by zebratul » Sat Dec 29, 2018 10:40 pm I must preface this by stating the obvious — i haven't played the game for the last year and a half, or maybe more, so a lot of things are new to me. Pushout is great, hearth with cart is cool, wardrobes, drinking rework — all good QoL changes that reduce tedium. However, the actual new game design elements — dungeons — seem flawed.
Here's a short list of things that i found frustrating, unclear or downright broken.
1. The dungeon is massive and very, very time consuming.
As a first time player, i didn't know a lot of ant mechanics, so it took me over 6 hours to finally give up on this dungeon.
As soon as i entered the first room, i got the general idea — ants spawn in waves, defeat them, the doors open. The experience was very very grindy in the first rooms (my flex-button-spamming hand almost had a cramp IRL, too much flexing), and not rewarding. It got almost mechanical, run, get 2 IP, flex once for mounds, twice for dog-ants, thrice for the big honey ants. There were very little tactics or strategy, terrain is boring and the rooms are all the same (there was 1 room with a stalagmite maze, it was cool). The danger only comes from ants attacking in groups of 4, and then continiously spawning back.
However, soon i ran into a room with seemingly endless ants, who dropped keys. I kept killing them, waiting for the trusted room-opening mechanic to kick in, collecting keys, thinking, maybe they are for the treasures. I wasn't able to go through the room and had to go to sleep and heal.
My stats:
2. Key-spawning room are badly designed.
After coming back the next day, i've figured the keys mechanic — some rooms have unlimited (near unlimited?) pool of ants and have to be bypassed via keys. However, most of the keys i had seemingly didn't lead anywhere — they were from already opened rooms, a lot of the keys i've grinded were from the same 1 or 2 doors (i didn't know that), different room keys were mixed up.
This is very counter-intuitive, and seems like lazy game design. The keys need to look different (they even look like one of the curios from the same place, ffs). One of the solutions — just randomize the hue of the key depending on the room (or have a set of colours, black, grey, brown, etc), or add a text description to them (crooked key, twisted key, chewed key, etc). Maybe add a inspect description to doors («this door is guarded by ants» -> kill more, «this door looks chewed upon» -> use chewed key, «this door is controlled by a shrine somewhere» -> use a shrine key). And, most importantly, the keys should stop dropping if all the doors in the room are opened.
Maybe indicate unlimited spawn room by bubbling earth mounds that spawn ants?
3. The loot is worthless.
Here's how the general loot looks in the place (as far as i've reached).
There are 3 sources of loot in the and dungeon: A. actual ants, B. ant pupae, C. ant eggs loot chests. Sadly, there are issues with all 3 of them.
A. Actual ants. Since some room have unlimited amounts of them, the ants are mostly un-butcharable. However, some of them are not, and are an actual source of chitin, meat and guts. But, there's no way to differentiate the two. Maybe make spam-ants insta-despawn.
B. Ant pupae. These are generally worthless, spawning some 30-50q ant bits. The only item of worth are Needles with LP/H of ~400, maybe ant soldiers. The rest are foragables that would be much, much faster and easier to collect outside.
C. And eggs chests. These are just bigger pupae. More soldier ants and Needles for you to enjoy (?). Again, terribly not worth the time.
Summing up, these rewards are only worth to 10-statted newly burned in Hearthman, but he would not survive here.
4.The disaster.
Despite the hardships, i pushed forward, intrigued by branching paths of the dungeon, and slowly increasing loot Quality. But, as i soon discovered, the dungeon was bugged (in a game-breaking way.)
After about 4 hours since entering the dungeon, i've cleared out every room, except two:
The bugged room:
This room was situated after an unlimited room with 3 doors. I've used the keys on all of them to progress, this room was the first. It was empty when i entered, and the door was locked. I didn't pay much attention to it, and moved on.
The shrine room:
This room, too, came empty. Which, i guess, was intended. But i soon realised that i haven't seen the shrine to open this one.
I've began collecting keys to the unlockable door, farming the room next to it, but it was in vain.
Every key i've collected there, was useless — the key only open doors in the same room the ant generated from.
Random roaming ants didn't help either — they didn't spawn in that tiny hallway.
However, i've found out that you could despawn keys by clicking them on matching door arches that has already been opened. They disappear afterwards.
5. Epilogue.
In the end, i was forced to leave, after 4 trips, totalling up to 6 hours. This was a disaster of an expedition, massive waste of time, and a whole bunch of frustration.
Gathering the reports, bat dungeon appears to be as broken and bugged as this one, maybe even more. Beaver's lodge seems to work alright, for the most part.
Please, consider a round of polish on these dungeons.
This was the only original piece of loot i got out of the dungeon, hilarious:
