But damnit I hunted that possom WITH MY BEAR HANDS.
Legit cooked meat should give a gigantic bonus compared to reheating some cornmeal or slurping down a can of beans.
If you must, make it have a higher chance of failure/hidden failure. But don’t replace my rotisserie squirrel with boiled gristle. 
Oh oh! I got it!
Make the meat scale with your butchering skill, and with the animal.
So with level one on a squirrel you get “Ball of hairy gristle” "nutrition +5, morale minus 10, chance to vomit
With level ten on a bear you get the equivalent of a bolivian steak feast
Only if we can cook vermin whole.
Make butchering remove the gutses?
Suddenly I’m reminded of gradeschool lunch.
No amount of skill is going to turn a hunk of meat into a hundred dollar steak if you don’t have the materials to do so. If all you have is a pointy stick and a sharp object the best you’re going to be able to do is strip the unwanted bits of fur and whatnot.
As far as diffrent butchering skills and critters yeilding diffrent meats is concerned that’s not something I can tackle. It’s beyond my skill level at the moment (I think? Never looked into the code, just the JSONs.)
Also, I appologize for the misspellings. Spellcheck is telling me shit is spelled wrong but not letting me correct it. XD
pigeon is a delicacy. it’s also the ‘sky rat’
Cooked meat isn’t OP. The ability to obtain it so easily is. Nerf the amount of animals in fields. Make them spawn less and more realistically. Make hunting harder and the bonus for cooked meat will be balanced
I like the idea of having a quality of meat attached to butchering skill and animal cut from. In my mind, a nice venison tenderloin is going to be much tastier and probably impart more nutrition than a bowl of possum chunks.
I’ll agree that part of the problem is how easy it is to get fresh meat compared with storing and stockpiling more reasonable foods.
I get ambushed by cougars, wolves, the occasional coyote, moose and bear enough that they basically become a staple. Even giant mutant spiders drop perfectly palatable meats (you’d think they would be rather tainted due to all the mutation needed to reach such a size.)
I’ve never needed to hunt a squirrel or deer in ages given all the edible predators. To note, bears and other predator livers contain dangerous amounts of Vitamin A, as well as their systems generally concentrating all the toxins in the environment via the food chain.
ThisThisThisThisThis +9001. Even if it scaled with the survival/cooking skill, the sheer amount of edible creatures would make it far too easy to build/farm it up to a level that it’d be constant big morale bonuses and tasty food constantly, rather than it being a ‘trying to survive’ thing. Halving the wildlife, and causing most larger benign animals to run far, far away at the first sight of you would be a big improvement.
Things like farming, good trapping skills and so forth would then become invaluable, rather than just picking up any old bow and going on a squirrel/rabbit rampage for a 100 steaks a day.
Maybe make wild animals flee when you move around them, but have them gradually come closer and closer if you don’t move?
Wow! I never expected so many replies to this thread.
Anyway, I think removing the morale boost (while keeping the hot food one) as Ekarus did is probably the way to go. I wouldn’t want meat to become too scarce a resource as that would defeat the purpose of cooked meat being the level 0 dish. The way I see it, cooked meat should still be a solid fallback option when you’re short on fancier stuff. It should be better than eating chips or canned beans but not as attractive a choice as a spaghetti or a pizza or even a fruit pie.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a higher tier of cooked meat (maybe call it steak, or BBQ) that needs some sort of seasoning to go with it. a choice of salt, pepper, mustard …etc. But that’s not really important.
I’m not sure I like the idea of dividing meat into subcategories. We already have many types of fruit that are functionally identical. They have the same shelf life, nutrition values, are used in the same recipes … etc. I don’t feel that adds much to the game.
It’d be nice if those could be combined and use a similar system. So you kill a squirrel and you get “chunk of meat (squirrel)(fresh)”. You cook it and get “cooked meat (squirrel)(fresh)(hot)”. The squirrel modifier cuts down on some of the nutrition and enjoyment, but if you used “chunk of meat (deer)”, it would come out better? That way, all the meat recipes still function as they do now, but they get a penalty or bonus depending on the type of meat. The fruit could be retooled similarly, to have “fruit (blackberry)” and you end up with a “fruit pie (blackberry)” with whichever bonuses blackberries give. It’s probably too much to realistically refactor everything to, but at the very least it’s food for thought.
[quote=“Heruedhel, post:32, topic:4120”]I wouldn’t be opposed to a higher tier of cooked meat (maybe call it steak, or BBQ) that needs some sort of seasoning to go with it. a choice of salt, pepper, mustard …etc. But that’s not really important.
I’m not sure I like the idea of dividing meat into subcategories. We already have many types of fruit that are functionally identical. They have the same shelf life, nutrition values, are used in the same recipes … etc. I don’t feel that adds much to the game.[/quote]
+1
Anything that make more use of condiments is nice IMO.
I don’t particularly think dividing up the meat into so many categories helps, it just clogs up your inventory. I also don’t think animal spawning needs to be nerfed. If you must, include animal spawn rate adjustment in the options, same as with zombies. Taking away the morale bonus is good enough.
buh-huh-what?
You want to what cooked meat?
You gone loco, cabron.
Loco.
I think nerfing the interinsic morale boost is a solid first step, but it’s not the final word on the matter.
The spawn rates for animals is definitely high, not sure how high and it’ll take some careful thought to figure out where to put it. Also I want to make the animal populations persistent (spawn at game start, but the populations fluctuate over time).
A lot of animals are more skittish than they used to be, but not realistically skittish. Making e.g. deer realistically skittish would make them nearly impossible to hunt since they’re faster than the player and the player can’t sneak up on them (yet), so we need to be careful about that. They could stand to maintain a little more distance from the player though.
A higher-tier of cooked meat, with seasonings, higher skill requirement, etc is definitely something there’s room for.
I just want to reassure people that have brought up these valid points that we’re not like, “Ok, fixed it, don’t have to worry about it anymore”.
Varieties of meat has two benefits, one is pure flavor (ha), it’s just more immersive to have squirrel burgers vs deer burgers vs possum meatballs with spagetti. The other is when we get around to having a likes/dislikes thing for the player, they’ll like some, dislike some, get tired of eating the same thing all the time, etc, and that might or might not tie into particular varieties of meat. Point well made about making different meats unstack if they’re from different animals being a problem for inventory management. That’s something to be careful about.
Well we do have access to traps- make it so that deer can wander near the shelter while the survivor sleeps, but quickly abscond once they awake. Would allow for traps being useful, and waking up, looking out the window, and maybe taking a potshot or two at the fleeing whitetails.
Granted, scent would be everywhere, but we have deer living in fairly well-populated areas now- just last night I had a covey in my yard.
Population density in this county is 291/mi[sup]2[/sup], which would put it in the top 10 on the list of state pop densities. And I’m all of 2 minutes from the economic hub of the county. This isn’t that long after the cataclysm, so while they may have SEEN SOME SHIT the deer will still be used to ‘urban’ living. Hell, true human smell might make them feel safe.
That was a good point about having animals not notice you if you didn’t move too, not sure how hard that would be to code.
Maybe give foods a morale cap. Like cooked meat gives 8 morale bonus but morale cannot exceed 0. So, a desperate character will enjoy the meat, a well being one not really. High level foods should have higher morale cap of course.