OnyxShadow

Muffins are very underrated.

My current map is terrible. Its a giant horse shoe shape so some things I need take like 10 day round trips to get to (MacTusk). I have 3 small road segments but they don't help with travel to other areas. Also, I have no pig king. /sigh

I had a nasty perfect storm of badness at about day 50 of the Winter patch. I was away from my usual camp and getting silk. One of the nearby nests became a spider queen so I started fighting her. By the way, it was already dusk. So I notice I'm like 5 seconds away from night time, and I build a camp fire. I spent 30-45 seconds fighting the queen kiting her around the fire. Then two Grue hands come and put out my camp fire. So I'm running away in full dark with morning not even close. Quickly, I make a torch and run like hell. I survived to the morning with low sanity, low HP, and an important lesson learned about fighting nasty creatures at night.

I finally got my entire huge map explored that I generated on the first day of the Winter patch. There is absolutely no pig king. I hope that this is unintentional. Its too important a feature to be randomly absent (and for it to take like 50 days to determine that fact).

Got a screenshot of the most unfortunate map I've ever played... No pig king. Terrible near-useless roads. Annoying horseshoe shape. 1 Tallbird. 4 beefalo to start (more now after a few mating seasons). Just ugghhh.

Deerclops didn't show up in my second Winter. I think I heard him, but the screen never even shook like he was close. Disappointing.

As a counter-balance to the above analysis, let me give another example.After encouraging her for a while, I finally got my mother to play this game back just before the sanity patch. Now, obviously sanity and winter made the game significantly more challenging since then. However, even then she died very early in every play-through generally with me giving her hints as she went along and having heard me talk about strategy quite often before even playing. The best she could do was day 8.I realize that the players that understand this game inside and out, have an often-used bookmark to the wiki and this forum, and have tons of experience in this game and in games in general will not have an exceptionally hard time surviving in Don't Starve especially after many hours of play. I don't either for the most part. However, that's like saying that hardcore raiders in WoW are not aggressively challenged by leveling or basic dungeons.My hope is that this game can be enjoyed by many types of players with many levels of skill.

Just made it to second Winter. Thanks to spending another 10 days exploring, I once again only narrowly got prepared. I'm 98% certain my map is missing a pig king. I thought maps were supposed to be guaranteed to have one at this point.

One last thing. I understand that crock pot recipes need to be adjusted for balance reasons, but it would be REALLY nice if the patch notes gave specific recipe changes. Discovering recipes was fun the first time. Every 2 weeks becomes aggravating.

I have a huge map with a couple little circles of roads (helps with travel in about 10% of the map. I really miss the roads in the last patch. Was also nice that pig king could always be found on roads...

The game map is now HUGE...probably too big. I got unlucky and couldn't find a pig king even exploring for the first 15 days which made getting my alchemy machine done in time very hard. I miss the intuitive system of roads from the last patch and being able to find the king via roads.That left me hustling to store up enough food to last the winter. Barely made it. Fought with deerclops. He shreds armor. Didn't die, but had to run away a little to get another armor on and eat. He disappeared before I could get back. Its an awesome enemy, but it was lame that he vanished before one of us was dead.Day 20 is probably too early for Winter IMO. Also, right now Winter just overwhelms the rest of the gameplay. Regular game 1-30 and then Winter 30-40 and then repeat that cycle would be ideal in my mind. Another possibility is to make Winter happen more frequently as the game goes on giving advanced players more late game difficulty.Mosquitos are annoying common, and they have no purpose. They really need to drop SOMETHING or be meaningful in some other way.I got kinda lucky with the winter vest. Like I said, I was getting my Winter stuff done later than I wanted. I went out on day 19 looking for tracks to make breezy vest. I think it was either day 20 or 21 when I finally got a koalefant, and it was a winter one which gave me a winter vest which I didn't even know existed.Winter nights are also annoyingly long. Its boring. I can understand it from a difficulty perspective, but mostly it just makes me wanna alt-tab out and wait for it to be over.I'm not sure how I feel about the new summer nights. I like that nights are shorter and that I don't always feel like I have to use sleeping bags to bypass them. The problem is dusk. I don't have a problem with them being 2x as long as night from a gameplay perspective, but from a logical stand-point its incredibly strange feeling.

I had a strat for spiders that worked fine. Just wait until evening, set up a fire outside their den, and kill the weaker ones as they come out. 10-20 silk per night and safe.

My suggestion is a very inefficient recipe for jerky and similar foods. Like 3-4 meat make 1 jerky but it lasts a VERY long time.