On brightshades: return of desease

[Pig Princess]

The experience I’m going to describe below is experience of playing on multiplayer public endless server where rifts and rift frequency were left on default and were activated after Celestial Champion kill. I’m owner of the server, so I have power to change world settings, but if possible, I try to avoid disabling any content as much as possible.

I was skeptical to the update from the beginning: it carried some problems from beta, which could clearly be seen on streams of multiple big streamers but were never addressed, but I decided to leave everything on default this time. I was so wrong about that decision.

What was so bad about it?

Problem #1. Holding hostage a lot of content due to lack of cooldown of brightshades and them spawning very close to each other.

In sandbox game variety of things to do is a key to keep player interested. That doesn’t mean it should be as easy as to build in creative mode, but so far DST managed to combine survival and sandbox decently well.

But check this:

Spoiler

This:

Spoiler

And even this:

Spoiler

On the 1st image I wanted to farm. I like RWYS update a lot, and even though it really is not necessary to farm to survive and unlock some big parts of content, I like this side activity, especially as alternative to usual summer and winter activities. But just because rift was open 3 brightshades infested my garden 2 of which spawned within 1 pitchfork tile to each other and 3rd being really close as well, and even though I went through trouble of killing them, not even a minute has passed before they respawned in same exact location with same exact numbers. Rifts are uncontrollable, are open pretty often, so I can’t even blame my luck on it opening during season I wanted to farm and essentially locking farming until next in-game year for me. Maybe. If in the next year rift won’t be open in winter (in this case) again. At the point when I made image a lot of my crops have rotten already because of how long it took to clear this and because between clears I had practically no time to pick up anything. At this point I already gave up on farming and was angered to the point of making final decision of disabling them.

On the 2nd and 3rd image one can see spectacular possibilities of sailing activities. Yes, that’s right, 3 brightshades all within 1 tile-radius from each other that infest across ocean (wut?) are blocking trading with Pearl 95% of the time – unless she decides to walk far away from her house, which happens relatively rarely (especially in seasons with less daytime in the day). By the way, when brightshades are this close, when one plant does it’s AoE attack on the end of “dormant” period/because gestalts or Abigail hit it it reaches player who attacks the other plant, so even if one managed to create a window for attack, 2 hits is maximum one can safely do on practice for multiple reasons. Also AoE attack unmounts player and tunnelling vines nearby instantly hit unmounted beefalo with AoE, so 1 mistake leads to dead beefalo period, and one can’t do anything about it at all, even if it only was 1 plant, not even panflute can stop the fight because brightshades and their vines are immune to sleep effect. Ice staff needs 6 hits to freeze it (why?) and it crashes the game as soon as plant is frozen. Add to that the fact that targeting correct plant is difficult because they are very close to each other, especially in this particular case: lack of place for manuver basically forces one to kill plant closest to house first, but house itself is blocking access and player has to move from the side, entering range of other plants retaliation attack plus increasing chance of targeting wrong plant that is not “dormant” yet. So much like with Crab King, it’s instant gg (rollback/ragequit) in needlessly difficult fight, at which point it’s not a good challenge, it’s just plain stupid design. It’s not interesting because the punishment for engaging with content is too much. Overall sailing isn’t masterpiece of content in the first place, and ocean fishing is extremely niche and self-locked activity, but even if one decides to do it - here we go: brightshades just block key location and action to ocean fishing. And by the time one is done with them season may change, as well as player loose all real life sanity, not to mention possibility of huge setbacks like loosing domesticated beefalo.

And on 4th image one can see that group of brightshades can spawn very close to each other and block even locations without any transplanted plants at all! Want to pick some grass and berries right after spawning? Want to go to nearest cave entrance to pick lightbulbs before asking for base? Want to kill Bee Queen? Want to kill mac tusk? Too bad, take those brightshades, player, now you are obliged to either be in groundhog day for next half of the season and give up on what you wanted to do, or give up on what you wanted to do right away! But we are giving you choice, aren’t we? As for bug fixes and tools to properly combat it – nah, we are going to prioritise removing extra pixels on evergreen sprite visible with particular zoom and have patchnotes look like a lot of work was done with those kinds of changes - instead of fixing gameplay-relevant bugs and thinking deeply about new content!

Problem #2. Lack of player’s control, including cases when someone activated rifts, but others don’t want to endure consequences of someone else’s decision.

Leaving aside case when one person may want to engage with content at first and deeply regret it soon after, there is no way for one player that didn’t choose to mess with newer content to keep doing what they usually enjoy - without getting destroyed by brightshades if they happen to enjoy doing anything plant-related on surface (yet, cave shard is going to receive it’s share soon).

Real case on that same public server: Wickerbottom player joined server somewhere around time when I killed CC and activated rifts (around day 170, as far as I remember). Their fighting skills are not great, partially because of noobishness, partially because of connection quality, although not horrible either; they seem so enjoy farming, know it decently well, are friendly and want to cooperate within their capabilities. But instead of enjoying farming and feeling helpful, they had to ask me for help constantly while watching their crops rot– no wonder, there were 3 brightshades in their garden respawning without cooldown – and drag me in this for half of summer (!), loosing a lot of materials on weapons, armor, healing, resurrection. By the way, they were soft-locked on resurrection because tunneling vines killed them as soon as they could resurrect since both plant and vine are immune to sleep effect of life giving amulet. And that was with me helping both in actual clearing and in mining pure brilliance for weapons and armor while asking to hold a bit more (tunnelling vines blocked their kitchen and firepit from use constantly). Aside from the fact that I wanted to catch some sunfish that summer but was forced to wait 1 more year, it was just miserable for both of us, cherry on top being that player blaming server mods and me trying to explain that it’s vanilla feature, that "terrarium targets closest player"/"beefalo tamed no poop"/"epic healthbar"/"world cleaner ver. K" has nothing to do with that, - to person who barely understands English and as someone who doesn’t speak Spanish at all. I.e. people who don't datamine are really confused asking "what mod is this? I don't have them [brightshades] in my world", and it's not always easy to clear misunderstanding, plus they don't understand what have they done to deserve this compared to usual route. Luckily they didn’t quit and stayed until I restarted server with rifts disabled, and just as proof of this decision being correct I saw them enjoying game a lot more after that, feeding me honey hams and gifting potatoes to people while I grew big trees with their help near their garden and other person teaching them other things about game here and there.

Unfortunally, a lot of newcomers didn’t manage to get to this point though: aside from being killed by usual reasons they were killed by brightshades that spawned so close to portal that tunnelling vine was able to reach them out of gate. I’m not sure what exactly happened and why spawn protection wasn’t sufficient for them, but look at this Noob Killer 3000:

Spoiler

Although I didn’t screenshot the other case when rift itself spawned almost on top of portal, with plant resources being dug, enlightenment area being a thing and graziers attacking everybody who went asleep, I believe @MostMerryTomcat who played on the same server has screenshot, or at least can back me up on that. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have rift welcoming players right out of gate (much like case with moonstorms while they are active, but they at least can be turned off and bring some actual benefits like no darkness at night).

Here is one more thing about interaction with people. I really dislike how a lot of newcomers ask to provide them everything and lead them to base immediately (or even teleport, sometimes ask to do it with commands even (…)), but so far I could say that they didn’t need assistance that they sometimes demand, I could justify being cooperative as well as decline to babysit them. I found balance in cooperation with stragners by building minicamps across the map that would have basic structures with some random resources nearby (like bee box with flowers, few berry bushes or monkeytails with lunar trees), but with new update I can’t leave those advanced man-made set pieces with the intention of them being lucky encounter, because instead of providing indirect assistance in crafting some books, songs or even cooking some trail mixes/meatballs I’m leaving a trap that way because brightshades would definitely infest this, even if it’s just 3 transplanted berry bushes (on that same server I had a single sapling planted at camp that was originally uprooted in mosaic biome by meteor shower, and brightshade infested it every single time as long as rift was open).

Problem #3. Destruction of world resources via rifts.

Finally, another problem with rifts is that they uproot everything in large area. It was pointed out since beta, but Klei decided that for some reason answer to frequently dug up mushrooms was making them regrow after eternity and ignored matter with berry bushes and other plants. Problems that this approach has:

1. Regrowth is not going to restore mushroom rings and other densely spawned clusters of mushrooms, not to mention that renewing resource would take really long time and it still would be major loss which one can’t really prevent (rifts still have bigger expansion radius than “check for base” radius last I checked, plus even that aside saving mushroom ring/cluster at a cost of surrounding them with multiple structures from all directions is just insanity).
2. Berry bushes, grass turfts and saplings don’t regrow after being uprooted in survival worlds, meaning that eventually wild areas of that world – anywhere that is not considered “base”, in fact, including spawn area, - would be depleted from those plants. If they are uprooted while withered (in summer), they are lost forever, if uprooted in other time, that still makes them unusable because as player-planted entities they would just be held hostage by brightshades, and latter remain even after rifts have closed. Both outcomes motivate me to just dig up those resources instead of leaving them for others to use, i.e. brightshades by design make the least cooperative decision the most logical and profitable for everyone.

I don't understand why instead of uprooting plants rifts can't just temporarily crystallize them or something, reverting plants to their usual form after closing, maybe even allowing to mine crystallized forms for extra pure brilliance and revert them even before rift closes.

And it's not like disabling farm plants, berry bushes and grass tufts (both transplanted and - eventually - wild) makes game harder: it's easily possible to live off meaty stew made with ice/butterfly wings/cacti/egg/other meat as filler, as well as use other meat dishes, and get grass from transplanted to caves grass tufts/tumbleweeds/still normal grass tufts during travelling though the world, but that is annoying because I don't like to loose potential resources. It makes trail mixes annoying to cook, I'll give it that, but for me, who kills CC (and eventually just keeps flower salad in bundle anyway), it's not a problem, it's a problem for other players. Plus I want my options to increase with my exploration/progress, not decrease. If nerfs to food/resource sources are done like that - with them completely disabled as the result - I won't engage in unwinnable battle over them, I would instead just use other food sources, much like what I did when desease was a thing. So I made full circle: long time ago when I was noob I based in Dragonfly desert because it provided a lot of grass and twigs with other added bonuses and was available in all seasons, thus it let me avoid desease that way; then desease was removed, but I never changed my favourite location because of other benefits I discovered over time; and here I am - laughing because my number 1 reason from noobish times to base in Dfly desert returned - with same exact solution to the problem caused by same exact flaws in mechanic! Even if one wanted to nerf other food sources consequitively, I - much like most other people - would just move to sources that are not affected yet, and eventually just loose interest in playing at all because there is a limit to lack of variety I'm willing to tolerate and to number of times when I disable something in world settings.

With that said, as admin and owner of server I had decisions to make after trying this update.

• Do I leave it as is and loose a lot of variety in sandbox game, as well as return to pre-desease removal boring meta of never replanting vast majority of plants? Or disable rifts and enjoy RWYS gardens and other transplanted plant benefits (berry bushes, monkey tails, even banana bushes (a shame it overshadows crops though), etc.), cook something other than meaty stew and cacti?
• Do I want to make choice between helping others to fight brightshades and sacrificing my own enjoyment (because I wanted to do something else in that time) and refusing to help them thus potentially loosing teammates because of my “uncooperativeness”? Or do I disable the thing and make both parties win?
• Do I agree with certain playstyles being deleted and loosing potential teammates just because new update left little to no room for them? Do I agree with even less players becoming regulars on the server when it already suffers from “???” ping problem and general abundance of trolls, griefers and leeches?
• Do I leave those rifts enabled and let my world become wasteland eventually with even starter biomes deprived from grass and berries (for newcomers to use and me to watch when I walk near)? Or do I disable rifts and keep world beautiful and bountiful? Do I agree with new content promoting opposite of cooperation in terms of hoarding resources or do I want to promote cooperation in various ways on my server?

In all those cases single decision solves the problem: disabling rifts and basically new update with it. Unfortunally, it won’t be the first such piece of content, I listed examples in spoiler below.

Spoiler

Monkey raids fall in that category as well because of horrible decision of them deleting stolen items and because of them just mobbing player is nothing more than thulecite/marble tax, plus double and triple raids were never addressed. Some things I can’t even disable, for example, varglets from hound waves – they didn’t achieve anything as player still runs for half a day from hound wave to shake them off on random mobs or uses V-shaped shore to slow them down. Just like before, because just like before hound wave mobs player, but unlike before, player can’t dispose of hounds consistently with 50+ damage weapon right as they spawn and be done with wave almost instantly because of varglet. And riding beefalo works pretty much like before, but now it feels like a requirement instead of option if one wants to dispose of hound wave on the go consistently within reasonable time, which I really dislike. I can't even disable banana bushes from portal on monkey island for a change to usual rote (setting doesn't work and this bug was ignored); I want that option in the first place because banana recipes strength was initially balanced around availability, but then not only banana bushes made bananas availability much higher, banana shake recipe just left in dust anything one can cook with farm plants for sanity (i.e. making obsolete some specific crops) because it's just better version for less managment and time investment in the long run, and banana daikiri covered healing part aside from very specific cases. Which is clearly result of lack of deep understanding how it would connect with other content - brought by lack of diversified experience in the game. New craft UI is still lacking, not even covering all good things that old one was offering, with bloated interface being expanded towards examination of dead surviviours as well. Suggestions on improvements were stopped to be heared soon after it went live, especially in this case for some reason, often people – I suspect developers included – don’t even read those threads because they assume every time nothing worthwhile can be said except “I don’t like it, return to old UI” (not true).

And there is more, but I’m tired. Tired of detailed posts being ignored – even those that are focused on game controls improvement instead of balance (in my case mouse movement regarding specifics of playing as Maxwell, and to lesser extent as Wendy and Wortox), - and of this whole situation when it seems like devs lost passion for their own game somewhere between 2021 and 2022, letting update quality fall during 2022 with some warning signs of it appearing back in 2021. I’m not sure if my guess is correct (I wish I was wrong on that), but in case it is, I bet playing game itself, doing something different than usual rote and/or watching 2-3 different advanced players playing game differently would help to regain that passion, at least to some extent. At least that keeps my interest though years despite some problems present.

[ALCRD]

Nice DST now has it's own version of Aporkalypse.

Instead of spam of bats you get spam of brightshade vines.

[goblinball]

16 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

when it seems like devs lost passion for their own game somewhere between 2021 and 2022, letting update quality fall during 2022 with some warning signs of it appearing back in 2021. I’m not sure if my guess is correct (I wish I was wrong on that)

Joe has literally already explained that this update will make much more sense when the next content update releases, and they probably should’ve packaged the 2 updates together. 
Cut the devs some slack, man. They make 1 mistake and now suddenly they’re terrible devs with zero passion or smth. If they lacked passion then they wouldn’t even be updating the game at all still, let alone doing betas and making more shorts and being transparent and open to the community about this stuff. 
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that this update is a bit problematic. But I trust klei that they’ll try to fix it in the coming updates and it’s only bad temporarily. That’s why they added in the little wagstaff thing instead of making them automatically toggle post CC; they’re aware this stuff is messy and it’s a WIP and they’re working on it. Saying the devs aren’t passionate for the game anymore just because they should’ve delayed an update is an incredibly rude and just disrespectful thing to do, man.

[Baark0]

where you see a nuisance, i see free armor and weapons

[Brago-sama]

3 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

where you see a nuisance, i see free armor and weapons

I see an anoying to get log suit and football helmet that spawns on your food

 

The swords pretty good tho.

[Mike23Ua]

Just a real quick question but since I play on Xbox I can only GUESS at how it actually works- but.. if I space my Grass/Twigs further apart from one another, does that also effect the way the Brightshades will spawn? I mean I figured it logically WOULD & JOEWs Roadmap post clearly said we would be able to work With or Against the Roadmap Contents.. but since I’m on Xbox I have no way of actually testing it for Myself!

Hold on I’ll try to explain with an Image.. 

 

[Mysterious box]

3 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

where you see a nuisance, i see free armor and weapons

 

Just now, Brago-sama said:

I see an anoying to get log suit and football helmet that cant be semi-autofarmed like the former 2

[MondayNight]

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

Although I didn’t screenshot the other case when rift itself spawned almost on top of portal, with plant resources being dug, enlightenment area being a thing and graziers attacking everybody who went asleep, I believe @MostMerryTomcat who played on the same server has screenshot, or at least can back me up on that. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have rift welcoming players right out of gate (much like case with moonstorms while they are active, but they at least can be turned off and bring some actual benefits like no darkness at night).

Yeah, it was an... "interesting experience" let's say, this update.

First off, mentioned Lunar Rifts spawning almost beside Florid Postern - just look at the beaut' below:

An image worth 1000 words (of swearing to high heavens?) - and the subsequent problem of uprooting all resources (even Flowers) in affected area. Plus it didn't happen just once, but 3 times in total till Rifts were disabled on this particular server, they appeared close to Spawn Gate. I think the intent behind such mechanic is pretty clear: basic resource deletion in late-game. Funny thing is this mechanic won't even affect advanced experienced players - the ones towards whom this supposed "hard mode" (aka Survival faced of DST amped up) is aimed at - not even ones nomading with only but a boat or some Cave loot-stash place. It only affects newcomers on server - ones most-likely being newbies/noobs/casuals, happening upon the pub.
 

Then there was the issue with Pig King Communal Base - picture below:

See those circled spots? That's where the Deadly Brightshades spawned on and on and on.. 3 on those Farmplots, and 1 on the transplanted Sapling mentioned in OP. I alone killed the Brightshade that spawned on the Sapling 7 times. 3 of each were in a row. As in: killed, moved a bit to kitchen, came back: bam(-wham-thank-you-ma'am!) > Brightshade "Hello!"-ing me anew. Smashed, took loot, funny triangular ghost (Brightshade Gestalt) appears dancing from afar, Puff! "Bonjour!" Brightshade. 0 cool-down. Etc. When 8th was up, back there once more, I just "Fukdy!" out a la "You win, weed, you win! Happy?!".

Yes, using a Brightshade Staff in tandem with Enlightened Crown and Sanity Food does the job well, of yeeting the trio 'shades humping one's plants/farm plots. That's not the problem; but the Brightshades' respawn frequency! I repeat and underline: the frequency - it badly needs a cool-down. Currently isn't as hard as is tedious.

Yes, KLei mentioned next Cave's Shadow Rifts update will.. bring something to mitigate Forest's Moon Rifts (maybe?!). Yet that lack of cool-down, akin Monkey Raids - why devs are so reluctant to add one? Is there some philosophy behind Moon elements not having the regular cool-downs classic DST mechanics have? If so, why?! I for one enjoy the encounter with Brightshades, is like salt & pepper on a meal: spices up the monotony of late-game. Still, not with current rates of re/spawn, especially in relation with transplanted vegetation and veggie farming.

 

In conclusion from my pov: Lunar Rifts should maintain a certain distance from Florid Postern, let's say at least 1 screen-away. And Deadly Brightshades need a cool-down. Both, as they are now, aren't fun but tiresome for advanced players - and newbies/noobs/casual "shredders". More-so: Deadly Brightshades WorldGen settings, for density as well as spawn frequency.

[Pig Princess]

1 hour ago, goblinball said:

They make 1 mistake and now suddenly they’re terrible devs with zero passion or smth

Actually not 1. There were issues before: moon quay update made it to live as if unfinished, just look at pirates that just mob player instead of providing good challenge and danger - they are just tax on armor, healing and bananas because there is no smart way of fighting them, only "tank and spank" is an option. Pan flute/Sleepy Time Stories can cut that cost somewhat, but in the end it's still the same because they are unkitable. Cannons are too clunky to use and by the time you aim they are already boarding your boat, and strident trident is just... Return with that when getting 3 gnarwhale horns won't be so rng and when Crab King would be actually interesting fight. And then around start of 2022 Winter's Feast they made stealth changes to pirates: now instead of updating the same stash without limit they just delete any items past 20 items limit, and stackable things like twigs and seeds count as separate items. Plus even if you pay them banana before reaching that they still steal from your chests on the way to banana and ram your boat. Tell me, again, why they though it would be great design to have people PAY BANANA for the very POSSIBILITY of sailing? Also they never addressed double and triple raids that just have to happen at some point if one sails a lot because eventually one will run out of their luck.

Banana bushes show that they didn't think about balance of sanity dishes at all, it even affected healing balance greatly, I already mentioned it in original post. Monkey tails are just "digable reeds" mod and feel like filler. They are ok, not horrible, not gamebreaking, but they are just... Placeholder of reward.

Then there was A Little Drama that is mere shell of update, they just added essentially cosmetic set piece and called it a day. It also looks like they tried to hide that fact by fusing this update with QoL and Hallowed Nights to make it look "nicer". And even story that can be played on the stage doesn't add anything that we didn't know already from puzles and quotes, but unlike original checkmate ending with Maxwell's monologue, this one looks like distorted version that makes fun of first one. I hate it.

Dreadstone gear is just not worth using, and I had whole elaborate comment about why that is so. Details aside, it's features work against each other and it's just overshadowed by thulecite set that becomes available earlier and easier than dreadstone set, and also is not limited so much (doesn't straight up require duplication for multiple people to have it). As for it's repairing qualities, it's utility is overshadowed by eyemask of all things, which is also easier to obtain and more convenient to restore. And just because somebosy writes as response on comments pointing out problems "oh well, I don't care about minmaxing I just like it [for no reason]" devs decide that it's fine as is and move on.

What about Terraria bosses spawn mechanic? Would you tell me it's not a mistake? To your attention activating terrarium is considered griefing, and people have reasons for that.

What about craft UI? I wrote about it a lot, and no, it's not "I hate it period, remove it and give me back old". Devs pretend that problems with that don't exist and even make yet another mistake of implementing bloated interface into examination of dead survivior, which actually makes you unable to see cause of death. But most importantly they did the same with regular examination, so if you accidently click on player during battle, you open that thing that fills half of your screen while your character stops performing any action, including moving and attacking.

Want more? How about them stuffing Wanda with teleports instead of revisiting lazy deserter? Why did they make long requested feature character-specific, and even added that to DLC character? That just tastes bad despite possibility to weave Wanda, plus what if I hate her with burning passion and don't want to play as her because of other reasons?

How about devs ignoring feedback during Maxwell rework regarding controls? They made rework with WASD movement in mind, sure, but mouse movement was in the game since ancient times and also has utility that WASD movement doesn't have, which is why I use exclusively that. And yet simple changes proposed by me to make playing Maxwell with WASD on par with mouse just were ignored. I understand that some things - like advantage of moving and targeting being separated in WASD movement and continuum of directions in mouse movement just can't be replicated, hence 2 approaches are valuable, but making spell casting 3rd type of action that could be binded to hotkey and making it so that clicking with spell wheel open doesn't close spell wheel an option is not hard to do. Same for hotkey to summon/hide Abigail and release soul action.

And don't even make me write about ocean and Crab King. I like sailing in general (at least more than I dislike it), it has it's own appeal, but there is so much work needed, and yet they just started new arc while abandoning ocean?

I also was frequent visitor and writer at bug tracker at some point (for a few month), and I saw which bugs were fixed and which were ignored. Extra pixels are fixed, crashes are fixed, but non-skin related and still relevant gameplay bugs like saddle disappearing from beefalo, Abigail stopping attacking mid-fight, temperature effect of dishes overwriting each other (so honey ham cancels effect of hot dragon chili salad, and it affect Warly the most of all characters), bee boxes stopping releasing bees if latter were forced with fire, werepigs not recognising food on boats - and more - all of that is ignored. And even now those damn brighshades are still spawning this close to each other, devs never addressed lack of cooldown despite issue being known since beta... I don't want to continue, it's already long reply.

Edit: forgot to mention that regular updates also have money as motivation and necessity to follow modern trends. Or not also, unfortunally. But as I said, I wish I was wrong on that one.

[Mysterious box]

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

 

Feel like you should temper your expectations abit while things that do need fixed like crashes and it spawning on portal for example this is meant to be a hard mode of sorts hence kiel themselves calling this end game content it's not meant to be as comfortable for newcomers and relaxed play as the content that came before it which is why activating it is so optional and I imagine the rest of the end game side of these upcoming updates will expand in a similar way.

I understand it's unfortunate that other players can trigger the content in other people's long term worlds but I feel like this more or less falls in the same position as the kiel should police griefers debate.

 

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

And there is more, but I’m tired. Tired of detailed posts being ignored – even those that are focused on game controls improvement instead of balance (in my case mouse movement regarding specifics of playing as Maxwell, and to lesser extent as Wendy and Wortox), - and of this whole situation when it seems like devs lost passion for their own game somewhere between 2021 and 2022, letting update quality fall during 2022 with some warning signs of it appearing back in 2021. I’m not sure if my guess is correct (I wish I was wrong on that), but in case it is, I bet playing game itself, doing something different than usual rote and/or watching 2-3 different advanced players playing game differently would help to regain that passion, at least to some extent. At least that keeps my interest though years despite some problems present.

Saying devs have lost their passion is a common saying in the gaming community when a game takes a turn they don't like and in some cases people even assume devs are passionate about a very successful game when it's the opposite. Either way kiel has implemented plenty of good quality of life changes over this period as well.

[Dextops]

Can I get like a 10 word tldr 

[ALCRD]

50 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

What about craft UI?

Personally the new crafting UI is a godsend.

I am glad that old jank scroll hell is gone. It gave me PTSD to see that awful old ui after i started playing DS recently.. 

I am hoping there is a mod somewhere that adds something similar to DST's crafting ui to DS - search bar and quick craft tabs included

[abrocator]

2 hours ago, goblinball said:

Joe has literally already explained that this update will make much more sense when the next content update releases, and they probably should’ve packaged the 2 updates together. 

This is fine in isolation but I have seen a lot of this sentiment lately: “Yes, the game just got 10% worse but that’s only because they’re in the process of making the game 15% better which will happen any day now, just around the corner could even be tomorrow” (and yes that’s literally what goblinball said here, literally. That’s a real quote).

[Zeklo]

While I think it's great that the 'turn on' mechanic was isolated to a specific choice, I think it would have benefited from the good o' construction tape.

To very blatantly express that it's a WIP.

[Theukon-dos]

2 hours ago, goblinball said:

Joe has literally already explained that this update will make much more sense when the next content update releases, and they probably should’ve packaged the 2 updates together. 

Except that this isn't about the update "not making sense", it's about the update having massive and obvious problems that should have been caught in the beta. And if Klei has plans too add ways to make sure that these rifts won't destroy bases or resources? Great! But then they either
A. Should have included those in this update

B. Tweaked the rifts to account for the lack of a counterplay until said counterplay could be added. Like making the rifts only spawn in Mosiac to start; but once protection got added; letting them spawn anywhere. 

2 hours ago, goblinball said:

Cut the devs some slack, man. They make 1 mistake and now suddenly they’re terrible devs with zero passion or smth. If they lacked passion then they wouldn’t even be updating the game at all still, let alone doing betas and making more shorts and being transparent and open to the community about this stuff. 
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that this update is a bit problematic. But I trust klei that they’ll try to fix it in the coming updates and it’s only bad temporarily. That’s why they added in the little wagstaff thing instead of making them automatically toggle post CC; they’re aware this stuff is messy and it’s a WIP and they’re working on it. Saying the devs aren’t passionate for the game anymore just because they should’ve delayed an update is an incredibly rude and just disrespectful thing to do, man.

Y'know, what's funny is that I remember people saying the exact same thing about the ocean when Return of Them was a thing. "[The ocean's] only bad temporarily, they'll add more stuff to make it great". Hell, I remember saying such a thing myself more often than not. But, here we are. 2023, the ocean is still a steaming pile of nothing, and hasn't been touched in nearly a year. (Last ocean-focused update was Curse of the Moon Quay in June 2022). So while I do have faith that Klei will pull through and make the rift mechanics interesting; if only becuase they seem to have a much more precise idea of what they want to do with the end-game than they did the ocean; it's hard to fault people for not being so steadfast.

[Baark0]

2 hours ago, Pig Princess said:

Dreadstone gear is just not worth using, and I had whole elaborate comment about why that is so. Details aside, it's features work against each other and it's just overshadowed by thulecite set that becomes available earlier and easier than dreadstone set, and also is not limited so much (doesn't straight up require duplication for multiple people to have it). As for it's repairing qualities, it's utility is overshadowed by eyemask of all things, which is also easier to obtain and more convenient to restore. And just because somebosy writes as response on comments pointing out problems "oh well, I don't care about minmaxing I just like it [for no reason]" devs decide that it's fine as is and move on.

Thing is, eye mask has significantly less durability than dreadstone armor, especially when you factor in that it's meant to be a set bonus, meaning you'll be wearing both most the time, therefore increasing the durability since it's split between the 2 armor pieces, and due to it's low durability, it's very easy for the eye mask to break if you forget about repairing it, and finding time to repair it in the middle of a boss can be difficult without the use of a panflute. Eye mask also has 10% less protection, meaning dreadstone blocks twice the amount of damage the eye mask could. It's also cheaper to repair, coming only at the cost of sanity, instead of potentially valuable food.

[Fufuji]

We need an in-game approach to shut down the Rifts. We also need a tweak on the spawning pattern of Brightshades so that they are less annoying. Before the update comes, I'll just plant some dragon fruits near the lava pools, give up all my farms and let brightshades burn down in extreme agony.

[YouKnowWho]

I know you're frustrated. Hell, I would be too; but it's important to remember to try and keep things civil. Nothing productive is going to come out of us bickering with each other, so let's try and see if we can't work together on this one. Alright? Alright.

5 hours ago, Pig Princess said:

multiplayer public endless server

Truth be told, it seems like this type of content just wasn't made with public endless servers in mind. Any player would have trouble starting out if they had to deal with something balanced around players in the endgame. Does this suddenly make everything you've brought up invalid? Of course not, things like spawn frequency almost certainly need a change, but it's something to keep in mind when discussing the balance as a whole. If the endless experience is what you find most enjoyable, then perhaps it'd be best to cater your world settings to better fit around that kind of play-style.

3 hours ago, Pig Princess said:

I also was frequent visitor and writer at bug tracker at some point (for a few month), and I saw which bugs were fixed and which were ignored. .

I know it's not the best feeling,  I've had my fair share of unanswered reports, but I sincerely doubt the developers would ever do so maliciously. It's important to understand that the bug-tracker gets almost hundreds of reports in-between updates and there just isn't enough time for the small bug-fixing team to search through all the pages for things that needs addressing. That's why things like re-reports are important, so that when the developers are actually available to fix bugs they can see the things that need addressing.

I'm not saying you should make a new report every time your post falls into the second page, but again it's something to keep in mind when you're encountering an issue.

 

[Mike23Ua]

Can someone please confirm or deny if I can cleverly exploit the spawning behavior of Brightshades based on how I plant/place the things they enjoy infesting?

[maxwell_winters]

1 minute ago, Mike23Ua said:

Can someone please confirm or deny if I can cleverly exploit the spawning behavior of Brightshades based on how I plant/place the things they enjoy infesting?

I just made a sacrificial garden away from my base and planted 3 crops far from each. They always spawn there because they prioritize crops.

[ALCRD]

31 minutes ago, maxwell_winters said:

I just made a sacrificial garden away from my base and planted 3 crops far from each. They always spawn there because they prioritize crops.

*Happy Wormwood noises*

[Theukon-dos]

6 hours ago, Pig Princess said:

Regrowth is not going to restore mushroom rings and other densely spawned clusters of mushrooms

not 'shrooms, but Fat F to that one guy who had a rift spawn in right in the middle of their reed trap.  

[ADM]

43 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

not 'shrooms, but Fat F to that one guy who had a rift spawn in right in the middle of their reed trap.  

Well, that would be "fine" (and by that I should say just as bad as anywhere else) as reeds and other plants that cannot be uprooted aren't affected much the rift propagation, only their ressources drop. So mushrooms circle is certainly the most messed up thing to loose since the regrow system is very unreliable so we'd end up with less mushrooms in the end and loosing the tidy structure on top. But yeah in term of swamps I'd even hate on loosing a single Spiky Tree hehe...

[Cassielu]

That's funny, I also played on public endless servers for 200 days and came to the opposite conclusion: this is the best intrusive event DST has ever had.

[Yuuko]

tbh I think there is a MAJOR disconnect Klei is having with some recent content.

Its good for things to be challenging, but I'm sick of getting punishment advertised as "challenge content."

Challenge - you have to do a thing that is difficult.

Punish - no matter what you do, you are damaged for it.

Monkey raids are a great example - IF you manage to fight back you get cursed charms, lose character perks, and must deliver bananas.  This is if you DID fight them off.  Receiving a penalty for fighting them off tells me that is the wrong answer, but then, what is the right one?  Canons are not accessible before them, and if I do nothing they tear up the boat and loot everything also delivering injury to me.  It is a lose / lose situation.  No outcome from a monkey raid makes it feel worth going through.  Its not difficult either way, its just picking my punishment.

IMO Klei has at some point in the dev room decided that punishing us regardless of our actions / abilities is "challenging" us, and I'm not here for it.

Due to the feedback from monkey raids they were essentially turned off, but the horrible interactions remain.  Klei has been completely unwilling to look back on these things are realize they made a mistake.  This content is not good.  It could be with some changes, some reason to actually do it - but nope.  Silence, dead content.

This portal update is going down the EXACT same road.  Its punishing no matter what you do, and the "intended answer" is only available after you've been punished for it.

I don't care that "we don't see it all yet" b/c honestly that is just a big cop out, literally might as well just not post if that is all you can say.  The concept is not so amazingly subtle that we can't see where this is going.  idk why the devs are even at this considering DST has been - for a LONG time - a sandbox focused version of the DS survival experience.  We have renewable resources, optional bosses, griefer protection etc.  Lots of changes focused on building a better sandbox experience, which worked well with pick up and drop servers and TONS of decorative skins.  We should be gaining more options over time, not having them reduced.

DST is NOT some terraria, souls, or whatever uNcOmPrOmIsInG experience they decided they are trying to copy now.  This is 100% steering DST in the wrong direction.

Its not like everything has to be easy, there is a lot of room to add more difficult content - but Klei - why don't you take half the dam caves that no one uses anyway and just convert that into something instead of pushing all this BS stuff into our bases?