Dealing With Sea Striders and Their Nests

[Uncrushed]

I like to use a Fire Staff to burn the nests from a distance - that gets rid of them for good, so I can harvest figs forever in peace.

I have the perception that the common wisdom is that these are a great meat source and should be preserved.  I decided that I must be doing it wrong.  After a day and a half of picking figs and harvesting Knobbly Tree Nuts, and killing wave after wave of these things, I wore out a log suit, football helmet, and tentacle spike, then yet another 8 of them attacked me at once on my boat and I died.  Common wisdom was correct in that I died with a fridge full of meat, but I was still dead.

This time I'm being really careful to position the Tree Nuts so I can move around them, but a boat is still a cramped space.  I can't imagine kiting past all my chests and things.  I'm playing as Wicker ATM.  What am I missing?

Now I'm being really careful to get them to aggro on Chester and beat them with my walking cane.  It's working better, but I still died when Chester was on the wrong side of the boat.  I'm up to 17 monster meat after only 2 of the 3 trees.

[Tranoze]

Where are your 16 grumble bees? For each character you should use your perk as advantage vs them.
Wendy can slaught them easily with abigail.
Maxwell can summon duelist on boat to deal with them.
Wicker can summon grumble bees.
Webber just immune to them.
Wurt can put some merm on boat.

When they use number as advantage, use your own number advantage. You can hire some pigman. You can do spring beefalo + beef hat. Traven in pack of 2 if you have a friend.

[Popian]

Cookie Cutters are a better source of Monster Meat in the ocean, so leaving them around as a meat source is mostly for if you want to base in the biome. If you are looking for Silk from breaking the nests for something like Bug Nets you only need to leave 1-2 around each tree.

Fight with something that deals at least 50 damage, the Shield of Terror is most convenient for the ocean but you can always bring a Ham Bat and mats for more or drop a couple of Tentacle Spikes on your boat. Since they come out in twos, the damage lets you kill the first one before the second one is ready to attack you, letting you hold F.

If you do happen to get 3-4 beside you ready to attack, don't tank them. Their attack range is shorter to account for boat combat, so because of your 50+ damage weapon you are allowed to dodge, kill one, dodge, etc. until there are 2 left that you can hold F on. Having to deal with more than 4 might indicate that you have too many nests too close to each other so you can either trigger them one by one first or destroy the nests to make it more manageable.

[Brago-sama]

Heck no i burned all my down. I gathered 40 nuts aint no way im fighting for 15-20 days thru that.

Just because theyre unique doesnt mean theyre worth keeping around. Id burn down every dangling depth dwellers nest if i could.

  More importantly, there are more strider nests in other water logged biomes, so just clear out one that you wanna gather nuts from and leave the rest for whatever you want

Oh and for mass nut collection, i highly recomend attaching a second empty boat via the NautoPilot and storing them all there

[Frosty_Mentos]

Those nests alone are good silk source if you got the damage, cookie cutters are better for meat tho.

Best is to get highest damage weapons and get rid of the nests before getting figs considering how fast the nests respawn anyway.

[Gashzer]

Swap to webber, job's a good'un  

[_zwb]

Why would you even collect knobby tree nuts when you can just spam rain book as Wickerbottom? Growing an above average tree is quite pointless no?

If you only want figs just bundle one strider so a Webber can tame it later and unlock the switcher doodle recipe, then burn all the strider dens.

[Captain_Rage]

Tooth Traps will help you deal with Sea Striders / Rockjaws / Powder Monkeys.

[Brago-sama]

22 minutes ago, _zwb said:

Why would you even collect knobby tree nuts

Spoiler

 

[Uncrushed]

8 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

Tooth Traps will help you deal with Sea Striders / Rockjaws / Powder Monkeys.

One tip, so many problems solved.  THANK YOU!  Picture is priceless.

[1moregame]

8 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

Tooth Traps will help you deal with Sea Striders / Rockjaws / Powder Monkeys.

Whoa...TIL.

[Captain_Rage]

5 hours ago, Uncrushed said:

One tip, so many problems solved.  THANK YOU!  Picture is priceless.

They also make short work of Cookie Cutters. xd

[Uncrushed]

Thanks for all your advice.  I returned with a fire pen*, shadow armor, and night sword.  Those spiders and their homes are toast!

 

* Whenever I use a fire staff (or similar) I always make sure to have an ice staff on hand to prevent accidental infernos.  On Pyrotechnics is great when I want to put everything out, but my goal was to make sure that one thing burned thoroughly.

[Mike23Ua]

In my experience fighting any large group of mobs that can “stun lock you to death” simply isn’t any fun at all..

I suppose that I’m intended to fight them before they can climb to those numbers where they’ve got me stunned with no real way of fighting back- but every single time it happens I just roll my world back to a previous save because of how completely Unfair the Death actually was..

Its not just SeaStriders that have this problem, it’s any mob that can gather in large hordes and stun lock you preventing movement, I’ve Literally managed to DIE to a Horde of laughably easy to kill Birchnutters because they stunned me to death.

And while the above image of Tooth Traps sounds like a valid strategy, if I’m going to be stuck on a tiny boat platform with already limited movement options, can we maybe erase stun-lock for ocean mobs?

[Catteflyterpill]

6 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

In my experience fighting any large group of mobs that can “stun lock you to death” simply isn’t any fun at all..

I suppose that I’m intended to fight them before they can climb to those numbers where they’ve got me stunned with no real way of fighting back- but every single time it happens I just roll my world back to a previous save because of how completely Unfair the Death actually was..

Its not just SeaStriders that have this problem, it’s any mob that can gather in large hordes and stun lock you preventing movement, I’ve Literally managed to DIE to a Horde of laughably easy to kill Birchnutters because they stunned me to death.

And while the above image of Tooth Traps sounds like a valid strategy, if I’m going to be stuck on a tiny boat platform with already limited movement options, can we maybe erase stun-lock for ocean mobs?

The point of swarming mobs is to not let them swarm on you? Nothing wrong with rolling back, but it's not unfair - you were just under prepared and slipped up. There's methods of crowd control, Bramble Husks, Abigail, Weremoose, Weather Pains, Brightshade Staff, Pan Flute, etc... Fighting on the ocean is hard, but stun-lock isn't what makes it difficult; it's just part of DS combat. 

[Masked Koopa]

8 hours ago, Catteflyterpill said:

The point of swarming mobs is to not let them swarm on you? Nothing wrong with rolling back, but it's not unfair - you were just under prepared and slipped up. There's methods of crowd control, Bramble Husks, Abigail, Weremoose, Weather Pains, Brightshade Staff, Pan Flute, etc... Fighting on the ocean is hard, but stun-lock isn't what makes it difficult; it's just part of DS combat. 

I think the number of crowd control options is maybe a little limited. I always thought it would be kind of cool if electric damage was changed so instead of dealing more damage, it instead creates chain lightning between mobs. That way voltgoat choid-foir wouldn't just be chili flakes but better, and the morning star would have a much more concrete use as the ol' reliable crowd control weapon. It'd make bee queen way more managable as well. As for wet targets, the maximum number of arcs, and/or the maximum distance that the electricity can reach could be increased on wet targets.

Sure you could argue that that makes the brightshade staff less useful, but that it

em is awaiting its lunar allignment enhancements anyway.

[Baark0]

Spider dens are only worth keeping around if you plan on living in a waterlogged biome, as land spiders are much easier to farm with the help of bunnymen, and trying to kite spiders on the tiny cramped boats is not a fun time (unless you have an ornery beefalo, then it's a minor inconvenience).