Spring and Summer starting items

[SinancoTheBest]

Lately because of the Cawnival event, I've been only joining Summer or Late Spring servers and it came to my attention that the starting items (The vanilla setting added in the march QoL to make the life of late starters a bit easier) are inverted for Spring and Summer as they, end up being not helpful at all. I was wondering if this was intentional game design to make these items only microscopically helpful or was it an error in judgement? My argument is that the items for spring and summer would be infinitely more useful if they were given in the opposite season. I'd understand it was done intentionally but it creates an inconsistency where the winter's starting item is so much more helpful, viable and well designed.

The items I'm referring to are: Winter: Rabbit Earmuffs    Spring: Straw Hat     Summer: Pretty Parasol

By far the worst starter item is Summer's Pretty Parasol. The biggest problem with this starting item in is that it's very obsolete compared to the straw hat & whirly fan combo. While it provides a respectable 120 heat insulation, in practice this ends up being only useful until your first overheating in mere seconds, as you cannot cool you down to comfortable temperatures without going into caves or finding an endothermic firepit, which is locked behind finding Nitre and Science Machine. What ends up happening is that experienced players start rushing around to find unwithered grass for a straw hat and immediately after making one, ditch the parasol for a whirly fan and start running around trees to cool down, explore the area, gather materials for a base or head to potential base indicators on the map. In the meantime, I see almost all the novice players equipping the parasol but not benefiting much from it, start overheating, getting confused about the health loss and swiftly dying to the heat. If this mechanism was added to the game to help less experienced players a little bit, the few seconds parasol provides against the first overheating never helps them to survive nor provides a them with a tool to avoid overheating.

Straw hat would be a multitudes better starting item for summer as despite its smaller insulation value of 60, it would actually help save players from dying to overheating as combining it whirly fan and walking around a tree cools players down even at the hottest summer day for the character with most disadvantaged with overheating (Wes). It would also address the issue of withered grass tufts, since madly running around to scramble for unwithered grass tufts or other grass sources becomes a concern for summer starters, as the grass around the spawn quickly becomes depleted and unusable. Compared to parasol's 1.6 days durability in summer, straw hat's 5 days durability would also be much more consistent and en par with the rabbit earmuffs given in winter with 5 days of durability.

Pretty parasol would be so much better in spring, where it'd shine with its 50% wetness resistance for two days. Much greater than Straw hat's 20% but not in an unbalanced way, since the heavy rains of spring would raise your wetness pretty quickly regardless combined with the short durability. Straw hat isn't a bad starting item for spring but it'd be exponentially better for summer. A number of characters: Wigfrid, Walter and Wes already start with items that provide the same 20% wetness protection, making the straw hat largely obsolete for them as well as unnecessarily giving players an item made with 12 grass in the season where grass is most available as it grows the fastest due to rains. Straw hats in summer would be useful for all characters in summer, as well as parasols in spring.

I don't have much to say about Rabbit Earmuffs aside from the fact that they are really well suited for winter and compared to the starting items in spring and summer, they are immeasurably better. This is a very good design because of a multitude of reasons: Rabbits may not be immediately available to locate and catch two of when simultaneously having to allocate resources to make fire and combat cold weather. Earmuffs work well for all characters, even synergizing with some character's starting assets like Willow's bernie and Woodie's beard. Freezing can be stopped without technology using torches and campfires, so the earmuffs don't clash with the main mechanism of freezing, and instead work with it to provide much needed insulation to characters to sustain the heat they get from a fire source. And finally they help beginners by instructing them how to combat freezing, with the use of clothing and fire.

As they stand, the spring and summer starting items are leagues below the earmuffs, ending up as a bad design, precisely for failing at the strengths of the earmuffs. They don't provide you with something challenging to collect due to the weather conditions of the season. They clash with the mechanisms of their respective seasons as in straw hat's case 20% protection doesn't provide a change as big as insulation items and parasol doesn't help with cooling down. They clash with and are turned obsolete by other items including some character starting items. And finally they don't serve to teach anything valuable to novice players; as such players end up running around in panic with their parasols, wondering why they are still losing health, potentially not discovering the whirly fan whereas a switchup with straw hat can teach them a very valuable lesson on the utility of whirly fans and how to combat overheating pushing them in the right direction to defend against their hardest perceived seasonal challenge. 

Tl;dr: I believe starting items for spring and summer would work much better if they were given in the opposite season  in a balanced way and I strongly urge Klei to switch them with each other in a future patch or QoL update.

[Friendly Grass]

I really don’t agree about the pretty parasol being unhelpful.

The pretty parasol’s 120 insulation does mean it takes 5x longer to start overheating than if you have nothing. This can give you time to find a cave entrance. I don’t consider it a bad starting item. And a straw hat wouldn’t help with cooling down either because cooling effects and insulation don’t stack. Since they don’t stack you can totally just switch between a parasol and a whirly fan; run around a tree with a whirly fan and then switch back to parasol.

Whirly fans and trees provide cooling effects that stack.

Clothing provides insulation that stacks.

Insulation doesn’t do anything while you have a cooling effect that’s keeping you cool.

(120 + 30) / 30 = 5 seconds to lose 1 degree

[HowlVoid]

46 minutes ago, Friendly Grass said:

I really don’t agree about the pretty parasol being unhelpful.

The pretty parasol’s 120 insulation does mean it takes 5x longer to start overheating than if you have nothing. This can give you time to find a cave entrance. I don’t consider it a bad starting item. And a straw hat wouldn’t help with cooling down either because cooling effects and insulation don’t stack. Since they don’t stack you can totally just switch between a parasol and a whirly fan; run around a tree with a whirly fan and then switch back to parasol.

Whirly fans and trees provide cooling effects that stack.

Clothing provides insulation that stacks.

Insulation doesn’t do anything while you have a cooling effect that’s keeping you cool.

(120 + 30) / 30 = 5 seconds to lose 1 degree

Unless I missed something, and I apologize if I did, the post mentions both items being a bit weak in comparison to rabbit earmuffs. A person can spawn with a parasol and then have to choose between enough grass for a strawhat to stack insulation or tools like torches and backpacks. Spawning with a straw hat means you can collect flowers for a parasol and keeping all the grass for tools. A hat also frees your hand while mining and chopping while a parasol will have you go from 120 insulation to 0 periodically every time you decide to mine or chop. You wont always find a sinkhole on the first day nor nitre/gold. This goes double for new players who may not get their bearings in the 1.6 days the parasol provides, and their being no available grass due to withering nor flowers if caught in the wrong biome, will have them running around with 0 insulation and then dead in no time. 

I think this isn't too unfair given summer is supposed to be the hardest season but then again its also not worth facing given its lack of content and most people just go underground.

I do believe this change would benefit new players far more. Especially if they don't know about in game mechanics and will have the hat on all the time rather then the constant switching.

[Echsrick]

i think the reason for that is that in srping you only use the hat if its raining but durin summer you always need something to protect you and because the pretty parasol spoils on its own even if not in use you are givin the parasol durin the time where you always need to carry something