Self-sustainable caves request

[shaurun]

I've finally decided to give a try to "caves only rifts open world". And probably Klei doesn't want to allow players doing that, but I think it could be a good option for expierenced players if there would be some changes.

These are the problems I encountered so far:

1. There's no built-in options to to start in caves, or to create a caves only world. I've searched for hacks (https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/132082-how-to-make-a-cave-only-server/), and was able to change the world creation menu so it would seem like it should create a caves only world / caves start world, but actually it doesn't work, you will still start in forest.

2. Quest bosses, such as CC and AF, both depend on forest/caves access. For CC (forest champion) you need to travel to archieves in caves, for AF (caves champion) you need to beat shadow pieceis in forest.

3. Characer specifics. E.g. I've started as Winona since with her Charlie skill tree I should be able to cross the abyss in caves. It's fine she has no access to Wagstaff items in caves, but she obviously should be able to utilize her Charlie related kit, right? Wrong! You don't have flowers in caves -> you don't have access to petals -> you can't craft rose goggles.

So I want the opinion from community. I personally would be very happy if caves and forest would be self-sustainable, and I would have an option to create a caves only server with access to AF boss fight, and with character crafts doable independently. I would also like actually to make all bioms self-sustaniable, so e.g. if you decide to live in rocky biome only, there would be some grass geckoes for grass, birds will bring you twigs, you can feed from tallbeards and some stones would glow to provide you enough light without trees, etc. Am I the only one who wants these kind of changes?

 

[Lovens]

I remember trying a caves only challenge with my friend and solo. We would spawn in, pause, use console commands to enter the nearest cave exit without picking anything up, and then load into the caves. There's really a lot of things that cannot be done or are hard to do in the caves without access to the surface world. Stuff like Wigfrid's songs is pretty much impossible to make unless you get lucky with feather hat or sleep dart boon. Wanda can't get backtrek watch unless you get lucky with lazy explorer from AG or turn Winter's feast on. Most of Wickerbottom's stuff also can't be crafted due to the lack of feathers underground. Farming crops is not possible entirely since there are no seeds and the only crop available (carrots) can't be cultivated at all because there's no birds to make their seeds either. 

Forget character specific stuff - even getting flint underground is a challenge since it doesn't spawn on the floor freely like on the surface. The first earthquake happens close to the end of day two, until then you are stuck without a pickaxe and axe which means you can't even progress to the science machine, not mentioning alchemy engine. Pig skins are really scarse - you only get two touchstones and maybe a few football helmets in the labyrinth. If those are gone/wasted, pig skins can go extinct underground entirely (FW and therefore ruins/labyrinth reset are not available due to the shadow pieces softlock either). 

And the biggest question we got in that playthrough was "what to do there in the caves, really?" Once you beat AG and NM Werepig, rushed the ruins and killed Toad (regular version, Misery is not even possible without the surface)  and made a sustainable food farm by placing pigs or bunnies near the lichen field, you are kind of done and bored pretty quickly. Seasons are not much of a challenge. Starcaller and thermal really take a good care of winter and spring. Umbrella and football helm (or even a raincoat) are a good counter for spring weather. No seasonal bosses, no frog rains, free rocks from Antlion in summer... I guess with the addition of the big worm boss it becomes somewhat harder but it still gets boring after you beat it as well. Caves lack content badly compared to the surface, and especially as a standalone challenge. 

[Well-met]

official caves-only support would be cool.

the game not relying on a shards system for solo players would also be cool.

[Bumber64]

1 hour ago, shaurun said:

You don't have flowers in caves -> you don't have access to petals -> you can't craft rose goggles.

Are there not roses near the postern? Been a while since I've checked. Not sure they'd be renewable, though.

[shaurun]

15 minutes ago, Well-met said:

official caves-only support would be cool.

the game not relying on a shards system for solo players would also be cool.

What is shards system?

50 minutes ago, Lovens said:

I remember trying a caves only challenge with my friend and solo. We would spawn in, pause, use console commands to enter the nearest cave exit without picking anything up, and then load into the caves. There's really a lot of things that cannot be done or are hard to do in the caves without access to the surface world. Stuff like Wigfrid's songs is pretty much impossible to make unless you get lucky with feather hat or sleep dart boon. Wanda can't get backtrek watch unless you get lucky with lazy explorer from AG or turn Winter's feast on. Most of Wickerbottom's stuff also can't be crafted due to the lack of feathers underground. Farming crops is not possible entirely since there are no seeds and the only crop available (carrots) can't be cultivated at all because there's no birds to make their seeds either. 

Forget character specific stuff - even getting flint underground is a challenge since it doesn't spawn on the floor freely like on the surface. The first earthquake happens close to the end of day two, until then you are stuck without a pickaxe and axe which means you can't even progress to the science machine, not mentioning alchemy engine. Pig skins are really scarse - you only get two touchstones and maybe a few football helmets in the labyrinth. If those are gone/wasted, pig skins can go extinct underground entirely (FW and therefore ruins/labyrinth reset are not available due to the shadow pieces softlock either). 

And the biggest question we got in that playthrough was "what to do there in the caves, really?" Once you beat AG and NM Werepig, rushed the ruins and killed Toad (regular version, Misery is not even possible without the surface)  and made a sustainable food farm by placing pigs or bunnies near the lichen field, you are kind of done and bored pretty quickly. Seasons are not much of a challenge. Starcaller and thermal really take a good care of winter and spring. Umbrella and football helm (or even a raincoat) are a good counter for spring weather. No seasonal bosses, no frog rains, free rocks from Antlion in summer... I guess with the addition of the big worm boss it becomes somewhat harder but it still gets boring after you beat it as well. Caves lack content badly compared to the surface, and especially as a standalone challenge. 

I'm fine w/o veggies farming, but should admit that for some characters focused on that it's really sad (Wormwood and Warly mostly, and probably Wigfried since she has tomato in her recipes as far as I remember). If crops and birds would only provide food, it would be fine that you're forced to use other food sources, but since it actually disables some character features, it's not good.

For pigskins, you should be careful and craft pig houses, so it's doable to make pig skin renewable as you wrote.

Btw, can you please explain winter's feast Wanda hack?  

17 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

Are there not roses near the postern? Been a while since I've checked. Not sure they'd be renewable, though.

I haven't found roses there, but I'll recheck. AF actually drops one but since you can't beat him it's unaccessible.

[Evelo]

I would 100% play a Caves only world. That would be fun if I had all the abilities as you do with a hybrid world.

[Juanasdf]

1 hour ago, shaurun said:

Btw, can you please explain winter's feast Wanda hack?  

I'm guessing they meant turn on winter feast to get canes from gifts

[Lovens]

6 hours ago, shaurun said:

Btw, can you please explain winter's feast Wanda hack?  

Yeah I meant when Winter's feast is on you get a chance for some good loot (panflutes and walking canes) if you sleep in the dark under a fully decorated tree. It's a bit tricky in the caves because you have to do it at night specifically, and it's a lot harder to tell when it's night time in the caves. But watching creatures like bunnies go sleep helps, and you can place the tent near light shafts to watch the day clock there. Walking canes can be deconstructed for tusks and turned into backtrek watches. It's probably good to have on for playing this challenge with other people as well since AG only drops one lazy explorer, if any. 

Yeah I haven't even thought about Warly's kit being so surface dependent. He cannot access any of his spices (one garlic he starts with can't even be turned into them, you need three, salt and honey are non-existent downstairs as well) and can't cook most of his dishes (potato souffle once but that's it). Wormwood is kinda fine without farming imo because he doesn't need it neither does he benefit from it much. But his crafts won't be available either - both armor and bramble trap require stingers, without bee mine boon you won't have any bees underground. I wonder if you can even deconstruct the mine and make a bee farm out of it at all. Might be worth try and setting up some bee hives but they won't produce any honey without flowers anyway. And I don't remember seeing roses around the florid postern underground. Usually it has some lightbulbs and ferns and that's it. 

[Dwight34]

I'm entirely onboard with BiddoBams (youtuber) on the subject of X-only run, it's vastly more fun if you give yourself a limited time (like a few days) to collect resources normally before you start the challenge.

[Reiko24]

12 hours ago, Well-met said:

official caves-only support would be cool.

the game not relying on a shards system for solo players would also be cool.

What even are the advantages of a shard system anyway?

Wouldn't generating all "shards" on the same plane very far away from each other and teleporting players there be less resource-intensive?

[Bumber64]

8 minutes ago, Reiko24 said:

What even are the advantages of a shard system anyway?

Wouldn't generating all "shards" on the same plane very far away from each other and teleporting players there be less resource-intensive?

Caves work completely differently from surface, due to earthquakes, water, etc. It'd be a tangled mess to separate the behaviors on the same shard based on location.

[Well-met]

19 hours ago, shaurun said:

What is shards system?

the thing that literally creates permanent input delay aswell as creating various lua scripts problems that have to be accounted for.

All this to allow multiplayer, a feature that the high majority does not care for.

[Reiko24]

7 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Caves work completely differently from surface, due to earthquakes, water, etc. It'd be a tangled mess to separate the behaviors on the same shard based on location.

Why so? Why not generate the "shards" on the same coordinates on the huge square map every single time, and limit the behaviours to only certain areas based on coordinates?

I mean, yeah, it would certainly take a lot of work to make it work, but aren't the benefits worth it? You could even add more land, fe. shipwrecked or hamlet without increasing hardware requirements as drastically as shards do.

[gaymime]

7 hours ago, Dwight34 said:

I'm entirely onboard with BiddoBams (youtuber) on the subject of X-only run, it's vastly more fun if you give yourself a limited time (like a few days) to collect resources normally before you start the challenge.

oh man, i have fun with biddobams' stuff~

[gaymime]

45 minutes ago, Well-met said:

the thing that literally creates permanent input delay aswell as creating various lua scripts problems that have to be accounted for.

All this to allow multiplayer, a feature that the high majority does not care for.

solo is like this too. the dlcs have different world mechanics and so are kept separated as well

[Maxil20]

1 hour ago, Well-met said:

the thing that literally creates permanent input delay aswell as creating various lua scripts problems that have to be accounted for.

All this to allow multiplayer, a feature that the high majority does not care for.

This is a bad misinterpretation of what the shard system is.

The shard system is a means to allow multiple different worlds to load/function on a server. If you didn’t have the shard system, surface + cave worlds would be impossible to make. I’ve seen a lot of people suggest the caves and surface to be on the same “world”, but that already has a lot of technical problems alongside DST really not tolerating huge worlds very well. Their approach was the best way they could handle the system and still currently is the most “ideal” method to handle it

The reason you lag on a local client is you effectively create a dedicated server when launching a caves/surface world to handle the 2 shards. This also means you need to deal with the boundaries of a servers tick rate. DST has a local tick rate of 15 updates per second. As you can imagine, this is noticeably lower than the default 60 FPS the game should run at and this is where the minor delays occur because it’s very noticeable when you have no sort of lag compensation in place (which is what a good chunk of the community turns off intentionally for multiple reasons).

The “simple” solution is simply to amp up the tick rate, though that itself will bring a lot of unintended side effects as that isn’t natively supported apart from an experimental feature you can do in the steam client. I myself run a tickrate of 60 because I don’t personally mind the character stutter/other unintended side effects in exchange for reducing the tick delay to levels I am alright with, though I can understand why the former would be very agitating for a lot of people.

[Well-met]

26 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

This is a bad misinterpretation of what the shard system is.

The shard system is a means to allow multiple different worlds to load/function on a server. If you didn’t have the shard system, surface + cave worlds would be impossible to make. I’ve seen a lot of people suggest the caves and surface to be on the same “world”, but that already has a lot of technical problems alongside DST really not tolerating huge worlds very well. Their approach was the best way they could handle the system and still currently is the most “ideal” method to handle it

The reason you lag on a local client is you effectively create a dedicated server when launching a caves/surface world to handle the 2 shards. This also means you need to deal with the boundaries of a servers tick rate. DST has a local tick rate of 15 updates per second. As you can imagine, this is noticeably lower than the default 60 FPS the game should run at and this is where the minor delays occur because it’s very noticeable when you have no sort of lag compensation in place (which is what a good chunk of the community turns off intentionally for multiple reasons).

The “simple” solution is simply to amp up the tick rate, though that itself will bring a lot of unintended side effects as that isn’t natively supported apart from an experimental feature you can do in the steam client. I myself run a tickrate of 60 because I don’t personally mind the character stutter/other unintended side effects in exchange for reducing the tick delay to levels I am alright with, though I can understand why the former would be very agitating for a lot of people.

why not just make it like the original dont starve if your game has a player limit of 1?

[Reiko24]

13 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

This is a bad misinterpretation of what the shard system is.

The shard system is a means to allow multiple different worlds to load/function on a server. If you didn’t have the shard system, surface + cave worlds would be impossible to make. I’ve seen a lot of people suggest the caves and surface to be on the same “world”, but that already has a lot of technical problems alongside DST really not tolerating huge worlds very well. Their approach was the best way they could handle the system and still currently is the most “ideal” method to handle it

The reason you lag on a local client is you effectively create a dedicated server when launching a caves/surface world to handle the 2 shards. This also means you need to deal with the boundaries of a servers tick rate. DST has a local tick rate of 15 updates per second. As you can imagine, this is noticeably lower than the default 60 FPS the game should run at and this is where the minor delays occur because it’s very noticeable when you have no sort of lag compensation in place (which is what a good chunk of the community turns off intentionally for multiple reasons).

The “simple” solution is simply to amp up the tick rate, though that itself will bring a lot of unintended side effects as that isn’t natively supported apart from an experimental feature you can do in the steam client. I myself run a tickrate of 60 because I don’t personally mind the character stutter/other unintended side effects in exchange for reducing the tick delay to levels I am alright with, though I can understand why the former would be very agitating for a lot of people.

Is there a tutorial on how to increase the tick rate somehow??

Edit:

Ok I did it. You need to find cluster.ini and put tick_rate = 60 in the [NETWORK] section.

I feel almost no delay whatsoever. It's amazing. But the character stuttering is not amazing. I wonder if it's very hard to fix.

[Bumber64]

18 hours ago, Reiko24 said:

Why so? Why not generate the "shards" on the same coordinates on the huge square map every single time, and limit the behaviours to only certain areas based on coordinates?

I mean, yeah, it would certainly take a lot of work to make it work, but aren't the benefits worth it? You could even add more land, fe. shipwrecked or hamlet without increasing hardware requirements as drastically as shards do.

It's completely inefficient to check if every single object is within a given box for every single thing, especially in Lua. There's also mods to consider (it will definitely break them), and the fact that it means you effectively can't play without or unload caves for performance. (See: Don't Starve Alone mod.)

It's cleaner just to have a separate TheWorld for caves and surface that defines the properties.

You could probably make the loading between caves and surface instant, but it means keeping certain things loaded for each player, which will hurt their performance and increase system requirements (RAM usage).

I don't think Klei is going to sink development time into either of these, but there are probably marginal improvements that can be made to the current system.

[goblinball]

16 hours ago, Well-met said:

why not just make it like the original dont starve if your game has a player limit of 1?

DST and original DS’s internals are completely different. They are NOT the same game and you can’t just copy and paste all dst content (or mods, mind you) into original ds. It’s really not that simple.