Nerf to summer watering can strategy

[Walrusst]

47 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

The best water balloon farm is to literally just put Chester by some mosquito ponds. His HP regen is too high for mosquitos to actually kill him and they'll blow themselves up biting him. I think you do need the ponds on-screen for that to work, though.

Honestly ever since I figured out how to cage tallbirds and to make them torment the bunny people I've wanted to make the bunny's harvest my mosquito farm for me since rabbit houses have become a renewable resource.

[Cruvimaster]

8 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Dragonfly walls strat is absolutely an exploit.

Yes, and it’s the game's most famous exploit—one used by everyone. It makes no sense to craft an Ice Staff to neutralize the Lavae when a much cheaper resource does the job better. Nor would it make sense to spend blue gems crafting a staff if that specific resource is exactly what you want to get from the boss. Every player starting DST learns that using walls is the right way to face this boss; all content creators teach that. It’s the same situation as with the Ancient Guardian or Crab King, where people would only defeat them using exploits.

[DinsdaleP]

8 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Either you're talking about the max level ice staff upgrade or you've never done the fight with a normal ice staff, because you're going to use up far more than just two of them. The lavae each take many hits to freeze and Dragonfly spawns a ton of them. 

Nope, because you're only using the ice staff when it's actually required, when you're about to be overwhelmed. The first lavae can be fought normally, often along with the second one too, and the last one is also gonna be alone after you've put Dragonfly to sleep, it's quite easy to thin out their numbers even with a normal damage character. Do prepare 3 staffs, but chances are, you're not gonna need all of them.

[Nikki Darks]

In my 4K+ hours of playing this game, I never knew you could cool down a thermal stone with a watering can... And it never made summer difficult for me, lol.

Ice cubes are phenomenal, eyebrella if you can get one, there's boulders with nitre in the world so just make cold campfire. Doesn't change anything meaningful about the game now that it's gone.

[Walrusst]

Honestly I've said in the past I'd love if the resource reward for killing lavae with the staff or water source was more interesting. You are flash freezing a lava monster.
Some sort of igneous rock themed chitin or membrane could probably have 2-3 uses that make me happy for doing DFly in an interesting way. Especially if they provided an interesting interaction with DFly proper. 
(Say you could craft something that did both protect you from enrages but made enrages more common, but she had damage vulnerability in this phase that made fighting her while she was mad faster/profitable.... It would add two viable ways to fight her, the cheap way and a weird way where you are needlessly cruel to the boss that's fast.)

As for the argument about water cooling your thermal stone for better performance, sure its not essential but so is 90% of the game. Part of the game is the joy of making random trivia a reality so the fact that you could take your 0 degree thermal stone and kick it to -20 without wanting to rip your eyes out is something people found fun. These weird base kit interactions are what people want to use when they say Wilson is fine as he is.

[DegenerateFurry]

6 hours ago, Cruvimaster said:

Yes, and it’s the game's most famous exploit—one used by everyone. It makes no sense to craft an Ice Staff to neutralize the Lavae when a much cheaper resource does the job better. Nor would it make sense to spend blue gems crafting a staff if that specific resource is exactly what you want to get from the boss. Every player starting DST learns that using walls is the right way to face this boss; all content creators teach that. It’s the same situation as with the Ancient Guardian or Crab King, where people would only defeat them using exploits.

Yeah, but people throw a hissy fit if you point out that the popularity of cheese methods and exploits suggests a boss needs a rework, so unless Klei decides to ignore those change-averse individuals and fix the problem so we don't feel the need to use an exploit to get around outdated design, we're stuck with the current situation. 

[Walrusst]

14 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Yeah, but people throw a hissy fit if you point out that the popularity of cheese methods and exploits suggests a boss needs a rework, so unless Klei decides to ignore those change-averse individuals and fix the problem so we don't feel the need to use an exploit to get around outdated design, we're stuck with the current situation. 

We don't need a full rework to do it even, an incentive/resource that rewards doing the cool thing is probably enough here. If the lavae become a resource you fight dragonfly to mine thats both an awesome incentive to deal with them, and a cool dynamic as a bossfight which is a resource gathering minigame as well. Think bearger and ancient guardian, its a small dynamic that lends the game crazy depth despite it being like 0.1% of our gameplay time. One small mechanic, a huge reason to remember a boss as being awesome and memorable.

Let me have my asbestos klei please.

[DegenerateFurry]

30 minutes ago, Walrusst said:

We don't need a full rework to do it even, an incentive/resource that rewards doing the cool thing is probably enough here. If the lavae become a resource you fight dragonfly to mine thats both an awesome incentive to deal with them, and a cool dynamic as a bossfight which is a resource gathering minigame as well. Think bearger and ancient guardian, its a small dynamic that lends the game crazy depth despite it being like 0.1% of our gameplay time. One small mechanic, a huge reason to remember a boss as being awesome and memorable.

Let me have my asbestos klei please.

Yeah, that'd be nice. Another way to make non-walls Dragonfly strategies more viable would be to either make normal ice staffs freeze lavae in one hit or make the upgrade available way earlier. 

[AliceShiki]

I like the idea of a "igneous rock themed chitin or membrane" or something along those lines dropping from Larvae... I think it wouldn't even need to necessarily be dropped from Ice Staving the larvaes, it could drop from simply killing them with hits as opposed to waiting 30s for the Larvae to explode on their own.

Another idea on this line would be like... If the Dragonfly dropped something after it stayed 1min in Enraged Mode (as opposed to just using Pan Flute on it) could also be cool.

I think there was a similar discussion on this in the past in regards to Klaus, something that made fighting Enraged Klaus rewarding and the like.

Basically, what I'm thinking is that, I still like that the game offers you a variety of ways to kill bosses and I wouldn't really want those ways to be removed... But I do think it could be cool to have extra rewards attached to beating the hardest versions of the bosses instead of using the lowest effort methods.

Would be cool Klei eventually revisited those old bosses to add some extra rewards to beating them while properly engaging with their harder mechanics.

I'm not sure if there is any boss I can think of other than Dfly/Klaus that this could apply to though... Still think it would be nice though.

[Castiliano]

On 6/26/2026 at 6:15 PM, Mike23Ua said:

Only someone playing on PC using a bunch of mods would even know this information, for everyone else they’re highly unlikely to even notice the change. I can say that I have personally never used a water can to cool a thermal stone I just use a cheap Endo fire or shove it over into a fridge or duck into and resurface out of the cave tunnel. I do not think this change is worth reverting.

Bro, not everything is about PC, Xbox or whatever. You started a war that only exists in your head.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen you bring up something irrelevant about Xbox in posts that had nothing to do with it
like, thousands of times.

[Walrusst]

26 minutes ago, AliceShiki said:

I like the idea of a "igneous rock themed chitin or membrane" or something along those lines dropping from Larvae... I think it wouldn't even need to necessarily be dropped from Ice Staving the larvaes, it could drop from simply killing them with hits as opposed to waiting 30s for the Larvae to explode on their own.

I think there was a similar discussion on this in the past in regards to Klaus, something that made fighting Enraged Klaus rewarding and the like.

Enranged klaus feels intrinsically different in that its intended as a punishment rather than having a fleshed out workflow to it built in and ignored for the sake of convinience.
Not saying it doesn't deserve some sort of thing to mark a players accomplishment, but it does feel distinctly different in how it should be handled.

Most of your post here is good. Its just that I wanted to note this as a difference, and not a flaw.

[Mike23Ua]

1 hour ago, Castiliano said:

Bro, not everything is about PC, Xbox or whatever. You started a war that only exists in your head.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen you bring up something irrelevant about Xbox in posts that had nothing to do with it
like, thousands of times.

Without going too far off topic, anyone who’s paying 22$ a month to access online features just to play games should have the same amount of quality that platformers that do not have a monthly subscription tied to playing has, probably more features honestly. So yeah it’s a tad bit frustrating we pay more for less.

[AliceShiki]

56 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

probably more features honestly.

It's really not Klei's problem that Gabe Newel never tried to extort his users by making them pay to play online.

Microsoft did it with Xbox 360 and for some reason it worked, so every console company followed suit... But this really isn't Klei's problem. Steam providing good service that modern consoles do not is not gonna be an excuse to make PC versions of games worse.

I still don't get how people were willing to accept this ridiculous thing back in Xbox 360 days. If the Xbox Live had flopped and the online was dead, we'd still have free online play in consoles, but that's not the reality we live in.

So uhn... Yeah, don't blame devs for not giving extra bonuses to companies that actively extort their userbase? You pay 22$ a month to play online because Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo extort their users, PC players don't pay it because Valve doesn't extort its users. This really isn't Klei's problem.