I am someone that mains Wormwood, and have hundreds of hours on that character. I have experience in both farming at base in a group and boss rushing as Wormwood.
The good:
The best part is that this update doesn’t remove or trivialize any of Wormwood’s downsides, (unlike with Woodie). His downside of not being able to heal via food gives him 2 unique playstyles, (either staying at base farming and avoiding combat, or a high skilled risk reward combat character that forces you to actually kite most mobs in the game), both of which I enjoy and are still intact, if not bolstered by this update.
I love all the plant crafting skills and their excellent crafting animations. They add a lot of value to a team mid and late game, and can allow wormwood to produce different plants at an exponential rate as he gets more of them set up. This also gives additional things for Wormwood to farm, for those who enjoy that playstyle. I could even see this expanded into allowing him to craft even more plants like pinecones, twiggy tree cones, palmcone sprout etc.
Petal Production is great. I usually never bother with compost wraps as Wormwood as I find using Glommer’s goop and super growth fertilizers better for bloom, and jelly beans/tents better for healing. Getting 32 petals a day makes Wormwood a rot/manure machine and provides immense utility as you get it passively and don’t have to go to the caves to collect light bulbs or something.
Seed Sleuth, (while useless for experienced players), sounds great for new players.
Poor Sap, (while I will never use it), I think it’s fine that this rework has one purely joke skill
Neutral/mostly good:
I love how the Lunar Guardian adds a lot more “reward” to the “risk vs reward” aspect of Wormwood when you play him for his combat playstyle. The only issue that I have is that it somewhat incentivizes tanking over kiting with the way brightshade tentacles spawn, (you don’t want the enemy to move). Besides that, it is a fantastic option for Wormwood players who enjoy his combat playstyle, (even if farmer Wormwood players will never use it because it requires farm-destroying brightshades to be active).
Butterfly Friend and Bee Kind are cute and fun skills. However, by mid game most killer bee hives are destroyed in my world, and it becomes a dead skill. A simple fix would be to allow Wormwood to harvest bee boxes without aggroing bees, (or with a reduced aggro radius), as this would further enhance his farming playstyle.
Lunar Cultivator is amazing. Bulbous lightbugs seem useful for Wormwood, as a free light source for Wormwood during boss fights before getting starcallers. By giving Wormwood Saladmander followers it enhances his “don’t get hit playstyle” that makes him so fun to play, (I think it was a deliberate choice to have them do fire damage to the player, as a way to get them to do the damage for you). Lunar Cultivator even fixes Wormwood's fundamental flaw: he is the character best at farming, despite gaining nothing from farming. Food is not hard to get in Don’t Starve, and farmed foods do less for Wormwood than any other characters. By giving Wormwood a craft that requires him to farm, (getting dragon fruit via Saladmanders is a waste of time), it incentivises him to farm. I know, crazy, can you believe it?!? WIth all of that said, why is this in neutral? While this is great for Wormwood, it worsens DST farming’s fundamental flaw. In DST, the easiest crops to get and mass produce, (tomato, potato, and to an extent dragonfruit), are the best crops in the game. Crops that are hard to farm like Durian and Pomegranate have zero reason to farm them. DST simply does not reward you for going out of your way to farm the hardest plants. Dragon Fruit is a top tier plant and now you have even more reasons to farm it. This is more of an issue with DST farming, rather than an issue with the Wormwood skill tree, so you can ignore this if you fit. Overall great update for Wormwood.
The mushroom planter traits are good, but could be much better. Better yield and faster growth speed aren’t that appealing. Two better skills would be to allow Wormwood to plant moon shrooms in mushroom planters, and to allow mushrooms planted by Wormwood to not turn into rot in Winter. Since Wormwood can make his own living logs, he is the character least incentivised to go to the Lunar Grotto, let alone make multiple trips there. Allowing Wormwood to plant moon shrooms would fix this whole upgrade line as it would make his fun sleep spore skill actually worthwhile to have on constantly.
I do not know yet how Flytrap works yet. As a farmer you are incentivized to fight Lord of the Fruit Flies as early as possible as the friendly fruit fly is a must have. Currently, LotFF spawns on day 35 at the earliest, (-0.5 days for every crop you spoil, but you don’t want your crops to spoil lol), so if this bypasses this hardcap then I think it’s amazing. It also makes it easier to spawn LotFF in some random corner and then abandon him, (only one LotFF can be in a world at a time). This is in neutral because I don’t know what it actually does and I can only go off of its description.
Bad:
Farmhand skills are completely useless. I’ve made some pretty big farms in my day and even I have zero use for this.
Blooming skills are completely useless. Once you get Glommer you’ll be bloomed 24/7. By late game you’ll have a bunch of super growth fertilizer set up, which will also keep you bloomed 24/7.
The way you get skill points is boring and tedious, you should make them tied to specific actions. For Wormwood, make it so every time he grows a new mega crop he gets a skill point, (1 point for each of the 14 giant crops in the game, plus one more point for getting all 14 giant crops). Now Wormwood is not only incentivized to farm, but actually wants to farm each of the crops and not just potato/tomato or tomato/dragonfruit, (although this would only be a one time thing and not a permanent fix to those problems).
Some skills that I thought of as replacements for the blooming/farming ones:
- A skill that lets seeds put into a seed pack it last forever
- A skill that lets Wormwood use giant crops as one time use tents that break after use, (Wormwood now has an actual incentive to farm for himself, as sleeping allows him to recover health)
- A skill that lets him move giant crops faster
- A skill that lets him make a cheap wax alternative, that has the same effect when applied to giant crops
- A skill that lets him weigh giant crops without use of a produce scale
- A skill that lets him turn crops into seeds at a reduced rate (like 3 crops for 2 seeds)
- A skill that makes grumble bees neutral to him for the first 2 phases of Bee Queen, (Bee Queen and Ancient Fuelweaver are the only bosses I have to tank as Wormwood and this change could help fix that)
- A skill that allows Wormwood to increase the health/defense of the Friendly Fruit Fly, (I swear this thing dies so easily)
- A skill that lets crops planted by Wormwood grow in moonlight, (a cool reward for those who have made it to moon storms)
Thank you to all those that actually end up reading this. I am overall extremely impressed with this skill tree. After talking with a lot of my Wormwood friends, (both farmers and fighters), they seemed to have pleased both sides. This is my first forum post so be kind and tell me if I made any errors with how I am supposed to post these.
