Maxwell’s current beta state

[LeafyFly]

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

Yes, a lot of people are actually nice to play with. If I was playing exclusively with friends, I probably wouldn't even think about such situations, especially if those are irl friends and they sit right next to me and can even peek into my screen. But even with a lot of friendly people few not caring/with ill intentions are enough for preferable strategy to shift from "open community" to "partisan encampments in least convenient places on the map which only few people know about".

Relatively recently I played on yet another public server with some very nice people (for the most part). Location of bases were the following: spawn (small camp), oasis (turned out to be decoy base), monkey island + Pearl's island (they were within screen distance), waterlogged at the opposite to monkey island corner of the map (near the very corner), my boat base, cave entrance base, base in forgotten place past rock lobster biome that was dead end, and finally - ruins base way past monkeys and fissures. Can you guess what bases were burnt/hamnered/raided and how often? Spawn base - regularly, we didn't bother to even rebuild it after a while; oasis base - several times, some of those were sincere accidents, but it was located quite far and a lot of times we just refused to tell base location only for people to ragequit; monkey island base - griefed once, but it was because other player was noob Woodie who just happened to find it as weregoose and did stupid things by accident; cave base - was raided at least once (bye-bye bundle of dragonpies); ruins base - held steadily, and even though some jerk spent 99% of my bee queen crown durability, other people reaching this place were considerate and generally adequate; my boat base and my waterlogged base - unreached by strangers fortress, but sometimes it was useful for friends to have safe place nearby, and I invited some strangers who seemed trustworthy to my boat base to use bookcase and cook some food.

See, it was fun to play with people, but all precautions that we did were actually a necessity as was shown by spawn and oasis base: even if friendly, people are oblivious of a lot of things and let bases of other people burn, take their bundles with food and let contents spoil like nobody's business because they are hungry (despite field of banana bushes nearby and other food), hammer your black Fuelweaver statues because they think white would be better (and never actually place white ones) and so on. If people leave some flint in chest near spawn for late joiners, first person almost always takes all of it without ever returning borrowed for next joiners; if people are borrowing something like bee queen crown left in the ruins specifically near station to not loose sanity from nightmare lights - they would either break it, or leave at 1%; if people find pirate stash - they will claim they are legit owners of everything they found there, even if actual owner lost items due to bugged pirate raid which attacked Wonkey-owner (100% vanilla).

People steal in the blink if an eye, people don't even care about running screen away to houndius and not spawn hounds on glommer (in the end I evacuated him to waterlogged base and brought 1-2 stacks of glommer goop to oasis base periodically. People are legit stupid enough to threaten regulars to find and grief their base unless and because they refuse to tell base's location (15 days until the end of autumn, but this time people managed to kick that clown, although it was hard to convince enough people do it (!)). I can go on - even if friendly, people majority either doesn't care, or are stupid. I don't want this, I want to interact with nice people and pass resources to them if needed.

Bilieve me. Players who aren't friendly enough to burn down your base won't care about what's in your shadow container. If you're really worried about this, don't put anything too important. Things like sewing kits are also very cheap and can be put in after someone takes them.

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

But that is exactly what is the problem: in the end magician's hat wouldn't be used nearly as much as it could.

Maxwell usually gives away chests of wood or stone, and doesn't care if other players take some of it.

[Hormiga89]

I don't like that the puppets are stationary, the fact that you can get shadow fuel easier makes up for the fact that they are temporary. But the puppets are basically made for people that like going afk now. Also they are to vulnerable to tree guards and other hostel mods because of it. I wish you could switch them following you on and off like Wendy does to Abigail's agro, but I don't think that would happen. It would have been cool if you could use the codex to control them though.