Spider dens have a full life cycle. Tiers are more meaningful, and higher tiered dens will require strategy to overcome.
Spider queens come out of the highest-tier nests to wreak havoc and spread spideryness.
A new type of warrior spider protects high-level dens and the queen. They are resistant to kiting, so a frontal assault is not recommended.
Wilson can build fire darts, and light pretty much every creature on fire.
Wilson can build a spider hat from egg sacks that lets him control spiders. Just be careful when you take it off!
Wilson can build tooth traps and use them for defense or for guilt-free rabbit hunting.
There is a new, experimental map gen algorithm that you can use. It is a work in progress and is largely untested and unbalanced, so you may not live for very long! (Don’t worry, though - the old map gen is still the default!)
Pet Smallbirds will demand food when hungry, and can starve to death.
Wilson can build a warm hat. It… makes something happen.
New “epic fight” and “dawn” music.
Tuning:
High-level hound attacks are more intense.
Krampus is silent until you reach a certain threshold of naughtiness.
Farming takes longer.
Some fruits and cooked foods are a bit less potent.
Seeds drop less frequently.
The birdcage seed sorter is less reliable.
Pig houses wear out after a certain number of its pigs are killed.
Werepig monster meat threshold increased to 4, werepigs drop normal meat.
Fixes:
Stuff that falls out of bounds will disappear after a bit.
Most monsters will ignore things that are out of bounds.
Gobblers and Krampusses try to avoid getting caught against the edge of the world.
Fireflies drop individually.
Mobs shouldn’t get stuck in sliding animations.[/quote]
Klei is back from winter vacation, and we're working on the next set of updates for Don't Starve. We've got three months to complete the roadmap (and thus the game), so exciting times are ahead!
There will be a small update on the 9th. This is the "SHOVEL" update that some have spoke of in the past. (although we still don't know how you knew about it). There is only one new feature in this update, but I think that you'll like it. The reason that it is so small is that only I am working on it, while the rest of the team works ahead on the next update.
The next real update will be on the 15th, and with it we will resume our usual two-week schedule.
Here's an update on the roadmap features:
New Research Plan - I've got a pretty clear idea of what we're going to do with this, finally, and plan to implement it for the late-January build.
Level Progression - The experimental world gen that you got in the last update is actually the first part of this. The art for the craftable mechanism by which you progress to the next level of the game has been done, but is not yet hooked up. This feature is very closely tied to world gen, since we need to be able to increase the difficulty of a particular world to a fine degree. I expect that an early version will make it in to the game in late January / early February, and that refining and tuning it will consume most of Alia's time until launch.
Sanity - Alex is currently working on the art for this, and he should be done in a couple of weeks. Then, the gameplay programming team (me, Tatham, and Brook) need to go in and hook it up and do an initial balancing pass. I expect the first version of this will go live in early February.
Winter - As you can see from the winter hat easter egg, work has been progressing on the visuals. Kelly is currently adding snowy overlays to trees and structures. We have a couple of winter-specific creatures animated, but we need a couple more. This is the biggest feature in the roadmap (content-wise), so expect it to come later - possibly early March.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the schedule. We have 6 major updates left before launch, and the major remaining features will start coming out within a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted on any major setbacks or surprises that we encounter, as per usual.
This update adds the ability to dig up ground types using the shovel, revealing the bare dirt below. This results in a turf object, that can be placed down on bare dirt tiles. This is largely a cosmetic feature for the time being, but will probably become less so as we start to make tile types matter more.
Oh, and we got new art for the rocky biome, because it was previously just a duplicate of road.
This update was intentionally small, just to jump start our new 2013 schedule. The next usual-sized update is one week from today on January 15th, and then every two weeks from then on.