DST and Returning to its Roots

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, cybers2001 said:

Heh, yeah, the nerds got rustled looks like. Funny that even when I said not to outright nerf bundle wraps I still get attacked.

Hardly attacked.  People disagreed with you, and what you had to say in response was unconvincing.  Don't pretend you're some martyr lol

[goatt]

7 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

You're getting hung up on the wrong detail. Farms provide ease of food-related game loops, but the loops still exist.

You are getting hung up on the wrong detail. I didn't want to ignore Berry Bushes as regular food source. They can be both food source and hoarding method. But the label "food source" of berry bushes is irrelevant to the main topic here. So I didn't focus on it. But "food source" label doesn't contradict its "hoarding" label.

Yes, berry bushes as food loops exist. And yes, berry bushes as hoarding methods existed before bundling wrap.

 

7 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

Meanwhile, at the cost of a single inventory slot, I have 100% fresh stacks of cooked food at my disposal no matter where I am. I think it's very straight forward to understand.

Here, that's exactly the difference in storage method. The new concept bundling wrap brought was not food hoarding. 

If we are talking about food hoarding, we are talking about if it was possible to store infinite amount of food before bundling wrap was introduced (the word "infinite" shouldn't be taken literally). And the answer was yes.

We had DS improved farms to hoard dragon fruit. We could hoard unlimited amount of bee boxes. We could hoard ice, which doesn't spoil in ice all year round. Those are examples for how hoarding was possible. In other words, if you remove bundling wrap now, the problem of food hoarding won't go away. Food is still extremely easy to come by for those who are capable of defeating bee queen.

It's just wrong to blame food overhaul mainly on bundling wrap.

[Antynomity]

All a bundling wrap nerf would do is cause trouble, it wouldn't even fix the core issue of food beiing extremely easy to amass at all stages of the game, I don't like how bundles were introduced but changing them drastically now is a very, VERY bad idea.

[cybers2001]

8 hours ago, Antynomity said:

All a bundling wrap nerf would do is cause trouble, it wouldn't even fix the core issue of food beiing extremely easy to amass at all stages of the game, I don't like how bundles were introduced but changing them drastically now is a very, VERY bad idea.

I agree, that's pretty much exactly what I said in my original post. 

9 hours ago, goatt said:

hoarding words

Okay, let's try a different approach. Do you think food as a resource is too trivial due to hoarding? Yes or no. If so, what would be your ideas to address it?

[00petar00]

1 hour ago, cybers2001 said:

Okay, let's try a different approach. Do you think food as a resource is too trivial due to hoarding? Yes or no. If so, what would be your ideas to address it?

Food doesn't need any changes, managing bars is just another thing that players must overcome and it would get boring if it was harder to do so, the point of progression is to be able to do what you want in the game without being limited by any mechanic.

Removing bundling wrap wouldn't change a thing when it comes to hoarding food and it would just make it more annoying as you'd need to cook more often. If I cook 40 meaty stews at once so that I don't have to do any cooking in a while, who actually thinks I would starve if I wasn't able to bundle the meaty stews? (I would just make less crockpot dishes and cook more often).

[cybers2001]

1 hour ago, 00petar00 said:

Food doesn't need any changes, managing bars is just another thing that players must overcome and it would get boring if it was harder to do so, the point of progression is to be able to do what you want in the game without being limited by any mechanic.

Removing bundling wrap wouldn't change a thing when it comes to hoarding food and it would just make it more annoying as you'd need to cook more often. If I cook 40 meaty stews at once so that I don't have to do any cooking in a while, who actually thinks I would starve if I wasn't able to bundle the meaty stews? (I would just make less crockpot dishes and cook more often).

So was DS/DST boring before bundle wraps existed, then? How did you feel when Klei nerfed perma-fresh crockpot and drying rack storage from vanilla DS?

What do you do in this game when you optimize out the game loops? Just build?

My point is that I think food can be a more engaging loop. One that encourages more varied recipes and cooking structures/appliances (like gorge).

[goatt]

3 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

Okay, let's try a different approach. Do you think food as a resource is too trivial due to hoarding? Yes or no. If so, what would be your ideas to address it?

Yes and no.

Yes is because food can be trivialized.

 

But is it too trivialized? I think food trivialization is the progress of the game.

What benefit does trivializing food bring? Freedom. You have less to worry about food and more freedom for fighting, exploring, tinkering, strategizing, crafting and building. As seasoned players, we set up specific kinds of (non-decorative) farms to support our playstyles. We trivialize food intentionally to create time and space for the other more important things (players' self-created goals). Food deserves to be less important because it's the most basic survival challenges.

 

Trivializing food is a milestone in the game. From that point on, doing other stuffs in the game becomes significantly easier and more efficient. Food is trivialized to help players progress and focus on those other stuffs. It's not a problem, it's a feature.

 

Why does food trivialization become a problem for the game? Well, it becomes a problem when a player doesn't have any other stuff to do than food. Once that player got food figured out, he's done with the game, end of the game progression. But I think that's not a problem needs to be addressed by game design. It can probably be addressed via UI design to help players discover more about the game. Otherwise, they can stop play the game as they want when other players discover lots more game contents.

[cybers2001]

1 hour ago, goatt said:

Why does food trivialization become a problem for the game? Well, it becomes a problem when a player doesn't have any other stuff to do than food. Once that player got food figured out, he's done with the game, end of the game progression. But I think that's not a problem needs to be addressed by game design. It can probably be addressed via UI design to help players discover more about the game. Otherwise, they can stop play the game as they want when other players discover lots more game contents.

Well, yes. The first "what next" moment newer players tend to hit is when they survive past summer, and think that's all there is to do in the game. The wiki and scrap book would hopefully help them realize just how much content they are missing from that point. Like you said before, though, you can technically trivialize food with as little as a bunch of berry bushes and some meat. Once you've managed dealing with night, hounds, freezing, overheating, and food, then you can basically survive indefinitely.

[Mike23Ua]

4 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

I agree, that's pretty much exactly what I said in my original post. 

Okay, let's try a different approach. Do you think food as a resource is too trivial due to hoarding? Yes or no. If so, what would be your ideas to address it?

I don’t think food has ever EVER been a problem, I mean even Wigfrid who only eats meat.. when Klei added a sailable ocean to DST they also made it so she can go to any edge of land and fish for ocean fish (even in winter when the ponds freeze over) so the entire game.. balances itself out.

1 Monster Meat + 3 Ice = Meatballs.

1 Frog Legs, or Small Morsel (from cooking a captured Rabbit or Bird in a Campfire) + 3 Ice = Bunny Stew.

Bunny Stew is actually a very very good noob friendly healing food…

Theres no denying that DST has been becoming more and more noob friendly, However… when I can turn on Lunar/Shadow Rifts in DAY ONE worlds it also gives me hope for a more advanced player experience.

Brightshades & Brightshades ALONE will spawn on Berry Bushes and troll the area preventing you from easily gathering berries and that really can be game changing when you don’t have the resources to easily dispose of your Lunar invaders.

Like I said in my previous post though, if there was ever to be a nerf to Bundling Wraps- Maybe you shouldn’t be able to stash 120 healing salves in 1 inventory slot?

[goatt]

1 hour ago, cybers2001 said:

Like you said before, though, you can technically trivialize food with as little as a bunch of berry bushes and some meat.

I forgot to add. The so called "trivialization" involves an initial construction cost, which is kinda high. What comes after that is maintenance cost, which is then low to trivia. So for those noobs, even though they have food trivialized after bushes, but their main playthrough was still constructing the berry farms, which is not a trivia thing at all (including setting up turky traps and fire prevention). Let's say they can't find anything else to do after that, then their game was quite fun so far, in general.

So technically, berries farm weren't really a trivia thing. I would say any substantial food farms requires large labor work (days of work, if not more) to set up. I can't think of one that doesn't.

In other words, if you new, you having fun planting berries. If you veteran, you know fun is just about to start.

[Antynomity]

A lot of things in this game deserve rebalancing, that includes hunger as a whole, by that I mean a lot of dishes need stat changes, how you cook them, some fillers changed with how they work.

I'd love if Ice wasn't the edible twiggs equivalent it currently is with a few unique dishes, it should be expanded into a lot of unique dishes that require ice and different ingredients meanwhile it wouldn't be so effective outside of cooking those dishes.

A lot of healing and sanity foods are just straight up unbalanced, the way I play the game currently, I have no actual reason to use 95% of the game's dishes either because they are useless or just completely overshadowed by newer dishes even if those dishes don't require that much set-up unless you need factory amounts of them.

DST's gameplay can be made more interesting and engaging by just changing stats of different items, which includes dishes due to how little variety is promoted currently in the player's in-game diet as of currently.

I'm not saying that the system is horrible, that there isn't variety, but please be honest with me, how many dishes do you use actively enough for them to really make a difference in how you play, what you set up, what you do, etc.?

And like I said before, don't change anything about the bundling wrap, it's been like this for years and there's no point in changing the wrap when all the other issues in Hunger as a mechanic there currently are, heck, I even think that when starving you should lose health a lot quicker, to actually be a danger to you if you do fail at upkeeping this pretty darn easy stat to upkeep.




Not advocating for tedium, that can go suck a dirty rotten potato.

[cybers2001]

I would love some sort of reward system for encouraging recipe diversity, either bonuses from varied dishes or unique mini-buffs to more dishes. (maybe a well-balanced diet can result in boosted stats?) Granted, juggling recipes is a painful part of playing Warly, but I think a lot of that is also attributed to how most dishes lose freshness so quickly.

Also, not to beat a dead horse, but some other way to store cooked foods can also help with this. Going back to bundling wrap, I'm not going fit a varied menu of dishes in a single bundle, and I'd still rather pull a stack of 10 pierogi than bundle/unbundle every time I want to take out a single dish.

[Copyafriend]

On 8/17/2023 at 2:49 PM, Mike23Ua said:

Like I said in my previous post though, if there was ever to be a nerf to Bundling Wraps- Maybe you shouldn’t be able to stash 120 healing salves in 1 inventory slot?

I mean, this feels oddly specific and kind of... well silly I guess.

if you are at the point where you have 120 healing salves, putting them all in one slot is convenience, nothing more. even 40 salves is plenty to casually kill any overworld boss outside of celestial champion (who could be beaten with 40, just not casually)

It feels like a non-issue because i mean... you HAVE all 120, it's just a matter of "how many trips does it take"

And the answer is probably 1 trip, because it's only 3 slots. you have what 11? 17 with a backpack?

I guess what i'm saying is that that just feels like an odd thing to harp on being able to carry a large amount of healing items, when you could always just do another trip, or just put them in chester, or have a backpack.

the bundling wrap feels like a logical conclusion of inventory expansion, you can bundle things up to carry multiple times more, but they're not readily available and need to be opened costing resources to be wrapped back up.

[Evelo]

On 8/15/2023 at 9:03 AM, cybers2001 said:

DS has its reasons (*cough* dlcs), but for DST, I would probably trace it back to one pivotal moment: The introduction of bundling wraps.

I haven't used Bundling Wraps in... 2 years? Yeah that sounds about right. So no, it isn't bundling wraps that made starvation inconsequential. It was inconsequential in regular DS when ROG came out. Starvation isn't actually the main threat because of how easy it is to amass food in general. Winter is the hardest because food doesnt grow, birchnuts aren't available, seeds don't come from birds but it was manageable if you tracked down Koalefants consistently leading to an over abundance of meat. On top of consuming Monster Meat which is readily available from spiders and sleeping to restore sanity and health, death by sanity was the largest risk compared to starvation.

This is assuming you never build spider farms, pig farms, or bunny farms (assuming they weren't nerfed in Don't Starve solo DLC not included idk been a while)

Starvation is a major threat because if you don't know how to gather food it puts you on a timer. It is a knowledge based threat. Don't have the knowledge you die. Once you have the knowledge you will never be hungry again. This goes in tandem with sanity and even health. It is not bundling wraps that I can guarantee you.

[cybers2001]

2 hours ago, Evelo said:

I haven't used Bundling Wraps in... 2 years? Yeah that sounds about right. So no, it isn't bundling wraps that made starvation inconsequential. It was inconsequential in regular DS when ROG came out. Starvation isn't actually the main threat because of how easy it is to amass food in general. Winter is the hardest because food doesnt grow, birchnuts aren't available, seeds don't come from birds but it was manageable if you tracked down Koalefants consistently leading to an over abundance of meat. On top of consuming Monster Meat which is readily available from spiders and sleeping to restore sanity and health, death by sanity was the largest risk compared to starvation.

This is assuming you never build spider farms, pig farms, or bunny farms (assuming they weren't nerfed in Don't Starve solo DLC not included idk been a while)

Starvation is a major threat because if you don't know how to gather food it puts you on a timer. It is a knowledge based threat. Don't have the knowledge you die. Once you have the knowledge you will never be hungry again. This goes in tandem with sanity and even health. It is not bundling wraps that I can guarantee you.

The difference is that you still have to make some sort of effort at maintaining a game loop around food, though. If ice boxes were your only means of storing meat, for example, you would not be able to leave your kitchen for a whole season without coming back to fridges full of rot.

Sometimes I’m farming silk, or goats, or Pigmen, and have stacks upon stacks of food. But sometimes I’m doing something completely non-food productive, like building a boardwalk across the map, or a base in the ruins. I’ve had projects where I spent 3-4 seasons before returning to my base and farms.

[Evelo]

23 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

The difference is that you still have to make some sort of effort at maintaining a game loop around food, though. If ice boxes were your only means of storing meat, for example, you would not be able to leave your kitchen for a whole season without coming back to fridges full of rot.

Sometimes I’m not farming silk, or goats, or Pigmen. Sometimes I’m doing something completely non-food productive, like building a boardwalk across the map, or a base in the ruins.

Ok? I don't see how that changes anything I stated. The ease of acquiring food is still extremely easy (assuming you know how), regardless on if you have the bundling wrap or not.

[cybers2001]

18 minutes ago, Evelo said:

Ok? I don't see how that changes anything I stated. The ease of acquiring food is still extremely easy (assuming you know how), regardless on if you have the bundling wrap or not.

My point is that most of the game is about “easy” tasks that can punish you for neglecting. You’ve never been to the ruins where you eat your last pierogi and have to decide between chancing it longer to mine a few more statues or cut the trip short and return to base?

Grass and twigs are easy. But you never find that night is about to come and you don’t have enough grass for a torch?

Deerclops is easy, but you never have him show up midway through a fight with Klaus, only for him to kill a deer and enrage Klaus?

[HeatAndRun]

After certain point the game literally becomes Don't let them unbundled Together. A QoL for spoilage is definitely needed. I once thought about the 1 slot time-freezing box too before, it's glad to see someone with a very similar idea to mine.