Make autumn the only starting season

[Rosten]

While spring is great, and isnt a bad starting point, whenever summer comes, and there isnt enough ice for a hat and a fling-o-matic, you're base is doomed, without that time in winter to gather ice, there's no chance of surviving summer without being very gamesmart, and considering summer is only the second season after spring, thats pretty difficult

[An Artifact]

Set "Autumn" as starting season in world generation, then you will always start in autumn.

[rezecib]

While spring is great, and isnt a bad starting point, whenever summer comes, and there isnt enough ice for a hat and a fling-o-matic, you're base is doomed, without that time in winter to gather ice, there's no chance of surviving summer without being very gamesmart, and considering summer is only the second season after spring, thats pretty difficult

With the watermelons in now, starting in Spring is actually much more fun and just as viable as starting in Autumn now. Just rush farms, use the intense rain and fertilize a bit to get watermelons fast and stockpile. Five of them gets you through summer just fine.

[Rosten]

Set "Autumn" as starting season in world generation, then you will always start in autumn.

Mate, i'm saying this for the newer players, surviving summer isn't that difficult w/o a fling-o-matic if you know what you're doing, but if not, then you're pretty much doomed, and most new players won't bother messing with world-gen

With the watermelons in now, starting in Spring is actually much more fun and just as viable as starting in Autumn now. Just rush farms, use the intense rain and fertilize a bit to get watermelons fast and stockpile. Five of them gets you through summer just fine.

Not saying it because of overheating, thats easy to overcome, im saying it because of your building spontaneously combusting with you having nothing to do about it.

[justjasper]

and most new players won't bother messing with world-gen

 

Then new players should tough it out and learn the ropes like the rest of us. If starting in spring is really such a problem they will eventually find the world gen options.

[Rosten]

Then new players should tough it out and learn the ropes like the rest of us. If starting in spring is really such a problem they will eventually find the world gen options.

Considering it's still the begging of the game once you get to summer, (only around day 20) it doesn't make to much sense to start in the season with the hardest (in my opinion) next, as much as I love spring, it's really annoying finding a great world and having it destroyed on day 22 because you couldnt find enough ice to make a fling-o-matic. As spring may be akin to autumn in its difficulty, autumn goes to winter, which is significantly easier than summer, (in my opinion, at least) at least when you start in autumn you have ample time to collect the ice and gears necessary to survive summer, as starting in spring doesn't give you enough time to do either, sometimes i havent found my chess biome until the second summer (pre-RoG), so I propose this,

A) Make spring NOT a starting season (easiest way)

B) Nerf Summer (Not preferred at all >.>)

C) Make an easier way to deal with things spontaneously combusting and a way to deal with heat quickly,

In winter you dont have things constantly being destroyed

In winter you have around 40+ days to construct an icebox to store your ice (20 autumn, 20 winter, 20 spring, so actually 60 if im correct)

In winter if you're freezing you can quickly craft a torch and burn something for heat, in summer, there is no such alternative

In summer you also have to balance your heating, as without enough cooling, you could burn to death, and with to much, you could freeze to death, not the same in winter

 

@JoeW Klei may have done this because they thought summer and winter are equal in difficulty, but that is simply not so, as, if you didnt get enough ice in spring, and find gears for an icebox to store it, all your buildings are gonna catch on fire and be destroyed and you cant do a thing about it. 

 

not to mention fiddling with the world-gen settings makes me feel like a cheater >.>

[PopcornTattoo]

Considering it's still the begging of the game once you get to summer, (only around day 20) it doesn't make to much sense to start in the season with the hardest (in my opinion) next, as much as I love spring, it's really annoying finding a great world and having it destroyed on day 22 because you couldnt find enough ice to make a fling-o-matic. As spring may be akin to autumn in its difficulty, autumn goes to winter, which is significantly easier than summer, (in my opinion, at least) at least when you start in autumn you have ample time to collect the ice and gears necessary to survive summer, as starting in spring doesn't give you enough time to do either, sometimes i havent found my chess biome until the second summer (pre-RoG), so I propose this,

A) Make spring NOT a starting season (easiest way)

B) Nerf Summer (Not preferred at all >.>)

C) Make an easier way to deal with things spontaneously combusting and a way to deal with heat quickly,

In winter you dont have things constantly being destroyed

In winter you have around 40+ days to construct an icebox to store your ice (20 autumn, 20 winter, 20 spring, so actually 60 if im correct)

In winter if you're freezing you can quickly craft a torch and burn something for heat, in summer, there is no such alternative

In summer you also have to balance your heating, as without enough cooling, you could burn to death, and with to much, you could freeze to death, not the same in winter

 

I strongly disagree with getting rid of spring as a starting season for the new players simply because summer is a hard month to survive in

 

when you first played the game you probably lost countless worlds by not knowing what to do but you still played and so will most of the newer players (who probably wouldn't get RoG immediately anyway since they wouldn't be sure if they liked the game or not)

 

the whole point of the game is to learn how to survive and adapt to the environment and climate 

 

winter is in no way easier than summer and it would be just as difficult for a new player to have to track down and kill a koalefant + spiders to get 8 silk and a trunk to make a breezy vest especially since most players wouldn't know to do that anyway if they didn't look at the wiki

 

starting in autumn wouldn't prepare them for summer anyway because, again, a new player isn't going to know what to expect from the other seasons and won't know to gather ice or gears for specific things and might let the ice melt or eat it all to see what it does and then never touch it again. it wouldn't be until summer actually began and they started to overheat that they realized their mistake and if they died then they do better on the next world

 

permadeath is a huge part of Don't Starve and is critical for learning and growing as a player in this game

 

in the vanilla game you also start off with winter at day 20 as well and it's just as unfair for a new player

 

as for balancing your heat; you also do that in winter

 

in winter you need to make sure you don't freeze to death by wearing specific clothing and standing by the fire for a long time before you prepare to go out but there is also the possibility of overheating from this and dying of heatstroke if you fail to find the right balance

 

in short, I don't think spring should be removed as a starting season

 

for a new player it's a fantastic learning experience and a way to develop tactics on how to survive and actually planning things out

 

permadeath and "what about the new players" just isn't enough to convince me this should be changed

 

if you're a veteran and you don't like starting in spring you can simply change your world settings to start in Autumn

[rezecib]

Not saying it because of overheating, thats easy to overcome, im saying it because of your building spontaneously combusting with you having nothing to do about it.

 

Oh! I actually didn't realize this until I started looking at the code, but you can put fires out with a variety of things- rot, ice, manure are ones that I've used. Seems like the best use for rot right now. Pick it up and mouse over as if to fertilize it, but it will say "extinguish" instead.

[Rosten]

Oh! I actually didn't realize this until I started looking at the code, but you can put fires out with a variety of things- rot, ice, manure are ones that I've used. Seems like the best use for rot right now. Pick it up and mouse over as if to fertilize it, but it will say "extinguish" instead.

Really? rot and manure put out fires

wish i had known that 15 minutes ago.

[Sporb]

Klei may have done this because they thought summer and winter are equal in difficulty, but that is simply not so, as, if you didnt get enough ice in spring, and find gears for an icebox to store it, all your buildings are gonna catch on fire and be destroyed and you cant do a thing about it.

What's wrong with starting in spring being harder than starting in summer? This is a permadeath game with random generation. Sometimes you'll get stuck with a more difficult world to survive in. Sometimes a treeguard spawns really early. Sometimes adventure mode starts with The King of Winter. There's always an element of luck involved, but if you know what you're doing you'll be able to overcome the odds. If you don't, you start a new game.

And I really doubt that new players are going to find winter significantly easier anyway; they're not going to know how to deal with either. Heck, maybe the only reason you think summer is harder is because you've had much more experience in winter, I dunno.

 

not to mention fiddling with the world-gen settings makes me feel like a cheater >.>

Wait, is this about you, or is it about new players? I don't think that bringing up how you, an experienced player, feel when you tweak the world settings is very relevant.

[Devon Aster]

It's possible that the random start between Spring and Autumn was done to insure all seasons would be played through reasonably quickly for beta-testing purposes.  With there being four different seasons, each 15-21 days, it now takes longer to cycle through all the new mechanics.  If everybody started in one or the other, it would've stretched out how long it would take players to hit Summer or Winter, and bugs and suggestions would've taken that much longer to sort out.  It could've led to whichever new mechanics came first getting the most play and attention, with the rest falling behind because people didn't get that far or weren't seeing them with 'fresh' eyes.
 
I personally don't mind the randomness and other people have already brought up permadeath.  This is not a game that's nice to new players.  There's no tutorial and there are so very many ways to die from not knowing things.  Plenty of newbies died their first night because they didn't realize just how important having light is.
 
Also, as CowlRaven mentioned, it's unlikely very new players will buy the DLC right off.  I imagine most of them will play the original game before deciding if they want the expansion.

[scize]

Oh! I actually didn't realize this until I started looking at the code, but you can put fires out with a variety of things- rot, ice, manure are ones that I've used. Seems like the best use for rot right now. Pick it up and mouse over as if to fertilize it, but it will say "extinguish" instead.

i tried this it didn't work tho

[rezecib]

i tried this it didn't work tho

I don't think it works once it's caught fire, but if it's just smoking then you can still extinguish it. I'll set up a test save and see if I can play with the temps and stuff and check it there, will edit this with results.

 

Edit: You can extinguish smoldering things with guano, manure, rot, and ice, but only ice can be used to extinguish things that are burning. If two things are close together, though, they catch the other on fire too fast for you to extinguish either for long.

[pwhampton]

I believe the extinguish setting may have issues if there is a mod that overwrites that particular item's prefab file. Anyway, I have never had an issue getting enough ice before summer starts. I usually wait to mine the ice until I get my icebox up so I don't loose it. And with all of the new Maxwell set pieces, it is a lot easier to get your hands on gears.

[Rosten]

What's wrong with starting in spring being harder than starting in summer? This is a permadeath game with random generation. Sometimes you'll get stuck with a more difficult world to survive in. Sometimes a treeguard spawns really early. Sometimes adventure mode starts with The King of Winter. There's always an element of luck involved, but if you know what you're doing you'll be able to overcome the odds. If you don't, you start a new game.

And I really doubt that new players are going to find winter significantly easier anyway; they're not going to know how to deal with either. Heck, maybe the only reason you think summer is harder is because you've had much more experience in winter, I dunno.

 

Wait, is this about you, or is it about new players? I don't think that bringing up how you, an experienced player, feel when you tweak the world settings is very relevant.

Maybe you're right, maybe it is me just being an idiot because im more used to winter, although, this guys logic is pretty infallible as well 

It's possible that the random start between Spring and Autumn was done to insure all seasons would be played through reasonably quickly for beta-testing purposes.  With there being four different seasons, each 15-21 days, it now takes longer to cycle through all the new mechanics.  If everybody started in one or the other, it would've stretched out how long it would take players to hit Summer or Winter, and bugs and suggestions would've taken that much longer to sort out.  It could've led to whichever new mechanics came first getting the most play and attention, with the rest falling behind because people didn't get that far or weren't seeing them with 'fresh' eyes.

 

I personally don't mind the randomness and other people have already brought up permadeath.  This is not a game that's nice to new players.  There's no tutorial and there are so very many ways to die from not knowing things.  Plenty of newbies died their first night because they didn't realize just how important having light is.

 

Also, as CowlRaven mentioned, it's unlikely very new players will buy the DLC right off.  I imagine most of them will play the original game before deciding if they want the expansion.

I did a huge facepalm when reading this honestly, it just makes to much sense not to be true it would make sure all the seasons are only 20 days away from starting, and the more difficult ones at that, 

 

Also, about rot and stuff extinguishing fires, usually in this game there's some kind of hint about what things can do, the beefalo hat is "complete with smell" (will add more examples if necessary but i've gotta go atm)

 

being defeated sucks, now i think i know why all those people on youtube continue arguing long past their time of losing eh?

[HoneyHam]

I thought you were kidding about this.

Well, you can just set it to Autumn in the settings, and also, spring isn't that bad. You just have to be a little lucky on the glaciers.