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What other resources should punish the player for abuse?


Sliver
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Now this might be obvious, but I think it needs to be stated on the forum somewhere. If a specific food or resource is too easy to constantly farm, there's some force that exists to basically punish you for doing so. For example:

Constantly farming spiders for monster meat to go into your crockpot?

Spider Queen (next build)

Capturing lots of rabbits, birds, or murdering pigs?

Krampus slaps your ****

Chopping down a shitload of trees?

Hello, Treeguard

Mass berry farming?

Gobblers ahoy

I think that certainly a player should be deterred from using one food source, and I find that this is a very fun and interesting way to do so. The reason I'm pointing this out is to ask, what other resources should have this type of punishment?

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I would especially agree that farming needs to have a danger, maybe have bunnies and birds eat your crops and require a scarecrow and fences to keep your crops safe.

That wouldn't punish you for farming, that would just add one more step to perma farming for all your food.

I honestly think that the best way to nerf crops (provided nothing major happens in future patches, like idk winter) would be for the turbo farm to take a day and a quarter or so to grow crops. You couldn't just plant crops in morning, come back a dusk to harvest them.

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But that would not punish farming either, it would just make it take longer and thus make it less attractive, not to mention that it can be counteracted by building many farms. I liked Kevin his suggestion from a while back about monster plants having a change of spawning (on much used farm plots I suppose). That would add a new danger, since they can take over your base.

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But that would not punish farming either, it would just make it take longer and thus make it less attractive, not to mention that it can be counteracted by building many farms. I liked Kevin his suggestion from a while back about monster plants having a change of spawning (on much used farm plots I suppose). That would add a new danger, since they can take over your base.

I never mentioned punishing it, I just mentioned nerfing it. If you really want to punish it, here is my best idea:

1. Make them require much less manure to craft

2. Make them require manure to be applied every few harvests.

3. Make manure difficult to get and/or expensive.

(If you want to keep your farms up, you gotta take some risks getting manure for them)

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I haven't been on these forums long, but I see this recurring obsession with "Balancing" the game because things are too exploitable.

And while I tend to agree that the reward and the risk should always be equal, there's a fine line between balance and making the game too difficult.

Farming the first tier of resources is required to be able to get to the second tier of resources, punishing the player too much just results in stagnation and frustration.

That being said, instead of increasing the RISK of camping and farming, increase the REWARD of exploring and conquering the current biomes.

Addendum:

Adding "stages" to the game is also a good idea, i.e. getting a certain resource unlocks higher tier tools and weaponry and more recipes for items while at the same time making more enemies that are far more dangerous than previous enemies aware of you.

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It would be a pretty big nerf, but the problem with it and slowing growing crops is that it makes farming less attractive as a whole. The gobblers and Krampus make the berry farming and bunnie hunting more dangerous (gobblers more annoying than dangerous) but you can still effectively do them once you learn how to counter Krampus and the gobblers. Needing more manure being applied, slower crops or whatever can not really be countered (unless building lots of farms near beefalo) and makes farming less worth it.

Why would you spent time to grow your crops and make farms when it is far easier to go out and hunt?

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It would be a pretty big nerf, but the problem with it and slowing growing crops is that it makes farming less attractive as a whole. The gobblers and Krampus make the berry farming and bunnie hunting more dangerous (gobblers more annoying than dangerous) but you can still effectively do them once you learn how to counter Krampus and the gobblers. Needing more manure being applied, slower crops or whatever can not really be countered (unless building lots of farms near beefalo) and makes farming less worth it.

Why would you spent time to grow your crops and make farms when it is far easier to go out and hunt?

Because how else would you get 400 dragon fruit? :twisted:

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Make an overfarmed farm spawn a Tentacle, maybe? You're using the same soil over and over, so maybe a creature gets birthed in it.

Possibly coincide with the soil turning dead? I'm using the 3rd char, which she says "The earth is cold and dead" if I remember correctly?

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Farming is currently a bit too fast. I'm tuning it to take longer in the next patch.

One thing that I regret is making three tiers of farms. This dates back to an earlier design direction that we've since abandoned. I find multiple tiers of the same behaviour with the same numbers to be superfluous, and kind of boring. When I take another pass at farming (Soonish, maybe?) I might kill one of the tiers and push the behaviours apart. Maybe the faster one is more prone to growing monster plants?

Numbers is right, though. No simple numerical adjustment will fix farming in its current state. There needs to be some danger involved, so some kind of limiting factor that prevents you from creating lots of farms at once and making a super-stockpile of food.

I'm thinking of *maybe* implementing spoilage on a stack level. So stacks spoil at some fixed rate, and when you split/combine stacks they work on weighted averages to preserve overall freshness. That might work to counteract stockpiles, or at least make you think of preservation structures, and their upkeep. A nutritional balance system may prod players into diversifying their food sources a bit as well.

A dangerous creature that is attracted to farm density might keep things lively when you're turtling away. It's a bit of a dance to stop him from just becoming another source of meat. Maybe a carnivorous plant that is hard to take on on your own, so you have to go gear up somewhere else and come back to liberate your base? More thought is needed.

I think part of the problem is that farming is (by it's nature) passive. It's a waiting mechanic, and when combined with unlimited, renewable resources, it's easy to the player to get into a "steamroller of boredom" situation.

If all else fails, winter is coming, eventually. :)

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It would be a pretty big nerf, but the problem with it and slowing growing crops is that it makes farming less attractive as a whole. The gobblers and Krampus make the berry farming and bunnie hunting more dangerous (gobblers more annoying than dangerous) but you can still effectively do them once you learn how to counter Krampus and the gobblers. Needing more manure being applied, slower crops or whatever can not really be countered (unless building lots of farms near beefalo) and makes farming less worth it.

Why would you spent time to grow your crops and make farms when it is far easier to go out and hunt?

How come you never quote posts?

Anyway, farming is a passive thing, not an active thing. If you want to farm so badly, play a Harvest Moon game.

The name of the game is "Don't Starve," not "Sit around and farm." Food shouldn't be easy to get, nor should it be monotonous to get.

A dangerous creature that is attracted to farm density might keep things lively when you're turtling away. It's a bit of a dance to stop him from just becoming another source of meat. Maybe a carnivorous plant that is hard to take on on your own, so you have to go gear up somewhere else and come back to liberate your base? More thought is needed.

IMO don't encourage active farming at all. Farms should be something you either have to wait out or protect, but not both.

If you want to go the direction of turtling, then add more enemies that will attack the player at their base.

If you want to force the player to be more active, then simply decrease the output of farms so that they are literally not enough to keep you alive on their own, and make large farms much more difficult to maintain.

I don't think there's a reasonable way to accommodate farming and encourage exploration or fighting.

Edited by Chesska
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WINTER!!!merry christmas klei!

Not that quickly, sadly. There's a lot of content planned for winter!

I actually think sanity will make it in first, because it has a lighter art requirement. Our animators need a lot of lead time to make new winter creatures.

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Lovely response there Kevin.

I love the idea of each farm having a special risk and reward attached to it. That would make each farm worth it, since now you always go for the fastest farm. Maybe have each farm have a change of producing something special and the faster the farm, the more risk of a big man eating plant monster spawning on it. I can only imagine how fun it would be to liberate your camp from a giant plant monster:p.

A nutritional balance system would make using farms only less worth it. It would be more attractive to balance your diet and go out hunting instead of alwasy being at your farms. Combined with different risk and rewards for the farms it would make farming interesting without making it useless.

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Kind of an aside here, I guess, but maybe consider adding in conducts -- one of them being Vegan -- that affect the player's karma

And if you go vegan for too long, a meat monster will attack you in your sleep and force-feed you its limbs

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Kind of an aside here, I guess, but maybe consider adding in conducts -- one of them being Vegan -- that affect the player's karma

And if you go vegan for too long, a meat monster will attack you in your sleep and force-feed you its limbs

Now that is a scary thought, a monster feeding itself to you.

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I proposed locusts swarms for intensive farming and the idea seems to have been picked up (or just mentioned by coincidence) by Kevin in another thread. I'm sure that when the beta is finished every resource is going to have some kind of danger inherent to overusing it.

Edited by Kalmageddon
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