New to DST, balance questions

[ExplosiveDruid]

I played a decent amount of Don't Starve and made it to day 72 or so without too much trouble on my own. I recently started a few games of Don't Starve Together with a buddy who hasn't played the original Don't Starve at all, and I feel like DST together is immensely harder.

 

Granted, I'm still pretty new to the world of Don't Starve in general, but we have tried several different approaches to the early game and still haven't made it out of the first Summer. I'm not looking for tips, but I did have a few questions about DST:

 

1) Apparently players do a LOT less damage. Does it account for how many players are in the game and just split up the damage between them or something? Cause the two of us were beating on a pig with spears for what felt like forever before it died. I don't recall regular pigs being nearly that difficult in the core game. He didn't drop anything extra to account for the additional players/difficulty either. That doesn't seem right. If you have multiple people hitting something, it should die faster not take longer. Not dropping additional loot would seem like a fair tradeoff if that were the case. As it is, is there really any point to fighting mobs instead of just luring them to fight other mobs? Are there any mods out there that rebalance this so we can actually use combat to our advantage early on like in the core game?

 

2) How many players is the "default" settings world designed for? With the two of us, we seem to run out of food pretty damn fast unless we just ignore setting up the base/staying in one area and run off on our own. That defeats the purpose of not starving "together" in my opinion.

[Michi01]

@MonopolyLegend,
1.) The damage done to creatures that are supposed to be dangerous to
fight (pigs, hounds, bosses...) is reduced a bit. The damge done to creatures that are
killed for farming (rabbits, birds, spiders) is like in single player.
The number of players won't affect that. This has been done because two
players could kill a creature in like no time and that's too easy.
2.) It's a normal world, I think the only difference is that it's bigger.
Food problems are pretty normal for multiple players that aren't
experienced.

Some tips for you:
-Settle down near a good food source(pig village, savannah...)
-Build a crock pot as soon as you have a science machine
-Cook 3 berries/carrrots/shrooms with 1 rabbit/monster meat
-Also settle down near creatures that can protect you (pigs, beefalo...)
 if you have problems with hounds
-Try to build 2 heat stones and/or 2 warm clothing items (winter hat/earmuffs/beefalo hat)
 before winter starts

Hope this helps you.



 

[ryouryou]

I can't comment on 1 much. What you should notice, is that mobs you farm easily for resources, such as spiders, take about the same number of hits, other things should take more. I don't know how much more, but someone said roughly twice as much for the deerclops, so I'm going to assume it's roughly twice as much for your pig too. In that case, it's balanced for at least 2 players to be there to help. Maybe your friend isn't very good at getting a lot of hits in before dodging, and that made it take forever.

The difficulty, though, should be relieved by just you re-evaluating your strategies and getting more used to the game. It wasn't really worth it in the first place to just whack non-werepigs by hand for the roll at 1 meat or skin, at least not for me. Their annoying kiting means that they will waste a lot of your time chasing them. Why not feed a monster meat and get them to do your bidding for a while before suiciding on another mob? If I've got a million MM and need more regular meat, I feed them enough to turn them into a werepig, who ALWAYS drops 2 meat and 1 pigskin, instead of a piddly 1 either-or. It sounds to me like you just got desperate for food due to poor planning, at least based on #2...

The default world can accomodate anywhere from 1 to larger numbers of players, largest that can be on a player-hosted is 6.

t sounds to me like you are not efficiently dividing labor. You don't need to hug each other on the same screen the entire time, that's not what "together" means. You need to plan with each other and decide who does what, and yes, that means you need to explore. Even if you explore together, you need to explore. You can't just hug the base camp and live on the free carrots.

Remember that there is absolutely zero reason to eat on the first day, period. Find rocks, make a Crock Pot as soon as possible, and you should still have a large stockpile of free berries, carrots, and mushrooms to use as fillers. If you found spiders quickly, you also have infinite Monster Meat, and immediate food worries can be over on day 2-3 if you work at it, at least on the "set up base fast" type of strategy. But you don't even need that. Remember that torches exist, until you're sitting pretty on resources, completely, why waste the night staring at the fire? Keep moving. You can't be sad that you don't get to eat the food that you were too lazy to go find. 

There is some inherent efficiency to splitting up, because you will uncover twice the map, and find these resources faster. There are plenty of co-operative games where you need to split up at times, whether it's to hit separate switches, or because there are two objectives that need to be done at the same urgency that only require one player. If you travel together you must make sure you are doing something worth having both of you present, like hunting koelephant, or at least gathering way more material than you otherwise would. It's a game of efficiency. You don't need to hold hands the entire time in order to be cooperating. If you tell your partner, "Hey, you gather as much as you can around here, I'm going to go explore north. If you finish before I get back, go follow that path southwest," I fail to see how that isn't teamwork. If you want to have a hugfest where you never leave each others' side, then there's always real life?

This is only partially at you, and partially at the legions of "BUT IF I HAVE 2 LEAVE BASE, IS NOT 2GETHR LOL CALL IT DON'T STRAVE ALONE N PPL R THERE" that have become mildly infuriating.

[Noggle]

Combat in DST is not scaled per, it is a bit harder than in the base game. It takes more whacks to kill things, and you take more damage. It's a bit silly, but there has been some code in mods done to make combat scale based on the number of participants rather than the pure drop of what feels like 60% of the regular damage

[BipedalBear]

Well actually, the health for mobs are scaled. Im not sure the exact multiplier for most mobs , but: tallbirds, deerclops have 2x health, pigs and hounds have 1.5x. Armor soaks up more damage but has lower duration. Helmet and armor reduction stack mechanics completely changed(meaning soaking up less damage if you wear both of them, this is then balanced by the sentence mentions before).

[GeorgeStorm]

It's funny you found that, I've personally found DST easier than DS.

 

This is playing with my brother who had about an hour on DS before playing DST.

[tetrified]

1) Apparently players do a LOT less damage. Does it account for how many players are in the game and just split up the damage between them or something? Cause the two of us were beating on a pig with spears for what felt like forever before it died. I don't recall regular pigs being nearly that difficult in the core game. He didn't drop anything extra to account for the additional players/difficulty either. That doesn't seem right. If you have multiple people hitting something, it should die faster not take longer. Not dropping additional loot would seem like a fair tradeoff if that were the case. As it is, is there really any point to fighting mobs instead of just luring them to fight other mobs? Are there any mods out there that rebalance this so we can actually use combat to our advantage early on like in the core game?

 

as I've said before, doing a find and replace in tuning.lua for \n^((?!harder).)*$\r will instantly give you this list:

	    WEREPIG_HEALTH = 350 * 1.5, -- harder for multiplayer	    PIG_GUARD_HEALTH = 300 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    MERM_HEALTH = 250 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    WALRUS_HEALTH = 150 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    KNIGHT_HEALTH = 300 * 3, -- harder for multiplayer	    BISHOP_HEALTH = 300 * 3, -- harder for multiplayer	    ROOK_HEALTH = 300 * 3, -- harder for multiplayer	    BEEFALO_HEALTH = 500 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    KOALEFANT_HEALTH = 500 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    SPIDER_WARRIOR_HEALTH = 200 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    LEIF_HEALTH = 2000 * 1.5, -- harder for multiplayer	    DEERCLOPS_HEALTH = 2000 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    TALLBIRD_HEALTH = 400 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    TEENBIRD_HEALTH = 400*.75 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer	    KRAMPUS_HEALTH = 200 * 1.5, -- harder for multiplayer	    SPIDERQUEEN_HEALTH = 1250 * 2, -- harder for multiplayer

2) How many players is the "default" settings world designed for? With the two of us, we seem to run out of food pretty damn fast unless we just ignore setting up the base/staying in one area and run off on our own. That defeats the purpose of not starving "together" in my opinion.

 

I'm so tired of people saying this. It's designed for around 8 players. You can both have the same base, but you're gonna have to leave the base to get stuff just like in don't starve I don't know why people suddenly think they can just turtle in their camp now that it's don't starve together.

Saying it's not really together if you have to leave the camp is like saying you don't really live with someone if you ever leave on your own to grab stuff from the store, or go to work.

 

Imagine this conversation for a moment:

Dude: Do you live with your girlfriend?

Me: We have the same house, but I go get food alone, and to work alone, so we don't really live "together"