Difference between survival challenges and chores

[aidancode]

This is... tangentially related to the beta. A lot of people have been commenting in my thread about how we haven't seen any substantial exploration and survival based challenges in a long while and I want to respond to the idea that new survival content just ends up being chores because I think there's a very big difference between chores and survival challenges.

Difference #1: Survival challenges are active considerations; chores are occasional considerations

In DST, you can't just tend to your hunger bar when it gets low and otherwise ignore it. A new player is constantly thinking about how they're going to get and maintain food. Spoilage is a great mechanic because it doesn't just force players to renew their stock of food every once in a while, it makes players actively consider what kinds of foods they can bring with them on a journey. Hunger management is fairly easy for the experienced, so the game builds on it with areas like the ocean and the ruins where it's more difficult (though not impossible) to get food. Players are expected to figure out how to stockpile, figure out what recipes last a long time, figure out how much healing they need to bring around, make all of these decisions because hunger in DST is not a chore, it's a game mechanic that dictates how you play. This point probably doesn't hit as hard with very experienced players, so I'd like them to consider things like weapon durability, materials for crafting armor, and seasons limiting movement as ways the game substantially alters the way you need to think about playing.

Chores are more like acid rain and Wolfgang's mightiness. I want to separate regular rain from acid rain since regular rain still asks that you use an umbrella, rain coat, or eyebrella in one of your oh-so-precious slots. Acid rain pretty much just asks that you set down your umbralla where you're going to get stuff done. Since you can always hold the umbralla with you, there's no strategy. Since using the umbralla doesn't limit your control, it's not something to play around. And the umbralla never breaks if you're just using it for acid rain, so there's no resource worry. Wolfgang's mightiness is similar. Dumbbells are really cheap and only take up one inventory slot. It's just a little meter Wolfgang occasionally needs to maintain that doesn't really offer any meaningful strategy.

TL;DR: By making resources not always attainable, it adds strategy to what to stockpile and creates interesting risks and tradeoffs.

Difference #2: Survival challenges recontextualize the game; chores add to the game

On the surface, hound waves seem like chores. They're just something you occasionally have to deal with and aren't really super active to consider. But really, hound waves heavily recontextualize how the player is meant to interact with the game. Put yourself in the shoes of a new player. You have no reason to fight things. You can farm crops, mine boulders, and chop trees all you want without fighting anything. Then hounds come and you lose a bunch of health. Hounds force the player to always have part of their mind on their combat preparedness. Hound waves are the very first way DST teaches us to care about the combat and it quite literally kickstarts the entire game.

Compare this to great depths worms. They just sorta exist on top of an existing feature and don't provide much of a different experience except being really tanky and really annoying to deal damage to. They don't make you play differently, they're just there.

 

Survival Challenges:

• Caves
• Ruins
• Ocean
• Hound Waves
• Seasons
• Antlion (kinda, it's on thin ice)
• Rain
• Depths Worms
• Acid Rain mob changes
• Spider Queen

Chores:

• Frog Rain
• Acid Rain DoT
• Pirate Raids
• Hammering Wagstaff Junk
• Wolfgang Mightiness

 

Just giving a few examples from each side. There's definitely more on both sides. But I want to write this out since I think it's really important for the betas to consider. New survival content is good, it just needs to be handled well.

 

So uh yeah please add a new survival challenge tied to the final boss like a new island instead of a fetch quest thanks (i have no idea where im going with this post)

Edited May 28, 2025 by aidancode

[Mike23Ua]

Your post is subjective and biased.

ive watched plenty of people die to frog rain it isn’t just a chore it’s an actual survival threat that effects everyone who isn’t named Wurt.

Frog rain is dangerous in the aspects that a random hostile mob can fall from the sky near you & when it attacks it forces you to drop items from your inventory, and a newer player will attack back, forcing all frogs to start chasing them.

Ive even seen Wendy Mains die trying to recover Abigail’s flower after frogs lick it out their inventory.

And before Klei nerfed them into a laughable joke, I Myself had been personally stuck as Wonkey for 3+ hours in a desperate attempt to plead my case to the monkey queen to reverse my curse.

The game DOES have survival challenges, but your probably so skilled at it that the only thing you feel “challenged” by are optional raid bosses with an extremely obscure method of summoning, and a ridiculously high skill/learning curb that most casuals never get to experience or enjoy the fights they otherwise COULD if Klei were a little more forgiving on things like boss difficulty/health adjustment sliders.

[Evelo]

Yep! I really want more survival challenges. So unbelievable sick of these optional bosses. Hell even if it is something simple as having the pre-existing bosses start terrorizing you after 100 days or something would be a HUGE boost to making the game enjoyable again.

Imagine Toadstool after 100 days or something starts spreading around a Maisma of spores that requires you to kill it so it can stop for a while. MAKE me go kill the bosses that Klei wants to keep on adding, don't hide them behind some optional objective.

[AliceShiki]

Frog Rain is the main threat of spring for inexperienced players... Putting it as a chore is so weird.

[Erathia]

A very frustrating piece of writing and an ill-considered perspective..I don’t mean to be harsh, but your distinction between a “survival challenge” and a “chore” feels very forced and looks more like an attempt to frame everything around your personal feelings than an actual analysis of game design.

First of all, your “main criterion” seems to be that survival challenges affect gameplay, while chores are just things to tick off a list. The problem is that it all depends on context the player’s experience level, stage of the game, and playstyle. For one player, acid rain is just an annoying background effect; for another, it’s a serious limitation on exploration. For one player, hound waves are a stupid distraction; for another, they’re the first push to think seriously about combat. Your classification is a false dichotomy: instead of judging mechanics by their design, you’re evaluating them through the lens of your own frustration or nostalgia.

Secondly, you’re highly selective in your examples and completely ignore how certain mechanics actually affect gameplay. For example, you write that great depths worms “just exist” and are annoying. But they do impact exploration, loot pacing, and player resources. They might not be perfectly designed, but they force meaningful decisions: prepare? avoid? push through? These are classic survival decisions  exactly the kind you claim to value.

Thirdly, you apply double standards. You say normal rain is a “survival challenge” because it requires an item, but acid rain somehow isn’t, even though it works almost identically. You say Wolfgang is a chore because his mechanic is cheap and predictable  but you could say the same about 90% of characters who manage some kind of personal stat. This isn’t a structured critique — it’s just selectively slapping the “chore” label on anything you don’t like.

Finally, the post itself admits it doesn’t know where it’s going  and it shows. You bounce between loose observations, a list of examples, and inconsistent arguments, ending with a vague plea like “please make the final boss cooler.” That’s pretty weak for something meant to be taken seriously when discussing future content design.

If you want to actually influence the game’s development, you need to stop writing like a frustrated subreddit user and start thinking about game design systematically, not emotionally.

 

 

Edited May 28, 2025 by Erathia

[Gashzer]

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Your post is subjective and biased.

Hate when people use this to undermine someones point. Although I do agree with the rest of your post.

Subjectivity and bias-ness are hugely important feedback for video games. 

How can klei structure updates and content if they dont know what their playerbase enjoys or what level of experience is needed to even get to certain content without bias and subjective posts?

Bias posts are the purest and best form of feedback.

What i can infer from Aidans post that some experienced players like Aidan, in the late game, need a pretty hardcore survival challenge as acid rain and lunar hail arnt scratching that itch (tbh if klei was to steal abit from uncompromising mode and made the seasons harsher temporary as part of wagstaffs tomfoolery, would be cool)

[GenomeSquirrel]

From a perspective, even living in Winter, Spring, or Summer is a chore that's solved with a game over, and as a bonus, more players will join the lobby, and I've been asked more than once to do exactly this.

 

From another perspective, all threats should lead the player into making interesting decisions, and there's certainly a chasm in both quality and quantity of decisions between just joined in summer and making chilled amulets from junk that's lying around base, that lumping it into summer seems shallow.

 

And a final consideration is that a chore can be more interesting by having moving parts, compared to a chilled amulet which spends most of its life in your pocket, until you need to equip it for sliver of time, then unequip ... 

[PonyOfApocalips]

Caves and ruins are exploration chellenges but with other things youre correct

[JustAPineapple]

No yeah I really agree with this post.

Like I don't think all the examples are perfect, but the core point I think is good.

Personally I think what makes some challenges feel less fun then others comes down to a mix of things, and isn't always clear cut.

But for me the biggest things are:

Are you performing the same solution over and over again with very little variance? 

Is that solution especially time or recourse consuming?

Does the threat compound with other threats to take the player off guard, breaking up Repetition?

How much effort does it take to solve the problem?

How rewarding does it feel to solve it?

These are, of course, all subjective.

However I think why Acid rain and lunar hail fall flat as new survival challenges, is that they're not new survival challenges.

How do you most effectively combat rain? Staying dry. What's the most convenient way to do that? The eyebrella of course!

And whats the biggest hurtle to getting it? Being experienced enough to beat Deerclops, one of the earliest trials for a new player, and if your playing multi-player it's the knowledge on how to spawn several using hostile flares to get some for your friends too.

Once you have the Eyebrella, it's nature as a headslot item means that rain still hinders you somewhat, albiet in a minor way due to taking up that very valuable slot. This is especially relevant in the caves/ruins, where I find headlights and armor to be very important.

Now acid rain and hail have more consequences then normal rain if you stay out in them unprotected. Kinda, I mean you can pretty easily heal hail off or just not get hit but I digress.

And to most effectively combat them what do you do? Well uh, it's swap out the eyebrella with a new item, that's arguably more accessible for that stage of the game, and doesn't take up slots.

Do you see why it falls flat then? It's not a new challenge to overcome it's planar damage arbitrarily requiring new items and armor that's better anyway, but like for rain.

Greater depths worm is cool though.

Anyway that's just my perspective, hope it makes sense though.

Edit: Noteably I don't think acid rain or hail are bad additions, if only because they are very fun and flavorful as post rift aethestic changes. I would hate to see them go, but I also would love love love to see klei implement (imo) more unique challenges. However I also realize that takes time and effort, likely a *lot* but such is life.

Edit x2: Ickers are great, mimics are too, wish the latter was on the surface though. Don't get me started on brightshades though.

Edited May 28, 2025 by JustAPineapple

[Mysterious box]

13 hours ago, aidancode said:

Frog Rain

 

13 hours ago, aidancode said:

Pirate Raids

I gotta disagree on these two frog rain probably just feels that way to you because klei got carried away with how many threats fall on your head. Which to be fair is their fault not yours.

As for pirate raids I think they're fun how they handled trinkets could use work but that's a topic that's been addressed plenty so I won't go on about it here. Having a hostile force invade and plunder you while you're exploring at sea is the very definition of a survival challenge though.

13 hours ago, aidancode said:

Spider Queen

I'm not sure I'd consider this as anything but a random boss event not really tied to survival.

Edited May 28, 2025 by Mysterious box

[Radicaljoe]

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

I'm not sure I'd consider this as anything but a random boss event not really tied to survival.

It's like a punishment for not properly taking care of your world's spider dens. Left them alone too long? A hundred queens coming your way.

[Mysterious box]

3 minutes ago, Radicaljoe said:

It's like a punishment for not properly taking care of your world's spider dens. Left them alone too long? A hundred queens coming your way.

But they don't come to you unless you have them in your base for whatever reason so I don't see how it's  punishment and even then just wait some minutes and it resolves itself that's as much a chore as werepigs. Sure you could go fight them all on the full moon but nothing is making you do that.

[Mike23Ua]

56 minutes ago, Radicaljoe said:

It's like a punishment for not properly taking care of your world's spider dens. Left them alone too long? A hundred queens coming your way.

Spider Queens if left alone and not fought.. will eventually dig back down into the ground and reset as a Tier 1 Spider Den I always felt this was off for something to scale in difficulty from tier 1 to tier 4 (the Queen) and then reset to 1 again. With that said, Klei also introduced the ability to reduce tier sizes with a Razor.. so you no longer even need to fight or really maintain them.

meanwhile: last night I rewatched an old horror movie favorite of mine “Return of the Living Dead” where these morgue owners attempt to cremate a living zombie only for this to backfire when after it’s incineration, causes the area to have Acid Rain which reanimates all dead things back to life & I’m sitting here thinking to myself.. now that’s what DSTs Acid Rain should do! <3

(but it probably won’t ever do that, because the surface shards lunar hail already reanimated dead Deerclops so I feel like it would probably feel too similar to surface “rift” effects)

Still though, it would be sick AF if DST acid rain could be a small nod & reference to one of my cult classic zombie flicks 

[cybers2001]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

Spider Queens if left alone and not fought.. will eventually dig back down into the ground and reset as a Tier 1 Spider Den I always felt this was off for something to scale in difficulty from tier 1 to tier 4 (the Queen) and then reset to 1 again. With that said, Klei also introduced the ability to reduce tier sizes with a Razor.. so you no longer even need to fight or really maintain them.

It's not just a reset to 1. The queen leaves a tier 2 nest behind when she first spawns, so she's effectively increasing the total number of nests in the world if you're never killing her or destroying the nests.

Only Webber can use the razor on nests, too.

[aidancode]

16 hours ago, AliceShiki said:

Frog Rain is the main threat of spring for inexperienced players... Putting it as a chore is so weird.

I would say the main threat of spring is needing to spend an inventory slot on rain protection. Frog rain is less of a threat as much as it is a "stop everything and wait for the frogs to stop falling. Maybe lure them to moose goose. Or just put up with them and probably regret." The POV I was coming from was that frog rain doesn't influence strategy and doesn't recontextualize anything other than maybe the moose goose fight(?)

[Milordo]

While you had me invested in the good points you were making, I'm sorry but I can't deny and notice some heavy mistakes in those examples. Why are depth worms chores but not hounds? You're absolutely 100% correct on what you were saying about the wave system....until said system becomes a very indeed chore at day 200,300,400,ecc.... and it wouldn't be a problem if the players have access to a special late game item that let them decide when to activate a hound/depth/pirate monkey wave. Also depth worms are just a cool variation for two levels of the game, like pirate raids for the ocean, instead of having the same normal hounds, blue hounds and red hounds. 

Frog rains too. Like they're heavily rng based and you could have them 5 in a row during one spring or none at all, while you have hounds twice every single season.

 

For me simply a survival challenge becomes a chore when it 1) gets repetitive and doesn't change 2) doesn't offer too many solutions or options or strategies to deal with it.

Edited May 29, 2025 by Milordo

[aidancode]

20 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

but your probably so skilled at it that the only thing you feel “challenged” by are optional raid bosses with an extremely obscure method of summoning, and a ridiculously high skill/learning curb that most casuals never get to experience or enjoy the fights they otherwise COULD if Klei were a little more forgiving on things like boss difficulty/health adjustment sliders.

I think you completely misunderstood the intent of this post. I wanted to highlight good survival challenges and how recent additions have been more chore-like. Frog rain is the only well-established survival challenge that I look disfavorably upon. I'm absolutely biased, as are all of us. But like... when did I imply that I think the only good challenges are raid bosses? That's pretty much the opposite of what I want to convey. (This is a serious question btw I'm not trying to be antagonistic)

[AliceShiki]

1 hour ago, aidancode said:

I would say the main threat of spring is needing to spend an inventory slot on rain protection. Frog rain is less of a threat as much as it is a "stop everything and wait for the frogs to stop falling. Maybe lure them to moose goose. Or just put up with them and probably regret." The POV I was coming from was that frog rain doesn't influence strategy and doesn't recontextualize anything other than maybe the moose goose fight(?)

I specified inexperienced players for a reason.

An experienced player can handle Frog Rain just fine.

An inexperienced player will most likely die to it and have no idea what they were supposed to do to survive that.

Hence why it's the main threat for an inexperienced player.

[Mike23Ua]

23 minutes ago, aidancode said:

I think you completely misunderstood the intent of this post. I wanted to highlight good survival challenges and how recent additions have been more chore-like. Frog rain is the only well-established survival challenge that I look disfavorably upon. I'm absolutely biased, as are all of us. But like... when did I imply that I think the only good challenges are raid bosses? That's pretty much the opposite of what I want to convey. (This is a serious question btw I'm not trying to be antagonistic)

I’ll try to keep this a TL:DR- ok so from personal experience playing the game mysel and watching my significantly less skilled friends try to play DST with Rifts Enabled: My conclusion is that some (but not all) the obstacles and challenges that “Rift Changes” bring would only be *challenging* to newer players. A PERFECT example is the Effect Acid Rain has on Ponds in the Caves, the ponds will fill up and block off with Nitre, adding the Additional challenge of needing to mine them to make the ponds useable again, but only newbies will struggle with this as an actual problem, for people who have managed to kill CC and AFW this is just going to score them extra free Nitre.

Meanwhile there are early game challenges (such as neglecting to tend to a complex gardening system) that spawns more dangerous threats and hazards to newbies like fire needles and boss fruit fly, and all of this is Pre-Rifts.

Once the Rifts are opened up.. Nitre blocks off cave ponds. Lunar Rain provides free resources that fall at your feet.

all I’m saying is that the game as whole feels off balance & its difficulty scaling (or lack thereof rather) is in need of TLC.

Edited May 29, 2025 by Mike23Ua

[Erathia]

20 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Postaram się zachować to w skrócie - ok, więc z własnego doświadczenia z grą i obserwowania moich znacznie mniej doświadczonych znajomych próbujących grać w DST z włączonymi Riftami: Mój wniosek jest taki, że niektóre (ale nie wszystkie) przeszkody i wyzwania, jakie niesie ze sobą „Zmiany Riftów”, byłyby *trudne* tylko dla nowych graczy. DOSKONAŁYM przykładem jest efekt kwaśnego deszczu na stawy w jaskiniach, stawy wypełnią się i zablokują saletrą, dodając dodatkowe wyzwanie w postaci konieczności ich wydobycia, aby ponownie uczynić stawy użytecznymi, ale tylko nowicjusze będą mieli z tym problem jako z rzeczywistym problemem, dla osób, którym udało się zabić CC i AFW, to po prostu da im dodatkową darmową saletrę.

W międzyczasie pojawiają się wyzwania na początku gry (takie jak zaniedbanie skomplikowanego systemu ogrodniczego), które wiążą się z poważniejszymi zagrożeniami dla nowicjuszy, takimi jak ogniste igły i główna muszka owocowa. Wszystko to ma miejsce przed szczelinami.

Gdy Rifty zostaną otwarte... Nitre blokuje stawy jaskiniowe. Lunar Rain zapewnia darmowe zasoby, które spadają u twoich stóp.

Chcę tylko powiedzieć, że gra jako całość wydaje się niezrównoważona, a skalowanie poziomu trudności (lub raczej jego brak) wymaga szczególnej uwagi.

Really? Another round of nonsense. No, the point is precisely that not every part of the game is supposed to be as difficult for you as the moment you first picked up a flint off the ground and fought a spider.

You seem to assume that a well-designed survival game should keep the player in constant stress and chaos, regardless of their experience or progress. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding. If the difficulty of the game kept scaling endlessly in proportion to the player's skill, it would become a “hamster wheel” design  endless, unsatisfying, and with no reward for progression. Players who have defeated the Celestial Champion and the Ancient Fuelweaver have earned the right for some mechanics to become easier not because the game is “broken,” but because they’ve mastered systems that beginners still struggle with.

It’s like complaining that after learning a foreign language, conversations with native speakers become too... easy. That’s not “a lack of balance,” it’s a reward for progress. The real imbalance would be if a newcomer had to deal with Acid Rain and Fire Needles at the same time, without any tools or understanding of the mechanics. But by the time Rift Changes appear, the player should already know how to deal with them. If they get some free nitre along the way, great. That’s not a cheat, it’s the result of dominating the system and putting in time and effort.

Expecting the game to constantly surprise and attack you like it did when you first started playing is simply illogical from a player experience design standpoint. That first contact with the game is special because it’s shaped by ignorance, uncertainty, and a lack of context  and you simply can’t permanently recreate that. Mechanics that once surprised you become tools. If the game tried to artificially keep you in a permanent state of shock, it would either need to constantly wipe your knowledge or introduce forced, illogical complications  which would quickly become exhausting.

It’s like expecting every new book you read to keep you in suspense exactly like the first one  even though by now you already know the author’s style, narrative structure, and genre tropes. A well-designed game doesn’t try to recreate your naivety  it respects your growth and offers you new kinds of challenges: systemic, logistical, strategic — instead of endlessly recycling the same “surprise” moments.

Your expectation that every aspect of the game should remain just as hard forever leaves no room for expression, creativity, or a sense of mastery over the world. Not every obstacle needs to be a fight for survival  sometimes it’s just a way to shift the player’s attention to another area of gameplay. That’s not “off balance,” it’s simply a game that isn’t designed solely for people who want to suffer from start to finish.

If everything in the game had to stay at “life-or-death” level at all times, how would a survival game be any different from a masochistic clicker? Answer: it wouldn’t. And Don’t Starve Together clearly aspires to something far more sophisticated.

[readkey]

Just want to mention one thing: 

Wolfgang should use the gym when near base if you don’t want to lift dumbells. It takes only 5 secs to get back to full mightiness. 
 

And also consider putting points in max mightiness from gym if you want to stay longer as mighty so that you don’t change back and forth frequently. 

[00petar00]

I don't even agree with the definitions between survival challenges and chores, how are chores occasional considerations? Both can fit in the same category under active (permanent?) threats but both of these words are wrong to use since most survival threats happen on a regular basis depending on season, weather, mobs and bosses but you are separating it based on your own bias.

@Erathiaexplained it so eloquently, it literally doesn't make much sense.

On 5/28/2025 at 9:29 AM, Gashzer said:

Hate when people use this to undermine someones point. Although I do agree with the rest of your post.

Subjectivity and bias-ness are hugely important feedback for video games. 

I can agree with this in regards to most threads but as I said the words used are incorrect and even with the correct terms everything that you need to do to continue your uninterrupted experience while playing can be seen as a chore.

My definition of a chore in games is repeatable interruptions to gameplay that aren't located in specific biomes. Chore can be seen as a negative word but I don't dislike most survival mechanics that fit under my definition.

Everyone will find some mechanic annoying but we should focus on experience as a whole when playing, there can't be too many interruptions for sandbox/survival game and I believe we are close to the limit on how many survival mechanics we can have that encompass whole surface or caves.

Edited May 29, 2025 by 00petar00

[Swiyss]

I like chores