The many problems with Warly, and what his skill tree should improve

[Guille6785]

I know it, you know it, the devs know it, everyone knows it: Warly's skill tree is going to be in the next batch, so I thought it would be a good time to get my feedback in now that the skill tree is likely still in its early concept stages in a concise and constructive manner so that Klei will have time to see it and consider it, alongside any replies to this thread that add more feedback than what I provided. This post will obviously be very long so I broke it up into sections.

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Warly is not a very popular character, and I fear that his skill tree will have a similar problem to Winona, where she had a notorious lack of a dedicated playerbase (at least here on the forums, but she wasn't exactly many people's favorite character even outside of the site) and thus relatively little feedback was readily available to the devs about what direction the tree should go in. I'm not bringing this up to say her skill tree was bad, but rather that it felt very disconnected from her base kit, like the developers didn't really know where to start with her and essentially just gave her a bunch of stuff locked behind skills unified under the general theme of “builder”. Warly is very similar to Winona in many of his core issues, and he's a character who I really want to be good, but if Klei don't have feedback to go off of they might not know what to do with the character and his tree might end up being a bunch of craftables that have nothing to do with his base kit, while doing nothing to improve upon it.

In my view, there are three main problems with Warly: His mechanics do not match his intended playstyle, his upsides are extremely underwhelming, and the player has a notorious lack of control over accessing his upsides. I will go over each one individually and provide my suggestions about how each problem could be addressed.

Right away, there are some expected responses I want to address before I begin my analysis:

Spoiler

Warly is a character who flourishes in the late game. Not every character needs to have upsides that are accessible from Day 1.
I agree, and that is not what this thread is about. I'm not asking for Warly to consistently be able to mass-produce volt goat jelly from the second he spawns in; I understand that progression feels good and it's great that DST has characters that are more focused towards that. This isn't one of the problems I'm talking about.

Warly simply has a unique playstyle: It's fun to earn my power, and his downsides are significant enough to shake up my playstyle, and that's all he really needs to be, even if he's not very strong from a time-efficiency perspective.
I also agree, and none of the things I will suggest in this thread will take away anything that Warly currently has. If anything, I'm looking to make suggestions that will further improve his character fantasy. If you play Warly frequently, I would appreciate extra perspectives about my suggestions because I'm obviously not perfect, and the last thing I would want is for Klei to take away things that people enjoy, like they unfortunately have in the past with a handful of characters.

Warly is already very strong; any buffs would potentially push him over the edge.
Character strength is completely subjective: some people value safety, some people value convenience, some judge things strictly by time-efficiency, and your own personal skill level affects your perspective tremendously, making it so that a large group of people can perceive a character as being straight up overpowered while another large group of players can perceive them as underwhelming.

Warly in particular is very similar to pre-buff Wortox in that to a certain group of players (particularly those who are experienced enough to survive comfortably but not experienced enough to kill the major bosses without expending a ton of resources) he might seem very powerful, specifically because his upsides are excellent to help those kinds of players kill bosses. I understand I’m inevitably going to rustle some feathers at the mere suggestion that Warly could use a buff, but the truth is that the majority of his upsides simply fail to be appealing to a large number of playstyles in terms of cost, time savings and/or convenience, and I hope that I can present a solid case to explain this in the following sections.

And yes, I’m aware that in extremely late game endless servers (in the thousands of days) you will find chests full of spiced jellybeans and bundles full of volt goat jelly, which allow all players to buff up and kill bosses with a sneeze, but this really doesn’t mean anything in terms of character strength; even if Warly’s dishes and spices cost 10 times as much this would still continue to be the case, since ultra-late game players simply enjoy the process of stocking up on luxuries such as this.

Warly is simply meant to be good in a team; he’s a support character.
For starters, I personally find that trying to fit DST characters into “roles” is one of the weirdest things this community frequently tries to do. All characters (except Wes) have combat abilities at least on par with Wilson if not better, all characters (except Wes) are just as good at gathering resources and food as Wilson if not better, and all characters (including Wes) can explore the world as fast as Wilson if not faster. Additionally, shouldn’t skill trees provide the option to expand characters beyond their stereotypical roles? I don’t see why some people insist Warly should be nothing more than a basesitter who cooks food and tends to farms 24/7 when he is just as capable as playing the rest of the game as any other character.

Additionally, the statement that Warly is simply “better in a team” is pretty much just wrong by every measurable metric. Most people would point towards his ability to buff his teammates, but damage multipliers inherently have diminishing returns: The jump from x1 to x2 far exceeds the time and resource savings of any other jump; even if you give 2 teammates volt goat jelly before a fight, that only turns a x3 damage multiplier into a x4 multiplier if the target isn’t wet, a negligible damage increase considering bosses tend to melt with more than 2 or 3 players already. Other people might point towards the stereotypical Warly player that stays at base cooking food, but Warly is objectively worse at this too. Warly has no upsides that let him gather ingredients faster, he has no farming related perks, and he has a hunger drain multiplier and dietary restrictions, meaning he’ll actually be eating more of the food supply than any other character staying at base. Yes, his crock pots cook food slightly faster, but this is offset by the fact that his teammates can’t use them, making them paperweights that cost just as much as regular crock pots (if not more) once the Warly player disconnects.

With that out of the way, allow me to discuss the problems with his kit one by one:

His mechanics do not match his intended playstyle

Spoiler

With a portable crock pot, a cheap portable ice box (ish), lower stats when eating the same foods, and being a character originally from the shipwrecked DLC (where he was supposed to be a sort of nomadic chef and not much more), Warly is very clearly meant to be a character who encourages cycling through a variety of crock pot dishes to avoid repetition while gathering ingredients along the way instead of being restricted to a static crock pot location. Have the developers ever explicitly said this is Warly’s intended playstyle? Maybe, it’s 1 am and I’m not in the mood to look through dozens of threads from 2019, but this is at least how the majority of people who’ve never played Warly would describe his character fantasy as.

However, anyone who’s played Warly for more than 10 minutes knows this simply isn’t the case. Warly’s kit does not encourage variety; it encourages repeating low-cost, high-hunger dishes, and this is due to the way it was implemented. Warly’s food memory lasts for 2 full days, and within that timeframe he loses exactly 180 hunger points due to this increased hunger drain. This means that when playing as Warly, you’ll want to consume 180 hunger’s worth of crock pot dishes every 16 minutes to avoid refreshing the memory timer.

This system makes it disproportionately more difficult to live off low-hunger dishes when trying to not repeat dishes: If you’re trying to cycle between 37.5 hunger dishes (which is how many people who haven’t played Warly envision playing him as) you would need to cycle between 5 unique dishes with that hunger value every 2 days just to slightly surpass the hunger requirement. Sure, ratatouille, fistful of jam and pierogi are easy dishes, but past that point they start requiring slightly more unique ingredients which is why nobody plays like this; contrast that to simply eating a meaty stew and a meatball or a meaty stew and a honey ham, which provide more than enough hunger for 2 days and are significantly easier to gather.

However, what if we do allow repetitions? Warly’s repetition system is extremely lenient towards high-hunger dishes while heavily punishing low-hunger dishes disproportionately. The first repetition applies a negligible penalty, and so does the second one; eating 3 of the same dish only punishes you by making you miss out on 0.3 of that dish’s stat values. Everyone knows about the double meaty stew strategy, which is by far the easiest way for Warly to live while also being incredibly cheap to mass produce, since the 10% penalty on the second meaty stew is meaningless. Meanwhile, if you tried to live off a single dish with a hunger value of 37.5, you would have to eat that dish 9 times every 2 days. Even spamming meatballs is a viable strategy in comparison; eating 4 in a row will give you 209 hunger points and only penalize you with a loss of about 40, which is much more reasonable than trying to cycle through that many low-hunger dishes.

Heck, even if you’re limiting yourself to only dishes with 37.5 hunger, it’s still much easier to eat the same two of those dishes 3 times every 2 days, allowing you to easily bypass needing 5 unique ones, with a hunger gain of 202.5 and a loss of only a measly 22 for every batch of 6 meals eaten since the penalties are basically non-existent when divided between more than 1 dish. If it isn’t clear yet, a wide variety of low-hunger dishes, which many people think Warly is encouraged to gather, are actually actively punished more than using a limited range of low-hunger dishes or a single high-hunger dish. This is a problem because it is an inherent contradiction with Warly’s design. Warly should encourage variety, not punish it.

So how do we fix this? “Just nerf the high hunger dishes” I can already hear a bunch of people replying, but the problem isn’t the high hunger dishes being too good, it’s just the way the food penalty is implemented. I think this isn’t that difficult to fix, though; not long ago I asked around the community for people to help me find a sweet spot for a new food penalty system, and I think it can be fixed with a relatively small rework:

-Keep his max hunger and increased hunger drain the same.
-His repeat penalty is no longer a static 2 days for every dish, but scales with the dish’s hunger value. I suggest a conversion rate of 19.2 seconds for every hunger point the dish has.
-Warly now gains extra stats the first time he eats a dish, just like in shipwrecked, but the repeat penalties scale much more aggressively. +25% to all stats as the first bonus could be good, with 0.75/0.5/0.25/0.1 being the progressive repeat penalties.
-Food can be inspected to get an accurate quote indicating the time left until it can be eaten again, and food that gives the bonus will have a small sparkle effect in the inventory (to avoid unintuitiveness).

So what does this achieve? This would essentially fix every problem I just mentioned while actively encouraging dish variety to get the most out of the stat bonus. The conversion rate would work in such a way that 37.5 hunger dishes could be repeated every 1.5 days (faster than the current repeat penalty), 75 hunger dishes would take 3 days (slower than the current system) and 150 hunger dishes would take a full 6 days to be forgotten. This would overall make it more difficult to live off high-hunger dishes, which might seem like a nerf, but this carries several buffs to a Warly player who already prefers variety: Even with 150 hunger dishes, if a player were to cycle between Meaty Stew, Tall Scotch Eggs and Bone Bouillon every 6 days, they would get 50 minutes’ worth of hunger from the 3 dishes combined, thanks to the extra hunger boost, compared to the 40 they would receive in the current system, while also receiving the extra health and sanity that every crock pot dish gives.

This still wouldn’t make it entirely impossible to repeat dishes, as even with the hypothetical numbers I provided you could do so with good results in some scenarios, but that’s not really the intention. The point is that you won’t even want to repeat dishes (even then, this would make it basically impossible to live off just meaty stews or even honey hams since Warly’s 250 max hunger would make it impossible for the food memory to ever reset). Consider the way this would interact with low-hunger dishes instead: For starters, Warly can now comfortably live off cycling three unique 37.5 hunger dishes, which would provide 140 hunger points (as well as increased stats) every 1.5 days, which fits his character much more nicely than the current system that either requires 5 unique 37.5 hunger dishes or 2 repeated dishes.

Additionally, this would open up interesting interactions with dishes that Warly would otherwise have no interest in using: Consider trail mix, a dish with 12.5 hunger that restores 30 health; under this new system, Warly could get 37.5 health out of it every half day thanks to its low hunger, making it an even more excellent choice for healing in the early game for Warly players. There’s also soothing tea, a dish with 0 hunger, which would essentially always get a slight boost to the initial sanity upon consumption thanks to that. Banana pops would likewise restore 41 sanity and flower salad would restore 50 health, both every 0.5 days, making these otherwise overlooked dishes compelling options for frequent stat restoration.

Would this make Warly easier in some scenarios? Yes, and I’m aware that some people may not like that, but I think Warly could really use it. Not only are the repetition problems and the lack of variety encouragement fully addressed, but this also fixes the problem of Warly’s higher hunger requirement being a downside that cannot be avoided through any means, as the increased hunger from unique dishes would perfectly counteract and actually provide slightly more effective hunger out of the equation compared to a default character (e.g. a fresh meaty stew would feed Warly for 2.08 days under this system, a little bit more hunger than the 2 days for other characters; in the current system it only feeds him for 1.66 days).

That essentially marks the end of the analysis of his hunger downside, but I would also like to use this section to discuss two other issues with his kit I hope can be addressed, either via the skill tree or via base changes:

-The chef pouch is really not good. Some people wrongly believe it’s “half as effective” as the ice box because it slows down food spoilage by 25% instead of 50% but this is not how it works. A food item that lasts 10 days normally will last 20 inside of an ice box, but it will only last 13.33 inside of a chef pouch, a negligible increase when you consider that it’s only half of that due to spoilage in reality. I’m not sure how to change the chef pouch, but a suggestion I saw was to essentially turn it into a budget salt box, limiting it to only holding the same ingredients the salt box can, but with higher capacity than a backpack and a proper 50% or even 75% spoilage reduction. This would further encourage the character fantasy of foraging for a large variety of fresh ingredients since inventory space would be plentiful, and I really hope the devs consider this.

-A portable crock pot sounds amazing in theory, but in practice it’s insufferable to have to stop and stare at your screen for what feels like minutes at a time just to have the privilege of eating, which other characters don’t have to go through. Yes, it does feel rewarding when you plan ahead in such a way that you cook your food in advance while doing other actions like mining or fighting, but this is the exception rather than the norm. Please let us use the crock pot in the inventory, this would go a long way towards making Warly feel less awkward to play and further incentivize his intended nomadic gameplay for all types of players.

His upsides are extremely underwhelming

Spoiler

This section is inevitably going to be a controversial one since even in the year of 2025 there are still people who get inexplicably upset at the simple suggestion that Warly isn’t some meta-defining S tier character, and I’m not expecting to convince everyone, but at least I can try to explain why I think that almost all of Warly’s dishes do not reward the player enough for the time and resource cost necessary to make them. To keep things simple, I’ll start with the non-buff dishes, then the buff dishes, then end with the spices.

 

Non-buff dishes (these are not really that relevant):

Puffed Potato Soufflé: Ok, we’re starting on a bit of a tangent here but I just have to rant about this dish. Back in shipwrecked when this dish was called sweet potato souffle the point of it was that sweet potatoes could be picked up like carrots in certain islands and eggs would literally fall from jungle trees, thereby not requiring any sort of setup to make it. Was it a good dish? Not really, since as far as I know it just competed with pierogi which was made with arguably fewer ingredients and restored twice as much HP, however I think in DST it somehow has even less of a niche. Not only does it still compete with pierogi, it now also competes with creamy potato puree and fancy spiralled tubers, both pretty much better options, and it recovers less health and hunger than just eating the cooked potatoes (if you’re thinking about giving it to your teammates). This dish is a little fish in a big pond, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make it. I think a simple stat buff might be good enough to give it a niche, it just wouldn’t be all that interesting. 40 health and 62.5 hunger would be more in line with the cost of the ingredients, although it wouldn’t feel like a proper exclusive dish either way.

 

Moqueca: This dish is whatever at the moment since it’s basically just a late game luxury, but it would be indirectly buffed by the suggestions described in the third section of this post.

 

Monster Tartare: Simply a punishment dish at the moment, but if my suggestion of extra stats on the first consumption got implemented this dish would receive an interesting niche, as if I’m not mistaken the first consumption of dishes in shipwrecked actually reduces negative stats as well (please correct me if I’m wrong here). This would make it reduce less health and sanity while buffing its already fairly high hunger, making it an actually decent option for Warly players to complete a food cycle when they only have monster meat around.

 

Fresh Fruit Crepes: Rant time again; this dish requires 1.5 fruit value, which wasn’t a problem in shipwrecked since both coconuts and bananas (obtainable in the starting island) had a fruit value of 1, but this is a problem in DST because fruits with a value of 1 aren’t easily accessible in the early game (you need bananas, big glow berries, or farm fruits). This was clearly meant to be an early game dish in shipwrecked that rewarded Warly extra for luckying out with butter, so it'd be nice to reduce its fruit value requirement to 1 to make it more in line with its original niche.

 

Bone Bouillon: Actually fine for what it does (cleaning up other player’s skeletons, and mass produceable by letting fish rot iirc), and it’d be indirectly buffed for the early game with the suggestions described in the third section of this post.

 

Buff dishes:

Grim Galette: This was a dish that sounded interesting when Warly first got added, but unfortunately its upsides simply never come into effect at the stage of the game where you have the dish. Its intended use case is to allow players to either heal from sanity restoration sources or to recover sanity from healing items, but unfortunately the fact that it requires both onion and potato, two crops that you won’t have a lot of until the mid-game, severely restricts the situations in which you’d make this dish. Potatoes and onions don’t grow naturally, so the only way to use this dish at the right time would be to carry it with you in preparation rather than to make it on the spot, but the problem with this is that at that point there’s no reason not to just carry more healing or health items, such as creamy potato puree.

I understand that some people would like to imagine there are interesting clutch uses of this item, such as giving it to a Wormwood buddy when his health is low for him to recover sanity from planting stuff or whatever, but I’ve never seen these types of situations expressed as anything other than hypotheticals. However, I might have a controversial suggestion that could make this dish much more interesting: Ditch the veggie requirements altogether and make this dish able to be made with just 2 nightmare fuel and 2 twigs. Since nightmare fuel can be obtained anywhere, this means you could obtain this dish anywhere and cook it on the spot on demand, thereby significantly increasing the chances you might encounter a situation where it’s genuinely useful. It’s raining in the ruins and your sanity is extremely low, but you have a bunch of healing salves on you? Kill those 2 crawling horrors, make a grim galette real quick and you’re suddenly at full sanity and can heal back up from the damage. I still wouldn’t consider this dish to be all that useful but at least it’d be fun to come up with use cases for it when you need it the most.

 

Glow Berry Mousse: Hands-free lighting sounds cool, but if you actually try to use this dish you’ll quickly notice its light radius quickly diminishes to the point where it’s less than a magiluminescence, and that makes you have to constantly reapply it to get the bigger light radius. Don’t get me wrong, this dish can be really convenient when you make it in bulk (which is possible thanks to the forest stalker), but the way this dish is designed would lead you to believe that Warly would be encouraged to grab a few glow berries on his way to the ruins and do the whole ruins clear only using the buff from this dish, and unfortunately that just isn’t a thing with how quickly it runs out. Some people wrongly believe this dish makes Warly an excellent scienceless ruins rusher, but unfortunately it’s not really any better than just using torches and eating the raw glow berries until you get a magiluminescence.

Is this a bad dish in concept? No, and if Warly could make better use of it with fewer ingredients it’d be much easier to integrate it into a wider variety of playstyles, and that’s going to be the recurring theme with the buff dishes other than grim galette, which is that simply having a longer duration would make them much more flexible and fun to use, and that leads me to my main suggestion which so many others here on the forums have suggested as well: Make Warly get twice as much duration from his own buffs.

For the record, I don’t think this should be locked behind the skill tree, I think it should be part of his base kit just like the improvements Walter got to his base kit during the beta. This wouldn’t break the game, this wouldn’t be unbalanced, it’d just straight up make him much more fun to play and encourage players to actually play Warly rather than just swapping to him to make his buffs, since getting twice as much value out of each of each buff would be a very good incentive to actively stay as him. In this case, 4 days of hands-free lighting, even if you have to reapply it every 2 days or so to keep the light radius big, would be a really interesting incentive for Warly to either rush the shadow pieces for the shadow atrium or to spend long stretches of time in the caves.

 

Fish Cordon Bleu: This is the only dish among the buff dishes that I think is genuinely fine, as it is not hard to obtain in small quantities and can be mass-farmed if you really want to, and the double buff duration for Warly suggested in the previous paragraph would make it an interesting alternative for hands-free wetness throughout spring without having to grind as much as you currently have to (in its current state most people don’t really bother mass-producing it and basically only use it alongside volt goat jelly for fighting in the rain).

 

Asparagaz­pacho and Hot Dragon Chili Salad: I understand that some people swear by these dishes, and the idea of never having to heat up during winter or cool down during summer sounds awesome, but these dishes could really use some buffs for multiple reasons. Both of these dishes are objectively useless from a time-efficiency standpoint, as they never save more time than it takes to make them. Some time ago I calculated that if you swapped to Wormwood and planted all the seeds in bulk, you would have to make enough hot dragon chili salad to last you for 14 years just to break even on the time spent planting the seeds and cooking the dishes with the time saved by not having to heat up, and that’s not including the time needed to obtain the seeds or the wax paper needed to bundle that many of them. Essentially, there is never really a situation where making this dish will save you more time than it takes to make it, and asparagazpacho is even worse, as ice is much harder to obtain in mass quantities.

But I understand that these dishes aren’t meant to be efficient, they’re just meant to be convenient, but unfortunately they don’t really offer a lot in that department either. Yes, standing around burning trees to heat up sucks, but I think myself and most other players would rather do that than mass-produce the ingredients needed to make these dishes unless they’re just doing it for the sake of it, and even then there are multiple other options that are just as convenient as these dishes: Building furnace stations or ice boxes around the map to swap out thermal stones immediately, carrying ice chester with 2 thermal stones to never have to cool down, or simply carrying a watering can and a thermal stone are all extremely convenient methods with very little downtime that are vastly more time-efficient and cheaper than these dishes. You could even bundle thermal stones, which does require some micromanagement, but these dishes have to be bundled as well after mass-producing since they spoil (and unwrapped constantly if you don’t carry a polar bearger bin) so they aren’t better in that aspect either. You only really make these dishes because of the reward of working towards a luxury item, but that doesn’t make them useful.

IMO these dishes need twice as much buff duration alongside Warly’s double buff duration. This would make characters able to have the effect active for an entire summer or winter with 12 of these instead of 24 and Warly himself would only need 6, a much more reasonable amount that would actually make them an attractive alternative to insulation or thermal stones while making them significantly more convenient.

 

Volt Goat Jelly: This dish is pretty much non-existent in the early game and arguably even the mid game due to the insane RNG factor of volt goat horns and scarcity of volt goat herds, as well as its max potential being locked behind rain that isn’t consistent until spring. That said, the double duration suggestion for Warly would make this dish much more flexible, especially towards the early to mid-game, as you’d no longer need 2 volt goat horns just to solo one boss, since a 10 minute duration would give you plenty of time even if the world isn’t wet. This dish will be further discussed in the next section of this post.

 

Spices:

I would first like to suggest increasing the base buff duration of spices from 4 minutes to 5, to make them consistent with the buff duration of Warly’s buff dishes. I’m not sure why this discrepancy exists as it makes it awkward to have to apply pepper to another dish just to refresh 1 minute of the buff or just give up on it for that entire minute.

Pepper spice: This spice suffers from being an absolute hell to obtain in the first autumn, with a roughly 2% chance from either catcoons or random seeds, meaning you’re not obtaining any significant amount of this spice for potentially many hours. However, with a 10 minute buff duration for Warly himself, plus indirect buffs that will be discussed in the next section, this spice would become much more useful and flexible and I think it’d be in a good spot without further changes.

 

Honey spice: This spice is fine as is, but it does have some flexibility issues since you’re really only encouraged to pop it before an extended chopping or mining session, such as during a ruins clear. This makes me think that I would really like it if spices could be crafted and applied to dishes without the need of the grinding mill or seasoning station. There’s a fear that this might make those structures redundant, but I think this could be implemented in many ways and still significantly improve the character without resulting in that issue. For example, the grinding mill could craft spices in bulk at a discounted price, and the seasoning station could be changed to be able to apply spices to entire stacks of crock pot dishes. Another alternative would be to make the craftable spices smaller versions of sorts that last for a minute and are cheaper to make, thereby making them much more useful in scenarios where you don’t need several minutes of the buff to get value out of it. These suggestions would be perfect for Warly’s skill tree to add IMO, sort of like Wendy’s ectoherbology tree but with spices.

 

Garlic spice: This is going to be the most controversial suggestion in this post, since some people absolutely swear that this spice is powerful, but I just don’t see it that way. Garlic spice is essentially a safety net; if you’re not confident you can survive getting hit a lot this spice will help you, but unfortunately it cannot be used as anything other than a safety net. Yes, damage reduction is essentially reverse healing in a way, but the problem is that garlic is a farm crop, and farm crops are notorious for being mass-producible healing sources, which means garlic is only providing the same benefit all other characters can already get in a roundabout way. Add to that that this spice does not reduce damage taken by your armor, and you essentially get a spice that is useful for very inexperienced players but that doesn’t really provide a resource saving benefit otherwise.

However, @grm9suggested something that I find extremely interesting and could make garlic spice one of the most uniquely useful items in the game. The suggestion is that while active, garlic spice acts as a permanent, invisible 70% damage reduction armor piece, and then it applies the 33% damage reduction on top of that. This does not increase damage reduction any further than what garlic already does when wearing any armor piece better than a grass suit, as damage reduction does not stack, but it does split the durability loss like a 70% armor piece would with your other armor. For example, if you tank a fuelweaver attack (100 damage):

Wearing nothing but a marble suit: 95 damage to marble suit, 5 to health
Wearing a marble suit + football helmet: 51.57 to marble suit, 43.42 to football helm, 5 to health
Wearing a marble suit + football helmet + this hypothetical garlic spice: 36.83 to marble suit, 31 to football helm, 27.14 armor damage gets absorbed by garlic, player takes 3.333 damage

This would give garlic an actual niche as an armor-saving defensive spice without increasing its damage reduction further than it currently does. However, it would have a completely new use alongside that, as the invisible 70% armor combined with the 33% damage reduction would mean that the player would have permanent 80% damage reduction at all times while the spice is active, effectively turning the player that eats it into a diet weremoose for 5 minutes. Some might see this as being too strong, but I think it would be an incredibly unique perk, allowing players to comfortably use combinations of gear during fights that might be too risky to use otherwise, most notably the enlightened crown and magiluminescence, which would leave you without equipment slots for armor (besides the shield of terror). Wigfrid can already give players 80% damage reduction for dirt cheap, so I honestly think an alternative like this could be incredibly refreshing to see and give Warly an unexpected new upside for servers with lots of players and no pig skin around.

 

Salt crystals: These would become redundant if my food buff idea got implemented, and frankly they’re kind of not used by anyone either way since all they provide is a tiny buff to healing, so I propose something completely unique instead to give to this spice: Allow any dishes seasoned with this spice to never spoil, effectively giving Warly an interesting alternative to bundle wraps that doesn’t require micromanagement, and which frankly fits the theme of salt much more than the odd healing buff they currently give.

 

Other buffs I would like to see: I think the skill tree would be an incredible opportunity to allow Warly to select dishes made with boss drops for unique effects. Stuff like using the shadow atrium to create a dish that grants immunity to shadow creatures like the bone helm, a dish with royal jelly to grant the bee queen crown effect without having to wear it, etc. However, one buff in particular I think would be really cool to see on Warly would be a speed-increasing spice that can also be fed to beefalo, making Warly unique as the only character that can get a speed boost while riding one. I think this dish would fit him more than anything else because of his jack-of-all-trades nature, giving him a unique tool to explore the world faster. These are just random suggestions though.

The player has a notorious lack of control over accessing his upsides

Spoiler

This section is going to be very short because this point is very obvious: Warly is incredibly reliant on the tortuous RNG of farm crops for many of his dishes and spices, and arguably his most useful dish, volt goat jelly, relies on the insane RNG of volt goat herds and volt goat horns, which are only dropped 25% of the time whenever you kill a volt goat.

To be clear, I’m not saying every character needs to have their max potential guaranteed from Day 1, and obviously there are some characters like Wanda or Wortox that benefit much more from certain world generations, but the problem with Warly is that pretty much all of his desirable upsides are locked behind a brick wall of RNG that the player has no agency over. It’s not fun for most people to have your upsides locked behind hours of RNG before you have the privilege of using them, and this limits skill expression because being an experienced Warly player doesn’t mean anything when the game doesn’t give you permission to use the upsides that you picked the character for.

The solution to the volt goat horns problem is quite simple and I don’t need to dwell on it for too long because many others have suggested the exact same thing, even before the skill trees were a thing: Give Warly an “accomplished butcher” tree that allows him to get rare drops from mobs more often when he kills them. This obviously means extra chances for volt goat horns, possibly even a guaranteed one every certain period of time, but this would also include extra monster meat and silk drops from spiders, more pig skin drops from pigs, more tentacle spots from tentacles, etc. The sky's the limit for this branch so I really hope the developers listen to the community on this one.

As for the crops problem, my solution is pretty straight forward: Allow Warly to start with a seed packet and allow the player to pick what seeds to start with via the skill tree. The seed packet would act as a gift wrap in that the seeds in it wouldn’t start to spoil until it’s opened, thereby giving Warly players a ton of flexibility to start their farms. This addresses most of the problems with the dishes I talked about in the previous section: Warly players would now have the freedom to start runs with onions and tomatoes to start mass producing Moqueca for their team, they might want to immediately produce garlic spice or pepper spice, they might want to just rely on chili salad for heat as early as possible, etc.

Of course, some other farming related perks would go perfectly alongside this idea. Letting crops planted by Warly to grow faster even outside of their preferred seasons would give Warly players more freedom, and maybe even giving him a perk to have a chance to get an extra seed when feeding vegetables to birds (like it used to be before RWYS) would make it easier for him to multiply seeds in the early game rather than being forced to wait for them to grow. When playing solo, you can obtain a stack of whatever crop you want in the first autumn if you’re fast at building the celestial portal and swap to Wicker for applied horticulture, and I think if Warly was able to obtain similar results without character swapping this could be incredibly satisfying to pull off.

That’s the end of my analysis, sorry if at any point I came off as being rude or snarky, I’m simply trying to explain the issues I have with the character as best as I can in a way that can be understood and that serves as helpful feedback for the developers once they start work on Warly’s skill tree. I really want Warly to be good because I think he has insane potential, so I’m hoping he’ll get the Walter treatment and become an incredibly fun and unique character once the skill tree rolls around. Either way I’m excited to see what the developers settle on even if it isn’t exactly like what I suggested. Feel free to share your thoughts as well.

[ShadowDuelist]

I’d add that the fact that most early game accesible biomes only have berries and carrots, and this is a dated mechanic, inherited from the original don’t starve.

It would make the world feel more “alive” and it would help warly indirectly if different plants grew in the usual old biomes naturally (EG: you will find naturally growing peppers near DF, the pigmen’s farms will have assorted vegetables, you can find onions and potatoes near spider forests, etc)
 

 

[WilsonHiggs]

I agree  and im glad to see someone suggesting giving a stat bonus when eating different foods but making the downside more effective. Simply giving the stat boost just removes his downside because the reason you describe but if they increase the downside the result would be a more interesting character

Also i agree on the food buffs

 

50 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

 

Grim Galette

understand that some people would like to imagine there are interesting clutch uses of this item, such as giving it to a Wormwood buddy when his health is low for him to recover sanity from planting stuff or whatever, but I’ve never seen these types of situations expressed as anything other than hypotheticals

Not saying that i disagree with you suggestion but i have used in this scenario outside of the paper and is fun. Ofc is very niche to be really useful but ey, we got a lot of stacks of living logs :,)

12 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I’d add that the fact that most early game accesible biomes only have berries and carrots, and this is a dated mechanic, inherited from the original don’t starve.

It would make the world feel more “alive” and it would help warly indirectly if different plants grew in the usual old biomes naturally (EG: you will find naturally growing peppers near DF, the pigmen’s farms will have assorted vegetables, you can find onions and potatoes near spider forests, etc)
 

 

Yes, if birds pop seeds of all kings why there are only few veggies?

Also there are the saladmanders which are mutated dragonfruits but you never see this fruit outside of a player base 

[Cheggf]

It took awhile to read it all, but you were absolutely spitting. Every single word you said is extremely agreeable. I never really put much thought into a Warly rework, but what you've said has put mine to shame. All I had ever thought was "Let me combine pepper & garlic spices into one that does both as a QoL thing, give him 2x duration on all food buffs like his own and also mushcake, do something about his hunger so it encourages variety instead of cheesing, and do something about his three 'portable' things not really being that portable since nobody ever carries them all around (maybe let us combine them together into 1 item?)". You've made such an incredibly fun sounding idea for the entire character, I'm really hoping Klei reads this and takes inspiration from it if not just ripping it off verbatim.

The only thing I even slightly disagree with is

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

Additionally, this would open up interesting interactions with dishes that Warly would otherwise have no interest in using: Consider trail mix, a dish with 12.5 hunger that restores 30 health

I think trail mix is pretty good on Warly. Like you said you can eat dishes a few times without really getting penalty. The buffs you've proposed for it would be welcomed, but I like to make this. Making three of them is super cheap and recovers 81 health with the fast eat animation, and 81 health is a ton if you're dodging & wearing armor. 

[Reiko24]

1 hour ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I’d add that the fact that most early game accesible biomes only have berries and carrots, and this is a dated mechanic, inherited from the original don’t starve.

It would make the world feel more “alive” and it would help warly indirectly if different plants grew in the usual old biomes naturally (EG: you will find naturally growing peppers near DF, the pigmen’s farms will have assorted vegetables, you can find onions and potatoes near spider forests, etc)
 

 

Yeah it is kinda weird to only see berries and carrots, when birds drop all kinds of seeds on the ground.
There should be some wild variants of the crops growing around the map.

 

Edit: Getting dragonfruit too early by just getting it from a wild source would be too strong, so I suggest:

give a visual indication that dragonfruit are connected to dragonfly (fe. Make them grow inside the lava ponds, unable to be picked by the Player)

dragonfruits and dragonfruit seeds would drop from Dragonfly

[Catuna_]

3 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

Warly is a character who flourishes in the late game. Not every character needs to have upsides that are accessible from Day 1.
I agree, and that is not what this thread is about. I'm not asking for Warly to consistently be able to mass-produce volt goat jelly from the second he spawns in; I understand that progression feels good and it's great that DST has characters that are more focused towards that. This isn't one of the problems I'm talking about.

I feel like people who make this argument should also recognize that every character flourishes in the late-game in the sense that you'd eventually have a surplus of resources as any character. At that point your character choice doesn't matter outside of the convenience that the player wants to benefit from... And Warly is anti-convenience in a lot of ways.

8 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

Additionally, the statement that Warly is simply “better in a team” is pretty much just wrong by every measurable metric. Most people would point towards his ability to buff his teammates, but damage multipliers inherently have diminishing returns; the jump from x1 to x2 far exceeds the time and resource savings of any other jump; even if you give 2 teammates volt goat jelly before a fight, that only turns a x3 damage multiplier into a x4 multiplier if the target isn’t wet, a negligible damage increase considering bosses tend to melt with more than 2 or 3 players already.

I think that people should know that this applies to Warly's other buffs as well, as you start to experience diminishing returns when it comes to the benefits of garlic's innate damage reduction due to the short duration of boss fights with 3+ players, or honey's faster working speed the more players on a server, especially true when you have characters like Maxwell or whatnot, or even solo with armored/regular bearger to do all your logging needs.
cool graph by eberferatu i think its cool look at it

 

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

Volt Goat Jelly: This dish is pretty much non-existent in the early game and arguably even the mid game due to the insane RNG factor of volt goat horns and scarcity of volt goat herds, as well as its max potential being locked behind rain that isn’t consistent until spring. That said, the double duration suggestion for Warly would make this dish much more flexible, especially towards the early to mid-game, as you’d no longer need 2 volt goat horns just to solo one boss, since a 10 minute duration would give you plenty of time even if the world isn’t wet. This dish will be further discussed in the next section of this post.

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

The solution to the volt goat horns problem is quite simple and I don’t need to dwell on it for too long because many others have suggested the exact same thing, even before the skill trees were a thing: Give Warly an “accomplished butcher” tree that allows him to get rare drops from mobs more often when he kills them. This obviously means extra chances for volt goat horns, possibly even a guaranteed one every certain period of time, but this would also include extra monster meat and silk drops from spiders, more pig skin drops from pigs, more tentacle spots from tentacles, etc. The sky's the limit for this branch so I really hope the developers listen to the community on this one.

I heavily agree with this, and I don't want to dispute it. But I did want to add that the player is able to swap to Wigfrid in order to duplicate horns via the elding spear. It's not something I did because at the time Wigfrid's tree wasn't out yet, but if I were to play Warly again I definitely would as just two horns would allow you to get 4 extra off of a construction amulet and a deconstruction staff accounting for mooncaller, and these are two items I personally always make at least one of in the early game.


This is the bit where I rant about how much I hated playing Warly and why, I may just end up repeating what Guille said in a lot of ways. However, I just want to express my opinion in the form of someone that is genuinely open to trying characters, and what Warly's design, numbers, etc. feel like to me when I play him.

In general, Warly just feels like a dated character design that tries so desperately to inconvenience the player just because he can reach the funny 3x damage number. Being unable to eat raw ingredients, a downside that was a lot more mellow in shipwrecked, is a huge pain. It means that Warly can't eat blue caps, green caps, cactus flesh, cooked tomatoes, cooked tomatoes, honey, pumpkins, cooked koalefant trunk, meat, cooked monster meat and seeds.

The strength of farming generally relies on the crops being very good when eaten cooked, but Warly can't do this. Instead he tries to entice the player with spices and dishes that require a specific set of crop ingredients (see Moqueca requiring an onion and a tomato in specific) when there's other dishes that are a lot more general (Tallscotch eggs for example) that are literally better. Warly's dishes that do this are quite frankly universally mediocre. Asparagazpacho, Grim galette, Hot Dragon Chili Salad, Potato soufflé make up the majority of Warly's unique dishes yet are all so... bad... Which genuinely just leaves you with volt goat jelly and the occasional fish cordon bleu (which unfortunately becomes redundant in rifts), glowberry mousse and freshfruit crepe. Bone bouillon isn't bad, but I just frankly didn't use it over the usual dishes I make as other characters probably because I play solo.

Warly's seasonings are locked behind two pointless middlemen, being the seasoning stations. There is no reason that Warly can't just craft seasonings by hand or drag a mortar over seasonings to grind them, and apply them from his inventory by dragging the seasoning over them. This would make sense if other people could use Warly's stations, but they can't. Oh and they're also portable, for some reason. Warly's crockpot should be usable by anyone, they could just make it so that only Warly can dismantle it or make unique dishes from it.

Eventually, I realized spices are rather pointless to go after. 1.5x (2.5x) > 1.8x (3x) damage just isn't a big enough boost to justify the grind, and Garlic doesn't preserve armor, making it really mediocre for players to eat due to the insane armor values DST has, and thus the insane food healing efficiency characters have as a result (it's aight for beefalos). One can argue that Warly benefits from this because he heals less on dish repeats, but all this really boils down to is that 5 pierogi/fishsticks for Warly is the equivalent of 4 for other characters, both of which are plenty for more experienced players. Warly's healing system is also quite literally obsolete when you get jellybeans, which kills any need for any other healing dish. Buffs only last for half a day, meaning that you really can't really use the combat buff spices reasonably for day to day situations. 1.2x damage would allow Warly to deal 51 damage with a Pick/axe which would be great because of its durability... But that's only for half a day. It just feels like I have to work so hard and wait for the stars to align just to do what I could've done if I just picked Wolfgang. Honey crystals are nice though, no complaints past the annoying stations.

When it comes to Warly's upsides, I think most people would immediately bring up volt goat jelly. And I mean... It's good. But I also found myself not really wanting to wait for spring just to beat X boss, so for a lot of times where I had the horns I would just end up fighting with the 1.5x damage mod. It's a good damage boost, and there's no real reason why you shouldn't try to go for it, but it doesn't really reach its peak until a fair bit of time has passed and I feel like that's not fair for Warly because even with 1.5x damage, other characters still have much better combat. It really begs the question of why I should wait for spring to fight Bee Queen when I could just, fight her right now. I don't really think that season-conditional damage boosts are a great thing to have as what you could honestly consider to be Warly's only good upside. On the topic of combat, Warly is a lot worse at utilizing the crown vs other characters only really being better than Wortox who suffers a constant 50% food penalty. Can't eat cooked cactus flesh, green caps and banana shakes stop refilling your sanity completely just from the third banana shake. Not unusable by any means, just very annoying...

also he can cook food faster on a campfire but he cant eat it lol, used to be ever so slightly useful until they let you put raw birchnuts into the crockpot

And that's basically what Warly boils down to for me. I think that the biggest issue is that he's just so boring. His challenge is more of just actively inconveniencing the player and making them solve those problems in the laziest way ever, encouraging you to interact with the farming system only to barely benefit out of it. All for the reward of... A bad Wolfgang pretty much.

 

[Nini voovoo]

I think right now, Warlys biggest problem is that his design doesnt make you want to play warly, his design makes you just play with a warly. i hope his skilltree will give him some unique features that are good and makes you want to BE the warly in the team.

[WilsonHiggs]

11 minutes ago, Nini voovoo said:

I think right now, Warlys biggest problem is that his design doesnt make you want to play warly, his design makes you just play with a warly. i hope his skilltree will give him some unique features that are good and makes you want to BE the warly in the team.

Have to disagree.  I love playing as warly bacause how his early game makes you think about non used healing dishes to rush ruins or bosses, how his progression makes you stronger the more you invest into food farms, how his thermal dishes makes seasons confortable at a cost and how his downside makes you think how you engage with "long fighting period kind of content" like the ruins or fighting a bunch of celestial champions

I think that, as op said, with better buffs (longer periods of time for the thermal and glow berry not giving you a super small light radius) plus a more impactful downside this character will be way funnier. I doubt he will be popular because the majority of players like raw free power according to statistics but it will be better for those who enjoys him 

[Cheggf]

23 minutes ago, Nini voovoo said:

I think right now, Warlys biggest problem is that his design doesnt make you want to play warly, his design makes you just play with a warly. i hope his skilltree will give him some unique features that are good and makes you want to BE the warly in the team.

With how weak his upsides are I'd much rather be him for his aesthetics and interesting quirks over having his as an ally.

Edit: Actually on second thought yeah I would like him as a teammate since multiplayer makes the game too easy anyways. 

[Edible Coal]

2 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

With how weak his upsides are I'd much rather be him for his aesthetics and interesting quirks over having his as an ally.

Edit: Actually on second thought yeah I would like him as a teammate since multiplayer makes the game too easy anyways. 

the best way to play warly is to be play as someone else that know how to play as one and make him your own crafting station

[Mysterious box]

 

3 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

This section is going to be very short because this point is very obvious: Warly is incredibly reliant on the tortuous RNG of farm crops for many of his dishes and spices, and arguably his most useful dish, volt goat jelly, relies on the insane RNG of volt goat herds and volt goat horns, which are only dropped 25% of the time whenever you kill a volt goat.

To be clear, I’m not saying every character needs to have their max potential guaranteed from Day 1, and obviously there are some characters like Wanda or Wortox that benefit much more from certain world generations, but the problem with Warly is that pretty much all of his desirable upsides are locked behind a brick wall of RNG that the player has no agency over. It’s not fun for most people to have your upsides locked behind hours of RNG before you have the privilege of using them, and this limits skill expression because being an experienced Warly player doesn’t mean anything when the game doesn’t give you permission to use the upsides that you picked the character for.

This right here is my biggest problem with Warly and why I struggle so much to commit to him long term despite loving the concept he introduces...

[GetNerfedOn]

• I'll try not to comment on balance given I actively ignore it in my constant pursuit of farming-related insanity and sentiment-driven masochism, but I'll weigh in that thematically Warly as a chef does not translate mechanically into the game well at all.

Part of this is his being tied to the farming mechanic which seems like a deliberate decision given potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlics, asparagus, and peppers were added alongside Warly, whose perks and dishes mostly revolve around producing these ingredients. This was a decision made prior to the advent of RWYS and it was far, far more inconvenient to play as Warly while having to contend with the old farming system. RWYS only removed one of the steps to Warly's pick and swap cycle (Wickerbottom spamming old Applied Hort).

What I'm getting at is that as a chef character it makes far less sense for Warly's dishes to revolve solely around the vegetables brought by his update instead of experimenting with the already existing and newly added foods in the game. So much creative ideas abound with Warly experimenting with other ingredients; heck, Bone Bouillon, Grim Galette and Volt Goat Chaud-Froid are steps in the right direction in terms of Warly taking apparently improbable things and turning them into dishes.

We need more of these improbable things that may be far more accessible or enjoyable to get ingame (Batilisk Beefalo wings? A Lureplant themed exclusive? Fish specific dishes if you're out at sea akin to Tropical Bouillabaise? Amberosia candy? More Nightmare Fuel dishes), instead of continuing to rely farm crops as Warly's options. Hence, I quite like the boss drop dish suggestion.

And I think we need mechanics like the suggested butcher perks to help really sell the idea that Warly's a chef who knows just how to use everything he's got on hand. Perhaps the ability to retrieve seeds from crops without the use of a Birdcage for one, which is convenient and would work really well with ShadowDuelist's suggestion. 

• A pain point to note as Warly is that he has no convenient/reliable sanity control barring clothes and decreasing gains from sanity dishes, and especially no reliable sanity decrease methods until NM Amulet/Deserter.
• Also as usual I'll chime in and say that the character transition from SW to DST is really annoying because Warly still treats foods he can't eat in DST as not only edible but also delicious.

I agree with the dish changes but there's a point I'd raise for

3 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

Monster Tartare: Simply a punishment dish at the moment, but if my suggestion of extra stats on the first consumption got implemented this dish would receive an interesting niche, as if I’m not mistaken the first consumption of dishes in shipwrecked actually reduces negative stats as well (please correct me if I’m wrong here). This would make it reduce less health and sanity while buffing its already fairly high hunger, making it an actually decent option for Warly players to complete a food cycle when they only have monster meat around.

From my understanding from the wiki negative stats from crock pot dishes are affected while ingredients/firepit cooked have an increased penalty instead.

However the reason you'd not notice in shipwrecked is that 1.) I can't recall a Crock pot dish that decrease stats anyway lmao. At first glance at the wiki I found: Taaffy, Powdercake, Gummy Cake, Monster Lasagna, Coffee and Shark Fin Soup, most of which reduce a negligible amount of stats or are THE punishment dish 2.) Monster Tartare didn't hurt you at all and you'd cook that over lasaga anyway.

I've advocated to restoring it to its prior state of not damaging stats at all. I can see why its current status as a punishment dish stands but it sucks to have it got nerfed on in transition. (Funnily enough, Monster Tartare's quote is one of the few that makes more sense in DST than in Shipwrecked.)

As a throwaway suggestion one could convert its health damage into sanity damage (total 40) and give him the sanity subtraction tool he needs.

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I think trail mix is pretty good on Warly. Like you said you can eat dishes a few times without really getting penalty. The buffs you've proposed for it would be welcomed, but I like to make this. Making three of them is super cheap and recovers 81 health with the fast eat animation, and 81 health is a ton if you're dodging & wearing armor. 

Trail Mix is good for any character barring Wigfrid but you have to deal with

[WilsonHiggs]

7 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

• A pain point to note as Warly is that he has no convenient/reliable sanity control barring clothes and decreasing gains from sanity dishes, and especially no reliable sanity decrease methods until NM Amulet/Deserter.
• Also as usual I'll chime in and say that the character transition from SW to DST is really annoying because Warly still treats foods he can't eat in DST as not only edible but also delicious.

Not having easy access to sanity regeneration (ice cream and jelly salad exists tho) and being uneable to eat ingredients are 2 of the best things about the character 

Specially not being able to eat ingredients makes him early game interesting instead of being another character that can rush most content by munching 80 blue caps easily accessible in the caves. Is the only character, with the company of wormwood,that makes you think about how to recover hp to rush stuff

[GetNerfedOn]

8 minutes ago, WilsonHiggs said:

Not having easy access to sanity regeneration (ice cream and jelly salad exists tho) 

I agree to this point in terms of Warly being a challenge; I'm only remarking that the lack of sanity control/early sanity decrease is a pain point as and perhaps Warly should have a dish to lower sanity even if its affected by the food penalty

12 minutes ago, WilsonHiggs said:

being uneable to eat ingredients

For this i'll clarify: i mean Warly's quotes. For instance:

 Whether you quantify this as truly misleading or just immersion breaking it certainly counts as both to me (especially on the cusp of ingame death)

[WilsonHiggs]

10 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

I agree to this point in terms of Warly being a challenge; I'm only remarking that the lack of sanity control/early sanity decrease is a pain point as and perhaps Warly should have a dish to lower sanity even if its affected by the food penalty

While i agree, and maybe they can add another dish with NF as ingredient, he and wigfrid are the only characters that have an use for the mushcake since is useful for the very 1st celestial champion fight (in the following one the player simply wears the crown or the dumb BS helmet and forgets about the entire enlightment mechanic...)

[Edible Coal]

4 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

-A portable crock pot sounds amazing in theory, but in practice it’s insufferable to have to stop and stare at your screen for what feels like minutes at a time just to have the privilege of eating, which other characters don’t have to go through. Yes, it does feel rewarding when you plan ahead in such a way that you cook your food in advance while doing other actions like mining or fighting, but this is the exception rather than the norm. Please let us use the crock pot in the inventory, this would go a long way towards making Warly feel less awkward to play and further incentivize his intended nomadic gameplay for all types of players.

i would kill for a crock pot that works in your inventory

[Maxil20]

This is a very good post. I agree with just about every merit you said and I hope they implement similar results. I only want to highlight one thing in particular:

7 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

Glow Berry Mousse: Hands-free lighting sounds cool, but if you actually try to use this dish you’ll quickly notice its light radius quickly diminishes to the point where it’s less than a magiluminescence, and that makes you have to constantly reapply it to get the bigger light radius.

Personally, my biggest issue is the fact it always diminishes the moment you eat it. I get that this isn’t inherently exclusive to the dish (lanterns and the like do it as well), but it feels especially bad since the light radius is pretty subpar to begin with, and only gets worse overtime. It’s to the point I honey spice my mousse to remind myself to eat another one when I notice the text since it’s already diminished considerably by that point.

I personally want it so the dish doesn’t start degrading the light radius, until the dish duration is down to 4 minutes or less (the equivalent of a normal glow berry, if I remember correctly). This in my opinion would make it a lot more flexible, as having 12 minutes of subpar lantern light feels much better than a dish that gives 1 minute of subpar lantern light and only gets worse from there. With the hypothetical Warly buffs it would even mean Warly could net 3.5 days of workable light, which I feel would make it an excellent ruins-clearing or general cave exploration dish, with having some novelty during Winter’s long nights toward the middle of the season. It would be something I would love to see and hopefully shine a better light (heh…) on a dish I always liked the concept of, but wasn’t too amazed in actual gameplay and especially once you get an enlightened crown.

[Guille6785]

7 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

Warly is very clearly meant to be a character who encourages cycling through a variety of crock pot dishes to avoid repetition while gathering ingredients along the way instead of being restricted to a static crock pot location. Have the developers ever explicitly said this is Warly’s intended playstyle? Maybe, it’s 1 am and I’m not in the mood to look through dozens of threads from 2019, but this is at least how the majority of people who’ve never played Warly would describe his character fantasy as.

Update: I can confirm this was the developer intention for the character judging by how they spoke about his downside during the rhymes with play stream for his update (thank you to whoever reupload this one)

This is pretty much as good a reason as any to justify a small rework to his food memory system to make it more in line with the original vision the devs had for him

[WilsonHiggs]

46 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

Update: I can confirm this was the developer intention for the character judging by how they spoke about his downside during the rhymes with play stream for his update (thank you to whoever reupload this one)

This is pretty much as good a reason as any to justify a small rework to his food memory system to make it more in line with the original vision the devs had for him

I think they overestimate how much healing is needed per fight. Also didn't made the math about hunger. 10% loss is nothing for neither hunger and health

[DegenerateFurry]

I'm not gonna quote since it's a very long post and I can't be bothered, but I definitely agree about Warly's downside. I've played with a doubled-length version of the penalty via a personal mod and that's enough to make it so you can't just near-starve yourself and cram high-hunger foods or even really alternate them, but something more intricate like you've suggested, especially if it makes low-hunger foods more viable, would be much better. 

Everyone agrees about the Accomplished Butcher/RNG-reduction stuff. I think that's unquestionably going to be added because it just seems so obvious to everyone and killing 10 voltgoats to get 1 horn because of bad luck isn't ever fun.

The starting seed packet one is a neat idea, and it's one I've had before myself, but how about we make farming-related dishes more efficient in a different way: by making it so that Warly can just double the output of farms by using a chef's knife to minimize waste? You pick the Chef's Knife perk from the skill tree, you get the ability to craft a chef's knife with... I dunno, a stick, a piece of gold (because it has to be fancy) and two flint. The base perk lets you chop your crops into chopped versions, which have half the hunger value individually, but are the same as their normal variants in the crock pot. Maybe there's an additional perk for meat (not eggs). This'd mean you'd get twice the asparagus/dragonfruit/onions/peppers/garlic/tomatoes/etc for dish purposes, but not for spice purposes. Also, perhaps the final perk in this branch is the Accomplished Butcher perk? If you get the killing blow with the chef's knife, you get the better odds/extra stuff. 
This could be in addition to or an alternative branch to the seed packet idea, and it'd let you synergize more with having a teammate who's doing the farming for you (since Warly isn't and shouldn't be an obligate farmer if you have a Wormwood or Wickerbottom who's doing it already).

I largely agree with the spice suggestions except for the one about being able to spice dishes without the station. The station's portable, so I don't really get the issue. Also, semi-unrelated, but the salt mechanics you've suggested should also be something you can apply to jerky (maybe through an upgraded drying rack). 

[lowercase skye]

All great suggestions! And very insightful into how different Warly's playstyle is from the hypothetical one that people talk about, I've rarely played him since he was released, so I just assumed a lot of the things people say held more truth than they do. Kind of heartbreaking to know that my being unable to find uses for the Grim Galette wasn't a personal failing, lol.

[chloraei]

Based on how Klei has leaned into character lore for previous skill trees (IE Wigfrids beefallo branch and Wurts mosquito branch) I’m predicting that Warly is going to have some kind of fishing/sailing perks since he started in shipwrecked. Maybe he could make some kind of fish bait to spawn schools of fish or wobsters that he could catch.

Otherwise, I think it would be good if Warly was able to craft new dishes with items that are normally inedible. For instance, he could make escargot with slurtle slime, or perhaps combine glommer goop, phlegm, and wet gloop to make spewmoni (like spumone lol)

[Cheggf]

4 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

This is a very good post. I agree with just about every merit you said and I hope they implement similar results. I only want to highlight one thing in particular:

Personally, my biggest issue is the fact it always diminishes the moment you eat it. I get that this isn’t inherently exclusive to the dish (lanterns and the like do it as well), but it feels especially bad since the light radius is pretty subpar to begin with, and only gets worse overtime. It’s to the point I honey spice my mousse to remind myself to eat another one when I notice the text since it’s already diminished considerably by that point.

I personally want it so the dish doesn’t start degrading the light radius, until the dish duration is down to 4 minutes or less (the equivalent of a normal glow berry, if I remember correctly). This in my opinion would make it a lot more flexible, as having 12 minutes of subpar lantern light feels much better than a dish that gives 1 minute of subpar lantern light and only gets worse from there. With the hypothetical Warly buffs it would even mean Warly could net 3.5 days of workable light, which I feel would make it an excellent ruins-clearing or general cave exploration dish, with having some novelty during Winter’s long nights toward the middle of the season. It would be something I would love to see and hopefully shine a better light (heh…) on a dish I always liked the concept of, but wasn’t too amazed in actual gameplay and especially once you get an enlightened crown.

Especially with what's probably going to happen where Warly gets two glow berries like Walter does, that would make the dish very good on him.

[oregu]

Whew, that took a while to read. I play Warly about as much as any other character and I'm inclined to agree with most of your changes. His kit is underwhelming all around and a lot if not all his items need a buff in some way. but the main gripe with me is still unaddressed. I do like him for a challenge by pursuing his actual goal of variety, but I don't believe he has to be a challenge.

My main concern with Warly is that his signature signature portable items are single-function and has no real reason to be portable except the crockpot.

Crockpots:
My suggestion to rebalance portable crockpots to synergize with other players better:
- Size them as large as normal crockpots and let any player cook in them. Portable crockpots being smaller is not a benefit (and looks awkward imo), and will let you comfortably upgrade regular crockpots in bases.
- Provide 10% faster speed to all players and 33% faster speed to Warly (or whatever his skill allows).

- Let the crockpots have any skin a normal crockpot can have. I dont think you have to make a new skin entirely, as people who are curious of whether it's a portable crockpot can look at the name.
- Items in portable crockpots will be kept even when undeployed and in your inventory and will spoil slower (maybe 25%)
- Make portable crockpots cost 3 doodads, 4 charcoal, and 4 twigs.
- Please make them fireproof. For crying out loud, cooking something in your portable crockpot only to discover it somehow burned is one of the most devastating feelings imaginable. As an upgrade to the crockpot (already something thats supposed to take hot temperatures), there's not much of a reason for it to be flammable.
- Let them be placed on top of enemies so you could use it as a zoning tool in combat; Make it so you cant run between two portable crockpots placed close together and take longer to destroy. Maybe even make it so you can even deploy two portable items at once and retrieve them up faster if this is done so this intention becomes more clear.

Other stations:
Now onto the other portable items. Carrying around spices materials and the other stations with you is way too much inventory room compared to what you could do otherwise. You are incentivized to leave the portable grinder/spice station at base and mass produce spiced dishes and bundle them instead of bringing them with you.

- Ability to make them fireproof, larger, and more durable as well

Grinder:
- An ability to craft grindmill items in your inventory if you have a grindmill in it (grinding will also be faster if you have the station placed with this ability)
- Ability to have yield more (no-brainer)

- Ability to hold spices in your portable grinder (i guess more slots come with more ability points)

- Ability to "smell" spice sources nearby. You can find salt stacks, bee hives (beequeen first if her hive has honey in it), For hollow stumps, you will find a path where you will find a catcoon who will give you a pepper seed or a garlic seed on its first trade.  Or create something new entirely that drops pepper/garlic seeds but is still somewhat hard to get. (I would say let hot saladmanders  drop pepper seeds and for something that has garlic seeds to be found somewhere near toadstool) It doesnt have to be an infinite source, just try not to make obtaining his ingredients completely locked behind RNG.

Spice Station:
- You can add up to 3 spices into a dish (more when you upgrade your spice skill).
- Left clicking a spice station lets you open and close the station, you can put dishes in while it's open. Right clicking a spice station while it's open will make you spice the dish, right clicking the spice station while it's closed (regardless of whether it has a dish or not) lets you change your spice configuration.
- Spices will have three effects instead of one:
Honey     Primary: Work increase         Secondary: Sanity delta increase     Tertiary: Negative sanity aura resistance (up to 50%)
Spice    Primary: Attack increase     Secondary: Cold resistance         Tertiary: Movement speed (5% max)
Salt    Primary: Perish slower         Secondary: Health delta increase     Tertiary: Increase potency of other healing sources (up to 25%)
Garlic    Primary: Defence increase     Secondary: Hunger delta increase    Tertiary: Heat resistance
The amount of spices indicate what effects a dish will give
1 spice: Primary effect (+2)
2 spices: Primary (+6) Secondary (+2)
3 spices: Primary (+9) Secondary (+4) Tertiary (+1)
4 spices: Primary (+12) Secondary (+6) Tertiary (+2)
5 spices: Primary (+16) Secondary (+9) Tertiary (+4)
6 spices: Primary (+20) Secondary (+12) Tertiary (+6)
7 spices: Primary (+25) Secondary (+16) Tertiary (+9)
The "main" spice for a dish will be whatever spice it has most, or if an even amount, whatever was put in last. The main spice of a dish will be a flat benefit to the dish, usually the most powerful buffs.
- Another issue is how you are incentivized to powcakes instead of any actual food dish because of how long it takes to expire or mass bundle spiced dishes. Have a "freshly prepared" period where spiced dishes are a lot more potent (timer ignores whatever it's contained in). This can last up to a day.

I have a little sketch of what the spice configuration UI might look like, but it could be improved on somewhat.

I've had this idea in my head for a while, but I know it's not the best it can be so if you see something wrong with it feel free to suggest changes.

[loopuleasa]

all aboard the early warly anticipation train