Transcript for:
Development of Don't Starve

thank you to F porcus and meek good for helping make this video possible the year is 2010 and talk of the game industry is incredibly worrying or at least seems that way the founder of clay Jamie Chen although they existed earlier free to-play games were clearly on the rise with success stories like League of Legends releasing a year prior somewhat counterintuitively the games cost no money to play yet would make more money than the ones that did as far as Publishers were were concerned indie games were dead and freeo play was going to be the killer it made sense too why would you release another paid title when this random game I've never heard of can triple its income by releasing as free to play this was good for the consumer too why bother paying for some nerds indie game when you can get the same experience at no cost it's a win for everyone now remember this was 2010 before big titles like Team Fortress 2 and numerous others made this switch to freeo play so there was still time for clay to catch up with the change in market and CH was prepared so prepared he got a small team of four people from his office and told them to make a game and really I just had one mandate and the one mandate was we must do a free to- playay game cuz I really wanted to learn he didn't care what type of game it was as long as it was free to play the origins of Don't Starve can be traced as far back as 2010 every year clay hosts a game Jam in their office where developers team up in small groups to see who can make the best game in a few days one such team consisted of Kevin Forbes and Julian Quan who made this thing yeah you can tell it was made in 2 days the game takes place around the campfire where the aim is to not starve you can refill your hunger by killing Pigmen who spawn around your fire and cooking them for meat but be careful as the more pigs there are the faster you lose hunger and the longer you survive the more pigs begin to spawn until eventually you die and asked to make a game this simple Survival game is what came to mind so Forbes and the others started working on making it free to play they eventually came up with mayor of pigtown a very friendly inoffensive game designed to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible the idea was you do cool stuff like adventuring and fighting on an island which is where the survival aspect comes in before you return to decorate your pig city with the loot you found there was a catch though each Adventure Run would cost you stamina and if you ran out of stamina too bad go back to the boring part of the game or pay up to play again I think if it was any other company making this game that's probably where this story would have ended but clay had other plans this wasn't going to be some McDonald's burger you eat and forget about no this game is going to be an experience you remember this wasn't just a product this was a game that would make you feel things their design goal was to get people to care about their game deeply the developers thought the PX City part sounded boring to program so they began work on the adventure runs first the levels they created were going to have an end goal this pigin guy would give you a quest like go kill those spiders and that would be the adventure run it didn't really work out not only did it take a long time to play but it took even longer to make which was a problem since mayor of Pik toown was supposed to be released in a short amount of time so to save time instead of slowly making the levels themselves they got an AI to do it whereas it was known back then World Generation the game would now generate a world for you that would encourage you to explore it something was changing though and it wasn't just the world generation past this point the game kept getting darker and harder the survival chunk of the game got more difficult which in turn made the art style less friendly which then made the game play more desperate until eventually Wilson was born Wilson seems to Mark the turnning point where Don't Starve went from a citybuilding game to an uncompromising survival one likely because a proper Survival game wasn't out at the time also Kevin played a lot of Rog like so now the game is Perma death you die and your world is gone go cry to someone who cares some of the other team members were really terrified of Minecraft's first night the concept of being in this completely new world with monsters you don't understand seemed really appealing which is why they decided to make a whole game around that one idea now Darkness will kill you if you stay in the dark for too long this will happen that was cool and all but the game at this stage was incomprehensive when they got people off of Craigslist to test it no one had the slightest clue of what to do this must have made the developers sweat bullets they had just spent a month making this epic game where the darkness kills you and the the player in front of them has no idea what they are looking at luckily after a bit of pointing them in the right direction the play testers quickly learned how to play the game and even more shockingly started to have fun so clearly the developers had a really good game idea here people were having fun in their basic Survival game all they needed to do now was somehow get players past the phase of what do I do now and the game would be perfect the most obvious answer to a problem like this is to make a tutorial so that's exactly what they did the tall shadowy figure known as Maxwell would now give the player a long list of quests upon spawning in these quests would stick with you at the top of the screen including stuff like craft a torch find this thing kill a pigman or survive five days it was all aimed to teach the player how to play the game and it worked kind of not really it failed miserably now the opposite was happening players knew exactly how to play the game except now they weren't have any fun from the looks of it the play testers were treating the game like a second job they weren't playing the game for the experience they were playing it to finish the tasks given to them because at the highest level the game they were playing was complete the task list when asked to survive 5 days players would sit around the campfire doing absolutely nothing for 40 minutes straight the goal at the top of the screen set to survive 5 days so that's what they did at the expense of doing anything else but presenting the game as a list of tasks they had to complete they had inadvertently taught the player that there was not any more to the game outside of tasks without them there was no meaning to the game and once all of them were complete they stopped playing this is the main point of the essay written by Chen and Forbes at the time rewarding people for playing a game will actually demotivate them to play it for themselves the examples they used were a real world study on the effects of extrinsic rewards and the talk about how achievements are killing the game games industry it's funny to look back on you guys read one book and came to the conclusion that achievements are bad though clay seems to have backtracked on this as the page is now deleted but I think this essay was ahead of its time it had a very good point just with the wrong example in the last year or so I've seen an increasing distaste for life service games a type of game based around you logging on every day to complete a list of tasks a type of game most people don't play for fun but to complete the list it's hard not to see the parallels you can't drop the player in a new world without any guidance but you also can't hold their hand with quests the entire way through so The Logical answer was to find the middle ground one problem they found during play testing is how often people died to Darkness at this stage in development the crafting menu gave you access to everything from the beginning including items like a rope this meant players would waste all their grass craft in rope without realizing that by doing so they had wasted the resource needed to make a torch oh look I can build a cut stone or a piece of rope which are useful items later in the game for crafting but they're completely useless in the first day and they would consume all of their resources that way and then they wouldn't be able to create a light and then they eaten by the groove the solution to Bo of these problems was a revamped crafting menu instead of showing you everything you can craft they only let you make what you need this solves the problem of players crafting rope when they didn't need it as more complicated recipes like rope were now restricted to craft station such as the science machine but also organically teaches the player in a way that makes it feel like they figured it out on their own what's that it's going to be night soon and I need a light well then I'll make a campfire how do you make a campfire you need logs how do you get logs you make an ax so you can chop down a tree and use the logs to make a campfire Don't Starve teaches the player in other fun ways as well gold will shine so it stands out as a useful item following roads might lead you to an important location there's even an examine button in in which Wilson gives you some info about the item you inspected anyways they forgot to monetize their Survival game so back to the drawing board new idea no Pig city building part and no fatigue systems instead there will be call to actions in the environment that Force players to leave their base in a way it still follows the principle of go on Adventure Run before returning to decorate your base with the loot you found but on a much more interesting level the loot you found wasn't merely decorational it was now necessary for survival the plan for monetization would be to charge for cool hats like the top hat or the option to customize your world or possibly just add an in-game store where you could purchase items however the numbers weren't cutting it and then I took a look at it and I was like this is this is never going to work as a free-to-play game this is just not so in the end they decided to make a don't starve a paage title ironically every element of the game they had originally devised was still present in some capacity except the one thing Chen asked them to do make it free to play it's May 18th 2012 time which means the game is now available for free on the internet the versions here are pretty much lost to time so any info I have about the game is based on some surviving screenshots and videos the important thing to note is that don't starve started out as a browser game you open up Google and you play Don't Starve that's how it was back then no save files because they weren't added till July and if the servers go down well [ __ ] you can't play the game now but it wasn't all bad don't starve being on the web store let the developers Track cool statistics like how often people died or how many trees were chopped but more importantly through a software called olark they could talk with their players in real time to gain feedback on the game that's right you could be minding your own business playing hipster Minecraft before suddenly getting messaged by some guy asking for your experience with the game this is how I imagine where pigs got added the developers learned that people kept basing near the pigs because it was safe so they made the pigs turn hostile during full moons maybe trees getting chopped down so much is the reason they added a boss monster who appears to kill you when you chop too many trees I don't know you know what else I don't know what the purpose of the bond fires is are you telling me that the pigs just had an infinite light source back then what is this another stranger moved feature is the magic Meat Farm Kevin thought it would be creepy if you could grow meat so he added a farm to let you grow meat and oh my God is this thing broken you could turn something that gives you 13 hunger into two cooked big meat which give you 66 at the end of every single day if you use one of the big meats to replant the farm after using it as long as you have two magic Meat Farms you can literally Live Forever The Magic meat farm was so good that after its removal Farms never recovered you could plant a seed and then after using up some manure get a single Berry for like 10 hunger but when they weren't adding overpowered items they were adding Community suggestions there's no dedicated weapon then we'll add a spear are people bored of obnoxiously long Knights then we will add straw rolls which you can use to skip them big features were teased in either really elaborate args or just update posters but what I find interesting is what wasn't teased reading these decade old form threads makes me flabbergasted every time like wait this is this is in the game now we pigs spider Queens Spears an item you wear that resurrects you upon death a backpack which specifically takes up the body slot trap durability tent skipping the night and more advanced crafting stations were all things that people suggest tested that are now in the game and this is just a few examples it's like clay added anything anyone put down on the forums you write down some stupid over-the-top suggestion and suddenly it's in the game although there is a more likely possibility Kevin admits that some of the suggestions people had were eerily similar to ideas they came up with themselves so the community probably just happened to suggest things that were already going to be added rather than the other way around sometimes that thing suggested is already in the game you just didn't look deep enough then in August of 2012 Clay did something crazy the game would now charge you to play it however because they value feedback playing the game before this point would Grant you the full game for free all you had to do was play Don't Starve at a certain window in time and you would get the whole game without paying a scent something else was about to happen though clay doesn't really do advertising the most they did was hand out these weird Wilson business cards when showing off the the game packs they relied heavily on Word of Mouth marketing which is why when purchasing a game you get a second copy to give to your friend but it didn't matter because someone else was about to do the advertising for them ladies and gentlemen my name is total biscuit I'm here to ask an answer one simple question DF is Don't Starve well on September 13th a man by the name of total biscuit uploaded a video titled what if is Don't Starve seems fairly normal until you realize that this video has 600,000 views I can't speak for how many I had 10 years ago but it's safe to say that this video introduced Manny to the game it's kind of crazy how fast stuff spreads on the internet one day it's like 10 people chatting on a forum and the next hold on is that the Y cast play in this game some people really didn't get it though one guy died to Darkness and submitted a bug report because he thought he found a glitch but it didn't matter that some people didn't get it people were United with the common goal of figuring out what is going on in this world not knowing what was happening was the main appeal of Don't Starve and Clay later capitalized on this with their args revealing Hidden Lore about the game that leads us nicely into November 8th 2012 aka the cooking update aka the day that this game got added to steam aka the earliest update I have access to and it is buggy as hell here's a list of stuff you will experience while playing this version any mob that dies Le leaves behind their body and it's so creepy the bodies don't disappear sometimes they even take a [ __ ] after dying this mechanic makes me feels so bad for the spiders I killed my friend who wasn't even attacking me and his body just stayed there there's no hot keys for anything so you have to do everything with a mouse there's a weird inventory system where half of it is openable and closable you can turn the camera but only in four diagonal directions and do not hold them down there's no way to destroy D structur so if you put down a science machine it's there forever burlin Tings is super unintuitive you can't just rightclick when holding the torch you must first take the torch out of your hand and hover over what you want to burn and you're also immune to fire for some reason the torch lasts forever if you keep equipping and Dee equipping it halfs do not speed you up trees and a lot of other stuff just don't show up on the map pine cones instantly grow when planted gold will always drop from Boulders butterflies are on killable food doesn't spoil at all there's a moon walking Pigman there's a pigman doing this and then two pigs just killed each other at the same time lock suits block 100% of damage biomes are connected by extremely long land bridges no really they are really long chests can be pushed around as movable storage there's a duplication glitch a bunch of literal [ __ ] will spawn in the world center dishes are horrifically ineffective when compared to the hunger put in the entire game crashed because I tried fighting a spider and then there's the fact that boards give you less research points than the logs you spent combined yeah research points this is a really interesting mechanic and by interesting I mean terrible to unlock recipes in this game you need a certain amount of research points most items cost in well over 100 the upside being you only need to unlock items once and then they become available in every world you play to get research point points you must convert items at a science machine into points what makes it suck is how little points most things give grass turns into one point pine cones one point even something as rare as gold will give you 40 points which means you need 13 gold just to unlock a top hat mandres and trinkets are by far the best way to get points each giving 80 points each but here's the thing because trinkets are the only reasonable way to get research points the best strategy ends ends up being to run to a grave biome as fast as possible then dig them up and research it and then repeat that process over multiple worlds so you can finally unlock every item the whole system just makes me not want to play this version why bother doing anything if you can't craft cool items without wasting hours away first it was added originally as the solution to the players crafting rope when they didn't need it problem but it didn't work out however the system stayed for a good while as the Developers weren't sure how to replace it yet what's crazy to me is that when research points were eventually removed somehow there was people that got angry over it they removed the most objectively bad mechanic from the game and some gu still found a way to complain about it this just proves to me that no matter what you do as a game developer someone will always be mad anyways if I had to describe these early versions with one word that word would be potential there's not much in the game right now there there is different characters but none of them do anything so there's no reason to pick them and yet just from walking around I can't put off the feeling that this game might be Bare Bones now but it has so much potential to go to great places the spider dance for example contain a small amount of spiders in the beginning but the longer you survive the bigger the dens grow and the more spiders will come out at night they aren't that hard to kill especially with a good weapon but it makes you wonder what if the whole game was like that what if virtually every obstacle you came across became harder over time don't starve wasn't very difficult at this stage but Kevin promised some super scary monsters like deerclops who at this stage no one knew anything about other than that it would be called the deerclops speaking of Kevin during the early days of development this guy was everywhere on the forums and he was just dropping cool details about th star's design left right and center the constant explanation of design was not only great for the players as they got to understand why specific actions were made but also great for the developers as they got to see how the players react to new changes so they could update the game accordingly a player noticed that the pigs were very unreliable followers so he suggested methods to make them less disorganized and more controllable Kevin's response was that that's the way they are intended to act they are meant to be a bit bumbling and Chao sometimes they punch a teer tree spider Den with no backup silly pigs even when surrounded by a group of pigs the game still makes you feel like you're alone by not giving you full control over them it shows how Tau out the vision for Don't Starve was the developers knew exactly what should and shouldn't be in the game one of those thingss was multiplayer and there's this expectation nowadays that players have that most games will be multiplayer Kevin believes that you can't be fully immersed in the game world if you're with someone else as you will be talking to the other person instead of immersing yourself in the game you won't be pling as Wilson you will be plain as yourself Wilson is a is a Castaway Survivor in this strange world and I think that if if his friends were there with him it would it would compromise that quite a bit the team were so adamant about not adding multiplayer not because they hated fun but because they believed it would ruin the Bleak tone they were going for this is the same reason there's no health bar like what is this an RPG this is a survival simulator Wilson doesn't see health bars the closest thing you'll find to another person are the Pigman and like Kevin said that's intentional because they are not nearly smart enough to act like a person anyways the next build is a NE 3,744 days in this update they added the gobler and the minor had fishing to hammer damage from fire which enemies don't care about for some reason a new character and gold is is no longer guaranteed and now randomly drops from rocks people were finding it too easy to settle down and farm berry bushes so they added a mob that will pop out and steal them from you not that it matters to me since I get my food by spawn camping the pigs at the start of each day despite being an uncompromising Perma death game the gobler can't attack the player and will instead run from you he seems to be more of a drain on resources rather than something that can actually kill you although you can trap him on the edge and kill him something the developers must have thought of because the gobler drops loot the more interesting part of the update are the characters because one of them is the embodiment of a Chad for simply picking Wolf Gang you get double the health double the hunger and double the damage all for free all the time you can go almost 3 days without eating by playing Wolf Gang he is the easy mode of this game if you struggle with the combat at all just pick wolf can and he will obliterate a pig Village for you the other characters have actual stats now and they're not so good if wolf G is in s tier and Wilson in B tier because he can craft revives out of beard hair then these two are right at the bottom Don't Starve literally punishes you for picking a female character Willow lets you completely circumvent darkness by picking this character you become completely immune to Darkness although this ability is isn't that impressive when infinite use torches exist she also has fire resistance but there's not many uses for that the other character Wendy is even gimmick here she has this ghost sister that has a one in three chance to spawn when it's Dusk and then will vanish the subsequent morning so for a good few days you probably won't even know what Wendy does until you randomly get jump scared by this ghost spawning inside of you seriously she's so loud you can hear her talking even when the game is paused one thing that's cool is that Wendy was planned to be Maxwell's niece even back in 2012 as examining him gives you the quote about kinship but yeah Abigail is useless she just kind of sits there and okay I take everything back move Wendy up to AER you kidding me she doesn't appear often but when she does you can kill mobs without them noticing they're taking damage this beff is slowly dying and yet he does not react at all until he's dead it's like Abigail's a Lee if you get multiple be to chase you you can run into Abigail to quickly kill all of them easily this is so much stronger than wolf can what the hell you don't even have to do anything hold on you don't even have to do anything and you can survive indefinitely all right new update the birds and the bees and the hounds that want to kill you you think the game is easy do you well now now every couple days starting at day five Maxwell sends you a group of his dogs to kill you and the longer you survive the more hounds will come some of them turning into fire hounds which explode upon death and burn down your stupid base let's watch some footage of people struggling to survive the new [Music] update who even thinks of this stuff the game is supposed to get harder the longer you survive not easier you think that in a game that doesn't have walls mobs wouldn't need pathf finding but the community proved the developers wrong it's hysterical how the relationship between the developers and the community is the exact same as the one between Maxwell and Wilson Maxwell adds a new aggressive mob to kill the player while Wilson finds a clever way to continue camping at his base although the walls of trees and other structures weren't intended so many players used them in their base designs that real walls were added later the walls were useless though probably because Maxwell was still bitter about this the hounds Mark the point at which Don't Starve would enter its midgame phase instead of expanding the world the developers would now actively try to kill you before this point as long as you had food and an infinite torch you could easily survive forever now that wouldn't be so simple gloves off so to speak but for every update that added a new challenge there would be an equal amount of new items that you could use to fight back in the Hound update it was a bunch of new weapons but not any traditional weapons the intention at least is that Wilson's not actually that good of a fighter um his offensive abilities are are weird at best this is why Wilson uses unconventional weapons like sleep darts and be mines rather than something like a shotgun this is also why instead of using reasonable protection Wilson wears a football helmet Kevin talks about how there needs to be some horror element to Don't Starve and how you can't have that if you're overpowered and killing everything in your way this is why the weapons Don't Starve gives you are inherently cowardly you're either creating traps using ranged weapons or just getting pigs to kill things for you attacking enemies headon is supposed to be a last resort and while I think this is a cool idea it does not work the way they thought it would it's far easier to kite the hounds than go through all the extra effort of crafting a be mine they literally have a character that deals double the damage why would you bother using traps if you can twoot the hounds as Wolf Gang they also added the lifegiving amulet or rather gave this previously useless item the ability to revive you which is great because it means you don't have to be Wilson anymore to craft revives it even puts everything around you to sleep so you don't get spawn camped however in order to use the lifegiving amulet you have to be be wearing it at the time you die otherwise it won't work so either you never take this amulet off just in case you die or you somehow predict when you're about to die that's the only way to use this item the whole update was weirdly controversial in a hot fix patching the ability to create walls grass tfts got changed requiring manure in order to grow after regrowing three times grass tfts will need fertilizer to grow again a seemingly innocent change made from The Guiding principle that nothing in the game should be free turned out to be one of the worst changes ever it's another update designed to make sitting at your base less profitable but it ended up having the opposite effect now more than ever sitting still and never leaving your base was the best strategy after all what's the point of going around the map and Scavenging for resources if all the grass will eventually need manure no one's going to walk around the whole world fertilizing random grass tfts you're better off just digging them up and placing them all in one area it also forced the base locations to be right next to beff for more manure this whole situation is a great example of why an active Community is invaluable for feedback people got pissed off at how grindy it was to get grass after asking how much grass they typically use in a day Kevin found that people were using way more than he thought they were this highlighted the actual problem with the game people weren't turtling up at their base for no reason they were doing it because the game encouraged it they were doing it to farm as much grass as possible in order to cover the costs of the expensive items nerfing grass tfts so they would require manure wouldn't solve the core issue that being everything here is too expensive so in another hot fix the next day the issue was solved as the change was reverted and many items required much less grass to craft and just to discourage turtling you only need to fertilize grass that you dug up meaning random tfts in the wilderness don't need manure the core issue of items being too expensive could not have been solved with just internal testing which is one of the massive benefits of an open Beta the game like Don't Starve where I mean people play for hours and hours and hours I'm always kind of Blown Away by the by the hour counts that people actually uh kind of post a lot of the players actually know the nuances of how the game actually plays better than we do making a small change on my end and then pushing it live and then watching and waiting for their response see if they even notice it um I did that a lot um and it was very helpful it does make me wonder though what if people lied about how much grass they used in a day like come on guys if you all said you used 500 grass every day we could be living in a world where torches backpacks and straw rolls cost one grass each oh yeah they added backpacks in this update they added so much useful items like the backpack that this is the first update that felt good to play the previous versions had weird Mouse controls but now you can rotate the map with q and E while also pressing space to collect stuff including fireflies because I guess Wilson is now capable of grabbing them you can also attack stuff which can be used to kill butterflies although I'm not sure why you'd want to seen as they only give you one Health and hunger stop playing the figh music I punched the butterfly what if you got punished for killing innocent creatures introducing naughty and nice an invisible naughtiness meter has been added and it is such a big part of the game now killing just one butterfly is enough to hear Krampus hissing at you this must have terrified new players imagine killing a single Pigman and suddenly hearing this terrifying sound come to think of it old Starve is just weirdly creepy and I don't even mean the art style in the early versions there's this rare laugh that play plays at night and its sole purpose is to scare the player just listen to this imagine knowing nothing about the game and suddenly hearing this the developers knew what they were doing but back to Krampus eventually this conniving little fellow appears and similar to the gobler he threatens the player without directly attacking them how by steal line your stuff Krampus will take anything he sees off the ground including the items in your chests and people hated him people hated him like they they absolutely hated him for the most part I think that people felt judged like that I was accused of of of reporting like vegan propaganda like I think people really don't like it when um like you can attack the player that's cool fair game you touch their stuff oh man watch out people did not understand Krampus at all he was meant to be a cool little addition for Krampus knocked but he ended up being super controversial this comment says it well Krampus will punish me if I do anything except gather some seeds pick up poop and start farming instead of being rewarded for taking the risk of attacking pigs beffo herds tall birds and other dangerous animals I'm being punished and called Naughty for my good behavior Kevin tried to calm the player Base by explaining that every action in the game needs a push back but people were not having it so he was nerfed into Oblivion and now no longer breaks chests after this update it is really difficult to spawn him naess lowers over time so you have to be actively trying to spawn Krampus in order to see him but honestly I think the players were in the wrong here the thing about these open betas is that on one hand they can be really good for Gathering feedback on stuff you wouldn't even think about but on the other hand you will be completely unable to add something because your player base hates the existence of it this is what happened with Krampus and I don't really know why the concept of Krampus sounds annoying but in practice he's just this goat guy that sometimes appears and you bait him with an item and then you kill him that's it that's the whole interaction Krampus might be one of the easiest threats to deal with in this game and yet people still complained about him my tear is that by this stage in development some players had gotten so experienced with the game that they felt they could judge new content accurately without actually playing it the reason I say this is because the arguments you see made against him were more so against the idea of him rather than the implementation making me question if these people actually saw him in game you never saw nearly as much hate for tree guards or gobblers despite them working similarly which only leads me to the conclusion that these players are either Hypocrites or just didn't give the update a chance this is probably the worst part of an early access beta if you're too active within your community the player base will become the creative director and suddenly you can't add cool monsters like Krampus anyways what else can you do with an egg 10 years later and I don't think anyone has ever used this mechanic well okay maybe if you feel like doing nothing for 3 days straight you can baby sit this egg next to a campfire until it hatches oh for I sat still for half an hour just for the egg to [ __ ] itself the small birds that get hatched aren't even that good for combat they lose battles against most mobs so there isn't any reason to hatch the eggs over just eating them there was also Killer Bees added but who cares about that it's time for them to add an actual boss to the game this update finished off the spider life cycle as after the nest grows to tier three a Spider Queen will appear who will spawn a new nest after a while which basically means the spiders will eventually spread to every corner of your map if you don't keep their population down although that can be challenging as the dens now have Warriors at higher levels they even jump at you specifically to make it harder to kite them head on even though it is absolutely still possible Wilson wins again the Spider Queen is pretty easy to fight as long as you don't let her spawn too many spiders they added a fire version of the Sleep Dart but once again kiting is far easier than crafting whatever this is in order to obtain a fire Dart you have to catch these red birds the birds themselves are actually quite rare as you mostly find crows but even catching them is not enough as you then have to pray you get the stupidly low chance for a Red Feather or to craft a fire Dart that the does less damage than a punch to the face 1250 Health later and you don't get anything interesting originally the spider hat was actually a craftable item and wow is it fun to use you can trick the spiders into thinking you're one of them with this hat is the tall bird being ugly again well with this hat you can lead the spiders and completely obliterate him you can also use the hat to raid Pig Villages but be cautious as the pigs will also believe you're a spider causing them to attack you this game playay idea was so good that they later turned it into an entire character they also added a tf2 unusual to the game winter was far from finished at this stage so the winter hat doesn't have a proper gameplay purpose however wearing it gives us a sneak peek as to what the season would look like and sound like which is really cool Turf this update was hinted on the forums as connecting all the capital letters in this blog post gives you the word shovel and what do you know in the next update you can dig up Turf with a shovel but what a big feature this is I don't think Don't Starve would be the game it is today if you couldn't customize the ground under you it helps make bases have their own distinct feel as before this even day 100 bases looked identical to each other the update after that is quite gamechanging but before I talk about it I have to show you the insanity that are these update trailers one of the main rules of Don't Starve is to not let let the players see everything but another way don't starve achieves this goal is by hiding little args in update videos clay releas updates every 2 weeks but they kept the community active every day with these puzzles usually it's something basic like in the Spider Queen trailer where you have Morse code playing in the background and other times you have red dots that randomly appear for a frame and if you screenshot them all and overlay them over each other and connect the dots you get this strange creature no one knew what it was at the time could it be an evil frog is this what deerclops looks like oh no way it's just Chester Food will now spoil anything you stockpiled in your mega base will soon turn to rot this mechanic is quite unique in that we have definitive proof it was originally a community idea that got added to the game the developers always wanted to add it but just weren't sure how but with a bit of help from the community we got probably the best addition to the game food spoilage one of the common tins you would see on the forums whenever a new threat was added is a concern from a new player here I am struggling to survive and now you're adding something to make it harder it made the idea of getting into Don't Starve at this stage somewhat unappealing as you had to learn completely new game mechanics every other week otherwise you would be left behind and unable to play it would feel like the features are designed around veterans who are already used to the game while disregarding new players spoilage was not one of those mechanics if anything spoilage only hurt Veterans of the game as it made it harder if not impossible to stockpile food new players wouldn't notied their food rotting as they'd eat it before I had a chance to spoil this change was solely made to prevent high amounts of stockpiling which is great but just like when hounds were added there's ways to counter this for example you could craft an ice box slow food spoilage you could cook food to restore its freshness and just to balance everything out the default hunger was increased from 100 to 150 if you still really hated the mechanic you had options as you could always play the new robot character who completely ignores this mechanic we are fully in the midgame phase at this point the first 10 days or so will always be consistent so the new player experience doesn't change while spoilage hounds Krampus and the Spider Queen would affect players after day 10 to challenge those that survived longer this principle applies to other things in this update beffs will now go into heat making them renewable while also attacking the player if they get too close and those small birds you hatched a few updates ago they will now grow up and kill you even less reason to hatch them you could say that by raising this egg I lost a lot of progress this is when the world generation got added which makes the game look close to what Don't Starve is like today other additions include a new character free crafting baby beffs walls boomerangs and coolants from how bad the walls are it might seem like the developers are against building a base but that's actually not the case they are against turtling some people um in in in the forums and online I've seen think that we're against Base building but we're definitely not we're we're we're trying to make the game less turttly but that just means we want you to make a base and like go out and explore and then come back to your base and then go out and explore and come back to your base but don't star at its core is a Sandbox so it's easy to argue that there's no correct way to play the game and while that may be true I do think there is a two-stage cycle that every player has to follow in the first stage the player explores the map and collects any resources that could be helpful later in the second stage the player returns to their base and uses those resources to improve their odds of survival eventually the player will need to leave their base and return to the dangerous Wilderness which is when the cycle repeats the coant trail is the perfect example of this in action you'll be sitting in your base when suddenly a trail spawns near you following the trail into the wild leads you to a deadly Beast killing that Beast gives you meat so you can survive longer and a trunk which you might use to craft a clothing item you'd be forgiven for thinking that the original concept for Don't Starve is nothing like the one we have now but when you examine the game further it's clear the core Loop of build a base go on Adventure Run before returning to improve prove your base still exists even in the latest versions this seems to be the main goal of the progress update refine Don't Starve to a point where the only things left to add are the end game challenges and it succeeds at that in this update the spider's webbing counts as Turf and you can dig it up and place it wherever you want however destroying the nest doesn't destroy the webbing making it super annoying to move around eventually there's just random patches of webbing around the world slowing you down then there's the confusing features punching a butterfly in this version gives you 25 Health you eat six butterflies and suddenly you're at full health gold is still a random drop by the way they've had two Boulder Sprites for ages but I suppose nobody thought of the idea to use them for something and research points are finally removed sort of I guess clay was just really scared of the number one research points fan emailing them a pipe bomb because it's a setting in this update it's technically gone but with this one setting you can enable it again so what's the point of removing it just remove it and stop trying to achieve this dumb middle ground anyways progress did add one feature that would indicate the beginning of the end game the TS they are literally called the Tings the Tings in this version all spawn in one biome and if you combine them all at a machine you get the completely regenerate your world while keeping your items the teleportato was added to solve a multitude of problems the smallest one being to add some sort of end goal to Don't Starve have you done everything you wanted to do in this world well now you can move on to the next one as well as switch character if you want it also serves as a way to renew unrenewable resources whether it's used to get more rocks or to spawn more beff because you killed them all or maybe it's just to experience new content that was added after you generated your world but its main purpose was to solve the character XP problem the way you unlock characters in Don't Starve is by gaining XP the amount you gain is equivalent to the amount of days you survived the problem is that you have to die to get the XP you could survive all the way to De thousand but unless you die and lose the world you won't get any XP um but the side effect of this is that you have to die in order to unlock characters and people don't want to do that but so there's something fundamentally unsatisfying for most people to have to actually get their character to die and or to progress so we're probably going to change that um the solution to this was to give the player XP for regenerating the world which lets good players still unlock new characters without having to die as for the trailer they hit a now defunct QR code which would hint at the next update that [Music] being insanity and winter are the two big features that keep being teased on the forums and I believe this version of Don't Starve is the hardest one in existence no update before or after this one comes close in terms of difficulty and that all comes down to how absolutely broken insanity is they added a few creepy stuff like eyes that watch you in the dark shadowy hands that steal your fire and Distortion effects I had to turn off in case I gave someone a seizure but nothing compares to what happens when you're at zero sanity the Shadow creatures that spawn are ridiculous this is the stats of a modern shadow creature and these are the stats of the insanity update ones crawlers have 800 Health which is more than a be while the terror beak does 80 damage and attacks about as fast as crampus that being extremely fast if that wasn't bad enough up to four creatures could spawn at once and they spawn really quickly kill one crawler and another one will instantly respawn in its place you don't even get sanity for kill killing them giving you no reason to fight them unless you really want nightmare fuel to craft the new items but trust me you aren't winning the battle against these guys friendly mobs can't see them and they can't be put to sleep so the only way to kill nightmares is to attempt to kite them which will just get you killed this all sounds incredibly challenging and that's because it is however there is one easy solution that completely nullifies everything I just talked about and that's to just not be insane it is very much easier done than said in this version top hats while expensive did not have durability and wearing one would give you a passive sanity boost which works during the day Dusk and even at night meaning once you craft a top hat you will never be insane for the rest of your playthrough there is other ways to increase sanity like eating cooked berries or eating the new Taffy and pumpkin cookies but crafting the top hat is by far the easiest and requires no maintenance insanity sounds like the developer's solution to making the game less combat oriented while winter and spoilage are meant to make you think about how and when you farm sanity makes you consider which battles are worth taking the simple reason for this is that standing near monsters lowers your sanity by fighting tentacles or spiders you are lowering your sanity and doing that too much causes four Terror beaks to spawn conversely getting Pig followers gives you sanity and stuff like traps and blow darts won't lower your sanity as you are too far from the monster to be affected by their passive terrain if there was a version where Don't Starve was the least combat oriented this would be the version it's not that you can't fight monsters it's just that you have to either use unconventional tactics or just not kill everything that enters your screen it also refined other aspects of the game like encouraging players to cook their meat instead of eating it raw or just as a cost for using wormholes and surprisingly people really liked Insanity sure there was the one guy who was asking to make it a setting for the most part people were happy about the direction Don't Starve was taken Adventure Mode speaking of Adventure Mode you can play an early version of it now and completing it gives you this placeholder ending place they didn't want to spoil the ending yet so they made Maxwell a cardboard cutout that doesn't talk and can't be interacted with the only way to leave this place is to eat the deadly Feast sitting on the floor Adventure Mode wouldn't be properly added until a month later in the mean time it's time for winter winter was the developer's ultimate counter to farming in a post by Kevin he explains how there shouldn't be one answer that is right for every situation which is pretty much farming right now sure it isn't the cheapest thing but once you get it set up you never have to worry about getting food there's no pressure to find an alternate food source because the Farms are the one easy answer to hunger that always works in his eyes farming is a perfectly valid food source but it shouldn't work 100 % of the time which is where Winter comes in nothing will grow except trees forcing you to find different food sources you also freeze to that Now sucks to suck winter is mostly the same as it is in modern Don't Starve except here termal Stones had yet to be added the only time I had issues is when I tried to kill the new mtus because this walrus is better at the game than me mtus feels like an actual player that's just closed competitive CS go he's constantly kiting my attacks while sneaking in his blow darts to hit me it's like the developers were so sick of their Community kiting everything they add to death that they added something that KES the player but eventually after nearly dying to the Pingu wallus I killed him which is when I learned that the Tusk is completely useless because the walking cane had yet to be added what a fantastic game at least I can free stuff with the new ice staffs why is the screen shaking this is deerc and he is genuinely terrifying anyone who's played this game for long enough has experienced what I'm talking about thinking you finally mastered the game and then the ground starts shaking before this ginormous entity appears destroys your campfire and your base and then your dead this is like the final boss version of dying to the gr on night one once you kill this guy you've officially conquered the game because if you've made it this far then nothing else will kill you winter would be the last big thing added before for adventure mode now it was time to patch up the game and get ready for launch they were so close to launch that they even made a trailer setting up the backstory to the game and it is just beautiful it was so goodlooking that even back then people were asking for a to starve Animated Series in this style but before we can release the game you really thought that they wouldn't try to add more challenges to the game now it will occasionally lightly rain which slightly lowers your sanity and slowly kills your fires yeah no this is just winter but infinitely less threatening wetness is barely a mechanic in this update the actual content is all the key items they added to the game like the Clockwork night and therefore gears which currently look like my dogs vomit merms guard pigs drying racks honey PST gunpowder an umbrella purple gems fire staffs an entirely new magic station and three different mushrooms that come out at different times of day though unfortunately the option to cook them isn't there yet so only the blue mushroom is of any use and then there's the most important item introduced in this update the hambat this weapon was so awesome that on the same day this update came out it was also added into Team Fortress 2 with the Wilson weave the hambat is such a strong weapon that I can simultaneously kill deerclops and heavy at the same time although the hambat sucks in this version for some reason it has both durability and can spoil and if you weren't careful you could actually eat your hambat I imagine they had to remove this because people kept accidentally eating their weapon but back to that TF2 crossover what's interesting is that you can find a bunch of Sprites items and even voice lines for the Pyro in the [Music] files one of them implying that the Pyro would hear completely different Insanity effects similar to tf2's pyro Vision which means at one point he might have been intended to be a playable character unfortunately it turns out someone at clay made this just for fun and it wasn't actually planned to be in the game imagine being so bored at your job that you begin adding the Pyro into Don't Starve instead of finishing the game Doorway to Adventure Bishop Adventure Mode Pig back ear Buffs and thermal Stone lightning rod and healing Salve touch Stone this video has quite the number of incidental illustrations appearing for only a single frame the developers felt very evil with this update as there's a bunch of set pieces that will absolutely screw with your game if you trigger them one of them instantly spawns winter because you opened an ice box two buck fixes later and the game released on April 23rd of 20 13 on the release day Maxwell becomes a playable character as long as you find this hidden door which could spawn anywhere and beat the treacherous Adventure Mode which you know is going to be difficult because they nerfed how much health butterflies give you and finally fixed the infinite torchbug the existence of Maxwell's door serves to answer the question of can I leave and what's really going on here it's funny Maxwell's door is such an ominous structure that I remember randomly getting a text message from my friend asking me if it's safe to enter not in the will I lose my stuff way but more of the will don't starf turn into a horror game if I enter the store but then you go in and you learn oh wait it's just don't starve too [ __ ] Adventure Mode itself isn't too difficult once you know what you're doing although dying once is enough to send you back to the start causing hours of progress loss Kevin said he doesn't expect most people to Beat It and I can see why it definitely will challenge the inexperienced as you're forced to find all the Tings through the worlds where it's permanently winter with low twigs and grass there's even some unique set pieces like Maxwell's version of tooth traps or the Frog rain event which is supposed to be exclusive to Adventure Mode there's even Bridges guarded by deadly monsters like tall Birds spiders and tentacles you have to cross although none of it is too difficult once you get past the oh scary monster phase you realize it's comic ly easy to hold the W and walk right past them the only thing that could possibly kill you in adventure mode is the Killer Bees unlike every other mob in the game getting slightly close to these bees gets you hit in single player it is impossible to walk past them which can be a problem if there's an entire Bridge filled with hives other than that as long as you're patient you should be fine Maxwell was even kind enough to give you a tent to skip the night for free healing the ending to Don't Starve is something else though it's definitely one of the more memorable game endings not because it's great story-wise the writer didn't even know if the game would have an ending the lore Was Made Up On The Spot the reason it sticks in my mind is because the animators went all out on the presentation look at it you free Maxwell from his throne and he gets the most brutal death scene you think that by beating the game You' finally learn the secrets of this pseudo horror game you've been playing yeah only more Mysteries are revealed Max will explains that he's not actually in control and whoever controls him is the one who controls everything after a few hours of buildup and multiple failed attempts this is the ending to Don't Starve when you first open the game you don't really know much but at least you know Maxwell is clearly the one in charge now after beating the game it's almost as if you know less about this world than when you started you learn Maxwell isn't actually in charge and how he's essentially a puppet for the tin buff him who for all we know might be working for someone else as well thanks game I'm glad I spent 8 hours getting to this point so I could leave with even less knowledge in what I came in with I'll just go watch the credits instead that place appreciates me for playing and I get to see all the lovely people who worked on the game they later expanded the story and made Maxwell more of a sympathetic villain in the next ARG but to be honest I like the original idea for the ending way more the game was going to to track random stuff you did and beating it would reveal what ending you got that that always resonated with me where it's like oh okay well you can play as much as you want and and how you want but at the end it's all tallied up and and you see what happened imagine beating Don't Starve and getting the Wilson escaped ending or maybe the mayor of Pik Town Abigail is back or you are terrible at this game ending the developers promised 6 months of updates after launch but they were going to be very different for a few reasons the first is that don't starve is out of beta so anything they add now is going to need a lot more testing than what can be done in 2 weeks second and more importantly no major environmental changes would happen in the beta you could be happily farming away before the developers introduced an entire season dedicated to countering you but since it was a beta they could always justify it with well the game wasn't finished what did you expect but now don't starve was finished so it would be pretty stupid to drastically change the Decor gameplay in an update that happened after launch the correct thing to add would be challenges the player seeks out themselves which is exactly what they did when they added the underground this update is insane look at the poster there's such a massive upgrade in quality compared to anything before this the trailers are also starting to have animated segments and I love them it opens with a reference to Wilson's quote it must lead to the kingdom of the bunnyman which must have been really popular because they went on and added this whole cave section with actual Bunnymen and other creatures the caves themselves are what you'd expect you have your mush trees light flowers for lanterns and earthquakes which now finally make rocks renewable even if it is extremely slow clay seemed really focused on making you feel like you're in a cave to the point where they traveled to a mining Museum so they could record realistic Ambience another thing they added was cave walls but these were quickly scrapped they look looked really cool and added to the whole idea that you're in a cave but I can see why they removed it not only does it sometimes fail to generate but the cave walls tend to block your vision the solution at the time was to put this circle around the player which lets you see through the walls but this just makes things look even weirder on top of that cave walls were causing performance issues so they scrapped the idea another odd addition is the powder cake not because it's creepy but because it's entirely a joke item eating a powder cake gives you zero hung zero sanity and minus three Health but it's all balanced out by the fact that it lasts 18,750 days which is the equivalent of playing Don't Starve for 2 and 1 12,000 hours straight somehow though people found a use for this useless item which must have been a great shock to the developers what the [ __ ] since a lot of mobs tend to eat anything off the floor powder cake can be used to bait them in farm designs and because this tin will never spoil you never have to replace it Wilson 2 Maxwell Z One unintended consequence of the caves is that they felt like a side product once they were added there was the whole game on the surface and then there was this other thing tacked on it drove some players off the game probably because seeing a pop-up tell you hey the caves aren't actually done yet isn't the best thing to find in a supposedly finished game let's see if the next update can fix this problem and it didn't solve anything take it took about a month for the next update to release but it mostly just expanded upon the content in the caves clay must have realized this because their next update focused not on the caves but on the characters up until now everyone had one minor upside that barely changed how you play the game then came strange new powers giving everyone more interesting upsides as well as downsides to make them less similar to Wilson strange new powers was supposedly Dawn star's biggest update because the forums were EXT extremely active after its releasee likely because people just like talking about their favorite characters at least more than boring cave monsters after asking for opinions on balance changes every character received some crazy ability like an infinite lighter movement speed Abigail insane stats from gears are just books that feel like you enabled creative mode every character got changed except Wilson Wilson got nothing here this marks an important point in don't star's timeline as from here on out Wilson would get progressively worse than the other characters before this point wolf can was the easy mode and every other character had a single perk that was more or less equal to Wilson's beard but after strange new powers Wilson would only get weaker and weaker as the game went on and added new characters like Woody some people didn't like the addition of Woody as they were hoping for some cooler data mind characters like wox or Weber but come on the Canadian come added every single Canadian stereotype into a single character and then he turns into a beaver because you Chomp too many trees this is way better than whatever Wallace would offer when you compare Woody to Wilson suddenly growing a beard doesn't sound so good anymore even Wes got some new stuff although the balloons only serve to make him more of a joke character so they don't do much one thing that was added and quickly removed in this update was the gemology tab where all the items related to gems resided the chilled amulet was one of those new gem based items which is an odd addition as summer had yet to be added meaning you didn't have a reason to cool down yet it might have been used in the lava caves mentioned by Kevin but they were never added so I have to wonder what happened to the idea the lava caves sound like they would appear in a deeper level below the normal caves since you can see pools of the stuff in the loading screen but if that's the case then that would mean that the lava caves got replaced with the ruins unlike in modern Don't Starve the ruins are the caves inside the caves if you go two layers down you find this ruined Temple which in a super early build had walls and it makes the place so fascinating there's this maze with pigs guarding something and it really feels like you're exploring an abandoned Sanctuary apparently more levels under this one such as the lava caves were planned but they felt too empty and boring so they stopped here and that was definitely the right choice as the ruins makes the addition of the caves worth it it's no longer this weird part of Don't Starve and now it feels like it is part of Don't Starve there's nothing cooler than splunking so deep that you find what is essentially a dungeon it even has its own version of nighttime the nightmare phase which causes the whole ruin to go crazy and spawn 200 nightmare creatures from these lights nowadays there's a few places in the ruins like the maze which don't have any nightmare Lights making them a safe spot but in single player nowhere is safe other than the Wilds outside the ruins but even they become dangerous after the monkeys go crazy however one thing that makes the nightmare phase easier is how all the nightmare creatures die the second the ends and not only do they die but they drop their fuel too which means you can walk around the ruins get a bunch of Terror beaks chasing you before getting over 20 nightmare fuel for free it's such an easy strategy to perform that you'll often find nightmare fuel just sitting on the ground without you doing anything by the way it took them until now to add the Clockwork Rook which just baffles me how the hell was he not in the base game then there's the ancient Guardian a super large Minotaur that runs into you and is the strongest enemy and don't starve stronger than deerclops and just like anything powerful in this game you can cheese it by placing something stupid like a campfire this bug is still in the game so if you want to abuse this 10-year-old glitch then feel free to do so by this stage it's been four of the 6 months of promised updates and according to this update Post in August clay was once again going to focus on improving the game and adding better mod support rather than adding any major new content like the suggested lava caves or heat waves such small changes included making Wilson really happy after rebuilding some Clockworks we see a rare example of Wilson smiling which then happens again in the next update I can see why they never made him happy ever again the story of the puzzle was also beginning to finish up as they were almost out of trailers to hide secrets in and they went above and beyond with it clicking on the shadow Watcher in the secret image will give you a Mod download REM do this epic battle sequence not present anywhere else in the game before a gramophone appears giving you Morse code which when decoded gives you a secret password that can be used on a site that is only accessible from another hidden images source code with multiple images of Roman numerals that you must first decode before leading you to a site where you can enter the secret password which leads you to the ending of the ARG they really listen listen to the people who wanted the cartoon because here is 50 seconds of Maxwell's backstory which reminder is an unlisted video that was only accessible to people who solved this puzzle they put so much work into an animation most people will never see and to this day it's still unlisted so you can't watch it unless you have the link meanwhile the modern Community was booming last update's trailer showed off cool mod tools that anyone could use this included stuff like a character template which led to a platter of custom character mods most mods were character ones as they were the easiest to make you could play as basically anyone popular at the time plus anything else you can think of some people modded in unreleased characters like the Pyro or Wilton While others made Wario Zelda Dipper Steve Wolverine Octodad the worst Borderlands character Isaac Coraline Squidward and godamn Moy the mouse all these mods led up to the final update alls well that's Maxwell during this update clay held the Halloween mod contest there wasn't One winner instead they showed off some cool mods like Wilton The Haunted House mind Them Bones and my personal favorite trick or treat also what is this hyper realistic Don't Starve mod and who made it the answer clay entertainment themselves that's right clay decided to make their own Halloween mod to blow everyone else's mod out of the water and show those amateur cavemen who the real programmers are Maxwell wins again the actual purpose of the creature was to show that game-changing mods that add large swats of content are totally possible they wanted to let people make mods for their game to the point where they made an example mod of what could be possible if you put your mind to it clay never made a horror game before but the scure is fairly effective at what it wants to do after the Halloween contest for the first time don't starve was quiet for a while there was no updates no puzzle or anything of the sort the only thing that happened was the addition of shadow Chester and snow Chester after clay reached their plushy Kickstarter but for the most part Dead Silence that is until January 15th of 2014 when we got the first trailer for Reign of Giants the sub form for the DLC opens as Joe W tells everyone to guess what it's about and guess they did four teasers got released one of them showing the new character from just four teasers the people had solved it they knew EX exactly what was going to be added obviously there's going to be more big monsters like deerclops and one of them will be a giant fire breeding turtle called the Tusk the reason well you can clearly see him in the Forbidden Knowledge trailer see there the writers were so smart that they added hints to the new DLC 11 months before it was announced at least that was the case before a single trailer destroyed the entire te previously you had had such established Seasons as winter and not winter now you have the full set of four bringing you a large chunk of content that is both meaningful and interesting I never noticed this before but each seasonal teaser has a giant monster hiding among the trees this single secret set the community on fire I mean if if there's stuff in the trees then what else are they hiding suddenly people began seeing stuff like Morse code and pictures where there was nothing hidden at EG and spring trailer new character the musling noises at the end of the spring trailer Were Somehow misinterpreted as Morse code clay had ruined their community's minds with the puzzles their brains had become hardwired to see clues in completely ordinary objects rain of giants is a pretty huge DLC aside from the obvious additions you have two new biomes one represents the Autumn season which is now where the pig king lives and the desert to reflect the new summer season this desert sounds like it would be Barren of resources but if anything it has the most resources out of any biome in the game all because of the tumble weeds tumble weeds periodically spawn in the desert giving you grass twigs and a bunch of other stuff if you get lucky if you get really lucky you can even get gems from the ruins making them renewable unlike grass tfts and saplings tumble weeds still spawn during winter giving you free grass and twigs all year round this single addition is so overpowered all because the developers thought it would be funny if a tumble weed could give you everything in the game but the real winners are the new mechanics after playing rain of giants returning to the base game makes me feel like I'm playing an early Alpha of Don't Starve that's how impactful they are the wetness meter makes rain an actual threat that you must avoid failure to do so makes you go insane faster causes food to spoil and your character becomes incredibly incompetent and if that wasn't bad enough you can now overheat which is especially challenging in the new summer season even though summer is literally reverse winter I find it infinitely more annoying to deal with your character slowly overheats food everywhere spoils faster and good luck growing anything when your plants are dying of thirst and just to make sure you suffer random fires will start because I hate you I left my pig farm for just a couple of seconds and when I came back the whole T had burned down even animals like rabbits can be seen smoldering which is really deadly if you base next to them but on to what people actually care about the Giants there's actually five giants mining glomour statue gives you a crafting recipe for the old bell ringing it causes Bigfoot to [Music] appear the other Giants are just deerclops but for every season they tried to recreate the terrifying first encounter with deerclops three more times my biggest problem with the Giants is how sometimes they don't even spawn one thing I haven't mentioned until now is that deerclops wasn't guaranteed to spawn it's entirely possible to survive multiple Winters and never see deerclops if you get bad RNG this was probably done to fit the hole you can't experience everything in one playthrough design and while it might have been a creepy cool feature when it was only deer lops the fact that every giant has a chance to not spawn is just frustrating imagine buying the new Don't Starve DLC ready to experience the powerful new Giants only to go through a full year without seeing any of them what the hell man I got this DLC advertised to have many big enemies and none of them appeared this is exactly what happened to me while recording footage I waited 9 hours for these guys to spawn and none of them ever did at least until until day 66 of summer when I suddenly heard this weird buzzing sound the dragonfly is the new strongest boss monster as not only does she enrage when attacked but will also burn anything she touches which can be very dangerous with how fast fire spreads in this game dragonfly is absolutely a highlight in my playthrough although for different reasons than deerclops while deerclops may have been a surprise the first time he came dragonfly was very clearly advert ized as a summer boss so the shock Factor would be gone as you know she's coming despite this I would argue her encounter is much scarier than deerclops is one unique aspect of the dragonfly is that unlike deerclops she doesn't immediately go for the player instead she appears in your peripherals stalking you initially it seems like dragonfly is just coincidentally going in the same direction as you after all they haven't attacked me yet so therefore she isn't AG Ro to me but as you keep moving you realize hey it's been a day now and this ten is still following me you jump through a wormhole to escape her and she appears on the other side the sinking feeling you get as you realize you have to fight dragonfly is disturbing at least with deerclops you could always run away from him if you didn't feel comfortable fighting him dragonfly will actively stalk you through wormholes until you inevit have to engage in combat which turns out to be incredibly easy as I'm plain Wickford and dragonfly got stuck between two rocks reain of giants gave don't starf so many new mechanics and features that I didn't even mention playing single player Without Rain of giants feels like playing an incomplete game that's how high quality it is most video game DLCs are just some new area or this gun for $2 but clay made rain of giants truly worth your money if base Don't Starve is a painting then the DLC is like paying to see what an expanded version of it would look like the game's Vision had been fully realized at this point every idea that could have been added has been added even the Heatwave season is at in now which leads me to one question where do you go from here how are you meant to continue your most popular game when you've already done everything in it later that year in the summer while everyone else was dying to heat strokes and wildfires clay decided to randomly announc that you can now play Don't Starve with your friends if you solved the rain of giants puzzle and learned how to use a map then you would have found out earlier but hang on didn't you say you weren't going to add multiplayer in reality all they promised was that they would make Don't Starve the best single player game that they could however since the best single player game that they could make had been fully completed it finally made sense to try adding Co-op to Don't Starve apparently this Tipping Point was this proof of concept someone made in the clay bank which caused an office-wide session of multiplayer Don't Starve this convinced the developers that multiplayer was worth looking into so they began making the best multiplayer game that they could make by literally making a new game the whole multiplayer thing was so complicated that they had to create an entirely separate game called Don't Starve Together if you play Don't Starve back when it was a chrome game then boy do I have good news for you because owners of Don't Starve get together for free you now get both Don't Starve and its sequel without paying a any or well kind of although the game was announced in summer it wouldn't be playable by anyone until October of 2014 and because the servers are running under neighbors Wi-Fi very few people were given access as to not overload the the servers from everyone joining at once getting a key to play Don't Starve Together early was like winning the lottery twice people were desperately asking for keys on the forums making up soft stories as to why they should be given access to Hipster Minecraft together everybody wanted those keys and if you somehow did win the giveaways you would get an extra key to give to your friend except you don't have any friends so why are you playing a multiplayer game by yourself look the developers would stream their own game on Twitch so you could watch some gameplay to cope with the fact that you can't play it you know hey we generated two million keys I guess that was in the news at some point um and we've only given out some like why won't you just let everybody play Seth why are you like stealing fun from them um it's actually your fault Mr networking oh yeah so basically he streamed for so long that one of the developers died Midstream and turned into a ghost that must be where they got the inspiration to add ghosts to the game dying in single player is fairly simple when you die you either respawn or lose the world but what happens if you're in multiplayer if one person dies does the whole server reset or is it like Hardcore Minecraft where you get banned from the server for dying this is something the developers had many discussions about before they came to the perfect solution basically the idea there is like you're out on an adventure or a survival Endeavor with your friends and one of you perish which is kind of sucks if that's just the end of it so the ghost is basically like a down state similar to what you'd see in like uh Left 4 Dead Or Borderlands that's right dying in this game is like being down left for dead too we are only out for a little bit before someone revives you and then you're back in Action however if after a certain period of time no one revives you then you will respawn with no punishment at all okay you guys need to revamp this system not only is there no point in eating since you can starve and then respawn for free but no one is Reviving each other people are pvping the entire server to death when they hosted a px version of this game the developers quickly learned that strangers really hate each other because the whole game turned into a battle royale for the last man standing this had to change so they introduced a new system one that would encourage teamwork and make you care about other players now anytime anyone dies every player's Max health is lowered by 33% if three people die on a server then that's it you lost your world this sounds extremely over the top but it worked players began babysitting each other to make sure there was absolutely no chance that they could die and reset the world you know Vito would would play with with Kai another one of our uh developers and without this mechanic uh he just hoard the food and wouldn't care about Kai and if the kai died it's like yeah whatever but now it's like no no no no here have some food yeah right please don't die because because their wellbeing is also your wellbeing exactly exactly however one downside to this mechanic is that it is incredibly easy to grief servers by joining offing yourself three times and resetting the world the developers initially Justified this by saying it makes Co-op matter either Co-op matters or it doesn't matter and if it matters then it's grievable because it matters they compared it to shooting your teammates and left for dead and that's all well and good but I think there's a difference between temporarily killing your friend and completely deleting their day at Thousand World a perfect example of the flaws with this system happens in a developer's stream while messing around with a boomerang the developers end up killing each other or rather one of them somehow starves to death but that shouldn't be a problem after all they still have a life left and he respawn Spa instantly so what's the Worst That Could Happen how did you die uh unclear star starvation I chased him around until he oh my God they get spawn camped by the game well this system sucks as well time to change it what we got was pretty much the version we have today dying turns you into a ghost except the only way to get revived is if someone revives you and just to encourage players to help you not doing so would give everyone on the server an annoying sanity drain there's just one problem being dead is kind of boring if you died on the other side of the map you could be waiting 10 minutes before you get to play the game again which is really punishing while single player would reset your world if you died at least it was instant you could immediately start again with a press of a button but in Don't Starve Together dying is like being put on a medical waiting list if you died you have to wait 3 years before you can play the game again so they had to give ghosts something to do while their teammates fumbled to rescue them originally ghosts had a chance to set stuff on fire when haunting them but no yeah you're not going to change them at all I don't think I like what you're suggesting Mark they all they do is burn your stuff down so yeah that's not true the developers had to strike the middle ground between being a ghost not being completely boring but also not super beneficial either you don't want to encourage people to die in the end haunting triggers random environmental effects like summoning tree guards changing Hound types or even guaranteeing that the spider drops glands so you get revived faster one interesting benefit of multiplayer is that you don't have to be wearing a lifegiving amulet to respawn since haunting them is enough to revive yourself this is one of the many mechanics that completely change when you look at them from a multiplayer perspective life-giving amulets went from a gimmicky item to the best method to resurrect yourself other smaller items like the bush hat saw more use simply because the act of hiding is really funny in a multiplayer setting but not all items were this lucky some of them became inherently worse in the switch to multiplayer in single player sleeping was originally added to skip those long boring nights before eventually becoming a nice way to recover health and Sanity will also skip in the night obviously though you can't skip an entire day on a server with other people in it so the system had to be reworked while sleeping still gives you health and Sanity it's not exactly an exciting activity as you have to sit still and do nothing for multiple minutes at a time pretty much every main mechanic of Don't Starve got a major overhaul to account for multiplayer should you spawn randomly around the world or should everyone spawn at one portal should people be allowed to pick the same character yes then add shirts you can wear to differentiate yourself from others playing the same character how would caves work should Don't Starve have an MMO system where the whole server has to group up at an entrance and vote to enter or should we trust that our players's Game Boy Color can run two servers at once should people be able to pick up character specific items like Willows ligher if four people can do everything four times as fast then surely we should Nerf player damage and armor to account for this or will everything balance itself out due to players needing to gather their own food armor and other resources and how do we solve the problem of servers running out of Flint caves and the teleportato had yet to be added So eventually you would run out of flint and rocks causing the server to get soft locked so the five developers starved together and thought of the best way to regenerate rocks on the surface that's right meteors meteors will now periodically fall out of the sky in the Mosaic biome making rocks renewable there was just one problem in small apartments yeah um oh my God oh my God beo said this is going to be such a little bug what is this the screen shake from the meteors God no no I asked veto about he's like no it's just going to be a little thing a little bug veto you have a very different definition of small than I do depending on where you were standing the screen Shake would either be a little vibration or look like reality itself is falling apart but this update also introduced the first multiplayer only item that being moon rocks which as of now can only be used to make moon rock walls clay really wanted to have walls you could add to your base that weren't easily grief by other players speaking of anti-griefing measures this game is a serious trolling problem it is far too easy to burn down everything as a ghost which is like likely why 90 out of the 100 currently hosted servers are password protected do star's Community does not trust random players to not grief their world but how do you fix this well I suppose you can never fully change this as some people will always prefer private servers to public ones but you can definitely help players out by giving them anti-griefing tools such as roll backing this feature lets you revert your save back a few days which will totally not be abused to avoid yet the game also became less Griefer friendly as important items like the eye bone drop when disconnecting so someone can't just to join leave and steal Chester from you the old Bell is not going to be added because and just because people on the forums keep crying about it Willow is now no longer immune to fire people were complaining about Willow pretty much non-stop because Willow was the embodiment of Griefers and don't star together when a willow joined your server you assumed Willow was going to kill you um so we kind of just wanted to balance her out with some of the other characters we targeted Willow specifically since it is physically impossible to burn down someone's base as any other character to balance this out we gave her a teddy bear whose sounds were made by Smashing clay merchandise together almost as hard as clay smashed the addition of cannibalism out of their game lawn pig is a removed mechanic that was present in early versions acting as human meat you kill your friend in this game and don't starve lets you eat them the developers initially added it as a joke item and didn't expect anyone to actually eat it which must be why eating lawn pig loses you 20 health for a tiny gain of 13 hunger it was really bad the interesting part I want to draw attention to is the reason for its removal I ultimately made a decision to remove the long Peg because cannibalism like basically it gives rise to cannibalism in the game and don't starve is a game that's for all ages like it it's a game that we want people to be able to enjoy regardless of like sort of what their maturity level is but more importantly the idea clashed with the game's style it changes the direction of the game right and I think that you know talking about ages or whatever that's that's one thing but you know talking about you know everything that's um a little bit twisted in our game is kind of on a slant you know it's not directly Twisted it's just kind of on the slant and we're kind of poking fun at it without doing it directly yeah right it's like vaguely maob instead of like directly violent against other players and like you'd think that by breaking the heavily established no multiplayer wall clay would stop caring about what gets put into their game before it becomes a bloated mess but if anything the opposite is true they put a lot of thought into what should and shouldn't be in the game which is why every mechanic works so well here this isn't just the co-op mode to Don't Starve they didn't just let you play don't starve with your friends this is Don't Starve to together they had to rework the entire game just to make sure the Don't Starve experience still held up in multiplayer they basically fine-tuned everything to create the perfect game which is why I'm now going to mod the [ __ ] out of it and change everything because this game has insane support for mods although the developers didn't agree with lawn pig in their game they recognized that some people might want to play with it so all you have to do to enable it is enter the files and set this single line of code to true that's all you do it is the easiest possible mod you could make but no really I love the mod support you spend two clicks installing a wacky mod onto your server and everyone can still join regardless of whether or not they had it installed it's so simple and easy that you're almost encouraged to change the game to suits your play style stuff like an updated UI geometric placement gesture wheel or status announcements are all made by the same person what you're telling me that three of the four most subscribed mods are made by one guy well okay then Mr Clay developer one of the more mysterious mods is made by the developer clayfish aka v2k the mod in question is frog Weber it's a new character that's a frog and Weber and he jumps around and that's about it for the longest time I didn't think much of this mod as it probably didn't have a backstory but that has changed now I know the actual history of frog Weber after watching every early rhymes with play Dev cast I learned three things one game development is extremely hard that doesn't actually mean anything about uhoh and two the people on these streams are absolutely hilarious most of the time you have set Rosen Don't Starve togethers designer and Mark I can't pronounce his last name Don't Starve server computer guy and you would not believe the amount of memes that Spawn from these streams which end up being referenced in the game this is how the average Rhymes would Play Def cast went so they are talking about porting rain of Giants characters to Don't Starve Together you know there's a little bit of discussion there about creating rain of giants worlds but the characters for sure it makes sense like yeah you can't be the Frog dude what's he called the guy that's got the spider on his head or the guy with there's a guy with a there's a character with a spider on his head Weber Weber why did you say frog dude what's going on I thought he had like one of you black out I drink at work that's not true this sets the chat on fire as half of the people begin wondering if there actually is a frog character coming to the game while the other half are asking about unimplemented characters like pyro you did this well I mean this guy In fairness Mark did join after we finish reain of giants so he he can't be beholden to know everything the Frog dude I'm freaking dead that maybe we have a new character in the works and it's what no no don't say that because this this is how like goddamn rumors get started and then the whole Community some somehow gets into a situation not somehow very naturally gets into situation where it's like oh they said about a frog character on the Stream one time so it's just a matter of time before they see see what you've done now they're asking about Wallace and Waverly who are they exactly I'm going to look them up Seth why didn't you put these guys into the game I know I cuz I don't care about anyone except myself you're very selfish that's true and that's why the Frog Weber mod was created because this guy couldn't remember the name of Weber very cool mod Mr v2c you are such a I actually LS in my mind another meme that was added to the game is the potato cup which is such a powerful trinket that it is worth the most gold at the pig King anyways the game had finally stopped crashing every 2 seconds so the next step was to add some multiplayer only content specifically designed to kill anyone still trying to play this game by themselves the first of this content was the uus a deadly animal that had a chance to spawn at the end of a coant trail so deadly that it stun locks players with his ranged attack the uus is difficult to kill in a group so good luck fighting him by yourself the developers were really proud of this guy describing him as impossible to do on your own it requires multiple people to to take it down you you simply can't do it on your own you could probably take the uus down with enough blow darts pigs and other traps but fighting him head on without a Hunting Party should be impossible then the player base got their hands on the update and they found out you can solo him with an axe You' think that a super strong strong enemy like this would have powerful drops but all it gives you is a bunch of FL you also get steel wool steel wool can be used to make a brush which is helpful for beff riding this mechanic was actually a fan suggestion dating all the way back to 2012 look at this fan art of Wilson riding a beef this image became so synomous with Don't Starve that people thought it was a official art even gaming sites thought it was official art and used it when reviewing the game so understandably when clay said you can finally do what this fan art depicts in game people lost all of their hair on their entire body although I don't know why it's a together only feature because be writing would totally work in single player you would think that this means that they are abandoning single player in favor of this newer and cooler Don't Starve Together but then this happened when asked about the ocean Jamie Chen said um the ocean is just uh a place that you cannot go but what if we change that in collaboration with Cappy clay decided to let you generate an entire new world that is bigger than rain of giants where you sail between islands on a boat this isn't just a tiny new area this is a whole other game you can either play on the boring regular map or get stranded on an island and enter the lava caves that's as much as I'll go into Shipwrecked because unlike everything else in this video Shipwrecked had no rhymes with play streams nor does it have weirdly insightful comments from the forums and if I had either of those then they are deleted because I can't find them so let's fast forward to Spring of 2016 by this point both Shipwrecked and Don't Starve Together have left early ACC access Don't Starve Together in particular had an interesting change made to it this one addition will completely change how people play this game going forward and that change is turning dragonfly into a raid boss using tactics huh what what why instead of ambushing the player in the Summer she is now an optional enemy you can find in the desert You Can Tell She's a raid boss because dragonfly has 27,000 Health which is 10 times what she had in single player I don't think you understand how massive that is in single player you could kill both the ancient guardian and dragonfly with one Dark Sword and Don't Starve Together you need to craft five just to kill dragonfly not only that but her second phase causes her to spawn multiple annoying lav to overwhelm anyone stupid enough to fight her alone another reason to bring friends in case the obnoxiously High health bar wasn't enough of one but as should be no surprise by by this point people fought her alone anyway either by abusing the Dum La AI freezing them with an ice staff or just picking Wolf Gang and murdering them before they can do anything people killed dragonfly alone the reward you receive really emphasizes how optional she is using the scale you can build the scaled furnace which is basically a campfire that is always on this sounds broken but with how tiny the light radius is combined with the fact that you over heat quickly when standing nearby it really makes the furnace more of a decorational feature than a useful one the eyeball from deerclops lets you craft an umbrella that gives you 100% wetness protection for spring Burger's fur lets you craft a fur coat that absolutely destroys winter and dragonfly scale lets you make a furnace which you can cook food on if you want let's get back to the point clay seemed to really like the idea of an optional boss fight that challenges groups of players because the next thing they did was announce this new update line called Through the Ages an update so epic that it was immediately renamed to a new raid most of the content relating to six new raid bosses similar to dragonfly if you got to the end of the puzzle where Maxwell and Wilson fight each other you would learn some new lore about multiplayer and the new antagonist the villain change is interesting because it highlights the difference between Don't Starve and together in Don't Starve most up dates consisted of Maxwell trying to kill you updates were either some new monster or season and new items that helped you counteract that but it would seem cl's given up on trying to kill you because the new villain cares more about giving you optional challenges on August 11th of 2016 the First ofen new rain would be released and they returned to the classic Dawnstar formula of small consistent updates every 3 weeks accompanied by an update poster with trailers that show Wilson doing absolutely nothing while Willow does the heavy lifting the first update added toad stool who makes dragonfly look like the Goomba from 1-1 toad stool is absolutely brutal at least in its original form somewhere in the caves you can find this fat toad and he's the new boss it's a mushroom frog yeah so it's going to be a um dragonfly tier and Beyond boss uh it's going to be hard I don't I mean he's not intended for someone to try solo but I would I would want to watch that toad stool was the ultimate anti solo boss while dragonfly was hard to do it wasn't impossible to do by yourself Toad tool on the other hand will despawn and run away if you don't kill him within 5 minutes with that knowledge in mind how much health do you think he had 10,000 20,000 try 156,000 Jesus Christ that is like killing dragonfly six times to put that into perspective if you were wolf G with double damage and God mode it would take you 12 dark swords and about 9 minutes to kill him and if you remember toad stool borrows away after 5 minutes so yeah it's pretty much impossible to kill this guy by yourself not even cheese strategies like getting multiple mobs to kill him worked as to Tool threw out these bombs which could kill your entire Army in one hit it would seem that clay had finally done it after 4 years of people breaking their game it was impossible to kill toad stool without playing by their rules Maxwell 2 Wilson 2 or at least that's what everyone thought when out of nowhere 5 days after the update a man by the name of joeo cool stuff uploaded a video where he killed toad stool all by himself in just 13 days what how by using armored Bunnymen he gave football helmets to a bunch of bunny men who still died quickly but that didn't matter their purpose wasn't to kill toad stool it was to do as much damage as possible so that Joe could finish him off before his 5 minutes ran out the bunnyman died fairly early into the fight but it didn't matter because Joe had a few more tricks up his sleeve toad stool is programmed to stay in his little battle arena so if you lured him out he would attempt to return to it however he will ignore everything including you punching him in the face while doing this this let Joe and a few bunnyman do a lot of damage while to St struggled to retreat to his battle arena because a bunch of Bunnymen blocked his way another good source of damage came from the Tula side Club this club is basically a Dark Sword but it spawns a shadow tentacle under what you hit since toad stool is a giant mob that doesn't move much the shadow tentacles were able to deal a lot of extra damage all of this eventually led to the first solo of pre-fed to stool and what do you get for killing this Abomination RGB lights they did eventually Nerf him down to 50,000 Health removing the time limit while they were at it but despite that he's still a really challenging boss if you don't know what you're doing even with multiple people you will absolutely die to this guy but clay was not ready to give up yet after adding Krampus back into the spotlight among other things it was time time for the final boss the ancient fuel Weaver was not only going to be stronger than everyone who came before him but also much harder to find toad stool and dragonfly could in theory be killed on day one since both of these guys are accessible from the moment you spawn in but you should not be able to kill the final boss on day two that's I'm locking fuel lever behind both the ancient guardian and this other guy who can only be spawned on New Moon which is day 21 at the earliest after you acquire the shadow heart you then have to kill every tenter pillar in the caves and find the correct one that leads to the atrium a secret cave in which the fuel Weaver is summoned all of that should take you roughly 30 days which sounds about right for a final boss and how will we make this guy Impossible by yourself adding another zero to the health bar has proven not to work so instead we need to think outside the box you know what one person can't do that's right be two people at once in other words if fuel Weaver is designed around needing to do two different actions at once then bringing your friends alone will finally be a requirement and Don't Starve Together this is how the fuel Weaver battle goes initially it doesn't seem too bad the worst that happens is he traps you in a cage an attack that is completely unavoidable but then he turns invincible and then he begins eating small creatures to regain large amounts of Health you could try and remove his invincibility shield and then kill the little ones but there's a catch the problem with both of these moves is that they are on a short timer and once that timer expires he will use them again and again and again and again you could try killing all the shadows and then destroy the Torches but if you're too slow fuel Weaver will become invincible again and spawn even even more Shadow [ __ ] Lings it's virtually impossible to make any sort of progress in this fight without the fuel Weaver spamming his invincibility Shield or regaining massive chunks of Health it doesn't help that he also completely stun locks you every few seconds and so you die all because you're playing alone the developers had finally done it you needed a minimum of two people for this fight you you needed someone to deal with the shadow torches and someone else to kill the babies otherwise you would not be able to kill the final boss of Don't Starve Together nice we did it just kidding of course you can do this by yourself some people blew him up with gunpowder While others found some weird method to trap him but if you were really good you could beat this guy by yourself without breaking any quote unquote rules with an inventory that looks like this there's so many little tricks you can use to completely destroy this fight because apparently you can dodge the undodgeable cage attack by just walking at the correct time yeah here's the problem with trying to add boss fights to a Sandbox game since the players have the ability to do basically anything they want you can circumvent anything the developers throw at you with a little creativity and just to prove that point here's a little video of me killing the ancient fuel Weaver using my own method it takes me a while to do because I'm an idiot so this is a good time to mention that the community has found a way to kill this guy on day two as you can summon the shadow pieces on night one because of course you can you can also skip that tedious tenter pillar Quest by simply clipping outside the map and walking across the void to The Atrium or if you're really lucky use the Muggles zoom out and just teleport over there anyways here's the method I was using it's so easy to use it's there's like no skill involved you barely have to craft any special items for this although I forgot the spider egg this is probably a bug but I like to call it a manipulation of uh the game's AI the fuel Weaver is just stuck here he can't do anything he won't move and then I kill him as the weakest character in the game the developers must have gotten sick of their own player base breaking don't star because the next update was super weird that being the forge get ready because this special event would be all they do for the next 2 years in November of 2017 a new temporary game mode event thing called the forge was launched where you queue up with five other players to fight waves of enemies in an arena if this sounds like it has absolutely nothing to do it don't starve not a combat game then you'd be correct this this is the furest they've strayed from the original formula and it's the furest they've ever gone since Don't Starve hates achievements the forge loves achievements including boring ones like beat the game as Wilson beat the game as Willow beat the game as Wolf Gang beat the game you even get encouraged to come back every day because of this XP bar clay was so right that humans are boring because the second players learned you get skins for leveling up they began afking on servers and losing on repeat the fastest way to get XP was to queue up for a game sit on it for 30 minutes before losing and do that on repeat for hours and that's what people did you had entire servers of players sitting still and doing nothing just to farm some useless in-game items they were literally avoiding the whole game just to maximize on digital trinketry although it's worth noting that this was just a small portion of the player base the whole Forge thing was very random it's not that the forge isn't fun or wellmade but it feels like one of those clay game jams on crack here's a random game idea and let's use Don't Starve players to test it the reason I bring this up is because 3 and 1/2 years later clay teas a familiar looking title it's as if the forge was a test to see if a full game like this could work I mean just look at the similarities between the attacks rotwood has to be the forge full game stupid conspiracy theories aside for a while the community believed that that's all Don't Starve had become an abandoned game replaced with temporary events where the only new features were the character skins added to the shop the singular Hope was this trailer for some don't steam hams DLC but the last we heard of that was like 2 years ago so it's probably [Music] cancelled and then at E3 2018 CLA randomly announced that don't starve Hamlet would be com in summer 2018 which was then quickly changed to December 2018 which was then changed to Summer 2019 yeah I I don't know this expansion took so long to make in comparison to anything else its earliest public beta was launched in August and wouldn't properly release until 9 months later apparently Hamlet as a concept was just barely made the team was supposed to stop at ship wrecked but they still had a few ideas they never did anything with so they made Hamlet this is how you know Hamlet will be great they almost definitely won't be another single player DLC ever again but the fact that this one exists purely out of passion is a good sign for its quality here's a fun fact if you signed up for the beta in August and offered to test the game you would get the full DLC for free all because you reported the same book 200 people did before you that science add that to the pile of stuff you could get without paying if you were around at a certain time but back to Hamlet I love this dealy Shipwrecked seasons were somewhat predictable as the base game already established that they change every 20 days yet one of my first deaths in Hamlet involved me fighting a hippo on day 11 before suddenly the music changes a bunch of fog appears I can't see anything I can't move and then I died because the season changed Hamlet sees the constants set up by the base game and burns them to the ground in the base game berry bushes can be found all over the map acting as a free easy renewable food source not even the pigs in the pig Village will care if you steal their Berry Supply Hamlet has no easy food sources there's an abundance of random vegetables you can forage off the floor but once they're gone they're gone and you'll have to resort to kill any insects most of whom drop inedible monster meat there is berry bushes but all of them spawn in the pig Fields guarded by Pig guards Pig guards will begin murdering you for committing the most Petty of crimes that's the thing they don't just attack you the pig guards seek to punish you for breaking the law every other Don't Starve mob forgets after a while beff will forget that you killed their Brethren if you walk away tall birds will forget you stole their firstborn if you walk away the one exception to this are the the tree guards who will stalk you across the map but even they forget your actions if you just reopen the world or put them to sleep the pig guards are much smarter not only do they remember every crime you commit but they also don't follow you too far out of their Garden grounds they fully allow you to leave the pig Kingdom just as long as you don't come back if you do return the pig guards will be just as ready to kill you for that flower you stole 20 days ago the pig guards will only forgive you after you either die or you pay them off with cash because this world is also insanely corrupt the pig guards merely pretend to keep the peace because as soon as money is involved they lose all their morality I was attacked by a pig robber once causing all my 100 oinks to spill out on the floor and instead of apprehending the teeth the pig guards began assisting his robbery and started stealing my coins as as well one time I even saw them attacking each other because the guards saw each other stealing money off the ground they would brutally murder a pig guard because they stole a coin off the floor then steal his coin which would cause another guard to come in and kill him another departure from the series is the inclusion of infinite light previously the game made it clear that nothing could be free because everything had to have a cost this included light you always had to spend some sort of resource to create light any glitches that broke the game to create infinite light would be quickly patched out and yet Hamlet gives you a permanent source of free light on day one there's absolutely nothing stopping you from living on the streets of the pig City while abusing the street lamps and guards for protection the bats which act as Hamlet sound waves are of no threat because the pig guards will always outnumber them even if the guards accidentally burn down a few houses it doesn't matter since a convenient Pig Builder will magically appear to rebuild everything back to normal you are playing an uncompromising Survival game and yet there exists this paradise that counters all the game's Mechanics for you the previously mentioned fog season can be completely negated by entering a building or even buying your own house but despite the complete and total safety it still comes at a cost starvation in the original game there's a common about how and don't starve starvation is actually the least of your problems but somehow Hamlet turned that premise on its head by making it the biggest problem at least in the pig City hunger is the one challenge that can't be easily overcome here sure there is shops that sell you food but everything in them is horrifically overpriced which forces you to either explore dangerous ruins and sell ancient artifacts for money or find a clever way of producing oinks alternatively you could turn to a life of crime and steal the berries but the guards won't be too happy about that if the DLC was only about a pig City then I think it would be pretty boring however just like in the original concept for Don't Starve Hamlet has a relaxed city building section and a more interesting Survival action focused Adventure part the game advertises itself as a city building simulator yet there's a good chance that on your first few playthroughs you won't even find the pig City I would argue that it only covers about 15% of the total map the rest is this unique mon Verde inspired Wilderness unlike anything else in Don't Starve my favorite aspect of exploration is how for the first time there is actually stuff to do there's goals to complete I don't disagree with the idea that coming up with your own goals holds more value than the ones the game gives you but sometimes you need something to work towards otherwise I'm going to to be sitting at my base doing nothing because I figured out how to survive and the only interesting thing left at that point are the Giants which rarely spawn once you raid the ruins and Shipwrecked volcano there's not much else to do other than survive indefinitely but Hamlet changes this there's so much to do and so much to find that if I told you all about it I'd feel like I'm spoiling the game so I won't mostly because similar to Shipwrecked I cannot find any cool design details about Hamlet the mechanics I discussed earlier are just things I noticed while playing the game and not necessarily something the developers intended to add St together clay got sick of losing money through events so they decided to make actual updates again in 2019 they introduced return of them a new update line which adds boats to Don't Starve which is funny because Shipwrecked already did this 4 years before one of the core principes princi of Don't Starve Together is to not divide the player base this is why rign of giants is free here and not a paid DLC since it's such a core part of the base game however porting over the entirety of Shipwrecked would not only be a massive sync of development time but would also net them zero money since they can't sell it as a separate DLC as that would divide the player base which I presume is the reason they began making their own version of the ocean and I want you to tell me if any of this sounds strangely familiar the ocean itself is about what you'd expect you have your sea stacks an island for new content and stone fruit which now finally give you way to mass produce rocks one unintended consequence of the ocean is that it felt like a side product once it was added there was the whole game in the center and then there was this other Tain tacked on let's see if the next update can fix this problem it didn't solve anything it took about 4 months for the next update to release but it mostly just expanded upon the content in the ocean clay must have realized this because their next update focused not on the sea but on the characters more specifically it added a new character up until now everyone was really similar to play so clay started doing entire updates to redesign every character while giving them their own animated short the forums extremely active after each animation's release likely because people like talking about their personal favorite characters more than boring ocean monsters I don't know how they did this but by attempting to expand the world of Don't Starve Together the developers ended up getting themsel in the same situation that the single player developers were in 6 years prior they added this big new area that most people didn't care about promised to add more in subsequent updates but really all anyone cared about was the new character updates how does this even happen are we stuck in a loop this is an identical scenario but replace caves with the ocean personally I think attempting to add the ocean was a major blunder or at the very least a major time Sync It's better the way it is in the game now but back then it was completely empty aside from rocks Everywhere by adding this ocean teed AR clay essentially dug himself into a hole and the only way to fill that hole was to somehow fill this giant map they created and that endeavor would take them 2 years when the arc finally concluded earlier I said that the ruins fixed all the problems with the caves but I was lying all the ruins did was make players skip the caves level and go straight to the more interesting area a process which is still seen and Don't Starve Together known as ruins rushing even now the majority of the caves is just an empty area that that no one visits so it's sort of shocking to see clay make the exact same mistake 6 years later with the sea then there's the current Arc and the way it's going is very interesting from Beyond started 3 months ago and it's taking the game in a fresh Direction updates and don't starve went from being new threats you were forced to overcome to optional boss fights and areas you could go to if you want the new update somehow adds both killing either of the two Final Bosses will add environmental threats that spawn on the surface and in the caves however doing so will also Grant you the opportunity to craft stronger equipment so strong that it looks like it came out of Elden ring or something what is this remember when armor looked like football helmets because now they look like Terraria armor sets though I suppose that makes sense considering the crossover that happened a year ago yeah this game is the eye of culu as a boss now no deerclops is not for from Terraria I'm so mad searching up deerclops do star's most iconic boss puts the Terraria version over the Don't Starve one this is just sad to see there's probably some kid out there who thinks cool items like Chester Abigail the pumic horn are stuff Terraria came up with back to from Beyond the new update adds an earth shattering Hazard that is also completely optional which sounds counterintuitive as hell because well why would I willingly make the game harder for myself this is like if wildfires were an event that the player had to manually trigger and not one that occurred naturally the point is Clay has been experimenting with new Earth shattering hazards since they added Moon storms to the game which is odd because the last time they added any environmental event that could challenge the player was back in 2017 when antline was added as a replacement for dragonfly in the summer so in a way this newest Arc is actually returned to the original formula that don't starve was about originally caves and content similar to it was added as to not confuse new players no one wants to come back to Don't Starve and find out they added a turst meter this is why the caves and ruins were added to challenge experienced players who may want to venture beyond the normal confines of the game this is the philosophy Don't Starve Together as followed with its raid bosses up until now because world changing events are being added again but this time they are linked to player progression you kill the fuel Weaver acid rain bigger earthquakes and stronger nightmare creatures will spawn you kill the celestial champion and your garden is infested with terrible weeds of course this is all speculation on my part I don't know what the developers are planning or why they are adding it but if I'm correct and they are beginning to link player progression to new environmental threats then this seems like a great direction to take the game in the game will get harder over time but the difficulty will scale with how good the player is the game always got harder over time but now it gets harder the further you progress I've seen people complain that the recent updates have destroyed their Mega bases look at these Boulders absolutely wrecking my chests and I'm sorry but do you know what game you're playing I get it though it's annoying having your base you spent 20,000 days on get demolished with no real way to counter it the best case scenario is that the game will let you disable this stuff in the world settings which as of recent updates let you disable pretty much everything in the game although this scenario presents an interesting dilemma if clay continues to add new destructive elements to their game situations like this will only become more common so the developers will have to make a decision do they want to let people build cool bases or do they want the game to have devastating environmental effects or perhaps is there a way to do both of these things without compromising the other probably the last one because that's exactly what they did while I was recording this video however big changes to Don't Starve are only going to become more common because clay has been doing this to the game since 2019 reexamining old rules from the single player game to see if they still apply in modern Don't Starve Together you lose your world when you die no you don't food won't grow in winter yeah it does you are given the option to turn off permet in the world settings and the revamped farming system lets you grow crops in Winter Additionally the game will now hint at what to do through the tips in the loading screen which can make the big moment of dying to Darkness non-existent as the local tool tip guy describes how to avoid it it all sounds very Superfluous like the the game has been dumbed down to appeal to a broader audience but that wouldn't be giving you the full picture the developers aren't afraid to modify the game to fit a new vision but at the same time aren't changing things for the sake of changing them previously farming was incredibly expensive for very little reward making it not matter if seeds grew in Winter because the system sucked as a way to get food especially considering everything else in the game is a cheaper food source that is most likely available all year around the new farming system is not only vastly cheaper allowing you to plant over 20 seeds with one Farm kit but also has more mechanical depth plants might grow in winter but certain plants grow better in Winter as do others in different seasons crops grow better if you put them besides certain crops that they like or if you don't care about any of that and just want the food you can still grow produce without interacting with any of the deeper mechanics both are valid ways of playing the game however there is now a downside present in not tending to your garden that didn't exist before at first you'll get a few annoying weeds because you didn't properly take care of your garden but eventually a full-on boss spawns to punish you for being a terrible farmer you could make the argument that the new farming system is overall easier than the old one but I think the more accurate statement would be the new farming system is more usable interesting and most importantly fun than the old one and yet at the same time it's also harder than the old system as you can no longer ignore your plants like you could in single player you know what other mechanic is useless the crafting menu itself this ancient piece of UI was once used to teach players about what they should be doing but now it's gained so many items that scrolling through the structures tab takes more time than installing Red Dead Redemption 2 let's play a game which tab does the tent go to is it a the survival tab or B the structures tab did you pick B because it's a placeable structure then you'd be wrong obviously it belongs here the survival tab question two where does the Dark Sword belong is it a the fight tab or B the magic tab it's the magic tab you see the problem here the recipe sorting system could not have been made more ambiguous what the hell even is a survival tab what makes the buget a survival item and not a tool so they improved it by sorting tabs to be more clear making the overall UI more Compact and by adding a search bar if you really hated this change then you could always build your own crafting menu because the game lets you do that clay also decided that you shouldn't be able to do this anymore and instead of just patching it they completely reworked how the ancient Guardian works before this guy was literally an upskilled Rook with a different texture but now he is an actual boss fight with unique attacks and weaknesses you can exploit another Innovation was more controversial World settings have always been attained since the first release of Don't Starve but recently in October of 2022 well let me just read it for you relaxed mode a more relaxed play style with less threats from the world survivors will not die from starvation freezing or overheating or the darkness damage to survivors is reduced Resurrection is always available at the portal this is exactly what you think it is welcome to easy mode on one hand it's your world your rules you paid the price for this game you get to do what you want with it but on the other hand you are going against every single uncompromising element from the base game by adding relaxed mode what is even the point of eating if you literally cannot starve on top of that there's a world setting that lets you turn off the timer when you die you can turn off peret I guess it makes sense you can't really keep a game hard forever you can try but as past examples have shown that doesn't tend to work in your favor the best updates either reinvent old mechanics to make them play better or give the player more control with regards to how they want to play the game that's not to say you should never add more challenges like what the developers are doing now but there needs to be more to it than just Wilderness dangers I like where Don't Starve Together is currently it's a perfect balance between adding some admittedly exciting content and rethinking old design decisions to make the early game better I found an interesting article from around the time don't starve was released titled Don't Starve a life and death struggle in need of a point this is a lot of people's experience with the game yeah the art is cool yeah I die and learn but what's the point of it why am I going through this if there's no light at the end of the tunnel I've been playing this game for 10 hours and because I died I have nothing to show for my progress single player's answer to this question is that the experience you gained from playing was the point the experience was what you had to show for playing the game the fun you personally had and all the solutions that were unique to you are the reason to struggle through it and if the core game play wasn't enough to have fun by itself then no amount of quests or special badges would change that by completely deleting all your progress the game is telling you that the fun you had playing on this world is more valuable than the world itself however that's a pretty pretty difficult message to understand if you don't find any enjoyment from being clueless and dying all the time the sequel makes this more clear without being as unfair the Recently Added scrapbook is likely an inspiration from Clay's other game oxygen not included which contains this built-in Wiki inside the game so you don't need any outside source to play it initially I believe this would go against the design of learning to do everything by yourself I mean the whole whole reason Don't Starve hates achievements is because they tell the player what to do but the Scrapbook is actually clever with how it's implemented while it does tell you everything about everything it won't show you that information unless you experience the event first for example the scrap book won't spoil the deerclops encounter but after he does spawn you can check it to learn some details about him such as his health and damage it's genius because it both helps players who might get stuck without directly telling them what to do next the Scrapbook doesn't tell you how to kill deerclops but the information provided might help you develop a strategy to do so I think you're becoming paranoid was that the freeze of 87 Max yes this is Maxwell gaming I'm