A Blind Run Through the New Content

[Ridley]

Looking for an excuse to play some DST, I decided to try out the new Beta while avoiding spoilers. The intent was to see how much I would discover on my own and maybe come up with some suggestions. This was done under the assumption that you shouldn't have to google anything about the game in order to eventually understand/solve problems. By the end, however, it kind of seems like you are expected to talk with the community or look at the wiki. This was also done under the assumption that rolling back a world because of a mistake/failure/bad rng is not the intention of the roll back system, so I didn't rollback no matter how excruciatingly it was to carry on.

With the brief disclaimer that I haven't played the most recent patch, here's my takeaways:

Greater Depth Worm:

Absolutely love the imagery of this guy. I knew he was a thing before starting the play-through but nothing more than that. I enjoyed how utterly painful it is to get wrapped up in his attacks, although I was always able to retreat once things went south. Learning how to fight him was something I was able to do on my own and it was fun to discover. I prefer dropping bits of trash and hitting his tail end because the head sometimes decides not to roar. I don't know why he doesn't always do a little roar after eating.

I later saw people talking about feeding him different stuff which probably explains the time I saw airborne manure. I love that there are more quirks to the worm than what I was able to discover. Apparently you can be swallowed whole, although there was several times he probably should have done so but I was only bitten. Surely you have to be standing still for that to happen...

Sadly, I have only seen the normal depth worms lately and I greatly miss the big guy.

 

Rabid Bunny King:

I am fully confused by this thing. My understanding is that there is a naughtiness for rabbit slayers that can summon this thing in addition to the current naughtiness for Krampus. Is this to discourage people from killing rabbits and bunnymen? I thought the punishment for hunting rabbits was the inefficiency and you can kill nearly a city of bunnymen with just one carrot without accruing naughtiness. Is the reward for killing the Rabid King the goal? I've only worked out that the cudgel hits kinda hard, drains sanity when hitting rabbits, and bunnymen avoid it even when it's on the ground. It seems so much less useful than one carrot.

The fight with the rabid king doesn't make any sense to me either. I am ganked by bunnymen who I can't escape from unlike every other creature in the game, so I assume it is fight or die since I can't hand him a peace treaty carrot. Am I supposed to have other players kill the king with me? That'd make sense seeing how I always just had other mobs do the dirty work I can't feasibly do, but even then I am stunned by how long it takes two tentacles to kill a motionless rabid king. It seems impossible for one player to fight the minions off, why is the little rabbit also tanky? It's also weird that it ignores other things completely unlike even the more player fixated raid bosses.

Now I know there is something going on with the fancier looking rabbit I can attempt to pick up, but when I did that it turned into a rabid king. I think I read you are supposed to give it a carrot, and then it becomes a benevolent king that gives you a new item for commanding bunnymen. Since the rabbit only shows up in cave earthquakes for me and is never there when I return with a carrot, I am not entertaining the idea anymore. As long as one carrot is enough to cause a bunnyman city to collapse, then I feel the rabbit king is just an oddly quiet nuisance.

Granted, I know I am ignorant of some details. My point is that after 450+ days I couldn't figure it out and I don't care to anymore.

 

Rictus:

I would have posted this thread yesterday but I spent a few hours trying to remember this thing's name. My memory was too off for search engines to help me, there is no scrapbook entry, and those hours were mostly spent looking in the places I'd seen him in vain. Both Rictus and the Ink Blot trio slowly got on my nerves for going multiple rifts without showing up once. I thought Rictus only spawned in my Red Mushroom Biome where I had seen him, then theorised he spawns near the spider caves and tried some different locations, but nah. No more dark tatters for me. 

Before every Rictus vanished from existence, I was really enjoying him. The Ink Blot trio was always reluctant this run to appear, so Rictus was my main sponsor of dark tatters. Cool design and love the painfulness of the multi-chomp too, although they feel like they are missing sounds for their chomp attack at least. Crawling Horror and Terrorbeak both make otherworldly sounds frequently but Rictus is mostly mute.

 

Lurking Horror:

Pretty sure these are the source of the underwater sounds I hear in the caves now and the sound design is awesome. Even though I mostly avoided the lurking horror since fighting it was more trouble than it was worth, I really like their addition. Their shark fins are cool but I thought their face looked too plain for a nightmare creature. Maybe it was just too dark and I am mistaken. 

 

Icker:

The caves feel more lively with these guys around every turn. I broke my new favorite weapon on these guys so I don't think I will ever waste time killing them again, but I still like them. Very rarely did I ever get stuck in them and that was only because I was being reckless and fast. They never caught me by falling on me even though it seemed like there were a few times they probably should have. 

 

Dark Maul:

This is my favorite thing by far. I love trying to grow this weapon, hunting down bosses I normally would pass up, and hearing the weapon talk. I actually didn't know the Shadow Reaper also did this and now I have a strong preference for the shadow alignment. I was surprised that the maul started getting very sentimental towards me. It makes me think that surely the shadows aren't the monsters we make them out to be, right?

However, I have some suggestions. The scrapbook entry should warn the leveling resets when the weapon breaks. I thought this was a bug because I didn't even notice it broke at one point. I was just being frugal with dark tatters since I could never count on finding them again. The scrapbook also says there are 4 levels, each requiring 3 giant kills to advance. I took this to mean it upgrades 4 times if I kill 12 bosses because it says "each". Technically, I think the scrapbook entry is correct because it says, "advance", but I'd still suggest some clearer wording.

Also, after having accidentally broken this thing around 5 times, I am a bit crushed. I understand that is the drawback to the weapon, but couldn't the maul give me a warning when it is close to death like it does for starvation? Either way, it needs to scream or something on death. If I break it before it reaches the first upgrade then I don't even know it wiped my boss kill count.

 

Beefalo GloomBell and the new Saddle:

So for a meme I tamed a Pudgy beefalo before learning about these two items. I wasn't particularly tempted to bring a pudgy beefalo into a prolonged combat for testing this, so I planned to instead see what happens when the beefalo falls into the ocean after being bonded to the new bell. I didn't get around to it for upcoming reasons...

 

Gloomerang:

A pretty fun weapon that chews through repair kits. I see it as a tool to make some things easier rather than a weapon to frequently fling. I could stand on a boat and throw gloomerangs at troublesome foes, but Dark Maul hungers. The visuals are neat to watch too.

 

And that is it! That was all my time with the new content. Loved a majority of the new stuff and excited to see where the game goes next.

Spoiler

Crab King:

Look, I didn't want to do this either. The run ended after I felt like I had fully explored the shadow side all that was left was the lunar side. Only problem was that I had to go through the reworked Crab King blind. I think I had about 10 failed attempts, each where I didn't rollback and had to recover from. As annoying as that was, it was how I was dying that pushed me to quit.

So I didn't know what any of the gems did except that Pearl's must still count for 3 of each gem. First attempt was with one of every gem plus the Pearl and a few extra purple to fill the gap. I think I died to the imposing claw after flailing around the whole fight but honestly first encounters will do that.

From there I took the Pearl out and did all purple gems to learn what their affect was. It seemed to increase the crab guards, who completely overwhelmed me.

Next strategy was to do all blue gems, which didn't seem to do anything? Whatever it was didn't seem so bad but I was scared to max out a power like that. Keep in mind that most of my losses at this point are me falling into the water because I either thought I had more time on the cracking ice than I did, or more frequently because I wanted to hit a crab that was about to board my boat and my character jumped on a ice floe a millisecond before it sank. I'm also fishing my inventory out of the ocean each time and having to fix myself back up at the base.

Closest I got to winning was a mix of blue and purple while using the new rift gear to power through the minions. As I was mixing blue and purple, I also mixed the pan flute in to sleep the crabs. It was strange how it seemed they wouldn't fall asleep consistently, but they were hitting me the whole time so I assumed it had something to do with that.

Having almost defeated it with blues and purples, I decided to go all out on a few attempts with the Pearl. I used one whole pan flute on that fight in two separate occasions while being slapped around. In other cases I kept falling into water always sooner than I expected. Beyond frustrated and no longer learning anything, I gave up and looked at what the gems did.

What in the world is this? I thought the sleep was just failing to go off or bugged. Firstly, I don't think anything else in the game resists the pan flute effect like this. More importantly, this 10 point jump is the difference between the pan flute works or just doesn't. I wouldn't think that the purple gems are having that affect because the gap is so large. 0-4 gems is the same each time but 5 is basically sleep immunity.

The blue gem affecting the breaking up of the ice floes suddenly make sense as to why I could never accurately time the breaking up. I thought if anything the gems made the ice colder and therefore harder to break through.

Honestly, if I had known the effects of the gems I know I would've worked out solution. So now I wonder, how am I supposed to know what these gems do? Trail and error gave me wrong conclusions and pushed me to quit. Am I supposed to check a community wiki or ask the forums? Am I supposed to have a lot more man power to steam roll the opposition?

I think the scrapbook or Pearl should give me the gem effect knowledge in some way. Maybe Crab King used to write about his discoveries or made some song/poem that Pearl recalls? Maybe the gems should radiate energy in from his crown whenever they're abilities are having some affect over the battle so I can associate them with what is happening? The crab guards having no reaction to the panflute looked like a bug to me. Maybe they should very briefly rub their eyes or something?

I feel new Crab King has more personality and a much cooler looking fight, but I don't believe anyone could reasonably discover what his gems are doing if they didn't already know. I see people say you just hold "f" now and he dies and that he is one of the easiest bosses now. I know a meta has formed around the Crab King too. I just couldn't figure it out how without youtube guides, wikis, forum spoilers, rollbacks, or console commands which is my point. There are other bosses who I assume are like this too, *cough* Fuelweaver *cough* it's Fuelweaver, but I've spoiled that fight for myself years ago.

So now there's a new patch and also a mimic I never encountered that might have nothing to do with the lunar stuff, but the point wasn't to see all the new stuff. It was to see how much I could find on my own. One highly anecdotal and ignorant run to see where either I or the game breaks down. 

 

I am interested in hearing/seeing what I missed out on or got wrong.

[lowercase skye]

2 hours ago, Ridley said:

This was done under the assumption that you shouldn't have to google anything about the game in order to eventually understand/solve problems. By the end, however, it kind of seems like you are expected to talk with the community or look at the wiki.

It's a multiplayer game, you learn about things by talking with other players. I found out a lot of info about this update just from talking with friends about it.

2 hours ago, Ridley said:

This was also done under the assumption that rolling back a world because of a mistake/failure/bad rng is not the intention of the roll back system, so I didn't rollback no matter how excruciatingly it was to carry on.

That is exactly the kind of thing rollbacks are for! That's why all players have to vote for if they'd like a roll back to go through, i.e if the loss that was just suffered was devastating enough that they'd rather just go back to before it happened instead of pick up the pieces. Genuinely curious, what else would it be for?

2 hours ago, Ridley said:

I am fully confused by this thing. My understanding is that there is a naughtiness for rabbit slayers that can summon this thing in addition to the current naughtiness for Krampus. Is this to discourage people from killing rabbits and bunnymen?

He's an intelligent rabbit, like Bunnymen: he hates meat. He only spawns as the rabid version if you're holding meat.

[grm9]

31 minutes ago, finn from human said:

He's an intelligent rabbit, like Bunnymen: he hates meat. He only spawns as the rabid version if you're holding meat

no, there's a counter of naughtiness gained from killing bunny men and rabbits and it'll spawn and try to attack you if it'll get filled

31 minutes ago, finn from human said:

Genuinely curious, what else would it be for?

griefing

[Ridley]

40 minutes ago, finn from human said:

It's a multiplayer game, you learn about things by talking with other players. I found out a lot of info about this update just from talking with friends about it.

Fair. There are community puzzles so it wouldn't be unusual for Klei. I just think it is weird how I don't solve problems in the game for myself. I just learn what the meta is.

41 minutes ago, finn from human said:

Genuinely curious, what else would it be for?

Pretty sure it was added for griefers. I would use it for bugs that broke the game or if I accidentally left the game running.

[Milordo]

On 9/6/2024 at 6:35 PM, Ridley said:

Looking for an excuse to play some DST, I decided to try out the new Beta while avoiding spoilers. The intent was to see how much I would discover on my own and maybe come up with some suggestions. This was done under the assumption that you shouldn't have to google anything about the game in order to eventually understand/solve problems. By the end, however, it kind of seems like you are expected to talk with the community or look at the wiki. This was also done under the assumption that rolling back a world because of a mistake/failure/bad rng is not the intention of the roll back system, so I didn't rollback no matter how excruciatingly it was to carry on.

You gained a new follower just for this. Playing dst blind as intended. What a magical beauty! And the rollback, plus the all "we should discuss with practise, not talking only on paper" thing? How marvellous! You gained my respect! 

On 9/6/2024 at 6:35 PM, Ridley said:

Rabid Bunny King:

I am fully confused by this thing. My understanding is that there is a naughtiness for rabbit slayers that can summon this thing in addition to the current naughtiness for Krampus. Is this to discourage people from killing rabbits and bunnymen? I thought the punishment for hunting rabbits was the inefficiency and you can kill nearly a city of bunnymen with just one carrot without accruing naughtiness. Is the reward for killing the Rabid King the goal?

On 9/6/2024 at 9:57 PM, grm9 said:

no, there's a counter of naughtiness gained from killing bunny men and rabbits and it'll spawn and try to attack you if it'll get filled

WHAT

I didn't even knew, nor saw this during test!!! This is horrible!!!! Why did they implemented this system??? It now even makes my idea about the rabbit king more sense!

On 9/6/2024 at 9:29 PM, finn from human said:

It's a multiplayer game, you learn about things by talking with other players. I found out a lot of info about this update just from talking with friends about it.

That is exactly the kind of thing rollbacks are for! That's why all players have to vote for if they'd like a roll back to go through, i.e if the loss that was just suffered was devastating enough that they'd rather just go back to before it happened instead of pick up the pieces. Genuinely curious, what else would it be for?

This is not true 100% and it's kinda a wrong approach to Don't Starve as a whole. 

On 9/6/2024 at 9:57 PM, grm9 said:

griefing

Thanks for saying this!