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Related: Have you considered starting the player with more crystals so that the approach to the beginning of the first biome, as far as plots go, has more potential for variance?

Hopefully forcing players to mine and kill enemies for more crystals and how they go about that is in and of itself an interesting initial strategy decision with some variance. Do you start off with the crystal seed and get more crystals and avoid enemies? Are there some crystals lying around so you can jump-start your economy by picking them up, getting some thorns, and kill some big enemies for crystals? Do you use the prevalence and ease of access of plots in the first biome to instead plant as many hearts as possible so you can get a head start on health and worry about economy later?

All this to say that my hypothesis is that adding to the initial crystal count would remove decisions -- whether or not you want to get more crystals, and how you want to go about getting them -- rather than adding decisions.

The beginning of the game is not always the most exciting, and we've spent a lot of time worrying about making it as interesting as possible without making players feel like the optimal strategy is to restart until they get a nice initial spawn/randomness (i.e. the more strong variance we add, the more immediately restarting until you get good initial variance is rewarded).

This latest build from today actually attempts to address that a bit by making killing large enemies worth a lot more crystals. My early play has now shifted to trying to get as many thorns as possible and not only kill enemies, but avoid killing low health enemies which is its own challenge. So, things are still changing and we are definitely open to ideas on this problem!

Sorry this was rambling!!