Currently when foraging through underbrush all you find is random wild vegetables. Also, you have random fruit lieing around the map. I’d lie to have the amount of random fruit lieing around the map lessened some, along with a few less poppy flowers, and maybe have some more of it require the use of the survival skill to find. Aka foraging. You forage up the underbrush and it reveals a strawberry bush, or such. Should also have some form of this besides underbrush. Also, we mentioned lots of nasty and odd plants in our ideas. Why not implement them as some negative effects for failed survival rolls. Bwa ha ha ha ha! Poison Ivy is bad, mmkay!
PS: Also some sort of fibre plant should be findable as survival get’s a lil bit higher. (2 or 3?)
Not sure if this is doable, but it’d be nice if higher survival skills let you recognize food plants before you search them. I’ve never heard of a survival expert who couldn’t recognize a strawberry plant until he got his or her hands on the thing. It’d be nice if you could see that a bush had berries or root vegetables just by looking at them. This could either be a graphical change or a description change (forcing you to use the X to look button)
No. Skill-based perception stuff is cool, and there’s already some of it-game (say, in how characters with low perception/traps can’t see traps/mines), but it’s useless unless it’s visually apparent. If you can’t see, on the screen when moving around, the difference between an ordinary leafy bush and a fruit-bearing bush, than you may as well not be able to tell the difference at all.
Hmm, does Perception increase your chance to spot a edible fruit? I mean when your Perception stat is higher, strawberries and the likes will start to spawn more frequently - to simulate you being able to recognize fruits from afar.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a system similar to what we have with mushrooms right now. I.e. you can still forage wild vegetables at 0 Survival, but they might actually have some negative effects such as being poisonous or just giving you stomach cramps or whatever.
That said, for this to work there’d need to be a system where stats can be obscured if you don’t have the right skill (right now you can just eyeball mushrooms and gauge from the nutrition/fun whether it’s poisonous, hallucinogenic, or benign), and I’m not sure if that’s a direction in which people want DDA to be heading in.
EDIT: or yeah, just do a survival check, but I’d kind of prefer to have these properties as a static value rather than a dice-roll when you actually go to consume them. It just seems more consistent to me.
Actually this is something I’d like to do, edible plants would have a survival threshold associated with them, if your survival skill is over the threshold they’re drawn and described as their real self, if not they’re drawn and described as generic bushes. Obviously some would have a very low threshold, like 0. I mean you see a strawberry, is it really a strawberry? Um… duh? On the other hand plenty of people can’t spot a wild onion (probably still low though).
On the other hand there might be a “berry bush”, it has berries, are they blueberries, are they holly berries? at survival 0 you’re not sure… The berries themselves would be subject to the same thing, just being described as “berries” unless you have enough survival to recognize them. "maybe they go to “edible” or “poisonous” once you eat them… yipes, we’re wandering into an identification system >_<
Survival skill : effect of not recognizing it.
0 : Same as every other green blob.
1 : Not sure if it’s safe to eat.
2 : If it were edible I’d probably recognize it by now.
3 : Must be rare.
4 : Must be really rare.
5 : Wonder if it’s an invasive species?
6 : I don’t think it’s even native to the continent.
7 : Is it a new species?
8 : Is it a new genus?
9 : It it a new Family?
10 : What the hell is this thing?!?
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:13, topic:3600”]Survival skill : effect of not recognizing it.
0 : Same as every other green blob.
1 : Not sure if it’s safe to eat.
2 : If it were edible I’d probably recognize it by now.
3 : Must be rare.
4 : Must be really rare.
5 : Wonder if it’s an invasive species?
6 : I don’t think it’s even native to the continent.
7 : Is it a new species?
8 : Is it a new genus?
9 : It it a new Family?
10 : What the hell is this thing?!?[/quote]
An immediate use for the higher numbers would be marloss berries, but it’d be truly amazing to see even more things like that (strange effects) appear as time goes by and the landscape twists into something truly alien.
How about these:
0 : same as above and untrained checks to determine if we recognize it has edible parts
1 : same as above but we can tell if it’s a parasite plant, and we know what smells might hurt our bellies
2 : We’ve seen these seeds, and by the look of the plant we can tell if one or more animals have fed on it
3 : same as above and we know specific plant parts might cause nausea or poisoning
4 : We know what’s safe to pick for sugars, liquids, and what’s rich in minerals and vitamins
5 : We make use of the fact that certain parts are edible and nutrient but undelicious, and vice-versa
6 : same as above and we know the “hidden” properties such as healing and symptom elevating
7 : same as above and we are pretty certain about all the known species’ pros and cons
8 : same as above
9 : same as above
10 : same as above and we know how to tend to it so it doesn’t jeopardize the NE ecosystem.
Bwa ha ha ha ha! Poison Ivy is bad, mmkay! 
(2 or 3?)