The overabundance of food in postapocalyptic CDDA

[Agoelia]

Then having a cat or a dog would make more sense. Cats kill rodents and insects, dogs can make foxes and maybe even wolves run away. It’d be awesome! But first we need wildlife intelligent enough to steal yo food

[Kryxx]

I would think even the non-perishable food would start to become scarce after a while due to rodents and insects getting into it. In the future, refrigerators and similar could keep their nonperishables intact, but that box of pasta on the table would become an empty box with a hole gnawed in the corner, and that box of crackers in the cupboard would become a box of empty plastic wrappers, and so on. In the gameplay sense, instead of discovering a kitchen full of foodstuffs on year 3, it would just contain a bunch of empty food containers. I would think things like MREs and the like would have to be immune to the process. Also, your foods gathered at your base won’t be safe unless they’re stored somewhere that prevents rodents getting in, and there could be an indication that they are, like the presence of a rat vermin creature, and also some other means to kill/prevent it (mousetraps?).

Well, there’s lot of things for insects to get into. Modern food supplies are sealed pretty well. The stuff I stockpile is mostly the rice/flour/beans etc that keeps. Fresh meat is not an issue, those things allow a fair variety of food.

If you want infinite food, setup a few maps away from an anthill

[Nathan]

Farming, hunting, foraging, and butchering effectively should all probably require more survival skill than they do now, and gaining survival shouldn’t be quite as easy as it is. of course that would just punt it to books, but I’m also fairly certain that I’d need to read a book to even be a middling farmer. For an example: low survival skill attacks on an animal should probably do more corpse damage, which would further lessen the yields from butchering, and so forth.

[EditorRUS]

I am really bothered by the fact there are SHITTONS of food recipes (as well as clothing), but they are useless in most cases (well, except if you are roleplaying). Just seriously, they pretty much make the craft menu messy, but not any bit more useful. By the time you will be able to craft most of these, you pretty much will not have problems with food or clothes with night vision/infrared goggles being an exception. And probably survivor suits. And a bunch of other things too. Seriously, what is the point of most of food recipes? There is food which is far more nutritious than most of these. Morale boost? It’s questionable because their boost is too small and really not long-lasting to compensate time and resources you spent on crafting it. Simply heating food will make it far more good for character to eat (+15 morale comparing to ~+4 morale in average). Drinks yield more boost than food. And knowing all that you still continue to add more and more and more and more and more food and clothing recipes. I admire that you are filling the game with content to make it more interesting, but let’s face it: they all are functionally same and this just makes a mess. Realism? Well, that may be the only excuse, but it’s enforced pretty much and not everyone likes that you can’t ignore it. After a day or two I get so tired of craploads of clothing and useless things dropping from zombies that I enter in filter “-{c:clothing},-{c:food},-aspirin”. Unfortunately there is no excluding keywords at the moment and -{c:clothing} is applied to all clothing including those you don’t want to be excluded so you pretty much have to manually check things if you think there is something good in here, i.e. you killed zombie soldier that may drop armor.

[Kryxx]

The number of recipes are fine. Sure you don’t need a lot but a variety is good. Limitations in sandboxes make for a boring game.

The game has design reasons for a lot. I guess you don’t take many negatives. Take a meat/fruit/lactose intolerance sometime. They are a decent way to get more points.

I feel like some of the negative mutations traits should actually be food intolerance’s. Like Raptor, getting vegetable/fruit/wheat intolerance breaking the threshold etc.

Clothing, the biggest issue is the ‘survivor’ is the best of both wetness, EP and encumbrance. You don’t even need anything but the ‘light’. Pad it with leather and kevlar, and maybe 1-2 more layers. A duster, suit etc. Eventually find a few other pieces you cannot make for some situations.

As it turns from winter to spring to summer, you just remove some layers of lower protection that was providing warmth. (which I padded with felt. so usually removing 1 layer per season). Still the same protection just the skin tight warmth layers are gone.

I don’t play the experimentals, we’ll see how some of the re-work comes out for encumbrance

[Coolthulhu]

I am really bothered by the fact there are SHITTONS of food recipes (as well as clothing), but they are useless in most cases (well, except if you are roleplaying).

This, very much this.

Also about the morale bonus. Even the best morale bonus from food (and drugs) is nearly meaningless unless you stack it to max or take gourmand. With gourmand, morale bonus is still way more about stacking it for int before installing CBMs than for any regular activity. mp3 player is for those.

Morale bonus could generally use a big duration boost. Preferably decoupling duration from intensity.
From all the morale bonuses/penalties I remember right now, only murder, cannibalism and addictions have an effect strong enough to really bother with.

The number of recipes are fine. Sure you don’t need a lot but a variety is good. Limitations in sandboxes make for a boring game.

The problem is not limitations vs. no limitations, but Dwarf Fortress style overabundance of non-viable options - there are 3 good solutions, 300 mediocre ones and 10 bad ones. Unless you’re roleplaying, doing a challenge, inexperienced or in a strange situation, you’re going to pick one of the 3.

Some recipes are just plain better than the others. Biscuits are probably the best example: 8*28 nutrition for 2 flour and 1 cooking oil.
Other recipes are so useless I don’t believe the author tested them and that anyone used them. For example, anything involving glue and arrows. You need 50 bones (or 100 tainted bones) to craft a single stack of arrows with bone glue.

[EditorRUS]

Also about the morale bonus. Even the best morale bonus from food (and drugs) is nearly meaningless unless you stack it to max or take gourmand. With gourmand, morale bonus is still way more about stacking it for int before installing CBMs than for any regular activity. mp3 player is for those.

With recent changes in skill-n-learning system, morale's significance (I will never write this word correctly http://clip2net.com/s/3eI3aaD) dropped even more low. Why? Because "Focus Pool" (formerly XP) is not really useful anymore. XP used to be the main reason of keeping characters happy, but now we can craft things without having to learn recipes just by keeping a book with the recipe around or in your inventory, so there is no point in having huge focus anymore. You may learn recipes just by crafting things they refer to and most of commonly used recipes can be learned just by crafting them constantly. Other recipes are usually crafted once or twice and never needed again so there is no point in remembering their recipe. What about morale-influenced stat boosts? The threshold of Elated/Depressed status is just too high to get any significant boost. It's just more cheaper to use stimulators rather than food, music and stuff. Moreover if you need focus for some reason, there is checked-up-by-time method - mp3 player or even stereo system, which makes things even more cheaper. Just three fucking adrenaline shots give you THREE DOZENS of INT. THREE. DOZENS. Also you become Sanic and gotta go fast. This boost will last for HOURS in game. In order to get similar morale boost you will need to get, like, 3600 morale. I can't imagine this done without drugs. But you can't addict to adrenaline. So morale has become nearly useless and the only bad thing that may happen is that you kill "innocent" NPC and get 100 morale penalty for days that will restrict you from crafting unless you are using prozac (but even with prozac you'll be sensitive to wetness).

[Arek_PL]

hostille animals (moose, bear, wolf, coaguar and sometimes dog) give a lot of meat i made few tons of meat jerky without hunting because food come to me not me come to food

[Vorchar]

hostille animals (moose, bear, wolf, coaguar and sometimes dog) give a lot of meat i made few tons of meat jerky without hunting because food come to me not me come to food

Going near spiderwebs is also a good way to get easy food. A lot of animals tend to get stuck in the webs and get mauled by zombie animals. Spiders are usually long gone before you get near the web.

[Nathan]

[quote=“EditorRUS, post:24, topic:9184”]I am really bothered by the fact there are SHITTONS of food recipes (as well as clothing), but they are useless in most cases (well, except if you are roleplaying).

This, very much this.

Also about the morale bonus. Even the best morale bonus from food (and drugs) is nearly meaningless unless you stack it to max or take gourmand. With gourmand, morale bonus is still way more about stacking it for int before installing CBMs than for any regular activity. mp3 player is for those.

Morale bonus could generally use a big duration boost. Preferably decoupling duration from intensity.
From all the morale bonuses/penalties I remember right now, only murder, cannibalism and addictions have an effect strong enough to really bother with.

The number of recipes are fine. Sure you don’t need a lot but a variety is good. Limitations in sandboxes make for a boring game.

The problem is not limitations vs. no limitations, but Dwarf Fortress style overabundance of non-viable options - there are 3 good solutions, 300 mediocre ones and 10 bad ones. Unless you’re roleplaying, doing a challenge, inexperienced or in a strange situation, you’re going to pick one of the 3.

Some recipes are just plain better than the others. Biscuits are probably the best example: 8*28 nutrition for 2 flour and 1 cooking oil.
Other recipes are so useless I don’t believe the author tested them and that anyone used them. For example, anything involving glue and arrows. You need 50 bones (or 100 tainted bones) to craft a single stack of arrows with bone glue.[/quote]

The other thing about biscuits is that they finish quickly, as opposed to some recipes needing more than an hour to work. If tasks could be parallelized out(presumably villagers will do them), long completion time wouldn’t matter, but time for one person is pretty valuable.

[IcedPee]

some recipes needing more than an hour to work. If tasks could be parallelized out(presumably villagers will do them), long completion time wouldn't matter, but time for one person is pretty valuable.

That, or a rework of the crafting system so that we wouldn’t get into a situation where we need to sit and watch our jerky smoke for hours. It would be preferable to set the system up, be able to work on other things, and come back after a certain amount of time to collect our jerky/omelette/biscuits/whatever. Maybe if we took too long getting back and the food was still on the fire it would burn and become inedible.

I imagine this wouldn’t be very easy to implement, though. I’m glad we’ve got it with the charcoal kiln, but still…

[Pandromidal]

What about the way that water satisfies your thirst so much better than anything else even though it seams like the difference should be slight? Like can you imagine drinking two and a half cans of soda just to equal one cup of water?

All other beverages become useless when you can just drink water.

[KA101]

Morale and stimulants are available in non-water beverages. Clean Water is pretty much “meh”, but it is pretty effective at quenching thirst IRL–more so than a can of soda IME.

[Litppunk]

Is there no gatorade impersonator in the game that has all those tasty electrolytes, and thus is more quenching?

[Zero]

Sports drink. Gives some nutrition IIRC.

[Litppunk]

ah k thought I remembered something like that. But it gives less quench then water?.. well then again I guess that makes sense. sport drink makers over electrolyte them.

[Valpo]

It gives more quench as far as i remember.

edit:

along with mineral water its the only thing i can think of that quenches thirst better then water.

yet it doesn t realy matter because you can not craft either.

[Journeyman]

Honestly I feel that the huge list of recipes and sheer variety of food are part of what make this game fun for me. I love the realism and lack of conservation of detail; some things aren’t practical or meaningful to craft, but you can still craft them anyways.

Figuring out what’s effective and what isn’t is a part of learning to play the game, and I feel that cutting back on the recipes or rejiggering the food balance to force people to focus on other foods is at best unnecessary, and at worst a detriment to the quality and realism of the game.

Having said that, I do favor the idea of boosting the role of morale in the game. It always seems to be this nebulous quantity that never actually has a significant impact upon your skill XP (barring something drastic like killing an ally), so if there was some way of reworking it to play a larger role in gameplay, I’d be all for it.

[Iosyn]

Imagine everyone in your town/city/suburb etc suddenly disappeared or was evacuated at short notice.
The average family has enough food for a week or two in the house at most times. Larger families tend to keep much more food on hand than you’d think.
Now, imagine you have the run of a supermarket or local shop all to yourself. You probably couldn’t eat all the perishable food before it went bad, especially without power.
As for non-perishables, you could feast like a king for months.

Also as to food and morale boosts you better stock up on marshmellows, crackers and chocolate. Eating a stack of s’mores seems to be a shortcut to Nirvana.
I’ll certainly agree that the food crafting menu is messy. I’m sure we could at least break all the food made for long-term storage into a seperate sub-category.

[MormonPartyboat]

There’s a couple parallel issues going on with food availability, but I really see three primary ones.

The first is the timescale. The default timescale of 14 days per season means that for every apparent day, almost a week goes by in ‘real time’. So if you kill a deer and fill a large waterskin with water, that will last you a month or so (at least). If you bump the timescale up to 91 days/season, canned goods become a luxury until you’ve enough killdozer to drive off into the sunset. And like others have mentioned, the setting means there’s going to be a lot of canned goods.

The second is the ease of scavenging, in terms of effort, risk, and reward. The difference between low and high survival on scavenging is minimal in terms of rewards, the only thing you invest is a trivial amount of time, there’s zero risk except with blindly eating mushrooms, and even when you just get ‘garbage’ your reward can be pretty valuable items like glass jars or gallon jugs.

The third is that there is absolutely no reason not to pick an easily made single foodstuff as a ‘staple’ and just make that forever. As mentioned, morale is a non-factor, so the only things to think about are ‘is it easily made’ and ‘will I have to worry about catching diseases’. Biscuits are tasty and filling and probably deserve at least close to their current stats, but eating nothing but biscuits for months at a time would cause all kinds of health and psychological issues.

I’ve been thinking of how these could be addressed, but I’ll have to kick the ideas around in my head for a bit.

I love the realism and lack of conservation of detail

The current system is far from realistic, and the proposed systems are also far from realistic. Details should be added when appropriate, but it’s important to remember that the simulation serves the game and not the other way around. That’s why there’s just ‘chunk of meat’ rather than various cuts and ribs and all the other giblets when you butcher - it doesn’t add anything to the game to simulate all that.