Originally posted by Bigfoot on the official forums:
Wow, we’ve sure done a lot over the past year! Among them we:
- Opened Don’t Starve Together into Early Access via the Frontier Pack
- Integrated Reign of Giants into DST
- Created new DST-specific content, including the Ewecus, Bernie, and the Beefalo Mount.
- Opened the floodgates, giving access to Don’t Starve Together for free to everyone who owned Don’t Starve up to that point.
- Implemented Caves into DST, and made it possible to create multiple DST shards
- Added character customization through the Item Collection system
- Implemented a ton of features to help players manage their worlds including clans, admin tools, and tons of modding support.
- Enlisted Capy to make an expansion to Don’t Starve (singleplayer), and released it into Early Access.
- Crushed hundreds of bugs (and of course, there will always be more)
While we achieved a lot of things, there are some things we didn’t get to. Specifically, Through the Ages is something we discussed in the forums, but has not yet been implemented. It’s always been on our mind, but the core design team had their hands full implementing Reign of Giants and Caves, and simply didn’t have the bandwidth to get onto the new content. Implementing caves especially was a huge undertaking, and we’re still trying to make the process of starting your own caves servers as smooth as possible.
Now that we’re finally at content parity with the base game (minus Adventure Mode, which we don’t feel works as-is in DST; but don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about Maxwell), we’re looking to do the following:
- First, now that we have just about all of the base game content ready, we’re going to iron the bugs out, and put the game out of Early Access. This signals to the general public that we feel the game is ready for them.
- Once we’re out of Early Access, we will start rolling out Through the Ages content. This will still take time, but we’re committed to supporting the game for the foreseeable future. As long as our fans continue to support us, we would love to keep adding content to the game.
More information about Through the Ages will come in the New Year, but in general, you can think of it as a mini-DLC (so, substantial, but smaller than Reign of Giants). It will be focusing on the evolution of your world over longer periods of time; things like alternate winters, and mechanics that work over the course of a year or more. And as we promised, this mini-DLC will be free to all DST players.
Thanks again for supporting our efforts all this time. I really appreciate it. We love supporting this game, and appreciate your feedback, so please let us know what you think!
Also, most of us are out of the office until early January so we can spend some time with the family and recharge for the New Year. Happy Holidays folks! It’s been another wonderful year.
RELEASE - 161368 - 12/23/2015
Changes
- Character customization and gifting system is live. The cavesbeta Steam beta branch is no longer required to get items gifted to you.
- Beefalo riding and taming has been added.
- Tail o’ Three Cats has now been added as a weapon to the Fight recipe section.
- Unicode Chat Support is in!
- Changing your system’s keyboard language will now work in all text fields
- Localization Mods:
- There may be some conflict with this change and mods that were emulating this on their own. Those mods will need updating (sorry).
- Notes for Modders:
- If you were doing any utf8/unicode processing in your mod to support localized keyboard input, you should be able to remove it. This is supported by the engine now.
- The calls to TextEdit:SetCharacterFilter() have been removed from most screens, except in places where we require very specific input. Note: The current usage of the filter does not work well with utf8.
- All previous updates to the cavesbeta branch are now rolled into the live default branch.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed rare crash when a server loses connection to Steam
- Fixed crash when killing Fire Hounds with an Ice Staff equipped and using a controller
***NOTE FOR PLAYERS IN CHINA*** It seems that a part of the gifting system is being interrupted for players in China. This issue wasn't reported while it was on testing, so we weren't aware of the issue until it went live.
The team is on holiday break until Jan, 4th, but this will be a top priority fix when we all return.
Sorry for the inconvenience. All fixed, have fun China!