By: Bigfoot

Klei Discussions

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here, I’d like to share with you our plans for 2019, which are extensive!

First, I’d like to recap what happened in 2017/2018:
In 2017 we launched the Forge, and followed it up in 2018 with the Gorge. The idea was that we could offer a new way of playing Don’t Starve Together, in a limited-time format. We were a bit burned out on creating DST core game content and this format allowed us to try something a bit different, so we made these crazy game modes and provided them to the community for free.

Every time we launched these events, tons of players came to play, and in every instance we hit our highest ever DST concurrency. We’re super thrilled that so many people came to play the our weird game events!

While we enjoyed the events and are happy with the result, there were some drawbacks:

They took WAY longer to make than we expected, so we weren’t able to make as much content as we wanted, and it left little time to do things like bug fixes and Quality of Life updates for the base game.
Because we run the servers for these events, we also incurred the cost of these servers. Those of you who have been here a while know that Don’t Starve was not architected to be a multiplayer game, so running them on our servers was extremely inefficient. In short, even though we loved that everyone came to play, the item sales were only barely covering the costs of the servers.
We found that it was exceedingly difficult for us to run these events on console and as such underserved our console players.
It has been a valuable experience and we think the game is better for it, however we feel that it’s time that we turn our attention back to the core Don’t Starve Together experience: surviving together.

Here’s what we’re doing for 2019:

Brand New Content
The team is now working on brand new content for Don’t Starve Together. Survivors will be able to travel to new lands with new biomes, creatures, and more.

The first drop of this new content will come in mid-April, and we will continually be adding to the content every couple months afterward. As we said before, we think it’s important that everyone can play together and we don’t segregate our audience, so all of this content will be available for free to everyone!

Character Refreshes
The team also felt it was high time we gave our core cast some love (yes, we heard you). Over the course of the next year, we will be bestowing every character with revamped abilities, and give a glimpse into their backstory. Our goals here are to make each character unique, interesting and valuable in their own right and we expect this to be game changing in many ways.


Starting in March with Winona, we will be releasing a character refresh once a month.

These character refreshes will again be free to all players, and we will be selling new skins for these characters on the month they are refreshed.

In addition, the Triumphant, Guest of Honor and Survivor skin packs will be available to purchase for the character on that date. All owners of these skins prior to that date will be upgraded to an “Heirloom” rarity, with a higher unraveling value.

New Characters Enter the Fray
A fresh batch of four characters have been unwittingly ensnared and brought into the world. These new survivors will be released into the wild starting in Mid-March, and a new one will be released every 2 months.

forum_newcharacter_small.jpg

We are still deciding the final price of these characters, but we currently think they will be $6.99 USD each, which includes a full character skin set. You will also be able to weave the characters with spool.

Since we do not want to charge players for the new world content, these new characters will be our main way to fund development of this new content.

Console Development
We are working hard on keeping the console versions of the game up to date. Specifically, we are investing in technology to allow us to more quickly update the game without going through lengthy certification on every small change, and we've also added more staff to work exclusively on updating the console versions.

We're happy to say that the next update for the Year of the Pig King event will launch within 2 days of the PC version.


Quality of Life, Twitch Drops, Etc.
We will also be continually updating the game with bug fixes, QoL updates, new skins for Twitch drops, and more things that we’re not quite ready to announce yet.

Speaking of which, the Year of the Pig King update is going live on Thursday! Long Live the (Pig) King!

--
And that’s it folks!

In short, we are significantly increasing our support of Don’t Starve Together in 2019 with new game content, character refreshes, new stories to be told, new characters, and new skins.

Thanks so much for playing this crazy game, once again. I’m still amazed at how it’s evolved over the years. Please give us your feedback and thoughts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJbF_0Y5JEU&t=14s

This should have been posted earlier but....









eh

Originally posted by author:

JoeW
Posted Thursday at 05:13 PM

And... We're back!

As we mentioned previously, we're bringing back the Forge for another Limited time event.

We have added some stuff and changed things up a little bit so we're going to open The Forge a little early for some good old-fashioned "Let's see if anything breaks before it goes live and hopefully you can keep your progress" beta testing. Yay!

We're warming up servers and getting everything ready to go. These few days of testing will help us iron out any issues before things go live. In particular, we need to stress test the servers all over the world to make sure they hold up.

The Beta begins on November 5th, however The Forge will be open for everybody in November 8th. If you’d like to join in the Beta, please follow the instructions below.

We hope that you will be able to keep your progress from the beta. But there is a very strong possibility that something will be broken causing us to lose progress. Please be prepared for this possibility as we will not be attempting to compensate for this occurrence - if you can't deal with losing everything, wait till everything goes live officially.

F.A.Q.

What is The Forge?
The Forge is a limited time event for Don’t Starve Together. During this time players can earn event themed skins and rewards that are only dropped during the event.

Yeah, but WHAT is The Forge?
The Forge is a limited time 6-player co-op challenge, where the goal is to try and defeat Battle Master Pugna's champions in an arena. The only way to survive will be to work together.

The Forge is played on official Klei servers that are available only during the event. There are no community hosted servers during this event.

What else is in The Forge?

This years Forge has had many balance content and progression changes.
Character skins, emotes, item skins and more. Including skins from last
season with hundreds of items.

• Free on-demand dedicated event servers (Forge Only).
  
• Simple Matchmaking with friends / community groups.
  
• Event drop system (Forge only).
  
• And more!

What kind of feedback are you looking for?
First, we really want to know if something is broken. But we’re also looking for gameplay feedback. If you find a security vulnerability or gameplay exploit, we ask that you send it to us directly at [email protected] so that we don’t have issues with abuse. Please also include your steam id so we can investigate and follow-up on the issue properly.

If I play the regular game during the event, can I still earn skins?
You can. However, with one big difference. All common drops will now reward an event chest that contains Forge event items. Regular common items will return after the event.

Is The Forge free?
Yes! Events are free for everyone who owns DST. Players will have the option to purchase a single character’s Magmatic Skin Set for $2.99, or the entire Magmatic Chest collection for $12.99.

We hope that with this mechanism, we can both continue creating great free content while also supporting the development team. In addition, this method of funding allows us to provide content to all our players, instead of splitting the player community if we implemented it with a DLC paywall.

Why is The Forge temporary?

We get this question a lot. The Forge runs on official servers that we pay for and provide free of charge. Playing on official servers means that we have more control over the rewards we can provide during the event. Because we designed the event around this, we designed the gameplay to be played for a short time.

What about Forge Chests?
While we think it’s fun to get and open random drops, in terms of purchasing we felt it was better if players could buy the skins directly. We hope you feel the same!

When does the Forge end?
The Beta will last until The Forge officially opens, right now scheduled for Nov 8th. For the full launch, The Forge will last 3 weeks from the time it launches and we expect it to launch around the second week of November, but we will see how the beta goes. More details announced with launch.

Can I keep the items I gain during the Beta?
Your progress and the items you gain during the Beta will NOT be carried over from beta. ANY and ALL items you receive during the beta will be lost when beta is over.

We will have a mechanic for community progress this time, and this will carry over into the live version.

What is available during the Beta?
Pretty much everything is available. The only thing not available is skin purchasing and of course any finishing touches, balance changes and bug fixes that come from testing.

Where do I submit feedback and bug reports?
Please submit your bug reports here[forums.kleientertainment.com], and feedback here. [forums.kleientertainment.com]


From: 𝕶𝖑𝖊𝖎 𝕰𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖙𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/97865-the-forge-beta-begins-november-5th/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=lX0ovvZxzTk

Well, we got part of The Forge, but hey! Atleast we know people are working on some sort of arena for the Forge, currently its at an alpha state, but you can beta test it by downloading the game mode and testing it for yourself to check out features they have added, yet again, its at an alpha state so its not playable yet.

SO far they have added the character select and ready up screen, the arena, and all
enemies being spawned via console or Fix for too many items. Some enemies may crash the game when spawned doing specific actions.

So right now at its current postiton, this mod as enormous potential to be a fully functional Forge, I wish the creators of this mod, good luck.....

But once there are atleast functional waves and an actual victory, I will try then to create event schedules for more and more people to hop on in with us!

Link to the Gamemode
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1448485602

Link to the guide
https://steamproxy.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/1448485602/1739964766311358280/