' presence when spawning Worms, hence being in Abyss equates to not being in-game from this pov), but also Earthquakes; likewise, offers you the opportunity to "cheese" mobs and bosses from out-of-boundaries with ease.

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In my 300+ day world I turned hounds to less.  It appears that changing the setting after world generation only affects the spawn timer, not the number of hounds spawned.  This give a bit more breathing room between spawns, but still allows plenty of hounds to supply meat and cheap gems.

10 hours ago, Aeglefire said:

Random ideas, just throwing it out there:

- Hound's tooth necklace

- Hound's tooth soup

- Hound's teeth used to make hound station to pray to the hound gods so that they don't spawn as often, etc.

I love the idea of a different in-game mechanic rather than changing the settings.  With the hound station, maybe you feed it monster meat and teeth to delay future waves.  Perhaps the relatively unused hound whistle could be repurposed? If you blow the whistle when the hounds are barking it will scare them off rather than creating a follower.  

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I think interesting enough is to put hound shrine at new island at sea. It will prevent players to find shrine too early, add a reason to build telelocator focus or/and antlion teleport, stimulate players to explore sea and give a reason to add a new plants, mobs, turf in the game.

(Maybe coffee, I know, everybody want it)

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Not sure why people find it necessary to be so aggressive at all times in video game discussion online... it's kind of exhausting, not gonna lie. At first I wanted to write out a whole reply about why I agree and dislike hound waves, but seems like I'd get epic owned and shut down with witty remarks. So I'll just say I really really dislike hounds and they're one of the only pieces of content in the game that I explicitly dislike and don't enjoy at all, across both games and every DST update.

Just wanted to help represent that opinion since most everyone in this thread is disagreeing.

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39 minutes ago, Sunset Skye said:

Not sure why people find it necessary to be so aggressive at all times in video game discussion online... it's kind of exhausting, not gonna lie. At first I wanted to write out a whole reply about why I agree and dislike hound waves, but seems like I'd get epic owned and shut down with witty remarks. So I'll just say I really really dislike hounds and they're one of the only pieces of content in the game that I explicitly dislike and don't enjoy at all, across both games and every DST update.

Just wanted to help represent that opinion since most everyone in this thread is disagreeing.

i agree and disagree. like early game hound waves are fun because they are surprises so you must get over the difficulty curve and there arent a plentiful amount but later on it isn't about difficulty the little bastards keep coming and coming and coming i still think they shouldn't be removed maybe a small rework and for depth worms i think they are fine being they are easy to sink up their attacks and they send a butt load of them 

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It's possible to be able to deal with something in a game and still dislike its inclusion. Not every player is saying "help this mechanic is too hard!" when they say they don't enjoy a certain mechanic. Trying to imply that anyone who finds hound attacks or depths worms attacks annoying must simply just not be on your skill level doesn't add anything to the conversation. 

This isn't even a problem specific to this thread, it's one you see all over this board, even if the original complaint has a varying degree of validity. There's more to be said in regards to the pros and cons of a mechanic than how easy or hard they are to deal with.

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This thread clearly became something about opinions rather than facts, but I would like to try to remind about some of the latter.

Debth worms: are easy to outrun, as well as are not hard to be syncronized should one decide to fight them, also they are always wet, which means morning star is exellent weapon to fight them (deals 72.25 damage). From my experience 1 morning star is enough to deal with 10-12 full-sized debth worm waves, and delay between attacks of worms is bigger than between hound attacks, which leaves more time for other things to do. Difficulty and/or length of the fight scales according to surrounding (are there nightmares/monkeys/etc. attacking player already or not) and damage of the weapon used: the less damage weapon deals, the longer player is exposed to insanity aura, the more crawling horrors/terrorbeaks one needs to kill WHILE dealing with worm wave, so weapon with high damage is important in this fight.

Their loot is valuable, since glow berry is fuel for moggles - light source, which can be used while holding weapon/tool, can't be stolen by monkeys, reveals full screen and provides the more clear picture the more insane player is (insanity filter visually (although not functionally) lessens light radius of another light sources, which is inconvenient in the ruins and caves in general)). For glowberry alone debth worms are worth killing, since 1 stack of glow berries (10 items) provides light for 26.(6) minutes, which is more than 3 in-game days of constant wearing, whereas 1 stack of lesser glow berries (10 items) provides only 5 minues of light (a bit more than half a day), and inventory space is very valuable in this game, as well as information about surrounding (full screen vision). Debth worms also drop a lot of monster meat, which is valuable resource delivered straight to player: cooked/dried version isn't a bad food item (damages only for 3 health, eat 1 lichen or 3 light bulbs per 1 monster meat and health net loss is 0), can be used in crock pot as ingredient with 1 monster value, and, more importantly, full 1 meat value, which allows to cook surf'n'turf with 2 monster meat and 2 eels (60 health, 33 danity, 37.5 hunger), be converted into egg just as well as regular piece of meat, most of the meat recipes allow 1 monster ingredient so it can be used to cheapen recipes like honey ham, meaty stew, bacon and eggs, and in general can be used as only piece of meat in meatballs, pierogi, etc.; the fact that it is monster food allows it to be used for converting pigs into werepigs (and it's not hard to build pig houses in the caves), which allows to acquire large meat from monster meat in 1 : 2 ratio + guaranteed pig skin per 4 monster meat pieces (can be used for weapon, armor, expanding pig farm, tending item for crop farm, etc.). Not to mention benefit for Walter (food for Woby), Woodie (material for idols), each worm drops soul (additional benefit for Wortox), Webber doesn't even have health and sanity penalty, Wormwood doesn't have health penalty upon monster meat consumption. I don't understand how reward for the fight isn't worth it, it's not like debth worm drop nothing.

Hound waves: before day 100+ can be easitly managed with spear, after that tentacle spike amount of damage (50+) is everything player needs, since even after day 100 delay between each hound spawning during hound wave is enough to land 3 hits to previous hound before next one can reach player, not to mention using elemental hounds for crowd control, as well as other mobs for help. With only spear and without armor it can be painful, but that way game pushes player towards the progression.

Hound waves are PRIMARY RENEWABLE source of hound's tooth in the worlds with default settings, moreover, they DELIVER that resource straight to player. Sure, in late game teeth tend to accumulate too much, but without them sewing kit would be much rarer (non-renewable without hard-grinding tumbleweeds, living next to hound mound, which can't be relocated and requires to fighting hounds anyway, or spending green gems), in other words - no insta-repairing clothes/thermal stones and nesessity to farm much wider variety of resources in much bigger quantities would appear (from rocks and beefalo horns to pig skin, deerclops eyeball and tam-o-shanter). And this problem would be even worse for people often wearing 2 pieces of clothing simultaneously or Willow-players who actively use Bernie for tanking stuff. About monster meat I've said a lot already, and on top of that for Wortox in terms of free souls delivery they are even better than worms, because maximum worm wave is 5 entities, and 10 of them for hound wave. Gems are also required for crafting ice staves, life giving amulets, purple gems (moonrock idols, bat bats, telelocator powering and telelocator staves), powering Winona's G.E.M.erators, etc. Again, it's not like player gains nothing from hound wave.

During sailing hound wave is skipped and timer until the next one resets, so hounds at sea can appear only if barking started while player was on land, in which case player has an option to quickly return to the land (or outrun them as weregoose, especially on water).

Despite all that was said I would like hound waves to be improved and be made more interesting after day 100+. I also would like to keep stable flow of teeth (for sewing kits), as well as gain ability to craft more useful things from said teeth.

Also as many already have mentioned, there is an option to turn them off even in already existing world, so in the end developers left choice for players whether to deal with hounds or not. 

One more thing: this thread reminded me that originally according to the game lore hounds were the means of Maxwell to harrass the player, but Charlie seem to be more focused on her own goals. So from the lore point of view what is the purpose of hound waves in DST world?

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My only problem with Hound Attacks are the frequency at which they appear during games lasting several hundred days. Nobody really needs to be harassed by hounds that often. IMO, they shouldn't ever be more frequent than once every 7 days at most and that should only happen if you get unlucky enough to get the fastest interval in between attacks. Otherwise, they should probably always spawn a random number of days between say 7-28 IMO and never become more frequent than that. In other words, even in a world over 2000 in-game days old should still have occasional long lulls between hound attacks where it might have been 26 days since their last attack.

Aside from that though, I can't say I really agree with too much of the OP's issues with random attacks. With all due respect, suggesting hound attacks are either killbox or death is a false dichotomy fallacy. These are not the only two options. A skilled player can easily play the entire game dealing with hound attacks having never once relied on a killbox or dying. I'm not even convinced they need to be skilled. I'm pretty sure that all but the worst of hound attacks can generally be mitigated with a few pieces of armor and a decent weapon, where you can quite literally just hold down the F key and the hounds will die before you do. Sure, it might not be optimal and it might cost you a log suit and/or a helmet, but it's not like those are that hard to come by.

As for the OP's other point, it not being fun, that's just a personal preference. There are many people that enjoy the challenge random hound attacks can bring to the game and for those people, hound attacks absolutely are part of what makes this game fun. But I agree, not everybody will think that way. I don't think there's any shame at lowering hound attack frequency or even removing them entirely. Video games are meant to be enjoyed, so do what's most fun for you! Be that turning off hound attacks, enabling mods, playing with console commands or anything else for that matter. As long as you're enjoying yourself and the people playing with you are as well, then you do you!

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6 hours ago, Dextops said:

it isn't about difficulty the little bastards keep coming and coming and coming

I think that's partly the other thing about them as well. How I see it, more enemies does not usually mean "harder" but tends to mean more loot and tedium for an experienced player. Even with Ice and Fire hounds it gets kinda boring getting bum-rushed by 10+ hounds all at once when they are all the same. My hope is that in the future we may see variants of hounds that grow with the world, offering new challenges that you can't easily predict before a wave and simply retreat to a "panic room".

Deep Rock Galactic does a pretty good job at this in my opinion; there are multiple enemy variants that are meant to counter player strategy such as a bug that has armor plating on the front of which takes no damage, discouraging the player from using a bunker strategy. In DST I could perhaps imagine a type of hound that blows away deployables within range in an attempt to counter a tooth trap minefield strategy; or even long-ranged hostiles that try to keep distance from the player while attacking from afar.

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11 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

It's possible to be able to deal with something in a game and still dislike its inclusion. Not every player is saying "help this mechanic is too hard!" when they say they don't enjoy a certain mechanic. Trying to imply that anyone who finds hound attacks or depths worms attacks annoying must simply just not be on your skill level doesn't add anything to the conversation. 

This isn't even a problem specific to this thread, it's one you see all over this board, even if the original complaint has a varying degree of validity. There's more to be said in regards to the pros and cons of a mechanic than how easy or hard they are to deal with.

Don't get me wrong, I do find them annoying myself, but for me that is the point of hounds/Cave Worms to begin with. What I have an issue with, is the statement that they are just flat-out bad game design and then trying to explain it objectively with completely subjective arguments like "unfair". I feel like some sort of enemy waves are a stable of games like that, DS is not the only game having them...and again the fact that opinions are so divided about this also proofs that it is basically just personal preference...that Klei accounted for by giving you the option to turn them off.

I do agree that responding to these preferences with "How about you just get gud" is problematic as well, especially when we talk constructive criticism and ideas to maybe improve the mechanic. There's always room for improvements! And having these waves switch up from time to time...or adding new variants or something like that would be kinda awesome :D

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13 hours ago, Sunset Skye said:

Not sure why people find it necessary to be so aggressive at all times in video game discussion online... it's kind of exhausting, not gonna lie. At first I wanted to write out a whole reply about why I agree and dislike hound waves, but seems like I'd get epic owned and shut down with witty remarks. So I'll just say I really really dislike hounds and they're one of the only pieces of content in the game that I explicitly dislike and don't enjoy at all, across both games and every DST update.

Just wanted to help represent that opinion since most everyone in this thread is disagreeing.

Well, it's a whole different thing to say:

Quote

"I really really dislike hounds and they're one of the only pieces of content in the game that I explicitly dislike and don't enjoy at all"

...and to say: Hound waves are

Quote

"are a failure of game design"

..and that they should be removed. Also that there is only one real counterplay - waiting for them at base.

Your opinion can be disagreed with, but the OP's one can be "epicly owned", because it suggests some kind of "expertise in game design" while ignoring advices and ways that lead to successfuly dealing with the hounds and worms.

There can be only one default set of settings. And i think we should be conservative in this regard and keep the historical core of the game as the default.
(Which IMO is probably the unfairness of the Constant)
 

I'm glad that you're able to represent a non-popular opinion though.

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