Some thoughts on Wormwood

[azazel3221]

So yesterday i was sitting, thinking about DS characters, and a thought crossed my mind.

Out of all of the hamlet exclusive characters only Wormwood had an item that was only useful in the DLCs (the poison cure). Then i noticed that basically all of his skills were designed around hamlet:

• hamlet has very little free food, so he can plant seeds in the ground to get some
• hay fewer is annoying during the lush season, so he's not only immune to it but also benefits from blooming
• he can't heal with food, very convenient that shops sell healing items and manure is always plentiful all over the map

The resulting character actually turns out to be interesting in hamlet but kinda mediocre in the rest of the game, food is plentiful and making sources of it is easy, outside of hamlet poison only exists in SW, everyone is immune to hay fewer because it doesn't exist, he can't dig in dung piles for sanity cuz those also don't exist and blooming during spring and monsoon season is not as good since he starves faster and being constantly wet makes any food in his inventory (which he should carry cuz faster hunger rate) rot faster.

All those thoughts combined kind of made me think of only one thing: Why was Wormwood the one ported over?

And no im not some Wormwood hater, i like him and think he's kinda cool, it's just that in solo DS he was a crafting based character with benefits mostly visible only in hamlet, while in DST his perks are almost non-existant and limit him to an unsatisfying gameplay loop of a farm slave, something that he never was (his only "farming" perk was planting seeds in the ground to get easy food).


Sorry for the poor structure of the post, it's kinda hard for me to write my thoughts down coherently. I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks of this.

[Cassielu]

Wormwood's abilities are quite... "discrete", I guess the developers were just exploring the crazy idea of "what he would look like if there was a plant character" when they designed him. This makes him the most distinctive role in hamlet, not "another victim" or "another local creature who can befriend his own kind."

However, a section of Wormwood main went beyond the canon gameplay the developers designed for him, and discovered new gameplay path related to shadow magic, ruins, and combat. So we have what happened in beta, when developers continued to design the skill tree for Wormwood as originally idea, these skill isn't a part of Wormwood main wanted.

[Ohan]

4 hours ago, azazel3221 said:

Then i noticed that basically all of his skills were designed around hamlet:

Yup. Wormwood in Hamlet is a lot of fun. On the rare occasions where i find the time/motivation to boot up DS over DST its always to play Wormwood in Hamlet because its such a fun and unique experience. 

4 hours ago, azazel3221 said:

• hamlet has very little free food, so he can plant seeds in the ground to get some
• hay fewer is annoying during the lush season, so he's not only immune to it but also benefits from blooming
• he can't heal with food, very convenient that shops sell healing items and manure is always plentiful all over the map

Exactly. and to expand on this: 

• Wormwood's hunger drain while blooming is dramatically higher in Hamlet, literally double. Which makes his wild farm crops much more useful compared to solo wormwood in DST who has very little reason to farm other than planting random seeds for sanity. 
  • these wild crops also grow year-round in Hamlet vs what was the case for many years in DST pre-RWYS. 
• Only three seasons means ur blooming more frequently which makes up for the fact that Hamlet WW cant bloom on demand. 
• Pig towns generate a lot of manure and u are rewarded Oincs for picking them up! 
  • applying manure has a much faster animation in Hamlet making it so going through an entire stack of 20 for 40 healing is very do-able. 
    • Dung beetles are super fun to chase around for their manure tumbleweed ball and monster meat drops which is perfect food for WW. 
• Armor stacking in DS:A means that the Husk's original 65% protection is not a hinderance. It took literal years for the husk to finally be buffed in DST. 
  • the original bone shard recipe was no problem in Hamlet considering Pugalisk gave u a ton of shards. 
  • the husk is very efficient at vampire bat wave protection on the go considering they dont all attack the player at the same time so many of the bats that r circling u get hit from u only tanking 1 hit. 
• Batbats are very readily available in Hamlet. 
  • vampire bat waves bring wings to ur doorstep and the special wishing well in one of the ruins gives Purple gems. 
• he can make living logs in a world where the only other source is the magic shop iirc and the Elder Mandrakes hidden in a corner of one of the other plateaus 
  • no totally normal trees, evergreen for treeguards without buying and planting cones. 

And let me not forget the agressive plants in the jungle! 

• Hostile plant neutrality perk in Hamlet actually means something. 
• snapteeth are super fun to mess around with and cultivate, growing tier 3 snapteeth where u want them for defense. 

On the flip side they totally did not account for the volcano cacti in SW. The bramble husk offers no protection to their spines.

Lack of renewable nitre in Hamlet plus needing nitre to craft hedges and Spa shops selling poultice/salves makes compost wraps not very good. And bramble traps are more useful in DST than in Hamlet. 

Ill stop there but im probably still forgetting some things. 

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WW in hamlet is a really fun time and the only reason i occasionaly go back to DS:A. 

4 hours ago, azazel3221 said:

Why was Wormwood the one ported over?

This is a very fair question considering how connected he is to the world of Hamlet and how they did almost nothing to account for this when they ripped him out of the jungle and threw him in DST. 

Nice QoL things aside like blooming on demand, healing with other fertilizers, Compost Wrap buff and the much asked for Husk buff after many years, his main DST additions have been farming related when that was very much a side perk in Hamlet. 

His Hamlet origin story shows him being from the Moon. Idk at this point if the devs knew they wanted to add a whole Lunar faction in DST but Wormwood is literally the perfect survivor to explore all this content with and to this day he still has zero connections to any of it. His skill tree does not improve on this very much either. He should have lunar stuff in his base kit the way Maxwell has shadow stuff. 

Because of his living log crafting, complete lack of lunar living log crafts and major synergy with magic crafts like dark sword, batbat and night armor he is literally more of a Shadow aligned survivor in terms of gameplay than Lunar and his skill tree has not changed this in the slightest.