No, this isn't about wolves. Well, not particularly anyway. I just have a vivid memory of a certain Sega game.

No, this is about death.

Specifically, how much of a pain in the butt/time sink it can be to recover from death as a solo-player.

At first, the dropping of items doesn't sound too bad, the skill drain seems worse. You can make another club and some rags/leather armor quick and easy. And the difficulty curve from Meadows to Dark Forest isn't too much of a leap to get back into that by remaking some basic equipment. Then comes swamps. Swamps, Mountains, etc. will kill just about anyone without the appropriate gear, which essentially means you need to either train a very, very high sneak skill to regain your gear, or mine more Copper (and then Iron, and then Silver, etc...) all over again.

If you're smart, you'll have built some solid, nearby bases with portals to be able to get back quickly and easily, if you weren't, or were unlucky and had a key part of your bases destroyed you'll need to also likely) build a boat, travel there, destroy one of your two boats because you don't have any friends to bring the extra back and you can't disassemble them like everything else, and so on. On the plus side, all this extra work will likely give time for you to retrain (or even improve) your skills... but it can take hours, and in some cases (especially if you fail to retrieve your first set and now need to get two sets back...) it feels like it's almost as bad as just starting over entirely, as the only thing you keep is your (reduced) skills and whatever infrastructure you've built that wasn't destroyed.


That the game can be tedious, with a focus on logistics... I mostly like this. Needing to cart back multiple loads of ore, wood, and stone to build a base and build appropriate gear. Sourcing your food and stockpiling before a new expedition or attempt at a boss... that is fun to me... the first couple times.

With two different characters I've got a lot of playtime in this game (all solo) and I still haven't even gotten to the 4th tier... and part of that is how much time can get sunk into getting back to a state that you can try to get your stuff back (or to a point you can ignore it). While the ore resources are limited, it doesn't seem to restrictive at least, so there is that.

For me, even though I quite enjoy the game otherwise, it was almost enough to get me to quit it entirely. It's good for death to be punishing, but especially in later-game having to go through everything a fifth time is... too much.

There is a third-party solution to this, with modding (which I recently looked into and thus got back into the game, having a great time now) you can find mods to reduce, alter, or eliminate the effects of death on your skills and items. This helps a lot, and anyone else being frustrated by this should look into as well. Personally, I don't view it as "cheating" so much as "saving myself hours of repetition." But if you're enjoying it, more power to you.


This should, I firmly believe, be a base-line option in the game. To allow people to keep their inventory (maybe even skills), or even to increase the penalty if they want (like a "hardcore" setting that destroys items and puts skills to their minimum for example, for those that really want that kind of challenge). It doesn't need to be as specific as mods can get perhaps, but to get new players in, and want to stay in past the Meadows and the Elder, this would help.

Thanks for your time.