Don’t starve together boss difficulty

[Demigardenerner]

In this game having friends makes bosses a lot easier and I play with a 4 other people who are quite experienced in this game leading it to be a tad easy so I would like to propose an idea.bosses health and damage to an extent scale will scale with how with many people are nearby which will make boss fights feel more difficult and fun.and probably make this setting customizable in the world setting would more time to enjoy the boss fight with friends and difficulty to this game friends. And if the setting is customizable then people who need friends to beat bosses can just turning down or completely off the setting. And vets who find bosses easier can turn up the setting so both sides win.

[Mojmaowo]

1 hour ago, Demigardenerner said:

In this game having friends makes bosses a lot easier and I play with a 4 other people who are quite experienced in this game leading it to be a tad easy so I would like to propose an idea.bosses health and damage to an extent scale will scale with how with many people are nearby which will make boss fights feel more difficult and fun.and probably make this setting customizable in the world setting would more time to enjoy the boss fight with friends and difficulty to this game friends. And if the setting is customizable then people who need friends to beat bosses can just turning down or completely off the setting. And vets who find bosses easier can turn up the setting so both sides win.

The problem with that is that bosses require resources to fight so fighting bosses with more people would be less efficient and to bypass that the boss would need to drop more items to compensate

[Cassielu]

"damage taken" setting already exists

[AliceShiki]

As long as it's a customizable setting that is off by default, I see 0 issues with this suggestion.

Increasing enemy HP can make things more fun to parties of experienced players, but it also shouldn't harm the experience of newer players working together, so... Yeah, sure, I think it's a valid suggestion.

[Mike23Ua]

It should extend to far more things beyond just boss health and damage.

i can give a hugely exhaustive list of changes I would personally make to each and every boss.. but instead I’ll just provide one example.

Eye/Twins of Terror: this boss when fought in a group (ignoring its random summoning choice on a player) will split up and divide itself amongst players, meaning that when it does it dashing attacks it will target different people rather than just continuously dashing towards one solo player. It’s little eyeball minions are also easier to deal with when chasing someone else rather then them all trying to group up and chase you.

thats how the boss works NOW: but here are the changes I would make to it.

Less Players = Less Dash/Swipes Forward, and the amount of Eyeball Minions it can spawn cap out at lower numbers so it’s easier to deal with.

More Players = More Dash/Swipes, More Eyeball Minions can spawn.

This is “Borderlands” style Dynamic Content Scaling.

Now Another example is how State of Decay 2 works, a lot of people may not know that the more players you have in SoD 2, the more zombies can spawn, and the more difficult they can be. 

In single player: a player has to be in critically low health for a zombie to perform “kill animations”

In Co-Op: Players can be at full perfect health and the zombies can still latch on to them and if not saved in time by their teammates- Perform insta-kill animations.

Or.. to translate that to DST Language: It’s like fighting Malbatross alone works like she does now, but fought in a group: she can swoop down and snatch a player up in her mouth and if not attacked and forced to drop them back onto the boat, can swallow them or drop them in open water to drown (washing up on shore away from the fight)

[wormwood123]

i would love if not only the bosses but also some regular enemies were scaled down because going from ds to dst tall birds are absolute tanks i feel like clockworks work better with the health they currently have though

[Random Guy000]

It's not the fist time suggestions like this have been made, and the devs have sure considered it on their own, too. Clearly they don't intend to add anything of the sorts to the game

If you want a challenge, play solo. If you want a challange AND to play with friends, have them stand on the sidelines. Have whatever amount of people you feel appropriate fight, the rest will watch. Switch up for different bosses.

There isn't a better solution and there probably wont be in the near future

[Mike23Ua]

Just now, Random Guy000 said:

It's not the fist time suggestions like this have been made, and the devs have sure considered it on their own, too. Clearly they don't intend to add anything of the sorts to the game

If you want a challenge, play solo. If you want a challange AND to play with friends, have them stand on the sidelines. Have whatever amount of people you feel appropriate fight, the rest will watch. Switch up for different bosses.

There isn't a better solution and there probably wont be in the near future

Well uhh not exactly, if Klei plans to re-release, remaster or remake DST they probably will go back and tweak quite a lot of old content.

The Nintendo Switch 2 releases this month and I wouldn’t be surprised if Klei were to release an “Enhanced Edition” for next Gen consoles.

if such a thing were to be in the pipeline: then making old content more modernized, comfortable, accessible, fun etc would be a top priority.

You guys look at DST like it’s a 10+ year old game, but I personally would wager that it can and eventually will be “Enhanced” for more modern day devices and platforms.

[Uedo]

On 5/30/2025 at 7:25 PM, Mike23Ua said:

It should extend to far more things beyond just boss health and damage.

i can give a hugely exhaustive list of changes I would personally make to each and every boss.. but instead I’ll just provide one example.

Eye/Twins of Terror: this boss when fought in a group (ignoring its random summoning choice on a player) will split up and divide itself amongst players, meaning that when it does it dashing attacks it will target different people rather than just continuously dashing towards one solo player. It’s little eyeball minions are also easier to deal with when chasing someone else rather then them all trying to group up and chase you.

thats how the boss works NOW: but here are the changes I would make to it.

Less Players = Less Dash/Swipes Forward, and the amount of Eyeball Minions it can spawn cap out at lower numbers so it’s easier to deal with.

More Players = More Dash/Swipes, More Eyeball Minions can spawn.

This is “Borderlands” style Dynamic Content Scaling.

Now Another example is how State of Decay 2 works, a lot of people may not know that the more players you have in SoD 2, the more zombies can spawn, and the more difficult they can be. 

In single player: a player has to be in critically low health for a zombie to perform “kill animations”

In Co-Op: Players can be at full perfect health and the zombies can still latch on to them and if not saved in time by their teammates- Perform insta-kill animations.

Or.. to translate that to DST Language: It’s like fighting Malbatross alone works like she does now, but fought in a group: she can swoop down and snatch a player up in her mouth and if not attacked and forced to drop them back onto the boat, can swallow them or drop them in open water to drown (washing up on shore away from the fight)

So you mean the Twins then? That's what they do, we already have that.

[AliceShiki]

1 hour ago, Random Guy000 said:

It's not the fist time suggestions like this have been made, and the devs have sure considered it on their own, too. Clearly they don't intend to add anything of the sorts to the game

If you want a challenge, play solo. If you want a challange AND to play with friends, have them stand on the sidelines. Have whatever amount of people you feel appropriate fight, the rest will watch. Switch up for different bosses.

There isn't a better solution and there probably wont be in the near future

Well, one can always make a mod that tweaks boss HP, actually.

I'm fairly certain a mod that does that already exists, in fact, but it reduces enemy HP based on number of players instead of increasing.

So like... You'd just need to pick up the code made by the person that made the mod that reduces HP, and change the values to make it increase HP... Should actually be pretty easy to do, even for someone who never tried doing any coding in Lua before, because it should just be tweaking numbers, so not much programming knowledge would be needed.

Granted, it's a PC-only solution, but it's still a viable solution.

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

Well uhh not exactly, if Klei plans to re-release, remaster or remake DST they probably will go back and tweak quite a lot of old content.

The Nintendo Switch 2 releases this month and I wouldn’t be surprised if Klei were to release an “Enhanced Edition” for next Gen consoles.

if such a thing were to be in the pipeline: then making old content more modernized, comfortable, accessible, fun etc would be a top priority.

You guys look at DST like it’s a 10+ year old game, but I personally would wager that it can and eventually will be “Enhanced” for more modern day devices and platforms.

There's no need to make big changes to a game just because Nintendo decided to release a new console.

Switch 2 existing will probably just mean that people can now play with 6 players on a Nintendo Console instead of being stuck with 4 players like they previously were.

I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect a live-service game to completely overhaul itself because a company decided to release a new console.

[Mike23Ua]

14 minutes ago, AliceShiki said:

Well, one can always make a mod that tweaks boss HP, actually.

I'm fairly certain a mod that does that already exists, in fact, but it reduces enemy HP based on number of players instead of increasing.

So like... You'd just need to pick up the code made by the person that made the mod that reduces HP, and change the values to make it increase HP... Should actually be pretty easy to do, even for someone who never tried doing any coding in Lua before, because it should just be tweaking numbers, so not much programming knowledge would be needed.

Granted, it's a PC-only solution, but it's still a viable solution.

There's no need to make big changes to a game just because Nintendo decided to release a new console.

Switch 2 existing will probably just mean that people can now play with 6 players on a Nintendo Console instead of being stuck with 4 players like they previously were.

I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect a live-service game to completely overhaul itself because a company decided to release a new console.

What I mean is that while dst may be a 10 year old game for PC players, if the game was to be Day 1 launch title released on Switch 2, (when the switch 2 releases) the game would be less than a week old.

Klei may be hesitant to do significant chunky meaty content updates for a game that they’ve drugs life span on and on for 10+ Years, but… that isn’t how “Console Games” work.

GTA V for example has been re-released 3 times across 13 years and 3 console generations. And each time it was re-released new content, features etc was added making it a “new game”

Each time it was treated as a new game it got new updates exclusive to the new console (sadly leaving last Gen with no further updates)

When it comes to an Enhanced Edition of DST- Klei could do things like increase player count limit, redesign old biomes with new animations, textures, fancier graphics etc..

So yes DST maybe 10 years old, DST on Switch 2 however isn’t even born yet.  

[Uedo]

20 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

GTA V for example has been re-released 3 times across 13 years and 3 console generations. And each time it was re-released new content, features etc was added making it a “new game”

Can we get a community note feature - No, GTA V has been criticised by both the gaming journalism scene and consumers for releasing so many times. At this point Rockstar just lean into the meme of being considered money hungry.

Even Skyrim, which has also rereleased many times, has somewhat of a stinky rep for that - albeit with less uproar.

[AliceShiki]

28 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

GTA V for example has been re-released 3 times across 13 years and 3 console generations. And each time it was re-released new content, features etc was added making it a “new game”

Last I checked, GTA 5 is not a live-service game, so the comparison doesn't apply.

You should try checking if Capcom is planning to overhaul Street Fighter 6 because of the Switch 2's existence instead of looking at a single player game getting remastered releases.

And well, I can assure you that Capcom is not planning on doing that. Because that's not how live-service games work. They don't simply change their business plans because a company decided to release a new console.

Just like how Genshin Impact doesn't overhaul its game each time Sansung/Apple release a new mainline phone... It has nothing to do with them, so they just don't do it.

Or how Final Fantasy 14 didn't really change its game because of the Playstation 4, and later on Playstation 5 release.

So uhn... Yeah, Live Service titles should be compared with Live Service titles, not standalone releases, otherwise the comparison doesn't make much sense.

Edited June 2, 2025 by AliceShiki

[Random Guy000]

1 hour ago, AliceShiki said:

Well, one can always make a mod that tweaks boss HP, actually.

I'm fairly certain a mod that does that already exists, in fact, but it reduces enemy HP based on number of players instead of increasing.

So like... You'd just need to pick up the code made by the person that made the mod that reduces HP, and change the values to make it increase HP... Should actually be pretty easy to do, even for someone who never tried doing any coding in Lua before, because it should just be tweaking numbers, so not much programming knowledge would be needed.

Granted, it's a PC-only solution, but it's still a viable solution.

Yeah, duh. But I think that OP is referring to a vanilla solution specifically

If not, then I agree, a mod fixes all of their issues

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

The Nintendo Switch 2 releases this month and I wouldn’t be surprised if Klei were to release an “Enhanced Edition” for next Gen consoles.

Huh? The only thing they would  realistically do is give some skins bundled with the game. Why would they remaster a game that still receives frequent content updates

Edited June 2, 2025 by Random Guy000

[Radicaljoe]

If klei ever decides to change bosses when multiple people are present, it should have a couple things considered.

1: Don't change based on server count, change based on the players present. They can use the maxwell prison mechanics to determine how many characters/minions are fighting a boss. This prevents people who want to work on something at base from negatively impacting a fight 2000 tiles away on the other side of the map.

2: Change the attacks. Changing health and damage is cool, but not very interesting. Change the attacks to cater to groups of people when hitting a threshold. Like, 2 people you'd still get regular clops attacks. But 3+ and you'd get him doing a big circle swipe or something.

3:(more experimental): Maybe add a way to let multiple blueprints drop? This one is just a personal thing. But it's a little annoying to have to bother one guy in the server for stuff until you get your own blueprint. (I already hear the complaints for this)

1&2 are definitely required, 3 is just a QoL wishlist type deal

[AliceShiki]

14 hours ago, Radicaljoe said:

2: Change the attacks. Changing health and damage is cool, but not very interesting. Change the attacks to cater to groups of people when hitting a threshold. Like, 2 people you'd still get regular clops attacks. But 3+ and you'd get him doing a big circle swipe or something.

For what it's worth, changing health is simply an idea to let bosses not melt under the assault of multiple players.

Like, if you want to make the boss more challenging, then changing more stuff is definitely necessary, but health changes are usually just to stop the boss from melting.

... And well, definitely should be off by default, since people will often times want to bring friends to the fight specifically to make it easier and stuff.