The Volcano Season - Suggestions

[Bananenbauer123]

Hello folks

I've been playing the new DLC for a while now and I'm very surprised (in a positive way) by this expansion.
However EA just started and I got an idea aiming at the disturbing volcano season. 

I am very serious about this Post, but if you want to skip the discussion scroll down and read THE IDEA.

 

Why the Volcano Season needs tweaking:

This expansion is a lot more challenging than the vanilla and even the ROG version. 
It took me a few tries to survive trough all seasons and the new dangers ranging from storms over heavy rain to poison have been fun to overcome.
However In this threat I want to focus specifically about the volcano season.

If you managed to survived as long - greetings - if not, well the volcano season is a very harsh summer and in my opinion too much of a struggle:
volcano decription
When the season starts there will be around 3 days of drying the flooded areas back to normal.
It will get very hot which means the player should be prepaired by crafting a termal stone, a fridge and clothing. 
As soon as all flooded areas have dried out, earthquakes begin alerting the player. After roughly 4 earthquakes, the eruption takes place and fire balls will start raining around the players location. 
The fireballs cause a shockwave on impact to destroy all fragile obects in its radius, also setting them on fire. Mobs and the player are immune to the shockwave however the fireball itself deals enough damage to instantly kill pretty much everything (Hello there palm treeguard). 
If they fall into the ocean they creat huge waves in a star pattern


To me the first rain felt reall epic, however the season goes on for another 10+ days with increasingly more eruptions with an increasing spawn rate of fireballs. At the very end of the season there will be 1 Fireball per 2 seconds. You will barely have enough time to get your termal stone cooled, cook some stuff, collect some basic reccources and sew your clothing / repair your boat / craft a new light // sail.
Now it is defenitely possible, but the more repetitive it became the less fun it became. 

I think the biggest problem is, that the player is so busy by making prepartions there is almost no time for any decision making. What makes the game dont starve feel so awesome to me is the way it let's you survive in your own style, but the volcano season basically lets you do nothing aside from crawling. 
The way you die is very unsuitable for dont starve. It is a game that usually kills you very slowly and the other new mechanics perfectly contribute to the theme I am referring to.
Wind - Heavy Rain - Poison.

It appears to be unfair having the player dodge dozens and dozens of fireballs knowing he would die to a single one - with a serious count of play time at stake. 
Obviously, if you face an enemy mob low on health it's a very similar situation: Each button pressed, could end your play, however your previous decisions made this situation happen. It's actually very likely that you yourself caused this situation,by bad decision making by deciding to go to the caves without proper equipment. 
The volcano season however will put all players in the same spot regardless of their previous choices.

The Idea: 

What about total Darkness?
When the eruption stopped for the first time my first thoght was: Is it over? what's gonna happen next?
Whoa the screen is real foggy.
It's not unlikely for a vulcano to blow lots of ashes into the air. Some made the world alot darker for a couple days. Aside from that it's the dont starve universe, many things can happen.
It should be fun to have the fireball rain go on for a few minutes but afterwards I would prefer to have the day time go to dusk and then night and have it stay at night for another few days. 
If we assume the season lasts around 18 days in total I personally could imagine it to roughly consist of
8 days of Heat and 

10 days of Darkness
The Darkness could also come with cold - plants not growing - specific mobs? [hello there shadow creatures and deep see fish monsters] - spiders and snakes would be awake all the time. However the biggest imparement would be the constant sanity drain and lack of sight. After all you will still be free to go whereever you want. I imagine sailing to be creepy as hell and of course the ocean should be realtively silent during that time.

Well what's your opinion on the volcano season and my idea? 

Thanks for reading folks.

[SenhorLevi00]

I liked the idea. The volcano season is really annoying, it's almost impossible to handdle with that...

[NoOne]

you can find the volcano its on the map. there should be some way of breaking it or freezing it with a special magical device . like a freeze nuke you launch from a boat that would swap the lava for solid rock at the top and remove the smoke cloud from around its top

 

or maybe you could blast it with the cannon and lava runs down the side and thats the end of it. retrieve your obsidian from the solidified lava and no more volcano season ever again in that world

 

aside from that maybe it should only affect islands up to a set distance away so its not a map wide event. the heat is enough and the ash fog is bad. no reason for every were to have fire balls rain down on it if your there

[matthoffman]

i think a good way of implementing this is to force players to collect stuff that only spawns in the Volcano Season (players have a few days to wander around the map) and then to craft a certain stuff to "calm" the volcano for the entire season

[Aalda11]

Any solution that requires you to find the Volcano first is bad. The map is immense and vast majority of players won't find the Volcano the first year.

 

Plus I don't like any solutions based on "appeasement" of the Volcano in general. It would mean you'd be choosing between two options - either not appease the Volcano and suffer the eruptions roughlly in their current form, which is badly designed, or appease the volcano and stop them entirely, which is not ideal either because in principle it's a cool mechanics and I'd like to see it changed instead of removed.

 

There was a suggestion in some earlier thread that the eruptions shouldn't be seasonal but rather occuring occassionaly throughout the year, like hounds. That's much preferable.

[matthoffman]

Any solution that requires you to find the Volcano first is bad. The map is immense and vast majority of players won't find the Volcano the first year.

 

Plus I don't like any solutions based on "appeasement" of the Volcano in general. It would mean you'd be choosing between two options - either not appease the Volcano and suffer the eruptions roughlly in their current form, which is badly designed, or appease the volcano and stop them entirely, which is not ideal either because in principle it's a cool mechanics and I'd like to see it changed instead of removed.

 

There was a suggestion in some earlier thread that the eruptions shouldn't be seasonal but rather occuring occassionaly throughout the year, like hounds. That's much preferable.

Can we have "thermal sensors" to locate the direction of the volcano? The sensors point at the direction of the volcano and emit "beeps" to indicate the distance between it and the player. In this way finding the volcano will be easier for players in the first year

[Bananenbauer123]

Can we have "thermal sensors" to locate the direction of the volcano? The sensors point at the direction of the volcano and emit "beeps" to indicate the distance between it and the player. In this way finding the volcano will be easier for players in the first year

it would actually be reasonable to have the portal on the same island as the volcano. Im talking about the portal for  the 4 things to enter a new world. That way you could easily find the volcano with the Rod.

The only problem is, that i didn't manage to find any mechanical parts after 80 days and opening 6+ treasure chests - they should possibly have at least one part spawn per chest, that would make WX more viable too (poor robot so much rain so much pain  )