Sleep and fatigue

[Porkbrick]

Currently, sleep seems to not serve much of a purpose in vs beyond skipping a high rift night,dark in general, or to pass time waiting for some process to finish. 

     I think it would be interesting if there was some sort of bonus for getting adequate sleep like there is for having a balanced diet. 

     One idea is that maybe if you recently slept, food eaten would give a boosted satiety. Another idea would be that for a given number of hours sleep you could boost your walking speed and/or working speed (digging, mining, chopping).

     I’m not really a fan of having a tiredness or fatigue bar as such, but it would be nice to have sleep serve slightly more impactful purpose. 

     As far as negative consequences for lack of sleep, I think they shouldn’t be too nagging or super disruptive (it needs to definitely not discourage big building projects or long mining trips). A couple thoughts: the other block game spawns a unique enemy if you fail to sleep for more than three days. Maybe the longer you go without sleep after a point, the higher the chance of high rift activity or the higher the tier of enemies that tend to naturally spawn. Maybe you go too long without sleep and you either start do drain your temporal stability fast or trigger a storm. Could also reward frequent sleep with increased time between temp storms. Or reward sleep with with better temporal durability ( ie your gear won’t wind down as fast in an unstable area if you are well rested).

    Also, I would like it if beds would default wake you at dawn no matter what tier they are. The higher the tier the better to rest you get for any given hour of sleep (more comfortable!). 

[EmperorPingu]

I really like the idea that walk and work speed could be effected by sleep/fatigue - although walk speed made add a lot of difficulty in gameplay (say if you find yourself "suddenly tired" and the controls don't feel right just as you about to take on a shotile mob for instance).

When I started VS I didn't know what the Temporal stability was and I was calling it (to myself) "cognition" - perhaps too little sleep could start draining that as well perhaps and good sleep acts a boon? ... Oh wow, yeh, just read the line where you put that suggestion too lol.

Also, I hate that Temporal storms are forced onto the player - my style is all about preparedness to survive - would much prefer it if they only visited by game mechanics that the player could adequetly do something about (like getting good sleep).

I like the idea as a whole in general - the only idea I don't like the waking up at dawn no matter - I think fatigue is a good thing but I think the waking up mechanic should include things mechanisms to allow the player to get woken up (like by a rooster or something) - the quality of bed slept on should determine how good of a sleep the player got.

[Porkbrick]

“the only idea I don't like the waking up at dawn no matter “

maybe not no matter what, but at least a more accurate or consistent way to wake up at a certain time. I’m not a huge fan of trying to time left shift only miss time it and sleep through half of a short winter day. Or similarly, go to bed at dusk only to wake up at midnight and sit in the dark for the rest of the night. Right now sleep as a time travel mechanic leaves something to be desired.

“although walk speed made add a lot of difficulty in gameplay (say if you find yourself "suddenly tired" and the controls don't feel right just as you about to take on a shotile mob for instance).”

agreed. Any effect on something like walk speed or fighting ability definitely should now lead do a steep ramp up of difficulty. Especially in early game where survival is hard enough. Making good sleep boost your speed rather than the other way around could work. Or if lack of sleep did slow you down maybe something like an adrenaline boost could be involved.  You get a temporary speed boost the first time you take damage in a day or something. That way, even if you’re “exhausted “ you could still run away effectively. 
but like I said, I prefer to limit the negative effects if possible.

Edited October 21, 2024 by Porkbrick

[EmperorPingu]

13 minutes ago, Porkbrick said:

the only idea I don't like the waking up at dawn no matter 

maybe not no matter what, but at least a more accurate or consistent way to wake up at a certain time. I’m not a huge fan of trying to time left shift only miss time it and sleep through half of a short winter day. Or similarly, go to bed at dusk only to wake up at midnight and sit in the dark for the rest of the night. Right now sleep as a time travel mechanic leaves something to be desired.

 

 

More versatility should be given to the player for sure (perhaps a world creation option variable or something for those that do want that kind of consistency of gameplay?). There's definitely something to what you're saying about overhauling the sleep and fatigue mechanic. Roosters should wake you up at the crack of dawn (I don't know if they already do, I'm still noobish) - perhaps the tinkerer could make a time dependent device that when attached to a gong or bell or something could have a similar effect?

[Thorfinn]

I believe the mod Xskills gives a bonus of some sort to sleeping.

In what way would sleep add to the game? N00bs already complain about getting hungry while sleeping, and starving as a result. Seems this would be just kicking them when they are down.

Another way to ask the same question is why is it bad if people want to play without sleeping? Why should their preferred game style be punished?

[Porkbrick]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

In what way would sleep add to the game? N00bs already complain about getting hungry while sleeping, and starving as a result. Seems this would be just kicking them when they are down. 

Sleep already is in the game. It just seems not really very functional beyond skipping time. I don’t want it to be punishing at all, rather there should be rewards for getting enough. Negative outcomes for lack of sleep could be included in all sorts of interesting ways, but they should be optional at world creation, like cave-ins and mob hostility. That way, if you don’t want to sleep you’re free to play that way, but there is some positive incentive to doing it. Kind of like nutrition. I don’t think I’ve ever really paid attention to nutrition in the game, I know it’s there, and I know how it works, but ignoring it doesn’t really affect my gameplay. I like that it’s there if I want to put in the effort for the reward, but I’m not really punished if I don’t pay attention to it ( and it kind of naturally works in a more positive direction just by playing normally). I think regular sleep could offer similar, more or less positive rewards, and for those who want a more challenging mechanic there is a lot of space to come up with creative and maybe lore relevant negatives for lack of sleep.

 

 

 

[TitaniumVulpes]

I like the idea of sleeping giving a buff to temporal stability. Something like after sleeping you get however many hours of slower temporal drain. So sleeping right before a big mining trip or dungeon delve would let you stay down there longer. It wouldn't be intrusive, but it would be a benefit, sort of like cooking. I've watched Let's Players who instead of cooking meals just walk around with a stack of cabbage they eat raw - their preferred game style of not cooking is "punished" by not having the satiation pause of cooked meals, but it's not exactly intrusive. Sleeping should be the same way; not sleeping would have you at a disadvantage over sleeping, but not so much that it feels like you absolutely have to sleep - you sacrifice a few hours of in-game time to save the real-world time of coming to the surface and regaining stability more often, but you don't have to make that trade-off.

Actually, thinking of the satiation pause of meals, maybe sleeping could give a "temporal pause", where for a few hours after sleeping your stability doesn't drain at all. It would only kick in after a full sleep, and each bed tier would give a different length pause, like 2 hours on a hay bed, 3 hours on a normal bed, and 5 hours on an aged bed. This sort of system would work well with the design philosophy established by meals. IMO it shouldn't affect anything else like running or mining speed, like how balanced meal nutrition doesn't affect anything but HP, but maybe if you really wanted to expand the benefits of sleeping, sleeping regularly could potentially increase your stability meter cap over time, to a limit. And similar to how different classes have different max HP, different classes could have different max stability (e.g. hunters would have lower max stability because they hate being underground, clockmakers would have higher max stability because of their affinity toward the mechanical, etc. But that's all a bit of a digression).

[Thorfinn]

It may well be that sleep will serve more of a purpose than it currently does. Or it may be that sleep is for humans, not seraphs. I'm kind of indifferent however it comes out. But it does complicate multiplayer to a great degree, so if implemented in multiplayer, there should be a good gameplay benefit and/or lore rationale.

But that's why I mentioned the Xskills mod. Try it and see if that's something you are interested in. I think it's just faster XP for being properly rested, but it has been quite a while since I tried it. It's always one of the last I add to a game because even something as seemingly minor as adding skills changes the game dramatically. Bonuses or penalties to resource collection rates would be no less significant.

Edited October 22, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Porkbrick]

Yeah, I’m not invested either way. I’m fine if sleep remains a time skip mechanic. My only real gripe with the way it is now is not being able to easily wake up when I want to. Either the bed doesn’t let you sleep long enough to reach morning, or you miss time it and wake up with most of the morning gone.
 

all the other stuff is fun to think about, but definitely not crucial. 
 

I’ll definitely check out xskills.

thinking about it, I actually have no idea how sleep works right now in a multiplayer game. I’ve only played solo and lan games with my son. We just both sleep at the same time. 

Edited October 22, 2024 by Porkbrick

[Dra6o0n]

While there should be good mechanisms behind sleep, you should not punish players for stretching out their gameplay without sleeping ingame or whatnot.

I think instead of making it a powerful mechanism, you implement 'Sanity' like in Don't Starve.

Sleeping would have impact on sanity, rather than fatigue. And rather than Sanity functioning statistically, it should offer gameplay changes to your 'visuals' and 'audio'.

Low sanity causes you to become insomniac, and sleep is one of the factors to raise sanity up.

With low sanity you go into different stages of insanity, the milder ones are very faint and barely noticeable, with the deep insanity be akin to a nightmare or horror game.

Key elements affected is 'sound' of environment, and 'sound' of creatures and other players, and maybe visuals of monsters.

Ambience would be much louder in volume than normal, and 'normal' sounds is slightly muffled.

Certain creatures will have a audio filtered so make their voices sound 'different', if not scary. Footstep noises are elevated, so you can clearly hear every footsteps in a certain radius.

And supernatural entities and 'monsters' will be more disfigured, with a weird 'static' buzzing effect covering their bodies as if it's not stable and their bodies are glitching out.

[Maelstrom]

I find there is ALWAYS something to do, regardless of the day, night, storm or bad weather.  Especially in the first few days.  The only time I even consider sleeping is if I'm on an exploration far from home and need the daylight for scouting purposes.

I understand the whole push for realism, but this is a game and some aspects of realism make the game unfun. For me it would be pointless to have to sleep every so often so that I can continue to do basic actions.  Seraphs aren't humans and seem to be supernatural which plays out with lacking a necessity for sleep.

[Brady_The]

The world creator has so many options, another toggle for sleep complexity probably wouldn't hurt.

[Thorfinn]

It's not the toggle. Its more how and why. Play on an open multiplayer server for a while and you will see why it's not as simple as just adding a toggle. So HOW do you make a sleep system that works in MP? And then WHY is it worth spending dev time on right now?

There exist mods that let you tailor the experience to your tastes, and the game is specifically designed (see the Roadmap) to be extremely modder-friendly. Try out some of the Sleep mods and see if any really work to your preferences in an open MP setting. I think you will find it's kind of like herding cats. Whether you phrase it as benefits or penalties, those same things accrue to you if there is just one player who refuses to go sleepy-bye.

And then the only answer becomes peer pressure or cancel culture, neither of which make for a fun pastime.

[Steel General]

Sleeping, unless completely malnourished, should multiply the healing factor for the duration, and this should be multiplied again for changes in the rate of time.  This should stack with every kind of debuff - sleeping in armor is bad.

It can work the same in multiplayer - get hurt, eat a meal and go to bed.  It need not change the world speed to grant a healing buff.

The applied multiplier should depend on the kind of bed - a straw mat is not so great.

This is one of those things that took me a while to realize wasn't happening.

[Thorfinn]

3 minutes ago, Steel General said:

It need not change the world speed to grant a healing buff.

But it does, unless you want to watch your seraph sleep for 10 minutes IRL. The 7 hours your seraph spends sleeping are 7 hours someone else is planting seeds.

[Brady_The]

29 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Play on an open multiplayer server for a while and you will see why it's not as simple as just adding a toggle.

M'polgies. I wasn't aware that serverconfigs don't exist.

30 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

And then WHY is it worth spending dev time on right now?

Why is dev time spent on anything worthwhile?

Why waste time on creating a whole game mode that removes fundamental parts of the game? Could have used that time to implement new story chapters far sooner.

Why waste time on adding the option to disable the creation of water source blocks in certain game modes? Could have used that time to implement options I want to see in the game.

Why waste time on adding shivers? I am arachnophobic.

Why waste time on adding elks and boats? I am fine with walking.

Why waste time on creating the game in the first place? Could have saved tens of thousands of people from wasting their time on unproductive pursuits that ultimately lead nowhere. Memento mori.

[Thorfinn]

Don't be a jerk. You obviously have no time in on a multiplayer server. Whatever it is that sleep does, if it does not fast forward time, there is little point if you can't herd all the cats to bed at the same time. The whole idea is to fast forward through the boring part. And you sidestepped the question: Why RIGHT NOW? Wouldn't it be a tad better to work out the kinks in mods, and have the "toggle" be a selector of the most popular 3 or 4 versions of handling sleep? 

From the comments, I've seen very little evidence that anyone has given any thought to the fact that unless sleep is handled like My Time at Portia or Stardew Valley, where everyone conks out at 2AM without exception, it's very difficult to do. Everyone here is falling over himself to make it into a bonus instead of a penalty, which is fine, but skips the fine point of how you get the guy who hasn't been fighting and exploring to think it's worth enough to join the rest of the seraphs in slumberland. What kind of bonus/penalty would be enough to convince your farmer player to not do his harvesting and planting and beekeeping? Or baking or cooking and crocking prepared foods? Or getting another charcoal pit going? If sleep is 8 hours, you need a 50% productivity bonus to make up for the hours "lost", and that's assuming that a well-rested cook could prepare foods 50% faster or that crops recognize a well-rested harvester and yield 50% more. Or a smith to pound out an extra item for every 2 he makes. Make 2 things, select another that you get for free.

 

Edited October 22, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Porkbrick]

My impetus for starting this discussion was mainly to get at the question of why does vintage story have a sleep mechanic at all? The way I see it there are three main broad justifications for having a sleep system. 
 

1. “realism”. You need sleep in real life. Not getting enough sleep is detrimental. If you want a “realistic “ survival experience, sleep and lack of it adds to that style of play. Personally I’m not a fan of hard core realism in this case ( you can carry a million ton of stone on your back ffs).

    2.    Sleep as a game mechanic. This is more or less what it is currently. Its only use right now is as a pseudo time skipping device. Too many drifters to work outside? Waiting for that pit kiln to finish? Sleep through the night and you save a little waiting time. Like I’ve said before, I think it’s fine if that’s all sleep ever is, but I think it could improve a little if that’s the case. Besides time travel there are a lot of other mechanics that could involve or revolve around sleep. Food satiety and sleep, working speed and sleep, hunger levels and sleep… etc. ton of things to play with, maybe too contentious or disruptive to implement.
  

 3.    Lore relevance for sleep. I think this one could be most interesting. Do seraphs need sleep to stay temporally stable? Are the rust creatures attracted to those who are not temporally strong? If you go too long without sleep could you bring on a storm, or hold one off by getting sleep? I think there is a lot of room for something really interesting without making it punitive or Immersion breaking. 

Do I think the way sleep is handled currently really needs to change? No. It’s fine as is. Like I said my only nitpick is that I wish it was easier to time how long you sleep when you do. But I do think there are a lot of fun and interesting things that could be done with the mechanic. Tying it into lore and temporal stability seems really interesting to me. 

As for the multiplayer aspect. It seems to me that what we have now is really not very usable when you get more than a handful of players involved. Everyone has to cooperate and lie down at the same time. That is no good if sleep is a survival element and lack of is punishing. Also doesn’t really make sense as a time skip device. For any of the options there would need to be some way of adapting it to or disabling it entirely in multiplayer. 

And anything involving consequences should of course be optional, like temporal stability, water block moving, cave ins, and soil stability. 

[Maelstrom]

I actually like the variable nature of waking up.  To me that aspect of sleep is quite realistic.  I would not want that to change in future changes to sleep, if there are any changes.

[Porkbrick]

I think treating sleep and temporal stability like eating and hunger are treated could be interesting, easy, and rewarding. Sleeping gives you temporal “satiety”. Better beds offer better or longer lasting satiation. 
this way, totally ignoring sleep just results in base stability same as it is now, but getting regular sleep or recent sleeping allows you to spend more time in unstable areas or recover your gear faster.

[Porkbrick]

7 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

I actually like the variable nature of waking up.  To me that aspect of sleep is quite realistic.  I would not want that to change in future changes to sleep, if there are any changes.

If pressing left shift to wake up early was easier or more accurate I’d have no problem with the variable sleep.

[Thorfinn]

I understand why you started it, and it's a good thing to consider. I'm not even opposed to the "go unconscious at 2AM", though I would hope there is an exception made for if you are in a temporal storm or even just combat. Or going through the RA. Even if you went with the fatigue mechanic of Stardew Valley, there would be an advantage to going to bed at midnight, even if no one else did. At one minute=one hour, worst case, you only have to sit idle at your keyboard for 2 minutes. But the question is, without the brute force "Go to bed now!", how many people will be happy with waiting idle at the keyboard for 8 or 10 minutes? There are all kinds of complaints about how long it takes to chop a tree or dig a stack of clay or dress a goat.

I'm most sympathetic to your point #2. Seems like there could be something. But you are right smack back to the question of what, exactly. The guy whose job is chiseling and building does not care about healing or temporal stability -- neither affect him in the slightest. He cares little about hunger -- a quick trip to the cellar or kitchen and he's good to go. Running speed doesn't matter, nor do hallucinations or garbled sound.

Indeed, there was quite the sound and fury about the change to swimming, or to the change in map, or the change in fireclay or even things as relatively benign as the introduction of pit kilns. So I'd suspect it would not be long until mods removed that kind of thing anyway, if only as a nod to accessibility. Faster chiseling and block placement isn't really a thing you could offer the builder. So how do you incentivize him to get a good night's sleep?

Edited October 22, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Porkbrick]

44 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Faster chiseling and block placement isn't really a thing you could offer the builder. So how do you incentivize him to get a good night's sleep?

Let’s go with the temporal satiation idea. I don’t think you have to incentivize the builder. Like nutrition, there’s really no downside to not sleeping, but for the explorer or miner there would be an incentive in the form of better or higher temporal resistance. 
 

[Thorfinn]

But you have disincentivized the builder. You have taken from him roughly a third of his potential build hours. Why wouldn't he just say,  "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm just going to finish this up."

[EDIT]

There's no reason you couldn't do it that way. In my experience, it just does not work very well in multi. And if you implement the Sleep Vote mod, it's really easy for hard feelings to build up. Fine for single player or a close group of friends, though. Which makes it a better fit to a mod than built-in feature that takes up code-space but will likely never be called in multi, where packet passing and throughput is even more time-critical.

[EDIT2]

Or do you have an idea for sleep that does not require all the players to sleep? Where those who want to continue can do so? That's one of the best design choices of Xskills, IMO. It is to everyone's advantage to sleep to get the bonus to XP. It's just that the skills themselves are somewhat OP for a class-based game.

Edited October 22, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Porkbrick]

29 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

But you have disincentivized the builder. You have taken from him roughly a third of his potential build hours. Why wouldn't he just say,  "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm just going to finish this up."

[EDIT]

There's no reason you couldn't do it that way. In my experience, it just does not work very well in multi. And if you implement the Sleep Vote mod, it's really easy for hard feelings to build up. Fine for single player or a close group of friends, though. Which is better suited to a mod than built-in feature that takes up code-space but will never be called.

[EDIT2]

Or do you have an idea for sleep that does not require all the players to sleep? Where those who want to continue can do so? That's the good aspect of Xskills, IMO. It is to everyone's advantage to sleep to get the bonus to XP. It's just that the skills themselves are somewhat OP for a class-based game.

I really appreciate your perspective. Multiplayer is really not something I’ve played at all, other than 1 on 1 at home with my son. I’m really curious. Do most servers just ignore sleep altogether right now? It seems like adapting any new sleep mechanics would, like you mentioned, need some vote to or forced sleep. Could do away with the time skip aspect and just “tag” the bed, but that’s not very useful. Or just have to disable the mechanics altogether for multiplayer. They would have to be inconsequential enough that missing out on it doesn’t feel too bad. Thanks for discussing this!