Don’t Starve is an addicting survival game where you scavenge the world for resources and food while defending yourself against vicious monsters and the unseen horrors of the night.
http://www.dontstarvegame.com/blog/about/
It’s in Beta right now, and early access is about $12 (and you get two copies!). It runs on Steam or in Chrome (so it is cross-platform, hooray!)
Not playing it YET, but probably will pay down once I have some actual free time. Looks entertaining. I keep describing it as “Minecraft by Edward Gorey.”
Resurrecting this because I just got it on the last day of the Holiday sale. The game page includes this note:
I’m not normally the online-multiplayer type, in fact I’ve never played an online multiplayer game, but this is a game I think would be more fun with others. I’m going to wait for my free copy rather than buy the Frontier Pack, but once it does exit Early-Access, I’d be down to play Together if anyone is interested.
I’ve thought about getting this before. Can someone describe the game play a little bit and give some impressions?
There is no tutorial. You wake up in the wilderness, in a world that looks like it was created by Edward Gorey. You are on your own to survive. Collect everything you see, use them to create items you’ll need to survive (the crafting is done for you, you simply select a “recipe” from a menu and your guy will make the item, provided you have the right raw materials of course). You have three attributes you must maintain: hunger, life, and sanity. Letting any of them get to zero equals death. There is a full day/night cycle, and you must have fire or some other source of light during the night or monsters will come along in the dark and kill you. There are also monsters and other wildlife during the day, but you can generally avoid or escape them fairly easily if you can’t or don’t want to fight them. Stay alive as long as you can.
I’ve read that it’s like Minecraft combined with Dayz, but having never played either of those games I can’t verify the accuracy of that analogy.
That’s pretty much it. There’s lots of stuff to build, provided you have the right raw materials. Raw materials for basic survival are generally plentiful, but more advanced items require materials that are rare or difficult (i.e. dangerous) to acquire. It’s extremely difficult at first, because you don’t really know what to do. My first playthrough I didn’t even last the first day. But as you figure out what you’re supposed to do, it’s a pretty fun game. The randomly created world is humongous so there’s a huge area to explore. I am really enjoying this game. But like I posted above, I think it’s a good game for multiplayer, so you have the benefits of being able to divide tasks combined with the challenge of having to keep each other alive.
This game is a lot of fun. It can be tricky when you are starting but as you get more comfortable with the game you stop dying quickly. There is a lot to explore and once you start building it can get pretty crazy. I am looking forward to trying this out in multi-player mode once I get better at staying alive.
so, I actually found it kinda tiresome. The difficulty in obtaining materials to branch the “tech tree” sufficiently was a bit of a nuisance, and at the end of the day it seemed like most of the stuff I could build wasn’t really useful.
It’s a 2D survival game where the only goal is to, well, not starve. You start with absolutely nothing, a health bar that hopefully won’t decrease too much, a hunger bar that keeps decreasing and you have to fill back up, and a sanity bar which will start decreasing once your character is confronted by rabid monsters, eats the wrong kind of mushrooms or starts getting slowly eroded by the crushing loneliness. To keep that hunger bar topped up you have to explore the procedurally generated world, gather resources, avoid or dispatch monsters, stay sane (because going mad can literally kill you when your hallucinations start attacking. But it can also let you harvest beard hairs from rabbits so it’s not all bad), keep warm (or keep cool in the summer) and never, ever let the lights go out. For there are grues in the dark.
To help you do all that there’s an extensive crafting system which lets you cultivate the land, build defences and weapons, catch animals, cook food in less wasteful ways and so on. Even get extra lives.
As gametime passes, the world becomes progressively more hostile - there are more Evil Dogs attacking your camp more frequently, the mildly dangerous spider nests grow into gigantic roving spider queens, charming useful honeybees become more and more mixed with deadly killer bees, the harmless cows you’d been harvesting shit from (cow shit being extremely valuable !) become hyper-aggro during mating season, even the trees you cut for firewood can spawn treant guardians to fuck you right up.
So you can never really relax or stay ahead of the survival curve for long, and the game doesn’t hold your hand at all or tell you how to deal with any of it even though there are always multiple ways to - for example the treant guardians can be set on fire while you run away, or fought head on if you’re good at dodging… or you can just mollify them by quickly planting new trees, and staying away from that particular patch of trees from then on.
All in all it’s a cool little game.
The only problem I have with it is that while the best part of the game is dealing with these chaotic emerging issues and fiddling with the upper ends of the crafting system, starting a new game from scratch quickly becomes same-ey and while it isn’t challenging once you’ve figured it out it can drag on - and there are no multiple saves allowed, just one continuous one.
This no-saving policy also cuts down on the game’s main appeal and general philosophy, which is experimenting with things and solving problems creatively, because if you die, well, that’s it. Hours of “work” down the hole, and back to the mildly un-fun part of the game. Which forces a very conservative style of play, at least until you reach the stage where you can build Meat Idols (the aforementioned extra lives), and even then Meat Idols require sinking a lot of effort into them because they’re made with nontrivial-to-get materials.
But I suppose you can say the same of every rogue-like type game : I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup a lot, and it’s the same thing there - the first 5-10 levels of the dungeon are not very challenging except for the fact that your character is super weak and there are occasional jump scares, but you still have to go through them every time before you get to the fun “Soooo… how can I deal with a teleport trap that put my squishy mage in the middle of 20 angry demons, the kind that eats dragons for sport ? Do I try to blink back out, or call my god, or use this spell, or that spell, do I start chugging random potions in case one helps, is it the time to use my One Time Use Very Precious super item I’d been saving … ?” part.
Question for anyone playing this game: is there any point to chests? I realize it doesn’t take very many resources and the resources they require are plentiful (just logs, refined into boards), but they seem kind of pointless to me. I’ve just been storing extra stuff on the ground at my camp. With Reign of Giants they’ll get waterlogged, but I’ve not noticed much difference,if any, in using wet stuff, so what do I need chests for?
Food can be eaten. Moles can steal minerals. These are manageable threats. I like chests for organizing things and picking them up easier. They’re probably not essential, but they’re cheap.
I imagine I’ll get back into this in a big way once the multiplayer expansion drops for ps4.
Chests are one of the keys to surviving winter. Because you can store live rabbits in them and they won’t die or rot away (whereas wild rabbits hibernate in the dead of winter so you can’t catch any, and of course your farms don’t produce anything in winter), which provides a reliable source of fresh meat as well as a way to use monster meat without going nuts. In a crockpot, 1 slab of monster meat + 2 chunks of rabbit + 1 twig = 1 Kabob, which is a filling bit of food that doesn’t go stale very fast (and even heals you a smidge).
As well, a chestful of rabbits is a handy source of beard hairs for characters other than Wilson who won’t grow any naturally. Just go nuts when you need precious beard, and go through your rabbit stash - but you might want to have ways to immediately go back to sane on hand (like flower hats, melonsickles or green 'shrooms). Or, you know, don’t. Sanity is overrated :p.
Beyond that, they’re just handy to store your stuff “rationally”, like 1 chest for various kinds of rocks, 1 for wood & pinecones & twigs, 1 chest for odds & ends etc… As Hooker says, it’s just convenient and cheap.
I am obsessed with this game. My wife doesn’t understand what’s fun about it; frankly I’m not sure I understand what’s fun about it, but it is.
There’s just so much to explore, and figure out what stuff is useful for what, and figuring out the schedule of events and seasons. I’ve died a ton of times (those hounds at day 9 are a bitch!), but I’ve figured out what I think are good strategies for some things (like planting a ring of trees around a beefalo or spider nest, then setting them on fire rather than try to fight it out).
.
Spiders get caught/autokilled by rabbit traps, too.
Good one!
Anyone mess around with mods for this game? A lot of what I’ve seen is either borderline useless or way too overpowered.
Currently what I’ve got installed are “Better Crockpot” which adds a button above the “Cook” that will show you what the result will be of what you’ve put in there, “Wormhole Marks” which simply color-codes the wormholes (after you’ve used them), “DisplayFoodValues” which shows you the Hunger, Health, and Sanity results of edible items on mouseover, “Minimap HUD” which adds a real-time minimap to the screen, and “BackPackPlus” which adds an inventory slot so you can wear both clothing/armor and a backpack at once. Only that last one is really “cheating” IMO, as the others could be accomplished simply by making an IRL list or looking them up on the internet (or opening up the full-screen map in the case of the minimap one).
I’ve seen others that are way too overpowered and kind of ruin the challenge of the game, like things that will allow you to stack items way past their default, or reveal the entire map, or even let you build stuff at will.
I use many of your mods (minus the backpack one - It’s no big deal to switch whenever you’re expecting trouble), plus “Where is Chester ?” (which marks a number of things on the tab map, not just Chester - Beefaloes, carrots and mushrooms…) and one of the various Boomerang mods (I mainly use it for the autocatch feature, but IIRC it also bumps the nominal number of uses).
Used to have a “charcoal burner” mod too, but it’s been showing up as obsolete for a while and I can’t find a more recent version - it added a firepit recipe to be able to turn wood into charcoal+ash without the bother of planting trees then setting them on fire.
I’ve tried this game before, and I liked the art and sound design, but found the gameplay boring and repetitive-- I’d explore and survive for a day or two, and then starve or die at night, and have to start over again. It got boring replaying the beginning over and over again.
Do any of you have any experience with the multiplayer? I’d be willing to give it a try again as something fun to do with friends.
Bringing this back because there is new Early-Access DLC: Shipwrecked!
It’s just $5, so I picked it up a few days ago. Entirely new biomes, lots of new items to collect and build, I’m really having a lot of fun figuring out this new place! Build a boat and go island-hopping! Well, the islands are pretty small so you pretty much have to go find other islands, and it looks like the map is just as big as the land-only game. Find buried treasure! Battle snakes, stingrays, flooding and monsoons! Good times.
A friend and I just started this for our weekly cooperative multiplayer long-distance get-together. Our first try, we didn’t know how to make light, with the predictable result Night 1. Second try, we got as far as making a Science Machine (about Day 6, I think?), before calling it for the evening.
No matter what I do I die from insanity on day 5. Is there some trick to this?