balance issues/suggestions (minor spoilers)

[boppyboy1]

just some suggestions i had after playing the beta for awhile. minor spoilers.

nerf warbucks.

with the way the new dlc really tries to tax your sanity more than anything, the guy is absolutely busted. really, he just feels like powercreep on maxwell in his current state, in part due to how little penalties you actually have and how little oincs you need for good regen. with maxwell the return for your insane sanity regeneration is having to be cautious with 75 max health. all warbucks has to deal with is -30 to his max hunger, and a controllable 15 sanity penalty for non-crockpot food that is negligible most of the time anyway. the amount of oincs you need is so little it surprised me. I ran around with a stack of 40 oincs, expecting to need to grind up to 100 or 200 for semi-decent sanity regen, but I was completely fine for the 70+ days I played.

its so good that I didn't even realize the gas mask had a -12.5 sanity debuff while worn until I actually READ it on the forums.

an easy way to fix this is just to decrease the sanity regeneration you get for each 10 oincs. it'd be nice to actually have to shoot for having a stack of ten-piece oincs to get decent sanity regeneration (especially since trading relics is the easiest way to get them in ten piece form, fits in perfectly with warbuck's character)

nerf the berry trade between the green shirted pig villager

this trade is super profitable for little work. its also very easy to just buy a berry from a grocer and make a three oinc profit for nothing. the closest comparable trade I can make to this one is the carpenter villager. their easiest trade is probably rope, which means you have to harvest 3 tufts of grass, then craft them into rope, and then sell them. that nets you TWO oincs. with green shirt villagers, you pick a berry bush (which are sold by the florist for 2 oincs) and give it to them, and get four oincs. twice the reward for almost no effort.

i think it'd be better if the trade was only worth two oincs. still a favorable trade, but not super lucrative.

shop behavior

i don't know if half of this stuff can be filed under bugs or just unfinished content, but im going to touch on it out of necessity. the way you can manipulate shops is also completely busted. having to work for oincs to get key items like gears or boss loot is very satisfying, but not so much so when you can goof the system to basically giving you all the inventory for free, at the very low penalty of summoning lots of krampi for stealing.

A three prong problem with shops I have is that

a. shops will restock every day, regardless of if their shopkeep is alive

b. shopkeeps never respawn (according to my experience in my own world, as well as tests with LongUpdate())

c. the consequences of attacking shopkeeps are not as dire as they should be, and can be avoided altogether with enough cheese.

this is a huge issue. If one of your shop keeps happens to glitch out of existence, or accidentally runs into your spear ten times in a row, you now have free access to anything that shop would stock, forever. needless to say this breaks the game in half. put a deli in the middle of your base and just waltz in every morning to 5-6 free good crock pot foods, free of charge forever.

this can be solved with making it so that shops will remain empty if theres no shopkeep alive, but then you run the risk of making it so all the shops STAY empty, and the only way to generate new inventory is to craft new shops with the key to the city, which can be a pain to get. so just make shopkeeps respawn, right? well, that doesn't completely solve the problem, because now butchering shopkeeps is a viable method of getting their loot.

even without using a cheesy strat (hit the shopkeep once, and then run out of the shop; they don't regenerate health or tattle on you, so you can keep doing this until they're dead. no aggro from outside guards and no spawns inside the shop) this can still be manipulated. putting shops of interest in the middle of nowhere with the key to the city means all you have to do to get an ENTIRE shop's inventory is fight two pig guards. after they're dead, you're free to steal everything inside every day, and deal with the krampus spawns (or ignore them). nobody in the hamlet will ever be the wiser

my suggestion to this is make sure shops stay empty while shopkeeps are dead, but make shopkeeps respawn after 3-5 days, and to increase the difficulty of continuously robbing shops. my personal suggestion is to increase the amount of guards/spawn more elite guards that are harder/riskier to kill (maybe give them blunderbusses), increase how fast they spawn (so you cant just run out before they spawn in), and make it harder for the player to actually leave/flee when they do spawn in. maybe they lock the door, and you have to kill the shopkeep (who is frantically running around the shop) to get the spare key to escape, or they throw something to decrease your movement speed.

more threatening mant hills/queen womant fight

i was excited to see there was a long gauntlet of mant warriors between me and the actual boss room, but the way rooms work now I didn't actually need to prepare to fight my way through three to five fast, hard hitting mobs per room. with the stalking cane I was easily able to just run past them all, and duck into the next room before they had even decided to aggro on me, or if they had, before they even had a chance to swarm on me and hit me.

maybe add some small levers connected to the falling trap doors like in normal ruins, so you have to actually have to clear the room and search for the lever to open the next room and advance.

the queen womant fight was really disappointing. I was expecting her to spawn more guards after I had killed her first two and started wailing on her, but she just summoned an earthquake and dropped one scorpion, which I was easily able to kill. (testing this later, I found she does spawn more warriors, but I blew through her hp so fast she didn't get the chance to spawn more) The horn move she does that makes your player freeze to cover their ears is a nice touch. I was a little disappointed wearing earmuffs doesn't stop the effects (maybe it lessens it, I didn't test)

better feedback with the wilba npc

this is a minor gripe. figuring out how to actually unlock her isn't difficult, she'll eventually tell you exactly how to unlock her if you hang around her long enough. There's just little feedback when you actually 'succeed' in unlocking her. With Wes he'll 'die' and disappear, Woodlegs will wake up, click his peglegs and disappear. I was expecting Wilba to emote, click her heels and then disappear in a puff of smoke, or maybe run out of the castle, where the guards will say something about her 'escape.' When I gave her the crown she just said 'thanks' and continued to dopeily wander around the room. It was only after I had left for a day and come back that she had actually disappeared.

stealing from the mayor

everyone and their mother knows this one. im confused as to why the mayor falls asleep at all. all the other shopkeeps stay awake to prevent you from stealing. oversight, or intentional? add coffee to the mayors desk so there is lore for him staying awake 24/7.

general bugs

for some reason, the moggles will blind you underground if its daytime, regardless if you're in a room that's leaking daylight or not.

when fighting queen womant, sometimes you will stay deaf even after the fight has ended. this is fixed if you save and exit, and relaunch your world.

[Sasuga]

Warbucks

I agree that Warbucks shouldn't be super easy,I haven't played Warbucks yet but if he's getting a super sanity boost as described by only carrying enough Oincs to buy The Slanty Shanty, that's probably too easy. I am often able to buy the house in under three days, sometimes in one day.

Green Shirt

I strongly disagree with the idea that it needs to be nerfed. I think its a fine mechanic, and a cute one. I'm certain the developers thought of this interaction when they created it, and its not the most profitable thing ever. Don't Starve games are difficult until you figure them out, they're puzzles, and that's one of the puzzle pieces in this game. I often fine myself saving berries and not eating them because of that guy, berries are not precious to me. You can also buy bushes and setup a whole profitable system there, but Oincs ain't everything. They're helpful, but I often find myself lacking in resources that require me to leave the village. There's plenty of more profitable ways than that exchange to make oinc, and getting lucky on the shop selling berries to do it. I say leave the green shirt exactly the way he is.

I Agree Better Feedback would be good with Wilba

I do.

Steeling from the mayer is obiviously intentional, especially since as you say the other shop keepers say around.

Except, I have had another shop keeper fall asleep on me. They didn't have their desk, so it was probably a bug. I've noticed the shop keepers tend to walk into the walls a night, I'm guessing they're trying to leave and can't. The game is in Beta.  The Mayor falling asleep is OBVIOUSLY intentional, or they wouldn't have made the animation of him falling to sleep, and sleeping, and the feedback you get when you examine him. I think its a fun little thing they've added in, I just wish there was some sort of penalty for it as well. - I've noticed the mayor seems to sleep during the daytime after taking the scrolls, but that might be a bug, especially since he did eventually wake up. - Perhaps the mayor won't give guard scrolls out if the scrolls are stolen, as the guards are too busy looking for a their for something. I'd like it to be a choice of options, instead of the obvious way to go once you discover it, but even as it is, I think its fine.

[metallichydra]

you can wake the mayor by trying to give him items.
and if you steal too many items, you'll be punished by the krampi.

[Ellilea]

Krampi aren't a punishment, they're a chance to get a Krampus bag