Promoting Exploration

[Poisonous]

I, too, came to suggest this. My idea is that instead of 'true death' by being beaten senseless, the character could become what I call 'injured'. Upon becoming 'injured' the character:-loses all his/her inventory;-has their health at 10% maximum;-has their hunger reduced by 25% maximum or 50% current whichever is less;-has their Sanity reduced by 50% current;-is unable to wield weapons;-can use tools but deals 50% less damage;-gets knocked back a few distance so can't immediately go back to pick up their items;-but gains an increased movement speed (the 'adrenaline rush') which allows them to get away from the situation for the time being;All until fully rested via using a bed roll/tent.This forces the character back to pseudo-Day One where they have to gather fresh materials or return to their base and regain their strength for the next day.If the character's health is reduced to 0 before he/she is fully rested (e.g. the character foolishly rushes back into danger), True Death occurs as per norm. Maybe limiting the amount of times a character can be Injured would help, with a handful of naturally occuring shrine-things recovering lost points. I know some people aren't happy with the Touch Stones, so maybe those can act as the 'injury limit recovery mechanic' instead of true resurrection. What do you guys think? This punishes the beginners less while effectively giving only a 10% increased health for anyone who want more challenge from the game (and hence might not be so happy with the better survival rates).

[mobius187]

Not to put too fine a point on it, moral choice systems (which is essentially what Krampus is) which try to pigeonhole the gamer into doing what the developer wants them to do instead of giving them the freedom to find their own play style are one of the most annoying aspects of games in the last decade or so, and it is not something you need to include just for the sake of including it. As a concept, moral choices in a game are very interesting, but all too often they are shoehorned into a game without adding anything to the mechanics of play and just end up being very annoying.

Well originally the Krampus had nothing to do with morality. The Krampus was added back before rot, when players hoarded food and items in dozens of chests at their base camp. The easiest food to catch back then was rabbits and player also hunted pig men to "harvest" them for resources (i.e. hams/leather). To reduce the abuse the Krampus was added to discourage this type of gameplay.

However with the changes that have happened since then I felt that the purpose of the Krampus needed to be refocused. IMHO, killing rabbits and birds shouldn't be considered "naughty", it's just the basics of survival and besides, they're smarter now and not as easy to catch. I felt that "naughty points" should only be gained by killing pig men, smallbirds, burning down forests (i.e. 10+ trees), and other actions with evil intentions. Also, rather than steal the player's items I felt he should attack the player character, and once he drops you to 25% or less Health he would kidnap you in his bag, teleport far off, and drop you on the ground... taking away all the items in your inventory to boot.

That being said, if you want to be evil, be evil and kill the Krampus. He does have that bag after all. The only unnerfing of the Krampus I made was that he should be restored to his original power/toughness and be impervious to sleep. Anyway, that's just my opinion and maybe I'm hampered by the fact that whenever I play a game I always take the moral high ground whenever possible.

There isn't anything wrong with being able to farm and ensure basic survival, if it allows the player to build a stable base from which they can explore the rest of the game world and develop their character and their environment more.

Agreed.

Right now, it can be rather frustrating to go exploring once you have a base established as it can be very easy, exploring a new area, encountering new hazards to be killed and lose all the work you have put into the base.

Well Don't Starve is a very hazardous game. Death teaches you what to do and what not to do. In some cases it can be fairly obvious, while in other cases, not so much. I usually go into a situation fully equipped and, when I'm in further than I expected, I would run away. Yup, I always value a good strategic retreat.

This can be very frustrating is a very fast way to turn new players off to your game. I realize that you are still working to balance the game's combat system, and that the importance of survival and the permanent death mechanic are very major facets of your game, and it would radically change the gameplay style to weaken these aspects, but as it stands it is very discouraging to explorers when their game experience can be ended so quickly from seemingly relatively innocuous actions.

But didn't you attack a giant spiders nest? You must have had some inkling that this possibly could have not ended well for you. I remember the first time I died... I had no light source and wandered off to far, night came, and the Grue ate me. A pity I hadn't gotten around yet to building a Meat Effigy, so I died, and then restarted as Wendy. That turned out for the best, since IMHO, Wendy is the best character. That's my unbaised opinion.

For me I originally felt that the main issue with players not exploring was a direct result of a lack of goo reasons to explore. At the time I had argued that the game needed more unqiue random locations for players to stumble across and resources that couldn't be supplanted near their base camp (i.e. like reeds). I know that in Adventure mode the Devs are working on creating unique locations, so I'm interested to see what they will come up with over time.

Some have suggested incentivizing exploration by keeping a tracker of the amount of the game world explored, requiring players to continue to travel to find food, or punishing them for staying in the same spot for too long, but I think these all miss an important point: games are meant to be fun. The player should want to explore your world because it is an exciting world and fun to explore, not because he is simply being punished for not exploring or trying to maximize some arbitrary counter.

Agreed. Back when this was a focus issue players who stayed near their home base were considered to be "turtling". There was much discussion about how this behavior was bad and players should be punished/nerfed in order to get them to stop it. However I always felt that "turtling" wasn't the problem, it was a symptom. The real problem was, as I stated earlier, that players had no incentive to explore. Then Hounds were introduced and this served to further this behavior as players didn't want to run the risk of being caught off-guard by a Hound attack just to explore.

What I would suggest is making it somewhat safer to explore without taking too much away from the game's core challenge.

Hmmm. "Safer" doesn't usually equate well with the theme of Don't Starve, but I'm reading this post as I respond, so I'll reserve my opinion until after I've heard what you have to say.

The ability to create better weapons and armor. A more progressive system where players can make better items through researching so they can enter more dangerous battles without an immediate fear of death and still be able to run away if things turn sour would make exploring much less painful.

My thought on this is: what do you mean by "better"? If you mean the vanilla upgrade of "better damage" and "better durability", then I'm against it. I play Minecraft and its linear progression for the tech tree is one of its worst failings, IMHO. It's boring as all hell and promote getting the best (i.e. diamond) and then ignoring the rest. Now if by "better" you mean, "new/unique powers" then I'm onboard. If you have some suggestions for new types of armor or weapons, then I wouldn't mind hearing them.

For me, ever since gunpowder appeared in the game I have felt my old suggestion, namely the flintlock rifle, has renewed chances of actually being added to the game. If so, I felt its main feature should be killing power (i.e. one hit kill most enemies), but on the downside that it should require ammo (i.e. lead balls/gunpowder), needs 3-5 seconds to reload (making it terrible for multiple enemies), and cannot be fired when it's raining. Also, when its fired it creates a loud bang, which startles and frightens off various creatures (i.e. rabbits, birds, beefalo, ect). Let me know if you have any of your own suggestions.

Make combat deaths less serious. The title of the game is Don't Starve, so dying from running out of food should be the real permanent failure, while dying in combat may be something possible to recover from. I realize you can make an amulet to revive you after death, but this requires some fairly rare items that are likely beyond the reach of a starting player. Alternatively, you could make it so that player-created structures stay in the game world after dying. You already retain research, and it seems odd to return to a world that looks completely untouched after dying, but still have all your research from previous playthroughs.

Personally I've always argued you should lose everything you researched. The exception, I suppose, could be Wilson... as he's the starter character. I personally have no issue with permdeath, as the game is Roguelike in that aspect. Death also teaches us the greatest lessons in "life" (i.e. Don't Starve) and thankfully we can actually learn from them.

For the record, I play Minecraft and I die fairly often (once a month or so, usually due to stupidity on my part ). I don't play Hardcore mode because I've spent 200+ hours building massive castles and underground complexes so dying and losing all of that would suck. In contrast I've never done anything in Don't Starve that I couldn't redo, mainly because there is a limit to what you can build in the game, which works well with the permadeath aspect as no death is so painful that you'll quit the game.

That being said I know there are people who will argue for this or an Easy mode. I have no problem is there is a setting or mode that allows this option, so long as it's not forced on everyone. Then it's the best of both worlds.

Increase player health or give a warning when a player is near death.

If you want more Health, play as Wolfgang. As for a near-death warning... there is the Health meter. Or are you asking for the screen to tint or something... as a warning? I know when I die I'm usually in the wrong mindset to do anything constructive, i.e. "panic mode". It's only funny after you die and think "Awww-man, why did I just run around like a chicken with my head cut off?".

In combat without armor...

We'll call that Mistake #1 .

...a player can be killed in a few hits by many enemies if they are not careful,

That's why I consider this a serious mistake. If you can craft armor you should have some on at all times. I recommend always wearing a log suit, maybe a football helmet too. Especially if you want to wander around in the swamp. That's my opinion.

...and even with armor, it is very easy to lose track of your health and not realize when you are close to being killed. Perhaps some audible or visual warning when you are near death would help alleviate this.

Ah, well that's fine. I'm not sure it will help, I mean, usually when you're about to die the death part happens very suddenly by that stage. At what Health % would you suggested this effect trigger?

Also, when a player does lose health in combat, it can be very difficult to recover it, as there are fairly few healing items to be found in the game. Flowers and most food items recover very little health and require many consumptions to recover from any substantial damage, and honey is dangerous to acquire, and requires some investment of infrastructure to be able to harvest in any significant quantity.

Well the opposite used to be the case. Any food gave you good healing and dying wasn't as serious an issue so long as you had food, and later, honey. Sweet, sweet honey... it made you nearly invincible. The Devs opted to enforce a more realistic healing system and reduce the effects of food on Health. I can't argue it because we all used to abuse the healing powers of food. Ah, what wonderful memories.

One suggestion might be to allow the player to recover health by sleeping at night. You have the straw roll item, which seems like it would be perfect for doing this, but it does not appear to recover anything at the moment. Incidentally, why is the straw roll a single use item? Its only purpose right now seems to be to help the player avoid the annoying wait time if they have nothing to do at night, and it doesn't seem very sporting to force the player to continually invest resources in order to not be annoyed.

I agree with you about the healing power of sleep, but I think the straw roll is abused too much. Players have been avoiding the night and its dangers, plus maybe a lack of firewood, by using the straw roll. IMHO, you shouldn't be able to sleep without a light source and the straw roll should only let you skip the night for so long as the light source (i.e. firepit) provides a certain degree of light, otherwise you should wake up and need to feed the fire again before you can go back to sleep. Then, if it's daylight, you should be allowed to click on the straw roll to roll it back up and return it to your inventory.

Allow multiple in-game characters. The tent item allows you to switch avatars, but there is relatively little reason to do so at present, as the differences are, for the most part, cosmetic.

I would have to disagree. Each character has their own stats and powers right now, not to mention the Devs mentioned not too long ago the idea of adding an active power unique to each character (in contrast to their passive powers/bonuses).

Perhaps you could add a mechanic to, with the investment of a certain number of resources, bring other people into the game world and have them wait at your base. Then if you are killed your play switches to one of these, and the game only permanently ends if all of your characters are killed. To work, there would need to be a way to bring characters back who had been killed or to replace them, but it should be costly enough to do this that death is not just a slap on the wrist.

Personally, I prefer my solitude. Having multiple survivors standing around would ruin that atmosphere. But hey, that's just my opinion.

You have the ability to move plants and build many structures right now, expand on this.

I'll reserve judgement right now on this suggestion, since you haven't stated any specifics. However, maybe you could provide some examples on what you would like to see? For me I always felt that the ability to re-plant resources was a key issue that led to "turtling" as players no longer needed to travel far to collect the resources they needed. Unlike reeds, which required you to travel to the swamp.

A player should be able to start from nothing, barely able to find food for themselves and eventually build up their own little village, having a base to work from and expand out continually into the unexplored parts of the world while continuing to research and find more advanced items and build better structures for quite some time. A player having built such a village should not feel like they are in danger of losing it all from one unlucky exploration trip.

This is debatable. Personally I don't want to "civilize" the isalnd or become so far advanced that you can just sit back and relax. That's not to say I wouldn't want some conveniences that you could acheive to make your life somewhat easier, especially in surviving random attacks. Still, I'm always open to suggestion and I would like to hear your ideas when you have them.

[AnEmptyDream]

So Much Text... Make Dream... Tired

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Good Idea's

Debatable

But good.

[Nickboom]

Hey I just wanted to say I have a little theory on sleeping what I think is that if your not inside of a structure or in the air grue can get you, however I have noticed that almost every animal sleeps at night, seeming to suggest that grue cant get something that is sleeping. Pig if they cant get to their homes will default to sleeping on the ground if night comes. Same with rabbits, even Krampus sleeps at night. Monsters of course are either immune to grues effects (highly unlikely) or were made by or work with grue.

[Seriphos]

Some ideas are quite outdated. This is from December 12 after all.