Expand Custom Difficulty (Allow Down to 0)

[Kyle Sterns]

I'd really appreciate it if the survival settings under custom difficulty (or any of them) could be fully adjusted. I don't quite understand the point of allowing for custom difficulty settings but gating putting certain systems down to 0%

If I can put hunger or spoil down to 25% why isn't there a 0% to fully disable? after all the advanced section is meant for fine tuning to preference, gating it at that point seems like an arbitrary limit that's opposite what the advanced difficulty is meant to offer

[Thorfinn]

There has to be some minimum or some settings would give a divide by zero error. You can probably use a text editor to set them to 0 and see which crash the game. 

[Kyle Sterns]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

There has to be some minimum or some settings would give a divide by zero error. You can probably use a text editor to set them to 0 and see which crash the game. 

1) Are you 100% that the game would have a divide by zero error? I think it's equally likely these systems are using a multiplier on a constant value subtracted each tick. Using food spoilage for example:

      imagine a food item with 100 food "health" w/ 1 removed every time tick
      new health = 100 - (1 * multiplier) 
      
      or more generally for any stat
      V = V + (S * M) where V = Value, S = Stat Delta positive or negative, M = difficulty multiplier

In a case like this, which I feel is not unlikely, there would be no issues with 0 values as it's a multiplier on the base scaling factor being subtracted. I actually think the description would suggest this as it uses percentage scaling which would be easily implemented this way for nearly everything (at least as far as I can tell from the outside). If it were to use dividing to scale that would result in exponential decay and food not spoiling as it asymptoticly approaches 0 or at the very least non-linear decay in spoilage. I could be wrong, but from what I can see as a player I think it's more likely it's not dividing for scaling and rather using multipliers on the default values to scale up/down as I describe.

 

2) Even if that's the case you can still implement near 0 values that have in practice the same basic effect by having the percentage so low that it isn't '0' but is so close to it it would be nearly forever to spoil. (e.g. if floating point is supported near 0 values 0.000000001 or if integer only as low as 1 percent). Not as ideal as a full disable for some systems,  but a lot better than being limited to just 25% on the low end

[Tom Cantine]

If you roll the mouse over some food item, it tells you how long it is before it spoils. This calculation would involve dividing by the spoilage rate.

[Thorfinn]

That was the one I had in mind, too, @Tom Cantine.

No, @Kyle Sterns, I'm not sure.  That's why l suggested you use a text editor and see which can be set to 0.

[Kyle Sterns]

11 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

If you roll the mouse over some food item, it tells you how long it is before it spoils. This calculation would involve dividing by the spoilage rate.

Again wouldn't that result in exponential decay? Let's say the spoil rate is 2 and the food starts at 8 HP or however they track non-spoiled food. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding what you mean by divide it would go like this right?

8/2 -> 4

4/2 -> 2

2/2 -> 1

1/2 -> .5

.5/2 -> .25

and on never quite hitting 0

[Kyle Sterns]

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That was the one I had in mind, too, @Tom Cantine.

No, @Kyle Sterns, I'm not sure.  That's why l suggested you use a text editor and see which can be set to 0.

Oh yeah 100% I'm going to play around with it now that I know it's possible but haven't gotten a chance to yet. Just wondered if you were like a big modder & were familiar with how it works under the hood and knew stuff I didn't

Edited May 12, 2025 by Kyle Sterns
Added extra for clarity + tone

[Thorfinn]

10 hours ago, Kyle Sterns said:

Again wouldn't that result in exponential decay? Let's say the spoil rate is 2 and the food starts at 8 HP or however they track non-spoiled food. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding what you mean by divide it would go like this right?

What happens if you set that rate to 0? That's an example of something that would probably have to be set to a small number, not 0.

I don't have the game installed on this machine, but I'm pretty sure the file you are looking for is serverconfig.json. Create a game and turn down the settings as low as they go, enter and exit the world, then tweak the numbers and see which can be 0, and which must be small.

Though, seriously, in the amount of time it takes to do that, you could get good enough at the game not to care about the spoil rate. Particularly at the lowest settings.

Edited May 12, 2025 by Thorfinn