The hunger change and moving clothing looks really great and it sounds like combat/spawn will also be a lot better, but why did you remove fuel requirements? What will the water spirit in the mana extractor even do then or why do we get to make coal and what will those tons of bones and sap from the wind spirit harvester do? I get that you did that to the mana extractor, since it was a bit weird and people seemed to miss that (could have also give more hint in the tutorial about that though), but the patch notes make it sound like a general change and not just for the mana extractor?

It is also a bit weird to see enemy night time scaling being removed in the same patch that made enemies not spawn next to you when night starts and sleeping being able to skip night (thought not mentioned in the patch notes, it was in the last dev blog). Sounds like you just removed a choice from the players?

It also sounds a bit like I would just restart the session after an unstuck, since there is no way to say if I would fall into a crevice against that session. I mean you get better at avoiding that after some time, but it still sounds like a pain for new players.

Really like those stat icons! More identity to the game like that please! Long hair also sounds nice, but I do hope the camera does not eat it like it currently does sometimes (especially when aiming with the bow).

Originally posted by glass zebra:

The hunger change and moving clothing looks really great and it sounds like combat/spawn will also be a lot better, but why did you remove fuel requirements? What will the water spirit in the mana extractor even do then or why do we get to make coal and what will those tons of bones and sap from the wind spirit harvester do? I get that you did that to the mana extractor, since it was a bit weird and people seemed to miss that (could have also give more hint in the tutorial about that though), but the patch notes make it sound like a general change and not just for the mana extractor?

It is also a bit weird to see enemy night time scaling being removed in the same patch that made enemies not spawn next to you when night starts and sleeping being able to skip night (thought not mentioned in the patch notes, it was in the last dev blog). Sounds like you just removed a choice from the players?

It also sounds a bit like I would just restart the session after an unstuck, since there is no way to say if I would fall into a crevice against that session. I mean you get better at avoiding that after some time, but it still sounds like a pain for new players.

Really like those stat icons! More identity to the game like that please! Long hair also sounds nice, but I do hope the camera does not eat it like it currently does sometimes (especially when aiming with the bow).

hihi!

Regarding fuel, long term we want to try to integrate things like station power more directly into the Spirits in the base. This change will come farther in the future though - and in the meantime, we had some technical challenges maintaining fuel while making some other changes. Because we do not want it to exist as-is long term, in the short term we have removed it. Eventually, there will be some type of power associated with your base and its power level that will help fuel magical stations :) It's a bit far out, so this plan may change, but that's our current thinking!

Regarding the night time enemies, its another similar line of thinking. This was causing a ton of player friction and negative experience, but also long term we have decided it is not the way we want to increase difficulty at night. We will have different frictions in the future, and sleep will still be a helpful tool for bypassing that. But in the meantime, we wanted to remove this because its purpose was not sharp enough, and it was creating an actively bad experience for most people.

The Unstuck, we'll keep feeling this out. We wanted to balance some amount of an 'emergency' switch in case you really hit a bug, but did not want to make it 'easy' to trivialize some of the travel frictions. If people _really_ want to restart their client every time, it is technically exploitable, but I think that barrier will make a lot of folks not do it :) you'd be surprised how many people don't want to restart!

Andddd thanks for the kind last words :D we did fix the camera issue with the hair, and it doesn't happen on any new hairs!

So multiple of these changes are to asap remove friction, but not meant to be permanent changes? I mean it is a demo, so balancing is not that important, but it is definitely a lot less fun for some people to have stuff "evened out" like this. The onboarding experience is important though and I can understand why you decided to cut it for now, but it seems a bit like a cheap solution and less interesting.

Imo what was the biggest issue is the difference in burn time of e.g. wood vs coal. Wood burned up so so quickly that is felt pretty ridiculous to even fuel the stations for your first few mana, while with coal it felt pretty much infinite and you could spam a lot of harvesters in your base running all the time because of the bones you get + sap from a single wind spirit harvester. I think quite a few of these changes seem like they stem from some imbalances especially for early solutions/encounters that deter people to go find the more efficient solutions, since the early stuff seems so bad to use and people don't expect things to get so much better on the next step. Same for food with the berries just in front of the cave when the free-game starts. It is a bit sad to get some things removed when it feels like it was mostly about easing players in better.

You will likely still get feedback you get from people being annoyed that they have to restart their client due to a game error. It is not just a barrier for people to use to skip travel, but also a barrier for people to enjoy the game due to glitches. It is probably a lot better than the current system and will likely cause less annoyance, but unless the new patch will fix some more of those holes, you will probably still get people unhappy with that solution until they learn to stay away from slippery terrain/how to build ladders to get out.

I am definitely looking forward to what the next-step solutions or designs will be with these things, but so far it feels a bit too shy and making the game less interesting in the long run due to cutting out considerations for players regarding resources or day-trip planning. I definitely went out at night to the strong hold to get some loot and fight and wanted to go get underwater relics at day. The weird part was enemies face-spawning/changing when you were already fighting.

You know better what kind of feedback you get (e.g. from Discord) and what is important for the current development cycle of the game though, but it the direction of these changes does not look interesting to me (if it would stay like that). Thank you for the detailed answer and feedback as always.

Originally posted by glass zebra:

So multiple of these changes are to asap remove friction, but not meant to be permanent changes? I mean it is a demo, so balancing is not that important, but it is definitely a lot less fun for some people to have stuff "evened out" like this. The onboarding experience is important though and I can understand why you decided to cut it for now, but it seems a bit like a cheap solution and less interesting.

Imo what was the biggest issue is the difference in burn time of e.g. wood vs coal. Wood burned up so so quickly that is felt pretty ridiculous to even fuel the stations for your first few mana, while with coal it felt pretty much infinite and you could spam a lot of harvesters in your base running all the time because of the bones you get + sap from a single wind spirit harvester. I think quite a few of these changes seem like they stem from some imbalances especially for early solutions/encounters that deter people to go find the more efficient solutions, since the early stuff seems so bad to use and people don't expect things to get so much better on the next step. Same for food with the berries just in front of the cave when the free-game starts. It is a bit sad to get some things removed when it feels like it was mostly about easing players in better.

You will likely still get feedback you get from people being annoyed that they have to restart their client due to a game error. It is not just a barrier for people to use to skip travel, but also a barrier for people to enjoy the game due to glitches. It is probably a lot better than the current system and will likely cause less annoyance, but unless the new patch will fix some more of those holes, you will probably still get people unhappy with that solution until they learn to stay away from slippery terrain/how to build ladders to get out.

I am definitely looking forward to what the next-step solutions or designs will be with these things, but so far it feels a bit too shy and making the game less interesting in the long run due to cutting out considerations for players regarding resources or day-trip planning. I definitely went out at night to the strong hold to get some loot and fight and wanted to go get underwater relics at day. The weird part was enemies face-spawning/changing when you were already fighting.

You know better what kind of feedback you get (e.g. from Discord) and what is important for the current development cycle of the game though, but it the direction of these changes does not look interesting to me (if it would stay like that). Thank you for the detailed answer and feedback as always.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply :D glad I could share some insight at least ! It's always a trade off between acting now vs later, or keeping things until bigger changes come in. It's definitely not clear cut, but even our active players feedback was indicating to us that these systems were functional but not doing what we wanted and degrading the experience. So I hope by softening them for now, a lot of folks who bounced off or would bounce off will have a smoother onboarding experience :D