Weighted tumbleweed items

[Midnight Tea]

What's neat about tumbleweed is that it offers access to items that would otherwise be non-renewable but not to the point of it being trivial. What I think could be adjusted is that tumbleweed should reward items based on the current state of the world. For instance, it'll offer gravedigger items only if many (or even most) in the world as it exists has been offered to the Pig King already. Yellow gems are only on offer if you've depleted most of the natural sources of them.

 

etc.

 

However, to compensate, I'd suggest adding to the tumbleweed drop pool:  saplings, grass tufts, berry bushes, honeycombs

 

Naturally, all of those only showing up if your world has been afflicted by lots of out of control fires.

 

 

The thing is, searching tumbleweeds feels.. kinda not really very epic considering the potential importance of the desert. So I'd suggest some background lore somehow suggesting that the desert is connected to the heart of the world in some way, hence the presence of hounds.  i.e. it's implied the desert is where the rest of the world came from -- and thus returns to -- and it's where the hounds periodically emerge to hunt you down from.

 

To make it really fun I also suggest that searching tumbleweed has a low % chance of inciting a hound attack (i.e. the barking in the distance and so on), making the act of searching it a bit more of a risk.