Winter, regrowth and food overabundance affecting gameplay health

[grm9]

4 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

It better conveyed the feeling of despair. There were less sources of food than there are in dst. Sure, if you knew what you were doing then you most likely had stockpiles of meat and jerky laying around before the snow even fell. But during winter in singleplayer you can only rely on meat you hunt. As opposed to dst where you can have mushroom planters growing in the caves, banana and stone fruit bushes growing through the cold for whatever reason, farm plots bursting with giant potatoes, pumpkins and carrots, kelp on the side of your base. And all of that on top of your pigmen farm.

Also, in singleplayer you can't just spawn Deerclops in to kill him and not worry about him for the rest of the season

all of those are suboptimal so idk what's the point of nerfing them

[arubaro]

6 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

It better conveyed the feeling of despair. There were less sources of food than there are in dst. Sure, if you knew what you were doing then you most likely had stockpiles of meat and jerky laying around before the snow even fell. But during winter in singleplayer you can only rely on meat you hunt. As opposed to dst where you can have mushroom planters growing in the caves, banana and stone fruit bushes growing through the cold for whatever reason, farm plots bursting with giant potatoes, pumpkins and carrots, kelp on the side of your base. And all of that on top of your pigmen farm.

Also, in singleplayer you can't just spawn Deerclops in to kill him and not worry about him for the rest of the season

I think that you are complaining without a good reason

Dst world gen generates way more resources because is balanced for multiple people (something people thst complains about doing stuff solo never takes into account). You can reduce the ammount of starting resources

We have a wider variety of resources because, obviously,  the game got a lot more content during these years. What do you want? Is as simple as not playing a work in progress game if you dont want new content

About deerclops. I dont like the item that much but im DS deerclops is way less dangerous and, as someone who plays in a megabase im grateful of being able to spawn it when winter start so i dont have to deal with him destroying non survival related structures. The only people who has the time and resources to summon them are the people who wont struggle to beat him so i dont see the problem, noobs wont be able to control their spawn and will struggle... also small bases are way easier to defend from destructive stuff so i dont understand your point unless you still struggle to beat deerclops

 

So the complain is basically "dst has content and deerclops is a hard challenge that shouldn't be controlled"

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Szczuku said:

It better conveyed the feeling of despair.

it was just an empty game with practically nothing in it

[Szczuku]

3 hours ago, finn from human said:

it was just an empty game with practically nothing in it

And yet somehow it gathered enough traction to fund 2 dlcs and a multiplayer 

[Primalflower]

30 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

And yet somehow it gathered enough traction to fund 2 dlcs and a multiplayer 

not because of its boring ahh winter thats for sure

[lowercase skye]

41 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

And yet somehow it gathered enough traction to fund 2 dlcs and a multiplayer 

Which is good because the game was empty and had practically nothing in it

[Primalflower]

like, in all seriousness, you could say the exact same thing in combatance with vanilla DS. it received 3 DLCS (RoG, SW, Ham) and an iterative separate multiplayer version that still receives a substantial updates on a basis honest to god comparable to fortnite; they are to this day spending their time filling the void that initially was vanilla DS and they still haven't met a roof because of how empty the initial product really was.

People forget just how crazy RoG was, It added like, half of the games content. Winter is kind of nothing in comparison to anything we've got.

[Mike23Ua]

5 hours ago, arubaro said:

I think that you are complaining without a good reason

Dst world gen generates way more resources because is balanced for multiple people (something people thst complains about doing stuff solo never takes into account)

It’s far too late to even suggest changes like that, because MOST of the resources in DST can now either be gotten from them respawning over time when they used to be able to be destroyed forever, OR Klei added new ways to obtain those same resources such as for example- Swamp reeds, you can now get the very same thing from just standing on a Monkey Island as a portal spits out Cattail bushes for you.

The only way I see Klei ever balancing that out again is if they created some sort of actual structured challenge mode where they take extra caution to intentionally limit the players resources of a world (Adventures Mode from Solo DS)

Unfortunately for myself & im sure at least a few other people, the Dont Starve franchise has become less “Adventure” and More “Sandbox” or “Raid Boss” Simulator.

Klei would need to very cleverly limit our resources again to get the adventure back, set us up like rats in a lab maze like how Solo Adventures mode was structured and that would extend beyond just the OPs complaint of food being overly abundant into other resources.

It CAN be done, it would just take a long time and might cost too many developer resources and may not even end up being worth it in the end.

But as an Adventures Mode enjoyer myself, I would deeply appreciate if they took the idea at least into consideration. <3

[Primalflower]

mike i want to play adventure mode DST mod with you please i will buy you a pc

I love adventure mode as much as you do

@Mike23Ua mike it will be expenseless for you

[arubaro]

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

It’s far too late to even suggest changes like that,

You can reduce the ammount of resources in the world gen settings, change how fast stuff regrows or even remove them for a closer experience to ds but what makes this game easier is the experience so, even in ds, the people complaining about a nostalgic winter will find that they simply have a distortion in their memories about ds because you have plenty of food, nobody with few experience dies of hunger 

[paodocevoante1]

4 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

 

Unfortunately for myself & im sure at least a few other people, the Dont Starve franchise has become less “Adventure” and More “Sandbox” or “Raid Boss” Simulator.

 

But in your opinion, is DST too far from the adventure genre?
I played very few DS hours and many DST hours but I realized that the base is very similar, DST ends up having more mechanics but in the end you don't do the same things in both games? Tell me what you think

[Mike23Ua]

46 minutes ago, paodocevoante1 said:

But in your opinion, is DST too far from the adventure genre?
I played very few DS hours and many DST hours but I realized that the base is very similar, DST ends up having more mechanics but in the end you don't do the same things in both games? Tell me what you think

It’s honestly a bit of mixed bag. Like okay for example on solo don’t starve- At least when it came specifically to Adventures Mode, the game was structured in a more sophisticated way than a lot of what we see in DST.

Like there would be bridges of narrow land that were bottlenecked off and filled with a certain type of mob or hazard the player would need to over-come such as well uhh This:

you had absolutely no choice but to struggle to get your way past these pigs, or else you weren’t getting to whatever important things that were on the other side of this enemy stronghold such as finding all the lost parts to the Teleportato or getting back to an area that had food resources, when the one your in is void of them.

This goes hand in hand with the ops original topic, DST gives the player in my opinion too much freedom, it’s more of a Sandbox then it is something you’ll need to cleverly overcome or endure.

With solo to by pass areas of infested spiders or Tallbird dens you needed to pay attention to the Time of Day and pass through the area when these mobs were least active.

Yes, something similar to this exists in DST but only in the cave biome ruins where the player would be going to fight an end game boss, rather than being obstacles between day to day world exploration.

The Moon Quay pirates on the Moon Quay Island of DST will rob the player blind of their entire inventory but if you go to the island at night when they’re all sleeping you can pillage and leave.

This shares similarities to solo DS and needing to go through a spider infested narrow maze but going through during day time when the spiders are less active and sleeping.

The problem with DSTs presentation of this gameplay mechanic is that it’s tucked away on an obscure island in the middle of the ocean and you don’t need to go there but only once.

Unlike the above shown pig stronghold, which would require you to armor up and endure your way past every time you wanted to get on the opposite side of where you’re at.

The OP says that over abundance of Food is the problem, and maybe it is… (a little) but that isn’t the only thing making DST less challenging. 

DST has for example the same “Pigmen Torch Protectors” that Solo Don’t Starve had, but in most cases you can walk or sail around them and ignore needing to go anywhere NEAR them.

I have throughly tried to express these differences but I’m exhausted because I genuinely feel like DST is too far removed from its single player counter part.

Other things that could significantly help improve the difficulty of DST outside of making food less abundant, would be to remove the time of day hud, add hostile mobs that spawn at dusk/night, and add areas/climates of the game that require the player to wear specific heat or cold resistant gear or carry foods that protect against weather- Rather than having the weather tied to a highly predictable routine year round in game schedule.

AFTER the 20 days of winter for example… I ditch my Beefalo fur hat/ Bearger hibernation vest in a storage chest and then don’t bother pulling it back out again for 60 game days.

I beg everyone who discredits Lego Fortnite, to please just actually go play it… it is a sandbox game, but it also has the above mentioned survival elements as well.

And I’m sorry OP I just don’t think over abundance in food supplies is going to make much difference, a lot of other stuff (like I mentioned above) would need to be changed to for it to make much of an impact.

I mentioned once somewhere sometime back ago that maybe the games farm crop plants could have preferred biomes/climates they need to be grown in, that’s a good idea that ties to the Ops concerns of food being overly abundant.. but that alone- won’t be enough.

[Frosty_Mentos]

Back in the ol'days it was a lot more risk and twists and turns to go around in the caves to find ruins, for which can become one of biggest food providers for all seasons for the bananas and such giving us everything we want. But now caves are semi predictable (semi cause sometimes ruins spawn in cave exit areas or somewhere random, messed up by generation)  and food can be easily gathered too there now.

That time passed and I've now kinda realized this complaint of mine is kinda empty when there's food sources everywhere and anywhere that can be found in DST for how it's built, in singleplayer bunny hutches would give everything from veggies to meat without much effort in high amounts. Can still do what we can do in multiplayer, but maybe the risk of environmental damage were higher back then than now.

I've concluded as this is more of a niche and pointless take now that food is too common.

BUT I still want some environmental risks for overexploitation, cases of overpopulation of some growths and ways to help nature recover if damaged. I think that would be a good start to work with the regrowth mechanics.

[somethin]

1 hour ago, Frosty_Mentos said:

Some growths and ways to help nature recover if damaged. I think that would be a good start to work with the regrowth mechanics.

They really need to figure out the regrowth rate fr. Twiggy trees are EVRYWHERE even when I set them to very slow and lag my games with the amount of twigs on the ground.

[goblinball]

I never understood the hype for stone fruit and bananas tbh

yeah don’t get me wrong they’re really good food sources but they require so much investment to get 

I simply have too much other stuff I want to do during the first autumn I just don’t have enough time and/or resources to go sailing to the lunar or monkey island 

 

[grm9]

4 minutes ago, goblinball said:

I never understood the hype for stone fruit and bananas tbh

people often ignore initial time investment, e.g. drying racks and crock pots also, or maybe they're talking about mega basing but in that case they would probably want to do whatever they want to do instead of spending time on getting food

6 minutes ago, goblinball said:

I simply have too much other stuff I want to do during the first autumn I just don’t have enough time and/or resources to go sailing to the lunar or monkey island 

the problem isn't getting to lunar but digging everything up there, planting all of them, periodically fertilizing them and breaking the fruits

[RozeMeteor]

9 hours ago, grm9 said:

people often ignore initial time investment, e.g. drying racks and crock pots also, or maybe they're talking about mega basing but in that case they would probably want to do whatever they want to do instead of spending time on getting food

the problem isn't getting to lunar but digging everything up there, planting all of them, periodically fertilizing them and breaking the fruits

pick one stack of flowers at the start of the run let them rot, when gathering wood get some birchnuts and cook them to sustain you a bit, it's reliable enought to go lunar get kelps, fruits, starfishes and even stack the initial amount of fruits collected if you need to

[grm9]

4 hours ago, RozeMeteor said:

pick one stack of flowers at the start of the run let them rot, when gathering wood get some birchnuts and cook them to sustain you a bit, it's reliable enought to go lunar get kelps, fruits, starfishes and even stack the initial amount of fruits collected if you need to

why do that if you can just use byproduct food from killing stuff during early game and spiders after you run out 

[lowercase skye]

3 minutes ago, grm9 said:

why do that if you can just use byproduct food from killing stuff during early game and spiders after you run out 

Sustainability. Getting something like stone fruit or barnacles early sustains you with low-effort food for the rest of the game, compared to having to constantly scavenge for more from spiders and such if you've got no proper food source.

[grm9]

9 minutes ago, finn from human said:

Sustainability. Getting something like stone fruit or barnacles early sustains you with low-effort food for the rest of the game, compared to having to constantly scavenge for more from spiders and such if you've got no proper food source

the initial time investment is only worth it if you're going to play long term e.g. for more than 1 in game year, you also still keep getting stuff like berries on the way passively from going to different places when doing stuff

[Wonz]

Quote

1. Is gathering food too easy now? It's not even up to questioning.

It is too easy objectively. Shockingly there are people who don't know it.

[grm9]

29 minutes ago, Wonz said:

It is too easy objectively. Shockingly there are people who don't know it

difficulty is subjective and it might be best for it to remain not hard because most people seem to think that hard means time consuming and i wouldn't want to be forced into spending time on getting food instead of doing what i want to do and since you need to necessarily get food and it isn't optional unlike bosses or something, these changes'll affect everyone including newbies that might already have issues because people had issues back in DS and early game food sources haven't changed much except gardening that's suboptimal in comparison to what already existed in DS and character specific stuff like killing spiders quickly by using abigail without learning how to walk away from an enemy

[RozeMeteor]

10 hours ago, grm9 said:

the initial time investment is only worth it if you're going to play long term e.g. for more than 1 in game year, you also still keep getting stuff like berries on the way passively from going to different places when doing stuff

Same aplies to stone fruits, you can stack+use crockpot with mushrooms on the way or kelp, and you can map the whole world and get resources while doing so inittialy but that is relative to play style, i normally prototype stuff for base early and get wood for chests them go lunar... after that you are free of worry of running out of food 

[grm9]

Just now, RozeMeteor said:

Same aplies to stone fruits, you can stack+use crockpot with mushrooms on the way or kelp, and you can map the whole world and get resources while doing so inittialy but that is relative to play style, i normally prototype stuff for base early and get wood for chests them go lunar... after that you are free of worry of running out of food

the point was that both of those are suboptimal unless you're megabasing because it's optimal to not make a base except an alchemy and maybe a furnace

[goblinball]

6 hours ago, Wonz said:

It is too easy objectively.

This has to be a joke, right???

you do realize how difficulty is entirely subjective and how silly this sounds right???

you do realize there are still countless players who still struggle with hunger today, right??

yes, if you know how to rush to quickly and get the most efficient food sources then getting enough food, even in winter, will be easy. But 90% of the player base doesn’t know this or simply isn’t skilled enough to do it. Growing crops optimally requires lots of knowledge and is a massive time investment. Going to the lunar island to get stone fruit bushes is difficult and is also a massive time investment, same thing with bananas.

the average forumite who’s put a thousand hours in dst and thinks they’re an unkillable god who can nohit every boss and do everything at max efficiently (they can’t) will tell you that literally ANYTHING in dst is easy.