The unspoken rule of "vanilla" and options

[Wurtstool]

This is more discussion on game balance and difficulty of DST relative to "vanilla" world gen settings.

Over a few discussion threads about overall game balance, I tend to think that most people forget that world customizations are a thing and that vanilla is the holy grail on what needs to be balanced around. I'm an advocate for more options and personally believe that if you think that the game is too easy/difficult for your liking, you can adjust it in the world customization settings to suit your preferred type of experience. With that being said I think Klei should focus on making more accessibility options in the world settings(more options for harder/easier content) rather than to balance vanilla DST in a sense. 

An example of this I can think of is that back when disease was a thing, there is already an option to turn it off in world customizations but instead they removed the feature completely. This removes options and people who wanted to play with disease on can no longer can do so. 

To those who disagree with this sentiment, I completely understand that there needs to be a ground on the way "DST is meant to be played" and that vanilla settings are there to set that ground. But then what is there harm to give players the power to balance the game in the way they like rather then Klei taking it up themselves in balancing everything around vanilla? Are people overvaluing that the game needs to be played on vanilla to get the "true" gameplay experience and that changing settings may break some unspoken rule out there? 

Think if we had the options to select new or old farms in server settings, or better yet have options to select whether you want to play with old or refreshed characters as well. Are more options always better?   

[Mike23Ua]

Yes, and for years I’ve been trying to say that, luckily some nice folks at Klei actually listened and started to incorporate that into the game- For example: Setting Nightmare creatures to Tons doesn’t just make more of them spawn, they also move faster & hit harder.. and take a little longer to kill.

If your still playing the game on “Default” your currently missing out on the hardest available experience for DST.

I also predict that Klei will continue to tune these settings in future QoL updates, because “Technically” any new content they add to the game could/should be able to be toggled on/off.

Also: OPTIONS allow for more world control: for example you can toggle the Terrarium on/off So in this same area why can’t you choose “spawns on randomly choosen player” or “Only spawns on the Terrarium”

Both camps of players who demand it changed so people can’t troll with it & the camp that enjoys the “uncompromising” part of having it pop in randomly get to enjoy the content without Nerfing or removing the others way of enjoying it.

Boss fights in DST are now Outdated: Particularly the Dragonfly & Bee Queen- I can now toggle on WintersFeast at any time of the year & get Walking Canes, Tam’O, Gems, & Bundling Wrap without needing to even fight these bosses.

Which is nice: Because I don’t like to spend long periods of time fighting a singular entity in the first place.

Personally I enjoy something more like Shipwrecked or Hamlet, exploring content rich wildlife filled environments..

ANYONE who has played Spelunky or Spelunky 2 can tell you that randomly picking up and throwing a vase could contain loot, or it could contain something that’s going to hurt your health bars.

DST ALREADY has some RNG mob encounters like this particularly when sailing or opening up tumbleweeds- World Gen settings would allow me to increase the odds of these RNG encounters.

And as far as Klei Official/Dedicated worlds go: Maybe it’s time they pull all of those down and give each one it’s own set of setting applied??

for example: a server called “Catch that Splumonkey” should have More Splumonkey toggled on.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

i wish there were an option to increase or lower how much temperature or punish by it do you want. Lets say how much damage you take from overheat or freeze so that little mistakes like forgetting your thermal gear really punish you

right now to increase difficulty you can only put certain dangers to more which also gives more loot (like settings shadows to more) or decrease certain resources which is mosly making the game more grindy instead of actually difficult

[Cheggf]

36 minutes ago, Wurtstool said:

An example of this I can think of is that back when disease was a thing, there is already an option to turn it off in world customizations but instead they removed the feature completely. This removes options and people who wanted to play with disease on can no longer can do so. 

Disease was a garbage and unfun mechanic. I personally think it should have just changed from default on to default off instead of removed completely, but removing it completely was better than keeping it default on. Nearly no one has complained about its removal since it didn't really add anything and just asked you to shovel your plants periodically.

[Yuuko]

Worldgen settings are not "difficulty settings."  They change the world, and in some ways this can make things easier, in others it can make it harder, but they are world gen customization features NOT difficulty settings.  If X happens to be a challenge for you, and you set X to lots it can make it more difficult for you, BUT to someone for whom X is a boon it makes the world easier - and there is a LOT of debate about which way you could judge this.

For instance - there was a mod a long time ago that made bosses spawn on you non-stop.  It was supposed to be a sort of challenge, boss rush type game mode.  BUT the bosses kept dropping boss loot, tons of food, special resources etc.  And you could just make bosses fight each other.  Similarly there is the "all to none" option where you turn off every single option, hard to survive when the world spawns no grass / twigs / flint?  yeah.  Is this difficulty?  no.  Its just a slog.  Tweaking only the spawn rate can change the world, but not strictly for "harder" or "easier," and its hard to say for "better" or "worse."

Having a setting to turn a thing on or off in worldgen is the worst excuse for having something exist as is in the world.  Disease as it was originally implemented, where you could match turfs to prevent disease, wasn't bad.  When they changed it so that everything you plant would get diseased over time and all you got was a text line indicator of what was diseased it was simply horrible game design.  A pure fk u to the player who deigned to think they could set up a reliable base spot using the plant relocation system without taking notes on replant cycles and minding every text line that might pop up while they're playing.  The answer was not to turn disease off, it was to either remove it because it was just a bad system, or for Klei to change it into a good system.

[Maxposting]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

- For example: Setting Nightmare creatures to Tons doesn’t just make more of them spawn, they also move faster & hit harder.. and take a little longer to kill.

That's not even how anything works in the toggles.

I think I'm going to go insane.

[Mike23Ua]

World Gen settings actually are difficulty settings though & that’s what I keep trying to tell you guys and no one seems to want to listen. When you really think about it..

What even is a Difficulty setting in literally any game you have EVER played?

Like what defines it as being more Difficult? For games like “Gears of War 5” it’s smarter & more difficult enemy types that deal more damage and take less damage.

For a game like like “Battlefield” it’s removing the Mini-Map, any on screen information, and not allowing health to regenerate if you get shot.

For State of Decay 2 it’s removing resources, making enemies deal more damage, more enemy variants.

Are you still not seeing the pattern here?

Lets just pretend Klei adds something called Extra Extreme Difficulty Plus- and in this new mode: Frog Rain can now become poisoned frog rain, And those poisoned frogs fall to the ground exploding into gas clouds which will spread throughout the biome “disease” that needs to be cured or else that entire biome becomes a hazmat zone like the gas biomes of Hamlet.

That sounds like new difficulty.. but in reality it’s just a bunch of extra bells and whistles to world Gen toggles.

frog rain: On/Off/More/Less/ Normal/Poison.

Do Poison frogs explode? Yes/No.

If the answers to the above is set PoIson but also No for exploding then your frogs just fall as normal poison dart frogs.. 

If your frogs fall and explode into a gas bomb 

Does Gas clouds spread throughout the biome inflicting it with Hazardous toxin?

Yes/No/Random

If Yes.. then the above scenario of falling exploding frogs turning biomes into hazardous toxin hamlet style land fields is still True, if set to NO then these frogs only explode in a non spreading AoE..

And if set to RANDOM.. Goodluck guessing how your frog rain is going to behave that season.

In short: Any Currently existing or future content Klei adds to this game will go right here under this lovely little menu of things you can toggle on/off/more/less/random over.

So HOPEFULLY this brief demonstration finally proves once and for all that World Gen settings actually ARE Difficulty settings it’s just some people can see that.. where others still refuse to understand.

[Maxposting]

7 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

World Gen settings actually ARE Difficulty settings

Do you even know what World Gen means in the first place?

Sure, the tab includes active gameplay elements, but it doesn't actively change the playthrough, it just makes stuff spawn more or often.

[Yuuko]

40 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Lets just pretend Klei adds something called Extra Extreme Difficulty Plus- and in this new mode: Frog Rain can now become poisoned frog rain, And those poisoned frogs fall to the ground exploding into gas clouds which will spread throughout the biome “disease” that needs to be cured or else that entire biome becomes a hazmat zone like the gas biomes of Hamlet.

That sounds like new difficulty.. but in reality it’s just a bunch of extra bells and whistles to world Gen toggles.

 

No - that's not world gen.  In DST the world is generated programmatically every time you launch a new world.  In generating the world it uses these settings.  If you set a monster to more, then the world will have more of them.  It doesn't change when that mob is active, what its attack patterns are, how much damage it deals - NOR SHOULD IT lol.

There are a lot of ways to make a game "more difficult," but the reality is there are good and bad kinds of "difficulty."  If you just add more health to enemies, you're making them take x longer to kill.  If you add more damage, you're making the player die x times more easily.  In a game where you cannot run out of ability to attack, and you are able to take zero damage, this does nothing but extend the duration of the encounter.  Castle Crashers is a good example of this, where their "insane" difficulty took a 5 minute stage and stretched it out to an hour+ slog because the health of the enemies were just stupidly high.  And yes - stupidly - because it wasn't "difficult" or "fun," it was just a slog.

If DST wants to be a more difficult game the way to do that is to give bosses different attacks that require different responses and either up the complexity of their cd interactions or have them occur without a pattern but with small tells a player can react to.  Example:  Feastclopse and Klaus 2nd form.

Bad ways DST can add difficulty - scaling hp / damage, having toggled alternate versions of creatures, simply adding more of a creature, and dumbest of all "random."

[Mike23Ua]

You just indirectly proved my point: Feastclops is only a variation of Deerclops that can be toggled to On if the player turns on the WintersFeast event.

[ADM]

1 hour ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

i wish there were an option to increase or lower how much temperature or punish by it do you want. Lets say how much damage you take from overheat or freeze so that little mistakes like forgetting your thermal gear really punish you

Wish there was some sort of gamerule panel to customize such things, that could bring a lot of new customization to set up servers for events and more or less wacky things without bringing out a collection of ninety mods.

 

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

Disease was a garbage and unfun mechanic. I personally think it should have just changed from default on to default off instead of removed completely, but removing it completely was better than keeping it default on. Nearly no one has complained about its removal since it didn't really add anything and just asked you to shovel your plants periodically.

I complained a lot about its removal but mostly because this mechanism stent in the game for years despite all the complains (meanwhile I was just playing with it turned off and probably this was the best thing to do, that or mods doing something about it). I was really hoping the disease gets a cool rework from all the suggestions there was to turn it into something controllable, maybe useful (some events / boss / items from it?) but not just an useless time punisher... so to me this is a massive waste to have it straightly removed without attempting anything for years on such a hot topic.

Yet we've been told by the devs that the feature was only disabled so there was a potential return but by now I doubt anything come out. But I'd like to be wrong and a cool disease system pop out of nowhere.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

toad should have drop something like bug b gone to save your rotten by disease plants. Idk why klei said "we tried things and nothing worked" when was as easy as adding that but if they tried annoying things like shoveling them as a solution is obvious that it wont work...

having to taking care of plants instead of having accessible resources forever was a cool concept 

 

edit. and im afraid that they will do the same with wildfires instead of adding something obvious as a secondary and farmeable loot for CK...

edit2. and the worst part is that they removed it instead of making it a non default setting :_

im sure that it took more time to remove it from the settings that changing a "yes" to a "no"

[Gashzer]

2 hours ago, Wurtstool said:

"...or better yet have options to select whether you want to play with old or refreshed characters as well."

Just sounds like you want the old wolfgang back hahaha

Vanilla is the best way to play tho, plenty of challenges on the way to fighting Alter Champion and Ancient fuelweaver... without cheesing. Making the game artifically harder by changing the world gen just isn't fun for me.

Dst needs a completely new world with completely new mobs, seasons, threats, items and such. Playing hamlet in single player feels like such a unique and different don't starve experience everytime i go back to it after playing dst for a while. Dst needs a biiiiiiiiiiiig dlc, i'm willing to pay full price for a dst dlc with the same level of scope as hamlet/shipwrecked.

Klei shouldn't focus on more accessibility options but more content.

New content is the only way forward.

[abrocator]

55 minutes ago, ADM said:

I complained a lot about its removal but mostly because this mechanism stent in the game for years despite all the complains (meanwhile I was just playing with it turned off and probably this was the best thing to do, that or mods doing something about it). I was really hoping the disease gets a cool rework from all the suggestions there was to turn it into something controllable, maybe useful (some events / boss / items from it?) but not just an useless time punisher... so to me this is a massive waste to have it straightly removed without attempting anything for years on such a hot topic.

You played with it off yourself and yet complained about its removal.

I get that you would rather have the option than to not have it (although you apparently never used that option).  But the downside is that default-on means that it just becomes a trap for beginners who started a world without either knowing about the mechanic or just forgot, as in the classic “forgot to enable caves oops”.  And with that in mind I see no reason to prefer the old status quo of default-on to just removing it outright.  (Keeping it around because it might get reworked is like wishing that a band that you hate keeps getting played on the radio just in case they against all odds happen to release a good album eventually.)

Disease has little potential.  The farming overhaul worked because it’s just another way to get food.  Disease is similar to the grass geckos except it has no upsides (you can pen geckos and get an auto-drop grass area); I can’t imagine future strats which involve “strategically contracting disease in order to farm X”.  It’s just pure busywork.

[ADM]

34 minutes ago, abrocator said:

You played with it off yourself and yet complained about its removal.

I pretty much did all the different you could imagine with disease and beyond, played with (and most of the time just dealt with not making disease-able plantations), played without so I could just not bother myself with a so not necessary game feature to decorate and such, and also played with disease on but with a mod I made to make disease more manageable and only farming related, it's an aspect I previously suggested while disease was still a thing and I quite enjoyed how it was my way.

35 minutes ago, abrocator said:

I get that you would rather have the option than to not have it (although you apparently never used that option).  But the downside is that default-on means that it just becomes a trap for beginners who started a world without either knowing about the mechanic or just forgot, as in the classic “forgot to enable caves oops”.  And with that in mind I see no reason to prefer the old status quo of default-on to just removing it outright.  (Keeping it around because it might get reworked is like wishing that a band that you hate keeps getting played on the radio just in case they against all odds happen to release a good album eventually.)

There are many other features of the game that you could consider beginners trap and they doesn't deserve to be removed of the game or get tuned off by default for this reason, it's a game you learn with and definitely you realised it yourself at a time. The origin of the complains about disease is that there's nothing to learn around it outside of : it's been X days, let's uproot the plants. Because of that nobody has to prefer the old state of the game, myself included given this wasn't what the talk is about, no old disease is better over its poor execution but there was room for tons of improvement yet nothing was publicly attempted in 4 years of game updates.

35 minutes ago, abrocator said:

Disease has little potential.  The farming overhaul worked because it’s just another way to get food.  Disease is similar to the grass geckos except it has no upsides (you can pen geckos and get an auto-drop grass area); I can’t imagine future strats which involve “strategically contracting disease in order to farm X”.  It’s just pure busywork.

Farming got one hell of a good improvement cause they introduced many tools and brand new features. Crops couldn't be improved / rot before outside of drying, there wasn't weeds that have their own uses and there wasn't a miniboss offering even more improvements to farming and so much more other things that have been tweaked... so yeah tons of things you would probably not haven't thought about in the first place to make farming much better, disease could get a similar treatment despite being only a negative aspect in its old setting with literally no other take than getting a plant killed.

[00petar00]

3 hours ago, ADM said:

I complained a lot about its removal but mostly because this mechanism stent in the game for years despite all the complains (meanwhile I was just playing with it turned off and probably this was the best thing to do, that or mods doing something about it). I was really hoping the disease gets a cool rework from all the suggestions there was to turn it into something controllable, maybe useful (some events / boss / items from it?) but not just an useless time punisher... so to me this is a massive waste to have it straightly removed without attempting anything for years on such a hot topic.

Yet we've been told by the devs that the feature was only disabled so there was a potential return but by now I doubt anything come out. But I'd like to be wrong and a cool disease system pop out of nowhere.

There was really no point to complain about disease removal, especially if you didn't use it at all and people that did use it, just don't make farms if that's how you want to play, just decide on your own not to make any.

What is Klei supposed to do with it? I'd understand your point if that code was at least somewhat reusable, it was just so bad that they decided to scrap it completely. Klei would need to code a completely different disease mechanic from scratch and in the end it would still be time punishment, because i don't see how else would plant disease work and not be tedious when i have so many farms.

Because Klei removed disease, they added lord of the fruit flies miniboss, so i really don't see how people can still not be satisfied.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

2 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

Because Klei removed disease, they added lord of the fruit flies miniboss, so i really don't see how people can still not be satisfied.

meh a boss that isnt even as strong as a clockwork as penalty for having a stack of veggies...

3 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

i don't see how else would plant disease work and not be tedious when i have so many farms

bug b gone for plants dropped by toad

[Mike23Ua]

2 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

meh a boss that isnt even as strong as a clockwork as penalty for having a stack of veggies...

bug b gone for plants dropped by toad

So you want people who might play solo and can’t fight this boss to simply have their fun abruptly end?

deerclops 2.0 for many beginner players.

[00petar00]

3 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

meh a boss that isnt even as strong as a clockwork as penalty for having a stack of veggies...

At least its something to compensate disease removal and change of pace for players that make farms.

Honestly if klei just removed disease and didn't add anything in the game that had some interactions with plants, i would still have nothing to complain about, disease was a terrible mechanic that i always turned off and i didn't want to play with people for a longer periods of time if the servers had it on.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

19 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

So you want people who might play solo and can’t fight this boss to simply have their fun abruptly end?

 

no, only a punish if you move resources to your base (thing that i though you hated) but not as unfair and tedious as it was. Toad is one of the easiest bosses even for solo, solo players just need to work arround with what we have like using morning star and glass axes to drastically reduce the cost and time expend in the fight. Also, as happens with other items, there could be a low tier bug b gone made with other kind of materials

All players can beat toad but not all know how to do it which is very different

16 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

At least its something to compensate disease removal and change of pace for players that make farms.

Honestly if klei just removed disease and didn't add anything in the game that had some interactions with plants, i would still have nothing to complain about, disease was a terrible mechanic that i always turned off and i didn't want to play with people for a longer periods of time if the servers had it on.

the execution was horrible and bland but i loved the concept

[hhh2]

7 hours ago, Shosuko said:

there was a mod a long time ago that made bosses spawn on you non-stop.  It was supposed to be a sort of challenge, boss rush type game mode.  BUT the bosses kept dropping boss loot, tons of food, special resources

Was this joe? Endless Bosses mod? If it was there was also a only farm food restriction in the mod so you couldn't just live off all the meat drops.

5 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Just sounds like you want the old wolfgang back hahaha

Vanilla is the best way to play tho, plenty of challenges on the way to fighting Alter Champion and Ancient fuelweaver... without cheesing. Making the game artifically harder by changing the world gen just isn't fun for me.

Dst needs a completely new world with completely new mobs, seasons, threats, items and such. Playing hamlet in single player feels like such a unique and different don't starve experience everytime i go back to it after playing dst for a while. Dst needs a biiiiiiiiiiiig dlc, i'm willing to pay full price for a dst dlc with the same level of scope as hamlet/shipwrecked.

Klei shouldn't focus on more accessibility options but more content.

New content is the only way forward.

i agree, most the problems with people complaing about world gen biomes being empty or uninteresting i think comes from dst only using the RoG map/content, which obviously will become boring after playing it for years. I would like Klei to port over hamlet and shipwrecked, but a new DLC sized, uh... DLC would be better (but i'm not sure how that would work offline seeing as you can't even play as the DLC characters in offline mode).

2 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

bug b gone for plants dropped by toad

a single use item dropped by a raid boss to stop disease seems really dumb, especially since disease started around day 50 meaning if you didn't farm moose and goats a bunch for weather pains you'd be screwed during the toad fight to save your plants. I'm glad disease was removed

[Yuuko]

14 minutes ago, hhh2 said:

Was this joe? Endless Bosses mod? If it was there was also a only farm food restriction in the mod so you couldn't just live off all the meat drops.

idr but probably - I was very new at the game when I heard about this, and I remember the discussion about it where they chatted about how having bosses always spawn on you helped too much XD so they had to add other restrictions like you can't run away from them, can't get food from them, etc.

Which is kinda the problem with trying to add difficulty based things to world-gen.  World gen settings just cannot possibly be nuanced enough to handle the scope of all of the changes some people want to put forward, and most of the time they are putting them forward in some kind of quixotic quest for an "uncompromising mode" and they think like... "If ppl can turn it off then we can do whatever we want right?"  but the reality is world gen isn't for that, and shouldn't be.  If you want to make changes on that scale then really its time to learn how to mod :\ 

[ADM]

3 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

There was really no point to complain about disease removal, especially if you didn't use it at all and people that did use it, just don't make farms if that's how you want to play, just decide on your own not to make any.

What is Klei supposed to do with it? I'd understand your point if that code was at least somewhat reusable, it was just so bad that they decided to scrap it completely. Klei would need to code a completely different disease mechanic from scratch and in the end it would still be time punishment, because i don't see how else would plant disease work and not be tedious when i have so many farms.

I'd gladly repeat exactly what I just said to precisely answer you but I will do an effort to develop a bit more because you clearly overdramatise what making change on such a mechanism implies in term of work. I know disease was bad in its state and no I did play with disease more than necessary, actually sufficiently long to decide making a disease overhaul myself which was sufficient to fix my whole concern about the unjustified applications of the disease and doing so was only the work of a minute despite I could have done more and more. At any rate the main issue with disease is its trigger which is no more than a line of code beginning its timer that has no more play beside it than happening some day. All of the disease elements, code, arts, and anything you can imagine is still in place and perfectly useable and upgrades could have getting started by tweaking its conditions and consequences, starting by for example not destroying diseased plants.

Spoiler

And no even that doesn't require much more work given the diseased plants had item version but are just not implanted.
Again my reason for this talk is not to list millions of things that would improve disease-able plants it as you seems to have no idea what could be added around a mechanism that has so many free space that could be enriched with a little brainstorming on the disease topic which should already have a barrel full of suggestions to it. The game devs are great at what they're doing and it's not such a thing that is going to challenge them, especially compared to RWYS that was mostly exclusively new additions. Now regardless they do something about it now that it's gone or not doesn't change anything but I wanted that to be clear.

At some point that would be good to realise this is what players look forward for usually in different aspects of the game when it's out, but you need to quit thinking what disease concept enjoyers ask for is to get all your plants killed.

[00petar00]

42 minutes ago, ADM said:

I'd gladly repeat exactly what I just said to precisely answer you but I will do an effort to develop a bit more because you clearly overdramatise what making change on such a mechanism implies in term of work. I know disease was bad in its state and no I did play with disease more than necessary, actually sufficiently long to decide making a disease overhaul myself which was sufficient to fix my whole concern about the unjustified applications of the disease and doing so was only the work of a minute despite I could have done more and more. At any rate the main issue with disease is its trigger which is no more than a line of code beginning its timer that has no more play beside it than happening some day. All of the disease elements, code, arts, and anything you can imagine is still in place and perfectly useable and upgrades could have getting started by tweaking its conditions and consequences, starting by for example not destroying diseased plants.

  Hide contents

And no even that doesn't require much more work given the diseased plants had item version but are just not implanted.
Again my reason for this talk is not to list millions of things that would improve disease-able plants it as you seems to have no idea what could be added around a mechanism that has so many free space that could be enriched with a little brainstorming on the disease topic which should already have a barrel full of suggestions to it. The game devs are great at what they're doing and it's not such a thing that is going to challenge them, especially compared to RWYS that was mostly exclusively new additions. Now regardless they do something about it now that it's gone or not doesn't change anything but I wanted that to be clear.

At some point that would be good to realise this is what players look forward for usually in different aspects of the game when it's out, but you need to quit thinking what disease concept enjoyers ask for is to get all your plants killed.

That's kind of precisely what i am saying, its a simple code that would need to be made into something quite complicated and completely redone if you want it to not be too punishing for megabase/base builders that make all the possible farms in the game in their base.

The art assets are in the game and could be reused but why do you think klei decided against changing the mechanic but outright removed it from the game?

I enjoy most new additions or current game content, even if i don't plan to spend much time on it, its still good for the game to have more things to do, however i don't want to micromanage 200-300 plants around my base, it would be really hard for me to enjoy disease unless it is coded in specific way that it wouldn't really matter much or didn't completely kill plants.

[Notecja]

1 hour ago, 00petar00 said:

The art assets are in the game and could be reused but why do you think klei decided against changing the mechanic but outright removed it from the game?

Possibly because there are better priorites for them to work at. There it's lots of cut content that didn't make into game.

1 hour ago, 00petar00 said:

didn't completely kill plants.

That was ADM saying, it could be reworked in a way, that doesn't kill plants for just replanting.