First thoughts: Yay water and trees! Boo poison!

[doh_boy]

I've been playing Don't Starve ever since its very first early access offering and have loved seeing it progress over time. In fact, my great experience with Don't Starve led me to participate in several other survival game early-access programs that ended up going nowhere! Anyway, I'm having fun with the new Shipwrecked content and would like to share some initial thoughts:

 

- While standard DS games feature a continuous landmass, I think most players think of the map as a series of islands/zones anyway (the grass/beefalo island, the stone quarry island, etc.), and time spent walking in between the zones is quite tedious. By making actual islands there is a great opportunity for travel between them to be its own fun, challenging experience. Plus, the island atmosphere fits a survival game even better than, dare-I-say, caves.

 

- Speaking of tedium, one of the most tedious things in standard DS is gathering lumber. It's probably the one resource players spend the most time mindlessly harvesting, and it's made exciting only by the occasional spawning of an Optimus Pine. Shipwrecked's change to trees is fairly subtle, but having them drop various building materials, food, and even minor enemies (which drop their own materials) make this chore much more fun and impactful.

 

- Poison... I think a poison/disease effect fits the whole tropical theme pretty well, but the current mechanic for curing poison is (and I use this term sparingly) broken. You have to chop down foiliage, which might spawn a snake, which might be poisonous, which might drop a poison gland if you want to make a poison cure. That's way too many dice rolls stacked on top of each other! I think there should be some sort of poison cure that can be made from readily-available materials, but has a significant downside (Sanity reduction?). Alternately, poison could be approached like it is in other video games where it gradually reduces your health down to a certain low level, yet doesn't kill you outright.

[mitboy]

Posion is fine, imo, you can get it from plenty of sources. If you got posioned, it's also not a problem  to dig swamp geyser to get guarnteed venom. In my opinion, the recipe of venom should be cheaper. Like, 2 seaweeds, venom, one coral.

[HeatherKan]

I find digging up poison holes (what are they called...?) to be more efficient. You can also get them from the flying squirrel things.

 

Oh, and certain things vastly reduce your chances of getting poisoned: shell armor, gas mask, etc. 

 

Frankly I felt the same way as you until I learned all this. Now the poison thing is easy.