Coming up on my first winter, I'm worried I may be under-prepared. Is Deerclops guaranteed to spawn every winter? And does he spawn near you? If not does he move randomly or does he behave like the Hounds and seek you out?
Does Deerclops spawn every winter, and how does he behave
dont-starve
Related Solutions
Loot that graveyard for research before you decide to move on!
It doesn't sound like you have a terrible world, but also not a super easy one. Having a rock field handy is a bonus, as is having early berries. The only thing you are missing that I find super useful for starting out is a bunch of rabbits.
There are a bunch of other food sources -- perhaps you even have tallbird eggs in your rock field? I'd say try a few games to see if you can get the hang of keeping yourself fed from the other food sources, but if you're just not feeling it, there's no harm in rerolling your world to see if you can't find one more to your liking.
For a first-time player world, food sources are the best things to have nearby, as well as ENOUGH rocks -- at least a fair number of rocks in the fields, if not a biome actually dedicated to them. Graveyards are great and the best way to boost your research quickly and early, but these don't renew in a game, so in the long-term they don't really need to be right by your base. Pigmen are also great if you're planning to make it a long-term game, but if you're just looking to get started, there's no reason they need to be close to your home base. If you happen to start near beefalo, that's great, but they aren't an instant fix for food problems.
Also for players just starting off, swamps are a pain. Tentacles can finish you off very quickly if you don't have armor and get caught by one. A swamp CAN be run through successfully, but in general they are just worse than other biomes near to start.
Surviving your first winter can be hard, especially for new players. Veterans can start a game in winter and still manage (in fact, a few level in adventure modes require you to do so). The Winter Guide gives a few good pointers.
Temperature
In addition to the three basic things you need to keep up to stay alive (hunger, health, sanity), and to the task of avoiding getting killed, in winter your temperature becomes an issue. Fire will warm you, but going away from fire too long will lower your body temperature. If it dips below 5, you get cold (visual indicator, edges freezing), if it gets below 0, you start losing health.
An evil sideeffect of this is that should you die and respawn, you'll start freezing pretty much instantly again. Having a heatsource near your respawn point (fire, chest with logs/coal) is recommended.
Insulation
To mitigate losing temperature fast, you can wear protective clothing. Things like a winter hat, rabbit earmuffs, beefalo hat, puffy vest... all slow down the rate you get colder.
Another easy (cheap) way to lower the freezing rate is a heat stone. Warm one near a fire (even holding it and standing near a fire works), you'll get cold slower.
As you figured out, the biggest problem with cold is that it makes it harded to stay away from your camp for a long time. A solution could be to have everything you need close to your camp. Have a lot of berry bushes, crock pots, drying racks, twigs, grass, and trees. Being near to rabbit holes (in combination to a boomerang or traps) can get you food as well.
A trick I often use is that food doesn't spoil until it's removed from it source. Use these ways to store food indefinitely:
- Plant Berry Bushes, let them grow berries so that the berries are on when winter begins. Since growing berries takes max 5 days, don't harvest berries after day 15. Have a boomerang ready when harvesting, so you can kill the gobblers, too. Free food!
- Get a lot of crock pots (8 will do) and make dinner in them without taking it out. Cooked stuff doesn't spoil while it's in the crock pot. 8 pots filled with meat stew is enough food for 8 days of winter.
- Get a lot of drying racks (8 will do) and have meat dry. Big meat takes 2 days to dry in summer temperatures, so start soon enough. Jerky is amazing stuff, probably one of the best food sources in the game. It stacks nicely (20 for big, 40 for small), keeps long, feeds, heals and restores sanity.
- Get a few farms (4-6) and have crops ready. As long as you don't harvest, they don't spoil.
- Get livestock and store in chests. They don't spoil as long as they're alive (and require no food to stay alive, curiously). Disadvantage: killing them is naughty.
Now you have enough reserves to only need a small amount of daily food intake to survive. A few rabbits, one koalefant, a beefalo or two... will do.
One pitfall: when killing innocent creates (birds, rabbits), your naughtiness goes up. Kill enough on a small timescale, and Krampus appears...
Alternative
Another way to deal with winter is to spend (parts of) it in the Caves, where it does not get cold. Surviving in the caves comes with its own problems though, of which sanity is a major one, unless when playing as Maxwell.
Opportunities
Then again, winter is not only about surviving. Once you solved that part, there are a few things you should do in Winter:
- Hunt a few koalefants (which in Winter become Winter Koalefant) for their Winter Koalefant Trunk, the vital ingredient in Puffy Vest.
- Hunt MacTusk, to get the Walrus Tusk, the vital ingredient in a Walking Cane.
Related Topic
- Does Krampus only appear in the winter
- Does viewing the Map pause the game
- Difference between worlds
- Summer has come and I don’t know what to do
- Does straw hat and other overheat-slowing items increase heat drain during winter
- Does killing Pigs raise Naughtiness as Webber
- How to befriend aggressive, overprotective pigs
Best Answer
Yes, the Deerclops spawns every winter, roaming the land looking for things to crush.
It does not seek the player actively unless it gets close, but it will always be announced by a growl and the ground shaking. If you stay out of its way you can make it pass, but it will not despawn until it's Summer again, so if you don't have the right equipment to fight it prepare yourself for a lot of running.
If you are getting followed by a Deerclops you can shake it off your back by making it fight other monsters (the Walruses are very effective at this), or you can make it fall asleep with the Pan Flute or the Sleep Darts. These are the only ways to make it sleep though, since it doesn't sleep at night, so it won't stop pursuing you if you're caught by the darkness.
Try to keep a good armor around, and a good weapon too if you plan to challenge it: it has a lot of HPs, a very high damage and a Sanity drain aura. If you fear you can't stand up to the challenge, you should have already learned what to do: RUN!
Other informations on the Deerclops can be found on the wiki.