Uploaded October 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Clips were from the Rhymes with Play Dev Cast Stream. Klei Entertainment's Twitch Channel and the clips themselves: twitch.tv/kleientertainment
Beak Clip: twitch.tv/kleientertainment/clip/FancyBeautifulGarlicDansGame?filter=clips&range=30d&sort=time
Fish In Shoals Clip: twitch.tv/kleientertainment/clip/AgitatedBombasticWerewolfDoubleRainbow?filter=clips&range=30d&sort=time
Stuff and Things since it's about the mechanics of the Malbatross and its loot (and I have a poor naming sense).
Nothing has really changed with how the fight pans out that I haven't mentioned here, so here my fight against Malbatross (it does now correctly play its Boss Music though compared to this video): youtu.be/Onoc1T35i3s
The Don't Starve Wiki is wrong on what very little it has on Malbatross' spawning mechanic, which says that "Each Deep Ocean Fish shoal has a 25% chance to spawn the Malbatross when visited for the first time." Not only is this not how it is implemented, if that were the case, then that means you could potentially keep rolling a low number for all shoals, making it so that Malbatross would not spawn, even if the spawning timer was 0. (Much thanks to Cosson for better explaining that to me).
Instead, this is how the game does it, as per my understanding of malbatrossspawner.lua and util.lua. Much thanks to Zarklord's post on the Klei forums for pointing me in the right direction as well: forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/111667-new-game-mechanics-explanation/?tab=comments#comment-1258882
The TL;DR version is that the list of shoals are shuffled (like a deck of cards) for where Malbatross can spawn after it dies or relocates, with it always being 25% of the world's shoals.
The longer version is this (this is a visual demonstration of what's happening FYI).
Let’s say there are 6 shoals in a world, signified by the letters A-F. And let’s say it starts like this:
A B C D E F ||
The game takes the last letter and swaps it with any other letter to the left of the double bars, with the double bars moving so that letters past it don’t swap afterwords.
A B F D E || C
The Letter C & F were swapped, and now C can’t be moved anymore.
Now we keep doing this till there are two positions left.
E B F D || A C
E B D || F A C
D B || E F A C (I think it stops here?)
This is the final order:
D B E F A C
Now that we have the final order, 25% of these shoals (rounded up) can actually spawn the Malbatross.
So a (6 shoals * 0.25) = 1.5 shoals, rounded up to 2 shoals.
Shoals B and D can spawn the Malbatross. Now when Malbatross either dies or relocates, this whole shuffling process is reset and happens again. (The relocation one is slightly different in implementation, but it's a similar shuffling effect, to my understanding).
This is why I said it’s not really possible to game/predict which shoals Malbatross can spawn before visiting any of them. All you can do is just hit up each shoal till you’ve got it to respawn.
Clips were from the Rhymes with Play Dev Cast Stream. Klei Entertainment's Twitch Channel and the clips themselves: twitch.tv/kleientertainment
Beak Clip: twitch.tv/kleientertainment/clip/FancyBeautifulGarlicDansGame?filter=clips&range=30d&sort=time
Fish In Shoals Clip: twitch.tv/kleientertainment/clip/AgitatedBombasticWerewolfDoubleRainbow?filter=clips&range=30d&sort=time
Stuff and Things since it's about the mechanics of the Malbatross and its loot (and I have a poor naming sense).
Nothing has really changed with how the fight pans out that I haven't mentioned here, so here my fight against Malbatross (it does now correctly play its Boss Music though compared to this video): youtu.be/Onoc1T35i3s
The Don't Starve Wiki is wrong on what very little it has on Malbatross' spawning mechanic, which says that "Each Deep Ocean Fish shoal has a 25% chance to spawn the Malbatross when visited for the first time." Not only is this not how it is implemented, if that were the case, then that means you could potentially keep rolling a low number for all shoals, making it so that Malbatross would not spawn, even if the spawning timer was 0. (Much thanks to Cosson for better explaining that to me).
Instead, this is how the game does it, as per my understanding of malbatrossspawner.lua and util.lua. Much thanks to Zarklord's post on the Klei forums for pointing me in the right direction as well: forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/111667-new-game-mechanics-explanation/?tab=comments#comment-1258882
The TL;DR version is that the list of shoals are shuffled (like a deck of cards) for where Malbatross can spawn after it dies or relocates, with it always being 25% of the world's shoals.
The longer version is this (this is a visual demonstration of what's happening FYI).
Let’s say there are 6 shoals in a world, signified by the letters A-F. And let’s say it starts like this:
A B C D E F ||
The game takes the last letter and swaps it with any other letter to the left of the double bars, with the double bars moving so that letters past it don’t swap afterwords.
A B F D E || C
The Letter C & F were swapped, and now C can’t be moved anymore.
Now we keep doing this till there are two positions left.
E B F D || A C
E B D || F A C
D B || E F A C (I think it stops here?)
This is the final order:
D B E F A C
Now that we have the final order, 25% of these shoals (rounded up) can actually spawn the Malbatross.
So a (6 shoals * 0.25) = 1.5 shoals, rounded up to 2 shoals.
Shoals B and D can spawn the Malbatross. Now when Malbatross either dies or relocates, this whole shuffling process is reset and happens again. (The relocation one is slightly different in implementation, but it's a similar shuffling effect, to my understanding).
This is why I said it’s not really possible to game/predict which shoals Malbatross can spawn before visiting any of them. All you can do is just hit up each shoal till you’ve got it to respawn.
