Don't Starve Together

So after playing for a few more hours the game needs mods or it really isn't all that playable. Linda and I spent 20+ days gathering resources, went through a few hound attacks, had a giant smash our base camp to bit, froze or starved to death every second day in winter, and finally were able to have hay walls, a tent we could sleep in and heal in (which was hard to get the resources for), new weapons, and farms...things seemed good. Except the tent only had 6 uses and then disappeared. I was not ok with that. Then after the tent disappeared the weapons began to break. Basically you have to invest 30 - 35 days of dying and starvation to have 2 or 3 days of comfort. So I have added mods that made tents infinite and weapons durability increased as well as other items (can select which ones) more durable.

Let's plot the evolution of a game-style:

1) "Minecraft is a great game, and it certainly influenced our design," says Don't Starve's Kevin Forbes. "There are a lot of Burton and [Edward] Gorey images in our reference bin."

2) "It was supposed to be a lightweight Dwarf Fortress. Kinda like if DF and Rollercoaster Tycoon had a baby," says Minecraft developer, Markus "Notch” Persson. "It was called 'RubyDung' (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with a heavy focus on accessibility."

3) Dwarf Fortress comes right out of 1980s fantasy RPG boom. It's actually more difficult to find quotes of Tarn Adam's directly crediting D&D because it was the whole atmosphere he breathed and coded in, the D&D of the 1970s had diffused everywhere.  

Tarn Adams:  What's left to answer is why'd we be so into doing a fantasy game. That's probably the same as everybody else: Tolkien, D&D, myths, and of course, the movie Beastmaster. (We like the part where the evil priest is like, "You'll be sacrificed to 'The God of AAaa,'" like they didn't even bother thinking of a name, just powering through on the power of their badassedness.) But there were all kinds of things like that. In the movies, books, the arcade, PC, consoles, we were surrounded by that sort of thing. So along with generic sci-fi, generic fantasy is part of our heritage.

Tarn Adams of the road to DF:

So the evolutionary linkage is D&D > Dwarf Fortress > Minecraft > Don't Starve.

Now beneath D&D are many roots, but perhaps the most important and less discussed is the Gothic 'pulp fantasy' of Jack Vance, Poul Anderson and Lovecraft. This is distinct from the 'Heroic Epics' many associate with fantasy and even Tolkien's LoTR has strong Gothic elements in its' undead enemies and distrust of violence. The Vance-Poulson fantasy came out of the Korean War stalemate, Tolkien out of the mud of the Somme, Lovecraft was an avatar of materialistic nihilism. Even RE Howard's Conan is closer to a thief than knight, a scrappy barbarian not a paradigm of honor.

What the first D&D rules gave us was a grim, unheroic world of fighting rats, exterminating goblins, and easy routes to absurd, honor-less deaths by poison needle traps, rotting diseases and paralyzing undead. If you were obedient enough to play original D&D by its rules it was a sadistic, paranoid experience. The tales it generated were not 'power fantasies' but scraps to survive, robbing dead bodies for handfuls of gold or protected by and darkly humorous tales of absurdist death. Many early D&D-inspired tales are shallow victories not worth the toll of HP lost and death. They fit the mode of post-Vietnam wargaming and the 'survival horror' boom of the late 1970s.

'Don't Starve' and its explicit Gothic imagery is a true descendent of this lineage. And the sanity loss mechanism is right out of Call of Cthulhu RPG.

The problem is that absurdist tales take time and suffering to create. I can laugh at my ADOM fickle death-tales of kicking open trapped doors and poisonous kobald flesh only in retrospect - at the time it was the loss of hours of play.

At least no one starves to death in D&D, nor dies of heat exhaustion, you don't fight crows for seeds, or have to strap hay on yourself for armour. Worse, 'Don't Starve' seems caught in the Project Zomboid trap: if the best I have to hope for is re-inventing agricultural, than there is little reason for me to endure the grim scrap for survival. I'm not sure if people playing those games are masochists or haven't yet swallowed the repeated does of horror that real-life serves up, but I need the 'exploration' and 'wonder' dials cranked up from the minimum.

I recently read an early RPG account (1975-6) of players trapped in the first corridor of a dungeon run by Gary Gygax. It was frustrating, pointless and a great Kafka-esque existentialist metaphor. The PCs did not enjoy it at all. In there struggle they eventually cast Stone-to-Flesh on part of the dungeon wall and tried to hack their way out. 40 years later I still haven't encountered a game with that that sort of surreal gory wonder to balance the grim arbitrariness of survival horror.

Give me absurd instant perma-death, but give me wonder too!

We played around with the mods a bit last night.

Here are some that I like:
Storeroom - Stores up to 80 slots and helps prevent spoilage. I think this is necessary to survive winter.
Afraid of Lag - We have been playing with it on and hasn't caused any conflicts but may help you and Steph out. When a connection speed drops below a set amount, characters will automatically run from evil.
Campfire Respawn - We already know this is needed
DST Advanced Farming - Haven't played long enough to try it out but more food options seems necessary
DST Survival Gear - Again haven't played long enough to try it but it adds items to help survive the harsh seasons
Long Pig - When you die, you drop "Long Pig" meat which can then be eaten. I think in a world this harsh cannibalism should always be on the table.
Metal Armoury - Find Metals in rocks. Can make metal spears and some armour.
No More Respawn Penalty - We already know about this one.
Ride - Infinite Saddle uses
Sleepy Time - Absolutely necessary. Adjusts the number of uses and many other stats in regards to sleeping equipment.
Spear Trap - Haven't tried it, but bigger traps sound good.
Spike Trap - Same as above.
Slingshot - I like the idea of some ranged weapons
Throwable Spears - Same as above
Tweak Those Tools, Tweaked - Allows for adjusting durability for items. Some items just break to easy. I haven't found the sweet spot for settings here yet though.

Some other possibilities:
8 faced fence gates - Can actually make doors to our camps
Additional dressware - Didn't play long enough to see what it included
Addition Equipment - Didn't play long enough to see what it included
Archery Mod - Can make bows and crossbows. Stats are modifiable so this one I would be tempted to add. I didn't play long enough to try them.
Bee Nice - Bees won't attack you when wearing a bee keep suit. I think honey is pretty important.
DST Throwable Rocks - Haven't tried it but being able to throw rocks sounds handy.
More/Less Hounded - Adjust hound attacks. It is possible to adjust hounds a bit in the pregame settings so I am not sure how each affect the game.
Pickle It - Preserve food. With Storerooms added this is probably not needed.

We had added Birds and Berries and Trees for Friends but it actually made the game too easy. With it on there was never a chance of running out of food at all. The biggest issue was disposing of excess. So we took this mod out.

I want a challenge, but I want a challenge I can survive. I don't mind dying but I don't want to die daily. I want to be able to succeed and explore not fight birds for seeds or have moments of success quickly fade after 2 nights because the equipment broke and go back to square one.

I really like the 'long pig' mod, fits the mood and reduces the difficulty. I've always wanted to harvest honey, so the bee-suit that works sounds good. Steph has been testing mods too. The Owl people mod was fun but it conflicted with mods to reduced animation/lag.

This seems like the 'Minecraft trap' where getting the right mods and figuring out conflicting mods becomes 75% of the game.

Once you start modding a game it loses the 'logic puzzle' challenge for me because you are defining your own level of difficulty. I still go back to 'Royals' as a great game that seemed impossible at first but got me to wrestle with it due to its short length. There was no mods nor did I look for them because the grinding in it was manageable.

https://roadtonowhere.forumotion.org/t324-royals-game

If a game wants to test me that it must be set-up in a balanced format that is beyond my control. You are doing an excellent job of figuring out how to make the game playable with mods - but why doesn't the game just let you dial up/down some of the difficulties in a menu? I don't get their design philosophy: is it just that I'm too old or not masochist enough?

The games appeal to me now is thinking of interesting way to fix its brokenness - and mods allow us to imagine the possibilities. Here is one imaginary mod:

Shacks and Sanctums - Randomly generates 3 types of structures on the map: ramshackle hunt cabins, collapsing mansions (2 stories) and rotting forts (defensive walls). All of these are in disrepair and fall further apart with rain and animal damage. Can be continually repaired or dismantled for parts. Fires inside may ignite the walls - so keep them small or find (and repair) their fireplaces.

Haha Don't worry you're not Getting old. It just seems you Haven't caught whiff of the early Access survival genre gold rush Yet.

About two years ago a mod for Arma 3 Called DayZ came out which put people In a post-apocalyptic zombie world where there only purpose was to survive until they died. That quickly became so popular that they turned it into an early access game, which sparked an entire genre of early Access survival games like Rush, Seven days to die, ARK and many....... Many more......

They're all half-fast glitchy messes that are extremely popular with the younger crowd. They are almost all early access meaning that they haven't been officially released yet but you can still buy it and play it. One of the only officially released titles in the genre is Don't Starve So it really doesn't surprise me that it doesn't fit your particular tastes, as it basically takes everything you don't like from project Zomboid, amplifies it and takes out the badass zombies!

*Edit* LOL I forgot to get to my point! physically the point of these games are for people to put ridiculous hours into them. A large amount of grinding all for that one extremely memorable event or story that they can tell all their buddies about. Kind of like a "I lasted for 56 days what about you?" or "I tamed a freaking T Rex what do you Got?"

Perhaps age does have something to do with it. Once you realize that you've lived through over half the time you'll likely spend on this planet, time is a much more precious commodity. If you assume a lifespan of 75 then by you late 30s you're in the final half of your life - so the idea of 'grinding' 100 hour in a game gets less appealing, grinding also takes more of a physical toll too as you age.

Perhaps like the rise of D&D's paranoid fantasy world during the aftermath of Vietnam, the modern 'survival' and 'survival horror' crazes reflects the grim cultural effects of quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There is a gothic pessimism that links them all. "Losing is Fun" as Dwarf Fortress has branded itself.

The term 'gothic-punk' was used by White Wolf to describe their 'world of darkness' full of angsty vampires, ghosts and werewolves. That term would fit this genre too. Gothy in their pessimism but punky in their commitment to authentic DIY games. D&D was once the punk challenger from the indie scene questioning the old WWII wargames pumped out by Avalon Hill and SPI.  

These are the dark children of the failed optimistic revolutions of the 1970s and 1990s, forced to cope with cultural lives hedged in by futile neo-colonial wars and economic stagnation. As Hunter Thompson concluded in Fear and Loathing:

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously..."

Yet 'gothic-punk' games often have a mutant heart beating inside them, as dark as that heart is. Beneath the 'survival-orientated' exteriors designed to discourage causal gamers and FPS/RTS power-gamers is exploration, wonder and co-operation. A sizable chunk of my own heart is made of that gothic-punk material. I will keep occasionally trying these games, but...

I will not play any game where the final goal is the #$#&ing re-invention of agriculture!

There is also a deeper philosophical/religious element going on in this genre.

There is something very primal about creating new worlds - even better if it has the ring of meaningless/realism that procedural generation simulates.

There is also generally a hint of Absent / Cruel / Amoral Gods presiding over those worlds that gives a gnostic whiff of Rex Mundis and Demiurges (the lower, evil gods who created the physical universe, full of suffering and horrors. The underworlds of DF and Minecraft are full of hell creatures, but their skies contain no heaven nor comforting angels.