The many problems with Warly, and what his skill tree should improve

Warly is a character who flourishes in the late game. Not every character needs to have upsides that are accessible from Day 1.
I agree, and that is not what this thread is about. I'm not asking for Warly to consistently be able to mass-produce volt goat jelly from the second he spawns in; I understand that progression feels good and it's great that DST has characters that are more focused towards that. This isn't one of the problems I'm talking about.

Warly simply has a unique playstyle: It's fun to earn my power, and his downsides are significant enough to shake up my playstyle, and that's all he really needs to be, even if he's not very strong from a time-efficiency perspective.
I also agree, and none of the things I will suggest in this thread will take away anything that Warly currently has. If anything, I'm looking to make suggestions that will further improve his character fantasy. If you play Warly frequently, I would appreciate extra perspectives about my suggestions because I'm obviously not perfect, and the last thing I would want is for Klei to take away things that people enjoy, like they unfortunately have in the past with a handful of characters.

Warly is already very strong; any buffs would potentially push him over the edge.
Character strength is completely subjective: some people value safety, some people value convenience, some judge things strictly by time-efficiency, and your own personal skill level affects your perspective tremendously, making it so that a large group of people can perceive a character as being straight up overpowered while another large group of players can perceive them as underwhelming.

Warly in particular is very similar to pre-buff Wortox in that to a certain group of players (particularly those who are experienced enough to survive comfortably but not experienced enough to kill the major bosses without expending a ton of resources) he might seem very powerful, specifically because his upsides are excellent to help those kinds of players kill bosses. I understand I’m inevitably going to rustle some feathers at the mere suggestion that Warly could use a buff, but the truth is that the majority of his upsides simply fail to be appealing to a large number of playstyles in terms of cost, time savings and/or convenience, and I hope that I can present a solid case to explain this in the following sections.

And yes, I’m aware that in extremely late game endless servers (in the thousands of days) you will find chests full of spiced jellybeans and bundles full of volt goat jelly, which allow all players to buff up and kill bosses with a sneeze, but this really doesn’t mean anything in terms of character strength; even if Warly’s dishes and spices cost 10 times as much this would still continue to be the case, since ultra-late game players simply enjoy the process of stocking up on luxuries such as this.

Warly is simply meant to be good in a team; he’s a support character.
For starters, I personally find that trying to fit DST characters into “roles” is one of the weirdest things this community frequently tries to do. All characters (except Wes) have combat abilities at least on par with Wilson if not better, all characters (except Wes) are just as good at gathering resources and food as Wilson if not better, and all characters (including Wes) can explore the world as fast as Wilson if not faster. Additionally, shouldn’t skill trees provide the option to expand characters beyond their stereotypical roles? I don’t see why some people insist Warly should be nothing more than a basesitter who cooks food and tends to farms 24/7 when he is just as capable as playing the rest of the game as any other character.

Additionally, the statement that Warly is simply “better in a team” is pretty much just wrong by every measurable metric. Most people would point towards his ability to buff his teammates, but damage multipliers inherently have diminishing returns: The jump from x1 to x2 far exceeds the time and resource savings of any other jump; even if you give 2 teammates volt goat jelly before a fight, that only turns a x3 damage multiplier into a x4 multiplier if the target isn’t wet, a negligible damage increase considering bosses tend to melt with more than 2 or 3 players already. Other people might point towards the stereotypical Warly player that stays at base cooking food, but Warly is objectively worse at this too. Warly has no upsides that let him gather ingredients faster, he has no farming related perks, and he has a hunger drain multiplier and dietary restrictions, meaning he’ll actually be eating more of the food supply than any other character staying at base. Yes, his crock pots cook food slightly faster, but this is offset by the fact that his teammates can’t use them, making them paperweights that cost just as much as regular crock pots (if not more) once the Warly player disconnects.

With a portable crock pot, a cheap portable ice box (ish), lower stats when eating the same foods, and being a character originally from the shipwrecked DLC (where he was supposed to be a sort of nomadic chef and not much more), Warly is very clearly meant to be a character who encourages cycling through a variety of crock pot dishes to avoid repetition while gathering ingredients along the way instead of being restricted to a static crock pot location. Have the developers ever explicitly said this is Warly’s intended playstyle? Maybe, it’s 1 am and I’m not in the mood to look through dozens of threads from 2019, but this is at least how the majority of people who’ve never played Warly would describe his character fantasy as.

However, anyone who’s played Warly for more than 10 minutes knows this simply isn’t the case. Warly’s kit does not encourage variety; it encourages repeating low-cost, high-hunger dishes, and this is due to the way it was implemented. Warly’s food memory lasts for 2 full days, and within that timeframe he loses exactly 180 hunger points due to this increased hunger drain. This means that when playing as Warly, you’ll want to consume 180 hunger’s worth of crock pot dishes every 16 minutes to avoid refreshing the memory timer.

This system makes it disproportionately more difficult to live off low-hunger dishes when trying to not repeat dishes: If you’re trying to cycle between 37.5 hunger dishes (which is how many people who haven’t played Warly envision playing him as) you would need to cycle between 5 unique dishes with that hunger value every 2 days just to slightly surpass the hunger requirement. Sure, ratatouille, fistful of jam and pierogi are easy dishes, but past that point they start requiring slightly more unique ingredients which is why nobody plays like this; contrast that to simply eating a meaty stew and a meatball or a meaty stew and a honey ham, which provide more than enough hunger for 2 days and are significantly easier to gather.

However, what if we do allow repetitions? Warly’s repetition system is extremely lenient towards high-hunger dishes while heavily punishing low-hunger dishes disproportionately. The first repetition applies a negligible penalty, and so does the second one; eating 3 of the same dish only punishes you by making you miss out on 0.3 of that dish’s stat values. Everyone knows about the double meaty stew strategy, which is by far the easiest way for Warly to live while also being incredibly cheap to mass produce, since the 10% penalty on the second meaty stew is meaningless. Meanwhile, if you tried to live off a single dish with a hunger value of 37.5, you would have to eat that dish 9 times every 2 days. Even spamming meatballs is a viable strategy in comparison; eating 4 in a row will give you 209 hunger points and only penalize you with a loss of about 40, which is much more reasonable than trying to cycle through that many low-hunger dishes.

Heck, even if you’re limiting yourself to only dishes with 37.5 hunger, it’s still much easier to eat the same two of those dishes 3 times every 2 days, allowing you to easily bypass needing 5 unique ones, with a hunger gain of 202.5 and a loss of only a measly 22 for every batch of 6 meals eaten since the penalties are basically non-existent when divided between more than 1 dish. If it isn’t clear yet, a wide variety of low-hunger dishes, which many people think Warly is encouraged to gather, are actually actively punished more than using a limited range of low-hunger dishes or a single high-hunger dish. This is a problem because it is an inherent contradiction with Warly’s design. Warly should encourage variety, not punish it.

So how do we fix this? “Just nerf the high hunger dishes” I can already hear a bunch of people replying, but the problem isn’t the high hunger dishes being too good, it’s just the way the food penalty is implemented. I think this isn’t that difficult to fix, though; not long ago I asked around the community for people to help me find a sweet spot for a new food penalty system, and I think it can be fixed with a relatively small rework:

-Keep his max hunger and increased hunger drain the same.
-His repeat penalty is no longer a static 2 days for every dish, but scales with the dish’s hunger value. I suggest a conversion rate of 19.2 seconds for every hunger point the dish has.
-Warly now gains extra stats the first time he eats a dish, just like in shipwrecked, but the repeat penalties scale much more aggressively. +25% to all stats as the first bonus could be good, with 0.75/0.5/0.25/0.1 being the progressive repeat penalties.
-Food can be inspected to get an accurate quote indicating the time left until it can be eaten again, and food that gives the bonus will have a small sparkle effect in the inventory (to avoid unintuitiveness).

So what does this achieve? This would essentially fix every problem I just mentioned while actively encouraging dish variety to get the most out of the stat bonus. The conversion rate would work in such a way that 37.5 hunger dishes could be repeated every 1.5 days (faster than the current repeat penalty), 75 hunger dishes would take 3 days (slower than the current system) and 150 hunger dishes would take a full 6 days to be forgotten. This would overall make it more difficult to live off high-hunger dishes, which might seem like a nerf, but this carries several buffs to a Warly player who already prefers variety: Even with 150 hunger dishes, if a player were to cycle between Meaty Stew, Tall Scotch Eggs and Bone Bouillon every 6 days, they would get 50 minutes’ worth of hunger from the 3 dishes combined, thanks to the extra hunger boost, compared to the 40 they would receive in the current system, while also receiving the extra health and sanity that every crock pot dish gives.

This still wouldn’t make it entirely impossible to repeat dishes, as even with the hypothetical numbers I provided you could do so with good results in some scenarios, but that’s not really the intention. The point is that you won’t even want to repeat dishes (even then, this would make it basically impossible to live off just meaty stews or even honey hams since Warly’s 250 max hunger would make it impossible for the food memory to ever reset). Consider the way this would interact with low-hunger dishes instead: For starters, Warly can now comfortably live off cycling three unique 37.5 hunger dishes, which would provide 140 hunger points (as well as increased stats) every 1.5 days, which fits his character much more nicely than the current system that either requires 5 unique 37.5 hunger dishes or 2 repeated dishes.

Additionally, this would open up interesting interactions with dishes that Warly would otherwise have no interest in using: Consider trail mix, a dish with 12.5 hunger that restores 30 health; under this new system, Warly could get 37.5 health out of it every half day thanks to its low hunger, making it an even more excellent choice for healing in the early game for Warly players. There’s also soothing tea, a dish with 0 hunger, which would essentially always get a slight boost to the initial sanity upon consumption thanks to that. Banana pops would likewise restore 41 sanity and flower salad would restore 50 health, both every 0.5 days, making these otherwise overlooked dishes compelling options for frequent stat restoration.

Would this make Warly easier in some scenarios? Yes, and I’m aware that some people may not like that, but I think Warly could really use it. Not only are the repetition problems and the lack of variety encouragement fully addressed, but this also fixes the problem of Warly’s higher hunger requirement being a downside that cannot be avoided through any means, as the increased hunger from unique dishes would perfectly counteract and actually provide slightly more effective hunger out of the equation compared to a default character (e.g. a fresh meaty stew would feed Warly for 2.08 days under this system, a little bit more hunger than the 2 days for other characters; in the current system it only feeds him for 1.66 days).

That essentially marks the end of the analysis of his hunger downside, but I would also like to use this section to discuss two other issues with his kit I hope can be addressed, either via the skill tree or via base changes:

-The chef pouch is really not good. Some people wrongly believe it’s “half as effective” as the ice box because it slows down food spoilage by 25% instead of 50% but this is not how it works. A food item that lasts 10 days normally will last 20 inside of an ice box, but it will only last 13.33 inside of a chef pouch, a negligible increase when you consider that it’s only half of that due to spoilage in reality. I’m not sure how to change the chef pouch, but a suggestion I saw was to essentially turn it into a budget salt box, limiting it to only holding the same ingredients the salt box can, but with higher capacity than a backpack and a proper 50% or even 75% spoilage reduction. This would further encourage the character fantasy of foraging for a large variety of fresh ingredients since inventory space would be plentiful, and I really hope the devs consider this.

-A portable crock pot sounds amazing in theory, but in practice it’s insufferable to have to stop and stare at your screen for what feels like minutes at a time just to have the privilege of eating, which other characters don’t have to go through. Yes, it does feel rewarding when you plan ahead in such a way that you cook your food in advance while doing other actions like mining or fighting, but this is the exception rather than the norm. Please let us use the crock pot in the inventory, this would go a long way towards making Warly feel less awkward to play and further incentivize his intended nomadic gameplay for all types of players.

This section is inevitably going to be a controversial one since even in the year of 2025 there are still people who get inexplicably upset at the simple suggestion that Warly isn’t some meta-defining S tier character, and I’m not expecting to convince everyone, but at least I can try to explain why I think that almost all of Warly’s dishes do not reward the player enough for the time and resource cost necessary to make them. To keep things simple, I’ll start with the non-buff dishes, then the buff dishes, then end with the spices.

Non-buff dishes (these are not really that relevant):

Puffed Potato Soufflé: Ok, we’re starting on a bit of a tangent here but I just have to rant about this dish. Back in shipwrecked when this dish was called sweet potato souffle the point of it was that sweet potatoes could be picked up like carrots in certain islands and eggs would literally fall from jungle trees, thereby not requiring any sort of setup to make it. Was it a good dish? Not really, since as far as I know it just competed with pierogi which was made with arguably fewer ingredients and restored twice as much HP, however I think in DST it somehow has even less of a niche. Not only does it still compete with pierogi, it now also competes with creamy potato puree and fancy spiralled tubers, both pretty much better options, and it recovers less health and hunger than just eating the cooked potatoes (if you’re thinking about giving it to your teammates). This dish is a little fish in a big pond, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make it. I think a simple stat buff might be good enough to give it a niche, it just wouldn’t be all that interesting. 40 health and 62.5 hunger would be more in line with the cost of the ingredients, although it wouldn’t feel like a proper exclusive dish either way.

Moqueca: This dish is whatever at the moment since it’s basically just a late game luxury, but it would be indirectly buffed by the suggestions described in the third section of this post.

Monster Tartare: Simply a punishment dish at the moment, but if my suggestion of extra stats on the first consumption got implemented this dish would receive an interesting niche, as if I’m not mistaken the first consumption of dishes in shipwrecked actually reduces negative stats as well (please correct me if I’m wrong here). This would make it reduce less health and sanity while buffing its already fairly high hunger, making it an actually decent option for Warly players to complete a food cycle when they only have monster meat around.

Fresh Fruit Crepes: Rant time again; this dish requires 1.5 fruit value, which wasn’t a problem in shipwrecked since both coconuts and bananas (obtainable in the starting island) had a fruit value of 1, but this is a problem in DST because fruits with a value of 1 aren’t easily accessible in the early game (you need bananas, big glow berries, or farm fruits). This was clearly meant to be an early game dish in shipwrecked that rewarded Warly extra for luckying out with butter, so it'd be nice to reduce its fruit value requirement to 1 to make it more in line with its original niche.

Bone Bouillon: Actually fine for what it does (cleaning up other player’s skeletons, and mass produceable by letting fish rot iirc), and it’d be indirectly buffed for the early game with the suggestions described in the third section of this post.

Buff dishes:

Grim Galette: This was a dish that sounded interesting when Warly first got added, but unfortunately its upsides simply never come into effect at the stage of the game where you have the dish. Its intended use case is to allow players to either heal from sanity restoration sources or to recover sanity from healing items, but unfortunately the fact that it requires both onion and potato, two crops that you won’t have a lot of until the mid-game, severely restricts the situations in which you’d make this dish. Potatoes and onions don’t grow naturally, so the only way to use this dish at the right time would be to carry it with you in preparation rather than to make it on the spot, but the problem with this is that at that point there’s no reason not to just carry more healing or health items, such as creamy potato puree.

I understand that some people would like to imagine there are interesting clutch uses of this item, such as giving it to a Wormwood buddy when his health is low for him to recover sanity from planting stuff or whatever, but I’ve never seen these types of situations expressed as anything other than hypotheticals. However, I might have a controversial suggestion that could make this dish much more interesting: Ditch the veggie requirements altogether and make this dish able to be made with just 2 nightmare fuel and 2 twigs. Since nightmare fuel can be obtained anywhere, this means you could obtain this dish anywhere and cook it on the spot on demand, thereby significantly increasing the chances you might encounter a situation where it’s genuinely useful. It’s raining in the ruins and your sanity is extremely low, but you have a bunch of healing salves on you? Kill those 2 crawling horrors, make a grim galette real quick and you’re suddenly at full sanity and can heal back up from the damage. I still wouldn’t consider this dish to be all that useful but at least it’d be fun to come up with use cases for it when you need it the most.

Glow Berry Mousse: Hands-free lighting sounds cool, but if you actually try to use this dish you’ll quickly notice its light radius quickly diminishes to the point where it’s less than a magiluminescence, and that makes you have to constantly reapply it to get the bigger light radius. Don’t get me wrong, this dish can be really convenient when you make it in bulk (which is possible thanks to the forest stalker), but the way this dish is designed would lead you to believe that Warly would be encouraged to grab a few glow berries on his way to the ruins and do the whole ruins clear only using the buff from this dish, and unfortunately that just isn’t a thing with how quickly it runs out. Some people wrongly believe this dish makes Warly an excellent scienceless ruins rusher, but unfortunately it’s not really any better than just using torches and eating the raw glow berries until you get a magiluminescence.

Is this a bad dish in concept? No, and if Warly could make better use of it with fewer ingredients it’d be much easier to integrate it into a wider variety of playstyles, and that’s going to be the recurring theme with the buff dishes other than grim galette, which is that simply having a longer duration would make them much more flexible and fun to use, and that leads me to my main suggestion which so many others here on the forums have suggested as well: Make Warly get twice as much duration from his own buffs.

For the record, I don’t think this should be locked behind the skill tree, I think it should be part of his base kit just like the improvements Walter got to his base kit during the beta. This wouldn’t break the game, this wouldn’t be unbalanced, it’d just straight up make him much more fun to play and encourage players to actually play Warly rather than just swapping to him to make his buffs, since getting twice as much value out of each of each buff would be a very good incentive to actively stay as him. In this case, 4 days of hands-free lighting, even if you have to reapply it every 2 days or so to keep the light radius big, would be a really interesting incentive for Warly to either rush the shadow pieces for the shadow atrium or to spend long stretches of time in the caves.

Fish Cordon Bleu: This is the only dish among the buff dishes that I think is genuinely fine, as it is not hard to obtain in small quantities and can be mass-farmed if you really want to, and the double buff duration for Warly suggested in the previous paragraph would make it an interesting alternative for hands-free wetness throughout spring without having to grind as much as you currently have to (in its current state most people don’t really bother mass-producing it and basically only use it alongside volt goat jelly for fighting in the rain).

Asparagaz­pacho and Hot Dragon Chili Salad: I understand that some people swear by these dishes, and the idea of never having to heat up during winter or cool down during summer sounds awesome, but these dishes could really use some buffs for multiple reasons. Both of these dishes are objectively useless from a time-efficiency standpoint, as they never save more time than it takes to make them. Some time ago I calculated that if you swapped to Wormwood and planted all the seeds in bulk, you would have to make enough hot dragon chili salad to last you for 14 years just to break even on the time spent planting the seeds and cooking the dishes with the time saved by not having to heat up, and that’s not including the time needed to obtain the seeds or the wax paper needed to bundle that many of them. Essentially, there is never really a situation where making this dish will save you more time than it takes to make it, and asparagazpacho is even worse, as ice is much harder to obtain in mass quantities.

But I understand that these dishes aren’t meant to be efficient, they’re just meant to be convenient, but unfortunately they don’t really offer a lot in that department either. Yes, standing around burning trees to heat up sucks, but I think myself and most other players would rather do that than mass-produce the ingredients needed to make these dishes unless they’re just doing it for the sake of it, and even then there are multiple other options that are just as convenient as these dishes: Building furnace stations or ice boxes around the map to swap out thermal stones immediately, carrying ice chester with 2 thermal stones to never have to cool down, or simply carrying a watering can and a thermal stone are all extremely convenient methods with very little downtime that are vastly more time-efficient and cheaper than these dishes. You could even bundle thermal stones, which does require some micromanagement, but these dishes have to be bundled as well after mass-producing since they spoil (and unwrapped constantly if you don’t carry a polar bearger bin) so they aren’t better in that aspect either. You only really make these dishes because of the reward of working towards a luxury item, but that doesn’t make them useful.

IMO these dishes need twice as much buff duration alongside Warly’s double buff duration. This would make characters able to have the effect active for an entire summer or winter with 12 of these instead of 24 and Warly himself would only need 6, a much more reasonable amount that would actually make them an attractive alternative to insulation or thermal stones while making them significantly more convenient.

Volt Goat Jelly: This dish is pretty much non-existent in the early game and arguably even the mid game due to the insane RNG factor of volt goat horns and scarcity of volt goat herds, as well as its max potential being locked behind rain that isn’t consistent until spring. That said, the double duration suggestion for Warly would make this dish much more flexible, especially towards the early to mid-game, as you’d no longer need 2 volt goat horns just to solo one boss, since a 10 minute duration would give you plenty of time even if the world isn’t wet. This dish will be further discussed in the next section of this post.

Spices:

I would first like to suggest increasing the base buff duration of spices from 4 minutes to 5, to make them consistent with the buff duration of Warly’s buff dishes. I’m not sure why this discrepancy exists as it makes it awkward to have to apply pepper to another dish just to refresh 1 minute of the buff or just give up on it for that entire minute.

Pepper spice: This spice suffers from being an absolute hell to obtain in the first autumn, with a roughly 2% chance from either catcoons or random seeds, meaning you’re not obtaining any significant amount of this spice for potentially many hours. However, with a 10 minute buff duration for Warly himself, plus indirect buffs that will be discussed in the next section, this spice would become much more useful and flexible and I think it’d be in a good spot without further changes.

Honey spice: This spice is fine as is, but it does have some flexibility issues since you’re really only encouraged to pop it before an extended chopping or mining session, such as during a ruins clear. This makes me think that I would really like it if spices could be crafted and applied to dishes without the need of the grinding mill or seasoning station. There’s a fear that this might make those structures redundant, but I think this could be implemented in many ways and still significantly improve the character without resulting in that issue. For example, the grinding mill could craft spices in bulk at a discounted price, and the seasoning station could be changed to be able to apply spices to entire stacks of crock pot dishes. Another alternative would be to make the craftable spices smaller versions of sorts that last for a minute and are cheaper to make, thereby making them much more useful in scenarios where you don’t need several minutes of the buff to get value out of it. These suggestions would be perfect for Warly’s skill tree to add IMO, sort of like Wendy’s ectoherbology tree but with spices.

Garlic spice: This is going to be the most controversial suggestion in this post, since some people absolutely swear that this spice is powerful, but I just don’t see it that way. Garlic spice is essentially a safety net; if you’re not confident you can survive getting hit a lot this spice will help you, but unfortunately it cannot be used as anything other than a safety net. Yes, damage reduction is essentially reverse healing in a way, but the problem is that garlic is a farm crop, and farm crops are notorious for being mass-producible healing sources, which means garlic is only providing the same benefit all other characters can already get in a roundabout way. Add to that that this spice does not reduce damage taken by your armor, and you essentially get a spice that is useful for very inexperienced players but that doesn’t really provide a resource saving benefit otherwise.

However, @grm9suggested something that I find extremely interesting and could make garlic spice one of the most uniquely useful items in the game. The suggestion is that while active, garlic spice acts as a permanent, invisible 70% damage reduction armor piece, and then it applies the 33% damage reduction on top of that. This does not increase damage reduction any further than what garlic already does when wearing any armor piece better than a grass suit, as damage reduction does not stack, but it does split the durability loss like a 70% armor piece would with your other armor. For example, if you tank a fuelweaver attack (100 damage):

Wearing nothing but a marble suit: 95 damage to marble suit, 5 to health
Wearing a marble suit + football helmet: 51.57 to marble suit, 43.42 to football helm, 5 to health
Wearing a marble suit + football helmet + this hypothetical garlic spice: 36.83 to marble suit, 31 to football helm, 27.14 armor damage gets absorbed by garlic, player takes 3.333 damage

This would give garlic an actual niche as an armor-saving defensive spice without increasing its damage reduction further than it currently does. However, it would have a completely new use alongside that, as the invisible 70% armor combined with the 33% damage reduction would mean that the player would have permanent 80% damage reduction at all times while the spice is active, effectively turning the player that eats it into a diet weremoose for 5 minutes. Some might see this as being too strong, but I think it would be an incredibly unique perk, allowing players to comfortably use combinations of gear during fights that might be too risky to use otherwise, most notably the enlightened crown and magiluminescence, which would leave you without equipment slots for armor (besides the shield of terror). Wigfrid can already give players 80% damage reduction for dirt cheap, so I honestly think an alternative like this could be incredibly refreshing to see and give Warly an unexpected new upside for servers with lots of players and no pig skin around.

Salt crystals: These would become redundant if my food buff idea got implemented, and frankly they’re kind of not used by anyone either way since all they provide is a tiny buff to healing, so I propose something completely unique instead to give to this spice: Allow any dishes seasoned with this spice to never spoil, effectively giving Warly an interesting alternative to bundle wraps that doesn’t require micromanagement, and which frankly fits the theme of salt much more than the odd healing buff they currently give.

Other buffs I would like to see: I think the skill tree would be an incredible opportunity to allow Warly to select dishes made with boss drops for unique effects. Stuff like using the shadow atrium to create a dish that grants immunity to shadow creatures like the bone helm, a dish with royal jelly to grant the bee queen crown effect without having to wear it, etc. However, one buff in particular I think would be really cool to see on Warly would be a speed-increasing spice that can also be fed to beefalo, making Warly unique as the only character that can get a speed boost while riding one. I think this dish would fit him more than anything else because of his jack-of-all-trades nature, giving him a unique tool to explore the world faster. These are just random suggestions though.

This section is going to be very short because this point is very obvious: Warly is incredibly reliant on the tortuous RNG of farm crops for many of his dishes and spices, and arguably his most useful dish, volt goat jelly, relies on the insane RNG of volt goat herds and volt goat horns, which are only dropped 25% of the time whenever you kill a volt goat.

To be clear, I’m not saying every character needs to have their max potential guaranteed from Day 1, and obviously there are some characters like Wanda or Wortox that benefit much more from certain world generations, but the problem with Warly is that pretty much all of his desirable upsides are locked behind a brick wall of RNG that the player has no agency over. It’s not fun for most people to have your upsides locked behind hours of RNG before you have the privilege of using them, and this limits skill expression because being an experienced Warly player doesn’t mean anything when the game doesn’t give you permission to use the upsides that you picked the character for.

The solution to the volt goat horns problem is quite simple and I don’t need to dwell on it for too long because many others have suggested the exact same thing, even before the skill trees were a thing: Give Warly an “accomplished butcher” tree that allows him to get rare drops from mobs more often when he kills them. This obviously means extra chances for volt goat horns, possibly even a guaranteed one every certain period of time, but this would also include extra monster meat and silk drops from spiders, more pig skin drops from pigs, more tentacle spots from tentacles, etc. The sky's the limit for this branch so I really hope the developers listen to the community on this one.

As for the crops problem, my solution is pretty straight forward: Allow Warly to start with a seed packet and allow the player to pick what seeds to start with via the skill tree. The seed packet would act as a gift wrap in that the seeds in it wouldn’t start to spoil until it’s opened, thereby giving Warly players a ton of flexibility to start their farms. This addresses most of the problems with the dishes I talked about in the previous section: Warly players would now have the freedom to start runs with onions and tomatoes to start mass producing Moqueca for their team, they might want to immediately produce garlic spice or pepper spice, they might want to just rely on chili salad for heat as early as possible, etc.

Of course, some other farming related perks would go perfectly alongside this idea. Letting crops planted by Warly to grow faster even outside of their preferred seasons would give Warly players more freedom, and maybe even giving him a perk to have a chance to get an extra seed when feeding vegetables to birds (like it used to be before RWYS) would make it easier for him to multiply seeds in the early game rather than being forced to wait for them to grow. When playing solo, you can obtain a stack of whatever crop you want in the first autumn if you’re fast at building the celestial portal and swap to Wicker for applied horticulture, and I think if Warly was able to obtain similar results without character swapping this could be incredibly satisfying to pull off.