Alfons100

That could work too, which I guess adds a countermeasure for just spamming dupes when you have a lot of food, but I still find it odd that you cannot gain any Athletics via Skill learning too. Actually, why not add a secondary purpose to Manual Generators where you can place min and max athletic skill requirements to operate, to fill in the niche of exercise equipment. The Manual Generator Athletics learning should be buffed a good deal to not require literally a 100 cycles

You don't understand. I specifially stated that instead of directly nerfing Athletics, we build in some Athletics into all Dupes, and let you gain some extra via Skill learning.

Athletics is a very valuable stat that speeds up many things, even when you have unlocked Transit Tubes. It makes construction faster, it makes mining faster, it speeds up hauling such as supply and storing. Having high athletics will technically make one dupe act as 3 ones built into one because of how fast they can run back and forth. The problem I have with the athletics stat is that new duplicants in a lategame colony are always agonizingly slow compared to a duplicant that has lived for a good few cycles. There's no way to speed the process up other than letting them run. It does that inviting new duplicants into a colony is a real hassle. And it's a dull level-up too since, well, every duplicant walks for a living, which does that they'll level it up regardless of what they do. It's just a matter of time- lets change that: What I mean is that athletics should be rebalanced. Lets start by increasing the speed of any Duplicant, lets say by 15 Athletics or so, I know, a hectic change. But in turn do that it doesn't level up naturally, instead you can increase it by learnable Skills. The Skill-tree has three tiers that increase the athletics stat by 1, 2 and 2 points each, which allows you to have the speed of a dupe with 20 Athletics total, much like an experienced dupe right now. This does that levelling up Athletics for those who need it is more of an investment rather than something that happens naturally, it speeds up the early game exploration, and does that the speed difference between a maxed out dupe and a new dupe isn't as severe, which allows you to invite more Duplicants into your colony.

Can't they just do that the Airborne Critter Bait will capture the critter and then allow for Wrangling them, it'd make it so much easier. However, we can just steal an egg from a Puft to start a ranch, but it'd help al ot to be able to do that.

A recent patch did so that Princes can breathe any Puft gas.

Puft buffs. Awesome

The Forge showed just how fun cooperative DST combat could be, despite the dull combat mechanics. Each person has a role and everyone has to work together in order to win, if one person messes up, everyone dies. Though Forge as a whole is made for it, such as easy revival, unique abilities, healing being cheaper as a resource and so on. The weapon types idea I don't like that much, as the progression of weapons and tools you find isn't like other survival games. Instead of being "Sword good for this and that, axe good for that" and there's different material tiers, Don't Starve is more of "You got meat? Make a hambat! You feeling risky with that sanity? Use a Dark Sword! No resources? A cheap spear will do". Attack patterns and moves being revamped would be great, since the old bosses and enemies we have are starting to age, when we've seen the cooler bosses in the Forge, Hamlet and A New Reign. The bosses should have weird gimmicks to encourage teamwork in order to beat, like in the Forge. This game is called "Together", so why not seize the oppurtunity and make the bosses about working "Together" Treeguardians gets a "root to the ground" ability which immobilizes you, and can be cleared with fire or an axe. So you need to save teammates that get caught. Shadow monsters can mend together into a powerful and fast amalgation enemy if left for too long, so you need to keep track of the right shadow monsters to take down swiftly. Maybe Deerclops spawns large ice puddles that become hard to navigate which take considerable time to remove with pickaxes alone, but together it can be done faster, and to not allow "Just run away from the hazard", deerclops gets a new long ranged attack if you're too far, so you need to clear the fighting stage to allow for efficient kiting. Or Bearger picking up boulders and trees and chucking them at the player while shoving the player around, forcing them into new areas with fresh new trees and stones to throw at you. So you as a team needs to remove trees and boulders during the fight to mitigate danger. You get the drill. Some things are already different in DST like health scaling or some values, but with more players in the mix, you can make bossfights so much more chaotic and not one-dimensional, because right now, if you learn the kiting pattern, there's not much to stop you, unless you go insane and there comes shadow monsters but even then it isn't so bad. EDIT: Adding new moves to bosses could be a bit rude for new players who just learned kiting, so perhaps after you've beaten Fuelweaver, the overworld gets more difficult and sinister. Like wandering sorcerer merm cultists and the bosses getting trickier as I described. While perhaps making them drop unique loot to compensate. Developers don't want to devote that much time into a mechanic that may very well be hit or miss when some people don't even wanna use it, do stuff that everyone can enjoy (Or gets money, as sad as it is). And the devs really care about the idea of "We really do not want to split the community again"

Maybe the Insulated Pack reduces spoilage by a lot, but has less slots, and the Chef Pouch has more space, but not as efficient refridgeration. So they each have their own niche and weakness.

The germ idea sounds fun, requires actual manipulation of bacteria. Though it'd be really difficult to manage. The "They need presence of certain plants" sounds the most plausible in my opinion. The plants would need to be alive so there's still some challenge to it.

I think food preservation as it is is pretty dull. There's several different ways but it will completely negate food spoilage by just having one of them, making it really easy to stockpile food forever. Lets rethink food spoilage a bit Currently there's Sterile atmosphere and Refridgerated. Having one of these will reduce it by 100%. Usually every person who knows what they're doing will make a little pit of CO2 and put the ration boxes in there, now you have perfect food preservation. It outshines actually using a fridge or using thermoregulators to chill an area down. I think sterile atmosphere and refridgerated should each respectively reduce food spoilage by 50%, having both of them will grant completely stopped food spoilage, making that in order to truly refrigerate something you need to both cool and have a sterile gas pit. This does that larger fridgeration places are actually a bigger commitment for larger colonies. I think germs should also slightly increase food spoilage. If a Slimelung, food poisoning or zombiespore is on a piece of food, it will add 10% staleness a cycle, as they are bacteria afterall. So even if you have perfect preservation it may still spoil if it gets germs on it, but most bacteria dies in refrigerated temps anyways. Now lets talk about one of the preservated foods: Pickled Meal. Pickled Meal at the moment is rather pointless as it still spoils, it just takes longer to do so. It should never spoil, just like berry sludge, but it should also have a new bonus that it takes less space, as in, it weighs less and therefore fits more in Rationboxes/Fridges. This gives it an unique niche so you can store a lot in case you ever get into an emergency. Berry Sludge is also a preservated food but I believe it is fine as is. Thats all I had to say, it would make storing food a little harder while preservated foods like sludge and pickled meal stand out a little more until you get better refridgeration

Yeah, Puft ranching is the odd one out of all ranching methods. Maybe it depends on something really weird, like Decor?

but why

What did they do wrong other than their weird breeding tactic :c

Perhaps there could be a way to upgrade the AETN's around the map?

They're already very niche, and Lettuce is an optional ingredient. Though adding more methods would be nice, it's just that Squeaky pufts should be really efficient while the machine churns it out while maybe letting out a byproduct, like hydrogen from processing something else. Just when Squeaky pufts thought they would get used again, people complain about it.