Salem

I got a message about the darkness, and when my friend teleported to my claim he got a message. But I haven't noticed any drain on my skills. Does the drain only happen when you are doing something to drain them like dig? or do you know you are in the darkness if your stats constantly go down? why did it tell us to be careful of the darkness if it isn;t there? is it the location the darkness was before the map expanded?

See the wiki.

so If I'm not getting humor drain I'm not in the darkness even though the game said I was?

Stronger base stats = more regen. Darkness works against your regen, so if your stats are high enough you don't take any drain up to a certain point in the darkness.

the relevant part from the wiki page: Max humour levels: A higher cap allows one to travel further before drain sets in.

Ravi wrote:I got a message about the darkness, and when my friend teleported to my claim he got a message. But I haven't noticed any drain on my skills. Does the drain only happen when you are doing something to drain them like dig? or do you know you are in the darkness if your stats constantly go down? why did it tell us to be careful of the darkness if it isn;t there? is it the location the darkness was before the map expanded?

I was a bit thrown by the message as well, but as far as I can tell you only see the message once, that time being the first time you enter the darkness. If you leave it and then enter again, you will not see the message. Also note the drain increases as you go deeper into the darkness, so at first it can seem minimal or almost unnoticeable depending on your bile levels.

An easy test aside from simply watching your bile levels is to get them all full and get the gluttony button to appear, do not do anything that would drain biles and simply walk around. Make sure not to climb cliffs or anything of that nature and once the gluttony button goes away you can safely assume you are being affected by the drain.

You might also be right on the edge of it? If you try the above test you should be able to find the line where it starts/ends. It was also my experience that you can enter the darkness from multiple directions. So you could go North until you hit it, then go south to exit it, and then go east until you hit it again, so on and so forth.

Also worth noting, at one point when exploring I had a temporary leanto setup just over the border of the darkness. I had the misfortune of getting knocked out and teleport back to this leanto. Multiple times this led me to being KO'd almost instantly, once I figured out what was happening I was able to quickly make it to some nearby berries and heal before the next "tick" of damage was applied. Unless this was fixed or you are higher bile level characters it might be worth keeping a stock of food directly next to the area where you would spawn after getting ko'd.