[Unpopular Opinion] Current DST totally destroyed one of the best Don't Starve challenges

[Evelo]

The RWYS update really made DST extremely fun for me as a player. While it does negate the detramental effects of crop growing in winter there are other things I feel should be adjusted.
1) Crops that are outside of the preferred season shouldn't grow, period.
2) The crop diversity is nice, however the seasonal overlap imo, should be limited. Garlic grows in all 4 seasons, why? Pomegranates grow only in Spring while Toma Root and Dragonfruit do as well, resulting in a crop that (I believe) never gets utilized. Considering how easy and powerful gardening is, tightening the restrictions would be a nice change of pace (And upset the people who worked on models and other things for crop happiness)
3) Unless it loves a season, it shouldn't grow. Bananas and Figs in winter? Stone Fruit growing outside of the Lunar Biomes?
Just my opinion.

[Mysterious box]

28 minutes ago, Evelo said:

The RWYS update really made DST extremely fun for me as a player. While it does negate the detramental effects of crop growing in winter there are other things I feel should be adjusted.
1) Crops that are outside of the preferred season shouldn't grow, period.
2) The crop diversity is nice, however the seasonal overlap imo, should be limited. Garlic grows in all 4 seasons, why? Pomegranates grow only in Spring while Toma Root and Dragonfruit do as well, resulting in a crop that (I believe) never gets utilized. Considering how easy and powerful gardening is, tightening the restrictions would be a nice change of pace (And upset the people who worked on models and other things for crop happiness)
3) Unless it loves a season, it shouldn't grow. Bananas and Figs in winter? Stone Fruit growing outside of the Lunar Biomes?
Just my opinion.

I'm still of the opinion this would just damage farming as a whole the problem is there's not enough value in farming different crops to sustain this people farm the best crops specifically because they're the only crops that can compete with meat the rest of the crops just aren't worth the time so realistically the only thing this change does is make farming ignored outside of the seasons where the best ones grow and screw Warly.

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Evelo said:

Pomegranates grow only in Spring while Toma Root and Dragonfruit do as well, resulting in a crop that (I believe) never gets utilized.

I grow pomegranates a lot! They grow in summer too, and 1 pomegranate can provide the nutrients for 2 watermelons, so I end up getting a lot of giant pomegranates as a byproduct of those watermelons I grow for sanity/summer cooling.

[Castiliano]

I always thought that in together things were very abundant and easier, so I had to make some changes to the world generation to keep the game interesting: I turned off the regrowth of basic things like trees. I lowered all resources and foods to "little" like grass, sticks, reeds, berries and carrots. Overall, everything was pretty sparse and more fun!

[Antynomity]

is this a joke post?

[Duck986]

14 hours ago, Evelo said:

The RWYS update really made DST extremely fun for me as a player. While it does negate the detramental effects of crop growing in winter there are other things I feel should be adjusted.
1) Crops that are outside of the preferred season shouldn't grow, period.
2) The crop diversity is nice, however the seasonal overlap imo, should be limited. Garlic grows in all 4 seasons, why? Pomegranates grow only in Spring while Toma Root and Dragonfruit do as well, resulting in a crop that (I believe) never gets utilized. Considering how easy and powerful gardening is, tightening the restrictions would be a nice change of pace (And upset the people who worked on models and other things for crop happiness)
3) Unless it loves a season, it shouldn't grow. Bananas and Figs in winter? Stone Fruit growing outside of the Lunar Biomes?
Just my opinion.

agree with all my hands and legs, except limiting the seasonal overlap, because this may damage some combos like 2 potatos + onion + garlic or dragonfruit + any 3 other crops.

Though crops (farm ones, not replantable ones) not growing outside of their season may be harsh, I will find this interesting, because now I will need to rely on bundling wrap to preserve food from other seasons or change my diet accordingly.

12 hours ago, Castiliano said:

I always thought that in together things were very abundant and easier, so I had to make some changes to the world generation to keep the game interesting: I turned off the regrowth of basic things like trees. I lowered all resources and foods to "little" like grass, sticks, reeds, berries and carrots. Overall, everything was pretty sparse and more fun!

It depends. current difficulty settings limited only by worldgen settings, which is rather primitive most of the time.

3 hours ago, yourAnty said:

is this a joke post?

is this a troll user? 

13 hours ago, sylvia wander o said:

I grow pomegranates a lot! They grow in summer too, and 1 pomegranate can provide the nutrients for 2 watermelons, so I end up getting a lot of giant pomegranates as a byproduct of those watermelons I grow for sanity/summer cooling.

why would you grow pomegranates, actually? the only "unique" dish they can be used for is fruit medley, and there are a lot of other better spring and summer combos imo

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, Duck986 said:

Though crops (farm ones, not replantable ones) not growing outside of their season may be harsh, I will find this interesting, because now I will need to rely on bundling wrap to preserve food from other seasons or change my diet accordingly.

Why do you find the complications of farming to be less interesting than right clicking on the overpowered piece of paper?

[Duck986]

3 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Why do you find the complications of farming to be less interesting than right clicking on the overpowered piece of paper?

Overpowered piece of paper requires you to kill a rather hard boss, which requires resources and time, and prior that you'll need to adjust your diet.

I'm not the one who rushes a boss or ruins, and everyone have different understandings of "interesting" and "overpowered"

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Duck986 said:

why would you grow pomegranates, actually? the only "unique" dish they can be used for is fruit medley, and there are a lot of other better spring and summer combos imo

I grow them because they're super good at feeding watermelons. But they also give 20 health when cooked and are a veggie, so I've used them for healing before. They kinda spoil fast though.

[Antynomity]

2 hours ago, Duck986 said:

Is this a troll user? 

Mayde, but this post must be a troll because if you actually want to have good amounts of food from the sources that grow in winter you need to go out of your way to spend a lot of time on them.

So yes, your uncompromising game is still uncompromising and challenging

Also don't act like meat is hard to mass produce, we need to be fair here, if we want food to be scarce during winter, make it actually scarce instead of us focusing on one if that's an issue to some players.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

20 hours ago, GenomeSquirrel said:

There are deserts next to swamps, this is THE type of game where you should think meme rules apply.

lets break all inmersion because there are things that break it!!!

also biomes arent suppose to be 10 secs walks. Is a videogame limitation hard to mask but restricting plants to grow in specific seasons and conditions is easy and adds deepness to these season instead of ending up as just a colour filter and some melodies

[Mysterious box]

2 hours ago, yourAnty said:

Mayde, but this post must be a troll because if you actually want to have good amounts of food from the sources that grow in winter you need to go out of your way to spend a lot of time on them.

Define spending a lot of time much like the ruins the game gives you hints based on the map as to where to lunar island is and with the addition of grass rafts it's very common to find the lunar island just as fast as the ruins barring the occasional world gen hiccups with a sinkhole is inside the ruins or the lunar island is connected to the mainland if you actively pursue the lunar island it doesn't take long at all. I haven't found a pattern in moon quay's spawning but I'm sure it exists as well.(maybe)

2 hours ago, yourAnty said:

So yes, your uncompromising game is still uncompromising and challenging

The game is very much compromised this joke has kind of run it's course whether or not it's challenging really just depends on your basic knowledge and what character you pick.

 

2 hours ago, yourAnty said:

Also don't act like meat is hard to mass produce, we need to be fair here, if we want food to be scarce during winter, make it actually scarce instead of us focusing on one if that's an issue to some players.

I do agree meat could stand to get hit by the nerf bat hard it's the best food source and way too abundant.

[GenomeSquirrel]

3 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

lets break all inmersion because there are things that break it!!!

also biomes arent suppose to be 10 secs walks. Is a videogame limitation hard to mask but restricting plants to grow in specific seasons and conditions is easy and adds deepness to these season instead of ending up as just a colour filter and some melodies

 

The constant is a world refurbished by Maxwell to toy with people until they die. Some conventional wisdom does apply, fire will make heat and light, and the ingredients are a reasonable approximation. But other times mixing fish and sticks will get fish sticks, mixing hound teeth makes a dapper vest, frogs rain from the sky. Let's not forget cutting stone at will, or magic existing. The mix of realistic and whimsical things is vast, the game does not take place on earth. I'm not sure why you'd even feel confidence in any convention that would give you immersion, let alone have conviction that something is entitled to be a certain way is this magically, pun filled world.

I'd also argue that winter's limited food options were more stagnating than depth enhancing, ice/mushrooms/cactuses are simple, immobile, and don't fight back; while spiders barely fight back once you figure them out. With the puzzle having been solved for years, something worthwhile breaking the monotony was appreciated.

 

[Duck986]

8 hours ago, yourAnty said:

Mayde, but this post must be a troll because if you actually want to have good amounts of food from the sources that grow in winter you need to go out of your way to spend a lot of time on them.

Not really. Moon Island can be found by straight edges of the mainland, and while you look for them - you can already collect 40 seeds and resources for 1 garden digamajig, which almost always guarantees you at least 4 crops of one type for the future family bonus.

Even if you grow crops not in their respective season - family bonus + talking on each growth stage + watered farm plot guarantees you 1 fruit and 1 seed, so you already get some profit even for the cost of waiting twice as long (e.g. 5 days instead of 2.5 at the lowest stress possible).

Waterlogged biome for figs and Moon Quay for bananas can only be found by sailing, they don't have any obvious hints except for canopy shadows and monke pirates when approaching, so I don't find this as a reliable food source for at least first winter.

8 hours ago, sylvia wander o said:

I grow them because they're super good at feeding watermelons. But they also give 20 health when cooked and are a veggie, so I've used them for healing before. They kinda spoil fast though.

Ah yes, I forgot that they heal well when cooked lol.

And you probably meant that they are a veggie food type, not a veggie in cookpot? Because I specifically mentioned their usage in a Fruit Medley.

[Prinha]

On 8/21/2022 at 9:06 PM, ArubaroBeefalo said:

outside of "hunger is not an issue" can we agree that makes no sense that certain plants grow in winter like banana bushes or figs? it breaks the inmersion and the internal coherence of the game

I understand where this is coming from. At first I was agreeing, thinking something like "yeah, bananas and figs grow in hotter climates in the real world". Then I remembered: In the Constant bananas grow year round in the lightless ruins since the dawn of time. A place where only a few select things grow without the help of an artificial lightsource. That's some hell of a tough plant.

Wouldn't it be incoherent to have them grow in winter underground but not grow above ground? Would this huge difference between trees compared to bushes not break immersion? (I went so far as to look up if bananas grow on trees or bushes in the real world. Suprisingly it's neither!)

The same argument can't be made for figs (or stonefruit bushes). However, after going through all this, I like that many plants behave differently from each other and also different from the real world. It suprises and makes for a unique charm. Also nobody knows wether they will introduce more plants that only grow under specific conditions like nettles (water,spring) or coffee bushes (ashes, summer) in the future.

Maybe we should be careful with the word immersion here, because deriving immersion from realism doesn't work well for the Constant.

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

I 100% agree. Felt wrong with every single addition since bull kelp stalks and stonefruit. Then came winter crops. Then figs. And now banana bushes.

Even if you learn to be comfortable with other food sources in winter, it is hard to argue that winter no longer feels barren. It just doesn't feel like you need to prepare for it. When i started to play Don't Starve, i remember barely keeping hunger full with rabbits and ice. I miss this. I don't mind I can now kill werepigs, koalephants, tentacles, or even fell giants etc... But having easy food you can just wait for and pick... it doesn't feel right.

I think I'll write new post to offer a solution. Spoler alert: Make it seasonal and/or biome-linked.

[Notecja]

"unpopular opinion" and somehow so popular. But I agree, there is too much food. You don't need to farm or cook (except healing or sanity), you can just pick on the way whatever you need and munch quickly. Rn only food I bundle, is that one from Warly. We need to make food seasonal.

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

On 8/22/2022 at 2:02 AM, GenomeSquirrel said:

There are deserts next to swamps, this is THE type of game where you should think meme rules apply.

Well, yes. And meme rules can be (and in DST's case often are) good. But the thing is, the seasons and biomes miss interesting rules. It used to be impossible to grow anything in winter (no berries, no crops), why distance from the old ways? Winter used to mean something more than freezing.

Don't get me wrong, Klei is introducing very interesting mechanics with every new update. It's just that only the seasons and some biomes feel bland. By making the foods grow in different seasons and/or biomes, you make the world more interesting and thus immersive. Make interesting relations between things, for example, make bananas need pollination by batilisks. It mirrors a real world mechanic, while feeling very DST-like. Plus you need to think, where to plant those bananas and it makes them feel special - more than just a reskin to ther food items.

The immersion is a spectrum, not a binary. I just want the trend to be increasing, not the opposite.

4 hours ago, Prinha said:

I understand where this is coming from. At first I was agreeing, thinking something like "yeah, bananas and figs grow in hotter climates in the real world". Then I remembered: In the Constant bananas grow year round in the lightless ruins since the dawn of time. A place where only a few select things grow without the help of an artificial lightsource. That's some hell of a tough plant.

Wouldn't it be incoherent to have them grow in winter underground but not grow above ground? Would this huge difference between trees compared to bushes not break immersion? (I went so far as to look up if bananas grow on trees or bushes in the real world. Suprisingly it's neither!)

Well, bananas do actually grow year round in the real world, but mostly in warmer climates. You could imagine the ruins have some sort of special warm aura that the bananas can manage without light or warm. I would suggest they wouldn't be able to grow year round in all biomes, but rather only in deserts, monkey islands and monkey villages in caves.

4 hours ago, Prinha said:

The same argument can't be made for figs (or stonefruit bushes). However, after going through all this, I like that many plants behave differently from each other and also different from the real world. It suprises and makes for a unique charm. Also nobody knows wether they will introduce more plants that only grow under specific conditions like nettles (water,spring) or coffee bushes (ashes, summer) in the future.

But that's the thing, most plants do not behave very differently. Sure, you need to collect stone fruits repeat its cycles, you get 3 per harvest and you need to mine them and potentially get stone. But banana bushes behave almost exactly like berry bushes - they just need replanting, fertilizing and harvesting at a whim - the only difference is they grow in winter. And kelp behaves like that too, just replant, instead of fertilizing replant them in water, and then just wait and harvest. Juicy berries take more time to grow and give you 3 juicy berries, but other than that, the growing process is the same. The wait time is similar. The biomes where you can grow them is too. The season in which they grow are similar (nowadays season changes nothing). I don't even think banana bushes wither in summer. Figs require different setup, but regrowth and harvests work just like with other plants.

4 hours ago, Prinha said:

Maybe we should be careful with the word immersion here, because deriving immersion from realism doesn't work well for the Constant.

Yeah, you're right. But taking inspiration from the real world IS DST's style. It doesn't have to be one to one. It can have a twist, (just like the animal combinations and weird puns). But it is more interesting if the game limits you and it can actually give you some knowledge about real world.

[Datanon]

On 8/21/2022 at 2:54 PM, Duck986 said:

It doesn't mean that I'm an evil hater and despise everything new, it's just sad for me to see how DST is slowly drifting from a hunger-dependent survival to base building simulator.

i think we all saw this coming and i still dont really know what to make of it. non-PvP survival games are prone to become repetitive after you have enough experience; its true that i started playing DS due to the survival part, but when that was no more an issue (which was a very quick progress) the only thing that kept me going back to it was boss rushing and building/upkeeping bases

that being said, i feel like the things you mentioned that make winter and summer easier are kind of late game. your survival in terms of resources is supposed to be much more chill beyond the second year and i feel like thats by design so that you have more time to focus on bosses and the buffed hound attacks

edit: i forgot about the farms. them growing up during winter actually bothers me a little, youve got a point

[Mike23Ua]

No what made the game easier was:

Reduced Crafting costs of Weapons, Armor and Movement speed Boosts.

Why does purely decorative turf like Moon Quay and Pearls Island Turfs have higher crafting costs then Cobblestone roads which make movement speed faster?

With the addition of the hostile flare the Walking Cane isn’t so reliant on RNG odds anymore, I’ve gone literally winters without being able to make one..

Having Day 1 Beefalo mounts also gives a hefty boost to speed, health & damage.

I think what people seem to forget is that it was never one singular problem that the game throws at you that made it so challenging..

It was having THAT problem STACK with other problems.. Example: Freezing in Winter, Deerclops smashing stuff, trying to fight it drains sanity, nightmares spawn, you spend time running away from those, you don’t have time to stay warm, oh and if it’s classic solo DS there may be a Progress Blocking Blockade preventing you from getting to the resources and materials you need (such as needing to raise/lower sanity to pass through obsidian pillar walls, or needing Armor to run through a field of Pigtorch pigs..)

Crops not growing In winter really only effected WURT, but she could’ve literally lived off seeds & ice so it’s Meh..

[abrocator]

9 hours ago, Cr4zyFl4mes said:

When i started to play Don't Starve, i remember barely keeping hunger full with rabbits and ice.

Ah, so you had ice. Back in the original DS days we had to leave some berries on their bushes or carrots in the ground in order to have non-meat filler.

Easy RoG life

[GenomeSquirrel]

9 hours ago, Cr4zyFl4mes said:

why distance from the old ways? Winter used to mean something more than freezing.

Passive threats are dull, you can categorize farms into winter functional and non winter functional, disregard non winter functional farms, and the non freezing challenge of winter has been solved before winter even began. Disregarded, non functional content won’t do anything to amuse players, nor can it challenge them. There’s no value in certain things being bad.

[CaptainChaotica]

I dunno...I've always felt winter should be harsh and that harshness should mean something.  I mean, I grew up reading stuff like the "Little House" books, which include one called "The Long Winter".  And...WOW, that book.  See also:  The Jack London short story "To Build a Fire". 

I don't find passive threats boring at all; I think if done right they can be intense and even terrifying.  I HATE random monsters coming up to me and messing up my day, with a passion, but give me a good solid person-vs-nature challenge I can sink my gaming teeth into and I'm there.

Anyway all that said, I guess it's nice that some crops will grow in winter, but I always thought that should only happen if you built a special structure to _shelter_ them first or something.  It does kinda bother me that that whole "Ooh, this is harsh time of the year, that harshness means you actually do have to play a bit differently for a while!" thing has gone away.

...Notorious

[Sweaper]

Joining pubs as Wurt in the middle of the first Winter is fun, you never know if you'll be stuck eating cactus alone in the desert.

[IceTime]

Adapting to these changes is also a challenge