This game has a punishing death mechanic for players who don't know how to build effigies and the like so ''trying out new things'' when the return on the investment might be nothing at best, and a loss of hours of progress at worse, is not doing anyone any favors. Having absolutely zero knowledge and research on these areas in the game would strongly discourage the average player from even attempting to visit them.
Then you'd have to explore the ruins, die a bunch more with the confusion on the nightmare cycles. Find the ruins, probably having died multiple times in the caves(possibly never finding and never knowing they exist!). You as a player would have to mine the caves, somehow know to use a torch(or hopefully you can manage to find out how to make a lantern). Lack of wiki research can actually lead to exploring less game content unless you're an extremely rash person who is fine with losing entire hours of progress on going in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There comes a point to where trial and error gets so stupid and costs you so much lost progress that it encourages you to play everything you do the safest you possibly can. I think a healthy mixture of wiki research and winging it are best. And he's having fun too.ĭST is one of those games where you don't really have an endgame, and for us having fun together is the endgame, and to do so everyone needs to be able to play the way he wants. Then there is this guy who alt-tabs on the wiki every time something he hasn't seen happens. And he always has a blast when he then eats it anyway. Some dude has fun going in completely blind and relying on a dungeon master which tells him whether he should be eating that red mushroom or not. In my group, which I usually coordinate since we play coop and having 8+ people in the same base requires at least some measure of "dungeon-mastering", people expect me to know always a little bit more than them, and that means I read my fair share of the wiki, and I'm having fun in that role. There is no right way to play, in the end you and only you will find out what's fun for you. I see here people claiming that studying the wiki is half the fun and people attacking them implicitly accusing them of cheating and stating that trial and error is the right way to play. Some of us like to minmax everything and know every single page of the wiki by memory, someone else likes to wipe and restart ad day 10 and go back killing random stuff experimenting. Don't let anyone tell you what's fun and what's not. After around 100 hours of DST with an average of 6-8 IRL friends, I came to the conclusion that the definition of fun is different for everyone.