The overabundance of food in postapocalyptic CDDA

[Journeyman]

I’m sure it has been mentioned before but having a multitude of poisonous plants really would add something.

I agree, having a number of poisonous plants that are indistinguishable from safe plants at lower Survival levels would go a long way toward balancing out the abundance of food you can get from foraging, and could even generate some new crafting recipes in the bargain. Hemlock can be confused with wild carrots, moonseeds can be confused with wild grapes, mistletoe and yew berries are both fatally poisonous, jimsonweed causes powerful thirst and hallucinations, etc., etc.

The bit about poison ivy is also good; it would further discourage people from foraging without a good survival skill, and perhaps at higher skill levels one could learn to safely harvest it and use it for crafting recipes. I think that there’s a lot of potential here to make nature more dangerous than it currently is. It isn’t just the cataclysm stuff that players should be worried about; foraging in wild areas early on should be plenty dangerous in its own right.

[Frostwood]

I’m sure it has been mentioned before but having a multitude of poisonous plants really would add something. Pokeweed berries might be confused with wild blue berries and nightshade for wild carrots. Even if it was just vomiting and nausea, eating random berries and tubers can kill you in real life. Not to mention mushrooms. With low or no skill, I would think a 5% chance of contracting a moral disrupting ‘poison ivy’ disease from searching brush is well justified.

I’m wondering whether it can be done like it is in books-a books contents are unidentifiable until you read the contents. A survivalist would probably have a trait that helps avoid stuff like poison ivy, and poison plants, much like having the md trait helps you avoid CBM failures. Identification from non-survival characters should require a book like Peterson’s field guide to plants or oral teaching or trial-by-error.

[Vorchar]

I’m wondering whether it can be done like it is in books-a books contents are unidentifiable until you read the contents. A survivalist would probably have a trait that helps avoid stuff like poison ivy, and poison plants, much like having the md trait helps you avoid CBM failures. Identification from non-survival characters should require a book like Peterson’s field guide to plants or oral teaching or trial-by-error.

http://awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=061112

[Nathan]

getting poison ivy should be a good learning experience(IE you eventually figure out what it is, and I’d gather that most people grasp fundamentally what poison ivy is even if they don’t know how to recognize it,how to deal with it and so on).

perhaps at higher skill levels one could learn to safely harvest it and use it for crafting recipes.

You need gloves, and a long sleeved jacket, and to immediately wash everything and take a shower afterwards.

[Litppunk]

and a cutting tool. Long as you don’t get the oil on you long sleeves, and shower are not necessary. just cut em and don’t let the oil touch anything but the (waterproof) gloves. (cotton type cloves result in slightly hire chance because…maybe the material absorbs it. Gloves and its material forever unusable if poison ivy oil is in it.

[Journeyman]

Huh. I looked around a bit and it seems the urushiol oil in poison ivy was actually used to make the lacquerware in the Far East, because it hardens in the presence of moisture.

The more you know.

[Litppunk]

huh. interesting, thanks for sharing ^.^ feel like bill nye should be here now.

[Random_dragon]

As was pointed out by Rivet rather promptly, the abundance of food is because the eponymous Cataclysm was rather sudden.

Now in my opinion, if you moved the start time to a later season, there should be less food and supplies in general. The way it works currently is only advancing monster spawns (if dynamic) and rotting away all perishable foods, but random item removal due to survivor looting isn’t accounted for.

It’s possible that the rapidly dwindling population could leave a local area untouched by looters, but it’s still plausible to assume that enough people survive over time that periodic supply runs could reduce the amount of untouched stores. If a tweaker or high school student or what-have-you can survive most of the year like a late-season game start would imply, you’d think there’d be plenty of more competent survivors running around…

Turning item spawns down works hilariously well for simulating dwindling supplies though. I had some Fun with a barbarian in a winter start just trying to find some fucking rocks to make tools with because I had item spawns at 1% that time. o3o

[Ferodaktyl]

snip’

you seem to have missed not only the OP, but also most of the replies following afterward
While you can indeed tweak the loot frequency to the heart’s desire, foraging, hunting and butchering are unbalanced (imo and not only mine). unlike RL, even post-apocalyptyc life, they provide too bountiful rewards even for the most novice characters.
Idk, maybe a hunter trait along with a forager one would have to be implemented while reducing the endless wild food supply in its all sources…

[Random_dragon]

Hmm. Okay, hunting I suppose can be a bit OP. Foraging is the real issue, as butchery returns are, well…large animals like deer or bears certainly can and will return quite a lot of meat. It may not be balanced, but that element is at least OP.

Thing is, I get a large amount of my food from grocery store raids, unless I’m specifically doing a wilderness character.

Real issue with butchering and getting all that meat is the fact it’s unrealistically easy to render it indefinitely edible. Keeping all that meat preserved takes time and effort beyond the already time-consuming process of making jerky.

Foraging I will agree is a tad more abundant than expected, though.

Still, for an urban survivor you’d still get an implausible bounty of food, and indeed supplies in general, out of stores and other sources that’d realistically be depleted by the time winter rolls around.

[Valpo]

Theres no reason for it to be depleted because npcs do not eat . who would snatch all the food(rot doesn t take care of everything)?
If we had Npcs with needs then food would become more important as well as moral items shelter furniture etc. Npcs are the answere.

[Random_dragon]

Exactly this. I would love to see simulated looting implemented alongside other NPC fixes.

Also pertaining to butchering, some implantation of size variation in animals would be a good fix to the “craploads of meat” issue. Would likely be part of changes allowing for long-term simulation of how the wild population react s to the cataclysm. They might repopulate and even thrive in areas reclaimed by the wilderness, hunted to extinction by desperate survivors, or entirely subsumed by the horde.

Though I’m going to bet someone’s already suggested that. I really should read the whole thread before weighing in on the matter. =w=

[Coolthulhu]

If someone created a mapgen template that would allow adding tags like “raided”, “ransacked”, “totally cleaned out” to map tiles, it could be somehow tied to NPCs roaming the area.

Angle was doing a mapgen rework, but I’m afraid it’s all dead now.

[Coolthulhu]

Also pertaining to butchering, some implantation of size variation in animals would be a good fix to the “craploads of meat” issue.

Animals do have different sizes, it’s just that survival bonus/penalty does not scale with it. At 100 survival you can get a megaton of meat from a squirrel, at 0 you’ll always waste meat when trying to chop up small stuff. Giving it scaling could help.

[Valpo]

Wow i thought it would scale xD

[Random_dragon]

Scaling would help, yeah. Is the variation purely random? If there was some simulated population model and having animals grow up and reproduce if able to survive, or some simulation of that… o3o

[Coolthulhu]

Scaling would help, yeah. Is the variation purely random? If there was some simulated population model and having animals grow up and reproduce if able to survive, or some simulation of that… o3o

Each point on map has a very abstract population number, but this population number doesn’t even say what species those things are. Depending on the you reach the place, the population can manifest as regular harmless animals, zombified stuff or mutant insects.

No reproduction and no repopulation yet.

[Random_dragon]

Then again, repopulation would take place over a timescale most character won’t live to see occur. The time-skip from starting later would be the best “first step” place for adding it though, as it’d be just a bit of number-crunching and population calculation compared to tracking wild populations dynamically during play.

[Belteshazzar]

It’s been discussed that vermin and other pests would be a food hazard, but the Zeds themselves might get hungry if they happen across a stash of easily accessible food (corpses, meats, fruits, uncanned foodstuffs.)

The blob might have the good sense to leave in some sort of food scavenging protocol like their hunting instincts thus relaxing the energy requirement of a vast trans-dimensional mutant army, while helping those those spooky skeletons to grow big and strong into hulks and other abominably large terrors which can then kill and make little hulks of their own and so on and so forth.

[Random_dragon]

Hmm, maybe. At a bear minimum (huehuehue), allowing animals to scavenge and be attracted to caches of food would be Fun.