A Casual Player's Experience [Includes some weird bugs]

[InternalScreing]

TLDR; each chassis having its own stats feels a lot less fun than the linked stats were, it's a lot more busywork, and its current implementation with chassis revival feels extremely unforgiving. Additionally, the chessmaster circuit feels needlessly expensive for its niche base use, and its skill upgraded function feels way too potent and I worry it wouldn't work well with multiplayer, which is important for Don't Starve Together. (Also side note, I'd love for WX to have a character ability wheel like Wendy, Winona, or Maxwell to control your gamma circuits, maybe it visually shows the row of plugged in gamma circuits when opened and then you click on one to ready its ability to use. I especially say this because Sonic Invoker and Blocking are too hard/annoying to activate and also don't really work at all together, look at my silly concept art at the bottom)

Hello! I'm a relatively experienced player who has never really gotten far in the lunar or shadow questlines, and have been impatiently awaiting the shadow affinity for WX. I spent a bit of time looking at some posts here to get a bit of an idea of what it's about, before deciding to jump into the beta myself.

Upon entering my first world.. Well, I just messed around with some console commands to get a general idea of the changes, but my second world was an actual run. And it... Gave me the heebie jeebies, to be frank. I don't know why, especially because as far as I could tell the early game of WX is unchanged, but something just felt... Off... And I found some set pieces that I've never seen before, even watching other people playing the game, and with a little digging they shouldn't exist in DST? Am I just uninitiated and these weird set pieces are just a cute little beta-exclusives for funsies? Or is something going on?

Regardless, I think that world was haunted anyway, because now (after an update) it refuses to load in the strangest way I've ever seen, missing my inventory at the bottom of the screen and all my player model skins, but the spear I was using and its skin would still be in my hand, and I could walk around a little before getting kicked out with a message saying I was disconnected from the server, despite being locally hosted I think? (I actually have no idea how DST handles its servers) Anyway, that's a bit of a shame because I was getting a little attached to that world, and I haven't seen any of those weird set pieces since. The uneasy feeling has still persisted, though. Odd. 

Anyway, now to my most recent world, I actually got to the point of having backup chassis! Well, one and then I put a second in the ruins for quick Pseudoscience crafting, so that barely counts. Anyway, I got the first one with a cute little trick I like where I'll revive at a touch stone instead of reanimating my chassis created by Inhabited Machine 2, that way I don't need to rush gears and gems for an extra circuit loadout and flexible positioning. (When I revived I was locked facing right for some reason? No clue why, and it was fixed when I swapped chassis) When I swapped back to my original body after that, oh boy! I got back up with one hit point? I thought that was a little rough, but getting an extra chassis for almost free is pretty good, so maybe a bit of risk and reward? I mean, worst case scenario you die again and possess your newer chassis, so you don't really lose anything from it. Skip forward to when I start using the second chassis and the per-chassis stats start really being a drag on things, because I feel like I need to micromanage it to make sure it doesn't fall into disrepair. I mean I know its stats only degrade while I'm controlling it, but it's something I need to keep tabs on before I switch to it. Skipping forward a bit more, and it's winter, that spare chassis is built for combat (a ton of health circuits plus an optoelectric) but I don't have the most time to dedicate to keeping it healthy and kitted. Deerclops noises start. I throw my consciousness to the chassis. It's about half dead, with breaking kit, but I feel like I've done more with less before. Deerclops spawns. I start fighting. Things start going south as my spears break and I run out of log suits. I disengage. Sanity drained from Deerclops's insanity aura. A Terrorbeak gets me. I revive on the spot, hoping to catch my breath. 76 hunger, 0 sanity, 1 health. I barely throw myself to my base chassis, which is in near tip-top shape. Okay. That is... A situation. A situation I also don't really need to deal with until later. 

So a couple things that I unpacked from that endeavor;

1) The way that reviving with backup chassis works, as it is currently implemented with persistent chassis stats, is extremely unforgiving. Not only do you lose all your charge, which you were probably using to survive in the first place, but you're thrust back into the situation that killed you, with no room for error. I imagine this could easily lead to situations where you can die by freezing or overheating, revive, and immediately die again to tick damage. Or my example with sanity monsters. Good luck no-hitting a Terrorbeak or three! (you probably won't, given you died to it once before)

2) While I was one who thought the stat shifting with the original release of WX's skill tree was a bit overpowered, I think it's probably the lesser of two evils here. When I was playing through my 300+ days of solo skill tree WX, I felt clever for figuring that "mechanic" out, and building my chassis to take advantage of it. It's a pretty big investment, too, with the reward of requiring much lower maintenance, which is nice so that I can focus more on playing the game rather than the busywork of sending materials to and from chassis just to keep them alive. Also to note, it isn't terribly hard to get more value out of food and whatnot anyway without linked chassis stats. It just takes a bit more effort and waiting for charges to come back. Getting more value with the linked stats also wasn't the end all be all, either. You can't exactly switch to a weaker chassis to heal mid-boss, and switching between warm and cool chassis constantly gets really annoying and really time-consuming, driving players to seek out better and more traditional methods of staying cool or warm, depending on season.

3) Still on the concept of linked chassis stats, you still had to deal with it if your stats got out of hand. I mean you still need to, but just.. Later... Honestly, with the current system in the beta world, I could run all the way down to the backup chassis and destroy it (and subsequently rebuild it) just so I don't have to deal with the lethal situation it finds itself in. My base chassis, however? Perfectly fine. Cool as a cucumber. I don't have the fire under me to force me to deal with it now. If chassis stats were linked, I'd have to eat that death and, well, probably revive, losing my charges. Still, change that from sanity to a more deadly condition like starvation or wetness and we'd have something potentially run ending if my chassis aren't close enough together. 

4) After a bit of testing in another world with console commands, Inhabited Machine 3 is... Weird. Its main use is to synergize with 2, allowing you to get back up with 100 health instead of 1, which is more forgiving, however is still does nothing about other stats like sanity. Furthermore, reviving with another chassis will set its health to 100, as the skill describes, but switching back to the chassis that died will cause it to be at 1 HP, which is very... Well frankly using chassis for their (assumed) intended purpose of being revives is really weird in general. It consumes all charges, but that means it consumes 0 charges if it had none to begin with, and chassis that are dropped on death are automatically fully discharged, so like you should really only ever revive with the chassis you create on death because then you can switch to another, more charged chassis to be safer. I feel like it might make more sense if you either revived without depleting charge and lose all charges when you drop a chassis on death, or you don't lose any charges when you drop a chassis on death but lose all charges when you revive with a chassis. That way the player doesn't need to think about "charge economy" nearly as much when figuring out where to revive from. Is this making sense? Probably not. Anyway, I still don't really feel like Inhabited Machine 3 is worth it because it's especially planning for failure while 2 has some fun and neat ways of being gimmicked. (Also with the non-beta implementation 2 can feel really cool in a "I didn't hear no bell" moment)

Last thing I want to talk about, and it's a bit more on the speculative side, is the Chessmaster Circuit. I'm not exactly the most sure how to feel about the Chessmaster Circuit. Its base effect is to increase the max number of clockworks you can recruit, which is... Niche, to say the least. I can't remember the last time I saw a single person recruit a clockwork other than to show off that it's a mechanic or for a gimmicky boss rush. It's also pretty expensive, as gears aren't exactly common, and are in high demand, especially early game. When upgraded, however, WX becomes the de facto best character to rush the ruins as, which they were already pretty good at, because clockworks become completely neutral to them. Keyword, them. Given this neutrality isn't conferred to any of WX's allies, it means WX really wants to ruins rush alone, leaving their allies behind, which is a dang shame when your friends want to come along. Already with WX's innate reduced aggo range, my friend was having so much more trouble in the ruins than I was, and once I got the Chessmaster Circuit in my second world, I actually considered basing in the ruins for a moment because I found a space where only clockworks, that were neutral to me, would be close enough to actually be a threat. I'm seeing a lot of people loving this thing, but it just feels... Wrong to me. Especially as a one slot, you could slap this thing on nearly any gamma loadout with the only cost being the gears in the recipe, and while its use is niche it's extremely potent in that niche. I really want more gamma circuits, because I think the concept is cool, but this ain't it, chief. You should go back to the drawing board in my opinion. (Also side note, I'd love for WX to have a character ability wheel like Wendy, Winona, or Maxwell to control your gamma circuits, maybe it visually shows the row of plugged in gamma circuits when opened and then you click on one to ready its ability to use. I especially say this because Sonic Invoker and Blocking are too hard/annoying to activate and also don't really work at all together)

I'm already up too late so here's some quick concept art. I'd play with the opacity but I don't like how it looks with it so eh.

[Baark0]

The obelisk and hound set pieces exist and can appear normally, the obelisk is just really rare, and the hound one can even appear in the caves/ruins.

[WendyHater9000]

TLDR, I just want to reply the chessmaster circuit is too expensive part.

Like 1gear is too expensive for you able to skip all the ruin clockwork? What? Or did my poor English make me misunderstand something 

Edited Thursday at 11:55 AM by WendyHater9000

[doritosdamafia]

the complain about reveving in a chassis with one hp is a bug, you are supose to revive with 50 hp normally, seconds how are gears expensive? super speed is the same cost and is easy to get

Edited Thursday at 12:00 PM by doritosdamafia

[Master_NiX]

50 minutes ago, WendyHater9000 said:

1gear is too expensive for you able to skip all the ruin clockwork?

Very cheap. Especially since you can get 2 gears every full moon for a price of 5 rocks.