Game balance and item suggestions

[Tosh]

I wanted to give my opinion on ways to improve and balance some seldom used items to make them more competitive in DST. I also suggested a few items/mechanics which might make sense. 

 

Farm plot buffs: 

These are just some ideas to improve the utility of certain crops in order to make farms slightly more competitive.

 

Crockpot:

• Eggplant + 0.5 x meat = Hearty Lasagna (medium healing food/improved meatballs)

• 2 x corn = High Fructose Corn Syrup (damages health, counts as both corn and a sweetener in the crockpot)

 

Magic tier 1:

• Pomegranate + Monster meat = Healing Molasses (high level healing). The idea behind this item is to make pomegranates a more competitive healing item, while also requiring monster meat so that it's in direct competition with meatballs, pierogi and bacon & egg. 

 

Bearger:

• Mechanic idea: possibly make shavable every few days. Each time he is shaved he drops 10 x tufts. Shaving him again before the timer resets causes him to wake up, attack the player and then hibernate (resetting the timer).

 

• Insulated Pack: in the base game, this giant craft-able is directly inferior to each of its cheaper counterparts; a simple backpack can carry more, while the three gears that it takes to craft could be spent in better ways. Given the fact that this item is only available at the end of the first year makes it incredibly underwhelming. By the time you're able to craft one you could already have the far superior ice Chester (though this isn't as compelling in DST as there's only one). Additionally, the introduction of wax paper in the recent updates make it entirely redundant; carrying a single bundling wrap in a normal backpack is a far cheaper alternative.

To combat these issues I would suggest that it's inventory space should be increased to 8 or 10. Wax paper should replace gears as part of its recipe (This even fits thematically!). Additionally it should be given a unique function such as the ability to preserve 'dry goods' (I.e. jerky, butter, taffy, trail mix and pumpkin cookies) either indefinitely, or at the very least increase their spoilage time x4.

 

• Insulated carpet: either purely decorative, or offers tier two insulation during winter. Beefalo carpet could maybe offer tier 1 insulation as well.

 

• Hibernation chest: same size as scaled chest. Animals placed inside do not decay over time due to the fact that they're 'hibernating'.

 

Dragonfly:

• Mosaic flooring: requires marble and scales to craft. Visually similar spiral pattern to ruins turf, but with mosaic tiles. Either functionally the same as scaled flooring, or whatever is placed on it takes smoulder priority during summer.

 

Make certain items rechargeable 

 

The Morning Star could be rechargeable with frazzled wires and/or electrical doodads. As a light source, it is outclassed by the cheaper lantern. The functionality of having a weapon that provides light becomes redundant at higher skill levels as a lantern can be dropped on the ground, or simply switched to when fighting at night with any superior weapon. The main pro of this weapon was charging volt goats, but the inclusion of electric darts make this less viable. An alternative/additional way to make the morning star more competitive would be to allow water balloons to affect the wetness of more mobs than just the dragonfly.

 

The Lazy Forager should be rechargeable with nightmare fuel. As it stands it cannot compete with other ruins gear in terms of how you should prioritise using thulecite. 

 

If this post is too long, just look at my arguments for improving the insulated pack, the lazy forager and the morning star as I feel they are they most in need of love.

 

[Ecu]

7 hours ago, Tosh said:

Crockpot:

• Eggplant + 0.5 x meat = Hearty Lasagna (medium healing food/improved meatballs)

• 2 x corn = High Fructose Corn Syrup (damages health, counts as both corn and a sweetener in the crockpot)

Don't really see anything majorly wrong with these.  They seem like they would indeed make a few of the produce items more appealing.

7 hours ago, Tosh said:

Magic tier 1:

• Pomegranate + Monster meat = Healing Molasses (high level healing). The idea behind this item is to make pomegranates a more competitive healing item, while also requiring monster meat so that it's in direct competition with meatballs, pierogi and bacon & egg. 

As a magic item, the recipe here doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  Perhaps this should be another crockpot recipe?

7 hours ago, Tosh said:

Bearger:

• Mechanic idea: possibly make shavable every few days. Each time he is shaved he drops 10 x tufts. Shaving him again before the timer resets causes him to wake up, attack the player and then hibernate (resetting the timer).

This could be alright, but I'm not sure about 10 tufts per shave.  Would have to be playtested such that you weren't just able to make everyone Thick Fur items.

7 hours ago, Tosh said:

Insulated Pack: in the base game, this giant craft-able is directly inferior to each of its cheaper counterparts; a simple backpack can carry more, while the three gears that it takes to craft could be spent in better ways. Given the fact that this item is only available at the end of the first year makes it incredibly underwhelming. By the time you're able to craft one you could already have the far superior ice Chester (though this isn't as compelling in DST as there's only one). Additionally, the introduction of wax paper in the recent updates make it entirely redundant; carrying a single bundling wrap in a normal backpack is a far cheaper alternative.

To combat these issues I would suggest that it's inventory space should be increased to 8 or 10. Wax paper should replace gears as part of its recipe (This even fits thematically!). Additionally it should be given a unique function such as the ability to preserve 'dry goods' (I.e. jerky, butter, taffy, trail mix and pumpkin cookies) either indefinitely, or at the very least increase their spoilage time x4.

No.  The insulated pack should be made because you want to have a portable fridge.  There is a cost/benefit to each of the various backpack items, and having this one just completely superior to the others is absurd.  I would not be opposed to reducing the gear requirement to 1-2 gears and maybe using a wax paper instead.  Regarding slots, I think 6 slots should be appropriate.  It would then only be slightly worse than a backpack and still leave reasons to use the other backpack items.

7 hours ago, Tosh said:

Insulated carpet: either purely decorative, or offers tier two insulation during winter. Beefalo carpet could maybe offer tier 1 insulation as well.

I've used mods that offer tile-based insulation and while I enjoy the concept of it, in practice it ends up incredibly powerful.  I'll have to mull this over a bit, as having insulation that cannot be destroyed is rather strong.  Perhaps if it has to be powered by other heat sources (it improves insulation of heated areas), it could work.  That would give some legitimacy to building over areas as well.

8 hours ago, Tosh said:

Hibernation chest: same size as scaled chest. Animals placed inside do not decay over time due to the fact that they're 'hibernating'.

Not sure a chest is really that fitting for animal storage.  That said, you can already store animals in a chest and periodically feed them to keep them alive.  So I don't really see a need for this.  You rarely have a need to keep random critters alive this way and the current system already accommodates that.

8 hours ago, Tosh said:

Dragonfly:

• Mosaic flooring: requires marble and scales to craft. Visually similar spiral pattern to ruins turf, but with mosaic tiles. Either functionally the same as scaled flooring, or whatever is placed on it takes smoulder priority during summer.

As with the insulated carpet suggestion, I am not sure about tiles with mechanics.  Not really seeing the benefits to making this either.

8 hours ago, Tosh said:

The Morning Star could be rechargeable with frazzled wires and/or electrical doodads. As a light source, it is outclassed by the cheaper lantern. The functionality of having a weapon that provides light becomes redundant at higher skill levels as a lantern can be dropped on the ground, or simply switched to when fighting at night with any superior weapon. The main pro of this weapon was charging volt goats, but the inclusion of electric darts make this less viable. An alternative/additional way to make the morning star more competitive would be to allow water balloons to affect the wetness of more mobs than just the dragonfly.

I like the idea of making this item more competitive in general and definitely feel recharging it is a good idea.  So perhaps this would indeed work to be rechargeable via electrical doodads.  How much each one recharged would have to be tested so that this doesn't just become the main weapon used though.

8 hours ago, Tosh said:

The Lazy Forager should be rechargeable with nightmare fuel. As it stands it cannot compete with other ruins gear in terms of how you should prioritise using thulecite. 

Completely agree.  Do not have any idea as to why this isn't rechargeable.  It has such limited usefulness and takes a back slot to have active.  It should definitely be rechargeable via nightmare fuel.

[Electroely]

While I agree with all (but 1) of Ecu's comments, I only have 1 thing to say.

13 minutes ago, Ecu said:

As with the insulated carpet suggestion, I am not sure about tiles with mechanics.  Not really seeing the benefits to making this either.

Mosaic flooring, if it were to give items put on it smoldering priority, would be incredibly useful for summertime. One main issue is the amount of flingos you'd need for a bigger base. What I usually do is plant Lureplants over the corners of my Flingo (they have smoldering priority, as intended) and that makes 1 flingo work as 4. Although the issue with this is having to check on the lureplants everyday so they don't bloom. This kind of flooring would be pretty useful (I'd just place a piece of cut grass on it) although that would make it overpowered, as I guess you might say.

Every other comment of yours, Ecu, I completely agree with.

[Tosh]

The reason I didn't put the healing molasses in as a crockpot recipe was was to give it an advantage over the current food healing meta. It would be faster to craft a stack then if it were a crockpot recipe, and it would also be less time consuming to use in a battle. It's basically an upgraded version of the honey poultice, so I put it as a tier higher so it wouldn't make it redundant. 

 

I'd say that the amount of tufts you receive and how often you can shave the bearger would need to be tuned so that you're getting at most maybe 40-50 tufts over the course of its hibernation.

 

I agree that the hibernation chest is the least useful out of my suggestions as it is far too situational. I'd probably scrap this one. 

 

I agree with your critiques of the insulated flooring. It's intended as a primarily decorative turf, but with a slight benefit to make it more attractive. I think a better mechanic would be if it expanded the temperature AOE of a fire pit  (or endothermic pit). There would need to be a hard cap on how far away this affect could be extended though.

 

Yes! That was exactly what I had in mind for mosaic flooring. It would probably need to only give either 1-2 turf pieces per scales so to not make it OP.

 

For the morning star, I'd say that electrical doodads should only recharge it marginally (25% perhaps?) while frazzled wires charge it significantly more. I completely agree that it should be balanced so that it doesn't become the weapon of choice. The only circumstance for it being the arguable best choice is during ruins raiding when frazzled wires are abundant.

 

I would defend my stance that the insulated pack needs a buff by arguing that it is currently only useful for collecting quick perishing items such as spores. Most crockpot items last long enough that you're more likely than not to return to base and your stationary ice boxes before they spoil. Any situation outside of this could be solved by using a normal backpack and keeping one slot dedicated to rope and another dedicated to a bundled package. You could fill every slot of the bundle with a full stack of food that will never perish and still have 6 additional slots free for storage. The only argument I can see against this is that it's more practical to access the food in the insulated pack; however, you could dedicate one of the remaining 6 storage slots to a half or a quarter stack of the bundled food. Therefore, by using much cheaper materials you already have a better portable fridge than the insulated pack. I'd really like to see it given something special, or at the very least an increase to 8 slots so that it functions as a slightly better backpack.

 

Thanks for your feedback btw!

 

[Sinister_Fang]

15 minutes ago, Tosh said:

The reason I didn't put the healing molasses in as a crockpot recipe was was to give it an advantage over the current food healing meta. It would be faster to craft a stack then if it were a crockpot recipe, and it would also be less time consuming to use in a battle. It's basically an upgraded version of the honey poultice, so I put it as a tier higher so it wouldn't make it redundant. 

So instead of people just farming dragon fruit, they'll farm pomegranate. And they'll have a healing item that better the poultice, cheaper, doesn't spoil and is easy to mass produce? Feels a bit overpowered to me. The current healing items we have seem good enough. I'm not sure we need more.

Also, "food healing meta" made me laugh way too much. We don't really have enough choices for healing to make a meta. We have food or salve/poultice. Well there's sleeping too, but that costs hunger and would fall into the "food healing meta".

[Ecu]

1 hour ago, Electroely said:

While I agree with all (but 1) of Ecu's comments, I only have 1 thing to say.

Mosaic flooring, if it were to give items put on it smoldering priority, would be incredibly useful for summertime. One main issue is the amount of flingos you'd need for a bigger base. What I usually do is plant Lureplants over the corners of my Flingo (they have smoldering priority, as intended) and that makes 1 flingo work as 4. Although the issue with this is having to check on the lureplants everyday so they don't bloom. This kind of flooring would be pretty useful (I'd just place a piece of cut grass on it) although that would make it overpowered, as I guess you might say.

Every other comment of yours, Ecu, I completely agree with.

So you're saying that smoldering essentially makes the item smolder regularly and as such makes it a priority target for the flingo?  I'm not really sure I agree with such metagaming abuse via a tile.  The idea already of making 1 flingo work as 4 is something I feel should probably be nerfed, if that is indeed the result.  So I guess I stick with my thoughts that I'm not really sure I see a point to this tile, and I worry about giving tiles effects being an issue overall.

8 minutes ago, Tosh said:

The reason I didn't put the healing molasses in as a crockpot recipe was was to give it an advantage over the current food healing meta. It would be faster to craft a stack then if it were a crockpot recipe, and it would also be less time consuming to use in a battle. It's basically an upgraded version of the honey poultice, so I put it as a tier higher so it wouldn't make it redundant. 

Honest poultice actually has a recipe that makes sense as a bandage though.  This feels more like a cooking recipe.  I also really question if we really need another healing item like this as we have two tiers of healing items already.  We have the healing salve and the honey poultice.  Having something that healed more than honey poultice would start to be a bit too good without a prohibitive cost, which wasn't represented in the suggestion.

18 minutes ago, Tosh said:

I would defend my stance that the insulated pack needs a buff by arguing that it is currently only useful for collecting quick perishing items such as spores. Most crockpot items last long enough that you're more likely than not to return to base and your stationary ice boxes before they spoil. Any situation outside of this could be solved by using a normal backpack and keeping one slot dedicated to rope and another dedicated to a bundled package. You could fill every slot of the bundle with a full stack of food that will never perish and still have 6 additional slots free for storage. The only argument I can see against this is that it's more practical to access the food in the insulated pack; however, you could dedicate one of the remaining 6 storage slots to a half or a quarter stack of the bundled food. Therefore, by using much cheaper materials you already have a better portable fridge than the insulated pack. I'd really like to see it given something special, or at the very least an increase to 8 slots so that it functions as a slightly better backpack.

If your argument is that bundled food doesn't spoil and therefore insulated backpack would still be worthless at six slots, my counter argument is that bundled food should spoil.  From my viewpoint, arguing that the insulated pack should be that much better because bundling food is broken currently, is not a really good argument.  The current bundled food mechanic breaks the whole spoiling mechanic in general.

I think giving the insulated backpack six slots would be reasonably balanced given its ability to keep things from spoiling when compared to a backpack having more slots, but not having that feature.  Reducing the gear cost would also be quite reasonable.  Increasing it's slots beyond six, I cannot really agree with.

[Tosh]

10 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

Also, "food healing meta" made me laugh way too much. We don't really have enough choices for healing to make a meta. We have food or salve/poultice. Well there's sleeping too, but that costs hunger and would fall into the "food healing meta".

Hahaha well by meta I mean that the two most reliable forms of healing are either eating an entire stack of blue caps/butterfly wings or using crockpot recipes such as pierogi/fishsticks etc. as they're easy to make and give hunger too. Healing salves are useful due to their low cost, but honey poultices are arguably not as competitive. Farm plots are currently very singular in that the only worthwhile crop to grow is dragon fruit (or pumpkins if you like the decor/are farming for saffron feathers). My intention behind this item is to make farm plots more dynamic by adding a choice between 'major hunger with minor health' and 'major health with no hunger'. 

9 minutes ago, Ecu said:

Honest poultice actually has a recipe that makes sense as a bandage though.  This feels more like a cooking recipe.  I also really question if we really need another healing item like this as we have two tiers of healing items already.  We have the healing salve and the honey poultice.  Having something that healed more than honey poultice would start to be a bit too good without a prohibitive cost, which wasn't represented in the suggestion.

I was playing off the video game trope of a little red bottle of a healing potion. I chose the pomegranate because it already offers some minor healing in game, while also having magical connotations in folklore. The design purpose of this item is not to expand the current list of healing items, but to make farm plots more dynamic by offering more viable options. I completely agree with adding an additional prohibitive item to the recipe, but I don't want to add anything that's going to make it so that players don't touch it. I'd suggest maybe adding beard hair, as it is rare enough without having too many current uses (and would also make Wilson slightly more attractive to players).

 

34 minutes ago, Ecu said:

If your argument is that bundled food doesn't spoil and therefore insulated backpack would still be worthless at six slots, my counter argument is that bundled food should spoil.  From my viewpoint, arguing that the insulated pack should be that much better because bundling food is broken currently, is not a really good argument.  The current bundled food mechanic breaks the whole spoiling mechanic in general.

I completely agree that the current bundling mechanic is broken and should be tweaked. However, I understand that the design philosophy behind it was to make it so that more players would go down to the cave based on the ability of bringing provisions that will last longer. I can't imagine they would remove the ability to preserve food using wax paper altogether, so my argument remains valid that at the very least the insulated pack won't be as useful due to the comparative expense of making it. I'm simply working within the game design as it stands and completely respect where your opinion is coming from.

[Ecu]

22 hours ago, Tosh said:

I was playing off the video game trope of a little red bottle of a healing potion. I chose the pomegranate because it already offers some minor healing in game, while also having magical connotations in folklore. The design purpose of this item is not to expand the current list of healing items, but to make farm plots more dynamic by offering more viable options. I completely agree with adding an additional prohibitive item to the recipe, but I don't want to add anything that's going to make it so that players don't touch it. I'd suggest maybe adding beard hair, as it is rare enough without having too many current uses (and would also make Wilson slightly more attractive to players).

I'm not really sure it is appropriate to have a third tier of healing.  It would need to be prohibitively expensive to make (definitely more so than beard hair).  I definitely understand the reasoning behind your suggestion, I just worry it would be too good of a benefit.  I suppose with a crop ingredient like that it may be annoying enough to achieve that you don't have too many.  Definitely would need to be tested before being released officially.

22 hours ago, Tosh said:

I completely agree that the current bundling mechanic is broken and should be tweaked. However, I understand that the design philosophy behind it was to make it so that more players would go down to the cave based on the ability of bringing provisions that will last longer. I can't imagine they would remove the ability to preserve food using wax paper altogether, so my argument remains valid that at the very least the insulated pack won't be as useful due to the comparative expense of making it. I'm simply working within the game design as it stands and completely respect where your opinion is coming from.

I can only feel that they should remove the ability to preserve food using wax paper.  It almost completely negates the purpose of the fridge and insulated pack.  Therefore I cannot agree to altering the insulated pack with said preservation mechanics as a basis.

I stand firm on my feeling that it should have six slots at most.  I agree that the gear cost should definitely be reduced.  I also feel that perhaps it could benefit the user in summer by providing active cooling.  To keep this active cooling togglable, perhaps it cools heat stones placed inside it (like a fridge), which are also allowed to still cool the player (like any heat stone in a pack).  This would allow the user to gain some very solid benefits for crafting the pack, along the lines of eyebrella benefits.

[Arlesienne]

It's too late for me to elaborate, but you're forgetting the best healing item so far: jellybeans.

[Tosh]

On 09/12/2016 at 9:37 PM, Ecu said:

I stand firm on my feeling that it should have six slots at most.  I agree that the gear cost should definitely be reduced.  I also feel that perhaps it could benefit the user in summer by providing active cooling.  To keep this active cooling togglable, perhaps it cools heat stones placed inside it (like a fridge), which are also allowed to still cool the player (like any heat stone in a pack).  This would allow the user to gain some very solid benefits for crafting the pack, along the lines of eyebrella benefits.

I would avoid giving the insulated pack any direct cooling, or letting it cool thermal stones as the lack of durability means that you'd never have to worry about overheating. I think that could end up being overpowered.

If it was staying at 6 slots I'd be much more in favour of giving it an indirect cooling buff by allowing it preserve fruit (and maybe a few other items) more than an icebox. I'd personally set the perish time for fruit in the insulated pack to somewhere between 3-4 times slower. The benefit of this would be to make cooling fruit items like watermelon or fruit medley last longer and be more useful for longer trips in the summer. This extra increased spoilage time could maybe be added to vegetables (excluding mushrooms and cactus flesh), seeds and certain crockpot dishes (e.g. maybe pumpkin cookies). I'd consider allowing it to entirely suspend the spoilage of seeds, but this could be overpowered so it might have to be tuned more. 

 

In addition, I honestly think wax paper should be nerfed to at most increasing the perish time of food to 1.5, though allowing it to stack with other preservatives could be neat. The ability to have 4 stacks in a single inventory slot is powerful enough!

 

Just to illustrate:

Normal Perish Time = 1NPT

Ice box/Insulated Pack (Normal) = 2NPT

Bundled wrap = 1.5NPT

Insulated Pack (Fruit) = 3NPT

 

Therefore if the food is already bundled in wax paper it would increase to 4.5NPT (for fruit in an insulated pack) or 3NPT (everything else). In this system, jerky could last up to 60 days while most fruit would only last a maximum of 45 days. This would definitely need to be playtested to make sure the max attainable NPT isn't too powerful. 

 

Jellybeans: 

I think jellybeans should actually be buffed so that they're able to stack again (with diminishing returns). At the moment I think they only provide the equivalent of 7 healing salves worth of healing, but drawn out. I think they should remain the absolute top tier of healing. 

Healing Molasses/Potion:

I think farming is enough of a time sink to justify keeping the current suggested recipe and allow it to restore 60HP. It would be far easier to kill 12-ish spiders and get 60HP from 3 healing salves, but having this item gives people the alternative option if they want to put the time and resources into it. The usefulness of the recipe is drastically decreased as a player's skill level increases to the point where they can deal with large groups of spiders without losing any health. I agree that it would need to be playtested though. 

What else would you suggest as a prohibitive ingredient?