Don't Starve

[Samwise]

So yesterday my brother gave me a copy of Don't Starve as an early Christmas present.  It's a survival sim game where you collect things and build things and eat things.

On my first attempt I made it four days, figured out how to efficiently hunt small animals for food, started feeling pretty good about myself, and then I got killed by an angry tree.

It's pretty fun.

[Ingmar]

It's pretty much Tim Burton's Mincrafterraria. Or something. I messed around with it some, seems pretty neat but probably a little shallow in the long run. I do enjoy the SCIENCE MACHINE!

[Sky]

Pretty cool game.

First run I made it 13 days just catching birds and teching up to armor and spear. Then I forgot to light a fire at dusk. Woops!

[Xanthippe]

2 days first attempt. I attacked a spider nest.

12 days second attempt. Tentacle got me.

Armor? Spear? I have no idea how to make these things yet.

LOVE THIS GAME.

[kildorn]

I'm hoping the updates flesh out your options a bit more. I made it 9 days and died to a dog pack while looking for healing food.

Science Machine is awesome. Random commentary when examining things is also awesome.

[Xanthippe]

I like that when I die, I don't lose my discoveries.  I didn't make any in my second game, as I never found a gold nugget so no science machine.

[Sky]

Took me a long time to find gold in my second game. But getting the spear and bark armor helped with exploring once my little end of the world tapped out of resources (ie rocks) and I had to traverse tentaclelands. Then I found a rocky biome and set up shop nearby. Around day 15 or so and just getting underway, really.

Had a small pigman posse but they couldn't keep pace when I had to book it back to camp at dusk.

[Sky]

Got a little cocky and tried to kill a tentacle dude with my spear. Outcome: not good for me. 20 days.

[schild]

Made it 5 days. Fed some grass to the science thing. A boar ate me. I think I did something wrong, but don't know what. It came from off screen.

[Soln]

Played the beta and I also own it.  Was still in need of balancing.  Will try again since its made its way to this haunt.

[Xanthippe]

Made it 5 days. Fed some grass to the science thing. A boar ate me. I think I did something wrong, but don't know what. It came from off screen.

Maybe it was a hound?

[Xanthippe]

I'm on day 32 or 33 or something.

When I go to pick up a stack of things, it only picks up half a stack and then when I go to drop the things, they drop one at a time. I must have hit an unknown toggle switch. The only way to change it back that I know of is to exit and continue. Does anyone have a better way?

[CaptainNapkin]

6 days. Should have read this thread first as I died just like schild after feeding grass to the oz machine.

[schild]

6 days. Should have read this thread first as I died just like schild after feeding grass to the oz machine.

Happened again, don't know why.

[Xanthippe]

What I know about the hounds:

[Sky]

Yeah, they are some kind of event or something. You hear a sound before they show up. Get your armor and spear out!

I don't feed grass to the sciencebot, grass is too dear at the early game, anyway. I use pine cones and red bird feathers. Cones are only 3pts but I get a ton of them; feathers are 8pts and I can't use them yet.

About day 10 on my newest run, got disturbingly excited by finding a pile of manure. First time I've found the biome with bulls. And I angered the forest gods, luckily barely killed the forest beast for my first real meat.

Pro tip in case you're slow like me. The shovel can dig up grass, twigs, berries, etc so you get the resource AND the plant to put somewhere else. I set up a small farm just before dying to the tentacle. Oh, and monster meat is filling but wounds you. Took me a while to figure out how I was getting damaged...

[bhodi]

Feed the grass PLANT for 20.

[Xanthippe]

I have a nice little set up right now. There's a ton of rabbit holes and grass and saplings in the first island, so I can make snares and keep myself in morsels (which I can also feed to the machines for 8 each). There are more rabbits than I can snare. My plan is to continue to snare/feed the science machines until I've learned everything before moving. Plenty of trees, as well.

Meanwhile, I set up another camp a few islands away next to an island with a ton of spiders but also a ton of rocks (so spending the night there is deadly). As long as I mine only during the day, it's all good.

I've learned a lot of things I can't use, since I've not found manure yet. I've found tentacles but I'm too scared to fight them.

What I learned about bees:

[Sky]

About the tree monster:


I put up the first two garden/farm plot techs last night. Really slow and I fed one manure just to see what it would grow and I got a carrot. I guess once you get a bunch going it might be ok, but it seemed like a bother for a carrot which isn't nearly as filling as cooked morsels.

I usually just grab morsels at dusk/morning as I hit camp for the night. I surround the camp with regular traps and catch birds. Rabbits don't drop feathers in addition to morsels.

[Ingmar]

Feed the grass PLANT for 20.

Yeah this, great early source of science points. Dig it up with a shovel, it won't regrow, but you probably won't be staying in that spot long-term anyway.

[kildorn]

Feed the grass PLANT for 20.

Yeah this, great early source of science points. Dig it up with a shovel, it won't regrow, but you probably won't be staying in that spot long-term anyway.

It's behavior like this that causes environmental problems!

[Bann]

They should have called the game stay the fuck away from the giant bird eyeball things.

[shiznitz]

This game has some charm, but I am not convinced it is worth even $11.  I have plenty of app games for 99c with more replayability.

[Druzil]

What I know about the hounds:

Also:

[Ingmar]

This game has some charm, but I am not convinced it is worth even $11.  I have plenty of app games for 99c with more replayability.

I think I've figured out what it is; it's a survival roguelike. I don't see how that doesn't have plenty of replay value once it is truly finished.

Granted if roguelikes aren't your thing, that's another matter.

[tazelbain]

Well, the repeatably of a rogue-likes are random encounters, how random is this?

[Ingmar]

The map is random, you come across different creatures as time advances and as you go to different terrains, kind of like how you run into harder/different monsters on lower dungeon levels in a roguelike. It may still need more variety, certainly.

[Sky]

Remember, the game's not finished. They are definitely looking at how to shake up players out of their routine.

Don't Starve Roadmap
As you all know, Don’t Starve is in open Beta right now. That means that we are developing the game at the same time as you are playing it. This inevitably leads to the question: “When will the game be done?” To answer that, I’ll need to explain where I believe the game currently is, and what I think it needs to be “complete”.


Where we are, and where we need to go

In my opinion, the early game is pretty much fleshed out. The process by which new players teach themselves how to play seems to be working, and if you know what you are doing, you can build a pretty nice base within a couple of in-game weeks. The difficulty curve is pretty good in this part of the game and I don’t want to change very much that happens before, say, day 10.

We’re currently working on what I’ll call the mid-game. This is when you have a foothold established in the world, and you are going about the business of surviving and exploring. RIght now people are surviving a little too well, so we’re focusing on adding threats (like the hounds) that act as a push-back to your expansion. We’re also re-evaluating the farming/planting/etc systems to make it so that you can’t steamroll your way to success.

Most of the actual work that is left to finish the game will fall into this category. The central problem with the difficulty curve right now is that once you have found a strategy that works, the game conditions don’t really change over time and you can continue to use that strategy indefinitely. In nerd-speak, people are natural optimizers, and they are getting stuck on local maxima.

This is why you often see people making massive berry farms and camping out behind tree walls. It’s not particularly challenging, and it quickly gets boring, but people do it anyway because the game rewards them for it. If we continue to (unintentionally) encourage this type of gameplay, I think that people will soon get bored and burn out. The game needs to present a more dynamic challenge if it is going to capture people’s attention for a long time.

I want individual survival strategies to wear out from overuse, and to become periodically ineffective as the nature of the world changes. This, coupled with a generally escalating threat-level, will make the game a lot more challenging and fun. With enough different periodic threats overlapping, you’ll also start to see neat combinations that will lead to all sorts of cool emergent effects.

The end-game is a trickier matter. As I mentioned in the article that we wrote for the Penny Arcade Report, I’m not a big fan of explicit goals and rewards, so I’ve been hesitant to add any. Many players, however, require a sense of narrative completion to be truly happy with a gaming experience. We’ve come up with a solution that I think preserves the open-ended spirit of the game, while at the same time providing just enough structure for those who want it.

So, here’s the list of big things that we need to put in the game before it is done:

Two Big Periodic Threats

The Sanity meter:
Seeing scary things and performing certain actions will slowly drive you insane. While insane you can regain sanity via dapperness, and other acts of civility. This will give you one more ball to juggle, and let us introduce all sorts new interesting uses for existing items and systems.

Winter:
There will be a large-scale change in the game’s ecosystem that comes and goes. Certain animals and plants won’t appear, and others will show up. You will need to stay warm, or you will freeze to death. Night will be longer. Winter will be very hard.

The End Game

Free Play Mode:
This is the mode that you are playing right now. You get a randomly generated level, and see what you can do. We’ve been working on a new level-generation system in the background for a while now, and once it is complete, you will have more control over what kind of level you are going to play in. You should be able to adjust the overall difficulty of the experience to suit your playstyle by controlling the prevalence of the various biomes and by removing or adding certain features.

Story mode:
You will be able to build a one-way portal in each world that will take you to a newly generated world. This world will be harder and may be lacking in certain resources or have new types of challenges. You will come into this world carrying whatever you had in your inventory when you left the last one, so pack your backpack carefully. Once you escape from enough worlds, you learn the terrible secret of Don’t Starve. Doing so will unlock some of the more unbalanced options in Free Play mode.

System Upgrades

Research:
As I’ve mentioned before, the current science machine system has some issues. We will be replacing this, or at the very least radically re-tuning it. http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?1822-New-Research-Plan


Timeline

Our posted completion date is “Early 2013”. We made this intentionally vague because when we started the Beta we were still figuring out the scope of the game. Now that we have a defined scope, I can give a more precise date: Late March 2013.

This is a little longer than we had originally planned, but the game will be stronger for it. We have received a tonne of great feedback from our players, and we want to have the time to do the game right.

This won’t be the end of development, however. We will continue to support Don’t Starve with new content and tuning for at least 6 months post launch. We hope to continue to support it long after that, but that will depend on whether that’s financially viable for us or not. If players keep coming, we’re certainly going to keep updating!

I hope this clears up a lot of questions that you all have been having about the project. You all are shaping up to be a great and supportive community, and I look forward to finishing this game with you!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/55066022

[Xanthippe]

Feed the grass PLANT for 20.

Yeah this, great early source of science points. Dig it up with a shovel, it won't regrow, but you probably won't be staying in that spot long-term anyway.

I'm on day 60? I think and am still using my first camp. There are numerous rabbit holes, tons of grass, trees, and plenty of saplings. I make a lot of traps. I still have a few discoveries to make. I am glad I didn't drop grass into my science machines, or I wouldn't be able to sustain this camp. (I've also not ventured past island 4).

[Bann]

I have a copy of this in my steam inventory now. I'm not sure why. If someone is interested in this, shoot me a message on steam.

[Ceryse]

I have a copy of this in my steam inventory now. I'm not sure why. If someone is interested in this, shoot me a message on steam.

When you buy it you get two copies.

[Tairnyn]

Hmm, sounds interesting. If someone has an extra copy and wants Civ V or Left 4 Dead 2 I'd be happy to trade. They've been sitting in my inventory forever and everyone I know has them. Tairnyn on Steam.

[Soln]

13 days so far the longest.  Died on a stupid attack on a beefalo.  6hrs played!


fyi  http://dontstarvewiki.net/index.php/FAQ

[Quinton]

Have only made it 5 days so far, but having fun.  Finally found gold and started unlocking new recipes.

Wish I saw this bit from that FAQ before starting:
You can rotate the camera in 90 degree increments by pressing Q and E or the left and right arrow keys.

[Soln]

protip: make a hammer.  You can smash up everything and get your mats back.