A few suggestions for the Embalming Spritz and Elastispacer

[Nettalie]

Keep in mind that this first part of the post was written before the beta had started. Some of these suggestions, in particular the first one regarding the Elastispacer, aren't to be regarded as ones that are set in stone and can't change. For the more "up to date" suggestions regarding the Elastispacer and a few additional suggestions regarding the Spritz, see the edit below.

A lot of the new features shown off during yesterday's Rhymes With Play stream are features that I, and a few others, have been wanting for quite a long time, sometimes even years. So naturally I'm actually quite looking forward to see them within the game.

However, with that early look at said features do come a few things that I think are really important to point out early on as to ensure that these new additions are not just the best possible iteration they could be, but also to "stand the test of time" as people play around with them more.

Embalming Spritz (Plant Wax Spray)

Spoiler

The item itself is exactly what a lot of people wanted, freezing plant states indefinitely is in my opinion something that was... sorta overdue in all honesty but that's neither here nor there, what matters is that it will exist. And with 50 uses per spritz the "durability" is pretty dang good too.

There's really only three potential issues I'm seeing with what was shown during the stream.

1. You need to treat every single plant you want to freeze individually. For light vegetation that is perfectly fine, but if you're using grass, twigs, trees, bushes, and whatever other potential plants (or in the case of mushrooms """plants""") those numbers will absolutely add up, and would make the process kind of tedious. Though to be clear, I personally do not see too much of an issue in regards to the number of uses the item has, this is just a matter of how convenient the item is to use.
   Thus, I propose one of two things. Either let the spritz apply to several plants in an aoe (think like the shadow reaper's "cone" area for harvesting, but bigger) or alternatively let mosquito sacks be filled with spritz to throw at several plants. This would make the process of applying the spritz a lot smoother in the long run and would round the item itself out pretty much perfectly in my eyes.
2. It wasn't shown whether or not you could un-spritz plants, so this very well could already be a thing. But on the off-chance it might not, I think it is important to have some sort of way of removing the scared stiff status. 
   Reasoning being that players might spritz plants at some point, only to later come to regret that decision, or maybe they want to make it functional again at a later point for one reason or another. There would only be one thing to keep in mind and that is in order to not accidentally create plants that the player can choose to harvest at any time, you would need to add some sort of secondary cost or condition for the removal. For instance make the plant wither similar to how it would if it has not been fertilized or how plants wither during summer heat, meaning you need to fertilize the plant again in order to get the benefits of it. Or something along the lines of the plant reverting to its dug form, or seed.
3. Currently, there doesn't seem to be any feedback for a plant being frozen. So if you were to for instance scare an entire plantation of plants stiff, you would no idea which of the plants are treated, and which are still normal at a glance without hovering over each and every one with your cursor. Not to mention that this issue would be even worse for controller users, as they would have to painstakingly walk around their plants to check, as an entity's name only appears if you're close to it. However, adding a particle effect for the treated plants would in my eyes defeat the purpose of making them dedicated decor in the first place, as you would then alter how they look.
   So, my idea is to give players a visual hint for scared stiff plants if they are wearing the premier gardeneer hat. Not only would this let us check at a glance which of our plants are actual plants and which ones are decorative without needing to read, even on controller, it would also provide a bit more utility to the premier gardeneer hat, which I feel is an item that sadly doesn't see much use simply due to the circumstances surrounding it (experienced players won't need its visual guidance, and for new players the item is simply too cumbersome to get to be of any help). 

Elastispacer (Infinite Chest upgrade)

Spoiler

Mass storage like this, just like the item before, is honestly a huge thing for long-term worlds to finally see be added, but even here I see a few concerns with the iteration that has been shown on stream. 

The main issue I see with the way the upgrade itself works is that at the end of the day, you'll still just have a chest. With the exception of the stacksize limit of items within, it will work exactly like a chest, down to the different ways in which it can drop its contents. If your upgraded chest ever breaks with a ton of items inside, gets burned or god forbid gets hammered once, every single one of the infinitely stacked items will spill out. Best case scenario, it got hammered on accident and you'll be spending the next ingame day tediously picking up items to put back into the chest. Worst case scenario, the chest got broken and you need to rebuild it, meaning you have to move ALL the items that got dropped somewhere else, only to then replace the chest and right after moving all the items AGAIN back INTO the chest. Buildings being destroyed is one thing, but the impact that this particular one will have is in my eyes disproportionately humungous. Not just in terms of the potential tedium, potentially hundreds if not thousands of item stacks appearing out of nowhere is very likely to have a big performance impact, best case a lagspike, and worst case someone's world becoming about as responsive as a powerpoint presentation, with the best approach on the player's side being a rollback.

But that's not all, another aspect that has me feeling a bit iffy about the upgrade is how it seemingly will only apply to regular chests (to my knowledge, if i'm wrong please do correct me, i'll edit this part out). Scaled chests would be left in the dust, forever un-upgradable and thus people will be even less inclined to seek them out. 

Lastly, and this is 100% a subjective manner so I'm not going to speak for anyone except myself here, I just... think the upgraded chests do not look good visually at all. The art itself is fine and well made, and in a way I can somewhat appreciate its goofiness of Giraffe Chest™, but compared to the likely 30+ other chests that will be within a storage area, it just looks off. In fact I feel it's so off, it could pass as a distorted mimic chest of some kind that fails to blend in properly. Even on its own, it just looks kinda "stupid" for lack of a better word. I really do not want to harp on this too much as like I said this is subjective, and a bunch of work has been put into it already, I just do not like it.

With all these things in mind, and I know this is not necessarily the most constructive suggestion, in my honest opinion I think I would have preferred if an entirely different approach would have been taken for a mass storage container of this sort. Something entirely new that can not accidentally or through some random creature be destroyed with massive ramifications, something that stands as its own "pillar" of storage so to speak alongside the existing storage options. Something that... looks different than what we are about to get. Whether that would have been a storage cellar, a large safe, a magical pocket dimension hole, anything that can not easily drop its contents, stands as its own separate thing and... looks different would work out better in my eyes. Making it a chest upgrade brings a lot of weirdness with it that would end up only holding it back in the long run in a lot of ways.

Like I said at the beginning, this is a really good and important addition to the game, and even if it is relatively small in the grand scheme of things, I would love to see this become the best iteration of the concept it possibly can be and in my very biased opinion it absolutely has room to grow.

 

Edit:
Now that both items are within beta, I want to bring a bit more attention to these concerns again, and offer a few additional suggestions, like the one I had posted as a reply later.

For the Embalming Spritz:

Spoiler

Like said in that one reply, another way of telling players which plants are scared stiff at a glance would be to highlight plants in some way, maybe a particle effect, if the player is holding the spritz. This idea is curtesy of a friend, and is meant to make the usage of the item a bit more clear, without requiring another relatively out of the way item.

This next bit is regarding the scared stiff plants that are diggable. Pretty simple, they currently do not get distinguished visually while in your inventory EXCEPT for the fact they are unstackable, which also makes it a bit more cumbersome to move them around.
I suggest adding an indicator to the inventory image to denote they are frozen, akin to how Warly spices show a little spice icon in the inventory, as well as letting players stack plants of the same type, that are also within the same state.
This way the player always knows which plants are actually functional, and which are just decor. One could say the spritzed plants are the "composters" among us
.And Bonus points if dug frozen plants have unique inventory images for their states, but that would be purely luxury at that point and isn't the most important. Would still be welcome though.

For the Elastispacer:

Spoiler

Since the chest upgrade ended up staying as the chosen approach, which to be honest shocks nobody since saying "do something else" barely counts for feedback, here's a two for one deal that still gets the general idea of what that initial suggestion was trying to do across (minus the thing about the visuals, but that was subjective in the first place and isn't the biggest deal in the world.)

1. An upgraded chest will only drop one set of each item at a time when hammered, or otherwise hit.
2. Upgraded chests are immune to total destruction until they are entirely empty.

These two changes would alleviate the concerns of one or two chests turning into performance bomb singularities just because someone misclicked with a hammer in their hand or forgets what "use gadget" means whilst holding a weather pain. Plus, speaking personally, it would be thematically fitting that a bottomless chest upgraded with the shard of an all powerful lunar being could withstand a few bumps with a hammer.

 

Edited March 9 by Nettalie
Beta released, post needed an update.

[Swiyss]

That spritz suggestions were amazing. Genius ideas.

[Nettalie]

On 3/2/2024 at 8:37 PM, Nettalie said:

Currently, there doesn't seem to be any feedback for a plant being frozen. So if you were to for instance scare an entire plantation of plants stiff, you would no idea which of the plants are treated, and which are still normal at a glance without hovering over each and every one with your cursor. Not to mention that this issue would be even worse for controller users, as they would have to painstakingly walk around their plants to check, as an entity's name only appears if you're close to it. However, adding a particle effect for the treated plants would in my eyes defeat the purpose of making them dedicated decor in the first place, as you would then alter how they look.
So, my idea is to give players a visual hint for scared stiff plants if they are wearing the premier gardeneer hat. Not only would this let us check at a glance which of our plants are actual plants and which ones are decorative without needing to read, even on controller, it would also provide a bit more utility to the premier gardeneer hat, which I feel is an item that sadly doesn't see much use simply due to the circumstances surrounding it (experienced players won't need its visual guidance, and for new players the item is simply too cumbersome to get to be of any help). 

Something I forgot to add initially, a friend of mine had the idea of sprayed plants having a visual indicator whilst the player is holding the bottle. So you'd just be able to tell pretty easily without the need for any extra equipment. 

Even though I quite like my own idea, this idea would also be a pretty good way to handle visual feedback for spritzed plants, so I wanted to add this as another suggestion for it.

[Nettalie]

I edited the post with a few more suggestions now that the beta has released.

[WhackE]

On 3/2/2024 at 12:37 PM, Nettalie said:

Like said in that one reply, another way of telling players which plants are scared stiff at a glance would be to highlight plants in some way, maybe a particle effect, if the player is holding the spritz. This idea is curtesy of a friend, and is meant to make the usage of the item a bit more clear, without requiring another relatively out of the way item.

That's cool but what if instead it was the Gardeneer Hat (Premier or both) let you see what plants were spritzed, since they go on your head and are all about plants. I just think this is fitting is all, I see what you mean with not needing another out of the way item though, so maybe instead of just having one item both can do it? 

again this is more of a "it makes more sense" type of thing, having a visual indicator on any item that you can easily equip/unequip so you can easily tell which things are sprayed or not would be good no matter what, so I agree.