Invasion

[Dragolantis]

One thing I noticed between DST and its offline predicessor, is the lack of randomness that DST possesses. The most important things that are left up to chance are certain boss drops, hunt surprises, and that bloody sea bird. Compare that to base Don't Starve where there was a decent chance (I believe around 33%) that certain bosses wouldn't show up at all during their season. Pair this with the fact that most fights are very repetitive to the point they feel more like chores and long playsessions of DST can get a tad dull. Its mostly the prospect of absolutely conquering and completely changing the entire map that captivates most past their first couple years. So I think combat needs a little something to spice things up.

I'm not trying to impose some massive idea that completely changes don't starve combat at all, since that is obviously not my place to suggest, nor would it have any possibility of seeing the light of day. Something like that belongs to you to create and decide upon. What I am suggesting, is a relatively small change, that I feel would boost the unpredicability of the constant, while also breaking up the repetitiveness of certain fights.

My Idea is simple: Invasions.

To put it quite simply, the concept for invasions is that there could be a small chance to spawn creatures or even a boss creature, that would invade ongoing battles. Ocean creatures, story bosses (fuelweaver and celestial champ related bosses), and potentially raid bosses would obviously be exempt, and the chances for these things would be extremely low in early days, and even in the endgame still relatively low for nonboss fights, as the chances would obviously scale up as the day count progresses so as to not overwhelm people in the early game of an already difficult game. 

Be it a simple brawl with some spiders suddenly interupted by a hungry bearger, a fight with a winter koalaphant crashed by a mactusk hunting party, or a ewecus that gets absolutely decked by a deercops, the chaos that can ensue when one figures a fight has gotten stale, only for more enemies to join the battle unexpectedly with little warning gives a certain replayability to previously stale fights. 

[ShadowbirdRH]

Can't say I'm a fan of this one. It's already a PITA when a sudden hound wave or frog rain interrupts a boss fight. Having even more chances for similar things to happen sounds like a good reason to put the game away for good.

[Mike23Ua]

How to make the game more challenging- Step 1: Play on Xbox, Step 2: Play Alone without other players, Step 3: Fight any boss with endlessly spawning Minions (Eye of Terror, Dragonfly etc) Step 4: Realize that your idea would make so many people rage quit and never play the game again.

DST is not an easy game at least not for console gamers, you can chalk that up to lag, finicky controls, or completely missing gameplay functionality.. and your wanting to add even more problems on top of that?

Weren’t the Spider Queens that spit out minion spiders AND now have healing spiders enough already? 

[Dragolantis]

I’m just upset the game isn’t as chaotic as it used to be. A lot of changes seem to outright remove some of the risk v reward that makes me so invested in the game.
 

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting more things like hound waves and frog rain that immediately require your full attention and force you to drop whatever you were doing, I’m suggesting a singular, or small handful of strong enemies that occasionally spawn and roam the map, causing an added randomness to an otherwise predetermined outcomes of fights. So when one inevitably shows up in a fight, it adds risk in that you can choose to abandon the fight, or fight the beast as well. Perhaps the roaming mob could also drop potentially decent loot to add extra reward for being able to face it in addition to the other mobs.

 

I’m avoiding drumming up stats or abilities for said invasion creature(s) because I’m More trying to suggest the concept of an invasion creature that doesn’t necessarily take your full attention, nor is it a defeat at all costs creature, just something to raise the stakes very occasionally without completely destroying the flow of the fight.