Strictly modless (no client mods), dedicated, Klei-run servers. Read and give thoughts?

[Bird Up]

Don't Starve Together on PC has developed to a point where there are literally hundreds of helpful client mods, trivializing many aspects of the game or at least giving a huge advantage you otherwise would not have. There are client mods that allow you to find Pearl's island, moonquay, lunar island, touchstones, biomes of interest, etc. in just seconds. There are client mods that let you see in the dark. There are client mods that estimate boss hp and attack time. There are client mods that show your current temperature, season, moon phase. There are client mods that auto-row, auto-fish, auto-chop, auto-pick up. It goes on

Many veteran players and even intermediate players have long since moved towards using mods as a fundamental playstyle, losing touch with the experience of vanilla playstyle. This player experience sometimes clashes with newcomers who play modless, and wonder how in the world in public servers that other players are able to find biomes quickly, see in the dark, find islands with ease, and announce items in their inventory (status announcement mod) etc.

I think the existence of these mods is generally a very positive thing and has been a staple to the game from the beginning, and it makes playing the game so much more enjoyable for me, however, I think there could also be some value in public servers that exist solely for generic vanilla playstyle, a Klei-dedicated server where client mods are immediately disabled upon joining. This server would put every player on an equal playing field by removing substantial advantages that client mods will always give, and would reduce what opportunities and potential we have as mod-using players down to just our skill level and basic knowledge of the game.

A potential risk for adding this kind of server would be that it could split the player base somewhat. With more server choices, the player base that exists for one server might gravitate away towards a modless server. But more dedicated servers with these diverse and appealing playstyles could also help with player's interest in DST as a whole, increasing longevity of interest and perhaps growing the player base. I could also be overestimating how common the use of client mods are in public servers and how much of a strain it could be on players with vanilla playstyle experience playing with mod-users.

Wondering what y'all think.

*Random second thought. Most player's first modless experience in the Don't Starve world is Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode from single player Don't Starve would be an amazing experience in multiplayer and fairly "easily" portable addition to DST (with the same risks of splitting player base, but could perhaps be a limited time event like forge/gorge.)

[BezKa]

The playerbase is already split on mods. I myself think that many mods commonly used by majority of players are blatant cheating and it's one of the things that drive me away from playing on pubs.

Completely modless servers could be a fun idea, but have the downside of removing actual QoL mods that do not impact the game like Den Critters muting, emote wheel and geometric placement can be too much for some people. I can however see the appeal even in that. The messy bases, screaming pets, etc... Can be fun to experience once in a while.

As for new players, maybe it's better for them to get away from pubs and have some fun on their own first, where they won't be yelled at for eating a mandrake.

[Bird Up]

4 minutes ago, BezKa said:

The messy bases, screaming pets, etc... Can be fun to experience once in a while.

After using mute mods for so long, and then turning off my mods, I heard the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing, glommer buzzing, pets screeching, tumbleweed fx, insanity ambience. It's definitely a great refresher just turning everything off once in a while.

7 minutes ago, BezKa said:

Completely modless servers could be a fun idea, but have the downside of removing actual QoL mods

I think the loss of QoL for some players like me would be a good trade off knowing that at least everyone else is playing with the same loss of various QoL 

 

[Cloakingsumo198]

Integrate most popular mods as features to the main game.

[dois raios]

it is inevitable, if anyone can make mods and post in steam workshop, then eventually there will be cheaty mods. I dont understand nothing about Lua, neither any other type of coding, so it is just a guess of mine that even if client mods were disable, people would find a way to cheat.

The only "solution" would be banning people from servers or banning them from the game itself, but since dst it is not a competitive, i cant imagine that happening.

lets apreciate the mods that are actually good, like geometric placement and snapping tiles (in my opinion, bc i know there are way more good mods in the workshop)

[Guille6785]

I think you severely overestimate how much of a difference client mods make in terms of the things they let you do

[Captain_Rage]

A thousand times yes. Mods are a nice things in theory but in practice they tend to make the game experience far less interesting, for different reasons, or even worse. If people want to gimp themselves, sure, but personally I haven't used a single one (except for the stupid auto-script thing for The Gorge plus the mod to remove the cheering pig crowd in the first The Forge in order to get reasonable framerate on a potato netbook).

The silly thing is also when people claim that they use mods that don't affect gameplay when they obviously do.

[Bird Up]

27 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

I think you severely overestimate how much of a difference client mods make in terms of the things they let you do

Well like I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are client mods that allow you to do all these things and more. I know because they're on the steam workshop, they're totally publicly available to everyone, and I use them. What I may overestimate is how commonly used these mods are. As far as I know, there is no way to tell how many subscriptions these mods have, and who all is using them.

[loopuleasa]

Client mods are not technically cheats (since the game is not competitive to care) but they act like cheats in the sense that people that rely on them have less skill because of them.

I have about 100 client mods active probably. How can you tell. I like convenience. If I could I would play Factorio in DST.

And yes, I 100% have less skill than Don Giani, Joshmocoolstuff, Guille, and Catperson.

 

Additionally, as a library of client mods, I have two workshop lists, one with all client mods, and one without "cheat"/no-skill mods.

All client mods: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1860864238

No cheat client mods: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789777888

 

Let me know if any are missing from list.

 

I am a fan of the World of Warcraft approach to client modding: Modding your UI and client is allowed, and it is up to you to organize your scripts to your advantage.

Still makes you less skilled as opposed to someone playing pure client.

Same discussion happens in the Old School Runescape RuneLite client.

 

As for the main topic of discussion, it would be cool to have client-less servers, but there are so many QoL mods out there, that I personally would not play on them. Additionally, you would need an EasyAntiCheat type service to spy on the users to enforce that, and DST is not competitive enough to care.

[Philip.]

As I have already mentioned multiple times, the solution to all our client mod related problems is a fancy whitelist for verified mods.

Or possibly a blacklist where the server owner could specify which workshop mods should be prohibited for clients joining his server.

[00petar00]

Client mods have literally extended my playtime by countless hours.

Using almost any client mod can be considered cheating to some people but why do you care what other people are doing? If you have such a big issue, don't play on public servers. Also i don't think i've seen mods that can find specific setpieces or locations, there were mods that revealed map that were patched by klei.

There are a few client mods that i consider cheating and while i won't use them i don't have a problem if someone else uses them as it doesn't really affect me much.

While many people may disagree with me but majority of the mods i use basically let me enjoy the game more and i believe should be added to the base game.

[Cheggf]

3 hours ago, Bird Up said:

Many veteran players and even intermediate players have long since moved towards using mods as a fundamental playstyle

It's mostly noobs and a second group that isn't veterans using them.

3 hours ago, Bird Up said:

Klei-dedicated server where client mods are immediately disabled upon joining.

If they were capable of having an anticheat there wouldn't be these map revealing darksight enabling client mods to begin with. There would immediately be a mod that lets you have mods on no mod servers.

[Pig Princess]

10 hours ago, Bird Up said:

With more server choices, the player base that exists for one server might gravitate away towards a modless server.

I would expect the opposite, i.e. people gravitating towards servers that allow client mods, considering how popular some of them are. So I suspect running completely modless server would be waste of resources even if it was possible to implement (I'm not sure it is, and if it would require to gather more information from player's PCs).

Also I definitely wouldn't play at such server, at least not before more QoL changes are implemented to the base game. Why does going below 5° in spring/summer not trigger frozen screen effect? Yes, I use option to show character's temperature in combined status to avoid situation where I suddenly start to loose hp. Why is there no option to bind release of soul or summoning/desummoning Abigail to keyboard button? Seems like Klei just forgot to add those options, and they allow movement with mouse to be on par with movement with keyboard via binding those actions to keyboard (which keyboard-moving people do with their relatively free mouse). Why is there no settings to always show hunger, health and sanity without hovering cursor over this HUD part? Again, it's just QoL to me since my mouse is always in other use, such as pointing direction to which I run. Why is there no option to toggle visual opacity of pillars? Why is there no option to enable showing season clock? One can already predict season with knowledge about settings and season's length - which is quite easy to remember for first few years, i.e. when it matters the most, - but once world is in ~5+ (and even to greater extent in 10+) year it's just inconvenient to divide on 70 and subtract each time; it's fake difficulty. Why is there no option to disable insanity sound? Just sound, not visual filter: it's the filter that makes light radius of lantern/torch/miner hat visually smaller, no change in difficulty occurs if one just doesn't nuke their ears with that noise. Why is there no option to place structures along the grid (togglable)? Is it so broken op to have crock pots in perfect hexagon or square? Same question goes for seeing tiles under snow. Just why can't snow opacity be changed or disabled? It could make game tiny bit easier if one uses road to kite something during winter, but it can be easily countered with placing marks (dropping objects) along the road, it's just inconvenient to do so. And I want to point out that disabling distortion, bloom and screen shake are already an options that also technically make game tiny bit easier (but it's great QoL). Gesture wheel and status announcements should be base game feature, in my opinion.

I'm aware of mods that add client night vision, automatically perform animation canceling during attack, that let player zoom out all the way to see turf tiles of the whole map, etc. I consider them cheating, and therefore don't use. If other players use them - I can't care less as long as they don't brag about their skill, and again, they trick themselves first and foremost anyway, and I let it be their punishment. Worst case scenario I'd mark them in my head as clowns and not pay attention to the bragging anymore.

And yes, for completely new players it's better to play on personal server for a bit to learn basics, to develop self-sustainability. As for public server encounters, along with chance to meet night vision user there is also a chance to meet people who know about those cheats and can explain things to newbies. So all newbie has to do is to not be shy and ask people how they can do something so good.

[MondayNight]

Lemme get this right: in some environment where Random Willu N+1 (well, any character really) can just torch your camp to cinders in 30s, and most times you just sit there, watching dumbfounded (because people either don't care to vote on a rb, picking nose with fork, or press "yes" too late), you want.. fair play?

Client mods allowing you to "cheat" - ok. DST is a pretty chillax Sandbox alongside Survival, there's no ultimate "win" condition - your goal is just to accumulate some personal-use good loot, and build. Pissed off you ran in circles with your lil pancake boat, being smacked by sea monke, while that Woodie over there went day 3 to Moon and back, bringing all Stone Bushes, Kelp, some Moonglass Axes and Cutters? C'est la vie. Find another server and do "legit" another run in circles till you'll eventually find Moon and you can bring back some Shattered Spiders to type in chat the victorious "yoohooo, ski11z boy!" - most likely to the "no one gave a flying ff... bird" of everyone on server. Forced Client Mods disablement on official servers or any servers, via some forced special script to do so.. kinda waste of time, considering griefing wasn't addressed for years, or rather "is just another play-style, a chaotic one" - ultimately that defines KLei pubs.

Try yourself hosting a dedi server with a special mod disabling all joining people's Client Mods and see how well will it work, what traction it gets and so on. But in context of KLei encouraging both Client & Server-side mods development & use for their game, where most personal utility is assured by Client-side Mods like Geometric Placement, Status Announcements, Boss Indicators, Aerial View, Combined Status or Minimap HUD, I doubt you'll get the results you desire. Also if mods weren't a thing in DST I for one would've f-ed myself out the door a long-long time ago. Btw, in my opinion those listed-above mods should've been part of core-game options for years now.

[Echsrick]

some mods i can tell are more of a cheat kinda thing, like being able to see in dark or these automatic ones, im even goin to say geoplacement mod as one, since i have bein screamed by people taht use that mod that i dont use it, and i put that berry bush 1 pixel wrong for them, and i was thinkin i was the asperger autist that needs to order things, but these geo place mod users beat me with that, in fact the only client mod i realy use is 

combined status, probably most "cheaty" mods i use, but somehow the least offender

gesture wheel, i mean thats realy not realy cheat in any ways, i mean is that not what console players technicaly use?

character rotating, its literaly only in the skin menu to see used skins from all sides

warly food memory, kinda cheating, i mean it does the time thinkin for you of food you ate on a timer, even if its for only 1 character

snow tile disabler, i mean its only on winter, and it makes you see no snow, so you can actualy see the road

i barely use these kind of mods, do kinda give unfair advantages, even if its a coop game

[. . .]

sounds horrible. this game is only fun with mods

[mr. brj]

I would play in such a server, but wouldn't care about the longetivity of the server as long as there is no geometric placement, so I would probably burn berry bushes for light and get kicked eventually.

[Dr. Safety]

Seems like the kind of thing that some big dedicated community group should do, not Klei. 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 hour ago, . . . said:

sounds horrible. this game is only fun with geometric placement 

fixed

[Juanasdf]

15 hours ago, Bird Up said:

There are client mods that allow you to find Pearl's island, moonquay, lunar island, touchstones, biomes of interest, etc

There's a CLIENT mod for that?! Where can i find it?
But yeah... I don't think klei will do that, considering how most of the community likes geo placement, and the fact that klei barely makes big changes to dedicated servers

[Guille6785]

15 hours ago, Bird Up said:

Well like I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are client mods that allow you to do all these things and more. I know because they're on the steam workshop, they're totally publicly available to everyone, and I use them. What I may overestimate is how commonly used these mods are. As far as I know, there is no way to tell how many subscriptions these mods have, and who all is using them.

knowing where the oasis desert is isn't as gamebreaking as some people make it out to be, a "map revealer" mod doesn't do much except save you a few days of vague mapping at best (or just asking the other people for directions), and if you're looking for the shadow pieces heads chances are you're going to have to map out the world anyway since those mods only show you turf cause the rest is not loaded

(nightvision also doesn't let you do much that you can't already do by opening your map)

 

people on pubs also genuinely couldn't care less about what you do on a server regardless of how impressive it may be

[MA7xGE]

I would love to see Klei being more openly cooperative with QoL-modders.

[Captain_Rage]

4 hours ago, . . . said:

sounds horrible. this game is only fun with mods

Totally disagree. Just putting it out there, since certain loud opinions are gaining traction and definitely not everybody agrees. The game is enjoyable without using a single mod, even after hundreds of hours.

[. . .]

5 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

7 hours ago, . . . said:

sounds horrible. this game is only fun with geometric placement 

fixed

u have my condolences

1 hour ago, Captain_Rage said:

Totally disagree. Just putting it out there, since certain loud opinions are gaining traction and definitely not everybody agrees.

that fine its ur opinion (which i totally disagree with)

this game has way little biomes, biomes are empty lifeless spaces of land without dozens of mod adding fauna and objects into them, not enough content (once the game has the same amount of content as ds RoG + sw + ham that ds has then it will have enough), not enough mechanics, not enough qol, not enough mobs, and not enough anything to keep me entertained enough to play more than a few hours without mods

2 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

even after hundreds of hours.

I played for more than 6k hours, hundreds of hours is baby numbers to me lmao

[loopuleasa]

10 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

Totally disagree. Just putting it out there, since certain loud opinions are gaining traction and definitely not everybody agrees. The game is enjoyable without using a single mod, even after hundreds of hours.

Another take: Due to volume, most mods (95%+) simply make the game worse. Applies to every game that has mods.

It's really hard to compete with the quality of content and design that Klei makes.

In DST it is particularly bad with ... *shudders* ... custom character mods