Lies

[Tranoze]

I never seen such scene in game.

What really is 

Edited March 20 by Tranoze

[DegenerateFurry]

Just now, Tranoze said:

I never seen such scene in game.

Yeah, in reality, Tallbirds are so aggressively cannibalistic that they're incapable of growing their numbers as a species. 

[Tranoze]

3 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

cannibalistic

aggressively true, but grown tall birb doesnt eat things on ground. Klei need to work more on what creatures eats.

After killing their own kid, tall birb doesnt care about it's meat at all.

[DegenerateFurry]

Just now, Tranoze said:

aggressively true, but grown tall birb doesnt eat things on ground. Klei need to work more on what creatures eats.

After killing their own kid, tall birb doesnt care about it's meat at all.

Yeah. The short implies they eat meat, though. Lots of gameplay/lore mismatches in that one.

[twitchgabo]

Mercy was never an option for tallbirds

[Tigris Nano]

Biggest misinformation of year 2026

[Captain_Rage]

Maxwell refers to them as a failed experiment. Arguably a lot went wrong. I miss the original absurd and surreal atmosphere of Don't Starve.

[hoxi]

Yeaaah.. I gotta address something..

On 3/20/2026 at 4:52 AM, DegenerateFurry said:

Tallbirds are so aggressively cannibalistic that they're incapable of growing their numbers as a species. 

Not intentionally.

 

Funnily enough, it's a mix of two issues:

• For the Smallbird (the baby) in DST, they immediately get attacked due to an oversight from when they ported the code from DS to DST.
  • The baby has the proper tags, but they're not properly checked by Tallbirds, see further below.
• For the Smallish Tallbirds (the slightly grown up bird), they get attacked in both games, due to an oversight that has been around since DS (from Reign of Giants specifically, since it's related to Spring), which also made it into DST as as result.
  • When the baby grows up a bit, it's spawning a different entity, and the unique tag changes (and other behavior, like not starving) that the baby gets when spawning from Spring season, aren't transferred. So while the babies are safe in DS RoG, and they're intended to not be attacked by their parents in DST either, they aren't safe once they grow a bit in both games.

 

-- when evaluating a target, "guy" here is the target
-- notice how the HasTag("smallbird") or HasTag("companion") checks aren't done on guy, but for inst

-- this means tallbirds check for those tags on themselves, not on a potential target
-- which results in considering smallbirds to be valid targets because they never check those tags on them

local function IsValidTarget(guy)
	return not guy.components.health:IsDead()
		and inst.components.combat:CanTarget(guy)
		--smallbirds that aren't companions are parented
		--to other tallbirds, so don't target them!
		and (not inst:HasTag("smallbird") or inst:HasTag("companion"))
end

 

 

I reported it a while back, here.

Something to add is that if this is all addressed, they'd need to also add some sort of limit to them so that they don't eventually lag the server in long term worlds (this is also technically an issue currently, if they're off screen long enough).

 

It'd be nice to address this and bring their follower code a bit more up to date. The recent clockwork update introduced support for having followers remember their leader in more detail, mainly for disconnecting/switching shards, which could make trying to make one grow up less of a weird unintuitive feature where they can easily stop following you (including when you die).

[Auth]

39 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Not intentionally.

i love you

finally, another smallbird truther
you're making me consider no longer being the world's only official tallbirdologist, even.

 

I reported this YEARS ago, Klei marked it as working as intended at the time. Although I can't even find the bug report now. Oh well.

It's worth mentioning that if you just remove the whole making tallbirds and teenbirds target each other thing, smallbirds still properly treat their parent as their leader, it's fully intact underneath it all to this day.

44 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Something to add is that if this is all addressed, they'd need to also add some sort of limit to them so that they don't eventually lag the server in long term worlds (this is also technically an issue currently, if they're off screen long enough).

I made a mod that just makes tallbirds and teenbirds stop targeting each other, and only play with the mod on. I've technically got thousands of days of test data. While overpopulation is a threat, it's actually still dependent on them being unloaded off-screen, just as much as the current setup. The young tend to just... starve to death when they are loaded. I've never had a tallbird overpopulation problem in the entire time I've run the mod.
Fun fact! I made the mod as a salty response to Klei not fixing the bug. Nyehhh.

[Hungry French]

It's not a lie. It's just a separate, non-canonical dimension.' where the birds are more cute...
Don't add that. Tall birds are scare and it's good

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, Hungry French said:

It's not a lie. It's just a separate, non-canonical dimension.

Lore accuracy to gameplay is something game dev need to pay more attention to. You cant have animated short where Wilson eat gears and whip Charlie using broken stopwatch.

[Hungry French]

2 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Lore accuracy to gameplay is something game dev need to pay more attention to. You cant have animated short where Wilson eat gears and whip Charlie using broken stopwatch.

Why not? The constant is a multi dimension with different worlds. There are even hints that the personages have different variations of each other...

Alas, the game world is just a blank... Trailers used to match the content... well... In DS... And in the earliest trailers of DST...

You can't imagine how I laughed after Wortox One Shot Deersclops with 1 blow) So absurd.

3 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Lore accuracy to gameplay is something game dev need to pay more attention to. You cant have animated short where Wilson eat gears and whip Charlie using broken stopwatch.

What about Beard Lords ? I like DS unique horror bunny's‚ in DST them just regular but black‚ but in trailer them just cute...

[Hungry French]

Cute things are certainly cool. But only HORROR reveals the full horror of survival in the Constant...

[Tranoze]

4 hours ago, Hungry French said:

Why not? The constant is a multi dimension with different worlds.

at certain point of different it no longer DS/DST anymore. You could call avenger trailer a DST trailer with that change logic, spiderman is webber, ironman is wx78, haweye is Walter... and they just another dimension of DST.

[hoxi]

12 hours ago, Auth said:

I reported this YEARS ago, Klei marked it as working as intended at the time.

They either might've confused it with the Smallish Tallbirds, since they get attacked by Tallbirds in both games. Or they simply didn't spot the issue because using "guy" as a variable name instead of "target" in a targeting function is just confusing, and thought it was fine.

 

12 hours ago, Auth said:

It's worth mentioning that if you just remove the whole making tallbirds and teenbirds target each other thing, smallbirds still properly treat their parent as their leader, it's fully intact underneath it all to this day.

Yeah, which further cements that it's supposed to work that way. They can argue about the Teenbirds/Smallish Tallbirds since it's always been that way even in DS (even if it was likely an oversight), but not about the Smallbirds.

 

12 hours ago, Auth said:

I made a mod that just makes tallbirds and teenbirds stop targeting each other, and only play with the mod on. I've technically got thousands of days of test data. While overpopulation is a threat, it's actually still dependent on them being unloaded off-screen, just as much as the current setup. The young tend to just... starve to death when they are loaded. I've never had a tallbird overpopulation problem in the entire time I've run the mod.

Yeah, I've had it fixed through a mod of my own for years now, including without population limiting. It's usually fine, but I can see it potentially becoming an issue, especially if going close enough to trigger entity waking and then back to sleep range without realizing or so. It's never good to not have a limit for stuff like this regardless though.

 

7 hours ago, Hungry French said:

What about Beard Lords ?

I've been working on a mod that allows classic Beardlords to exist and use different animations and sounds between clients (as well as different attack stats depending on who they're attacking or who their leader is, to mimic the different stats they had in DS).

I mention this because the game fully supports the animation and sounds stuff (although some of it requires some unconventional methods, but it's nothing really out of the realm of what Klei has done to make some features look and feel extra smooth or cool). And it's something that Klei could easily add, given everything they've done in the past few years.

And I mean, even the animations and sounds are still in the game. Though given how they changed their direction with them and this recent video supports this, I wouldn't mind if they kept the cute sounds (even Beardlords still played cute sounds in DS, and Bunnymen both in DS and DST make Beardlord-like groans when sleeping, so the Beardlord being cute in the trailer changes nothing, and could still have their classic sounds return), but it would be cool if at least the stats changing depending on who they're attacking or leading them was added to make them more unique. The unique animations and/or sounds on top of that would be a bonus.

 

I do think that in general, things that change based on perception is heavily unexplored and underutilized in this game, especially related to sanity (and there's also enlightenment now!). I'd love for them to explore on that and make more use of it, while making the related systems support more of it and more cleanly.

Edited March 22 by hoxi

[Hungry French]

23 hours ago, Tranoze said:

at certain point of different it no longer DS/DST anymore. 

Because ?

21 hours ago, hoxi said:

And I mean, even the animations and sounds are still in the game. Though given how they changed their direction with them and this recent video supports this, I wouldn't mind if they kept the cute sounds (even Beardlords still played cute sounds in DS, and Bunnymen both in DS and DST make Beardlord-like groans when sleeping, so the Beardlord being cute in the trailer changes nothing, and could still have their classic sounds return), but it would be cool if at least the stats changing depending on who they're attacking or leading them was added to make them more unique. The unique animations and/or sounds on top of that would be a bonus.

The game should not adapt to the trailer.
Especially the classic 14-year-old design of beard lords.

The mod sounds intriguing. I hope you have enough motivation to create it.

[Tranoze]

55 minutes ago, Hungry French said:

The game should not adapt to the trailer.

The trailer should adapt to the game. Why would anyone ever think things should go the other way around?

[DegenerateFurry]

2 hours ago, Tranoze said:

The trailer should adapt to the game. Why would anyone ever think things should go the other way around?

Perhaps because the game's bugged and Tallbird infanticide isn't really intended behavior?

[Tranoze]

44 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Perhaps because the game's bugged and Tallbird infanticide isn't really intended behavior?

We really need dev clarification on what their intended behavior is, as we cant read dev mind. If the bug report's respond are true

On 3/22/2026 at 3:57 PM, Auth said:

I reported this YEARS ago, Klei marked it as working as intended at the time. 

and dev truly intended for infanticide tall birb...

[hoxi]

4 hours ago, Tranoze said:

We really need dev clarification on what their intended behavior is, as we cant read dev mind. If the bug report's respond are true

Checking for the "smallbird" and "companion" tag (both which belong to Smallbirds) on Tallbirds makes it pretty clear it's not intended.

Smallish Tallbirds though? That one you can argue as it was like that even in DS, even if I I feel like it was an oversight to not inherit the changes on growing up.

4 hours ago, Tranoze said:

and dev truly intended for infanticide tall birb...

Or they just looked and didn't spot it because, frankly, having "guy" and "inst" being used on the same function can be confusing and can kinda blend in. They've made a few mistakes like that recently, and it happens, inst or self.inst, or inst and owner, it does blend when there's a bunch of subsequent lines that look very similar, even more so when going through so much code to end up with +200 lua files changed for an update.

 

  

8 hours ago, Hungry French said:

The game should not adapt to the trailer.
Especially the classic 14-year-old design of beard lords.

You say that, but the "14-year-old design" of Beardlords includes them making cute sounds for certain actions, not just creepy ones, and Bunnymen doing similar sounds to them when sleeping. Which I already mentioned there.

Edited March 24 by hoxi

[ZeRoboButler]

A mistake in the lore and in the code, the way of the tallbird.

[user1464576869]

Probably a bug initially, but I think it can make sense, when interpreted as aggressively territorial behavior. Which is even a quote from one survivor I think. In real life some birds kick their kids out of the nest early with little regard, don't they?

On another topic, I'm deeply disappointed that DST turned so cartoony and cute. It started out quite dark and somewhat deranged. For example I swear it was implied Wendy forced her sister back to life to keep toying with her like a psychopath, not that they loved each other with an unbreakable bond or anything. And this retcon among with all other kindergarten behaviors the survivors now share between each other doesn't sit well with me. Gross. But it's been so many years now, I've mourned the soul of the ip for long enough there's no point in beating a dead horse.

[hoxi]

9 hours ago, user1464576869 said:

Probably a bug initially, but I think it can make sense, when interpreted as aggressively territorial behavior. Which is even a quote from one survivor I think. In real life some birds kick their kids out of the nest early with little regard, don't they?

Not against Smallbirds because (for the third time) it was clearly an error when porting the code from DS to DST. But for Smallish Tallbirds? Sure, you can interpret it like that, even if that might've been an oversight since DS.

[Frosty_Mentos]

If the guy was right about the code being messed up for as to why Tallbirds kill their young... Would that mean it's a good reason to update them? Maybe in a sense that they could create some sort of "herds" like multiple nests in one area of sorts, having a limit as to how many there can be. Would be a neat way to have lots of them, but that also means we would need smallbirds to be fed by tallbirds otherwise they'll just starve as usual.

Just for the funny and old timey thing to keep I wouldn't mind if they don't change, but in a sense of having practicality and a sort of a husbandry of an aggressive animal I think it's not a bad thing change for us all to benefit from it.

[cybers2001]

On 3/20/2026 at 1:04 AM, DegenerateFurry said:

Yeah. The short implies they eat meat, though. Lots of gameplay/lore mismatches in that one.

The teenbirds do eat meat, though.