My thoughts on a lot of the balancing and general criticism [wall of text]

[LadyxLucia]

My thoughts:

 

Poison is really not that bad at all honestly. After you get the hang of the game it becomes very easy to avoid. (Early game you see a poisonous snake? Just avoid it if you're uncomfortable in your combat skills. Although snakes are VERY easy to kill, you have to make a pretty bad mistake to get touched by one at all) Seashell armour is very easy to create and it removes like 90% of your poison worries, just carry a suit of it around with you at all times. Gas mask makes it so you don't have to worry about Stinkrays, I have one on my cargo boat at all times, just equip it when they spawn. At this point I think if poison get's nerfed it will be irrelevant to me, and to be honest it's more of a nuisance to me than a real problem since I have 5 poison antidotes on my boat ready to go. I honestly think poison needs a buff instead of a nerf.

 

Combat armor seems not very important this time around. I've had the same log suit from the start of the game, and it's still at around 80-90% at day 80. There's nothing really worrying in combat for the player health, which is funny considering how many health based crockpot recipes got added into the game.  If you're taking damage it's mostly going to be done to your boat. Monkey's don't even do damage to you so you don't have to worry about them, spider's have always been fairly easy, snakes are just spiders, and I usually get the water hounds due to me being on the sea so much.

 

I don't see why everyone wants less Prime Apes considering that they're a fantastic source of bananas and morsels (morsels and meat in general being quite rare in SW) and bananas are one of my new favourite food items in the game! (I LOVE bananapops) Besides nothing is more fun than starting a civil war with the monkeys and reaping all the loot after planting the seeds of destruction. (aka a single banana)

 

Volcanoe/Summer season needs some work to be honest. I think the intention was for you to be away from your base in this season, much like how the hurricane forced you to be around your base a lot of the time, which it accomplishes quite nicely, HOWEVER being one shot by a stray falling boulder is a little too punishing and frankly a little silly. I also kind of think this goes against the flavour of Don't Starve which is usually based on preperation; you play the game the game and get annihilated by something, like say a new player in winter and then you prepare for it after learning what killed you. You're a new player who died because they froze to death in Winter, you say to yourself that you were definitely not prepared for Winter, but now that you know that it exists and what the challenges it brings you can prepare for it, you notice there's winter clothing in the Dress tab so this time you make winter clothing in preparation for it. You don't really prepare for meteors except hearing the ground rumbling and praying to yourself that you won't get it. Maybe the challenge could come from the volcanic ash that get's left around afterwards instead of surviving the flying rocks. Maybe you need a gas mask to survive, or the ash covers the structures of your building so you need a Luxury Fan or something to blow the ash off so the buildings can work again. This way you can actually prepare for the season and fits with the flavour the game.

 

Silk seems to be somewhat useless, you can still make the Sewing Kits but they are kind of unnecessary. The Snakeskin hat and coat are very easy to make because you usually have so many snakeskin just laying around because there's only two items that you can craft with them and you get a lot of them just from having a jungle tree farm patch near your base for lumber. Pirate's hat and Captains hat are practically useless imo because they barely last long enough to be worth it and are quite easy to make so you don't want to repair those. Same thing for the blubber vest honestly, and the snakeskin items do just a good job protecting from the rain anyways that I don't really see a use for it. Blubber in general just seems kind of useless, there's no Puffy Vest equivalent to really want to make use of it, the only thing I can think of is maybe giving blubber some type of item that reduces your temperature to make overheating less of a problem. (although it's really not much of a problem right now even in summer, RoG summer got way hotter than this)

 

Crockpot: Limbets being 1 fish each is a little silly, but the real problem right now is the priority system for the new recipes. I should not be able to make Surf N Turf with 2 monster meat and 2 limbets, that should give me Monster Lasagna. I shouldn't be able to go on the beach for 15 seconds, grab 2 Limbets, and come back to the base for a relatively free 60 health and 33.5 sanity. I should have to go into the water and do some fishing or whaling if I want 1.0 fish, so I think Limbets should be 0.5 fish.

 

Sandbags and flooding should probably need some work honestly. I think if an area is completely covered in wooden flooring, and the wooden flooring is surrounded by Sandbags, then it should not be flooded AT ALL. This doesn't trivialize flooding because it requires quite a bit of resources (especially if you expand your base later, then you need to hammer down sandbags and renovate) and all the other islands are still flooded making you have to be prepared with rain gear if you want to gather resources and explore other islands. As of right now though there is too much uncertainty when preparing for flooding, even when I have prepared for the flooding, I feel like I'm just hoping that the water somehow doesn't get through rather than being sure I'm safe. Pro tip: It also seems more effective to just isolate flooding puddles with sandbags rather than surrounding your entire base with them at the moment, which is kind of annoying when base building because of all the structures in your way, leaving everything unorganized and unsymmetrical, but at least everything is dry.

[Pomf]

I agree on most of these points.

Poison is easy once you know how to deal with it, its only painfull if you get it in the very early days, and if that happens its because you didn't know how to avoid it.

 

Not sure about the armor part, I think the merms and those other monsters in the marsh really need armor to fight, but not sure if fighting them is worth it. Maybe if merms dropped pig skin, which I don't think they do.

 

The volcano season seems even more annoying then summer in RoG, I don't really mind getting oneshotted, but you should be able to see the shadow longer before it hits the ground, the shadows are hard to see because of the ash anyway. but because you can't be around your base you really get nothing done at all, which I really dislike, in my game I didnt get anything done in spring either, because I was always running around to get more sandbags, and it didn't even help, so I couldn't for summer and now its even worse, I really feel like I haven't gotten anything done in the last 2 seasons.

 

Silk indeed seems useless, I have 50 in a chest and I don't even pick it up anymore, same with snakeskin, there really needs to be some use for it other then clothing, right now it annoys me that I can't even get rid of it by throwing it on a fire.

 

Haven't really done anything special with the crockpot, other then loving the Bananapops.

 

I really agree on the sandbags and flooding, I spent 200 bamboo on getting my base surrounded with sandbags, and it still didn't help because of puddles forming from the rain, surrounding the puddles with more sandbags is really annoying and you don't always have the space for it, maybe some way to get rid of the puddles before they get larger would fix it. The mosquito's are also really annoying, I don't care much about the poison, but they spawn inside my base and I can't attack them because they move around to fast, and pressing F doesn't work untill they attack you first, which is weird as its a hostile mob.

[Calicea]

I agree with most of what you two said. However, I had a lot of fun with the volcano. I picked up a Volcano staff on like day 12 so I wasn't even really set up in my base. It went straight to Volcano and after this first barrage I spent running around my beach I figured out how it works and found a really a strategy that made sure nothing in my base got hit once and I never got hit once either. Basically I hop on my boat.(I'd recommend at least a row boat so you can equip it with some gear.) and would row straight away from my base until I was in the middle of the water away from any islands. Then I'd row in a big square/circle and just dodge the waves. As for the shadow needing to be seen for longer before it hits wasn't an issue as you should just not stop moving move in between the big waves than resume the square/circle. I even had to dodge a barrage through night so seeing the shadow wasn't even an issue. I just kept moving and focused on avoid waves.

 

One last thing. Yes the volcano season does shake up the game formula a bit with an emphasis more on playstyle changes needed to survive over preparation, but I don't think changing the meta a little is a bad thing for a game. It gives Klei information on what we the players enjoy and Klei has been wonderful about listening to us so if enough people don't like it they can change it to fit the style of Vanilla and RoG. I'm happy either way as I enjoy it as is and I enjoy RoG/Vanilla. Lastly excellent work on your post. I think threads like this will make a huge difference on how awesome SW is when it exits Early-Access. It's great now but could always be better and I think Klei will make it so as long as we the players do our job and let them know what we think.

[BravePotato]

Good post, almost cover all current practical problems.
I really hate spring, I like my base tight and cozy, so there is no empty place to use sandbags to cover the pond. My machines break down, inclue ince box and 120 ice in it for summer. I'm soak due to walking in the pond and raining (rain gear don't matter), get poisoned multi-times by bug, sanity keep go down, result is fighting those shadow monster non-stop till I running of food and wood to keep the fire burn then get killed .

 

Maybe we could use sand to leveling the pond or make some kind of drains to solve this problem.

[NotStarvnMarvn]

Volcanoes 1-shot you no matter what from my experience.