Hey! I’m playing “survival in the wild” and I’ve noticed its very very hard to sustain yourself without scavenging…
I’ve caught 5kg fish, and after buthering I get 3x 0,2kg fillet and 3x 0,2kg bones… Where is the rest of that fish? O.o
I’e hunted 120kg bear, which after buthering yelded 13x bones, 4x chunk of fat, 6x chunk of meat, 1x large stomach, 3x offal, 4 pelts and some sinews… Well… considering that bear weighted 120kg - getting 6kg of edible parts from him is… fun? sad? stupid?
I’ve hunted 120kg moose (which can grow up to 700kg) and after butchering there is another 6kg of edible parts…
Honestly after taking down one big game, and with means to preserve meat (drying, smoking, salting…) - I should be able to survive whole season, not… a day or two…
If you want to make use of higher survival skill… then make few tiers of meat (shreds, cuts, steaks, slabs) and with worse skill and/or tools you should get more shreds rather than getting no meat at all…
Basically what Soyweiser said, you can already quite easily get enough meat from a corpse or two to jerky your way through to the next year, and you quickly end up sat on more imperishables than you can easily fit in a Cargo Space and can survive years at a time before having to even butcher a corpse.
That said, this seems like a good idea for a mod to couple with longer season lengths. A 91 day season, 364 day year with realistic meat quantities would be fine for those who enjoy such things, and there’d be no balance concerns since mods aren’t required to follow the default balance concerns.
@Soyweiser: I always play with wither 90 or 120 days long seasons. And I can’t see anything balancing in animals who weights 120kg and give 6kg of food. It’s just stupid. Also, remember that season length is just season lenght. If you have to survive 360 days - it’s still 360 days, be it 3 seasons, whole year or 10 years.
If you want to play “survive in the wild” like me (I turn off cities) - you can’t roam around because you will starve.
@Pantalion: That’s how it should be done. Hunt a deer and you should be able to get at least 60kg of meat to survive a month or two. Hunt elk, get 500kg of meat and survive a year.
OFC meat jerky shouldn’t be imperishable and without spices it should be quite unpleasing, but still… Right now the only way to survive in CDDA is to scavenge in cities (especially if you pick quick metabolism and high thirst).
Yeah, there should maybe be time limits on imperishables so they don’t outlive your atomic lamp. There’s also a lot of scope for making small critters steal from your food stores, necessitating taming cats and so on.
I don’t agree with your assertion that you can’t survive without scavenging, however. I’ve played essentially 100% wilderness games for several years (started in the wilderness, bounced between rare mansions farms and labs when possible searching for so much as a road - stupid 8 city spacing), and food has never been an issue, even though my characters typically gravitate towards a vegetarian shrub-forager lifestyle.
Foodwise, if you’re travelling cross country and examining bushes faithfully it’s honestly very, very easy to get enough wild vegetable to make more aspic than you can eat, and eggs for vitamins. Not to mention if you come across an ant hill you’ll have more meat and eggs than you could ever, ever need (one ant egg alone is essentially a day of nutrition, which is problematic in itself), while bee hives give perishable but awesome Royal Beef to cure your B12 deficiency.
The biggest problem for me is water, 90 day season or not. Realistically speaking, cities are deserts where water should be a serious problem, and most water supplies that are available would be tainted by pollution that would be hard to remove without serious filtration and treatment of the water.
But a swimming pool in Cata is a permanent, never emptied, healthy water supply and most houses carry days worth of water in their bathrooms that can be rendered perfectly safe by a burning candy wrapper. Meanwhile fields and forests are barren, desiccated wastelands that stretch on for mile after mile without so much as a trace of morning dew. The only way the player can feasibly survive the limitless jerky is to live river-adjacent, have a CBM, or use a trolley with a funnel attached to help simulate the “small streams” and “puddles of rainwater” that are notoriously absent from the Cataclysmic wilderness.
Even meat jerky gets “old” over time, not to mention tin cans or jars of different food types. They usually are edible withing 1-10 years of making (if stored in perfect conditions), but lets face it - not every single can or jar were made day before cataclysm - so they should have some random length of edibility.
Yup, shrubs are totaly OP in comparison to hunting or other ways of gathering food… You can get 3 wild vegetables/eggs/anything from single shrub and most importantly - bushes won’t retaliate. This game was defenitely made by vegetarians
And water - yeah, it should have hidden stats like polluted and dirty, while dirty water should be rendered safe by mere boiling, polluted water should be still dangerous even after boiling or sometimes even after filtering…
Euh, you are complaining the game is not balanced in a very specific game setting. Can’t really do much if you turn of cities at all. (even then, I never had a problem starving myself). When you push the game into settings it was not made for, you are going to run into some problems.
Edit: So, yeah, I see why you have a problem with it. But im not going to change it myself.
I don’t know, with a squirrel in the game you can pass the whole day without hunting anymore cause you have enough food. I guess making butchering levels give way more at late game would be better, maybe? But it’s already balanced enough IMO.
[quote=“lordmatiz, post:6, topic:12384”]Even meat jerky gets “old” over time, not to mention tin cans or jars of different food types. They usually are edible withing 1-10 years of making (if stored in perfect conditions), but lets face it - not every single can or jar were made day before cataclysm - so they should have some random length of edibility.
Yup, shrubs are totaly OP in comparison to hunting or other ways of gathering food… You can get 3 wild vegetables/eggs/anything from single shrub and most importantly - bushes won’t retaliate. This game was defenitely made by vegetarians
And water - yeah, it should have hidden stats like polluted and dirty, while dirty water should be rendered safe by mere boiling, polluted water should be still dangerous even after boiling or sometimes even after filtering…[/quote]
Distilling could be used to remove water from polluted water. Also, I think some guy made a solar evaporation device out of a bucket, windshield, and some other things.
I believe it should be just like in UnrealWorld - you hunt a deer and get enough meat to sustain yourself while you build farm for a month or walk across the continent - no need to hunt every single day.
Right now I consider butchering big games in CDDA as bugged and out off balance/realism.
With default spawn rate, you can encounter many moose, bears, wolves and coyotes in day. It’s a lot of meat if you kill them all.
The problem of wilderness survival is fire. The sinew from animals is not going to be enough for making fire drill that is necessary since you do not have matchbook, lighter, or solar RV kitchen.
If I’d like to kill 1000 mooses to get enough foot to survive year - I’d do so. But I want REALISTIC meat amount of food from animals. Early game it’s hard to hunt big game- especially with simple bow or glass shyv. If I kill moose, I want to see meat I fought for… 3kg meat is like… Yeah I’ll cut a bit from his arse and go away, let the woolfs or zombies eat the rest. And the best part is when you get “your lousy butchering destroyed all the meat” xD
IMHO it’s bugged. It’s bugged as hell. Because if you walk around the forest and get 300kg vegetables then you make bow, arrows, find moose who leaves you nearly dead… and get 3kg meat… Then why even bother hunting? Better stay vegan.
That’s why I use cheat menu right now. I spawn 100kg meat per game and live a happy life. Annoying way but I believe I deserve that meat if I hunt something that big and dangerous.
Rather than lowering their spawn, what about the majority of non-predatory wildlife moving away from noises where possible, and have far better hearing than the player? Moose attacks should be the result of startling the animal by moving into its territory, rather than angry moose charging from the woods to stalk outside your car glaring at you.
This behaviour change alone (possibly combined with making predator meat less valuable - predator meat tastes gross and has much less fat, while eating their livers can straight up kill you, after all) would completely change the dynamic of hunting, since the player would then have reason to make use of all the snares, pits and traps that you can currently ignore in favour of waiting for breakfast to come charging out of the woods to harmlessly attack you.
Successful hunting would involve a lot of staying still and silent, hoping for a spawn to cross your sights, and hoping it doesn’t run too far away and get lost in the woods / attract a dangerous predator before it dies of blood loss and shock. Aka: Actual hunting.
Out of curiosity, has any player actually successfully hunted a deer in-game? I’ve honestly never been within realistic firing distance.
I have. It’s quite the pain in the ass. A lot easier to just wait until you can take on moose or bears.
Maybe animals could get their own horde dynamic? Or just the more important ones like deer and such. It would be awesome to see an increased yield from larger animals, mixed with random weights and sizes, as well as a change in their behaviour.
- so they should have some random length of edibility.