Nachimir

Don't Starve

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http://www.dontstarvegame.com/blog/

A lot of people here at the Eurogamer Expo are saying "Oh, so it's basically Minecraft", but so much has gone into it that it really is a different thing. There's an element of horrible grind to it, but it's wrapped up in such a lovely way I find myself not minding.

Death is usually sudden and catastrophic; yesterday I watched a guy eye up a buffalo, attack it with an axe, then suddenly get trampled by a dozen more running in from all sides of the screen. There are also some nice bits of balancing in there: A meat effigy lets you resurrect yourself, but requires quite a lot of beard hair, limiting the rate at which you can make them. It's easy to eradicate lairs of some of the monsters, but there's more benefit to farming them and accepting the danger.

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I'mm not sure on the beefalos, though you need their manure to farm. With most things, they have lairs on the map, and if you leave them they grow. You can also put things like spider eggs down to create them. Farming things seems to be about balancing danger against resources.

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Does the game have a tutorial? I have no idea what it is I'm supposed to do. I wandered around looking for some way to make tools but eventually I revealed too much of the map for the game to handle, frame rate-wise.

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Would give it a try but figuring out how to get the NaCl plug-in for Chromium seems too difficult to bother.

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Does the game have a tutorial? I have no idea what it is I'm supposed to do. I wandered around looking for some way to make tools but eventually I revealed too much of the map for the game to handle, frame rate-wise.

Sounds like it needs optimization.

But yeah, this looks like a highscore game and it has a very straight-forward premise. I saw someone doing a Lets Play of it and it needs more guidance on tools and what they can do for you. I do like that there's little permanence with this. You have to rebuild your tools when you use them too much. But hopefully you can create stronger versions of them, as a function added later on. It is in-progress development wise, afterall.

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Yeah, watching people play it at Eurogamer, I found some immediately got it, others struggled. On my first go, I failed to find out how to make a fire and got eaten in darkness. Basically, you need to:

Make an axe, quick as possible.

Stockpile food as you find it.

Be careful with torches and where you site camp fires.

Make sure you have enough logs to feed the fire for your first night.

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Dredging this up up from the depths to note that it's just about a week until Dont Starve officially releases. It's 20% off until then so, if you're like me and wanted to play the finished product without being involved in the sausage making, now's the time!

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I played about 20 hours of it in beta. I think there's a really entertaining, if not somewhat directionless feeling game in there. The game is really nothing like minecraft. I would say it shares more with terreria if anything. Even there i think the comparisons are thin. The "campaign" mode seems to have only gotten in sometime in the last few months. I played a few levels in and actually found that more fun then just playing the endless survival maps (which was what most of the beta period was). I'd surely recommend it for the $11.99 US pre release price. IDK if this deal is still going but you used to get 2 copies of the game as well. 

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It's kind of like if Terraria were made by Edward Gorey. And also not 2D sidescrolling.

 

I was a little puzzled by why I got two copies when I bought in, though, since at least last I checked there's no multiplayer.

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I'm kind of surprised that more people around her haven't played and talked about this.  I'm really digging it so far, it has that emergent element that a lot of thumbs fans enjoy.

 

It is an engine for creating madcap screaming sprints when you accidentally pop an enemy that you weren't expecting.  Seems to happen to me every two or three hours so far.  The best so far was tonight when I created a three-way pitched battle in the middle of the night between a giant spider, her army, a pigman village and ravening pack of hell hounds.  I ended up just making a campfire and watching, then picking through the remains the next morning for all the goodies.  The marathon run to make it happen was exhilarating though. 

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I reached a point in the game where I could reliably get about mid-way up the tech tree, but never get any further because I'd either die or loose interest. There have been a few patches since I played last, so maybe they've fixed it, but there's a definite section of the game after you've tended to your immediate needs but before you're powerful enough to start taking on enemies that drags.

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It definitely has the potential to create some crushing monotony.  That midway point is also when you end up doing a lot of busy work to solidify your position in the world.  Getting farms going, moving grass/saplings into a farmable area, hitting winter and just surviving because of the difficulty in exploring.  It's not terribly exciting, and feels like it may never end.  Which is how I feel about winter anyways.  I'm just coming out of that portion though, and once you're through it, there's lots of cool stuff left to do. 

 

I'd be tempted in a future playthrough to disable winter or just have short winters.  I get the point of it, but I've been through it now and don't feel like I need to experience it every time.

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Last night my wife was playing this (she's really gotten into it).  Winter was just starting and she had her base camp all prepped and ready, with a chest fully of live bunnies to feed on for the winter.  Then the sounds of hounds approaching started, which really stresses her out.  While trying to swap some stuff around in her inventory to get ready to face the dogs, she accidentally hits the wrong button, causing her to swing her hammer at the chest next to her.  Hammers break things down to their base components, and hitting a container once causes everything in it to fall out onto the ground.  She hit the chest with the rabbits in it.  So right as the pack of dogs roll into her camp to attack, 16 bunnies magically pop out of a chest.  Bunnies spook if ANYTHING gets close to them, and try to retreat to their rabbit hole.  If no hole is nearby, they just run for a bit and stop.  But with the dogs and my wife running around the camp, the bunnies just kept spazzing and running every which direction, with dogs alternately switching between targeting bunnies and my wife.  So there's 16 bunnies, 8 dogs and one madman with swinging a hog's leg as a weapon (my wife) all running around by the light of a campfire. 

 

And queue the Benny Hill music.

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It was awesome and the funniest thing I've seen all week.  She didn't appreciate the humor until after it was done, she couldn't figure out why me and our kid were laughing so hard.

 

Though, being Don't Starve, it did have a quietly sad moment afterwards.  It was still night, so once the dogs were dead the bunnies all curled up and went to sleep.  You can only catch them live with traps, so she had to go around and kill each of the sleeping bunnies so they wouldn't get away in the morning and she would at least have saved some of the meat.  It's one thing to kill them in your inventory, but it's somehow different to intentionally equip an axe and click on each of the adorable sleeping puff-balls to murder them.

 

Oh, and we've had to start locking 2 of our cats into other rooms when playing.  The sound and movement of the birds in the game send them into a frenzy and they try to attack the screen.  I've never seen them react to a game like that before.  Good job Klei, you've apparently created the most accurate bird simulation as far as cats are concerned.

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I made the mistake with this game of not doing any research on it, figuring it would give me a nice sense of "discovery of systems".  But it ended up feeling aimless.

 

The art style is fine, but overall the world feels a little too procedurally generated.  The crafting system is massive, and it was hard to figure out what I should make, if anything.  Then my inventory filled up with things I crafted, and since I was still aimlessly wandering about the map, I had to start leaving stuff on the ground.  I'm a goal-oriented type of person, so I gave myself the goal of uncovering the map before figuring out what to do next.  This got boring, and I'd usually get killed by the wild dog things after a while.

 

Thennnn, I caved and did some research, and the whole farm thing made the game come together.  I stopped worrying about uncovering the map, and instead started looking for sources of manure to set up a base camp.  It's fun now!

 

@Bjorn Been playing it on breaks at work, so I haven't heard the bird sounds. I'm psyched to try it at home and see how my cat reacts!

 

Is this game better with a controller?  The Diablo-like controls kinda bug me - I'm not coordinated enough to click on a butterfly which is moving while the entire screen is moving.

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I've seen it played on a PS4, and the controls actually looked pretty nice.  You get multiple context sensitive options whenever you move close to something.  I don't know if they work the same way on PC, I use M/K. 

 

However, there's an easier way!  There are a few hotkeys that you can hold down to automate an activity.  Hold down spacebar, and you will automatically gather or use the tool in your hand.  So with an axe in your hand, you will cut down a tree, pick up the wood, pick up the pinecone, then move to the next tree and start cutting.  If you are near several grass/saplings/flowers, you will gather them.  If you have a bug net in your hand, you will chase the butterfly until you catch it.  You can hold down the F key to automatically fight.  You will just keep swinging your weapon at the nearest enemy. 

 

It makes harvesting sooooo much faster.  I had probably played for 20 days before I realized either of these things.  As far as uncovering the map goes, I made it to day 99 once, and had not fully explored the map.  But I had some pretty long stretches in there building a base camp and and trying not to freeze to death in winter.

 

I'm curious if your cat acts the same way.  Our third cat does not care at all.  He's the oldest one though, the other two are much younger, so perhaps they are more easily excited. 

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