So how is everyone doing at the game? I thought I was doing pretty good today. I had a campfire near some beefalo, so I could get some manure. I had some berry plants lined up and fertilized, I was going for advance farming plots at the time. Until 2 "treemen" took me out. I could not take them out, I could have left to a different island, but I would be leaving my base I worked so hard for.. I'll be playing more tomorrow and ignoring the bottom island. So how is everyone else doing?

Pretty great, got to 15 days on my first playtrough and died on purpose to see the second character. Now on my third or fourth one, don't see any danger on the horizon. I can keep growing trees to keep the treeman at bay, and my turbo farm plot produces more food than I will ever need. I also have an amulet I dug out of a grave altough I don't know what it does, I'm protected from death so that's good I guess? Don't see any wild or useful stuff in the tech tree. Did I miss anything? Because I don't feel a great urge to go back to the game if I can't find anything else to do in it.

So far I haven't starved, so good job there. Now I just need to work on forgetting to replenish the fire before it's so dark you can't interact with it even if you know exactly where on the screen it is (dick move, guys), bees, spiders, more spiders, the recent update that increased spider population in spider nests (really? really???) and accidentally eating monster meat when I meant to click on berries with really low health.

The good news is I've recently set up home in a nice beefalo patch. So long as you don't attack them, they seem pleasent enough and they're great for kiting newly spawned hell hounds into for free drops you don't even have to fight for. Also, I've serendipitously glitched Krampus so that he's not coming to get me (he spawned on a very close island, but there's no bridge between his and mine).

I am facing the same sort of problem as @pyrodactyl though. Because I've set up good source of food, really all I have to do is stand around my main camp and occasionally venture out for fertiliser. Without some sort of objective what will happen is I'll just run out of flint and not be able to make any weapons or cut down trees, at which time I can still survive by eating raw food because I'd have even plenty of that. (Playing second person right now, so dark isn't an issue.)

Once I get to about day 8, a tonne of dogs (or whatever they are) swarm me, and I can never seem to fend them off.

@DizzyMedal: I don't even have your flint problem. There's a stone field not to far from my camp and I could get enough flint and gold (gold tools) there to last years.

@mandude: Weird, the dogs always spawned in groups of 2 every week or so for me. I just make a spear and a log suit and dispatch them without any trouble.

I've managed 30 days and eventually got caught by of pack of 5-6 hounds. RIGHT IN MY CAMP! How rude of them. I wanted to get my weapons out of my chest (I had a couple of spiked tentacles) but I just couldn't stand still long enough, they just wrecked me.

So far I've unlocked the third character.

@pyrodactyl: The amulet needs to be equipped in your "chest" slot or whatever you want to call it, and it breaks after one use.

And yeah, so far in the beta, if you get yourself a nice camp with farm plots and berry bushes, a camp fire, maybe a crock pot, a tent and a couple of chests and some bee boxes, you can survive a long time. That is, until you make a stupid mistake, or get overconfident.

Edit: Oh and also, just a random question for you guys. Do you always create a new world when you start a new game, or do you keep the same ones? I prefer to get something new every time, changes things up a bit.

I haven't seen any hounds yet... How bad are they?

@SexyToad said:

I haven't seen any hounds yet... How bad are they?

Not very bad, provided that you're prepared. You should research/build the spear and log suit. Best scenario is to lead them into some pigs or beefalo, which will dispatch them for you. If that's not possible, just kite them - run away, take the opportunity to attack right after they miss. You'll need to hit them 3 times each (maybe 9/12 total), and they'll probably need to hit you around 20 or more, so you should be fine. Alternatively, if you drop some meat, they will try to eat it, and you can kill them while they're eating.

About a day (IIRC) before they attack, you'll start hearing growling noises. Also be aware that any slightly reddish hounds will burst into flames upon death; don't kill them near your camp.

I'll probably just wait for them to add winter and the sanity system so I don't get burned out before the game becomes interesting. So, see you in a few months I guess...

game gets too easy to not starve at a point,if all your doing is grinding days then you can go on,its when you get cockey that you die.

I can't think of anything that could stop you from living pretty much indefinitely by setting up a fire pit in the grasslands near a beefalo herd. You have effectively an unlimited supply of grass, seeds, and manure, so you can build and maintain a ton of farms for food and you never run out of fuel for your fires (a rope can keep a fire going all night and then some, if memory serves). Plus, whenever hounds attack, you can kite them in circles around the beefalo. Eventually the hounds will shift their focus from you to the beefalo, at which point the entire herd converges and tramples them to death.

The only thing that can stop you at that point is boredom.

@TACOBOY said:

game gets too easy to not starve at a point,if all your doing is grinding days then you can go on,its when you get cockey that you die.

@BBAlpert said:

I can't think of anything that could stop you from living pretty much indefinitely by setting up a fire pit in the grasslands near a beefalo herd.

Yeah, on the Don't Starve forums, the developers have mentioned that right now it's too easy to not starve indefinitely (they also mentioned people planting "tree-walls" to protect themselves from monsters). They're planning to add some stuff to try and make the game more dynamic by essentially making any one strategy worse and worse as time goes on, so you have to keep changing strategies.

Give the pigs with meat and they'll join up and fight for you till their deaths. 8 pigs can kill pretty much anything. Get a bunch of meat by slaughtering rabbits after putting them to sleep with the flute, grab the reeds from the swamp and fabricate the rope from grass to build the flute, stock up reserves of meat whenever you need a pig posse to wreck something. The tentacles in the swamp can drop the tentacle spike which is a nice, free upgrade to the spear that does more damage. The pigskins come in handy as well for the pigskin helmet. Since the helmet gives you some damage protection you can drop the logsuit for the backpack. Also you can feed the pigs any fruit/vegetable and they'll poop manure.

I survived 44 days unil I aggroed TWO spider queens....TWO! they ran me out of my home base and there were so many little guys after I tried to kite them with out thinning the herd that had to run, but died in the darkness due to losing so much loot after getting resurrected at an effigy

This game is great. The art style and music give it some great charm.

i was doing great since i had survived though the first winter… i lived near the rabbit holes and never go far ( i was playing real safe because i was scared of encountering dangerous creatures)

then after the winter i thought that i should settle down my permanent base… it was hard to decide since i couldn't find an ideal place… but when the time i had made my mind… a NUMEROUS pack of hounds found me!! there were around 10 of them and i wasn't sure and maybe more!!! I was packing up everything to ready for my base and HELL they suddenly attacked!! my character had warned me before and i was ready for them but SHIT!!! not so MANY of them!!!! and suddenly something flashed through my mind…I had never encounter any hound since the very 1st day…and from the wiki it says that they spaw about every 3-5 days then i was like "GOD they accumulated!!!"

I really hate to say it but i died peacefully attacked by a UNIMAGINABLE NUMEROUS pack of hounds ='(