Difficulty

[sarahnorthway]

So, I'm not sure what you intend for the final difficulty, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting my ass handed to me when I first started playing, and like that right now you lose all your progress and have to start over.I was actually kind of disappointed once I got a little farm going and never had to worry about starving again. After playing for a couple hours I feel like I've got the current game solved (although I've yet to make a tent or take down a beefalo). It'd be nice if resources were more scarce, so that I was in more constant danger.I do like the idea of having being given a fresh instance and told to complete some challenge. I'm guessing a lot of people would rather play forever in a sandbox (which is totally fun too), but personally I love starting over from scratch and barely scraping by. That wonderful feeling of just barely making it through the night.

[Kevin]

I'm glad you like it! I'm a big fan of very hard games - even if I'm not very good at them (which is usually true) I have more fun trying things out and failing than in a bunch of empty success.The actual difficulty curve is very much in flux at the moment as we set things up, but I want to keep it on the hard side. In next Monday's build, we are adding level permanence - if you quit, you can continue at the last morning that you reached. If you die, however, we delete your save game, and you have to start again. It is my hope that when we eventually have a bit more combat and a better sense of progression, this will make for a very tense, high-stakes mood.One of our pillars in the design is that "Don't Starve is about scarcity." We hope to never let the player get too comfortable in their position - you may build a nice food economy at your base, but you will run out of *something* that will force you out into hostile territory. The farms are a bit too powerful at the moment, in my opinion. Maybe if they wore out after a couple of uses, forcing you to go look for more manure?

[Bigfoot]

Ohhh, I like the idea of the farm running out. Perhaps it also ruins the ground, robbing it of nutrients.The ebb and flow of the game is really interesting. It's great to be always in want of something, but if the psychological pressure is "always on," that could get tiring. Then again, I actually made my own rest point by majorly stocking up on meat and wood around my camp, until I felt fit enough to go out and bushwack like an explorer.

[Kevin]

Crop rotation!!Perhaps I should prioritize implementing multi-tiered farming. Then it would at least take a while to work up to super-meat-farm comfiness.

[Bigfoot]

That would also be interesting. Just playing with conservation of energy will already make it much more challenging, considering you'll need to keep finding more poop.And if the world isn't so poop abundant, then even building one farm plot will take some work. Maybe need to feed them beefalos something to give them the runs

[DouglasTheAwesome]

YES!  I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think it would be a fantastic idea to do crop rotation.  Somebody should start a poll!