Moon rock idol should cost an iridescent gem instead of a purple gem

[Cruvimaster]

1 hour ago, Auth said:

You can craft purple gems with a red gem + blue gem as any character at a prestihatitator. These can be mass farmed via hounds (even without varg farms), earthquakes, stalagmites, winter's feast trees...

I'm in a world of 2k days and with each hound attack I get a maximum of 2 gems from each season (fire attacks x ice attacks). Often 1 or 0 gems. Never 3. Is this what you say is "mass farmed via hounds"?

Late game we all know that it is easier to get gems (iridescent gem will never be a problem for late game too), but we are talking about the first year or at most 2 years of the game.

[Catuna_]

7 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

Purple gems are everywhere and lead to people exploiting a mechanic that should only be used for players who really want to play as another character.

Iridescent gems however, are harder to get, but not impossible if somebody truly wants to change their character. 

It also makes sense lore-wise because iridescent gems are tied to the moon, just like the celestial portal, while purple gems are more related to shadows.

We’d get far less complaints about the celestial portal + another use for iridescent gems + it makes more sense lore-wise. Thoughts?

Let people have fun man, if they want to have fun from maximizing swapping they should be allowed to. I don't understand the idea of restricting the way people play to your liking.

[Cruvimaster]

In any case, players who started at the beginning of the game say that to replace characters they only had to use the tent.

Then Klei changed to the current system.

Those playing on PC can just use the "c_despawn" command.

And I highly doubt that Klei will modify the portal to make it more difficult.

Edited March 18 by Cruvimaster

[EatenCheetos]

26 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

Let people have fun man, if they want to have fun from maximizing swapping they should be allowed to. I don't understand the idea of restricting the way people play to your liking.

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics, simple as that. Same goes for other things like pathing abuse, selective area loading (having a summer base in the caves so your main area isn't loaded, despawning frogs during frog rain by running far enough away, etc), and animation cancelling just to name some examples. Saying to just "let people have fun" is incredibly reductive.

To quote @Gashzer: "The biggest failure of our DST community has been normalizing cheating and exploits."

Edited March 18 by EatenCheetos

[Catuna_]

17 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics, simple as that. Same goes for other things like pathing abuse, selective area loading (having a summer base in the caves so your main area isn't loaded, despawning frogs during frog rain by running far enough away, etc), and animation cancelling just to name some examples. Saying to just "let people have fun" is incredibly reductive.

"A healthy meta"? This is a sandbox game, not a pvp game...
A sandbox game is about options, you can choose to control the game as you please. This is why things like path abuse and boss cheese still exists, players are rewarded for creativity. And no one is forced to abide by a "Meta" or an "Optimal way to play". You can and will achieve the same results, even if it takes a drastically different amount of time.
Just like how one could kill every boss with no cheese in a year, someone could prefer cheesing every boss with gunpowder. Same result.

Animation cancelling is not a bug and is intentional, and patching it would likely result in the game feeling a lot lot lot lot worse to control and play from my understanding. DST feels a lot better to control than DS because it's snappier and you can cancel actions. In removing a mechanic you literally do not have to use at all just so people play the same way you do, you just make the game worse.

That's literally all that happens when you think like this, the suggestions you make would make the game worse for everyone if they were implemented. What if I do not want to play as a character I picked anymore? What if I am a solo player or play with only another person and I want to make more out of the roster? Am I just screwed due to how expensive it is? Servers with more players get to have a lot more options than me, and that's unfair. And honestly, fun comes before balance here. I'd rather have broken mechanics that I can avoid than have a sluggish mess of a game that's "balanced". It's a sandbox game. Klei do try to eliminate what they deem too easy or too game-breaking but they are extremely lenient and don't limit player options.

It's literally just "Let people have fun".

Edited March 18 by Catuna_

[mykenception]

21 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics, simple as that. Same goes for other things like pathing abuse, selective area loading (having a summer base in the caves so your main area isn't loaded, despawning frogs during frog rain by running far enough away, etc), and animation cancelling just to name some examples. Saying to just "let people have fun" is incredibly reductive.

To quote @Gashzer: "The biggest failure of our DST community has been normalizing cheating and exploits."

man, why can't we have fun in a sandbox game. I really don't care about meta, just wanna play and have fun

[Faintly Macabre]

31 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics

33 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

selective area loading (having a summer base in the caves so your main area isn't loaded

Here, I'll make you a deal: you buy upgrades to all the potato PCs and consoles this game was designed to run on a decade ago, and you can have an incredibly impractical game that has its entire world loaded at all times.

[Maxil20]

44 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

To quote @Gashzer: "The biggest failure of our DST community has been normalizing cheating and exploits."

Utilizing glitches in DS/T has existed since reign of giants has come out, which was almost a decade ago. Glitches, both old and new, will not stop appearing, and will continue to be utilized through various means. You are never obligated to use glitches in ways that you might find negative to your experience.

[mykenception]

this has devolved into a meta standpoint

this isn't a competitive game, each player's world is his own and are free to mod and edit. Why we gotta have metas to abide by? I never notice speedruners or boss rushers actually rush for the portal just to get an upper hand on something 

[Auth]

2 hours ago, Cruvimaster said:

I'm in a world of 2k days and with each hound attack I get a maximum of 2 gems from each season (fire attacks x ice attacks). Often 1 or 0 gems. Never 3. Is this what you say is "mass farmed via hounds"?

Late game we all know that it is easier to get gems (iridescent gem will never be a problem for late game too), but we are talking about the first year or at most 2 years of the game.

There's also MacTusk and Hound Mounds. You can even have a friend haunt hounds into seasonal versions to get more gems if you're truly strapped for them. My point was that purple gems are far from limited and don't need nearly as crazy a proposal as farming dfly/fw being the only realistic ways to get more.

[cybers2001]

2 hours ago, Cruvimaster said:

In any case, players who started at the beginning of the game say that to replace characters they only had to use the tent.

Then Klei changed to the current system.

I'm pretty sure that was never true. However, if you had a world on wilderness mode, you could respawn as a different character when you die.

[JazzyGames]

Selective area loading op. I want my base to burn while I'm clearing ruins.

[arubaro]

7 minutes ago, JazzyGames said:

Selective area loading op. I want my base to burn while I'm clearing ruins.

Is the real challenge. Rebuilding the 3 chest, 2 crockpots and a science machine, which is what people who suggest this kind of destructive non sense, is the peak of the videogame industry 

[00petar00]

11 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics, simple as that.

As soon as you bring up a healthy meta as a requirement in a sandbox game you literally lose all your credibility. Meta exists in DST like in any other game but it doesn't need to be balanced like a PVP game and it is player's choice if they want to play in the most efficient ways possible or not.

9 hours ago, Auth said:

There's also MacTusk and Hound Mounds. You can even have a friend haunt hounds into seasonal versions to get more gems if you're truly strapped for them. My point was that purple gems are far from limited and don't need nearly as crazy a proposal as farming dfly/fw being the only realistic ways to get more.

No one is actually going to die and haunt hounds.. This is a very niche thing. If you are willing to do something like that, just go ahead and build varg farm. This also doesn't really change anything when it comes to the cost of moon rock idol, it shouldn't be expensive anyway.

18 minutes ago, JazzyGames said:

Selective area loading op. I want my base to burn while I'm clearing ruins.

You can never use logic with these types of people. Their logic goes as far as if something should burn when you are there, it should burn when you are not. The strain that would put on the pc to keep everything loaded at once doesn't matter to them, what they want is how the game should be and they don't care how it is achieved.

Even if it was possible without making the game require better hardware to run it still wouldn't make any logical sense as wildfires are a bad mechanic at the core, there are quite a few ways to deal with them now but only really one way for megabasers and its not something anyone would want to do, you'd need to cover whole biomes in ice crystaleyezers which I don't think anyone sees this as a perfect solution.

Lets ignore the difficulty in obtaining large amounts of ice crystaleyezers, it would still ruin the style you want the area to look like if you had this in the middle (like lightning rod currently does) and it also freezes the player.

Edited March 18 by 00petar00

[finn from human]

9 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

You can never use logic with these types of people. Their logic goes as far as if something should burn when you are there, it should burn when you are not. The strain that would put on the pc to keep everything loaded at once doesn't matter to them, what they want is how the game should be and they don't care how it is achieved.

To preface, I don't like the idea of wildfires applying everywhere, but I also think an argument of "this would not be technically possible because performance issues" is rarely every going to be a good rebuttal to anything, because there's an infinite number of ways that something could be achieved on a code level, and such a rebuttal relies on the idea that there only exists one highly specific way. If for some reason Klei wanted wildfires to apply everywhere, that doesn't mean they would have to entirely remove the loading/unloading system and have everything loaded simultaneously, that's just silly, they would find another way to make it work! For example, since things do still exist while unloaded, in a very simple low-power state, every day the game could simply pick some number like 3-6 entities randomly across the world and instantly make them burnt, since they're unloaded it would be an instant process and about as complex as flipping a switch. It wouldn't cause any more performance issues than it does for the game to know that volt goats are spawning or bee boxes are refilling off screen.

The problem with wildfires applying everywhere is that it would be a bad and unfun mechanic, not that it would be impossible for Klei to implement. It makes more sense to tackle it from the former standpoint, rather than also going for an own of "and logically it would be impossible."

[00petar00]

27 minutes ago, finn from human said:

To preface, I don't like the idea of wildfires applying everywhere, but I also think an argument of "this would not be technically possible because performance issues" is rarely every going to be a good rebuttal to anything, because there's an infinite number of ways that something could be achieved on a code level, and such a rebuttal relies on the idea that there only exists one highly specific way. If for some reason Klei wanted wildfires to apply everywhere, that doesn't mean they would have to entirely remove the loading/unloading system and have everything loaded simultaneously, that's just silly, they would find another way to make it work! For example, since things do still exist while unloaded, in a very simple low-power state, every day the game could simply pick some number like 3-6 entities randomly across the world and instantly make them burnt, since they're unloaded it would be an instant process and about as complex as flipping a switch. It wouldn't cause any more performance issues than it does for the game to know that volt goats are spawning or bee boxes are refilling off screen.

Its not nearly as simple as you make it out to be, everything that protects structures and plants would need to be tracked and range needs to be figured out.

Bee boxes are so simple when not loaded and this can't be compared or used as an example to the undertaking it would require to make wildfires work unloaded which is a flawed mechanic to begin with.

27 minutes ago, finn from human said:

The problem with wildfires applying everywhere is that it would be a bad and unfun mechanic, not that it would be impossible for Klei to implement. It makes more sense to tackle it from the former standpoint, rather than also going for an own of "and logically it would be impossible."

Almost everything is possible, I should've worded it differently.

The thing is that it takes time and effort that can be used elsewhere. There are priorities and the playerbase is very split on wildfires so it probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Edited March 18 by 00petar00

[Yuuko]

22 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

A healthy meta should not have exploited mechanics, simple as that. Same goes for other things like pathing abuse, selective area loading (having a summer base in the caves so your main area isn't loaded, despawning frogs during frog rain by running far enough away, etc), and animation cancelling just to name some examples. Saying to just "let people have fun" is incredibly reductive.

To quote @Gashzer: "The biggest failure of our DST community has been normalizing cheating and exploits."

The term "meta" refers to things which are aware of themselves from without of their own fiction.

For instance - meta humor is when a joke told in-fiction relates to the fact that the subjects are in fiction and not real.

Meta gaming - whether table top rpgs, card games, or video games - refers to dismissing the theme and narrative of the game to break down the math and determine which actions are going to provide the greatest benefit.

For PvP the "meta" is typically used as a blanket term to describe what methods, tools, or techniques are simply more powerful / reliable / common.  This is important for pvp because players are playing to win, theme is always secondary.

But even in PvE games as much as we enjoy the theme of a game success is still the goal.  Humans are problem solvers by nature.  We love efficiency and optimization.  No matter what game we take, we are going to test limits, identify patterns, and isolate the best paths to completion.  This will always include meta information like the formulas for damage calculation, reliably exploitable glitches, etc.

You say "healthy" meta, but what is "healthy" ?  Is it when people aren't "exploiting mechanics" ?  What does that even mean?

I know that spears are weak, alchemy is not hard to reach, and a hambat is a significant step up - is it exploiting mechanics to skip over the spear and go straight for the hambat?  How about acquiring a SoT first autumn for the 51 damage threshold and ez repairing?  Lureplants have wildfire priority in their code, is using these to control wildfire "exploiting" the game?  What if I put a Lureplant (wildfire priority) on a boat (no eye plants spawn) under a tall tree (protected from wildfires) to protect a significant zone?  Is it "exploiting" only if I know exactly what this zone is?  Or am aware of the loading / unloading that occurs as I enter / leave the area?

What if I know hounds spawned by Varg prefer food over combat targets?  Is it "exploiting" if I drop meat for them as a distraction while fighting the Varg?  What if I drop the meat in one area and run the Varg away to another?  Varg won't spawn more hounds if they are all alive there, and if all of it's hounds are unloaded they won't return to it, is that "exploiting" ?

How about running hound waves through beefalo?  Or walking Deerclops through trees until you get tree guards?  Using Bearger's charge to level forests for logs?

What is "healthy" and what is "exploiting" ?

Edited March 18 by Yuuko

[EatenCheetos]

4 hours ago, Yuuko said:

The term "meta" refers to things which are aware of themselves from without of their own fiction.

For instance - meta humor is when a joke told in-fiction relates to the fact that the subjects are in fiction and not real.

Meta gaming - whether table top rpgs, card games, or video games - refers to dismissing the theme and narrative of the game to break down the math and determine which actions are going to provide the greatest benefit.

Meta is an acronym for “most effective tactic available”. When the most effective tactic available is abusing a mechanic like loading optimization (or in this case, fast repeated character changing to gain the upsides of multiple characters without the downsides), it’s not good for the game.

4 hours ago, Yuuko said:

I know that spears are weak, alchemy is not hard to reach, and a hambat is a significant step up - is it exploiting mechanics to skip over the spear and go straight for the hambat?  How about acquiring a SoT first autumn for the 51 damage threshold and ez repairing?  Lureplants have wildfire priority, is using these to control wildfire "exploiting" the game?  What if I put a Lureplant (wildfire priority) on a boat (no eye plants spawn) under a tall tree (protected from wildfires) to protect a significant zone?  Is it "exploiting" only if I know exactly what this zone is?  Or am aware of the loading / unloading that occurs as I enter / leave the area?

What if I know hounds spawned by Varg prefer food over combat targets?  Is it "exploiting" if I drop meat for them as a distraction while fighting the Varg?  What if I drop the meat in one area and run the Varg away to another?  Varg won't spawn more hounds if they are all alive there, and if all of it's hounds are unloaded they won't return to it, is that "exploiting" ?

How about running hound waves through beefalo?  Or walking Deerclops through trees until you get tree guards?  Using Bearger's charge to level forests for logs?

What is "healthy" and what is "exploiting" ?

Using a lureplant to extend a flingomatics range and that hound unloading thing are both examples of exploits, everything else you mentioned isn’t

Edited March 19 by EatenCheetos
Fixed embarrassing acronym mistake

[Uedo]

Did the OP just say they think the idols should cost an iridescent gem? How do all threads get like this XD

[chirsg]

3 minutes ago, Yuuko said:

The term "meta" refers to things which are aware of themselves from without of their own fiction.

For instance - meta humor is when a joke told in-fiction relates to the fact that the subjects are in fiction and not real.

Meta gaming - whether table top rpgs, card games, or video games - refers to dismissing the theme and narrative of the game to break down the math and determine which actions are going to provide the greatest benefit.

For PvP the "meta" is typically used as a blanket term to describe what methods, tools, or techniques are simply more powerful / reliable / common.  This is important for pvp because players are playing to win, theme is always secondary.

But even in PvE games as much as we enjoy the theme of a game success is still the goal.  Humans are problem solvers by nature.  We love efficiency and optimization.  No matter what game we take, we are going to test limits, identify patterns, and isolate the best paths to completion.  This will always include meta information like the formulas for damage calculation, reliably exploitable glitches, etc.

You say "healthy" meta, but what is "healthy" ?  Is it when people aren't "exploiting mechanics" ?  What does that even mean?

I know that spears are weak, alchemy is not hard to reach, and a hambat is a significant step up - is it exploiting mechanics to skip over the spear and go straight for the hambat?  How about acquiring a SoT first autumn for the 51 damage threshold and ez repairing?  Lureplants have wildfire priority in their code, is using these to control wildfire "exploiting" the game?  What if I put a Lureplant (wildfire priority) on a boat (no eye plants spawn) under a tall tree (protected from wildfires) to protect a significant zone?  Is it "exploiting" only if I know exactly what this zone is?  Or am aware of the loading / unloading that occurs as I enter / leave the area?

What if I know hounds spawned by Varg prefer food over combat targets?  Is it "exploiting" if I drop meat for them as a distraction while fighting the Varg?  What if I drop the meat in one area and run the Varg away to another?  Varg won't spawn more hounds if they are all alive there, and if all of it's hounds are unloaded they won't return to it, is that "exploiting" ?

How about running hound waves through beefalo?  Or walking Deerclops through trees until you get tree guards?  Using Bearger's charge to level forests for logs?

What is "healthy" and what is "exploiting" ?

PvE still has a meta, imo. But I can only speak for general productivity when it comes to games as a blanket. Like, MMO, there are "meta" characters that can get more exp or loot per hour, in skyrim, the safest method of play is stealth archer, thus being more productive than losing an hour because you failed to quicksave periodically and played because you mashed your head into the controller. 

 

Dst is in a weird and wonderful place in the meta. As long as hunger, health and sanity are topped off, you are winning. And almost every character is able to do this. This game almost seems to have an absence of a true meta in a sense, outside of speedrunning, and even then, speedrunning has different categories. And with speedrunning removed, you have different 'creams' for lack of a term that rises to the top. 

- Woodie is the best speedrunner who focuses on seeking landmarks

-Wolfgang remains the best boss killer speedrunner

-single player niche situations, maxwell is the best because of his day 1 dark sword.

And as for resource acquisition, 

-Wickerbottom

-Maxwell

-(Wendy)

And resource acquisition is perhaps the most important thing in worlds. We've reached a point where there world around you does what you need if you have enough game knowledge. Hell, if you chose to, you could even use the world around you and be functional as Wes.

It seems like a lot of the discontent behind character switching would be alleviated if every character had something truly unique to offer to the player and could stay in and take advantage of what the character has to offer, then we'd be in a good place.

Ever since the Wigfrid skill tree, she's set apart from Wolfgang and has a number of niches over him, rather than being effectively, "Wolfgang's little sister"
Wolfgang has utility where he functions better and Wigfrid has utility where she functions better.

 

With the whole discussion of meta, Really, it all comes down to general productivity. It's hard to speak in terms of what a character offers to a team, because even a full server of Wilsons can make small work of cooperative tasks. It all depends. 

I've said this 1.7523 quadrillion times, but for betas, klei absolutely should delegate at least one server per region to running the beta to monitor what is undertuned, overtuned and just right. 

Too many betas being undertaken by solo players which isn't a good way to seek out general tuning of a multiplayer game.

[Well-met]

100% agree. Character swap is a powerful ability, not a right.

Also indirectly would make wilson more useful

Edited March 19 by Well-met

[arubaro]

Is comical how people want to make inaccessible changing characters just because you can access a portion of the power as playing with multiple people 

Changing characters is op but is something shouldnt be hard nerfed, as common sense dictates, because is simply changing characters. Is like going to prison because you have hands and you can use them to steal or kill, not everybody that changes characters is to min max but to simply, you know, play another character.

Maybe people should suggest things to increase the difficulty when playing with more people since you dont need to update the portal, dont need to waste idols and the sinergy is wider than when you are limited to 1 character at once

Apparently people want the game to be as easy for them as always while nobody can take advantage or enjoy features that opens fun options like not being forced to play all the time with the same character

Edited March 19 by arubaro

[Faintly Macabre]

2 hours ago, Well-met said:

100% agree. Character swap is a powerful ability, not a right.

Except it kind of is? It's not like this implementation is an accident, or that something made this easier to access than expected. Klei decided this was what they wanted. If you guys want to dictate how other people play so bad, run your own servers and mod the item as you see fit.

2 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

Meta is an acronym for “most effective tactic possible”. When the most effective tactic possible is abusing a mechanic like loading optimization (or in this case, fast repeated character changing to gain the upsides of multiple characters without the downsides), it’s not good for the game.

Even if that were the origin or most common usage of the term meta (it's not, and you didn't even get the last word right), it'd still be debatable if you were correct here. In what sense is ducking into the caves the Most Effective Tactic Available? It hinders your ability to do any of the things that can only be done in the overworld, it isolates you from what is likely your main base of operations, and subjects you to a more intense version of most of the overworld's dangers. The only thing it is strictly speaking the Most Effective Tactic Available for is very specifically avoiding wildfires, and I would argue that if everybody decides that the best way to deal with a mechanic is to avoid it that maybe it's not very ****ing fun.

I use the word avoid, specifically, because when you go to the oasis or the caves, you are not abusing or exploiting anything. The fact that retreating to these places prevents your pretty base and world from burning to the ground is by design! These things are tools that Klei purposefully put in your toolbox for dealing with summer. A crazy person could get to thinking that maybe the devs recognize that this aspect of the game is just not going to be much fun to everybody! Which brings me to the next point:

1 hour ago, arubaro said:

people want to make inaccessible changing characters just because you can access a portion of the power as playing with multiple people

Ding ding ding ding ding! Give the lad/lass/person a prize! When you switch characters, you are not exploiting or abusing anything, because this feature is a deliberate design choice. And it's not the Most Effective Tactic Available either. What's the Most Effective Tactic Available? Playing with people. The most effective way of accessing another characters' unique abilities is to play with somebody who wants to play that character. But for a number of reasons, this is not always feasible and/or desirable. Maybe you only want to play in a small group that doesn't have enough room for all those characters, or your group just doesn't find playing a specific character very fun. Or, you know, you're playing the game alone, a thing that lots of people do, which is a fact that the developers are aware of.

I personally don't find switching characters to be fun. I mostly play alone, and I actually mostly like to play the character I'm playing and leverage its advantages and deal with its challenges, so my least favorite part of any playthrough is going through tons of prepping to go switch to Warly and do days and days of cooking all at once to gain the benefits of his damage boosting food, after which I switch back. Is it good that the game enables this? I dunno. Personally, I think most of the DST original bosses are unpleasantly bulky damage sponges and just don't have much fun fighting them for the length of time expected, and this is how I deal with that. But I know that that's like, lots of players' favorite part of the game. So maybe in aggregate it's fine the way it is? A similar argument can be made for summer wildfires: lots of people find summer incredibly annoying for this reason, but I actually like having a specific time of the year I'm encouraged to go down into the caves and do my cavey things (which, I would like to point out, is very clearly an intended result of the game's current design).

Gosh, if only there weren't all these people playing the game that aren't me.

Edited March 19 by Faintly Macabre

[Yuuko]

3 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

Meta is an acronym for “most effective tactic possible”. When the most effective tactic possible is abusing a mechanic like loading optimization (or in this case, fast repeated character changing to gain the upsides of multiple characters without the downsides), it’s not good for the game.

No, it isn't.  Meta comes from Greek, as many of our words do.  It's a prefix that has been in use in the English language for a long time to mean "going beyond" or "transcending."  Some common uses are metaphysics, which studies things beyond the physical realm, and meta-analysis, which combines the results of many different studies together to form a better "full picture" of all data available.

When attached to gaming, metagaming, it carries the same meaning.  Meta gaming is when you look into the systems, mechanics, and statistics to determine things rather than simply reading the thematic sections of the book and following your gut.  To a meta gamer it doesn't matter what the narrative says, because the rules are the real regulators of the game.

Gaming was dropped from metagaming, as the gaming part was a bit superfluous.  When you're talking about gaming you only need to say "meta" for people to know what you are talking about.

Whatever this "Most Effective Tactic Available" thing is, it is a post-hoc addition.  It probably helps people communicate the idea of what "meta" is, but it is not what "meta" means.  More likely it was some influencer's clickbait video tag line.

Anyway - all that aside - Meta is entirely about data.  Its all about uncovering the numbers, the facts, the actual mechanics of the game beyond what anyone "intends" and deciding what to do based on that.  Metagaming is inherent in humans.  We are pattern recognizing, problem solving creatures who don't even need access to the code to figure many of these things out.  Further - meta gaming is essential to DST.  Just imagine if you re-started every game and weren't able to know all of the things you know, what a different experience DST would be lol.

3 hours ago, chirsg said:

PvE still has a meta, imo. But I can only speak for general productivity when it comes to games as a blanket. Like, MMO, there are "meta" characters that can get more exp or loot per hour, in skyrim, the safest method of play is stealth archer, thus being more productive than losing an hour because you failed to quicksave periodically and played because you mashed your head into the controller. 

Absolutely!  You're correct with your post.  DST does have a meta layer.

The thing about DST is that it isn't so "hard" that you need to pick a certain character, or do a certain action, so there is a lot of freedom of choice without violating any meta advantages.

imo this is the advantage of DST being "easy."

I put easy and hard both in quotes b/c those terms themselves have a bit of nuance.  When something becomes "hard" in a pve game it doesn't always mean that its hard to execute in a player-skill sense, but rather that of the options available only a few can succeed.  Such as type damage on Pokemon - if you are going against the Rock gym you can't really bring electric / normal type mons and expect to win.  The gym is "hard" only in that it requires you know which types exist in the gym and how to counter it.  Once you have the counter types and proper levels the gym is actually easy to defeat as a matter of raw skill.

DST is an "easy" game in a sense that it ensures many play styles are viable.  You could survive successfully without ever using a single crafting station, because all it takes to survive - as you clearly pointed out - is to keep your health, hunger, and sanity up.  If you look at the meta methods for food production you can find some very efficient, high production farms.  That's great BUT the threshold of food required per player is not very high so we can freely engage in this activity if we wish or ignore it and just take what food comes our way.

That's just it though, sometimes we ask questions.  What is the best farm layout?  Which crops provide the most value?  How best to protect a base from burning in summer?  How to find Atrium fastest?  etc  In these subjects we will definitely see the meta of DST come out.

imo Klei has done a pretty good job of giving us a game that allows us to explore, exploit, and maximize in an enjoyable way while also not requiring it.

Edited March 19 by Yuuko

[Siren11]

The main problem with this is that it would probably hurt people who actually want to change characters the most. Newer players in particular already have a hard time scraping together enough moon rocks and purple gems to swap. I’ve hosted worlds where my friends couldn’t swap so we just had to start over (and lose some cool worlds), and a more difficult crafting recipe just means we would’ve needed even more experience before we finally pulled it off. Not to mention how much time it can take to get an iridescent gem, regardless of skill level.

Anyone who’s looking for an exploit is going to find one, and it’s not like you can’t ask a friend to quickly join your world as Warly or Winona or whoever. And if that really isn’t an option for you, I don’t think it’s wrong to want access to some of the multiplayer perks.

There’s also just… nothing wrong with metagaming imo. I don’t typically swap characters or use a ton of exploits bc I don’t like it, but I don’t even care that much what other people do on my worlds (much less what people are doing on private worlds I’ll never see).