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Hey everyone! It's time, The Caves have arrived! Finally, you and your friends can go spelunking, get beat up by Rockys, step in Bat guano, get eaten by a Depths Worm, smell Slurper's rancid breath, run from angry Bunnymen, and go insane and die in some labyrinth in the Ruins! Hoooraaaayyy!!!
For those of you that haven't been following the beta branch, here's what's been going on:
About 2 months ago, we began bringing the Caves from Don't Starve single player into Don't Starve Together. This was a huge technical undertaking, as it was not previously possible to have a server with both the forest and the caves at the same time. Solving this meant making a way for two servers to be able to talk with each other -- one with the forest, and one with the caves -- and for players to be able to seamlessly "migrate" back and forth between these two servers.
All this additional network functionality took these months to pull together -- and of course we had to bring all the single player caves content up to DST standards, and solve many gnarly design issues along the way.
While there are still some rough edges that need polishing and improvements to be made, we feel that the caves are ready for release to the community at large! Don't Starve Together is still in early access, and so we'd like everyone to try out the new caves and help us find the remaining issues. So welcome! Come on in! We're glad to have you down here!
Here's the major changes and features to be aware of in the world:
- Now, you can have worlds consisting of more than one layer! One of those layers is the Caves preset, full of spelunking goodness.
- However, caves currently can only be hosted on dedicated servers. Thankfully, we've made an option to launch an Overworld and Caves dedicated server with almost no configuration. Preconfigured Server instructions can be found here.
- If you'd rather configure the dedicated servers yourself: Detailed dedicated server instructions can be found here.
- Caves look a little different than in Don't Starve. The layout is different, mushroom forests abound, and the sinkholes have gotten much larger.
- As well, the ruins have found their way up to the same level as the caves. So be warned as you are wandering around in the dark! You might just find yourself in a nightmare…
- Many items and objects in the game have undergone some tweaks and changes, especially things found in the caves. So pay attention!
- As well, dozens of existing bugs have been fixed! Yay! But we probably added lots of new ones too. That's how it goes!
Some other things to be aware of:
- Now when you make a server you pick an "intention" for it. This is to help players joining your server for the first time understand what kind of gameplay you're expecting on your server.
- If a direct connection can't be established to a server, the game can use NAT Traversal. This means it's easier to set up a server, with no need to mess with router settings. Official Steam Controller support is in, and several small tweaks and improvements to controllers have been made.
- There is now a dedicated server for OSX. This is especially important so that Mac users can run their own caves.