Hard tack and smoke houses

[Luke_ksmith]

Pemmican has been suggested 1000 times (it should be added though), but I believe hard tack and  smoke houses should also be added, hard tack should never go but but give very little saturation+require being smashed and soaked to be eaten in order to combat how stupidly easy it would be to obtain. Smokehouses to make preserved meats, such as sausage.(bonus points if you can hang the sausage links from the ceiling) 

[DeanF]

You can already preserve meat in salt; I think that fills the sausage niche.  But a smoker for making jerky would be nice, though for gameplay reasons the smoked meat should not last as long as the salted meat- it is harder to find the salt, so it should have a benefit.  You should also have to make it in batches- sort of like charcoal- to keep it from being ubiquitous in the early game.  For example you might have to make a firepit in a hole, build a tipi smoker over it with sticks and some raw hides, load it with meat (and I think that bushmeat should work as well as red meat), and wait 20 hours or so before breaking it like a skep.  These smokers could be different sizes and capacities, depending upon whether you use two small, medium, or large hides (and more sticks).  The sticks and hide should be partly recoverable- when you break the tipi you get one hide and half the sticks back.  These could be raw hides- they shouldn't need to be preserved, though preserved ones or even leather should work fine in a pinch.

I envision each smoker having four input slots, like making a meal.  Red meat, bushmeat, poultry, and fish filets should all be smokable, and lose a slight bit of nutritional value when smoked, again for gameplay reasons.  The small smoker only accepts one item per slot (total 4), but the medium one accepts two (total 8 ) and the large one accepts four (total 16).

But meat, fat, and berries is a pretty simple recipe, so pemmican gets my vote.  Even better if you have to use the smoked meat above as the meat to make the pemmican, since after all pemmican is supposed to be made with ground dried meat, and then the benefit of all of that effort is that pemmican should last as long as salted meat.  And it probably shouldn't be possible with fish... maybe?  (Was there ever an example of fish pemmican?)  You definitely should still have to make pemmican in a pot, though the cook time would be very fast.  Production chains in survival games are always a good thing.  So long as animal fat and the vegetable oils from sunflowers and olive are discrete, the vegetable oils should not work for making pemmican- only animal fat. Yet again for gameplay reasons, it might be best if pemmican were treated like other meals, meaning that you need a bowl, and crocks. Two smoked meat, a fat, and a berries makes one meal of pemmican.

With all of these mechanics, you can definitely make salted meat more easily in much larger batches... once you have the salt.  That's it's big advantage over pemmican.  Pemmican should be a small-batch stone age technology.

Hardtack or pilot bread might work, so long as you had to make soup out of it to actually eat it- the resulting meal could be called "mush".  Otherwise hardtack should be inedible.  But it should have some sort of shelf life, even if it's a very long one, like grain.

Edited Friday at 05:29 PM by DeanF

[Zx573]

Very well reasoned and thought out additions. I just want to second everything you've said. It's all great