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Any body actually have a problem with the fact that there are multiple creatures in this game you cannot attack or reach normally without;

- Kiting them into an ally, rare

- Hitting them with a ranged weapon, tedious and unorthodox

- Glitching their pathfinding on a corner, the primary thing

- Laying a trap, uncommon but complex

 

This mostly just results in people not actually interacting with any of these things ninety percent of the time, simply because having to prepare extra equipment to deal with a relatively generic problem isn't worth it.

Birds and rabbits are fine because they are meant to be small things you have to trap, but other things.

 

Gobblers for example, they exist; but players almost never actually interact with them. Because they spent so little time on-screen, and when they actually show up it's impossible to catch them and thus you need to be prepared for this rare event already. So nothing ends up happening with them.

Splumonkeys are toxic. That's it really. You can't catch them, yet they will consistently follow you and take everything on the ground. If you attack them they still won't confront you and will keep running, so unless you have massive damage you still can't kill them that way either. Additionally they will steal most of your things if you die, so if they get ahold of a Thulecite Crown just R.I.P you the player for daring to actually try to play in the caves right.

Koalephants are the main exception because you can glitch their pathfinding relatively easily on edges of the map. And because of how much meat they provide and their trunks they're quite lauded. Again, the only ways to catch them fairly on your own are tedious and waste time; while the only proactive way to play is by glitching their pathfinding.

Tumbleweeds as well, are like, you can't effectively farm them while they roll because they will outrun you more then half the time. And so you have to rely on them getting trapped by an invisible wall at the edge of the desert in order to get them. Really.

 

Does it really have to be this way, because it seems like this has been left really unpolished as a system.

Might be forgetting some other creatures here but, yeah, it doesn't make sense why this is possible when all it does is promote players to not actually interact with the content in the desired way because the desired way is exceptionally tedious. They got the formula right with butterflies, you have to chase and maneuver against them in order to land a hit.

Why can't this be done with other creatures so that they retain their evasive nature but can still actually be countered without needless exploitation or chores-required from the player. Same goes for tumbleweeds, it makes no sense that they get stuck at the end of the world it'd be much more interesting if they rolled slowly and fall off the edge of the map when they reach it.

 

Not in suggestions and feedback because this isn't a direct proclamation it is asking what the rest of the community feels on this subject in its current status.

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Koalephants are a problem for me as well.. i just hate when they spawn nowhere near a suitable edge of the map, and the chase becomes just frustrating! A solution would be putting them to sleep at late dusk , or giving them a "passive" idle animation that plays when they feel safe, leaving you the possibility to quickly approach them without the glitch (as you described) or at night (which is mainly very problematic: find them too soon and you will have to wait A LOT. Find them too late and the dark will cover their trails , making your hunt useless anyway).

I like your idea about the tumbleweeds, i mean you end up catching them ANYWAY once they get stuck. Most of the time you catch them just because they are stuck on the edge of the map and you are just walking nearby. 

The only time gobbler becomes killable is on huge berry farms where one player gathers resources and the other just holds down the "F" key to punish him as soon as he comes out. Very annoying indeed. Once again, making him stick around on-screen and getting put to sleep at late dusk / night would fix it a bit. After all, he just gives 2 chunks of meat. is that really worth a boomerang shot? no.

Spulmonkeys ... ehm... *tumbleweeds rolling around*

 

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Are koalefant easier to kill with a salt lick ?


I don't have problem with gobbler.

Method 1 : put berries on ground, go away a little, hit the gobbler when he want to eat the berries.

Method 2 : put 3 red mushrooms on ground, enjoy.

Purpose of gobbler is to be an annoyance that prevent you to make too much berries farm without having to be cautious. So they are working well, design wise.

 

Koalefants are fine for me either, because when i want to kill one, i usually lead him into a swamp (or a tentacle trap made by book), and enjoy. But i prefer keeping them near my base, free manure time to time for a monster that will not become hostile to me and could take the aggro of hounds during houds attacks (at least before fire hounds start to appears)

 

I hate Splumonkeys, they are one reason i don't want to go to ruin. More annoying than anything else, but not only because of the running part, mostly of the "follow and steal".

 

Don't have too much prob with tumbleweeds. Usually either i take the one in the border, or the one crossing my path. Tumbleweeds without the outrun will be pretty much free loot so a limit is needed.

 

For me everything is fine excluding Splumonkeys.

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2 hours ago, The Curator said:

Gobblers for example, they exist; but players almost never actually interact with them. Because they spent so little time on-screen, and when they actually show up it's impossible to catch them and thus you need to be prepared for this rare event already. So nothing ends up happening with them.

Splumonkeys are toxic. That's it really. You can't catch them, yet they will consistently follow you and take everything on the ground. If you attack them they still won't confront you and will keep running, so unless you have massive damage you still can't kill them that way either. Additionally they will steal most of your things if you die, so if they get ahold of a Thulecite Crown just R.I.P you the player for daring to actually try to play in the caves right.

Koalephants are the main exception because you can glitch their pathfinding relatively easily on edges of the map. And because of how much meat they provide and their trunks they're quite lauded. Again, the only ways to catch them fairly on your own are tedious and waste time; while the only proactive way to play is by glitching their pathfinding.

Tumbleweeds as well, are like, you can't effectively farm them while they roll because they will outrun you more then half the time. And so you have to rely on them getting trapped by an invisible wall at the edge of the desert in order to get them. Really.

Gobblers can be lured with berries which requires the player to drop the berries, step away from them so the gobbler gains interest, and then come in and attack when the gobbler is preoccupied with trying to eat the berries you dropped. You can "catch" them by making a farm of berry bushes, walling in some bait (dropped berries) and then walling the gobblers in when they surround the bait. I've done this to "store" drumsticks for winter and other times.

I recently saw a post on monkeys in caves and how to easily deal with them, that being to fence them in. They apparently cannot pass fences and do not attack them. Another method that I enjoy - destroy all but a few houses, typically these houses you keep should be in an area that's easy to maintain and not somewhere you frequently pass. A good example would be an area that is a dead end with a land-bridge that is skinny enough to fit a bunch of teeth trap on it. This way you can farm the monkeys and keep them from running around unchecked.

Koalefants are easy to trap on the edges of the map like you mentioned, but I have also found that for certain mobs like pigs the Koalefant will attempt to keep their distance just like they try for you, so you can use this to your advantage by pushing a Koalefant into a pigman and having the pigman push it back towards you, just be ready to swing when it gets close.

Tumbleweeds have spawn-points that make it possible to "farm" them. With trial and error and a bit of searching, you can wander around your deserts looking for places where you cannot put objects (like a firepit for example) and once you find a place that has nothing visibly blocking you from placing things yet the game just wont let you, you've most likely found a tumbleweed spawner. All you have to do is surround it with walls and put a gate on it. (singleplayer only, as OP stated best way to do it in multiplayer is to run around the edge of the desert)

 

Now, do I have a problem with the game having mobs like this? No, it changes things up from just running into things that are aggressive / or just completely unresponsive and mowing them down. It provides a bit of a mix-up to how you need to approach them, and I feel it would be very unnatural to not have creatures that go out of their way to avoid you, besides everything wants to live right? In terms of that effecting the player wanting to interact with these creatures then yes it may, but there are many things that are "optional" in the game, and I believe that it's which things are more efficient to do than others that really effects the players choice on how they play the game. With the proper knowledge anything can be efficiently farmed in a sense.

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19 minutes ago, The Curator said:

Gobblers for example, they exist; but players almost never actually interact with them. Because they spent so little time on-screen, and when they actually show up it's impossible to catch them and thus you need to be prepared for this rare event already. So nothing ends up happening with them.

I don't know about you, but I always carry berries and/or red mushrooms around to either poison them or just strike them while they eat. And it's not like you have to prepare yourself either, since players usually are always carrying a few berries with them.

21 minutes ago, The Curator said:

Koalephants are the main exception because you can glitch their pathfinding relatively easily on edges of the map. And because of how much meat they provide and their trunks they're quite lauded. Again, the only ways to catch them fairly on your own are tedious and waste time; while the only proactive way to play is by glitching their pathfinding.

Well, this IS Don't Starve Together. Getting him with friends isn't that much of a deal. Now if you want to complain about them in DS, usually boomerangs solve the problem really fast, and it's not that hard to make them early on.

22 minutes ago, The Curator said:

Tumbleweeds as well, are like, you can't effectively farm them while they roll because they will outrun you more then half the time. And so you have to rely on them getting trapped by an invisible wall at the edge of the desert in order to get them. Really.

A lot of the times they just come directly to me, so I really don't find that a problem. If one outruns me, there's usually another one nearby I can easily get.

Just my two cents on these, I completely agree with the splumonkeys though. No one likes them.

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4 minutes ago, ItsPizzaTime said:

With trial and error and a bit of searching, you can wander around your deserts looking for places where you cannot put objects (like a firepit for example) and once you find a place that has nothing visibly blocking you from placing things yet the game just wont let you, you've most likely found a tumbleweed spawner.

Doesn't work in DST, just saying.

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Its not suppose to promote players ignoring them... That is not a good option for most of these cases and ignoring them is a sign that the player is either being lazy or lacks experience/creativity... As a note you can use pan flutes and bed time stories (Wickerbottom) to stop them from running as well.

For the gobblers, I walled in my berry farm and alternated berry bushes and tooth traps. It makes "turning the crops" (disease counter measures) more tedious, but it makes harvesting the berry farm more profitable and significantly more entertaining/satisfying. (Gobblers spawn and explode)

For tumbleweeds, me and my playgroup have not gotten around to putting it into action but we plan on constructing a tumble weed catch for our oasis base. The idea was something like this... please forgive me if I do not explain this properly as it probably requires visuals. (Note: oasis is by desert side of the desert entrance + and we have a cave entrance on the other-side so the base extends into the caves making it a perfect summer base) we build a wall separating desert from non desert and with a door in the center. We then build a second wall that is funnel shaped... two diagonal walls that come to a close at the end closest to the first wall... but we also wanted to add a bit of a lip or tunnel at the end of the funnel. The idea here was any tumble weeds rolling this way can get into the funnel and then get stuck in the enclosed spaces on the otherside of the funnel due to the great desert wall / gate that we constructed. This would function as a gate to the desert and collect tumbleweeds for us to harvest whenever we are in the area. (Again we haven't implemented this so we don't know if it will work. But theoretically it seems promising.) That said they are not difficult to catch, this is just constructing something to enable us to be lazy about it.

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The only thing on this list that is at all difficult to deal with are the monkeys, and they are more challenging because the ruins are supposed to be more challenging--also, they drop great loot.  It's only natural that some of the stuff you want to hunt will try to run away and be faster than you are, requiring creative use of the environment or tools or guile. The fact that not all of them can be hunted in the way some players most prefer (or have figured out) isn't really a design flaw, it's just design, and one that keeps things interesting.

For the koalaphant, you can corner it (a completely legit real-world hunting technique), aggro it with a boomerang, chase it into a tall bird (personal favorite of mine because it will get you 10 meats) or simply wait until night and attack it while it sleeps. For this reason, i often put off tracking the until twilight so that by the time I've spawned it it's almost night just don't camp too close or it will remain on guard.

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1 hour ago, The Curator said:

Tumbleweeds as well, are like, you can't effectively farm them while they roll because they will outrun you more then half the time. And so you have to rely on them getting trapped by an invisible wall at the edge of the desert in order to get them. Really.

You're chasing tumbleweeds wrong, you shouldn't just give up because they're "outrunning you". Their speed is just a liiiitle bit higher than yours, and then slowly goes down as you chase them, until eventually they're slow enough that you can catch them.

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1 hour ago, The Curator said:

Gobblers for example, they exist; but players almost never actually interact with them. Because they spent so little time on-screen, and when they actually show up it's impossible to catch them and thus you need to be prepared for this rare event already. So nothing ends up happening with them.

Splumonkeys are toxic. That's it really. You can't catch them, yet they will consistently follow you and take everything on the ground. If you attack them they still won't confront you and will keep running, so unless you have massive damage you still can't kill them that way either. Additionally they will steal most of your things if you die, so if they get ahold of a Thulecite Crown just R.I.P you the player for daring to actually try to play in the caves right.

Koalephants are the main exception because you can glitch their pathfinding relatively easily on edges of the map. And because of how much meat they provide and their trunks they're quite lauded. Again, the only ways to catch them fairly on your own are tedious and waste time; while the only proactive way to play is by glitching their pathfinding.

Tumbleweeds as well, are like, you can't effectively farm them while they roll because they will outrun you more then half the time. And so you have to rely on them getting trapped by an invisible wall at the edge of the desert in order to get them. Really.

 

Does it really have to be this way, because it seems like this has been left really unpolished as a system.

 

Not in suggestions and feedback because this isn't a direct proclamation it is asking what the rest of the community feels on this subject in its current status.

Gobblers -   Are so easy to kill! Place a berry on the ground & they will walk to it like a mindless zombie.

Splumonkeys - Are annoying but all you have to do is stay away from them or carry everything important with you. Don't put important stuff  inside hutch or they will steal it.

Koalefants - Are easy to kill IMO. Chase them to the edge until they keep become stuck running towards nothing. You can also kill them at night while they sleep.

Tumbleweeds - The best way to farm tumble weed is to walk along the edge of the desert & collect all the tumble weed stuck on the edges.

 

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I don't get why you all waste time on chasing Koalefants to be honest.. I just one hit them with a boomerang and they come running to attack you instead, easy enough. Ain't nobody got time for dat chase. Always have a spare boomerang, good for 10 easy Koalefant kills. 

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29 minutes ago, Kittydub said:

I don't get why you all waste time on chasing Koalefants to be honest.. I just one hit them with a boomerang and they come running to attack you instead, easy enough. Ain't nobody got time for dat chase. Always have a spare boomerang, good for 10 easy Koalefant kills. 

I do sometimes do it in the very early game before I've decided where to place the alchemy engine. But it is kinda a nuisance compared to just attacking them at night.

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...which is pretty much what I do. "Aww, look, it's sleeping like a little angel MURDERTIME!!"

Tumbleweeds I just walk around the edges for, and if I happen to be able to catch up with one every now and then before it gets there, good, otherwise, eh.

For Gobblers...I wish I knew the correct distance to go away from them because every time I try the "lure them with berries" trick, they freaking FINISH EATING IT AND RUN AWAY BEFORE I CAN HIT THEM!  Ugh.

And last but not least....monkeys.

EFFING.  MONKEYS.

Yeah I don't know what they drop but if I ever do get around to properly doing the ruins, I'm thinking I might just completely turn _off_ those things in worldgen.  The Shipwrecked monkeys already make me want to bash my head in; I can't even IMAGINE how bad it'd be with things that are apparently even _worse_...

(Sure, once I have the materials to make the fences, things would get better, but until then...yeah.  As stated in one of the Metheus puzzle threads, teeth-grinding frustration is NOT my idea of a good time.)

...Notorious

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volt goats, grass geckos, gobblers, monkeys, koalefants name it. You can't outrun them.

Does it makes sens that puny humans be the fastest thing in DST? Not at all ; like in real life ; you can't catch the animal you want? Use your human brain! Discovers new strategies. Thats not hard, nor it is frustrating or a problem. This is the fun part!

Monkeys stole your stock last time? ok, well next time dont bring Hutch with you. Adapt to the game and dont try to make the game adapt to you.  

 

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7 hours ago, The Curator said:

Gobblers

Intended to be faster than you. They are supposed to gobble everything near you while you despair.

You can chase them until dusk arrives and they go away.

You can chase them to run over tooth traps.

You can lure them with berries to kill them when they approach. Or red caps so they die from food damage.

7 hours ago, The Curator said:

Splumonkeys

Go near them during the nightmare phase of the ruins, now you can kite them as always.

Bonus points if you lure in depth worms or bunnymen for the best loot party ever.

Remember to not get in range of several shadow monkeys or you risk getting overwhelmed.

7 hours ago, The Curator said:

Koalephants

Boomerang. Fire staff. Ice staff. Weather pain. Any of the darts.

Enough to hit the animal once and trigger his wrath onto you.

No need for mindless chasing into the edge of the map.

7 hours ago, The Curator said:

Tumbleweeds

On average, you are slightly faster than them (6 run speed versus 5 average tumble speed).

The speed can vary between 2.5 and 7.5 speed. It also changes for every clock segment.

I never had an issue with tumbleweeds. Just click them once and watch Wilson eventually catch up.

 

All working as intended.

Maybe tumbleweeds should be looked into. Not so much for balance or farming, but for server health. If they spawn and nobody picks them up, they end up on the edge of the desert, consuming CPU resources doing nothing, just bouncing on the edge of the world while also demanding speed recalculations.

Can't say I experienced tumbleweed lag though, I always pick them up when I enter the desert.

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And this, mates, is why speed boosts are underrated.

Gobblers will walk towards 'vegetables' on the ground and are unresponsive to being attacked while doing so.

Rabbits can be killed with melee. https://gfycat.com/SoreCoolBubblefish

Tumbleweeds are actually polite enough to stop and let you open them. Opening a tumbleweed takes mere seconds of chasing.

@DarkXero Anything that is a least a distance of 76 metres away from a player is unloaded and does not severely consume resources.

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2 hours ago, JohnWatson said:

And this, mates, is why speed boosts are underrated.

So underrated that it's the stat number 1 in modded character in the workshop.

Yeah, ok, the number could be wrong, but seriously, i have the feeling that half the character has a feat like "run faster" "have a better speed" "fast runner" or whatever.

 

It's not really underrated, the cane is one of the most popular items, it's just that there are few items giving speed.

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You can lure Gobblers with berries or any veggie.

Koalefants: After your 1st winter you should have AT LEAST 1 blow dart as a loot from McTusk so getting a koalefant should be easy and if you have a succesful bynnymen/pig farm you shouldn't waste time on koalefants

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16 minutes ago, Lumina said:

So underrated that it's the stat number 1 in modded character in the workshop.

Yeh, ok, the number could be wrong, but seriously, i have the feeling that half the character has a feat like "run faster" "have a better speed" "fast runner" or whatever.

 

It's not really underrated, the cane is one of the most popular items, it's just that there are few items giving speed.

Most modders that make characters don't know how to balance. Hence why they think that speed boosts are just a small minor perk.

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I don't get these whiny topics about mobs and things in DST. If you don't have time to spend some time to understand the game mechanics or if you are bored cause you played too much, just take a pause from the game. It will not change anything if you whine on the forums ''Guys Koalephant is too OP, I can't catch it.'' Some of these mechanics been since release and no one has been whined about them before. There already been topics about making the game easier which personally I don't want them.

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4 hours ago, JohnWatson said:

Anything that is a least a distance of 76 metres away from a player is unloaded and does not severely consume resources.

The unloading band around a player is at 64*1.2 -> 76.8 units, to be more precise.

Limbo entities still take up some resources ongameframe in that they're in a list checked against to see if they're not in limbo, so it's fairly minimal.

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The Walrus! Characters can easily catch up with it like chasing a butterfly. But unlike butterflies, it's impossible to land a hit on the walrus after you reach it.

Also, the thing that you can hit it for free when it's far enough from home, feels like a glitch to me.

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3 hours ago, JohnWatson said:

Most modders that make characters don't know how to balance. Hence why they think that speed boosts are just a small minor perk.

It's an explanation, yeah. I don't like character with bonus speed because for me it's too powerful, but maybe they don't feel the same way.

 

3 hours ago, Mananu said:

I don't get these whiny topics about mobs and things in DST. If you don't have time to spend some time to understand the game mechanics or if you are bored cause you played too much, just take a pause from the game. It will not change anything if you whine on the forums ''Guys Koalephant is too OP, I can't catch it.'' Some of these mechanics been since release and no one has been whined about them before. There already been topics about making the game easier which personally I don't want them.

Mechanisms here since release isn't really the thing here for me. I mean, it's not bad to look at something a little old, and ask "does it deserve a dusting (is it the right word ?) so it doesn't seems to old or anything.

 

The problem here is that suggestions aren't an improvement, for me. This, or "mac tusk becoming a monster chasing you instead of a camp" are suggestions that want to change things without seeing why the fact that they function the way they are IS important for the game. Because of diversity. Because people will have to find their own strategy. Because it create a lot of things.

 

We need just to look at the topic to see how people do differents things to kill koalefant/gobblers.

For koalefant, for example, tentacle, boomerang, dart, another entity they'll try to avoid.

For gobbler, berries, toothtrap, red mushrooms, even tentacle again.

 

And i probably forgot some that were mentionned here.

 

Would all this creativity exist if the method "i run, hit, kill" was easy ?

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13 hours ago, JohnWatson said:

Anything that is a least a distance of 76 metres away from a player is unloaded and does not severely consume resources.

Well, just because something is unloaded doesn't mean it doesn't consume resources. It depends on the implementation. Sometimes the world pushes events to the asleep entities (beyond awaking them) and they react, or sometimes they have tasks that keep running in the background (beefalo domestication task).

Tumbleweeds get events pushed to them (although they don't completely react to them because they have a guard for when they are asleep).

You are correct in thinking that the heavy wind calculations aren't done (since they are performed in the OnUpdate method of the blowinwind component, and that gets paused when the tumbleweed unloads).

However, I was just thinking of just having them exist. Like flowers. And having lag spikes when suddenly loading 100 tumbleweeds in one corner of the desert (where they do demand the wind calculation).

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