From the little of it I've seen from the Terraria crossover, it seems like an interesting game, and I'd definitely want to try it, but what's the gameplay like?

I'm one of the developers of Nine Equipment Slots, a mod for Don't Starve Together.

A lot has happened in the Chinese DST modding community over the past few days. I'm directly involved in this situation, so I want to be transparent about my position and explain what happened as accurately as possible.

I'd genuinely like to hear what players and other mod developers think.

How it started

On October 15, a player reported that Nine Equipment Slots might be incompatible with the Hollow Knight character mod, because they couldn't enter a server with both installed.

One of our developers, cmx, asked for logs and explicitly said that the problem might not be caused by Hollow Knight. At that point, we were treating this as a normal compatibility issue.

On October 16, Hollow Knight received an update at 12:44 PM (UTC+8).

Later that afternoon, another player reported that Nine Equipment Slots had stopped working properly when used with Hollow Knight. They could enter the game, but only the three original equipment slots remained.

We requested logs, checked the mod configuration, investigated the Workshop update history, and eventually inspected Hollow Knight's Lua code.

At approximately 4:52 PM, we discovered something unexpected.

What we found in Hollow Knight

The mod contained code that explicitly identified Nine Equipment Slots using its Steam Workshop ID:

3776018992

It then attempted to:

• Remove our custom equipment slots from the global EQUIPSLOTS table.
• Clear our registered post-initialization callbacks and associated data.
• Remove registrations associated with our mod from action and RPC-related structures.
• Identify and undo function hooks installed by Nine Equipment Slots.

These operations weren't merely displaying an incompatibility warning. They were actively modifying another installed mod's functionality.

The code also did not require an actual compatibility error or crash to occur before attempting these operations.

At 6:52 PM, Hollow Knight received another update that moved the disabling logic into a separate Lua file.

At 7:01 PM, we publicly warned players about what we had discovered on our own mod's Steam Workshop discussion page, explaining the relevant code and preserving the original files.

The Hollow Knight developer subsequently acknowledged that the code was intended to disable Nine Equipment Slots, while arguing that this was necessary to protect players' saves and preserve their own mod's functionality.

They also publicly stated that their personal unwillingness to support Nine Equipment Slots was related to comments made by one of our developers.

I'm not claiming Hollow Knight contains a virus or a Trojan. That is not what the code analysis establishes.

My question is much simpler:

If two mods are incompatible, why not warn players and let them decide which one to disable? Why deliberately remove another mod's equipment slots, callbacks and hooks?

Then other mods became involved

On October 16, Travel Diary of Another World announced that it would no longer support Nine Equipment Slots.

Our analysis of that mod indicated that it removed dedicated equipment-leveling support for several Nine Equipment Slots slots and added repeated incompatibility notifications. This is a different technical implementation from Hollow Knight's cleanup script.

Later that evening, Lovely Tallbird Family, another mod that players had previously used together with Nine Equipment Slots, was updated.

We found that it contained a nine_cleanup.lua script byte-for-byte identical to Hollow Knight's cleanup script.

Both files were 7,639 bytes and had the same SHA-256 hash:

16A4650DC7FA54148F18AC855FD6634D3259AF75F4BD4AA51DE326B376A15DB2

This does not prove that the developers secretly coordinated with each other. It does, however, demonstrate that the two mods distributed the same targeted disabling code.

The Lovely Tallbird Family developer also publicly attributed their decision not to support Nine Equipment Slots to the personal behavior of one of our developers.

What happened afterward

On October 17, I released a separate protection patch intended to restore Nine Equipment Slots functionality for players who wanted to use these mods together.

Subsequent updates introduced further changes to the compatibility-handling code. I have preserved historical mod archives so these changes can be compared.

I want to emphasize something: I don't believe other mod authors are obligated to support Nine Equipment Slots.

If a developer doesn't want to provide compatibility support, that's their decision.

But I believe there's an important difference between saying:

"This combination is unsupported. Please disable one of the mods."

And writing code that actively disables another mod's functionality for everyone who installs both.

The players who use Hollow Knight, Lovely Tallbird Family, or Travel Diary of Another World may also be Nine Equipment Slots users. They are not mutually exclusive groups.

When these modifications cause problems, those players may end up reporting issues to us, and we then have to spend additional development time investigating and restoring functionality.

A separate, more serious finding

While investigating Travel Diary of Another World, we also found code that checks specific players' Steam IDs and schedules calls to c_regenerateworld(), which requests a world reset.

I tested this behavior in an isolated test world by replacing one of the hardcoded Steam IDs with my own. The targeted message appeared, the world regenerated, and the behavior triggered again after I re-entered the newly generated world.

To be clear, this reproduction used a modified test copy with my own Steam ID. It demonstrates that the execution path can work, but it does not establish that the original listed players actually lost their saves.

I consider this a separate mod safety concern, and I'm preserving the original archives, modified test files, and recording for independent review.

Why I'm posting this

There have been personal arguments, accusations, and disagreements between members of the Chinese modding community. I am not claiming that everyone involved has behaved perfectly, including our own side.

But I don't think a mod developer's personal opinion of another developer should determine which unrelated mods players are allowed to use together.

I have preserved multiple historical versions of the affected mods, screenshots of the authors' statements, relevant source-code comparisons, and test recordings.

I welcome technical criticism of Nine Equipment Slots, including reproducible bugs and legitimate compatibility problems.

What I want to discuss is the approach taken to handle those problems.

Should mod developers actively disable other installed mods because they disagree with their developers? Or should players be informed of the conflict and allowed to make that choice themselves?

I'm interested in hearing other players' and developers' perspectives. Please keep the discussion about the code and its effects on players, rather than harassing anyone involved.

This time the hounds and moon event hordes really get stuck by pathfinding :D and you can open the doors for other players when not.

Still can't find a perfect way to order the tools, it's always a mess.

I'm a beginner and I see a lot of people recommending organising the inventory, and I'm all for it, but unless (hopefully) I'm missing something in my experience the game itself makes it impossible.

The issue is twofold. First, when you change equipped items they don't go to the inventory spot they were equipped from but rather switch spots with the other item. This alone is a huge headache and makes any sort of positional arrangement impossible as far as I can figure out. Second, newly acquired items fill in the first available spot, which makes sense in a way, but that makes it impossible to reserve certain spots for a certain kind of equipment, so constant rearranging is needed.

How do you guys manage it?

I have several but to name one... twiggy trees.

Goated solo. But even multiplayer they're only a struggle for the first season, but you can get a stack of twigs from tumbleweeds. After that you will never have twigs scarcity. I just plant them across high traffic routes (along roads, sink holes). Instant pickup instead of the delay with saplings. Or create a twiggy tree farm with a powder monkey, autograbber, wobot, winbot. Never needs to be fertilized. Doesn't wilt in summer. No deadly brightshades. W

I have a lot of tools, ruins gems, thucelite, and other stuff i keep in the ancient guardian chest as well as some nearby maze chest. Im planning to beat AFW and unlock the rifts to be able to do charlie later on. Side note: they really made it so the boulderboughs have to hit you now?

The picture shows the current state Im in (which im quite proud of). Im not too good of a player, so I wouldnt trust myself to go deep into the caves this winter. What else is there to do, except for surviving and here and there adding a bit to your base?

Hi! I’m a new player to Don’t Starve (Alone) and was wondering if there were any good spoiler free guides just to help get me going. I’m bad at survival games and the help would be very appreciated!