"Final" tier of food that never goes bad

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, CyberCat05 said:

Because it's good to have that option even if just to fill a niche gap.

Again, the entire alcohol system is pretty much pointless besides Aqua Vitae which is pretty obscure and most people won't be using as it's simpler to just use a few cheaper healing items than one alcohol-soaked bandage. But for the few players who do want to maximize their playstyle, it's nice for that option to exist to fill that gap, even if it takes up an entire mechanic that is pretty much pointless otherwise.

Alcohol is one thing that fills that niche gap though. The basic alcohol lasts several in-game years in a cellar, while the distilled stuff lasts forever no matter where it's stored. Distilled alcohol is a little tedious to produce, depending on available farms and such, but certainly not impossible to produce en-masse, especially if one plays consistently for a period of time. It's not a food that one would want to rely on, but it will keep one from starving long enough to go hunting, fishing, foraging, or acquiring food some other way.

So I don't think it's a very good argument to say that it's pointless when it fills the exact role that you're asking for. 

[SnapJelly]

4 hours ago, CyberCat05 said:

Again, the entire alcohol system is pretty much pointless besides Aqua Vitae which is pretty obscure and most people won't be using

Again, this is just simply not true
Wine is the best way to preserve fruit
Distilled drinks literally solve the very problem you bring up in this post but you pretend it doesn't
Aqua vitae is an ingredient in THE BEST healing item you can make in game

Why do you keep pretending the alcohol system is pointless? You've said it several times now but repeating it isn't gonna make it true. I don't go a single playthrough without making alcohol, I make wine was soon as I can put down barrels specifically BECAUSE it lasts long!...

Edited Sunday at 11:19 PM by SnapJelly
Spelling errors

[CyberCat05]

17 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

Again, this is just simply not true
Wine is the best way to preserve fruit
Distilled drinks literally solve the very problem you bring up in this post but you pretend it doesn't
Aqua vitae is an ingredient in THE BEST healing item you can make in game

Why do you keep pretending the alcohol system is pointless? You've said it several times now but repeating it isn't gonna make it true. I don't go a single playthrough without making alcohol, I make wine was soon as I can put down barrels specifically BECAUSE it lasts long!...

It only preserves fruit though

[SnapJelly]

1 hour ago, CyberCat05 said:

It only preserves fruit though

Again wrong...

[Demoncyborg]

7 hours ago, CyberCat05 said:

It only preserves fruit though

alcohol (ale) from flour is the other, it even gives a tiny bit of grain saturation 

[Feltmeow]

8 hours ago, CyberCat05 said:

It only preserves fruit though

If you distill any alcohol it loses nutrition and only provides satiety, that's the trade-off for having non-perishable food that can be produced in large quantities. If you want a lot of non-perishable foods it's fairly easy to make a huge berry patch and ferment + distill it all, even with the new berry bush mechanics. I just compiled and uploaded information on every food item in the game under the guides forum if you want to see more in depth, but the entire list of currently non-perishable foods are (in descending order of renewability & ease of obtaining, IMO):

Food item	Satiety	Nutrition
Unpeeled green/brown bamboo shoots	100	None
All once distilled alcohol (1L)	80	None
Aqua vitae (worse alcohol for this purpose) (1L)	40	None
Lump of rendered fat	200	Protein
Honeycomb	300	Fruit
Honey (1L)	300	Fruit
Walnut seed	40	Protein
Uncooked tule/papyrus/cattail roots	80	Vegetable
Vintage beef	280	Protein

I personally find bamboo to be the most quick and renewable source of non-perishable food, and it's always a staple in the early game in warm climates for me. It's accessible any stage of game, doesn't give the shifting effect of alcohol, stores compactly and without a container in your inventory, and doesn't need a firepit to cook over. When a bamboo sapling grows into a mature cluster of bamboo, several bamboo shoots spawn in the cluster so it's easily renewable too. All-around my most recommended pick for someone looking to alleviate the multiplayer or long-distance travel issues brought up in this thread. It's one downside is that it doesn't provide nutrition, though as long as it's being used as a stop-gap between bouts of regular food consumption that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

If you want to build up your nutrition bars with nothing but non-perishables, walnut seeds are a pain to farm up, but they are a renewable source of non-perishable protein nutrition; if you have a lot of domesticated animals lumps of rendered fat is probably more easy to come by. Tule roots aren't good for much else, so having a stash on hand to cook provides vegetable nutrition. Honeycomb of course takes care of fruit, but really if your goal is just to not starve right away when you come back to a multiplayer world bamboo shoots and/or distilled alcohol are your best bets. 

[Kulze]

So, some things have come up and I couldn't write back, but I'll cut down on post-size substantially.

First off, the argument of 'there already are other indefinitely lasting food sources' is true! I agree! I didn't think about them. But in that case... what is the issue to introduce another one of the preposition would be that it's bad to have them? Wouldn't it then rather be good to remove the indefinite aspect of those as it would co-align with the existing gameplay?
Or are they 'fine' for some other reason?

The second is that both of those rely on either luck (I don't know how many games I had where bees were as easy to find as being hit by lightning in reality... twice... and others were they just existed everywhere seemingly.) or absolutely ridiculous amounts of hunting (1-2 pieces of fat per animal without livestock is not reliable, as well as the need to use it early on for crocking + lamps reducing the availability)
This is why I'm nudging for 'something' - doesn't matter what - which is based on mechanics that can be done at night since many players stand around a good chunk of it in the first year or just sleeping it off but still demands a high amount of effort play-wise to actively do this long-term storage.
There's a reason why nobody uses fat or honey as travel rations for example... since the respective mechanics mandate a decent amount of effort up-front for the one-time setup the resulting rewards are small for those materials specifically. Farming and animal husbandry simply takes a lot of time instead with repurposing food with a negative effect to generate meat (livestock) or having to wait a long time in-game for farming. And since bees work automatically you get relatively little out of them per hive and got to wait for the very long growth-time of reed.

 

On 8/16/2026 at 9:01 PM, CyberCat05 said:

Because it's good to have that option even if just to fill a niche gap.

Exactly! That's all that needs to be said. Niche-filling mechanics are not only viable mechanics but even important ones.
As long as they don't negatively affect the gameplay otherwise. The argument of 'people will complain' is nonsensical, plain and simple. Not even worth to get into big time.
 

On 8/17/2026 at 12:27 AM, LadyWYT said:

Alcohol is one thing that fills that niche gap though.

How so?
Alcohol needs intensive times to be set up. What does it help to fill this exact issue earlier on?
By the time you make alcohol you'll likely have overpopulation of livestock already which can be culled without any worries... you log in during harvest times of some fruits which also reduces the chance for it to happen in the first place, and you're likely in year 2-3 at that stage.
What about year 1 in terms of playtime?
 

13 hours ago, Feltmeow said:

If you want a lot of non-perishable foods it's fairly easy to make a huge berry patch and ferment + distill it all

I would agree with you usually, because yes, that's how it was formerly.
You did that to manage it early on.
But now berry bushes need propagation, and they won't be ready in year 1. So that option is Year 2 at earliest again.

Otherwise we wouldn't see this issue anyway.

But the solution of using bamboo is good! Needs a bit of travel which can be iffy... but that one actually is reliable. Yes, that works. A 'all biome' food is still something I would like to see in a similar regard, but at least it removes the actual problem reliably in a relative early-game situation.

[LadyWYT]

6 minutes ago, Kulze said:

There's a reason why nobody uses fat or honey as travel rations for example... since the respective mechanics mandate a decent amount of effort up-front for the one-time setup the resulting rewards are small for those materials specifically. Farming and animal husbandry simply takes a lot of time instead with repurposing food with a negative effect to generate meat (livestock) or having to wait a long time in-game for farming. And since bees work automatically you get relatively little out of them per hive and got to wait for the very long growth-time of reed.

 

6 minutes ago, Kulze said:

How so?
Alcohol needs intensive times to be set up. What does it help to fill this exact issue earlier on?
By the time you make alcohol you'll likely have overpopulation of livestock already which can be culled without any worries... you log in during harvest times of some fruits which also reduces the chance for it to happen in the first place, and you're likely in year 2-3 at that stage.
What about year 1 in terms of playtime?

Here's the thing though...as far as I can tell, you're asking for a source of food that's easy to acquire, easy to prepare, and never expires--hence the "first year" requirement, apparently. That doesn't fit with the concept you mentioned earlier about a food source that never expires but is extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive to produce.

Livestock, bees, and a distillery do have a time and resource cost up front, yes, however, all of this can easily be acquired within the first year of gameplay, and require little upkeep after being set up.

Livestock: Pigs reproduce prolifically, and sheep can eat hay, which never expires. Livestock that is left alive can easily be harvested at any time, and all it takes is an animal or two to make a good meaty stew that will keep the player fed for quite a while. Fat can be rendered so that it never expires, providing yet another emergency food to store.

Bees: They're not particularly hard to find in temperate forested areas or warmer climates. Once you find them, it's easy to transport a skep back home, which can then populate as many skeps as the player has cattails and reeds for. Bees only work while the weather is warm, but each skep produces 3 honeycomb, so a large field of skeps can easily produce a massive amount of honey in just one harvest, which should be more than enough for an emergency food supply that never expires. All that is required to make skeps is clay and cattails/papyrus, both of which are easy enough to find en-masse. 

Alcohol: If the player has access to metalworking, they can easily make a fruitpress and still. Ale/wine lasts for several years by itself, and takes seven days to ferment, which can happen while the player is offline, so the only commitment the player needs to make here is taking the time to press out the fruit or prepare the flour mixture for ale. The player can spend time to distill the wine/ale into a stronger drink that never expires, no matter how it's stored(which frees up cellar space), and they can easily do this at night when there is not much else to do. And no, the player doesn't NEED to propagate berry bushes to get alcohol, since there are plenty of wild berry bushes to harvest, fruit trees that don't need maintenance and grow larger every year, and grains that can be easily farmed and turned into liquor.

Fishing: I include fishing here, because it can be done in any decent-size body of water(including artificial ponds), and doesn't technically need bait although worms are easy enough to find. Fish can be flayed and the resulting fillets cooked into a filling meaty stew.

But if you're not willing to use any of those options because they're "too hard" or "not efficient" or "not fun", then what's the purpose of adding yet another option that is also tedious, difficult, and not very fun to acquire? And adding a "forever food" option that is very efficient and very easy to get only gets players to ignore the food preservation mechanics of Vintage Story entirely, because there's little purpose in investing in food that expires when you can just make a "forever food" that has the same satiety and fills the exact same nutritional needs. 

And like has been said multiple times already in this thread...the only scenario were a player really has to worry about all their foodstuffs spoiling, is if they play sporadically as a lone wolf on a large, active multiplayer server. However, that's not the fault of the game; that's the player deliberately picking a server that doesn't fit their preferred playstyle, and then getting upset when things don't work out so well. There's no one to blame but themselves. 

[Kulze]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

as far as I can tell, you're asking for a source of food that's easy to acquire, easy to prepare, and never expires

Which I clearly don't, hence you're taking it in wrong plainly spoken. And I don't see how after all the things mentioned specifically against that and adjusted each time it came up before it become simply nonsensical.

Neither is combat in Year 1 against specifically hostile animals 'easy' (unless you counter their AI in some way, more then enough ways, but unintended so ignored). Nor does it give 'large amounts' and hence would be in that regard easy.
Neither is reliable firing material 'easy' to uphold when you need to - for example - burn a pot filled with water down to achieve a single portion of salt, which would take a decent while (as that's freely adjustable how long this specific mechanic would take) and also takes materials... which have then during the day to be gathered again instead of doing something else.
And neither would be the smoking 'easy' as a) I specifically asked about a potential multiblock structure setup like charcoal to achieve it, with respective time investment nor b) would acquisition of the material I mentioned be 'easy', since I specifically mentioned 'shavings' from only 'oak' as the example.
Also neither would be the acquisition of enough copper to make hooks be 'easy' in the earlier time of the game to allow hanging up the prepared food so it doesn't go bad but instead is dried into the wanted result.

So while all the materials named are abundantly available in theory that doesn't mean you'll always have endless amounts of them in praxis. Why? Because neither will you endlessly fight against wolves/bears, especially not as a more casual player, nor will you be able to specifically manage oak to make thing out of and nor will you be able to just set up 20 fireplaces to constantly have them burn down water into salt and especially you'll not have a boatload of charcoal to work a endless amount of copper you'll likely not have yet into hooks which would likely be needed for something else at that time still.

So while the resources are abundant the time is not.

So I really really don't know why you would say 'it is easily acquirable'. It is a dedication but reliably doable in the first year.
Which the bamboo method though already does take over, so it's not high priority to 'plug a oversight mechanically' anyway, and likely neither the amount of people having this issue putting it in any high priority area since the workaround exists and is reliable.
But obviously I'll talk about available resource types for year 1 which then have to be changed into something else via respective effort and time to provide the outcome... since otherwise it would not quite make sense to ask for a 'Year 1' method, right?
I mean... should be logical when thinking for a second about it... so I really don't know why 'make a large livestock setup' or 'make a large bee setup' or 'just make alcohol' for a Year 1 situation being repeatedly mentioned. That's plain and simple delusional to ask that of any player which isn't highly skilled and has done that multiple times already. But for some reason it comes repeatedly back.

Edited Tuesday at 05:45 PM by Kulze

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Kulze said:

But obviously I'll talk about available resource types for year 1 which then have to be changed into something else via respective effort and time to provide the outcome... since otherwise it would not quite make sense to ask for a 'Year 1' method, right?

Several of those methods already exist in the game though, as myself and others have pointed out multiple times. Honey. Livestock. Fishing. Alcohol. All of these things are easily achievable within the first in-game year of play, and all of them require some time and resource investment to acquire. If players already don't use those methods to solve the problem, how is adding yet another method like that supposed to solve it? Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting the results to be different is just...asinine.

Likewise, you have to consider that if the player needs to sink a lot of time into achieving this thing, that is time they don't have to use elsewhere to do other things. If the average casual player only has a couple hours a week to play, and they choose to play on a large, busy server, they're going to get through maybe two to three days in game before they have to logout. So a processing method that requires a lot of direct involvement just isn't an option, because that means they spend all of their time just scraping together enough food so they can log in and spend their next session doing the exact same thing. It can't be an option where they just throw stuff in a barrel, ignore for several in-game days, and then get food that never spoils out of it either, because that renders other preservation methods obsolete. Same problem with "forever food" that doesn't take a lot of time to create, or that has the same satiety values as other preserved foods--there's no point in investing time and resources into something that spoils when you can have something that never spoils but fills the same role, for the same or comparatively less work.

The best way to fix the food problem on large servers, without unbalancing the game, is the following:

1.  Tweak the player inventory so that the spoilage timer only ticks while they're online. Doing this means that the player can play on a multiplayer server essentially the same way they would in singleplayer, without needing to worry about starving to death when they next log in. While they're online, they will still need to interact with the natural cycles and food preservation loops. It's not something that can be easily abused either, because inventory space is precious and if they gather more than they can actually use then they receive the consequences to deal with(ie, it rots).

2. Tweak player claims so that the spoilage timers for things within the claim only tick while at least one of the associated players is online. This gives players the option for better storage once they've picked a spot to settle down, as well as made progress through the game's tech tree. Instead of just hoarding things in their inventory, they can put things in a cellar on their claim, and not need to worry about it spoiling if they can't play for a couple of days(or several). They still get to rely on the same preservation methods that they would in singleplayer. To keep players from abusing this mechanic, the spoilage timer ticks whenever one of the claim owners(not admins, since they can access everything regardless of whether their name is tied to it) is online, since obviously that means there's someone there to care for the claim. 

The above two options fix the exact problem with large multiplayer servers, while leaving the core gameplay intact and without unbalancing the game itself. That's it. That's literally all that's needed.

[Kulze]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Several of those methods already exist in the game though

Yes, and from the ones mentioned I'll break it down again:

Livestock: Won't proliferate enough to allow the needed culling year 1 as you can't proliferate them well without at least a single harvest supporting the proliferation.
Bees: Sometimes available... sometimes as easy to find as randomly finding the story locations without searching for them.
Alcohol: Based on having significant stockpiles, which is not year 1, once again.
Fishing: Is an active thing to do instead of something else. It is not a quick 'cut the animal down', it is a long-drawn action which will need a good while to allow supporting yourself for a while longer. This goes actively against the premise of 'return and continue where you left off without major interruption' and hence is a problem to even be mentioned as a start, because that was the premise to go by.

So once more... bamboo has been the only viable solution, which is fine, it is viable, it is messy... but it is at least viable still.
Formerly it was berries and alcohol from those as the bushes provided enough year 1, not anymore.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Likewise, you have to consider that if the player needs to sink a lot of time into achieving this thing, that is time they don't have to use elsewhere to do other things.

Which is fine, it is a downside for this type of player playing in MP... but it is based on player agency rather then absolute inability.
So acceptable. Not optimal... but acceptable at least.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

2. Tweak player claims so that the spoilage timers for things within the claim only tick while at least one of the associated players is online. 

This is probably the best solution, better then bamboo by far. So yes, this I would agree with. Optimally with the chunk not being able to be accessed in the first place during offline times.
Though it is also highly abusable. People bringing over their easily rotting stocks before a player goes offline to then have said player go online again when the stocks otherwise dwindle, hence having the non-rotted stocks and masses of them available at once.

Which leads to:

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

1.  Tweak the player inventory so that the spoilage timer only ticks while they're online.

Being actually the better option, less options to abuse it. 22 crocks is the maximum, which is a lot but unlikely to be used this way.
But it feels messy, I don't know what exactly is my issue with it so I won't go into details, but usually my 'hunches' turn out to have a viable reasoning until I can form it coherently into words. It has likely to do that it's a workaround based on the online/offline stage rather then an 'achieved' thing to actively solve a problem plainly spoken.
But for the time being it seems like the most reliable one.

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Livestock: Won't proliferate enough to allow the needed culling year 1 as you can't proliferate them well without at least a single harvest supporting the proliferation.

If the point is to store food long term, you don't need to cull them. The meat doesn't spoil if the animal is alive. All you have to do is trap the animals in a pen and then feed them enough to breed. This is easy to do in the first in-game year.

18 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Bees: Sometimes available... sometimes as easy to find as randomly finding the story locations without searching for them.

And if you're playing multiplayer, you can always ask someone who already has bees if you can buy/have a full skep. Or, y'know, spend the time to get a skep full from a wild hive.

19 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Alcohol: Based on having significant stockpiles, which is not year 1, once again.

You can have significant stockpiles in the first year by putting effort into farming and keeping track of where the wild bushes are. If you're playing on an established multiplayer server, wild fruit trees are also on the table, since the server will have been running long enough for them to produce.

 

21 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Fishing: Is an active thing to do instead of something else. It is not a quick 'cut the animal down', it is a long-drawn action which will need a good while to allow supporting yourself for a while longer. This goes actively against the premise of 'return and continue where you left off without major interruption' and hence is a problem to even be mentioned as a start, because that was the premise to go by.

Using bait makes the fish easier to catch. And bait is as simple as just grunting around a few minutes for some worms. Fishing can be done on the very first day of playing, and it doesn't take much fishing to get enough meat for a meaty stew. 

 

24 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Though it is also highly abusable. People bringing over their easily rotting stocks before a player goes offline to then have said player go online again when the stocks otherwise dwindle, hence having the non-rotted stocks and masses of them available at once.

Nope. When a player is offline, you can't access their claim without permission unless you're an admin(which aren't counted for the spoil timer since that role has special powers for maintaining order on the server). If you have permission to access the claim, then that means your name is tied to the claim...which means that the spoil timer is going to keep ticking because the claim still has a responsible party online. If your name isn't tied to the claim, then sure, you could put everything there(or at least, have the claim owner do it) before that player logs out...but that also means that whatever you store there is no longer under your control, and there's no guarantee the claim owner will come back online at the same time as you. And of course, you'd also be assuming that the claim owner wouldn't keep it for themselves, or would be open to letting someone else use their storage space(when they could be using it for their own stuff), or would be willing to stay offline(and thus not play) just so that your stuff stays fresh. Someone could do it through an alt account, I suppose, but that's expensive and clunky to manage, and something that could potentially warrant a ban from the server depending on the server rules.

There's also no reason to store things in someone else's claim when you can just...store it in your claim. It'll keep fresh while you're offline, and there's plenty of stuff that can be stuffed into even a small cellar.

38 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Being actually the better option, less options to abuse it. 22 crocks is the maximum, which is a lot but unlikely to be used this way.

The player inventory option could technically be abused a little, but here's how I look at it: if the player is storing things in their inventory like that, that means they're going to have to go to the effort of loading their inventory full of stuff before they log off, and then unload their inventory when they log back on. That's why the claim option is important--the claim gives them a place to store a lot of stuff, without worrying about someone messing with it or the stuff spoiling while they're offline. 

Basically, the two options are meant to go hand-in-hand. To break it down into gameplay terms, let's look at it from the perspective of a casual lone-wolf who only has a couple hours at night to play, a couple of days a week at best. This player chooses to play on a large, active multiplayer server, because they like the more social atmosphere, and maybe they have a friend or two that also plays.

Option #1 is going to be immensely valuable to this player at the start, because it allows the player to play the game normally without feeling like they have to rush certain mechanics to avoid starving to death. They can hunt and forage some food, acquire their first claywares, and focus on finding the perfect little spot to settle down and build a base. If they can't find a spot the first session, that's okay--all they really need to do is make sure they have some food in their inventory for next time and they should be able to pick up right where they left off and continue their adventure. 

Once the player has found a spot they want to settle down, that's where option #2 comes into play. No offline inventory spoilage is great, but at this stage of the game, inventory space is very limited. The same as singleplayer, the player doesn't want to put effort into food that will spoil before they can reasonably eat it, and they're also going to want inventory space for collecting other resources, so they don't want to use more slots than necessary for food either. However, once they have a claim set up, they can build a cellar, which gives them a place to store more food and retrieve it as needed. They'll still need to keep track of their food stores, of course, since what they don't eat will eventually rot, but this setup does allow them to enjoy the same mechanics as everyone else(singleplayer included) without worrying about everything rotting if they can't play for a while.

For the record, both of these options exist as mods, to my knowledge. There's at least four different options.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/offlinenospoil

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/60475

https://mods.vintagestory.at/noofflinecontainerfoodspoil

https://mods.vintagestory.at/offlinefoodnospoil

[SnapJelly]

2 hours ago, Kulze said:

Alcohol: Based on having significant stockpiles, which is not year 1, once again.

well this is false, in my current playthrough I managed to made 50 liters each of blackcurrent, redcurrent, whitecurrant and cranberry wine and it's the 2nd day of october year 1

I could've made much more aswell if I just focussed on blackcurrents because those are the most prolific at my base but I wanted variation for rp reasons

2 hours ago, Kulze said:

Fishing: Is an active thing to do instead of something else. It is not a quick 'cut the animal down', it is a long-drawn action which will need a good while to allow supporting yourself for a while longer.

yeah but fishing doesn't require any setup, all you need is a knife, some rope and a few sticks. I think that's what @LadyWYT meant with their comment, you can start fishing and get mountains of protein day 1 any playthrough so similarly it's viable as an emergency food source just by keeping a fishing rod ready.
And I believe worms also don't spoil? But I might be wrong, I never keep them around long enough to try it out but if they don't then you can even stock up on the bait if you so please.

 

2 hours ago, Kulze said:

Bees: Sometimes available... sometimes as easy to find as randomly finding the story locations without searching for them.

I understand both your points of view, because bees spawning is a little random, and it can happen that you just don't en up running into any. But they are also something you only have to ever find 1 time in an entire playthrough and then you're set. So yeah teeeechnically you can't be certain you'll find bees early or even at all but it's just something you gotta casually keep an eye out for at all time until you find them, 9/10 times you'll find them rather quick.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

2. Tweak player claims so that the spoilage timers for things within the claim only tick while at least one of the associated players is online.

I do like this suggestion but I also feel like a system like this would be ripe for cheesing  if something like this gets implemented I'd suspect a lot of balancing issues would present themselves rather quickly



lasty I wanna add I am kinda confused about why people feel like they need unspoilable foods for travel specifically? I never timed it exactly but I know you can travel thousands of blocks in a single day if you are dedicated to traveling and don't get distracted much so how far are ya'll traveling? You guys got outposts 100k blocks away or something? Because if something is 20k blocks away yeah that would be quite a walk but regular food with regular spoilage rates would still get you there before it spoils so???

Edited Tuesday at 11:52 PM by SnapJelly

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

I do like this suggestion but I also feel like a system like this would be ripe for cheesing  if something like this gets implemented I'd suspect a lot of balancing issues would present themselves rather quickly

Maybe, but I haven't managed to think of a good way to cheese it. If your name isn't on the claim, then you're not allowed to interact with the stuff in that claim, so you're losing access to some of your stuff. If your name is on the claim though, then the spoil time is ticking whenever you're online. And storing stuff in another player's claim means that you're trusting them to be online when you want it back, and that they'll give it back, and that they'll be willing to let you use their space instead of storing their own stuff there.

Admins could probably cheese it by shuttling stuff around for players, but I don't think many admins are going to want to do that when players are perfectly capable of storing their own stuff.

7 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

lasty I wanna add I am kinda confused about why people feel like they need unspoilable foods for travel specifically? I never timed it exactly but I know you can travel thousands of blocks in a single day if you are dedicated to traveling and don't get distracted much so how far are ya'll traveling? You guys got outposts 100k blocks away or something? Because if something is 20k blocks away yeah that would be quite a walk but regular food with regular spoilage rates would still get you there before it spoils so???

In my experience, on default settings you can travel around 7-10k blocks a day over land, depending on the terrain. Translocators can extend the range even further. I think the furthest the player actually has to travel is around 20k blocks from spawn, and that's only if they want to complete the story. If they really want to visit the arctic or the tropics, then it's more like 70k blocks, I think. But story and polar-equator distances are both settings that can be changed at world creation, and chapter two(which involves the heavy traveling) can be completed in about an in-game week, so the preserved foodstuffs mentioned below should be more than enough to keep the player adequately supplied for such a trip. It's also worth noting that using an item like the base return teleporter allows the player to skip the walk home, teleporting them there instantly instead.

The way I look at food for travel though is...managing your supplies and acquiring fresh ones as needed should be part of the process. It's why you bring along a cookpot, or pack foods like flour, grain, pickles, cheese, and salted meat. Those items stay fresh for a long time and stack rather high, so they make very good road rations. The cookpot is useful for turning freshly hunted/foraged food into a nice meal, when you can get fresh supplies anyway, meaning your preserved foodstuffs will last even longer.

In regards to outposts...the point of building one is that it's a spot you intend to visit somewhat regularly. The preserved foodstuffs currently in the game last for years when stored properly in a cellar, and it's also possible to set up a small farm with livestock nearby to help with the supplies as well, or rely on hunting, fishing, and foraging to supplement the staples stored in the outpost. Of course, if the outpost is purely decorative, that's also fine, but in that case it doesn't need supplies since it's not actually going to be used.

[Kulze]

I think the situation still calls for a bit of math here.

First off, upon return livestock will be at the 'starving' stage. This reduces yield to a maximum of 7 red meat and a minimum of 0. Average outcome is 3 red meat.
In a pot 4 red meat turn into a portion of 1680 calories, hence 420 calories per piece of meat.
At average without any extensive movement the player will use up 3456 calories per hour. That includes neither mining, shoveling, woodcutting, running or jumping. Just 'baseline actions' of walking.
Breaking a block costs 25 satiety.
Running more then doubles the rate of calories used, but nobody walks around everywhere.

Hence we can say a returning player needs ~ 6000-10000 calories per hour (could be more, unlikely to be less then 6k though). Let's average it at 8000 per hour.

This means we need 8000 / 420 = 19,something red meat. Or we can say 20 for simplicity.
We can say a short session of 'finishing up whatever' would take 2 hours of gameplay, hence 40 red meat.

So the breakdown:
- Livestock, pigs (as they're the highest yield for meat, others need substantially more.): 14 pigs need to be slaughtered for meat. Probably 13 with fat as they won't give any likely, or only 1.
- Honeycomb/Honey: If we have them (I mentioned the issues with it at times) we need 54 honeycomb to get us over that timeframe.
- Alcohol is 80 calories per liter. We need hence 200 liter of it for the timed ones. And '2000' liter for the non-timed ones (1 to 10 ratio of distilling it down).
- Fishing is still a outright 'no' as it entirely breaks the premise and is not usable hence for what is to be achieved, as baseline. No matter how 'easy' it is, so I'll ignore the mention of it simply. Not going to engage with that, staying within the framework of the premise is core to reach answers, otherwise we don't need one, do we? If 'continuing where we left off' as the core premise isn't upheld it makes no sense, we could just walk out and search food every time... which is the friction to avoid which is unique to MP sessions as otherwise it's pure player agency to stockpile properly.

@LadyWYT
Livestock with 13 breedings... potentially doable, but quiiite hard and not repeatable I would say, as you've culled the stuff then already.
Honey might be doable, as it's a regenerating resource, unlikely though to have that much by the time it becomes needed in such a situation, but it's close.
Alcohol is a big no-chance. Simple as that. 200 liters non-perishable alcohol comes from 6200 fruits/berries. Just no.

@SnapJelly
Your 50 liter will get give you 4000 calories, which is 30 minutes of gameplay action. This is nothing.
Bees: Yes, same as with Lady, potentially doable, but not reliable. 
 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

When a player is offline, you can't access their claim without permission unless you're an admin

But you can bypass spoiling time by having someone log off with loads of nice food and only come online when the stockpiles start to dwindle to then have fresh food stockpiles. This is just bypassing with tedium intended game mechanics, which in MP is iffy.

This goes for both the claim-based storage and the inventory-only one, but the second is at least smaller in possible scale.
 

40 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

lasty I wanna add I am kinda confused about why people feel like they need unspoilable foods for travel specifically?

Was just a nice side-effect, not the core premise.
The core premise still is:
MP / Player comes back after long inactivity time / all perishable food rotted / nobody else online / nobody else available / still year 1 or no simply too little play-time to setup significant stockpiles anyway / friction of coming back and instantly having to do food management rather then whatever is planned to be done is to be near 100% avoided. Maximum 5 minute effort I would say as limitation.
Which is solely a issue for MP, never for SP. So non-perishable with bamboo has turned out to be a wonky but doable solution. Bees potentially. Livestock... eh... unlikely. Fishing is hence entirely unviable.

But for travel? This is actually a rather important aspect for outposting. Which becomes gradually more important with story locations being further and further away, but also simply for long-term gameplay in the type of 'forever worlds' where projects start to be apart significant distances needing multiple days of travel and then a full shebang of managing food before doing anything you actually want to do. This can be counteracted with livestock (in very large quantities) and bees though at least.
But as @LadyWYT mentioned at baseline the poles are an issue, specifically the northern one. Resources are scarce there, specifically food. So you need to transport food over. At 50k default setting it means you're out for multiple days, which limits the timeframe in which you can actually do something there. If you load up on non-perishables and stockpile them in place it allows for long working sessions where you dwindle those down without regular multi-day interruptions of traveling. So having a option which allows to simply not perish and can be produced in large quantities is important in that regard if you intent to not come back for potentially years... or tens of years, but don't want to have to re-do your stockpiles every single time over there, which takes ages at first.
This then is a major issue with current existing options like honeycomb which can only be stacked to 8, hence you need honey itself in a bucket, which makes it doable at 10 liters per barrel. Though to achieve that you need 50 honeycombs per barrel, which then yields 3000 calories, which is roughly 30 minutes of action.
So to do a 4 hour building/chiseling session for example you would need to to carry 8 buckets over which have used 400 honeycombs. That's... acceptable rates for sizeable projects. Probably gonne need a lot more but doable. But who wants to deal with 133 broken skeps and hence beeswarms in vanilla to do that?  
So fishing is what is usually done in the arctic currently, which takes ages to set up the system initially and you have to keep it going with repurposing the filets, hence to forego that something non-perishable is huge for that.

This is especially the case for MP and offline times in the arctic which demands the setup again every single time. Livestock is not available anyway. Bees aren't either. Only bushmeat and fishes are. And fishes takes as mentioned absolute ages to set up again and circle, perishing relatively quickly after.

This is actually a prime reason for allowing bushmeat to be processes with some tedious methods, solely for not having to worry about that there. But that's another topic entirely and wasn't planned with my argument. But it's a interesting topic.

Edited Wednesday at 12:29 AM by Kulze

[SnapJelly]

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

We can say a short session of 'finishing up whatever' would take 2 hours of gameplay, hence 40 red meat.

sure man but how much food you you want to keep in reserve anyway? You mean you want to join a game and have an entire year worth of calories stored and just ready to go? That's not how the game works, when you log on you gotta think about your next meal, that's the gameplay loop

 

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Your 50 liter will get give you 4000 calories, which is 30 minutes of gameplay action. This is nothing.

So now you're just casually pretending I didn't say I made 200 liters of wine not 50 and ignoring the fact I said I could've easily made more if I wanted but chose to focus on diverisfying flavors for roleplaying reasons, and this is me during a casual playthough... aka not SPECIFICALLY for a very niche reason trying to stock up on foods that never spoil for some reason

Not a great argument man

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Bees: Yes, same as with Lady, potentially doable, but not reliable. 

disagree, extremely reliable, one of the most reliable, you hardly have to do anything but wait and they just generate food by themselves. You're saying bees are not reliable because you have to go find them 1 time? Yes?? Like you have to go and find anything else too... you want food to just spawn in your inventory by itself?

 

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

But as @LadyWYT mentioned at baseline the poles are an issue, specifically the northern one. Resources are scarce there, specifically food. So you need to transport food over. At 50k default setting it means you're out for multiple days, which limits the timeframe in which you can actually do something there.

Sure I see that but what is it exactly that you have to do in the north pole specifically?? What's 50k blocks up north that isn't anywhere else? Seems to me like this is a self imposed limitation followed by a complaint about why this self imposed limitation is limiting

 

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

This then is a major issue with current existing options like honeycomb which can only be stacked to 8, hence you need honey itself in a bucket, which makes it doable at 10 liters per barrel. Though to achieve that you need 50 honeycombs per barrel, which then yields 3000 calories, which is roughly 30 minutes of action.

This is just an issue because of the vessel you choose; 36 slots to a trunk with 8 honeycombs per slot is 288 honeycombs stored in 2 blocks space for 86.400 satiety, or 43.200 per storage block.

I never tried storing honeycomb in a crate so idk if it's possible but if it is then you can store 160 honeycombs or 48.000 fruit satiety per block

47 minutes ago, Kulze said:

So to do a 4 hour building/chiseling session for example you would need to to carry 8 buckets over which have used 400 honeycombs. That's... acceptable rates for sizeable projects. Probably gonne need a lot more but doable. But who wants to deal with 133 broken skeps and hence beeswarms in vanilla to do that?

So your argument here is that it is too difficult or takes too long to get that many in bulk??? Wasn't part of you initial argument that the suggested food would have to be tedious to make in bulk?? What's the argument here?

Edited Wednesday at 01:14 AM by SnapJelly

[Kulze]

5 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

sure man but how much food you you want to keep in reserve anyway?

2 hours, as mentioned. For the premise of it.
 

6 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

So now you're just casually pretending I didn't say I made 200 liters of wine not 50

You write it in a ambigious way which could mean '50 liter total' or '50 liter each'. So I took it as '50 liter'.
Which by the way in non-perishable is 5 liter. Or if we go with your 200 liters is actually 20 liters.
Still doesn't change the need to have 200 liter non-perishable for the premise.

I mean... come on... how often do I have to repeat the specific premise I'm going for for people to actually stay in the constraints of it since I've used it for a very specific existing situation which is based around the idea of the existence of 'forever servers' which simply aren't made in VS while they are absolutely made in MC... question the why that is the case and then work within it.

If I just write anything randomly and never align with the topic then sure... I can also do a lot of comments which mean nothing.

Specifically since you seem to absolutely looove to ignore arguments brought furth beforehand and just flop willy-nilly around between positions.

1 hour ago, SnapJelly said:

I understand both your points of view, because bees spawning is a little random, and it can happen that you just don't en up running into any.

Here you agree with it potentially being an issue. So fine, great! Same page!

10 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

disagree, extremely reliable, one of the most reliable, you hardly have to do anything but wait and they just generate food by themselves.

And then you flop 180 and disagree.

Which one is it? Are you bipolar? I mean... I don't know what to make of it, it's kinda hard to have a proper argument when one side waffles about randomly. It is impossible to make an argument about anything if that happens.
 

12 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

What's 50k blocks up north that isn't anywhere else?

A permanent ice biome to build nordic-focused things in.
 

13 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

36 slots to a trunk with 8 honeycombs per slot is 288 honeycombs stored in 2 blocks space for 86.400 satiety,

We're talking about transport, not storage.
 

14 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

So your argument here is that it is too difficult or takes too long to get that many in bulk???

1 hour ago, Kulze said:

Was just a nice side-effect, not the core premise.

Reading is a nice skill to have.

[LadyWYT]

19 minutes ago, Kulze said:

But you can bypass spoiling time by having someone log off with loads of nice food and only come online when the stockpiles start to dwindle to then have fresh food stockpiles. This is just bypassing with tedium intended game mechanics, which in MP is iffy.

This goes for both the claim-based storage and the inventory-only one, but the second is at least smaller in possible scale.

This strategy relies on several factors in order to work. Chief among them being that the other player won't take your stuff, will be online when you need your stuff, and will be willing to just not play at all so that your stuff stays safe. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be logging in all the time to be a friend's packmule just because they couldn't be bothered to keep their stuff in their own inventory and claim. I certainly wouldn't do it on a game or server that I don't want to play on myself. The only way I see this being very feasible is via multi-boxing, but that relies on the player being willing to buy two different game accounts, and the server not having rules against multi-boxing. And in my experience, multi-boxing is something that generally isn't looked on kindly by other players, since it gives an unfair advantage, and thus probably isn't going to be looked on favorably when it comes to server rules.

 

28 minutes ago, Kulze said:

First off, upon return livestock will be at the 'starving' stage.

Depends. To my knowledge, livestock don't lose weight over time, and it's quite easy to feed them up to Good weight.

 

29 minutes ago, Kulze said:

This reduces yield to a maximum of 7 red meat and a minimum of 0. Average outcome is 3 red meat.

Depends heavily on the animal gender and species, not just the weight. A well-fed hog can easily provide enough meat for a crock of stew(or most of a crock, two slots of meat), while a well-fed sheep can easily provide an entire cookpot full of stew(six servings, two slots of meat). 

 

32 minutes ago, Kulze said:

At average without any extensive movement the player will use up 3456 calories per hour. That includes neither mining, shoveling, woodcutting, running or jumping. Just 'baseline actions' of walking.
Breaking a block costs 25 satiety.
Running more then doubles the rate of calories used, but nobody walks around everywhere.

Hence we can say a returning player needs ~ 6000-10000 calories per hour (could be more, unlikely to be less then 6k though). Let's average it at 8000 per hour.

This means we need 8000 / 420 = 19,something red meat. Or we can say 20 for simplicity.
We can say a short session of 'finishing up whatever' would take 2 hours of gameplay, hence 40 red meat.

This is going to depend heavily on the game settings and other factors like player activity level, class choice, time of year, and whether or not the player is currently injured. I think this rundown also fails to account for the fact that certain foods like cookpot meals will pause hunger. The block breaking cost I'm also rather skeptical of, since if each block costs 25 points, then every 4 blocks is costing 100 points, which means that the player is going to empty their hunger every 60 blocks. And it's not very hard to break 60 blocks in a very short time. Something is off here.

38 minutes ago, Kulze said:

So the breakdown:
- Livestock, pigs (as they're the highest yield for meat, others need substantially more.): 14 pigs need to be slaughtered for meat. Probably 13 with fat as they won't give any likely, or only 1.
- Honeycomb/Honey: If we have them (I mentioned the issues with it at times) we need 54 honeycomb to get us over that timeframe.
- Alcohol is 80 calories per liter. We need hence 200 liter of it for the timed ones. And '2000' liter for the non-timed ones (1 to 10 ratio of distilling it down).
- Fishing is still a outright 'no' as it entirely breaks the premise and is not usable hence for what is to be achieved, as baseline. No matter how 'easy' it is, so I'll ignore the mention of it simply. Not going to engage with that, staying within the framework of the premise is core to reach answers, otherwise we don't need one, do we? If 'continuing where we left off' as the core premise isn't upheld it makes no sense, we could just walk out and search food every time... which is the friction to avoid which is unique to MP sessions as otherwise it's pure player agency to stockpile properly.

In my experience on standard settings, a crock of meat stew should be enough to get the player through one, maybe two, in-game days, which equates to about an hour and a half of real time. Certainly enough time to go hunt, forage, or fish up more food, with some time left over to do other things. So all the player really needs is one, maybe two, spare animals that they can slaughter and turn into a stew or soup--enough to allow them to go hunt, forage, fish, or buy food from the auction house. Alcohol and honey can fill a similar role if needed, but neither will pause hunger as a proper meal will, so the grace period is going to be a little shorter. Same goes for walnuts, fat, and bamboo shoots. But they're still viable options.

And no, we aren't going to ignore fishing. That's also a readily available, perfectly viable option for the player to use to quickly replenish their food stock without too much effort. Plus if we want to insist that it isn't viable because it "forces the player to drop whatever they were doing at the time to focus on food", then it's not very logical at all to turn around and say that forcing the player to spend all their time on an incredibly tedious early-game "forever food" just to avoid starvation the next time they log in is a satisfactory solution.

Now if the player doesn't want to focus on food at all for that player session, then that means they'll need to put more effort into things like acquiring herds of livestock, hoarding heaps of honeycomb or fat, brewing and distilling lots of liquor, or stockpiling gears to buy supplies if they don't intend to play on that server regularly.

In any case though, none of this is a concern if the spoilage rates for the player inventory and player claims are tweaked. As I said in previous posts, tweaking those rates allows players to play multiplayer the same way they would in singleplayer, but without worrying about starving to death because all their food rotted, rushing certain parts of the game because of supply limitations, or otherwise spending a lot of time grinding out very specific foodstuffs just so they can have one session where they can maybe focus on something else.

53 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Which becomes gradually more important with story locations being further and further away

Keeping in mind that while Chapter Two introduced the concept of traveling very long distances for certain story events, it also introduced the concept of unlocking "fast travel" systems. That is, when it comes to major travels and story content, at least, the plan seems to be for the player to unlock some sort of fast travel to the main location, so they can make a return trip later with much greater ease.

 

55 minutes ago, Kulze said:

But as @LadyWYT mentioned at baseline the poles are an issue, specifically the northern one. Resources are scarce there, specifically food. So you need to transport food over. At 50k default setting it means you're out for multiple days, which limits the timeframe in which you can actually do something there. If you load up on non-perishables and stockpile them in place it allows for long working sessions where you dwindle those down without regular multi-day interruptions of traveling. So having a option which allows to simply not perish and can be produced in large quantities is important in that regard if you intent to not come back for potentially years... or tens of years, but don't want to have to re-do your stockpiles every single time over there, which takes ages at first.

Like @SnapJelly already said, there's really nothing to do at the poles currently. And yes, resources are scarce there, partly because it's the arctic and the arctic isn't known to be very easy to live in, and also because the arctic is one area of the game that's not very fleshed out. The better argument here is that we need more resources native to the arctic that the player can use to survive.

 

12 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

You're saying bees are not reliable because you have to go find them 1 time?

If it's multiplayer, you don't even have to find your own bees. You can just buy them from another player, assuming they don't just give you a skep for free.

 

14 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

I never tried storing honeycomb in a crate so idk if it's possible but if it is then you can store 160 honeycombs or 48.000 fruit satiety per block

Pretty much anything can be stored in a crate, including other crates, I'm pretty sure. How much can fit in the crate depends on what the crate is made from. Aged crates can only hold 16 stacks. Most other wood crates can hold 20 stacks of items, with the exception of ebony and purpleheart crates, which can both hold up to 25 stacks of items.

[SnapJelly]

4 minutes ago, Kulze said:

You write it in a ambigious way which could mean '50 liter total' or '50 liter each'. So I took it as '50 liter'.
Which by the way in non-perishable is 5 liter. Or if we go with your 200 liters is actually 20 liters.
Still doesn't change the need to have 200 liter non-perishable for the premise.

Funny how you misread something that is plain english and then end your post by saying: 

 

5 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Reading is a nice skill to have.

HAHAHAHAHA XD 

I agree man: ''50 liters each'' means: ''50 liters each'' in case that wasn't clear!

7 minutes ago, Kulze said:

And then you flop 180 and disagree.

no? once again an interesting take that only holds up because you're not reading the very next sentence after the one you quoted, it completely explains my viewpoint...

 

8 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Which one is it? Are you bipolar? I mean... I don't know what to make of it

Let me help you out then: Look up the term: ''perspective-taking'' and you'll figure it out!

 

9 minutes ago, Kulze said:

A permanent ice biome to build nordic-focused things in.

So like I said, self imposed limitations. If you're building a base in a place that is freezing all the time then you're going to have to deal with the consequences of it freezing all the time

 

12 minutes ago, Kulze said:

We're talking about transport, not storage.

oh my bad, I misunderstood

Sidenote, I suggest you go take a walk man, it seems like you're getting pretty agitated over this...

[Kulze]

9 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Depends. To my knowledge, livestock don't lose weight over time, and it's quite easy to feed them up to Good weight.

Passive animals have a 0% to 100% satiation rate which the respective stages of weight come from. They loose 0,1% satiation per in-game hour, or 2,4% per day when no food is available for them.
They absolutely go to 'starving' but never die simply. Their drops are horrendous though and they don't breed unless re-fed properly to weight.
And 'feeding them up' kinda would be hard when 'all perishable food rotted' is the case.
 

11 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Depends heavily on the animal gender and species

I didn't know it also has something to do with gender. I took the number from pigs, which are the highest yield species available for the player in terms of livestock. Do sows provide more then boars?
 

12 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

This is going to depend heavily on the game settings and other factors

Default settings. No woodcutting/mining/digging in masses, a bit of running and a bit of jumping, no off-hand, not blackguard, no damage taken. Otherwise the numbers are significantly worse by quite a lot. I took it for a especially low amount, you'll usually use up more calories in 2 hours of gameplay.

And I think the 25 is solely for woodcutting, lemme check for a moment what the digging/mining are, I assumed there and didn't think, that's my fault.

Checked, digging and mining does incur no malus. Only woodcutting does.
 

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

In my experience on standard settings, a crock of meat stew should be enough to get the player through one, maybe two, in-game days, which equates to about an hour and a half of real time. Certainly enough time to go hunt, forage, or fish up more food, with some time left over to do other things.

But that still goes against the premise of the MP situation.
If you come back and your first action is that you have to deal with food after having done so before leaving (because it perished) then it's exactly the friction existing which is to be avoided for such cases in 'some' way. Which is up for discussion. Activity to rebound is not the solution, since that is what causes the friction. It is still a loss of player agency despite prepwork being done beforehand. And not too rare either.
Yes, there's a myriad of ways to solve it, but all need immediate action of some form as well as time. The less of that exists in that moment the better. Which is why my push in that regard is so strong.

So no matter what you say... fishing is ignored as it obviously goes against the premise.
If you're on a soccer field you cannot play outside the soccer field. Same thing here. Stay within the field of the example, other stuff will be ignored no matter what. Simple as that.
If someone provides 'hey, this is the issue' and you provide a solution which does not solve the exact mentioned issue then you can't state 'but it was relevant for the issue!'.
That's simply not how things work, and I really don't understand how that is such a hard concept to get.

So since I just wrote that I'll reach a bit 'forward' to the mention of bees. Which yes, might be available, but we're talking about the premise of 'no other players available' and 'no taking stuff without active permission', which is a rather common thing to have for forever servers with very long-term players to not infringe on the fun of others unless actively collaborating for something.

21 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Keeping in mind that while Chapter Two introduced the concept of traveling very long distances for certain story events, it also introduced the concept of unlocking "fast travel" systems.

Yeah, which is fair, and if it becomes a enhanced system in the future then great!
Maybe it'll be fixed spots only... like the pre-existing translocator network, just a separate one. Maybe it'll lead to freely buildable ones (which I prefer plainly spoken, but it's not a guarantee).
Until then though I'll treat it as not a thing coming up as we didn't hear anything about it being a thing to my knowledge. But that could be wrong too. And I know mods to solve it exists, I'm only talking vanilla still. Core game, non-modified, absolute baseline.
 

24 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The better argument here is that we need more resources native to the arctic that the player can use to survive.

Yes, that's a very fair argument.
 

26 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

Funny how you misread something that is plain english and then end your post by saying: 

I don't flip-flop willy-nilly around, and misreading a single word is a bit easier then misreading a disclaimer put as the first sentence when addressing you as well as once again as the last sentence of the whole explanation. 

You know... misreading 'each' once and failing to read a whole message which is framed by two sentences specifically stating 'this is not even the actual topic but a side-tangent, not the topic though' which @LadyWYT nonetheless gave a great argument towards which makes a lot of sense is quiiiite on another level here I hope you agree.

Not to speak of the whole premise being about 100% non-perishable food... and last time I looked wine perishes. Which hence means I raised the number in your favor even and you're giving me shit for it now.
So sure, lets go with the 200 liters... which is now rotten and worthless. Or once again in your favor since you didn't actually do it (as you haven't mentioned it) it would now be distilled and is actually 20 liters.

1/10th of it. 12 minutes of play-time. Wow! Great! Good job!

And yes, I'm getting agitated here, but it is not because of the topic itself, it is because here's you and Lady which both jump outside the topic discussed and try to conflate it into it, spinning and twisting the baseline I asked for, and which I asked for with a reason, and with the specific limitations as well for a reason. And both of you try to twist it around with me giving extras outside those limitations. Like livestock, which needs to butcher them and cook the meals, as they're not prepared and ready to consume, hence once more avoiding the 'jumping right back into it without diversions'. And still... since it's a low time investment compared to everything else I accepted it without complaint. But seemingly I should've also stayed absolutely solid there, since it also doesn't apply. And Lady came and said 'but no, you can't just ignore fishing!' despite I don't even know how often I repeated the premise and expect people to work with that unless there's a reason why said premise would need to be changed... which there was none.

Not to speak that it is by the way already handled since the solution was multiple posts ago 'Bamboo fixes it' plain and simple. With the others not. And nonetheless the same repeated regurgitated arguments with the same answers come back over and over and over again, with the example becoming more and more precise and also quite lenient. Because I could also state 'Yeah, let's have a full play-session for MP as backup, that would be the reasonable amount' that would be 8 hours for a full 'play day' as many do it. And instead culled it down to '2 hours' which is the average play-time of a more casual player only instead of someone which comes back from a long break after having gone to work away from home for a month or 2 and then being unable to hop back into the server which is finally supposed to be relaxation time to instead be confronted with having to rush work-like to catch up on food which was in absolute abundance accessible before the break but now all universally rot without fail.
And something like that breaks the spirit of continuing, which is a well known thing, which is not a massive outlier, which every single person having owned any form of 'forever' type server can likely tell you 5-10 stories about for people having to take substantial breaks, with the server sometimes being extremely busy, and sometimes dead for a whole week, no matter if it's MC, Project Zomboid, some copied old MMO of some sorts, VS or whatever.

So yes, I do get agitated when I get a level of argumentation which is below sub-par while the actual content inside the messages is actually well written. This is a massive disparity, and such a thing pisses me off because it means my words are intentionally ignored in favor of nonsense like 'winning an argument' or 'not having said anything false'. Because what else is it?

[SnapJelly]

8 minutes ago, Kulze said:

I don't flip-flop willy-nilly around

I don't either, you're just choosing to only quote half of what I say and ignore the other half

 

9 minutes ago, Kulze said:

you're giving me shit for it now.

I'm doing no such thing, you're the only one that's upset here man

 

10 minutes ago, Kulze said:

So sure, lets go with the 200 liters... which is now rotten and worthless.

becaue 14 years isn't long enough for your hypothetical scenario... you're gonna stock up os so much wine that you can survive on nothing but wine and still have wine left over for it to spoil after 14 years and not be able to make another single drop of wine in between so it's ''rotten and worthless'' (for reference I just checked my own games cellar which is not in the arctic and my wine is set to stay good for 14 years)

 

13 minutes ago, Kulze said:

1/10th of it. 12 minutes of play-time. Wow! Great! Good job!

So how much ''time spent preparing food'' to ''nutrition gained'' ratio would be a sufficient amount for you? I'll be sure to tell the vintage story overlords next time I see them!

 

15 minutes ago, Kulze said:

And both of you try to twist it around with me giving extras outside those limitations. Like livestock, which needs to butcher them and cook the meals

I mean... sure but that's quite literally the least possible effort you gotta put in, killing them with a cleaver is a single click. Yes you do have to cook them but you're sayng you don't want to bother cooking your food? It's a base mechanic of the game??? And a meal takes like a whole 10 seconds to cook, idk how you would survive such a time investment!

Also ignoring aaaaaaalll the other suggestions we gave that are ready to eat as they are AND ignoring the fact that in your own premise this ''mystery food'' requires a lot of planning and preperation I find it a little strange you find cooking a meal for a couple seconds such a hurdle.

21 minutes ago, Kulze said:

'Bamboo fixes it' plain and simple.

Oke so, why get angry about alternative solutions people are giving if bamboo solves the issue for you already? Just ignore the rest then?

 

23 minutes ago, Kulze said:

it means my words are intentionally ignored in favor of nonsense like 'winning an argument'

we all love a bit of irony don't we?

[Kulze]

1 hour ago, SnapJelly said:

becaue 14 years isn't long enough for your hypothetical scenario

Yes, because at default setting 14 years are 1209,6 hours or 50,4 days.
And it actually doesn't matter 'how much' since it goes against the concept of 'permanency' anyway, which is a major portion of the 'forever server' concept itself and necessary to understand.
Without that there is plainly spoken no discussion possible in the first place as that's the most fundamental aspect existing.
Servers which when you take a break for a year and come back... your don't have to start from 'scratch' as methods are available to ensure you don't need to do so without utterly breaking the stability by forcing hundreds of animals in small pens at all times dumping the FPS down. The game does a fantastic job in upholding the majority. The claim system, no damage done to your structures from exterior influences, no age-based degradation which is tied to real-time.

The perishing time is the outlier, and don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic system, but as anything you do when you change the concept of a system which in this case is in most games 'permanency' of some form... like in MC, like in 'Necesse' or even farming games like Stardew Valley where things don't rot... you automatically introduce issues inadvertendly in areas which formerly had none. And this simply is one of those places.

Permanency as a concept is a very important one for any form of extreme long-term content. People use these things then because no matter when they come back... they can be sure it still exists, and if it's solely for the memories of it. And while this has been quite a bit 'mangled' over time in the digital space... it is absolutely still a thing.
Not without reason there's Minecraft servers still existing which have been created in alpha, my personal one with currently a total of 2 players coming by every week or so being one of those, and I intend to uphold this for the next decades. Same with some olden games from before the millenium even, which still are running, primarily because they don't need any resources to keep running at all nearly. Ultima Online servers, 'Crossfire MMO' or nowadays 'Delantria' which was a 1992 project still being used and many more.

You don't see this form of 'permanency' in Vintage Story despite the sizeable game-world and the ability to update and clean unused areas out via world regen commands. The ability to ensure your builds aren't messed with the land claim option.
It is a prime candidate for this form of setup.
So question yourself about the 'why' again. Why doesn't those exist? What stops people from doing it?
And that's exactly because the 'permanency' premise isn't upheld in every aspect. Food is currently the outlier, and actual permanent sources are either extremely space inefficient or simply non-existent. I think we got 4 sources of non-perishable food currently.
- Rendered fat
- Honey
- Distilled alcohol
- Vintage Beef

Even bamboo is not a perfect one, but it works at least the earliest. But to achieve a reliable permanency based server setup that makes people actually want to come back there needs to be an option available to ensure that return is without struggles and which upholds inside the established way the game wants to set itself up.
And that's the major issue, because such a thing is not easily achieved.
And for that 2 specific points are not fulfilled yet, but could be. Which are extremely early game options which manage to push you over 'getting into it again' at least. This is why I'm speaking about bushmeat there as it's unused but you'll simply get it in ok-ish amounts over time automatically... and it's usually a throwaway material plainly spoken, which is a bit of a shame. And a reliably and more abundant end-game option. Because at end-game you're already set up with livestock, honey, farming... and you're so much in abundance that a non-perishable food source which isn't a massive hassle is no issue as it doesn't interfere with any ongoing mechanics.
Which is the discussion I'm trying to have, but seemingly won't get.
 

1 hour ago, SnapJelly said:

Oke so, why get angry about alternative solutions people are giving if bamboo solves the issue for you already? Just ignore the rest then?

Because I have the basic decency of etiquette to actually not ignore people?
I know that's gotten a bit into favor... but it's not a positive trait to have and should be kept for extreme outliers in terms of communication.

[Rainbow Fresh]

Oh boi, I ain't gonna read all the rest as it clearly seems like we are still spinning in circles.

"Reading is a nice skill to have" - Yeah, so is being able to accept the words you read without having to go "Yes, I can agree with that, but actually you are still wrong so here is my single take again".

Your numbers are swell and all, but have we all ever considered one teeny, tiny, crucial core consideration here?

You say you want to have about 2h of food available. So that someone with nothing to their name on an always-on multiplayer sever with no available outside help can return after a long, long period of absence and have the mental freedom to just "Come back for a quick round of something fun". Something fun here being anything but engaging with the game's core premise of *survival*. Ok, fine. So we now introduce reliably available forever food that a fresh, bought the game today, first days player can acquire in preparation (so, the half a stack full of emergency cattail roots I was running around for like 100h with) for the potentially inevitable black-hole that rips them from video game reality, while being otherwise such a bad choice to consider for food (so you have to do double the work - make food and make backup food simultaneously) for anyone else. The person in question has now done this - solely moving the impact of how shit it is to have to deal with food when you would love to do virtually anything else by preparing food in advance instead of making it a re-entry hurdle; And now the big question nobody talked about before (or if it was in the last 3 walls of text - sorry, didn't read): What then? Your player comes back for a quick, small, 2h session where they can live off of just their forever food supply and not worry about starving while "finishing what they started" before leaving. Then log off again. Cool. And when they... log in the next time? Still no food. Forever food supplies gone. And, you won't believe this, we are in the exact same situation we would be in without this forever food, just postponed by a single short gaming session! At this point, no matter if they keep playing regularly (in which case bro, if you plan on keeping up then keep up and solve the food issue first) or vanish for another IRL month, they have no food. The only way to return to the game and continue is by getting fucking food. An entire mechanic that already spawned THIS much controversy BEFORE even being implemented, to give the single-odd player on a big multiplayer server (that only a part of all VS owners actually play on) in a really inconvenient situation (possibly of their own making) can get 2 whopping hours of leeway. Leeway that, by any means, should generally be used to acquire a proper food supply again anyway. You don't come back after 6 months with nothing left to your name and focus on just "Oh yes, I wanted to chisel this bridge!". That's like returning to your IRL wood workshop with a half finished table you wanted to finish after a year, thinking you could just waltz back in, fire up the saw and do it - ignoring the completely dusty place, probably unpaid electricity bills so you got no power, maybe a critter infestation somewhere in the corner; and you are suggesting adding a roomba for this particular person to be able to ignore reality for the entirety of this one unfinished table.

I'm generally all for making the game enjoyable and accessible to people and I do understand where this "mental wellbeing" argument comes from. Re-entry hurdles are what kills games. Anyone who ever played a mobile/gacha game knows that. All this FOMO, all this routine that if you fall out of the loop just once, catching back up would cost you more than you are willing - or able - to give. But at some point it just gets ridiculous for how far you want to go. The argument of wanting more readily accessible forever food as emergency ration for unforeseen circumstances so that people can more easily get back into the swing of things? Decent. Doing so under the pretense that this is *specifically* for that 1 in 10.000 players that winds up ignoring or very unfortunately unable to obtain all the other failsaves? Questionable at best. Now we have specified *even further* that we do this for poor John who only played the game for like 15h so far? At this point, screw the re-entry hurdle this guy didn't even get over the normal entry hurdle! We could reasonably argue that this person would not really lose much of value even if they had to start over fresh because they get trapped in a starvation loop! People have restarted playthroughs for much sillier things!

So no. Good job on all the calculations, even though my personal experience doesn't seem to really back them up. But this is plain out getting stupid. Not to mention constantly moving the goalpost to try and find some tiny bunker corner you can hide in and defend your claim, then yelling at people for not understanding what you want. If we really want to give more leeway to multiplayer people - the notion that the player's inventory is safe from time progression while offline is the most sensible path here. Even though I still personally think we don't really need that.

 

Now, for the side quests:

Animal starvation. You can run a test to prove me wrong as I am solely going off of memory and personal singleplayer experience, but animals don't lose weight - ever - outside of winter. I'm also rather confident they need to be actively loaded in in winter to lose weight. So no, the player vanishing for several in-game years, living alone far away from everyone else so their chunks should never be loaded in will have good weight animals at the ready, even if coming back in the middle of winter.

The "But we have other forever food why are those ok and this suggestion not?" argument. For all I care, the other forever food can get a perish timer like anything else, and most of them probably simply don't because nobody bothered updating the necessary mechanics. Walnuts - probably non-perishable because they are primarily tree saplings, and tree saplings don't spoil. Makes no sense to me and I defend my stand from another thread discussion fruiting bush cuttings: They are all plants, plants die if not in soil - give saplings perish timers. Seeds could be too tediously unbalanced but saplings; there is no need to stockpile them. Cattail/Papyrus/Tule roots - and probably bamboo shoots as well. Plants. Rot. Done. Vintage Beef is a rare easter egg - can stay. Honey; at some point putting a 100 year timer on things is just silly so ok, can stay non-perishable for simplicity's sake. Fat; now this one is a tough one. Making it inedible seems a weird downgrade yet making it perishable also seems weird as it is primarily a crafting ingredient for all things mechanical. Or sealing crocks. But considering you need fatty animals for this, the gate to obtaining is high enough so we can overlook this. Now as for how *long* all their perish timers should be is up for discussion and balancing, but all these other things should really, reasonably, rot. Boom. No more "but we already have it so why not have more" argument for forever food.

And the traveling discussion - yes yes, it's *not the core claim, just an optional bonus*, I know, calm your horses. Long distance travel in Vintage Story - is an active challenge. Because basically all food spoils, and most of it rather quick, logistics is something to genuinely consider. Building outposts as resting spots where you can stock back up - not because you have a trunk full of non-perishables to gather from, but because you have a small, functional secondary base from which you can forage, hunt and fish. On top of potentially storing long-lasting food like grains in a cellar should you anticipate coming this way again soon (like a camp on the way to a new story location). Especially when going south, chances are you can establish an outpost where you can plant some crops that don't wither all year round. On demand food. Or bring and propagate livestock. It's an active investment like most anything else in the game, and by design - a good design that is what makes VS stand out and fun for myself and others. The world is already bland, repetitive and boring enough, could you imagine running 20.000 blocks in a straight line with an inventory full of forever food? Atleast you have something to do! Keeping the eyes open for some foragables, managing stock; maybe spotting a particularly well-endowed buck to bring home as trophy. Planning where it would make sense to construct and outpost. Maybe planning roads to key locations for easier travel in the future. You want to take this away too?

And the subsequent argument of the dangers of the poles... Is pointless. Going to the poles is currently literally just a bragging right. There is nothing there to do or gain other than going there for the sake of crossing it off the bucket list. As such, it is your responsibility to plan for this harsh trip, no demand things that trivialize it. And for those players choosing a cold climate start... They voluntarily chose this challenge and really don't need a cop-out either. But hey, as you said - forever food being good travel or outpost rations is just a side idea, not relevant to your core claim that you refuse to lighten up on no matter how many counter-arguments you are presented with, because you simply don't want them to be true.

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, Kulze said:

Livestock: Won't proliferate enough to allow the needed culling year 1 as you can't proliferate them well without at least a single harvest supporting the proliferation.

9 hours ago, Kulze said:

Alcohol: Based on having significant stockpiles, which is not year 1, once again.

So you want to be able to make significant stockpiles of this non-perishable food... at a point in the game where the player doesn't have significant stockpiles of fresh food?

What you're asking for, by all accounts, is a way to cheaply and easily get back into the game after a long break with no added work imposed. That is, for all intents and purposes, quite literally unachievable with a new food item which is supposed to:

• be available very early into the game,
• be achievable prior to existing methods for long-term food security,
• be accessible to inexperienced players,
• take little to no effort and time when getting back into the game,
• not take an excess of time and effort to initially produce,
• not require a significant initial setup to start producing,
• not have a significant luck component,
• be producible largely at night,
• possibly something else that I've missed,
• and also remain balanced.

If you think you can make it work, then feel free. But as of now you're mostly just making excuses for why existing solutions are insufficient while seemingly ignoring the fact that your solution would also need significant drawbacks if it's supposed to remain remotely balanced, and as such would likely inadvertently get struck by the same arguments that you're using against other alternatives.

 

2 hours ago, Kulze said:

Permanency as a concept is a very important one for any form of extreme long-term content.

Nothing requires the game to explicitly enable and support "extreme long-term [multiplayer] content", especially on its default configuration which is tailored primarily for singleplayer worlds. Server-specific world configuration is the built-in method which allows you to largely solve your own problems, which includes making the world more suitable for irregular multiplayer play. If this fails, it's the other players that can welcome you after an extended break - that is largely point of playing on multiplayer servers in the first place.

 

There is a point at which "permanence" just becomes irrelevant. If you're playing a survival game, then it is only natural that you have to put in the time and effort to survive. VS is advertised as an "uncompromising wilderness survival", for better or for worse, and permanence as a concept can be easily argued to be largely incompatible with that design direction.

At the same time, I do want to mention, VS as a survival game is already quite easy, much easier than many survival games like Project Zomboid, The Long Dark or Don't Starve. Long-term and even indefinite food storage is not a problem for the "immersive homesteading sandbox" side of VS, which often seems like a much more accurate descriptor for the game, and personally, I think that this split between difficult survival and casual homesteading drives a lot of issues with the game. It does certainly broaden the game's appeal and can contribute to player retention, but it also contributes to scope creep and easily makes the game seem like it lacks proper design direction.

Edited Wednesday at 07:18 AM by MKMoose

[SnapJelly]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

What you're asking for, by all accounts, is a way to cheaply and easily get back into the game after a long break with no added work imposed. That is, for all intents and purposes, quite literally unachievable with a new food item which is supposed to:

• be available very early into the game,
• be achievable prior to existing methods for long-term food security,
• be accessible to inexperienced players,
• take little to no effort and time when getting back into the game,
• not take an excess of time and effort to initially produce,
• not require a significant initial setup to start producing,
• not have a significant luck component,
• be producible largely at night,
• possibly something else that I've missed,
• and also remain balanced.

I think you figured it out! What they truly want is to play creative mode but they don't realise it!

Then you don't have to worry about food and you can just hop back in at any time, even 50+ irl days later and go on doing whatever it is you're doing that isn't at all survival related!
Creative mode is the solution here!