Dev's just been adding and removing and tweaking things at random for over a year--and "over a year" is just an estimate based on how long I've been waiting. I think I recall it being much longer for others. There's hardly a rhyme or reason. Just filler for the most part to keep the game in people's minds until she's ready to move the story along for those who've beat the game 100x up to it's current stopping point with no reason to actually go back to even experience any of the scraps being tossed out. In the discord she's basically admitting that even this thing she's added is something she plans to change later on once she figures out what she wants to do. My guess is, rather than outright clearing the tiles, it'll be simply lowering the encounter rate to simulate that some creatures are hiding during the storms rather than absolutely all of them. She'll pretend to figure this out in another filler episode.
I agree with this. There's definitely more important game-affecting things to be doing. Either continuing the story itself in a significant way or expanding and properly developing the sandbox so that the world is playable in an interesting way even without further story development.
1. Adding player enslavement as a threat.
2. Adding economic incentives. Costs and inflation that actually force the player to seek money and improve their economic output or suffer the consequences of not meeting (insert payments needed here).
3. Making the outcomes of losing more interesting and substantial.
4. Destruction or theft of clothing by enemies.
5. Being forced into different clothing by enemies, with various different curses and so on.
Just give it a sandbox gameplay loop so that people can enjoy the sandbox itself. The player needs a motivation to seek work and to improve their income, one that gets larger over time to force the player to seek more and more income, this causes the player to need work and take on increasingly more risky things until the player eventually ""loses"" and is rewarded with slavery and other lose-conditions. These can then be escaped or otherwise for the player to seek to improve their circumstances or not. And so on and so forth.
If the sandbox itself were developed and fleshed out like the sandbox in Degrees of Lewdity then what is currently there would be significantly more enjoyable while waiting for story itself. Right now however there's like 20% of an extremely unbalanced sandbox and an extremely linear story to follow. The potential of the game is absolutely excellent because the tiny details of combat interactions have been fleshed out very well but there is almost no focus on the broad big picture of the gameplay motivations for the player and sandbox itself. No incentives, no gameplay loop, no driving forces to press the player into taking risk and no real consequences.