And then Winter hit.
All plants stopped growing. I was reduced to catching my meals every day from the rabbit holes nearby, but I was surviving. I was able to get enough food to last the day and had enough logs and trees nearby that I could stay warm through the nights. I was trying to juggle food and sanity, slowly losing it while horrific shadowy hallucinations began to flicker across the screen. Still, I survived, just barely scraping by and Winter continued to drag on.
Day 27 came and went with no signs of Winter ending. In the night, I began to hear rumbling in the distance. The land beneath me started to shake while Wilson, frantic, began to wonder what sort of monstrosity could be large enough to make the earth tremble. It was reminiscent of the barking of hounds before their arrival, only this was not them. It was something else.
Then, the rumbling stopped. Out of the corner of my screen, a massive white horned creature emerged from the darkness. The Deerclops. The screen shook with each step it took. I ran to the edge of my camp, just inside the light, and watched it make short work of my farms, destroying half of them in seconds. It lost interest and wandered off, leaving my seasonal food source in shambles. I struggled to find enough grass to remake my farms in time for Spring, but I needed it for sleeping to prevent the long nights from driving me insane.
Somehow, I managed to scrape by. The Deerclops came again, but I tricked it out of my camp and into a Treeguard to fight to the death. I was low on food and resources. I wasn't sure how much longer I could make it. My beard was scraping the ground but still I almost froze when evading the hounds near the beefalo herds. My wits were drawing thin.
Finally, Spring came. It was Day 36, and after 18 long days of Winter, Spring was here at last. I immediately went about planting crops and gathering berries, a pleasant relief from cooking rabbits over a fire. The days were still short, and the evenings and nights long, but at least the plants would grow again. A few hours into dusk, I heard the baying of the hounds, signaling another attack.
I ran to my beefalo herds, praying I could make it through this before night came. Little did I know that beefalo are hostile in the Spring. After losing half my health to beefalo and then almost the second half to the hounds, night was only a few ticks away. I tried to run back to my campsite, forgetting that I had two torches in my inventory, only to have one of the beefalo I had cared for in the Autumn ram me down and kill me.
After 36 days, a horny beefalo was my end.
I spawned again in a spot that I recognized to be near my old camp. It was night, though, so I stood in the spawn light next to three dead trees. And then it started to rain. Before I knew what was going on, I was freezing to death. I ran to my campsite, hoping I had enough fuel somewhere to make a fire. I survived with 2 health left, sopping wet and empty handed. But at least the berry bushes are growing again.
Spring is freaking garbage.
I hopped on a server in the middle of summer once. I was trying to become more familiar with the multiplayer mode, so I joined one of the more promising-looking games. I quickly found myself dying from the heat. I was literally burning alive.
Klei Entertainment wasn't kidding when they said that the world hates you and wants you to die.