Can we find alternative for "sprint naked to loot your corpse"? Throw in your ideas (:

[ftsm]

I know it's stable mechanic that we are used to play with since century start. But isn't it weird? 

You are to run to your body (to the place you was slain in your best equipment) naked in a naive hope to snatch your belongings back and run away.

Also you are on a item despawn timer. Also you can't leave the game, bcs all your dropped items will be despawned (yeah, keep that in mind if you didn't know this. Never ragequit VS, boys)

Do you have any ideas of alternative way to punish a player for their death that aren't so annoying, hasteful and.. chaotic?

 

Maybe Anego will pick someone's cool idea from the discussion

[LadyWYT]

I know that even if you have the "keep inventory on death" rule set to true, you'll still be penalized for dying with the reset of your nutrition meters and your stamina meter being set to half-full on respawn. It's not the stiffest penalty though, as it's fairly easy to recover your nutrition(although not immediately). It also opens up a rather ironic use for the really bad mushrooms like funeral bells--just go exploring however far you'd like, and eat one of those when you're ready to return home.

5 minutes ago, ftsm said:

Do you have any ideas of alternative way to punish a player for their death that aren't so annoying, hasteful and.. chaotic?

I think the annoying, hasteful, and chaotic part is supposed to be the primary incentive to avoid death in the first place. I'm also not sure that there's really a good alternative either, as a penalty that's easy to ignore will encourage players to play more carelessly. On the flipside, a penalty that's too harsh can make it more difficult to fully enjoy the game.

There's a couple of other games I can think of that do handle death a bit differently, that could potentially work in Vintage Story. However, it would require implementing some sort of skill progression system for the player character first, before such systems could even be considered as an alternative.

Example #1: Valheim tracks the player's skills in things like running, swimming, chopping trees, mining, and using various weapons like spears, bows, axes, and swords. The more skill you have in a particular area, the better you are at doing that task. So a high skill in one-handed swords means you'll do a lot of damage with swords, high running skills let you sprint for longer periods of time, etc. If you die though, you'll lose a few levels in your skills and need to work to level them back up. Dying every once in a while isn't that bad, but dying multiple times within a short time could set you back significantly.

Example #2: The Elder Scrolls titles don't exactly penalize death, as much as they penalize jail time. The longer sentence your character has to serve, the more progress they lose on their skills. However, I do believe this is limited strictly to losing progress towards the next level of the skills; it doesn't actually cause your character to lose levels in skills as Valheim does.

Example #3: World of Warcraft is a different beast due to being an MMO, however, it has some methods that could be considered. First and foremost, if your character dies, any gear they had equipped suffers a significant loss in durability. Multiple deaths in a short time can make for some expensive repair bills(although in WoW's case, gold was easy to acquire and repairs cost money instead of materials). Second, if you don't run back to your corpse and choose to resurrect in the graveyard instead, you'll be penalized with the "resurrection sickness" debuff, which significantly lowers your health and damage until it wears off(one hour).

Now all that being said...I'm not sure adopting one of those options would actually make player death any less frustrating. A skill system would be great to have for character progression anyway, however, a simple penalty to skill level is usually easy to overcome by grinding out a specific task for a few minutes. Knocking a chunk out of the player's armor/clothing and any tools/weapons on their person might work, but may likely end up ignored in the late game given that the player has plenty of resources to work with by this time. The "resurrection sickness" penalty probably fits in the lore the best, however, the only real drawback to a penalty like that is just needing to sit in your base doing some mundane chores for a little while before venturing back out.

In short...I think at best, you're swapping one set of frustrations for a different set that will likely be much easier to ignore. The potential to lose one's items still provides some of the best incentive to carefully consider one's surroundings, equipment, and possibly risks before committing to things like long trips or other hazardous activities.

[BunnyKate]

I think this will be too cruel, considering that the game has seasons. Running naked in winter to your point of death will not be easy 

[WiredSlumber]

Another way to punish people for dying, would be to have some sort of death sickness instead of dropping items. Maybe lower work speed, higher hunger rate, slower running speed, etc...

[Toroic]

Similar to Valheim and Minecraft, a good strategy is to keep a secondary set of gear you can easily toss on in order to get back to your body and maybe even fight off whatever killed you.  This strategy gets stronger the later the game gets and the better your secondary gear becomes.

Unlike Minecraft, you can't easily reset your spawn closer to where the danger is, so you'll need to stock up on temporal gears or take it more carefully in the first place.

Also don't forget about pillaring up or blocking off enemies.  Being able to place a barrier between you and enemies when you're the only one who can dig is powerful.

[Maelstrom]

Probably gonna get a lot of blow back for this suggestion.

Don't die! 

As in figure out what you need to do to keep from dying in the first place.  Assess the situation, are you equipped to handle the opponents?  If not, better to run away to fight another day.  I've done that countless times when spelunking in battle jammies or nekkid and hear that wonderful bell.   Whoops, don't have ladders with me.  Welp, gonna have to come back before caving down that death hole.

If you don't die there's no respawn and no running around nekkid.

[ifoz]

6 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Probably gonna get a lot of blow back for this suggestion.

Don't die! 

I mean, yeah, this is the ultimate strategy. 

Still, sometimes it can't really be helped, such as when you're on a laggy server and drifters are more than happy to teleport you around so that you can be hit by a rock barrage.
Another example might be getting knockback from starvation damage and being flung over a nearby cliff.
Until combat gets an update, I'd say that there are indeed certain scenarios on laggy servers when you really cannot do anything but die.

Back when I was new, I would have probably complained about the current death system, but since I don't really die much anymore, I think it's personally not an issue.
I agree that the "sprint back to your corpse with no gear because otherwise it can despawn" isn't the best solution though, and I think we could seriously use a player corpse or something of the like so that you can log out and your stuff won't vanish.

Edited August 17, 2024 by ifoz

[Thorfinn]

Both those situations are choices. A laggy server needs to be investigated and fixed, and you can avoid hunger knockback with this one weird trick.  

I think a decent "feature" of the game is if it turned your view distance down to minimum on a death. The despawn timer doesn't start ticking until you reload that chunk, so you get a lot closer to your stuff before it can be an issue.

Another possibility is to realize that it's just stuff, stuff that is probably easily replaced. By the time you have battle jammies, you should have materials for several sets of battle jammies. Linen sacks are even more easily replaced. It's just inconvenient enough that you decide to exercise a little more caution next time.

[LadyWYT]

21 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Don't die! 

 

14 hours ago, ifoz said:

I mean, yeah, this is the ultimate strategy. 

Agreed! I'd also wager that those who aren't okay with the risk of losing their stuff are most likely playing with the "keep inventory on death" rule set to true, so death really shouldn't be much of an adversity in that case.

13 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Another possibility is to realize that it's just stuff, stuff that is probably easily replaced. By the time you have battle jammies, you should have materials for several sets of battle jammies. Linen sacks are even more easily replaced. It's just inconvenient enough that you decide to exercise a little more caution next time.

This, plus what @Toroic mentioned about Valheim and Minecraft--it's a good idea to keep some extra armor, tools, and weapons around in the event that you die. Even if you don't die, items will eventually wear out and break, so it doesn't hurt to have the extra anyway. By the late game, you've got a lot of resources to work with as well. And while linen sacks are easily replaced, so are leather backpacks. Or at least, I've never had any issues of running out of leather.

[MassiveHobo]

I think players stuff should drop into a block on the ground that looks like a pile of stuff and a bag on top of some clothes. I'd have it survive a year and age through several states.

[WiggleStick]

I've thought you could spawn in a traders bed and could get your belongings back when you pay the trader for his recovering and healing you.

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, WiggleStick said:

I've thought you could spawn in a traders bed and could get your belongings back when you pay the trader for his recovering and healing you.

Ooo, I like this one! Especially if there's some sort of reputation system implemented for the player, otherwise I see some players resorting to killing the trader in order to avoid paying to get their stuff back(since traders do respawn after some time).

[Thorfinn]

Another possible solution to having to run back to get your stuff naked every time you die is permadeath.  

[Maelstrom]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

 I see some players resorting to killing the trader

Good luck with that.

[Omega Haxors]

Losing your stuff is garbage design and archaic as hell. I don't mind players being punished for their own mistakes but losing items damages not just your playthrough but also the environment in which you had to exploit in order to get those items in the first place, making it harder to reobtain them on your second playthrough.

A solution I use when playing :OtherBlockGameTM: is to install gravestones but only allow other players to loot them, that way you're still punished for dying but you're not deleting the items from the game completely. That means if you get lucky you can find the grave of a high level player and get a head start. Maybe have to kill the skeleton of the player who died using their gear so you can't progression skip? Just a thought 

[Alluvium]

What if at initial world spawn you had very poor nutrition, and therefore a "malnutrition" debuf - perhaps reducing strength l, ranged acuracy, and attack damage. As you eat a varied diet in game this would slowly build up to a balanced diet, removing the debuf and increasing health, strength, ranged accuracy. When you die, you would return to this malnurished state and all diet bars would reset to low. This wouldn't be something that spamming 500 cooked meals could resolve quickly, so still a penalty even in late game. 

 

To avoid the mad rush to your corpse to retrieve items, we could maybe implement a mechanic involving temporal gears. These are used to set your spawn, so already function for 'translocating' things upon death. Why not have a craftable (but moderately expensive) item using temporal gears which teleports your items back to your spawn point, so long as you have it with you when you die. This item would be lost in the process and need to be recrafted, but all other items would survive (albeit with some durability damage from the death). This would give another function for temporal gears, be a useful and interesting mechanic later into the game, and be consistent with existing lore and mechanics. 

[Thorfinn]

I think that's the way it works now, @Alluvium, except that it doesn't debuff strength, accuracy and damage. Rather than a malnutrition debuff, you just lose your nutrition buffs. And you can only restore nutrition to the extent you are currently un-Satiated. So, yeah, you can do things to increase your hunger rate, but you can't just spam meals. In fact, meals are a bad idea because of the period of time that satiation does not decrease happens after eating at least 100 Sat. So you are better off eating raw veggies, berries, unprocessed grain, etc. and leave whatever meals you have in storage for after you max out as many nutrition bars as you can.

Edited September 19, 2024 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

I'm reminded of how Subnautica handles inventory on death. Your current inventory is essentially "saved" whenever you're at a "checkpoint area"--that is, your base. I'm not sure if you actually have to sleep to "save" your inventory, or if you just have to visit your base. In any case, if you die while away from home, you'll keep the "saved" inventory and only drop any items you've acquired since leaving home. A system like that for Vintage Story could make for a nice "in-between" option for how inventory is handled on death; you'd not have to start over with your gear if you happen to die, but trips away from home would still be risky since you could lose any resources you acquired along the way.

Now that being said...a flaw of that system is it's quite easy to avoid the inventory loss by simply setting up bases everywhere. You could change what qualifies as a "base" by requiring installation of specific Jonas tech to act as a checkpoint, but that rather defeats the purpose given that Jonas tech is late-game. There's also already existing Jonas tech that makes retrieving your stuff a lot easier if you happened to die--the Terminus Teleporter. I'd wager retrieving stuff on death may also get a bit easier with the introduction of mounts, since those seem to be intended to function as mobile bases themselves. Therefore, my guess is that mounts will make it easier to retrieve your stuff in the mid-game, provided you took your mount with you while traveling, and the Terminus Teleporter will still maintain its function as an upgrade option for this scenario in the late-game.

Just as a side ramble though...I get the distinct impression that death in Vintage Story is supposed to be rather harsh by default. It's supposed to be at least somewhat of a struggle to survive, and while experience does make the game a bit easier, it's still very quick to punish cockiness or complacency. That being said, there's also a reason there are so many customization options available, including mods if the options don't already exist in the game itself.

[Michael Gates]

If you made using a temporal gear to set your respawn point also create a little save beacon that you could poke when you were leaving, this would be about equivalent to the way Subnautica handles things. My one issue with it is PvP-- If somebody murders you they should get to take your stuff, mostly.

On the other side of things, your armor is by far the most expensive thing you carry, and that already comes back with you. Extend that to your backpacks, let the contents land on the ground as happens currently, and I seriously wouldn't care much about dying. Nothing else is all that hard to replace except maybe a full hematite disc worth of blooms.

[Ven]

Terminus Teleporter, when used in right hands. And a small labeled chest named "Revenge comeback" at your respawn point! With a set of heavy armor, 1 temporal gear, ladders, barricade blocks, shield and stack of poultices

[AngryRob]

How about a temporal mannequin? you spend 3 temporal gears, and it spawns all your items on it. 

[CrazyGrape]

Personally my biggest gripe is just the items despawning after 10min by default. They really should be on a player corpse entity similar to animal/drifter corpses that have an openable inventory after butchering, but with a really long (if not indefinite) timer.

While exploring, I lost some items once by sleeping while the death point was just within render distance... right before a temporal storm crept up and and dashed my efforts entirely! Not fun! I did end up recovering from that mishap though; in fact, I'd be hard-pressed to remember what I even had on me at the time. I've also had a fair number of "Rage Runbacks" where I took it very personally against the hyper-aggro wolves bullying me while exploring, and made it my mission to chase them down if they started running from me at any point. Nutrition be damned, if it takes 4 deaths, so be it.

All that said, after getting a set of steel chainmail, most wilderness threats aren't nearly as much of a concern as they used to be. Didn't want to spend the effort on earlier game armor I was just going to redo in a higher tier (after doing a single copper chain helmet). Most of the armor is a considerable resource+time sink before a helve hammer is feasible.

[CrazyGrape]

Sorry for the double post, but this is a distinctly different idea and sentiment from my previous reply.

Idea 1: A means by which you could apply temporal gears (or maybe a percentage portion of one) to certain items directly. While enhanced, the item would return with you on death for a limited number of times, just like the gear itself sets your respawn 20 by default. The idea would be that you can apply it to your tools/weapons, even bags, but not stackable items. Even if you applied the soulbound treatment to a bag, its contents would still drop--you just wouldn't have to run back to get the bag itself again (which would be really nice for items like the Miner's Bag the point in progression where bronze plates are still expensive).

Idea 2: A special inventory-expansion bag that uses a temporal gear as a crafting component. The bag would have very few slots (2-3 at most), but the tradeoff is that it, plus its contents, return with you on death. Only issue with that is it wouldn't affect anything on your hotbar.

[Deaderpan]

considering that a big aspect of the game is temporal mechanics, what about a late game keep inventory system?

what i have in mind is, you have to build a very expensive device that you place down, its powered by temporal gears.
to activate the device you need to give it a blood sample of yourself so you touch it and take a huge damage hit and a temporal stability hit at the same time.
from then on you have a keep inventory on death effect that lasts up to one death. when you die you respawn with all your items but your super low health and near starving and your temporal stability is next to zero. hell i wouldnt mind if it brings forward the next temporal storm by a day aswell.
but then after you have healed up and got your sanity back, you can activate the machine again.

basically, i dont mind an end game lore friendly keep inventory mechanic since the game already has temporal mechanics that can be used to justify it.

[Thorfinn]

On 9/25/2024 at 9:08 PM, CrazyGrape said:

They really should be on a player corpse entity similar to animal/drifter corpses that have an openable inventory after butchering, but with a really long (if not indefinite) timer.

You would have to extend the loot container size for it to work on a body because it only has 4 slots. There's a mod that does something with a similar result called Player Corpse (or something like that -- look for "Corpse" and you will find it). Another interesting take would be if the death location were converted to a Better Ruins-style grave with headstone "inscribed" with the death message. I might even switch from permadeath a few games just to see it.

On 9/25/2024 at 9:08 PM, CrazyGrape said:

Personally my biggest gripe is just the items despawning after 10min by default.

Like you say, that's just the default. The core complaint is already covered in-game.

On 9/25/2024 at 9:24 PM, CrazyGrape said:

Idea 2: A special inventory-expansion bag that uses a temporal gear as a crafting component. The bag would have very few slots (2-3 at most), but the tradeoff is that it, plus its contents, return with you on death.

That's a pretty good idea. No point in limiting it like that, though. Bag management, making sure that the most important stacks are in the right bags does not seem to be a fun part of the game. I think to keep it easy, it would be best to just have all such bags and their contents appear at spawn rather than death location, but the bags are no longer enchanted, just regular old bags. One TG per bag seems a little lean. Maybe one per inventorySlotsAdded/2. So 2 for linen sacks, 3 for backpacks, 4 (or is it 5) for mining bags. Wouldn't be too friendly with bag mods though.