Sleep and fatigue

[jola]

I do agree that sleep must have more significance in the game than just what it has now. At least, the loss in the character's health bar must be compensated through sleep other than satiety. In reality, most of the time, hunger is not actually felt during sleep. And upon waking up, hunger does not really set in until after rigorous physical movement is initiated e.g. running/sprinting/cutting down trees/etc. But I really have no idea how this mechanic can impact the algorithm of the game.

[Thorfinn]

OK.  But is it fun? Would you ever try to convince a friend to buy the game based on how it handles fatigue?

Edited April 9, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Broccoli Clock]

It should probably come as no surprise to anyone reading my previous comments that I'd like to see fatigue/sleep be more integral to the game, it is pretty standard for lots of offline survival crafting games and I would definitely like an expansion of the realism. I understand the difficulty in implementing that on a multiplayer server, the only true way to handle that is to sleep in real time, and I can understand if the devs felt that it should either exist in both or not at all, but for a single player game it's certainly doable, with sleep not being forced upon the user but their skills taking a hit when not fully rested. In many ways this is the same as food, you get more health from eating more and varied foods, you do not need to max out your HP with food, but you can.

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

OK.  But is it fun? Would you ever try to convince a friend to buy the game based on how it handles fatigue?

The simple answer is "Stardew Valley". 
It's whole game loop is based around fatigue, and it's considered a fun game.

 

Edited April 9, 2025 by Broccoli Clock

[Thorfinn]

11 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

The simple answer is "Stardew Valley". 

Fair. But I think there is a difference between a 4-player game and the planned 200-player game. Unless you have an enforced bedtime, you can't fast forward time until everyone or at least x% of the current players are in bed. What do you do with the others? Collapse on the spot and Harvey hauls you home? Collapse and be vulnerable to attacks? Collapse but are not subject to being attacked? Just fast-forward time so the crucible with 2500 units of copper that you were just about to pour cools down and you have to expend all that charcoal again? I don't think any of those are very good answers. Particularly for those who are doing something that is not physically demanding, like cooking or clayforming. And an even worse answer is not fast-forwarding time at all, so you get to sit and watch your character sleep for 16 IRL minutes.How do you handle things when one player is in a basic hay bed, so sleeps for 7 hours while another player is in an aged wooden bed and sleeps for 9.5? Everyone sleeps 9.5? No one sleeps 9.5? The 9.5 guy has to stare at his blank screen for 5 IRL minutes until he wakes up?

You could obviously create "rust" in skill levels, and I think that's probably a part of the planned status effects system, though I hope it doesn't become the mess that is parodied in that Survival Game Logic vid. But that just takes you back to the same question. What does skill rust do in a game which is not skill-based? Would fatigue cause you to fail at cooking? The UI prevents you from putting ingredients into the correct slot? Or does it turn into rot or something? Baking is a matter of watching when to take it out of the oven, completely immune to skill rust. Unless maybe you change the colors so fatigued people could not see when to take it out? And also change the hover text that tells you what state of done-ness the pie is?

Just seems to me that's a whole lot of futzing around for something I don't see the need for in the first place. More of a solution in search of a problem to solve.

But I could be wrong. How do you envision this system working? Not to the level of pseudo-code, just broad-strokes. 

[EDIT]

Oh, hey, there was a mod, Ned's Survival something or other, I think, that added fatigue in addition to a bunch of other tweaks, mostly progression based. I thought it an interesting, but sometimes tedious take on the survival game. Seemed everything was gated behind something else, and gameplay became very linear. No idea if it's been updated, (I think it was for 1.18, or possibly even 1.17) but that might be a good place to start to see what kinds of complications arise. Wasn't terribly popular, IIRC. Kind of like diseases and infections and parasites and the like. Seems like a good idea, but almost no one plays those mods.

Edited April 9, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, the system we have currently is fine. It's a good way to pass the time if you don't want to deal with winter, rift activity, the dark, or other various issues, in return for burning through some of your satiety. If you don't want to lose the satiety or would rather keep working on stuff, you're not penalized for going without sleep, aside from potentially working in the dark and needing to deal with rift activity. It's a system that also works well for both singleplayer and multiplayer.

[Thorfinn]

Were the firepit and cementation furnace updated to use game time rather than real time? I was quite disappointed when I went to bed expecting the stack of torches to be done, but nada. Then I noticed the same thing making steel -- you couldn't speed that up, either.. Pit kilns used game time, IIRC So did the barrel recipes. I never did decide whether crops or skeps or reeds used real time or game time.

Basically, the only time sleeping would have been useful, to reduce the amount of IRL time to get vessels and pots and crocks to finish firing, I needed those hours to form the next batch of pottery, and to gather the sticks and grass. So, never useful.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Were the firepit and cementation furnace updated to use game time rather than real time?

I don't think the firepit operates on game time, but the cementation furnace seems to. I could be wrong though. It takes about a week to fire one, and I tend to sleep through most of the nights in game, and never noticed it delaying the completion time.

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I never did decide whether crops or skeps or reeds used real time or game time.

I think they use game time as well, for similar reasons above. It's another case where I've never done exact math on it, but I've never noticed slower growth times due to sleeping.

[Never Jhonsen]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Were the firepit and cementation furnace updated to use game time rather than real time?

I don't think the firepit operates on game time, but the cementation furnace seems to. I could be wrong though. It takes about a week to fire one, and I tend to sleep through most of the nights in game, and never noticed it delaying the completion time.

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I never did decide whether crops or skeps or reeds used real time or game time.

I think they use game time as well, for similar reasons above. It's another case where I've never done exact math on it, but I've never noticed slower growth times due to sleeping.

I can second this, everything but the firepit uses game time

[Thorfinn]

So as long as I'm not firing lime or flint or making torches, I no longer face a production penalty for sleeping. Good to know.

[jola]

On 4/9/2025 at 12:48 PM, Thorfinn said:

OK.  But is it fun? Would you ever try to convince a friend to buy the game based on how it handles fatigue?

If you were a fan of Minecraft, in my opinion, I would try convincing a friend to buy the game. Actually, I tried convincing my son, but he is on a different genre. VS is still new compared to Minecraft and it still has a lot of time in the future for the developer(s) to polish the game. I'll just have to be patient for now.