it is one of those games you dont beat but get a little better at each time. every world spawns something called maxwels portal which you can go through a gauntlet of themed worlds like neverending winter, night only, etc. if you beat 5 in a row you beat the gauntlet. its all randomly generated. you can find 4 items and another portal to transport yourself to a new world if you do not like the state yours is in (you lose resources or your base gets mauled by monsters).
basically you build a self sustaining base, explore, survive winters, survive monsters attacking you, create a new world and do it again for as long as you can. monster attacks get progressively worse. my best is like 70 something days. i was ill prepared for the number of hounds that came.
basically the goal i guess if there was one is to find maxwels portal, and beat the gauntlet that challenges the games mechanics on you.
it has a bit of a learning curve but it is terribly addicting once you have some basic grip of the mechanics. winter starts at day 21. basically you want to explore a ton and light torches at night and explore for the first 5 days. you want flint, sticks, grass and food from the ground for this period. later you want to find gold and beefelo before you build a base (their poop is arguably the most important resource of the game - its funny, there is a heavy emphasis on collecting poop in the game) from that you can build a self sustaining base with farms and shit. you could theoretically go forever at this point if it wasnt for constant attacks by hounds and monsters (starts day 9 to 11 or something) that get worse over time. this encourages you to find and harvest more resources and build better bases.
you can unlock characters that have unique abilities.
i love it. its free too.
This post was edited by sleepy1 on Feb 3 2014 06:33pm