Wormwood craft branch rework.

[Walrusst]

A little rework of wormwoods crafting branch. This is a branch branch which should should encourage small dips into it because it makes wormwoods small time investing in crafting more viable, as most wormwood builds have a hard time freeing up even a single skill due to how long his skill lines are. Needing 4-5 skills to use a branch, but also requiring a skill point to invest in any branch is a harsh cost to pay. (I would be down to make wormwoods first skill a base kit perk, as its a forced skill for all wormwoods so it practically is base kit, but I'll avoid arguing it too much here.)

So branching out the branch like this reduces the cost of most crafting strategies from four down to two or three does a lot to make crafting wormwood a lot more interesting, useful, and less expensive. So wormwoods who  make sacrifices can do interesting crafts. There are two things I need to explain still that aren't self explanatory from the image, so let me get into it.

First is a merge of the berry skills so its not RNG which is useful on a given world, the second is a bit of a weird one that is a new skill:
Seastack Souvenir.

• Learn to duplicate sea sprout starter kits using super growth formula and lichen.
• Sea sprout starter kits can be improved with 8 rocks to add a sea sprout rock to it. This converts the starter kit into a heavy carriable object that can be planted with fewer restrictions.
• Boulder rooted sea sprouts can be planted anywhere sea weed enemies can live, but they can also be planted in fresh water. Sea sprout boulders plug fresh water sources, but can be lifted our of the pond as a heavy object once more.
• Sea weeds grown in fresh water Initially starts enraged, attacking even wormwood, and must be pacified with repeated applications of growth formula, but once its been pacified it becomes a domesticated sea weed that is only hostile to creatures that would attack wormwood while not also being aquatic.
  • Unlike winownas catapults, you can't aggro them on a butterfly patch and watch them farm forever. They aren't willing to act offensively like a catapult.
• Domesticated seaweeds become dormant in the winter, and give lichen in addition to the freshwater barnicles in the cave ponds.
• Domesticated seaweeds must be relocated to to enable to pond to be used for fishing or watering cans once more, but become enraged again if left dry before dying and reverting to being boulders and a starter kit. Watering or fertilizing them delays their enraging.
• Domesticated seaweeds enrage if they go 60 days without being fertilized if no wormwood with seastack souvenir exists, or they are replanted planted in salt water without having been fertilized in the past 20 days (Going feral.)
  
  Alternatively, wormwood can use fertilizer to gather small numbers of seedshells from seaweeds, but domesticated seaweeds are completely passive to everything when not enraged, offering no defense but instead giving a source of a new type of distinct weaponry. Or both because its still a high work to utilize skill so it giving a strong benefit is likely fair.

I just find this concept interesting for letting players utilize a resource I've genuinely never seen get mentioned, and enabling a basing style where people can, with a considerable amount of travel time and effort, terraform frog hell into a home with unique benefits, resources, and defenses.

Now, I will acknowledge that a skill like this might work better as a capstone, as its better than the monkeytail/berries skill in a few ways (Overall power, uniqueness,) but I tried to balance it by requiring more complicated resources, and having greater restrictions on how it may be used (Requiring bodies of water to keep it functional.) I would be cool with discussing ways to improve the rest of the branch, but I was more interested in drafting a replacement for one of the duplicate berries skills that I'm advocating for merging.

[HowlVoid]

Whatever people wanna do with this branch i don't appose it. Because this branch might as well not exist for me.

My biggest gripe is that I only have one other branch I'm forced to use to access saladmanders/carrats/lightbugs.

Its unintuitive for an entire crafting branch to exist alongside "affinity skills", and he's the ONLY character to suffer from this. He has an entire branch dedicated to crafting. A branch that is limited in use, dead weight when not in use, but yet somehow you need them to access skills that can be used daily.

The forced skill is weird too, another issue he alone has. 

I love his skill tree for two specific skill which carry the whole tree. But it certainly feels like they had half-assed ideas with half-assed implementations. 

[Walrusst]

1 minute ago, HowlVoid said:

Whatever people wanna do with this branch i don't appose it. Because this branch might as well not exist for me.

My biggest gripe is that I only have one other branch I'm forced to use to access saladmanders/carrats/lightbugs.

Its unintuitive for an entire crafting branch to exist alongside "affinity skills", and he's the ONLY character to suffer from this. He has an entire branch dedicated to crafting. A branch that is limited in use, dead weight when not in use, but yet somehow you need them to access skills that can be used daily.

The forced skill is weird too, another issue he alone has. 

I love his skill tree for two specific skill which carry the whole tree. But it certainly feels like they had half-assed ideas with half-assed implementations. 

IIRC it was an early tree but I would need to go back and check.
Kleis gotten better at tree design as of late but on most old trees there is a single branch or two thats gone a bit rancid.

I think some people would appreciate having an alternative way as wormwood to get some types of plant based weapons like I offer here (As the idea of being able to turn fertilizer->Seedshells gives wormwood another unique AOE trick.)

[Valase]

25 minutes ago, HowlVoid said:

I love his skill tree for two specific skill which carry the whole tree. But it certainly feels like they had half-assed ideas with half-assed implementations. 

Wormwood skill tree for me is quite "weird" , it has some of the best perks among any skill tree, such as bramble armor, lunar shroom and the rift ones, but  the path to each of those is just forgettable, and while the bloom branch is quite useful, you still end up going a few perks into the lunar shroom branch since you don't have anywhere to put them.

Being very frank, I think that those skills are enough to carry Wormwood while klei decides what to do with the upcoming ones and the ones that have big shortcomings.

[Walrusst]

1 hour ago, Valase said:

Wormwood skill tree for me is quite "weird" , it has some of the best perks among any skill tree, such as bramble armor, lunar shroom and the rift ones, but  the path to each of those is just forgettable, and while the bloom branch is quite useful, you still end up going a few perks into the lunar shroom branch since you don't have anywhere to put them.

Being very frank, I think that those skills are enough to carry Wormwood while klei decides what to do with the upcoming ones and the ones that have big shortcomings.

You know, it would be kinda interesting if wormwoods plant crafts also gave some sort of masteries over these plants as well.
Given other resource crafts in modern trees, or even in wormwoods other branches are like.

A: You can make this.
B: You have the ability to use this better than a lay person.

A: You can eat lune shrooms.
B: Your basic all around powerful food items a powerful weapon that lets you CC whole hordes of enemies for you to vorpal down with your explosions.

A: You can make absurdly fancy armor.
B: You can do sick free bonus area damage if you kite perfectly while wearing it.

A: You can make a unique cheap bandage (Walter.)
B: You bandaging people heals sanity, you are faster AND stronger with medicine.

A: You can make long lasting torches that a quarter of the characters can cook on them too.
B: Its a powerful weapon that CC's for you, does extreme damage.

Sprouting plants would be sort of just a why clone of stonefruit, a base game plant, which wouldn't help so much.
Maybe if wormwood could enrich some of the worse plants to give extra (Including being able to enrich plants that are natural, IE, not placed by wormy.)

• Blooming berry bushes so that the bees can both make honey from them efficiently (The bushes counting for several flowers) and also fertilize the bushes themselves.
  • They do give butterflies, but only when picked and not withered.
• Overgrown juicy berries, these grow extra grass that can be gathered with a razor in addition to the berries, both the grass and the berries use less fertilization when gathered.
  • Being near amphbians partially restores their fertilization, ecosystem services/pest control the frogs provides.
     

Idk what you do with monkey tails.