Animal harvest

[Zero_]

It'd be really neat if one could (if they so chose, don't make it a requirement!) participate in a more complicated animal harvesting process.

Perhaps one harvests the animal on site, or perhaps they could haul an entire carcass of certain animals back home (in a "backpack" slot?), hang it to bleed, harvest select cuts, organs, age meat, make various multistep meals, and so on.  Would give a guy something to do during the long nights.

Harvest

- On site or hauling home to harvest where one has all the proper tools (knives, saws, large workbench)

Hauling home

- In ones pack or perhaps on a cord/belt (chickens, other birds, squirrels, rabbits)
- On one's back for certain animals (smaller deer, goats)
- On horseback (eventually)
- In a wagon or cart - person or horse driven
- With another person or NPC, tied to a pole carried on the shoulder

Cuts

One could take those they are interested in, and turn the rest into steaks or ground meat.

Organs

Highly nutritious, one might harvest the heart, liver, kidneys, and intestines (for sausages).

Other prep

- Hanging to bleed, over a bucket, to collect the blood - some cultures use it for various blood puddings and such
- Hanging meat to age
- Cutting meat into thin slices and drying to make into a jerky

Optionality

And if people so chose, they could stick to just rough cuts, taking just rough pieces of meat, the hide, and bones, as they do currently. I'm just currently a bit bored by the process - it's too quick (you can hunt and dismember a couple dozen animals in a day's time in game nowadays - irl it takes a day to hunt and harvest one animal).

[Thorfinn]

Pretty sure there's a butchering mod that does approximately this.

[LadyWYT]

22 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Pretty sure there's a butchering mod that does approximately this.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/7966

1 hour ago, Zero_ said:

And if people so chose, they could stick to just rough cuts, taking just rough pieces of meat, the hide, and bones, as they do currently. I'm just currently a bit bored by the process - it's too quick (you can hunt and dismember a couple dozen animals in a day's time in game nowadays - irl it takes a day to hunt and harvest one animal).

As long as there's still the quick option to take the hide, trophy(if applicable), and the best cuts of meat/fat, I think it would work well. That way hunting for food while traveling/early game doesn't get tedious, and the player can be rewarded for sinking more time into the effort but not punished for picking the faster option if there's other things they'd rather do.

Where I see a system like this backfiring is if it's mandatory that the player go through the complete butchering process. Even if the gameplay loop is fun, it will become a tedious chore if it's enough of a time sink that it makes it difficult for players to devote time to other activities, like exploring and building. For my own personal tastes, I don't mind the simplified system we have already. It's immersive enough to be interesting, while leaving me with plenty of time to devote to building, exploring, or other tasks instead of constantly working on my food supply.

[Thorfinn]

I've seen Tyron say several times that the vision is to have an experience that can be easily modded to one's tastes. Thus all the mod integration. Heck, every game "ships" with a packager so pretty much anyone can bundle up his own JSON mods. Granted, many of the suggestions are beyond simple JSON editing, but not that far, and even if you aren't a coder, there are open-source mods that do something quite similar that one could learn from, and, depending on the license, even copy almost verbatim, changing the details like materials, workstations, etc.

[EDIT]

That's why all this, "But I don't want to use any mods!" seems slightly off-base. You don't want to play the game as the designer(s) intended?

[/EDIT]

Edited August 4 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, Zero_ said:

irl it takes a day to hunt and harvest one animal).

Slacker.

The bottleneck is always hanging them to age a bit. If the game warden sees a dozen deer hanging in your machine shed, he's going to get a bit suspicious and want to inspect the tags.

[Zero_]

 

26 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I've seen Tyron say several times that the vision is to have an experience that can be easily modded to one's tastes. Thus all the mod integration. Heck, every game "ships" with a packager so pretty much anyone can bundle up his own JSON mods. Granted, many of the suggestions are beyond simple JSON editing, but not that far, and even if you aren't a coder, there are open-source mods that do something quite similar that one could learn from, and, depending on the license, even copy almost verbatim, changing the details like materials, workstations, etc

I think, at least for people like myself, there would have to be quite a bit more mods for examples as to how to do things, as well as guides/tutorials, before I'd endeavor on such a journey. I'd love to do so in the future, though. Has to be easy though, otherwise I won't be able to motivate myself, as I have other interests as well that compete with any to do with VS.

Thanks guys for the mod suggestion.

[LadyWYT]

41 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Granted, many of the suggestions are beyond simple JSON editing, but not that far, and even if you aren't a coder, there are open-source mods that do something quite similar that one could learn from, and, depending on the license, even copy almost verbatim, changing the details like materials, workstations, etc.

I'm not a coder by any means, but I do like that Tyron and the devs made tools and guides so that players can easily jump into modding themselves. One of these days I'll probably give it a shot, I just have to find the time and motivation to actually do it.

42 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That's why all this, "But I don't want to use any mods!" seems slightly off-base. You don't want to play the game as the designer(s) intended?

That used to be me regarding Skyrim. Then one day I tried a few mods, and decide that modding really wasn't that bad and freshened up the gameplay nicely. Now my favorite thing to do whenever possible(after playing through at least most of the game vanilla, of course), is mod the game until it suits my particular preferences. And then the gameplay can be as mind-numbingly easy or as bone-crushing hard as I want it to be at any given time!

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Zero_ said:

I think, at least for people like myself, there would have to be quite a bit more mods for examples as to how to do things, as well as guides/tutorials, before I'd endeavor on such a journey.

It really depends on what you want to change.

For example, a common complaint is skeps take too much resources. To change it, just open up skeps.json in your favorite text editor (mine is Notepad++) and you see

[
	{
		ingredientPattern: "LLL	LLL	LCL",
		ingredients: {
			"L": { type: "item", code: "cattailtops", quantity: 2 },
			"C": { type: "item", code: "clay-*", quantity: 2 }
		},
		name: "skep",
		width: 3,
		height: 3,
		output: { type: "block", code: "skep-empty-east"  }
	},

	{
		ingredientPattern: "LLL	LLL	LCL",
		ingredients: {
			"L": { type: "item", code: "papyrustops", quantity: 2 },
			"C": { type: "item", code: "clay-*", quantity: 2 }
		},
		name: "skep",
		width: 3,
		height: 3,
		output: { type: "block", code: "skep-empty-east"  }
	}
]

You could change the quantity for "cattailtops" to 1 and now need half as many. Or say you wanted to substitute something easier like dry grass. Torches use dry grass, so open up torch.json, and find out the game's name for it (unsurprisingly, it's "drygrass") and add a recipe for skeps that use dry grass and clay. Or dry grass and dirt. Or whatever trips your trigger. You could also see in the torch.json that "quantity" is an allowable trait in the output line, so you could easily set it to make an entire stack instead of just one, as unrealistic as that sounds.

Or how about a mod that lets you make terra preta with dry grass and rot instead of compost? Or make compost by adding rot, dry grass, and some vegetables?

Don't like nails and strips for chests? Fix it.

Want to be able to make baskets or rope with grass? You be you.

Packed dirt is packed...dirt... so the output should be halved? It's your world.

Add a recipe to disassemble fences? Piece of cake. Open up some thing that you can disassemble (hand baskets, for example) and see how it's done.

This is NOT best practices and it will get overwritten by the new release when it comes out, so you will want to go through the Wiki and set up your own workspace/domain once you catch on, but tweaking JSONs to your liking is so easy even a caveman could do it.  Should go without saying you need to back up all the JSONs you fiddle with so you don't have to reinstall just to get back to vanilla.

Edited August 4 by Thorfinn