Warly skill tree ideas!

[ThiEErren]

Good day, everyone! Today, I want to share my ideas for the future skill tree of Warly.

The goal is to make the character more appealing to new players while maintaining the original essence that defines him. I've come up with three branches to develop a skill tree that is, at the very least, intriguing.

Let me clarify that I don't claim ownership of these ideas; I only aim to inspire the creation of an original and enjoyable skill tree for one of my favorite characters. With that said, let's begin with:

Diet:
The backbone of Warly has always been his connection to food. However, in his inclusion in DST, his main trait is that he can only eat food made in a crock pot. My intention is not to drastically change this, but to add two new characteristics:

1. Warly can eat food processed in other ways (e.g., food produced by a drying rack).
2. Food serves additional purposes beyond merely refilling empty stats.

The first point is self-explanatory: Warly could eat other things without removing his main restriction. As for the second point, my idea is for Warly's ability to remember what he ate previously to have some benefit beyond just being a disadvantage. As a result, if Warly eats different dishes (and potentially foods of various types), he could gain temporary benefits to help with his survival.

For example, if he eats meatballs, butter muffins, and ceviche, not only would he receive the maximum stats from these foods, but he could also gain boosts to certain maximum statistics. These might include movement speed, maximum health, sanity, hunger, regular or planar damage, or more specific effects like reducing hunger or sanity loss, increasing resistance to cold/heat, or specific types of damage. There are many possibilities to explore.

Cooking:

Warly is introduced as the chef among the survivors, and thanks to his portable cooking kit, he can prepare entirely unique dishes and enhance them with spices that only he can use. To add more "flavor" to his abilities, I thought of three new features for Warly:

1. Warly can cook new recipes.
2. Warly gains additional spices for seasoning.
3. Warly can prepare food in a way that makes it more powerful.

The first two points are straightforward and are likely the most feasible additions to the game, as they are the obvious choices for expanding Warly's potential. I won’t propose specific ideas here since I don’t have many concrete suggestions, but I would hope that underutilized or unpopular ingredients in the game could be given more value or uses through new recipes and spices.

The real centerpiece of this section, however, is the idea of better cooking methods. My concept is that, after placing four ingredients into Warly's portable crock pot and start cooking, players could interact with it to access a rhythm-based mini-game similar to Wolfgang's gym. In this mini-game, players would need to press the space bar at the exact moment to create an enhanced version of the recipe.

• If the player completely fails the mini-game, the result would be a wet goop as a penalty for attempting it without playing properly.
• If the player doesn’t achieve the required number of successes to win the mini-game, the result would simply be the normal dish with no modifications.

Enhanced Dishes

Successfully completing the mini-game would result in improved food:

• These dishes would restore 20% more hunger and provide 15% more health and sanity (values are just examples).
• Enhanced dishes would also lose fewer stats when consumed repeatedly by Warly, slightly reducing his penalty for eating the same meal multiple times.
• Importantly, these improved dishes could be shared with other players, allowing them to enjoy the enhanced benefits.

This would add a fun and interactive mechanic to Warly's cooking and give more utility to his role as a team chef.

Ingredients:

The final branch of my skill tree focuses on improving how Warly can gather and manage the ingredients for his meals. To achieve this, I thought of two flavorful additions:

1. An upgraded Chef Pouch for carrying ingredients.
2. A new tool for more efficient harvesting.

Upgraded Chef Pouch

The Chef Pouch could be improved, not necessarily in terms of space (as the Insulated Pack already covers that), but in terms of how long food stays fresh inside it—both raw ingredients and cooked meals. This would benefit wandering Warly players by reducing the need to constantly return to an Ice Box or rely on Bundling Wrap to store food. It would allow him more freedom to explore while still keeping his supplies intact.

New Harvesting Tool

The second idea is a tool specifically designed for gathering ingredients more effectively. It would work similarly to the Shadow Reaper, but exclusively for food source plants (berry bushes, planted crops, etc.). This tool could allow Warly to harvest in bulk and even yield larger quantities of food compared to manually harvesting each plant.

These additions would streamline Warly’s ingredient-gathering process, making it less tedious and more rewarding, aligning with his role as the culinary expert among the survivors.

And finally,
Lunar or Shadow Affiliation:

This is perhaps the hardest part to conceptualize. I honestly don't have many ideas for what could make Warly’s alignment to Lunar or Shadow unique, aside from maybe some exclusive recipes. I’ll leave this part in Klei’s capable hands.

Miscellaneous Ideas

Here are some additional ideas I came up with that don’t fit neatly into the sections above:

• Creatures that Warly feeds follow him for longer periods.
• When Warly feeds a beefalo, it gains extra hunger points.
• Warly can obtain extra ingredients when killing mobs.

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Those were my main ideas for the upcoming Warly skill tree. What do you think? My goal was to avoid changing the character too drastically while introducing gameplay modifications that make him more interesting and fun to play.

I don’t expect many of these suggestions to become a reality, and that’s okay—I’m just excited to see what Klei has in store for us. Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll enjoy it a lot!