Banana Rework

[arubaro]

1 hour ago, Maxil20 said:

But nerfing bunnymen wasn’t the only reason new food sources sprouted up. Things like barnacles/figs/tallbird eggs and the dishes that came with them or the entire farming system being reworked to be far more lucrative were changes that made it much more worthwhile to go and use new food sources and make new dishes.

Again, I really don’t see the problem with having multiple equally viable food sources. Just as players can stick to basics and be set forever (heck, I ate honey for IRL years in my world because I genuinely did not like making crockpot dishes pre bin), you can also go out of your way to make more exotic dishes which usually come with additional benefits and also be set forever. I personally have went out of my way to try mass producing a bunch of hunger related dishes overtime and do things I would have never done otherwise as a result of that, from barnacle linguine, to tall scotch eggs, to figatoni. 

I would rather Klei buff underutilized dishes like the vanilla/ROG ones then nerf the overused ones personally, but that’s mainly because I think it’s nicer to have a variety of dishes that work. 

But you can do this with literally any other food source (which includes meat). Transplanting food sources to a base does not require an immense amount of difficulty to cultivate and grow and in fact is the ideal place to put them. You can pretty easily keep a couple food sources at base and be topped on all three stats. Bananas didn’t cause that to occur, it’s been like this since base DS existed.

Im not asking to nerf dishes for the sake of it. Obviously some dishes needs buffs to be appealing but i dont think makes sense to have stuff like meat stew giving 150 hunger, honey ham having such stats at such reduced cost, bananas making sanity dishes made of crops obsolete without any kind of downside once set up or how cheap is pierogies with their spoling time

Some dishes could have slightly adjusted their stats, getting longer eating animations or their sources having interesting downsides 

[Jakepeng99]

2 hours ago, arubaro said:

Im not asking to nerf dishes for the sake of it. Obviously some dishes needs buffs to be appealing but i dont think makes sense to have stuff like meat stew giving 150 hunger, honey ham having such stats at such reduced cost, bananas making sanity dishes made of crops obsolete without any kind of downside once set up or how cheap is pierogies with their spoling time

Some dishes could have slightly adjusted their stats, getting longer eating animations or their sources having interesting downsides 

Bananas are just better than every crop in the game. They provide everything but hunger, unless your wormwood. The main limit is ice for healing.

[Maxil20]

5 hours ago, arubaro said:

Im not asking to nerf dishes for the sake of it. Obviously some dishes needs buffs to be appealing but i dont think makes sense to have stuff like meat stew giving 150 hunger, honey ham having such stats at such reduced cost, bananas making sanity dishes made of crops obsolete without any kind of downside once set up or how cheap is pierogies with their spoling time

Some dishes could have slightly adjusted their stats, getting longer eating animations or their sources having interesting downsides 

In this aspect I can agree with this somewhat. I personally don’t think many need as substantial nerfs, as you don’t get significant gains or usually trade the stats the ingredients give for another, such as honey ham giving minimal extra hunger and an okay amount of extra health or pierogis giving a lot of additional health at the cost of hunger (other than the stew, as the extra hunger you get is borderline silly and you practically always get well over +80 hunger from easy components you don’t go out of your way for). 

I think spoilage is a good approach for nerfing them without massively shifting things around, though I would appreciate a number that is average as a lot of the “new” dishes suffer from 6 day spoilage penalties and I feel like every “good” dish being like that would be a bit cumbersome, would rather it be ~10 days or so for things like pirogies and shakes, and maybe ~6 for stews in a theoretical nerf context.

2 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Bananas are just better than every crop in the game. They provide everything but hunger, unless your wormwood. The main limit is ice for healing.

I personally disagree they are better then every crop. They are good, but mass producing crops will leave you with a lot of excess and post BQ you can save that excess and be set for dozens-hundreds of days. For my particular case I “lazy” farm with Wormwood and I am set with ~6 bundles of crops per session, which is more then enough in most cases for basically anything you can want.

[lowercase skye]

Any thread like this will always romanticize winter as some tough challenge where food is scarce and you have to prepare like crazy, but this was simply never true, we were just new players. Already grown plants stay grown across the entire world, and meat is literally EVERYWHERE, like, almost trivially everywhere, you just have to know the several easy places to find it. All that nerfing bananas or figs would do is take an already niche food source and send us back to constantly using the boring ol' reliables like cactus and honey all the time.

I don't think people here really realize just how time consuming and particular it is to go to the moon quay and get its banana bushes, btw. A lot of us are just used to it, but you have to sail out to one specific corner of the map (which constantly puts you in danger of a pirate raid), carefully approach the island so as to avoid all the cannons, dock nearby and wait for night to come (or come in winter, cutting into your time for winter tasks), run like hell around the island grabbing all the banana bushes you can get, probably ignore collecting palmcones or monkeytails too if it's a short night, pray that you haven't been here long enough for a monkey to spawn from the portal since it's homeless and going to follow you until you kill it, and if at any point in this process you DO have to kill a monkey then you're going to have to come back days later once your transplanted bushes have grown so you can give bananas to the monkey queen (again, during the span of a single night or waiting until winter). I think if we had to do all that, and then banana bushes spawned hostile mobs and barely restore more sanity than taffy, the majority of people would simply stop using them! That would really suck!

[Bumber64]

2 hours ago, finn from human said:

(again, during the span of a single night or waiting until winter).

Why does it have to be a single night?

[Masked Koopa]

2 hours ago, finn from human said:

I don't think people here really realize just how time consuming and particular it is to go to the moon quay and get its banana bushes, btw.

I feel this x100 when people want Figs to be nerfed. If you're at the point where you can find the Waterlogged biome, get the pinch n winch, get glommer, put a nut down where you want it, and then regularly fertilise it, I don't think you're going to be under any difficulties come Winter. It's one thing to care a lot about the fundamental principle of plant growth, but ya'll need to realise that these things already exist, and there's just no way to disable Winter growth at this point without it being a nerf to a mechanic that demonstrably does not need one, and worsens QOL.

I think it is a very different question to ask whether Bananas are too good as a consistent source of sanity food vs. hyperfixating on winter growth. But I also think the point brought up here regarding Melonsicles is way more relevant: why are we so concerned about potentially "OP" stuff when there's a bunch of needlessly understatted garbage that was never good in the first place? Id much rather buff the bad options first, and then take the strongest options a peg or two afterward.

[lowercase skye]

30 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

Why does it have to be a single night?

Being at the center of the Moon Quay, where all the banana bushes spawn, puts you well in the range of 4+ monkey huts (potentially 8+ Powder Monkeys). So if you aren't willing to tank up to 8 mobs that are constantly stealing your items and giving you 1 trinket each on death, you'll need to approach at night while the monkeys are asleep in their huts. Admittedly, this does not have to be in one night, as you can slowly whittle away at it over the course of several nights, but you'll be investing even more time in that case + risking a raid for even longer.

[Bumber64]

2 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

I feel this x100 when people want Figs to be nerfed. If you're at the point where you can find the Waterlogged biome, get the pinch n winch, get glommer, put a nut down where you want it, and then regularly fertilise it, I don't think you're going to be under any difficulties come Winter.

Don't forget you can't just plant them wherever. You'll be basing on or near the ocean. (Fig spoil time's also worse than bananas? What?)

That said, if lureplants hibernate during winter, then bananas bushes probably also ought to. (Maybe bushes planted in caves should still grow, like mushroom planters.) We can assume the figs are protected from snow by their canopy.

Banana shake flat out needs a nerf, regardless. The sanity is too high for just bananas and twigs. Either reduce the sanity to 20, or limit to 1 twig. Probably deserves figatoni's spoil time. (Buffing fig spoil is an option.)

[hyoton123]

5 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Bananas are just better than every crop in the game. They provide everything but hunger, unless your wormwood. The main limit is ice for healing.

They're abysmal at hunger compared to almost any other farm crop, and needing ice + to get them from moon quay and moongleams is a significant hindrance for new players. They are definitely not zero interaction.

 

If they absolutely needed nerfs and I don't think they do, I'd say no winter or they cycle like stone fruit bushes, and put some of the sanity from shakes into an annoyingly long duration heal over time to prevent spamming them. But I'm not even sure why you feel that they're a problem. People sitting passively at base are at the least risk, and have the fewest problems from, losing sanity or health. 

[Sacco]

19 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Don't Scarf Together

Potato, carrot, pumpkin, asparagus, garlic. This doesn't change much because these are what you'd be growing in winter to begin with.

Notably, potato grows well in every season except summer. Dragon fruit grows well in summer (and spring). They use the same nutrient groups and are two of the best crops. Basically, you're always growing one of these two, and the rest just kind of exist around that fact.

The choice in winter is carrot vs pumpkin and asparagus vs garlic. In any other season, you can balance with just toma root.

as i said i think some crop recipes should get buffed, especiallt the ones made from niche crops

[Szczuku]

Right, of course, the classic 'But it takes so much time and effort to get it! At that point you know how to deal with hunger, so these food sources don't need to follow the game logic"

If that's the case then maybe tam'o'shanter and bone armor shouldn't have durability? When you get these items you are already at a point when you are comfortable with fighting spiders, hounds and shadow creatures, so getting sewing kits and nightmare fuel is not a problem. So having to refueal these equipable items is just a pointless chore that worsens the game's QoL, right?

[arubaro]

9 hours ago, finn from human said:

Any thread like this will always romanticize winter as some tough challenge where food is scarce and you have to prepare like crazy, but this was simply never true, we were just new players

People asking for bananas to dont grow in winter arent expecting a challenge but logic and inmersion (atleast i hope is for that)

9 hours ago, finn from human said:

Already grown plants stay grown across the entire world, and meat is literally EVERYWHERE, like, almost trivially everywhere, you just have to know the several easy places to find it

That should be changed too tbh, makes no sense as you pointed

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Szczuku said:

Right, of course, the classic 'But it takes so much time and effort to get it! At that point you know how to deal with hunger, so these food sources don't need to follow the game logic"

Nobody is saying this.

1 hour ago, Szczuku said:

If that's the case then maybe tam'o'shanter and bone armor shouldn't have durability? When you get these items you are already at a point when you are comfortable with fighting spiders, hounds and shadow creatures, so getting sewing kits and nightmare fuel is not a problem. So having to refueal these equipable items is just a pointless chore that worsens the game's QoL, right?

These comparisons don't really work at all. I do think it's interesting you chose the tam o shanter specifically here though, considering the Enlightened Crown is basically just a tam o shanter with no durability, and it is given to you past the point in the game where you'd ever struggle with sanity.

[W0l0l0]

I wouldn't mind more hunger challenges. Especially during winter.

With the issue of banana nerf shifting the dependency back to meat farms, I'd like to suggest nerfing meat farms during the winter, by having different drops during that period. Spiders could drop more silk and less meat, and maybe standard meat is dropped as morsels instead. Not sure how well this would work, but I'd be open to the idea.

[Frosty_Mentos]

If you wanna rework bananas you need to start with the farm plots, then go for the blue mushrooms and their regrowth mechanics, after that you need to rebalance dishes overall for what should be considered mid and what isn't to make it distributed all evenly for complexity and what is not.

Unfortunately bananas are but only a hair of the overall problem. We can just go to ruins spend a day in monkey fields by slaughtering enough of them to supply ourselves for days plus nightmarefuel and beard for revival.

We can dig mushrooms on the surface or caves, bringing us more than enough vegetables to survive on for years if we use cooking.

We can utilize Wicker books in order to mass farm anything including mostly meat.

You and some few people make this into a giant problem without taking the account that the whole game balance is about giving you tons of healing and ways to get healing and food options in masses.

If you're not old enough to remember or haven't played enough singleplayer then you probably forgot the daily respawning of bunnymen, which gave two carrots and a meat. Using flingos and star caller staff we slaughtered them daily for krampus sacks and endless supply of food. It was thousands of veggies and meat back then, but now it's a bit more distributed to have other sources stronger instead of funneling into this method.

Food balance for harvesting and cooking has been the same but it's methods are distributed into various ways of gathering and farming to supply self with more than enough. We never had salt boxes before and those became next most popular thing to bundles.

[chaosmonkey]

On 11/15/2024 at 9:36 AM, Jakepeng99 said:

Banana shake: Now restores 20 sainity instead. Its just way too overstatted for being so cheap i believe.

 

If this change were made, nobody would bother with Banana farms at all. Cooked cactus flesh is 15 sanity and doesn't need crock pots to cook.

[Bumber64]

12 hours ago, Frosty_Mentos said:

If you wanna rework bananas you need to start with the farm plots, then go for the blue mushrooms and their regrowth mechanics, after that you need to rebalance dishes overall for what should be considered mid and what isn't to make it distributed all evenly for complexity and what is not.

Farm plots are a lot more work than bananas. (Watering and tilling at minimum.) Bananas are stone fruit that you don't have to mine, don't cycle, and are more than just filler.

You can't plant blue caps in base (without wasting living logs). If you're shoveling them, you'll have to track down the new ones. They don't grow in winter and it's tied to rain.

8 hours ago, chaosmonkey said:

If this change were made, nobody would bother with Banana farms at all. Cooked cactus flesh is 15 sanity and doesn't need crock pots to cook.

You have to walk around in the desert to get those. Also they hurt you to pick them.

So the same argument could be made for cave bananas vs bushes. Same item, but clearly the trees have their own tradeoff.

[Maxil20]

1 hour ago, Bumber64 said:

You have to walk around in the desert to get those. Also they hurt you to pick them.

2 deserts with cactus are in the world by default (one being a common base location, and the other is one usually frequently visited for DFly/tumbleweeds). The damage from cactus with 80% protection is also fairly minimal. Provided you pick the cactus with 80% armor (and take 1.2 damage) and eat the cooked cactus when fresh (as it heals 1 HP, and you want it fresh for the sanity anyway), you’ll lose .2 health total. To put this into perspective, if you kill a butterfly and eat the wings, you offset the health reduction of an entire stack of cactus flesh.

If it is inconvenient to get, dried kelp is also an alternative I’ve used quite a bit. Dried kelp only takes 2 minutes to dry and heals 10 sanity pop. It is less powerful than cactus, but the ability for it to be relocated alongside the innate advantages of going to lunar for resources evens it out, at least in my opinion.

[SilverSpoon]

Considering humanity gets how furious when treats that once been given is taken away, we should buff the bad stuff instead of nerfing the good stuff.

[Cruvimaster]

Jelly Salad gives 50 sanity points, you don't need to sail to Moon Quay Island or go to the caves to defeat monkeys, it's an easy farm to make and a recipe that Wigfrid eats.

The only winter that would be a problem to get food is the first one. And it's only a problem for very beginner players.

The only effect of nerfing a food (how insane to read this!) is to give the same response as what was done with Shadow Maul: nobody cares about that item after the nerf.

[arubaro]

1 hour ago, Cruvimaster said:

Jelly Salad gives 50 sanity points, you don't need to sail to Moon Quay Island or go to the caves to defeat monkeys, it's an easy farm to make and a recipe that Wigfrid eats.

The only winter that would be a problem to get food is the first one. And it's only a problem for very beginner players.

The only effect of nerfing a food (how insane to read this!) is to give the same response as what was done with Shadow Maul: nobody cares about that item after the nerf.

Because having unbalance between content pieces clearly brings variety...basically you prefer to ignore non top food instead of making them all equally interesting 

Bringing the maul is hilarious

Also most complains about new food sources is how little they interact with other mechanics like weather. They are flat and uninteresting 

[Frosty_Mentos]

13 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

You can't plant blue caps in base (without wasting living logs). If you're shoveling them, you'll have to track down the new ones. They don't grow in winter and it's tied to rain.

I'm very sure blue caps regrow in bluecap forest in winters. It's not hard to check for which cave it can be if you check many of them or when traveling in caves looking for one. I never had food issues regardless. I'm very sure that bluecap forest is probably the easiest vegetable gathering area in the game as a whole.

[Cruvimaster]

1 hour ago, arubaro said:

Because having unbalance between content pieces clearly brings variety...basically you prefer to ignore non top food instead of making them all equally interesting 

Bringing the maul is hilarious

Also most complains about new food sources is how little they interact with other mechanics like weather. They are flat and uninteresting 

Food has never been a real challenge in the game. In fact, the game shouldn't even be called "don't starve".

Klei has put an interesting farming system in DST, but the practical results of the recipes are bad. It's just "more of the same" that we already have in the game through traditional means.

For hunger, I don't need anything other than meaty stew or even meatballs. Why would I make the other more complex recipes? Or waste time with the farming system?

For sanity, there are a lot of solutions in the game. The same goes for health.

All of Don't Starve's original solutions perfectly solve the hunger, sanity and health problems of DST.

I make all the recipes in my world and all the giant crops. But I only do this late game and just to pass the time. I never do it with the purpose of maintaining the character's stats.

It's very difficult to talk about "balancing" in the game simply because Wickerbottom exists and breaks any farm in the game.

[xDarkSoul18x]

Hard disagree. But if they nerf bananas before they nerf meatballs I'm eating my own underwear. 

[Jakepeng99]

2 hours ago, xDarkSoul18x said:

Hard disagree. But if they nerf bananas before they nerf meatballs I'm eating my own underwear. 

Meatballs is mediocre.