Let's all not starve (Don't Starve Together)

You can come back in, you just start in a new random spot and don't have any stuff. If you can hunt your stuff down again you get it back.
 
Bah. Go on without me, I accidentally bought the wrong thing and now I want to wait for them to straighten it all out before I redeem any keys.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Started a new game (hosting it in Together, so steam friends can join if they want, this time if they happen to feel so inclined when I'm playing). After a really close fight with a merm (ended with ONE hp), I discovered how awesome trail mix is. In your crockpot, put a cooked beechnut, berry, berry stick. Cheap, fast, instant 30 hp heal. Doesn't do much for hunger but it is easier to come by than spider glands or honey poultices.

Also I'm kinda getting the hang of the timing on killing bunnies with a spear. Not perfect yet, but I've managed to get the morsel about 1 in 3 attempts so far.

Also I live in fear of poison beechnut trees.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Oh, and it turns out we could have cleaned up those skeletons by using a hammer to turn them into bone shards. The bone shards can be used, among other things, to make buckets of poop out of three manure and some wood, which lets you fertilize 10 things for the price of 3. Also they can be used to put out fires, oddly enough.
 
By the way, Gas, I realized something while watching the videos: when you're digging up bushes, you're picking at them first. You can actually just dig up the bush and it'll drop whatever you need to pick off it, too. So both berries and the bush will pop up if you dig it up with the berries still on it. It's a small time saver.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
By the way, Gas, I realized something while watching the videos: when you're digging up bushes, you're picking at them first. You can actually just dig up the bush and it'll drop whatever you need to pick off it, too. So both berries and the bush will pop up if you dig it up with the berries still on it. It's a small time saver.
Turns out I've been doing all kinds of things the long way. I found out the day after we recorded that stuff that you can hit spacebar to make your guy "do whatever is nearest/most obvious" like chop a tree if he's holding an axe or pick up any nearby item. In those videos above? Every single chop of the axe was a click of the mouse. I could have just been holding down the space bar!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Having played briefly on a server that uses it, I highly recommend the Food Values Item Tooltips mod. It adds on-mouse-hover tooltips to items, such as the eponymous refill values of the foods, but also shows time remaining on campfires and number of uses left on tools/how much damage items do in combat/armor condition/thermal insulation. You can also hold down CTRL to see how much time is left before food goes stale/spoils, and hold down ALT to see the values of what the food would refill if you cooked it (by itself on a fire), and both CTRL+ALT to see how long that cooked item would last.

Tonight I'll see if I can figure out how to add the mod to the server.[DOUBLEPOST=1440447577,1440446978][/DOUBLEPOST]Another mod that looks good (though I haven't tried it, but I plan to) is Always On Status, which expands the top right status gauges to show more useful information such as seasonal progression, current temps for both ambient and character, moon phase and dampness. It also displays the numerics without having to mouse over them.



It's a client-side-only mod, so it'll work both solo and on any server you play on without affecting anyone else's game.[DOUBLEPOST=1440447683][/DOUBLEPOST]I'll also be looking into installing the Global Player Icon mod on the server, to help avoid the "where are you/where'd you go/where do I go" stuff. Assuming the next play session is still cooperative.
 
So it's horrible cheating really, but if we're going to have so many people in one area again, we might want to extend the time for autumn just to give us more time to get our shit together (Both literally and figuratively).
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So it's horrible cheating really, but if we're going to have so many people in one area again, we might want to extend the time for autumn just to give us more time to get our shit together (Both literally and figuratively).
Eh, we can lessen the cheating factor by, say, making ALL the seasons longer... but even at standard length, last session was four hours long (non trivial for 30-something adults like us, some of whom have kids).

But in the end, it wasn't winter that killed us (well, it killed YOU but you forgot to take one of the thermal stones we made :p ), as you can see in the most recent video, the copious amounts of ice available in the winter worked as filler. Between the pre-winter hound attack and all the bunny traps and bird traps, we had enough food to make it through. No, what finally drove the nail in our coffin was.... well, you'll see :p


But anyway, the vanilla server software lets me control all kinds of things. I could start us in spring, if we were so inclined. The problem there is, without ice stockpiled, summer can be as deadly as winter. The game does have heatstroke (damage from overheating) ;)

Or, I could remove spring and summer from the rotation and double the duration of Autumn and winter, I suppose - make it a long running pre-ROG type game but with ROG assets still in place.
 
Haha, spring is so horrible though. especially if it rains for so long that you have FROGS EVERYWHERE and you don't have an umbrella or anything. As an aside, by the time we got to winter as well, we were down to half as many people. If we were still feeding 7 underequipped people food would still have been hard.
 
Haha, spring is so horrible though. especially if it rains for so long that you have FROGS EVERYWHERE and you don't have an umbrella or anything. As an aside, by the time we got to winter as well, we were down to half as many people. If we were still feeding 7 underequipped people food would still have been hard.
Feeding a ton of people isn't too hard if you can get a decent sized farm going or even a beery... but our unavailability of poop basically made it impossible for us to self sustain and required us to forage heavily. Once you can count on having at least SOMETHING on the plate every night, you can start going after monsters to get some of the better tools... for instance, a fishing rod requires a silk but can get you 10+ morsels in a single day if you have a pond nearby... more if you can get some frogs on the trip. And you can fish at a pond as often as you want I believe... I've never seen one run out. That's basically infinite meatballs if you can get filler going.

Trail mix is actually a fair bit harder. You need birch nuts, which only spawn from chopping down full size birch trees. You get two a tree, but you'll want one to replant closer to home and that means you only get 1 trail mix a tree, max. Worse, you can't grow birch trees in winter so you have to stock up.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
As has been stated before, our two major strikes against us were no beefalo, and no gear for an icebox.

In fact, I didn't see a tumbleweed the entire night, and I know they exist, I've seen them on other servers.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Alright, I think I have the food and item tooltip mod running correctly on the server. It works for me, anyway, but I also have it installed as a client.

Can anybody else log into the server and verify the info tooltips are now working? I've reset the map to a new world since the other one was in the dead of winter and uninhabitable.
 
I can in an hour or so, not right now. Did you want it checked without the mod installed client side?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I can in an hour or so, not right now. Did you want it checked without the mod installed client side?
Yes, that is the idea. If I've done my job right, it should automate the mod process client side without users having to go get the mod themselves the hard way.[DOUBLEPOST=1440463964,1440463831][/DOUBLEPOST]Nick just tested it for me, it works. Cool cool cool.
 
Alright, I think I have the food and item tooltip mod running correctly on the server. It works for me, anyway, but I also have it installed as a client.

Can anybody else log into the server and verify the info tooltips are now working? I've reset the map to a new world since the other one was in the dead of winter and uninhabitable.
What am I looking for? Everything looks the same to me.[DOUBLEPOST=1440467879,1440467810][/DOUBLEPOST]Nevermind, they're working. They take a second to pop up
 

GasBandit

Staff member
What am I looking for? Everything looks the same to me.[DOUBLEPOST=1440467879,1440467810][/DOUBLEPOST]Nevermind, they're working. They take a second to pop up
I noticed that for some reason you have a huge ping time to the server. Maybe that has something to do with it.
 
Well, I don't see any harm in trying it, but honestly I'm rather underwhelmed by the performance of walls against hounds so far. If a hound sees so much as a bird land inside your walls he won't stop chewing on the wall until it breaks.
Yeah... walls are pretty dependent on you having a ranged weapon like blow darts to defend them.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Yeah... walls are pretty dependent on you having a ranged weapon like blow darts to defend them.
And, as is in keeping with how Don't Starve likes to fuck with us, the active ingredient in blow darts is hound tooth.

I'm thinking a more effective defense would be a wall with an open front entry tunnel lined with hound tooth traps, rather than enclosed doors/entry mazes and blow darts.

http://dont-starve-game.wikia.com/wiki/Tooth_Trap

1 blow dart costs 1 hound tooth and does 200 damage. Tooth trap does 60 damage per hit (approximately 2x regular spear damage) but can be reset and used 10 times for that same 1 tooth, plus no having to hunt down reeds or trap birds - the other components are rope and log.

Heck, don't even need a wall, then.. just make a cluster of tooth traps off to the side, and when the hounds come running, kite them over the traps... whoever is getting chased runs the hounds in circles, whoever is not getting chased resets the traps.
 
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I like to wall myself in in the middle of a herd of Beefalo so that hounds are distracted. But I didn't find any the last time and that's how a fire hound burned down my shit and I rage quit. ;)
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I like to wall myself in in the middle of a herd of Beefalo so that hounds are distracted. But I didn't find any the last time and that's how a fire hound burned down my shit and I rage quit. ;)
Yeah, those fire hounds are crap on a crap cracker. That's how I lost one of my protective meatlure plants in my now-failed best single player games, too.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Gas, please do more shit like that. It's hilarious. :D
Oh, I'm not shy about doing that sort of thing, it's just so far there wasn't much opportunities for meta bits like that, given how everybody else was in ventrilo.

But if you like that sort of thing you might want to watch the later episodes of Halforums Academy 2, say, starting on day 19.
 
I was bored and was screwing around on the server, I built a small camp off to the right of the portal if anyone else is going to screw around with it.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I was toying with the idea of making the server permanently autumn when just idling in "screwing around" mode between group gaming sessions.

Otherwise, jumping in late is a seriously life threatening situation.
 
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