Will movement be more responsive?

[Argwarn]

Mostly asking this because DST doesnt have very responsive movement,a game with combat should respond better to commands to change direction better than that. The responsiveness of original Dont Starve makes it really nice to play in comparison,I hope that part is improved on.

[Harrowick]

Seeing as how this is likely on a new/updated engine i'm sure we could see more responsive movement! 

[Capybara007]

better commands to change direction? i dont get it, what is not responsive about dst movement? maybe you mean we should have better animations?

[Juny Pear]

1 hour ago, Capybara007 said:

better commands to change direction? i dont get it, what is not responsive about dst movement? maybe you mean we should have better animations?

It's rather sluggish with lag compensation off with about half a second of input delay at best unless you're the host.

And with lag comp on, your client's movements and those on the server are desynced so heavily you never actually know when you get hit by things, again unless you're hosting.

It's something I think most dedicated players just got used to, but it's definitely been an issue since release and one that they should at least try to adress with DSE. The only thing DST had going for it in regards to responsiveness over DS was that you could cancel attack anims, but that never actually fixed the core problems with how awkward things can feel at times.

[aidancode]

On 4/21/2026 at 3:47 PM, Juny Pear said:

It's rather sluggish with lag compensation off with about half a second of input delay at best unless you're the host.

And with lag comp on, your client's movements and those on the server are desynced so heavily you never actually know when you get hit by things, again unless you're hosting.

It's something I think most dedicated players just got used to, but it's definitely been an issue since release and one that they should at least try to adress with DSE. The only thing DST had going for it in regards to responsiveness over DS was that you could cancel attack anims, but that never actually fixed the core problems with how awkward things can feel at times.

Most of these issues are with how DST is poorly optimized, not how DST has a fundamentally clunky movement system, to be fair

[ExplodTallbirds]

yea the game should feel as resposnive as using the Don't Starve Alone mod, but vanilla and even in multiplayer its actually bs how bad this is, it ruins my experience playing multiplayer so i only play solo i'd be pissed if the issue isnt fixed in  elsewhere

[Sanitar]

18 minutes ago, ExplodTallbirds said:

yea the game should feel as resposnive as using the Don't Starve Alone mod, but vanilla and even in multiplayer its actually bs how bad this is, it ruins my experience playing multiplayer so i only play solo i'd be pissed if the issue isnt fixed in  elsewhere

They will have to solve this problem. Klei won't have any excuses if they step into this trap a second time.

[hhh2]

On 4/21/2026 at 11:47 PM, Juny Pear said:

It's something I think most dedicated players just got used to, but it's definitely been an issue since release and one that they should at least try to adress with DSE.

But it's a physical limit, it will always be that way.    All multiplayer games that you think are responsive have lag compensation, which interpolates data.  For some games like shooters with acceleration in character movement, that interpolation is easy and accurate if network jitter is minimal.  For games like DST, the time it takes for your computer to send the drop Meatballs (20) action to the server and then receive the acknowledgement that the server has taken the Meatballs from your inventory is going to take at least your ping.  It's possible to interpolate continuous streams of data, but it's not for discrete actions.  That's why movement with lag compensation turned on is good in DST, but as soon as you decide to try pick a berry bush, your character is doing the animation for three seconds, and it's why kiting is basically impossible with lag compensation turned on.

In a single player game, where the whole program is on your computer, discrete actions are instant.

Edited April 26 by hhh2

[Juny Pear]

13 hours ago, hhh2 said:

But it's a physical limit, it will always be that way.    All multiplayer games that you think are responsive have lag compensation, which interpolates data.  For some games like shooters with acceleration in character movement, that interpolation is easy and accurate if network jitter is minimal.  For games like DST, the time it takes for your computer to send the drop Meatballs (20) action to the server and then receive the acknowledgement that the server has taken the Meatballs from your inventory is going to take at least your ping.  It's possible to interpolate continuous streams of data, but it's not for discrete actions.  That's why movement with lag compensation turned on is good in DST, but as soon as you decide to try pick a berry bush, your character is doing the animation for three seconds, and it's why kiting is basically impossible with lag compensation turned on.

In a single player game, where the whole program is on your computer, discrete actions are instant.

Well the thing is that most multiplayer games don't just interpolate client input and server response, a lot of games let clients "cheat" to a certain degree by giving actions that happen on the client priority over what "actually" happened server side, in a manner of speaking. This is most easily seen with shooters not just in their movement, but for things like hit registration; You can headshot somebody on your client and the game will accept it as valid and respond accordingly, even if on the server at that exact point in time you would have missed just barely, just for the sake of making things feel smooth and fair to each player.

And that's exactly where dst's lag compensation kind of just ends up failing a lot of the time, the client is given no priority and is forced to wait on the server for everything. If this only affected actions like picking up or dropping items this wouldn't be so bad, although these actions could also be simulated ahead of time on the client just to make things feel more responsive and then rubberbanded if something desyncs with a player to player interaction, but where this usually ends up being bad is in combat in particular where you can be far out of a mob's attack range on your screen only for it to still end up hitting you because on the server you are still right next to the mob, which is information that you end up losing with lag comp enabled, and then the game rubberbands you to your actual position.
You could try to account for it as a player, but your connection might not be 100% consistent and so you often end up guessing where you could be instead of just going off of the visual information you have available on your client, and so at that point for many people like myself it ends up being more bareable to turn lag comp off and deal with the input delay more directly rather than hoping things are actually working out as planned.

And that whole issue could be alleviated greatly by just giving the client some priority over the server for certain actions. Obviously there would need to be some safeguards in place to prevent clients from just allowing impossible actions to cheat [most commonly the server sort of "rewinds" actions and positions by the client's ping to check if it would succeed at that point, and if things line up the action goes through] but I wouldn't imagine that to be an impossible task to pull off for a new game. Especially considering that for a large chunk of player actions you don't even really need to account too much for other player connections, since the game is primarily designed around pve, so things like client sided hit reg or other object interactions should be easier to account for, or at least less noticably problematic, when players don't directly interact with other players that much.

Whether or not someone else actually got hit by a mob or if picking a berrybush technically happened half a second sooner or was slightly different on their screen won't be as noticable as it would be to peak a corner in a shooter, visibly see yourself back behind cover, only to still get sniped because the sniper's client registered a valid hit. There's no human player behind that hound who got mogged by somebody who seemingly "tanked" its current attack, there's only the one player who, on their screen, barely killed the hound fast enough to prevent its attack from going through, and as such if the client technically showed inaccurate information it still wouldn't be that big a deal if it means the actual moment to moment gamefeel feels more fair and responsive.

[hhh2]

9 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

Well the thing is that most multiplayer games don't just interpolate client input and server response, a lot of games let clients "cheat" to a certain degree by giving actions that happen on the client priority over what "actually" happened server side, in a manner of speaking. This is most easily seen with shooters not just in their movement, but for things like hit registration; You can headshot somebody on your client and the game will accept it as valid and respond accordingly, even if on the server at that exact point in time you would have missed just barely, just for the sake of making things feel smooth and fair to each player.

Huh.  I believe that.  I did not know so much, and that is very interesting.  Oh! that does explain the speed hacks that I've seen in shooters like Left For Dead and Call of Duty.  

The discrepancies system on the server that determines what is a valid action and what isn't must be very hard to tune fairly and in a way that can prevent most cheats.

9 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

and then the game rubberbands you to your actual position.

It does?  I tend to remember when trying to kite a spider that the effect is that the spider has suddenly a huge attack radius.  That effect is what I remember more sorely than rubberbanding.

9 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

but I wouldn't imagine that to be an impossible task to pull off for a new game.

I don't know about that.  I won't be so optimistic.  Only Klei engineers will know the true headache.  The solution can't be as standard as a shooter because DST is very much dislike a shooter.

9 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

Especially considering that for a large chunk of player actions you don't even really need to account too much for other player connections, since the game is primarily designed around pve, so things like client sided hit reg or other object interactions should be easier to account for, or at least less noticably problematic

I can already see the cheaters in pubs in that case.  Terrible image of spoil sports.  Do you think that will be the consequence for "client priority?"

 

Thanks for the detailed reply.  I didn't know as much as I thought I did.

[Juny Pear]

5 hours ago, hhh2 said:

It does?  I tend to remember when trying to kite a spider that the effect is that the spider has suddenly a huge attack radius.  That effect is what I remember more sorely than rubberbanding.

Oh, I should have specified this doesn't happen every time, just in more severe cases. I've usually had it happen whenever I had a pretty big speed increase so the distance between my client's player position and that of the server was greater than it would have been with a lower boost.

5 hours ago, hhh2 said:

Huh.  I believe that.  I did not know so much, and that is very interesting.  Oh! that does explain the speed hacks that I've seen in shooters like Left For Dead and Call of Duty.  

The discrepancies system on the server that determines what is a valid action and what isn't must be very hard to tune fairly and in a way that can prevent most cheats.

Yup, pretty certain that's the long and short of it. I can't speak for call of duty in particular but as far as I know left for dead trusts the client for things such as position and thus you can just use something like cheat engine or a modded client to feed the server false information and it just accepts it.

5 hours ago, hhh2 said:

I can already see the cheaters in pubs in that case.  Terrible image of spoil sports.  Do you think that will be the consequence for "client priority?"

I think that would be unlikely. More severe cases would probably be nipped in the bud, so you can't just conjure new items out of thin air, but I could maybe see some smaller position based things slip through the cracks, but nothing gamebreaking or anything. Plus, while there's definitely going to be some people that will try to mess with things in that way, if dst is any indication most players who want to ruin the fun for others will probably just stick to far easier "solutions" like burning things down with a torch or spamming something like on tentacles at spawn. Meanwhile those who just cheat for the sake of it or because they wanna mess around with godmode or something will probably just stick to their own servers with mods and the dev console on.

So for the most part I wouldn't be too concerned over running into somebody trying to spoil people's fun that way more than I'd be concerned over someone just using some game mechanic to ruin your day.

[hhh2]

16 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

but as far as I know left for dead trusts the client for things such as position and thus you can just use something like cheat engine or a modded client to feed the server false information and it just accepts it.

Oh dear, sensibilities in 2006...  Where did we go so wrong?

 

18 hours ago, Juny Pear said:

So for the most part I wouldn't be too concerned over running into somebody trying to spoil people's fun that way more than I'd be concerned over someone just using some game mechanic to ruin your day.

I don't know why myself I am concerned with pubs anyways, the things that reset after five hours.  The pub experience is always going to be chaos