Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Don't Starve (Part Something Or Other)

These are Beefalo:

Generally quite genial, they are a gentle herding animal, dropping manure that is invaluable for farming. They also don't mind at all if the player scurries among them, picking up manure.

Well, except for breeding season.

During breeding season, their bottoms turn a shade of red, and they become much, much more aggressive. Wander too close and they'll chase you, attacking you if they catch up.

Picking up manure during breeding season=hazardous.

I had established a nice little farm next to this area, because it made it easy for me to make a daily run and pick up manure, then go back to my farm and deposit the manure in the plots.

Beefalo generally stay in their own terrain, which is this savanna grassland area. Two members of the herd, though, started wandering a little further north each day, and after a few days, they were happily wandering around my camp.

At night, they slept in front of the campfire, snoring gently. Seriously, they were snoring.

In the midst of all this beefalo domestic tranquility, I realized I had forgotten about one thing: mating season. When mating season came, they would attack me if I stayed in my camp, and who knows what they'd destroy.

This was going to be a serious problem.

There's another serious problem, periodically, and it's wild dogs. Big, nasty beasts that wander in packs and hunt you down. They'll kill you, if they can, but fortunately they don't appear very often.

When they're about to, though, you'll hear barking in the far distance. And it will gradually draw closer, before the slobbering beasts explode onto the scene.

So I was at my camp one night, meditating on the beefalo problem and hoping that I was still sane enough for the night spirits to leave me alone, when I suddenly heard barking.

Oh, crap. Now I had two problems.

In another moment, though, I had a plan.

I needed to move the beefalo, but there was no way to move them. I also needed to get away from the hounds. What if I ran the hounds into the beefalo and let them fight it out?

Which I did.

As soon as one of the dogs bit the beefalo, they turned aggressive and attacked the dogs. Two beefalo, six dogs. By the time it was over, both of the beefalo were dead, dropping fur, horns, and meat, and four dogs were dead. The two dogs still alive were so weak that I finished them off easily with my spear.

I wanted to just sit there and cheer. It was a brilliant, wonderful moment in a brilliant, wonderful game.

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