Nerf Cooked Meat

[Inadequate]

Well, if it’s just a mod I’ll be happy to try it out when I have the time. I still feel unsure about whether this should be merged into main or not, but I have no problems with a mod.

Edit: Wait, are you pushing for merging it into master? I take that back.

[Cherry]

So a nutrition mod just means grow/find vegetables or suffer?
Thats kinda, “fun”, but also kinda “I’ll just put this off until I come near a forest again”.
Also, I have no idea how each animal in the forest tastes- bear, rabbit, weasel, racoon, RAT- cooked meat is cooked meat.
We really don’t need food qualities as the only thing FOOD does is fill up the hunger/thirst meter.
If you want food quality then eat spaghetti bolognese with some chardonnay!

[Heruedhel]

Relax. For now I specifically just made it into a mod cause I understand there are many ways to tackle this, all of which IMO have their merits. I just wanted to put the mod out there for consideration. I would really appreciate it if people, especially those who are skeptical about it (Inadequate and Patton, I’m looking at you) gave it a spin.

[Heruedhel]

@Cherry: Not quite. If you just eat two food types (e.g. cooked meat and dehydrated meat, or cooked meat and strawberries) you’ll get the same values you’re getting without this system. You do NOT have to eat vegetables.

On the other hand, If you take the time to vary your diet more than that, then you’ll start getting bonuses. Also, this mod actually gives you a bit of a boost at the beginning of the game, because you haven’t eaten anything yet, and because you’ll probably be eating whatever you can get your hands on, so variety will come by default.

One more side effect of this system is that if you eat a lot of some type of disgusting food (e.g. raw meat) you’ll get used to the taste and won’t take as much of a morale hit. This of course goes away after you spoil yourself with a bit more variety in food.

[Ratha]

In my experience with cataclysm, especially with all the new wildlife and vermin in the game ive had literally zero reason to eat anything other than cooked meat for ~14 days that my character has been alive. Every time i need to leave my house there is always something outside that stalks me, a fox, coyote, wolf, bear, moose, dog, spider, rat… the food literally comes to me. I have tin cans of things in the fridge which are spoiling (strangely) while i am able to eat as much meat as i want and continue to grow my cooking skill every day by cooking nothing other than meat alone.

While i do try to hunt down all of the other ingredients to make specialized and prepared meals, its simply too much effort to bother with cooking the better meals when theres literally an endless supply of very filling and almost weightless meat that comes to my door or chases me down every day. With as many things as i have butchered within 1-2 map tile of my house, and as much rotting meat as i have thrown into my fire pit, i should have attracted every large predator and zombie within twenty miles.

I cannot offer a comprehensive solution to this ‘problem’ as its more complex than just changing a few numbers i would suspect, however heres where i would probably start:

1: I would quarter the nutrition value of cooked meat. If the unseasoned meat from 2-3 rats is enough to fill you up for the entire day, that seems unbalanced.
2: Cooked meat is a level zero cooking recipe. It should not be able to raise your cooking skill past level 1 or level 2. You can only improve so much from cooking the same thing over and over.
3: The amount of meat gathered from a corpse should be capped to the size of the animal. Your skill in butchering/survival and the cutting quality of your tool should determine how many chunks you get. (This is probably how it is currently i would imagine?)

[Inadequate]

1 does make sense, I have to admit. 2 is a more general issue that I’m not sure is within the scope of this thread, like how boiling a water tank’s worth of water makes you a master chef. 3 is already how it is, but survival can’t train too slowly and you can’t have too harsh a limit on meat cuts, or it would be very difficult for players with zero survival skill and no towns around to get a good start.

[Cherry]

The solution is to obviously make different animals drop different meat.
Rodent meat, wolf chunks, bear slabs, and moose surprise. Each with their own nutritions and flavors . Yum.

[keldoclock]

Unreal World also does the nutrition system in addition to hunger. The funny thing is that meat is the most nutritious food there, so if you can afford to go on an all-meat diet there’s no reason not to.

This is because the URW nutrition system just tracks calories. It prevents the player from just eating berries forever- you literally cannot eat enough berries to stop yourself from starving, even if you stuff yourself with them every day. It also lets you do little things like drinking water to reduce hunger even if you have no food.

I think the right solution to this problem is:

1. Reduce wildlife spawns

and then see how things go from there, if it is still unbalanced then we can see about tweaking nutrition/morale, getting bored of food, or complex nutrition management systems. Lets just start by having less animals to eat, and play that game for a week or so to figure it out.

[Inadequate]

I do agree that the most recent additions to the wildlife has left the game world positively packed with wildlife. Even in the older versions, though, wildlife scarcity was hardly a major issue, except that there were less ways to convert meat into long-term preservable food.

[Cherry]

In the older games, wildlife only consisted of spiders spiders and more spiders.
They still consisted of lots of edible meat though.
Should we make spiders drop tainted meat?
Or should we just replace all the current city wildlife with zombie versions/apocalyptic creatures. (which we need more of)

All the small forest wildlife shouldn’t be spawning in the city anyways.
We should have to travel to a nearby forest to find rabbits and squirrels.
Maybe a racoon or rat in the city…

[Inadequate]

I don’t think we should punish any one particular playstyle. You should try to keep it balanced so that a character could spend his entire lifetime running around in the city, or hunting in the forest, and both styles are perfectly viable. No-city mode and mega-city mode are still options, after all.

[Cherry]

Do forest animals run amok cities in New England?
There some kinda realism thing going askew here. You can argue that no humans are around anymore, but there are freaking zombies instead.
But yeah if you play on mega city mode, there are infinite grocery stores to raid so you don’t starve even if you only have raccoons and rats in the city.

[Inadequate]

I don’t particularly think squirrels are rare in cities, myself. Personally it makes sense to me that the larger, more aggressive animals would claim city land for themselves, and cats and dogs aren’t exactly difficult to justify.

[Cherry]

Ahh ok, I forgot about the cats and dogs. Ok you win Cities can still have lots of animals in them. I’ve never been to New England so I wouldn’t know about the pest management there. lul

[esran]

if we really wanted to revamp it i would suggest the following.
reduce wildlife spawns.
overtime increase zombie spawns.
that way falling food supply and increasing zombie supply could act as a driving force to force the player to leave his comfort zone and move to new areas.

[Cherry]

[quote=“esran, post:115, topic:4120”]if we really wanted to revamp it i would suggest the following.
reduce wildlife spawns.
overtime increase zombie spawns.
that way falling food supply and increasing zombie supply could act as a driving force to force the player to leave his comfort zone and move to new areas.[/quote]
We already (barely) reduce wildlife spawns by adding ZOMBEARS in after like a few days. If the developers add more zombified wildlife or outright monsters later on into the mix, this would definitely dwindle the comfortable “get meat every day” lifestyle. I’m already imagining more aggressive mutant rat creatures after the first week.

I think that the roving zombie hoards for static can take care of your third line. They are already having ideas to revamp the dynamic spawn in another thread also.

[Inadequate]

I’d prefer it if you didn’t force the player into one particular playstyle. Even if the zombies increase and wildlife decrease, I don’t think I’d like any one area to be completely uninhabitable after any amount of time.

Honestly, I don’t think food should be a major issue after the early game, once you’ve got a good base up and running. It may be more of an issue for long journeys and lab raids, but I don’t think you should have to spend the vast majority of each day having to hunt food just for day-to-day living.

[Cherry]

You actually have a good point. Worrying about food all the time is boring. All we want to do is explore labs and travel the world with our 500 tons of bear squirrel sausage. Fk yeah! Thanks for getting me excited about ice labs again

[system]

[quote=“Cherry, post:110, topic:4120”]In the older games, wildlife only consisted of spiders spiders and more spiders.
They still consisted of lots of edible meat though.
Should we make spiders drop tainted meat?
Or should we just replace all the current city wildlife with zombie versions/apocalyptic creatures. (which we need more of)

All the small forest wildlife shouldn’t be spawning in the city anyways.
We should have to travel to a nearby forest to find rabbits and squirrels.
Maybe a racoon or rat in the city…[/quote]

Spider meat should at least give negative morale since… well I wouldn’t smile after eating a chunk of cooked giant spider…
Same with rat meat.

[Inadequate]

Broiled rat is a rare delicacy in parts of the world. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. And personally I’d take extra pleasure from killing and eating something that was bent on eating me.