So I’ve had this idea for awhile now. Crickets, Mealworms, Roaches even are very farmable, many individuals even do it for the purpose of feeding pets. Crickets in particular have made their way into near mainstream food sources for people.
I dont see why in a post-apocalyptic scenario like CDDA that small scale farms could’t be implemented. Now I do believe that without processing that this should come with a huge Joy penalty, but there are various ways Crickets can be processed to appear more appetizing or even enjoyable if done with certain seasoning. Protein powders, bar’s and the like are some of the first that come to mind.
Candied Crickets, anyone?
This idea could even be takken further with Maggot Farms. Not only are fly larva redily available it would give extra use to the refuse/organs that come from butchering. People in real life use farms like this for chicken feed, fish bait, and yes even for food.
I would also love to see what kind of monstrosity would emerge from one of these farms if they somehow got infected by the Blob! Really thw possibilities are full of potential.
Are you proposing this as sites to find in the game, or activities for the player to engage in? The latters definitely acceptable, the former would need some numbers regarding scale and frequency to show they have a notable presence in the New England area.
Not sure how sustainable it’d be as a human feeding measure without industrial feedstock, but some combination of composting-style rearing for maggots as a chicken feed is scale and resource doable for a survivor and provides a far more palatable protein option
Absolutely both, its actually fairly common with people who own reptiles to have some kind of insect farm. As a location i feel a slight modification to preexisting houses, maybe one in two hundred could have a single farm item as furniture. As far as an item it would only be able to subsidies calories to scavaging, unless you craft a great number. As far as feedstock, as far as my research food scraps, rotten vegtable matter, and grains are all they use.
I dont think post-Cata insect farms will be viable, first mutant maggot or cricket will break the plastic containment or whatever farm consists of. However pre-Cata farms could be added as a sort of horror show.
Everything that should be small that’s present is a mutated monstrosity. Unfortunately, the powers that be decided that it should be up to the player to guess whether something fairly small actually is the real fairly small creature or a much larger mutated one, as they removed all of the various conflicting naming schemes that indicated mutated creatures rather than deciding on a unified scheme (among other thing, they wanted descriptions like “giant” etc. to be used for even larger mutated creatures).
Okay so in a theoretical sense, there should be standard insects around. I like the idea of needing to feed and water the homemade farms, all it could take is accidentally watering them with tainted water and BAM, fun begins.
Everything is tainted though. Everything thats not hermetically sealed weeks before the blob started its infiltration at least. The tap water was certainly tainted and thats likely what is used for bug feed.
Its actually very common for people to use filtered or distilled water for these setups. Since tap water is usually treated with chemicals (Chlorine) that can be harmful to smaller creature’s.
I dont think filtering and/or distilling is enough to remove blob. I’m not sure how blob propagates but its most likely pulling more blob from another universe since zombies mass conservation doesnt apply to blob as zombies bloat to insane sizes without eating. I assume a tiny drop of blob in a lake makes entire lake contaminated in time. Blob is alive, it can probably crawl through filters and since we know that rainwater is contaminated it probably bypasses distillation as well.
Also no normal place uses chlorine to treat water, its ozonated instead. Chlorine is dangerous to humans, not just bugs, and even if there are such places remaining in New England now I doubt they’ll remain such in the future.
So unless you hermetically sealed water before first blob appeared its likely contaminated already. Blob had weeks to spread with rain clouds, ground water, tap water etc to everything thats not safely secured.
Even if water is safe food likely isnt anyway.
Considering boiling is enough id say distilled is fine, most people buy distilled water in sealed containers anyway. And for the chlorine, most people dont trust tap water for drinking anyway. I know the majority of people I know use atleast filtered water for most cooking and animal use.
There is nothing you can do to get rid of the blob. It’s not chemical in any known sense, but more like a field.
However, I don’t think animals you’ve managed to domesticate are mutated, nor are people you know (unless there would be story reasons or you subject those to mutagens or radiation).
Everyone and everything is affected by the blob (which is why healing is faster than in the real world).
I’m not sure where you’re drawing the assumption that everything is mutant and unhealthy, but its not. You can even go out and forage and find perfectly edible snails. Blob contamination is not inherently lethal or mutagenic, otherwise we’d all already be dead and malformed. Smaller animals aren’t generally represented as active critters but they’re still presumed to exist. You can find normal bee’s as items as well.
So farming a handful of insects is just as reasonable as foraging an edible snail - both just being items.
I hope the answer wasn’t actually directed at my post, as I believe we are in agreement.
A weak analogy is that of the real world issue with antibiotic resistant bacteria: Resistant bacteria doesn’t mean that everyone is doomed, but rather that those who get bad infections their natural defenses can’t fight off may be doomed.
The blob is everywhere, but it doesn’t run rampant (or at least it doesn’t do that yet).
The blob only mutates a small minority of animals not all of them. If a survivor where to build a insect farm after the cataclysm they could probably do so. They would just have to check the farm every week or so to pick out the unusually large insects and eat them before they get to mutated.
Farming gaint insects might also be a option. Maybe not for the more aggressive or truly huge ones but I could certainly see a survivor keeping more passive insects such as gaint catepillairs, aphids and maggots. Mutant meat is still a good supplement to a suvivors dieet and they can be used for chitin and fat.
