An Ode to Food

[Michael Gates]

I'm talking about food, of course. I frequently think about a saying I heard describing game design: they don't make these things to solve our problems, they make them to GIVE us problems that we can work on. The food systems in Vintage Story do this beautifully.

I see more complaints, more suggestions and more mods that cover this one part of the game than any other. Which is funny, because food is not even a problem for most people. Are you gonna live through the winter? Yes, you will, you're fine, and there are probably six different ways to pull that off and they all work. Can you pack a lunch for a 10k block trip? Sure, no trouble, you can do it with crocks or bread or pies or a couple stacks of (ugh) onions and a pot. You can min-max around it, but there is no situation where you find yourself saying "oh, I have SPELT bread instead of the optimal rice bread, I will surely perish." And I love this, that the system just works, and that everybody is sure it's horribly wrong and we can fix it just by adding chicken a la king to the menu.

I love crop rotation. I love that all of the food is "N" crops, only if you ever try to raise rye it gets sunburned. I love that the only useful "K" is flax, and that the map is entirely covered in carrots. I love if you try to do crop rotation Correctly, come the end of the year your entire farm is "Oops! All Onions." Parsnips? No, nobody has parsnips. What even IS a parsnip? Wait, don't tell me, I'd rather not know.

Then there's meats. Have a bunny! Now try to make something with one (1) redmeat, gee thanks bunny. Here's a chicken! Same thing, only the chicken fell off a cliff so it probably doesn't have any meat at all. Have a wolf! Have twenty! You can literally live for years on wolf meat and foraged berries, endlessly hunting the same woods and pulling the same wolves into the same traps. And then you get a bear, which probably eats YOU. Try to raise animals, which almost always means pigs because that's what falls in your wolf traps. It's trivial, and now you get buried in pork and hides about once a year, and if you step inside the pen even once they'll murder you without a thought. That part's actually quite realistic; Dad raised a couple sets of hogs for meat, and it was not entirely safe.The pigs are at least willing to eat all these onions from last fall.

I love that there are five different kinds of berries, and you can preserve them three different ways, and people complain there's no variety there.

I love how nobody can find bees, and how the few of us who do always end up running moonshine because what else is there to do with five barrels of honey?

So, yeah. This is the kind of thing I think about, when I'm trying not to think about more serious things. I'm going to go look for a mod that has toast, so I don't end up just drinking this barrel of honey.