some sort of decaying reward system for eating foodstuffs would be nice. But you make a valid point. For the time being the food system is much more relevant in a longer seasons game. I think most of the risk-reward system’s flaws come from the need to rework the combat system so that punching a moose to death is not something that comes out with a net gain.
I think a lot of the disconnect also comes from how easy it is to either clear a place out to safely rest and how easy it is to build a monster truck that can carry everything you’d ever need and can drive forever. In The Road, where other human beings were extremely scarce and the only (living) danger, there was still a lot of worry about staying put even (especially!) when they found a small mountain of non-perishable food, and when they left they left behind most of that mountain.
I think there’s a lot of broader issues that I think play into it to some degree. Increasing fuel consumption and vehicle maintenance would be something that could have a significant impact on food habits, for example.
valid point. Well as its been said before, the world didn’t starve to death. If you run out of the door screaming zombie you probably didn’t pack all your food in the suitcase before you left. That said I like the previous idea of much of the food having been eaten by rodents, or gone rotten/stale and no longer giving its full nutritional value.
Milk tea and coffee milk both have 55 quench, afair.
Its interesting. Because you have a lot of complex stuff going on here in the real world —> game world conversion, and its made more complicated by A. The passage of time, and B. The fact that the game covers about ~700 miles of latitude / ~371 miles of longitude make it more complicated.
I don’t really think this is the worst problem in the game (in fact, I think its probably something that can be safely left untouched) but if there were infinite time/resources, I think this would probably help increase realism:
- Drastically reduce the presence of all animals on Day 0, and increase their tendency to avoid humans/zeds.
- Make animals more numerous with each spring that passes. I don’t think they’d necessarily become less afraid of humans (because of the zombies) - but that might depend on the circumstances and the type of animal. I think something like increasing animals over time might actually be in the game though, honestly, but I don’t know for sure.
- Rebalance nutrition. I think its definately gotten -better- since I started playing Cata (vegetable soup is no longer the one and only thing you’ll ever need to not eat for days on end, for instance) - but there are definately places that are still silly. I fully agree with Coolthulhu with regards to this. ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO BONE GLUE … but thats not a food.
I do think, however, this should all be ignored until after z-levels are in, and the mapgen has progressed to the point where we have a ‘size range’ for cities, since worrying about the behavior of animals is pointless if changing the mapgen is still on the horizon. Since I’m not a coder though, I may be wrong about that.
In any case, I really can’t see it being the top priority. I mean, a couple tens of thousands of humans (am I being optimistic?) in the USA will have a far easier time eating then 300 million. Hell, after a generation or so, you’d probably have a hard time starving in this country. We really basically ate the continent down to the bone - it wasn’t that hard to survive in colonial america, we were just kinda idiots.
RE: the solutions I’ve been kicking around.
The solution for the first issue? It doesn’t really have one, and doesn’t really need one other than players just being more aware of the timeframe. By playing on compressed time like that, they’re sacrificing some of the realism. Easy peasy. Maybe way down the line it’d be nice to add can rust with botulism or dry goods being infested with insects, but that’s kind of a marginal solution and doesn’t really add anything.
The solution for the second issue? I think it’d have to be multifaceted. I’d suggest adding a significant amount of time to harvesting, with a reduction based on skill (a skilled survivor knows what to look for), which would help reduce the ridiculous yields from a fresh face bumbling through the woods. Adding a few failure events like accidentally getting poison ivy or stung by something would also be neat more as a thematic thing to emphasize that you’re far more goofus than gallant. Another thing that I sort of love is the way that you don’t know if mushrooms are edible or not until you have enough survival. The current implementation is really game-y (dissimilar types don’t stack, recipes know which is which, etc), but the idea is a great one.
The solution for the third issue? This one’s a weird one, because I don’t think there really is one without drastically changing some elements of gameplay. The ‘simplest’ solution would be something like keeping track of the last 14 days of what you’ve eaten and apply a stacking morale penalty if you eat something too much, but that runs into all kinds of issues right out of the gate (like pizza providing a bunch of slices rather than a whole pizza causing quick stacking) and wouldn’t really be fun. It’s just another box to tick every morning. Nutritional deficiencies would be ~simulation~, but having to prevent catching scurvy would be outright un-fun.
I think the ideal thing to look at for this would be the actual sources of mountains of staple food and reduce those so people rely on a variety of foods. I can’t imagine giant insect musculature is enough to provide a significant amount of meat, or that the meat would be particularly usable like ‘regular’ meat. Acorn trees probably need to be adapted to the fruit tree system as well, in that they should only really be harvestable in Autumn (rip tanbark). Thematically, it’d also be kind of neat to shift most of the pre-cataclysm food from dry/canned goods to perishables - walking into a grocery store full of rot and scavenging the few canned goods is a lot more interesting than walking into a grocery store of edibles with an occasional rotten burrito or fruit juice in the fridges.
Food ages based on the elapsed time since the beginning of the game/since it was crafted. Whether it’s within the ‘reality bubble’ or not makes no difference; you cannot keep it from decaying by leaving the area.[/quote]
This does not take into account the temperature, however. I stuffed some meat in the lower levels of an ice lab that was well below freezing and it promptly rotted my food for me when it should have been frozen solid, just because I left the area and the game just sort of forgot what cold is. I have a hunch that it will do the same to fridges unless those have some special mechanic in and of themselves that bypass this.
Fridges have a separate variable associated with them, but they only slow down rot to 20%, not eliminate it.
As for the food rotting in ice lab: food doesn’t rot while outside bubble (in this case probably different z-level), it is rotten all at once when it gets back into the bubble.
Ice labs are supposed to protect food from rot (there is even an explicit check for ice lab in the rot code).
If food rotting in ice lab happened in some recent version (0.C or later), it is a bug.
Response to the whole thread: Turning down item spawn is a thing, and it’s a thing I usually choose to do. I turn it down anywhere from 50-25% item spawn because I feel the drop rate of EVERYTHING (food included) is a bit too high. Maybe OP and others can experiment with that and see how that feels?
Most of what is causing issues isn’t changed by drop rate. If you could set it to zero, you’d still find infinite food via shrubs and trees and meat. I usually play below .05 item spawn, and finding a boiling container is a far bigger worry.
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Most of what is causing issues isn’t changed by drop rate. If you could set it to zero, you’d still find infinite food via shrubs and trees and meat. I usually play below .05 item spawn, and finding a boiling container is a far bigger worry.
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I’d call that (in the absence of humans) ‘working as reality actually intended’. In the context of the game world, an agrigarian society doesn’t actually make sense. When you have a very small group of people and a very, very large tract of land, such that they can basically travel for days/weeks without hitting another serious group of humans, food is… … actually less of an issue. Even today, the average hunter-gatherer group spends…what, 5-10 hours a week looking for food? When times are good, they are -very- good. Of course, when times are hard, you… starve.
Agriculture was actually pretty bad for humans, IIRC - but any forum anthropologists would know better.
I think amount of land/people living on land ratio is pretty important no matter what the food gathering method correct? If you have a good healthy batch of land and hardy crops you can basically plant and walk away until they are ready for harvest and have an abundance of food, negating insects and animals that eat them before they are ready. Many food crops produce a rediculously large amount of food in little time, if not destroyed by nature before.
Similarly in many areas humans are the only real major predator that keeps large game populations down. If a cataclysmic event happened and animal numbers were allowed to skyrocket (such as they do in no hunting zones of semi-sparsely populated areas) hunting gathering meat becomes extremely easy while finding uneaten veggies/fruits gets increasingly hard until you put a good dent in the game population.
The problem isn’t that you can survive indefinitely on hunting/gathering, it’s that food is just jumping into your pockets as you wander around. Walk into a forest, and a dozen acorns - what you can harvest from one tree in a few seconds of game time - are enough to sustain you for a week. And you’ll have a half dozen blackjack oaks on your screen at any one time. Hunter/gatherers had to actually hunt and gather, and that took up the vast majority of their time. What we have in-game is that people can spend one day gathering food from the wild and then they’re set for months with their massive stockpile of acorn flour and dandelion leaves and pine nuts and dried meat/fruit/veggies. Living near an ant nest is like being a hunter/gatherer on the grounds of an overpopulated cattle ranch.
Depends what you mean by ‘pretty bad’. Agriculture’s primary benefit was density - a crop of wheat provided more calories per square mile than hunter/gathering. Same with domesticated animals. That increased density allowed civilization to exist, as it allowed more people to be fed in a smaller area with less work. That generated free time as one person could produce significantly more food to their group thanks to that density, and that caloric surplus went to building societies.
There’s an argument that could be made about the aggregate nutritional value of each method, but that’s really not all that relevant.
The overabundance of food from wilderness forging can be eased by having forging factored into more ‘real’ life values:
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Edible plants should be present at the edges of forests, in fields and in swamps.
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Plants should be less plentiful in forests, and almost absent in deep forests-there is a reason why forest fires are considered healthy for forests as large trees tend to block out the sun.
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Gathering speed should be factored by survival skill-it takes more time to make sure the plant isn’t poisonous, when you are first trying to gather plants, and faster when you know the plant. It’s ridiculous that a person with 0-2 survival skill can forge for plants in very little time, and become a master survivalist on day one.
The commonality of food in cities would be more solved by an ‘event’ system, in which you have scavengers, animals and what not looking for food, and there was a PR by vache for an overlay system, but the pr is sitting in some sort of limbo-I’m not sure how far the pr is along, or whether vache would be okay with someone continuing it.
I do agree that the means of acquiring food should be more difficult, given how insanely resourceful each survivor has the capacity to be. This would help with defining the game experience based on how you want to play - if you’re traveling around city to city and are largely nomadic, that’s cool, you’ve got canned stuff and preserved foods to sustain you while you do that. If you want to dig in and bunker up, you’re going to have to start to invest in some long-term solutions to food demand. Frostwood’s ideas seem to make the most sense to me and is also pretty realistic.
It can probably afford to wait for a while but at some point this stuff should probably get considered. Probably around the time mapgen really starts shaping up.
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 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.
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.
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.