Twigcists

[MadMatt]

Almost every time I played on klei dedicated servers I had came to the realization that saplings are even more rare than beating the game your very first run when you get it. The drops of twigs from birds were more common than saplings and the only true reliable source is twiggy trees but still! Have twigs been hunted down to extinction? Has the mighty thunder birds break through the sapling hold and rip out all of the twigs from the kingdom savagely? Or maybe the twigs had over population and died from being as common as a common skin? Seriously, only 1 time had saplings actually be common like grass and trees. But still, while I probably had just bad rng with others, I am still salty that I had died day 5 from running out of twigs and flint.

[Axehilt]

Twiggy Tree worlds have zero saplings. (Apart from Caves, if Caves exist.)

These worlds spawn with quite a few twigs directly in the game world, but if you're joining day 10+ then the majority of those twigs will already be picked up, leaving you with no way to get twigs (since it takes twigs to make twigs) without extensive exploration.

So yeah they definitely need to tweak the "bird-spawner" so that it delivers a more reliable supply of early materials to players (which includes both flint and twigs.)  Ideally it compares how many resources you've found vs. how far you've explored, so that if you go a quarter/half of a game-day exploring without finding anything, you start to get periodic deliveries until you've reached a certain minimum.

It's mostly just something that has to be fixed in a cooperative shared-world game where the area surrounding the portal can very easily be completely farmed out early on.  So the game needs to account for that with automatic flint/twig spawning, and probably also some automatic tree-planting.  You want early gameplay to involve SOME scrounging for basic resources, so I wouldn't just start players with twigs, flint, or axe/pickaxe, but you also don't want early gameplay to involve a desperate and impossible search for basic resources that no longer exist anywhere close to the portal.