Originally Posted by
Dev
Lots of good points by lots of people in this thread - it was a very interesting read.
I think we've found our difficulty ceiling at last - pretty much nobody is complaining that things are too easy now. I think that the overall feeling is close to what we are going for, but there are a couple of points that still need to be addressed:
1) Winter has a couple of very specific requirements, that aren't always easy to fulfill. Right now, if you can't find beefalo, you're in for a hard time. We're going to add some more warmth-giving craftables that use different low-level materials, to remove the bottleneck.
2) Healing is better decoupled from food, but there's another bottleneck on honey. We're looking into a spider-based healing craftable. They're pretty common, so that should tide people over until their honey farms are up and running.
3) Killer bees! They're crazy! I think we might remove them from the normal bee structures, and keep them in their own wasp nests.
4) More findable loot. We're adding setpieces that have free, high-level stuff in them. These will encourage exploration, and give you a time-limited advantage / preview of cool high-level tools when you find them.
5) We're adding findable one-time-use respawning statues called touchstones. Kind of like a non-craftable effigy without the penalty.
6) Lightning rods - protect your flammable base stuff, or direct lighting to certain locations for other purposes.
I think that these changes will help to smooth over the initial difficulty curve. I may tone down the default hound numbers a bit, because they were put into such big crowds back when the game was a lot easier overall.
Another idea that I'm not sure of yet is increasing the overall health cap to 150 or 200. Now that healing items are more rare, it may be more appropriate to have a bit more durability in the player. I think this worked out quite well with sanity. Sometimes you just need a little more dynamic range in your numbers.
I'm still mulling over the idea of a 'cheat' mode, where you respawn as in minecraft or terraria... it would be something that you'd have to enable in the custom settings if it goes in. It'd probably be implemented using a variant of the touchstone. I haven't thought it through fully, though. I don't want it in the default game, but the new customization screen gives us a lot of leeway for changing the experience to suit different tastes.
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