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What other resources should punish the player for abuse?


Sliver
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After reading this thread, I wholeheartedly agree that there needs to be more challenge in the game, although "punishment" should not be the case. Noone likes to play a game and be punished for doing what you're supposed to be doing (in this case, surviving and not starving).

One thing I really don't understand is that resources are available in multiple biomes, and some in all of them. It makes the game trivial and turtling has become the main tactic because everything is available in one place. Not to mention that you can simply dig up grass, berries, and saplings to plant anywhere you like and have no issues with the basic resources. (why is this even possible? surely you should have to go to the forest/grasslands to collect berries for a day and deal with the dangers on the journey there and back).

It feels like each biome has become somewhat diluted whereas I see a need to force the player to leave the safety of a base even for the most basic of resources. Force the player to go to a plains biome to get dung or go to beehives to collect honey (don't let them move beehives and pig homes to their own location). This is already done with the quarry biome, as this is the only place to find stone and you can't move the rocks to your base (Wilson even says they are too big to fit in his pocket! :D) and this forces the player to deal with the threat of Tallbirds and spiders whilst mining.

If we had to go out to these different locations to collect things, then the danger / obstacles could be along the way, such as surviving spider attacks if you are caught out at night time, or tallbirds in the quarry area, or an owl-bear (I know you already have art for this ;P) eating berries in the grasslands area so you either choose to avoid him or hunt him down (at which point another will spawn say a day or two later) or have a giant rampaging Beefalo somewhere in the plains to either avoid or hunt when you get more powerful. That's just two new threats off the top of my head, and there could be plenty of other dangers out in the world and then you wouldn't need to punish people for making a base of operations, since they would HAVE to head out from it in order to survive and deal with what's out in that inhospitable world. At the moment you can literally sit next to rabbit dens with some farms and berry bushes and be happy.

I hope that makes sense, especially for you Kevin. I think this is an important point in order to keep the exploration and danger factor in the game as well as making it feel more rewarding when you get back to base with a big haul and can survive for a few more days.

Edited by Vandragorax
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I think punishment is dumb, but I don't see everything as punishment. Krampus is the threat of punishment, and he also comes with a reward. But it is random... I don't think that is very good. It would be better if you always got his bag, but, krampus himself is a lot harder to kill, and stalks the player around and harasses him with ambushes. So then you start using sleeping darts on him, maybe light him on fire which makes him just run around more slowly and eratically while you spear him to death. Something like that.

Perhaps a better challenge would be a mob that competes with the player for food sources. The Gobbler is already that, but something that hunts for meat. Like maybe too many spiders in one area will dig up rabbit holes, or, another mob entirely that does just that. Birds of prey, wolves, something entirely new.

See the thing that the Dev's want to do, in their beta that hasn't even figured out what its Mid-game experience should be yet... we're playing a very early beta, what the Dev's are trying to do is give us the option to do what we want--but no strategy alone will overpower the other and be more efficient or sensible, and every single strategy will come with its fair share of hardships.

Now if they wanted to punish us for having a particular playstyle, we'd have something like a swarm of locust come and eat our crops and destroy our berry bushes. That'd be really dumb. But I don't see this argument of making the game like a tower defense game, because, the argument doesn't work in this context. Like, someone suggested crows eating crops, so you make a scarecrow. That is kinda like a tower defense mentality, but is that a bad thing? Is that actually a contradiction of survival? Of course not! Isn't that kinda of what survival is about? Also in the olden days and in modern days? We have scientists to biogenetically engineer plants that are huge, resist pesticides so we can cover them in poisons that kill bugs that want to eat our plants and hopefully we don't poison ourselves in the process. Don't Starve wants to emulate surviving in a bad situation where you start with nothing. Human existence was built upon thinking of fool-proof ways of surviving, but nothing we've invented or done has been unbeatable yet, not in nature, not in real life, and if it is like that in the game, it will only encourage us to be inventive with the tools at our disposal. We can currently beat everything in this game and become unconquered survivors. The game isn't even half done yet.

I understand the sentiment of wanting to make the players encouraged positively for not turtling, going out to explore the world and discover its rewards and challenges, but this sentiment?

there is a fine line between challenging yourself, and being forced to be 'challenged' by the game itself.

This is what a single-player game does. It does both! It does both at the same time! There is a market for games like Don't Starve where sometimes you are caught with your pants down and if you panic even for a second, boom, your dead. This game kind of reminds me of the rogue-like genre in that respect. Farming is unstoppable right now. I should know. I played as a farmer. I was unstoppable until I went out and took risks, and then I just died because I was being dumb, not because I was being a bad farmer. Being a farmer is too easy. The Devs just want to figure out something where there's a difference between being a bad farmer and being a good farmer--where the good farmer overcomes challenges and difficulties that he is going to HAVE to face, if he wants to SURVIVE.

Or he can just die.

That's the kind of game this is. You can't even begin to compare it to a game like Runescape, an MMO for that matter! I mean this kind of genre is really new. We all keep talking about minecraft but there's barely any comparison there because minecraft focuses on one aspect, crafting and world building, while this one focuses on survival. I guess it is more like Oregon Trail and even that is a shaky comparison because they are so very different themeatically.

This game is called Don't Starve. Finding food should be a struggle. It should be, it must be, that's what they're advertising to us, that's what I payed for. That's what I want. I would LIKE to feel offered a challenge that I can ignore if I want, but not starving MUST be a constant challenge, otherwise, the game fails in its own name, and its theme.

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In games, there are carrots and there are sticks. Carrots are incentives that make you want to do something. Sticks are things that challenge you, and set you back if you don't meet the challenge. A game needs both in order to be engaging. All carrots and no sticks and you have a modern AAA on-rails third person bore-fest. All sticks and no carrots and you have, well... nobody actually makes that, because nobody would play it :)

dra6oOn, you seem to want more carrots. This is super understandable, and more carrots are coming! But they take time to make, so you'll have to be patient. In the meantime, while we are working on long-term goals, we spend time adjusting the current game content to improve the overall experience. This is an important step, because if the game has no sticks, there is nothing nudging players away from local maxima in the survivability graph. They slip into grind territory, and burn out.

For a while, farming was an infinite source of risk-free food. This is bad, because it's like having a big "press to win" button in the start menu. This needs to change, because people will see this as the way to play the game, get bored, and not experience anything else. We already have a bunch of fun and exciting content that people are missing if they just sit on their butts and farm, so I don't think that we can solve this problem by only adding more carrots. So, we're looking at ways to make farming a more varied experience, a not the unquestionable optimum food gathering strategy. This is happening in parallel to the rest of the game - that new level generation stuff wasn't done in two weeks, and it's building towards something bigger. Carrots are coming.

When we make changes that nerf things, or close exploits, we're not doing it just to mess with people or to punish them (Krampus fiasco aside). We're doing it because we are in the process of building the world that the game takes place in, and shaping the entire experience. Balance is important, even in sandbox games.

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Hey Kevin, has the team thought about introducing some kind of nutrition concept to food? Like needing vitamin C every so often so you don't get scurvy, something that would take many in-game days to become an issue, and then Wilson would inform the player that something is wrong with his diet, to keep players wanting to not just eat the same thing over and over? Like, go too long without toasted seeds or meat, and just eating berries, will make Wilson's physical prowess less substantial, but only meat for two weeks will make Wilson need berries? It could add some dietary concerns to players during the upcoming Winter mechanic.

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We're mulling over nutrition and spoilage. Gotta think on it a little more though - they would be big changes to the way the game plays :)

I think the idea of nutrition is fine as long as the time between when you have to start eating something different isn't too short.

The spoilage thing though...I don't know. I'm the type of person that hoards items in practically ANY genre of gaming. In a shooting game I would often hold out on using the good ammo/weapons and sometimes end up not even using them. I would absolutely hate it if all my hard earned collection just started to rot and go down the drain. It just gives me security when I have an emergency stash incase I really need it. Some may view hoarding as bad but this is just how I play.

Edited by vinchon
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I think the idea of nutrition is fine as long as the time between when you have to start eating something different isn't too short.

The spoilage thing though...I don't know. I'm the type of person that hoards items in practically ANY genre of gaming. In a shooting game I would often hold out on using the good ammo/weapons and sometimes end up not even using them. I would absolutely hate it if all my hard earned collection just started to rot and go down the drain. It just gives me security when I have an emergency stash incase I really need it. Some may view hoarding as bad but this is just how I play.

I do the exact same thing. Someone told me to be careful about not running out of ammo in Silent Hill 2, and that I would be running out constantly. I got out of the apartments with over a hundred bullets.

You have to admit though, your concern is going in the direction that Don't Starve wants to take us. You don't want food to spoil because you want to be able to save up, to feel comfortable, to not starve. I feel the same way. I make so many chests full of food and honey. I would hate for it to spoil.

That's why I support spoilage. I know it is going to give me one more thing to worry about that, although in my control, is not fully under my control. I hope the Dev's figure out a spoilage system that works well, because like in the common suggestions area there were some good points brought up, would spoiled food be an item? How is it put into your inventory? how should it effect a stack of items or does the game need a huge fancy database tracking each item created?

I think when the game is out of beta that whatever system is put in place will be effective--something that doesn't happen too fast so that people CAN store up food for winter, but, you have to be smart about it so that it lasts long. That, or, go through some kind of enrichment process to make it last longer. Like turning pomagranite into jam so that it lasts longer, but isn't as effective for sating hunger. The psychological implication to the player with each mechanic is a worthy consideration!

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I do the exact same thing. Someone told me to be careful about not running out of ammo in Silent Hill 2, and that I would be running out constantly. I got out of the apartments with over a hundred bullets.

You have to admit though, your concern is going in the direction that Don't Starve wants to take us. You don't want food to spoil because you want to be able to save up, to feel comfortable, to not starve. I feel the same way. I make so many chests full of food and honey. I would hate for it to spoil.

That's why I support spoilage. I know it is going to give me one more thing to worry about that, although in my control, is not fully under my control. I hope the Dev's figure out a spoilage system that works well, because like in the common suggestions area there were some good points brought up, would spoiled food be an item? How is it put into your inventory? how should it effect a stack of items or does the game need a huge fancy database tracking each item created?

I think when the game is out of beta that whatever system is put in place will be effective--something that doesn't happen too fast so that people CAN store up food for winter, but, you have to be smart about it so that it lasts long. That, or, go through some kind of enrichment process to make it last longer. Like turning pomagranite into jam so that it lasts longer, but isn't as effective for sating hunger. The psychological implication to the player with each mechanic is a worthy consideration!

You have a point, and they will probably implement it. Hopefully after they finish making the game and taking it out of beta, they have a option to set spoilage off in Free Play Mode upon generating a new world. Most people will probably enjoy it I'm sure but I don't think I can cope with not being able to hoard, so I'd probably stop updating the game until then if they decide to implement it lol

yes I realize I have a problem.

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I presume that there will be a way of curing food. Someone in another thread proposed the existence of a smoke house, then, you could hoard food from that. I know I would.

But see my problem is that in any game that allows for food crafting, I try to go as nuts as I can. Like when I could cook 2 ingredients in Paper Mario, I got derailed for hours just trying to discover recipes. I was heartbroken when I mixed cake mix and the dizzy dial and it DID NOT make a funnel cake.

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If cured food doesn't spoil at all then I'd be on board for that...but that's still just hoarding isn't it? It just adds another step to hoarding.

Perhaps not if it is a big step down in nutrition value? Then the only reason to stock up on cured food is to prepare for the coming winter. The rest of the year it's not a good food source...

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I think curing would take a lot of time, like farming does, but you need to keep a fire going, a smokey fire, using like twigs and pinecones and whatnot. Finding a good balance between effort, "grinding", and interest can be hard. Still, stuff like seeds, toasted seeds, and honey might not spoil. Real honey doesn't spoil easily, that's for sure.

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For a start I'd like to see a difficulty setting. As a new player I want to be able to learn the game at my speed. You could go to options "easy", "medium" and "hard". Medium will be as it is currently but with some harder features, easy would be stuff like -33% hunger consumption, -50% monster health. Hard might be visa versa along with other features like spoiling and whatever you guys are talking about. I don't want this game to be hard as a beginner, I want it to be challanging, but not difficult as such. Even right now I'm dying to hounds, queens, and werewolves due to lack of experiance/skill. Easy keeps beginners from dying endlessly, medium for experianced players and hard for player who are adept at Don't Starve.

Abusing solutions, from Lagoe:

Farming: Crop spoiling and also infestations that can make your plants wither quickly, not grow, be infected and hurt your health when eaten that would go away eventually, let's say 7-13 days or so and have a 5% chance of being infected each harvest on medium and 8% chance on hard. There would be no way to tell if it was infested or not, until you notice you being hurt upon eatingor crops acting strangely. I'm against evil weeds and such by the way.

Pigs: The pigs that spawn in future will be aggressive to you in hard or medium if you have repetitively slain them. To make better relations you must offer large amounts of meat (only meat or morsels, 5 medium, 8 hard) and gold (3 medium, 8 hard) to the king. Also make it so the pigs might run and hide from you if you keep killing them despite their aggression about 18 pigs killed both difficulties, again offer sacrifices to the king, meat (15 medium, 25 hard) and loads of gold (7 medium, 15 hard) or graveyard items (1 on both difficulties). During these times if you lack gold and have no way of getting it the pigs will become more friendly after 15 days on medium, 25 days on hard, if they were scared, they become hostile, if they were hostile, they become friendly.

For beefalo make them respawn after 7 days only, but make them aggressive if you get too close. Also make them deal 60 damage.

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Make the inventory a couple of slots bigger, and make stacks of food ALOT smaller, like 1, 2 or 3, so it feels like the food that was cooked in crock pot, that doesnt stack at all. That way you can't really hoard food and be safe for 50 days without having to really bother about it, it kind of feels like that now.

Also, gief a new clothing slot that doesn't share the backpack slot, I wanna wear the fancy shirt dammit :3

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In games, there are carrots and there are sticks. Carrots are incentives that make you want to do something. Sticks are things that challenge you, and set you back if you don't meet the challenge. A game needs both in order to be engaging. All carrots and no sticks and you have a modern AAA on-rails third person bore-fest. All sticks and no carrots and you have, well... nobody actually makes that, because nobody would play it :)

dra6oOn, you seem to want more carrots. This is super understandable, and more carrots are coming! But they take time to make, so you'll have to be patient. In the meantime, while we are working on long-term goals, we spend time adjusting the current game content to improve the overall experience. This is an important step, because if the game has no sticks, there is nothing nudging players away from local maxima in the survivability graph. They slip into grind territory, and burn out.

For a while, farming was an infinite source of risk-free food. This is bad, because it's like having a big "press to win" button in the start menu. This needs to change, because people will see this as the way to play the game, get bored, and not experience anything else. We already have a bunch of fun and exciting content that people are missing if they just sit on their butts and farm, so I don't think that we can solve this problem by only adding more carrots. So, we're looking at ways to make farming a more varied experience, a not the unquestionable optimum food gathering strategy. This is happening in parallel to the rest of the game - that new level generation stuff wasn't done in two weeks, and it's building towards something bigger. Carrots are coming.

When we make changes that nerf things, or close exploits, we're not doing it just to mess with people or to punish them (Krampus fiasco aside). We're doing it because we are in the process of building the world that the game takes place in, and shaping the entire experience. Balance is important, even in sandbox games.

I hope that carrot is actually a potato ;)

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Is anyone else curious about how Beefalo breeding is going to be integrated? :D (If it still is)

I mean, what is going to be the method for "punishing/taming" the number of Beefalo you breed for food and fur? Already killing one Beefalo yields a fair amount of food at a relatively easy difficulty (if you can separate the unlucky fellow from his herd and kite well enough!) to last a couple of days. The only thing currently stopping me personally from farming them for food is that they don't respawn.

So what are people's thoughts on how Beefalo breeding is going to work?

Feeding the Beefalo a specific combination of items? Taming them? Rare drops from certain mobs that you have to give the Beefalo to make them breed?

Or perhaps it happens naturally, with no 'Wilson' intervention.

How long would it take for a new baby Beefalo to be born? Would the parents become very aggressive and protective until the baby grows up?

Maybe there will be an "Alpha-male" Beefalo that brings the pain upon any unwitting adventurer who dares to harm any of his herd!

I'm stumped for ideas, too late at night for me! But I would be very interested to hear everyone else's views on the situation :D The prospect both excites and scares me! ^_^

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