"Final" tier of food that never goes bad

[Demoncyborg]

10 hours ago, Kulze said:

And 'feeding them up' kinda would be hard when 'all perishable food rotted' is the case.

i think this is less known in general, but as long as you're raising sheep/goats.. no need for perishable food whatsoever :3 (LadyWYT mentioned this earlier, but i think it's been lost in the madness.)

Edited Wednesday at 12:47 PM by Demoncyborg

[Kulze]

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

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

Eh, the major issue is likely that I'm conflating things together as well here, and that's entirely on me. Early-game methods and late-game methods primarily.

But as for access and realistic methods... we could go with dehydration of mushrooms, optimally powdered and dried out for early-game long-term storage which incurs a loss of nutrition simply.
Also as mentioned options with bushmeat as that's a sadly ignored type of food after the initial progression passes, and only to counteract the loss - if even - from fighting the animals which provide bushmeat in the first place for many people.

But I personally think while you're right with it being not solvable to the degree I would enjoy it to be solvable (gotta stay realistic here) at least improvements are possible for the situation overall, which would be a good think at large.
 

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

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.

Yes, and that's a very very fair argument.

The game indeed started out as the 'uncompromising survival experience' you mention, but as you progress you kinda progress beyond this point. It takes a long while... but we do get there. While many players do it related to overcoming the AI limitations rather early on to kill bears in larger amounts, as well as wolves... as you progress you can even just stand on the spot with steel armor and fight a bear in frontal combat without moving and win.
This is something which goes a bit against the premise of the wilderness survival limitations, so yes, I agree with you that it turns into a 'immersive homesteading sandbox' over time.

The question here is now which is the actual focus. Not the worded one... but the one which is done design-wise. Because I'm not entirely sure. The scope definitely has gotten beyond the pure survival experience and more towards sandbox. Now the question is... trying to uphold the survival experience at any stage? Which would need a bit more ongoing management of livestock, or handling of larger areas of farming to increase the workload so you can't outpace scarcity fully... or rather lean into the homesteading aspect?
I personally am on the fence there, but I'm leaning towards the homesteading aspect after overcoming the challenges. And with the changes for berries in year 1 a reliable easy food-source was a short while ago removed to reinforce the early-game survival aspect substantially... so I think the part about scarcity management itself with the ability to change some things to a more permanent storage methods with a net-loss of nutrition as well as time-investment would likely not implement major problems but rather expand the scope without brushing against any common limits for causing issues related to design direction.

But that's only my stance there, and plainly spoken I haven't thought overly in-depth about that topic yet, VS is a extremely solid game in terms of overall design, so I'm not worried at all for it to uphold into the future.
 

1 hour ago, SnapJelly said:

What they truly want is to play creative mode but they don't realise it!

The only existing thing here is you wrangling words around randomly to fit into your personal narrative, that's plainly spoken all it is.

The game is built specifically around a SP experience, the issues related to real-world offline time in MP are not a inherent aspect which is even wanted to exist. Not a single game wants them to exist but there's sadly not many viable solutions to that yet found. The major ones are non-perishable things to overcome it, which often leads to abundance if badly implemented and counteracting the systems which are built on things bein perishable. Another is default adjustment of how time passes, for example 'Wurm Online' does that, which has a 1 to 4 real-world passage of time, which makes the game experience extremely slow-paced though and runs into issues with people having to be online at specific times or failing to do things they want to do.
Everything has a upside and a downside, the question is only how to expand as far as possible on upsides and how to reduce the downsides to as little as possible.
 

1 hour ago, Demoncyborg said:

but as long as you're raising sheep/goats.. no need for perishable food whatsoever :3

Oh yeah, that's very fair!
Didn't even think about it since I'm primarily using pigs and rarely sheep. Thanks for that info! And yeah, that info has definitely gone under along the way.

[SnapJelly]

31 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Oh yeah, that's very fair!
Didn't even think about it since I'm primarily using pigs and rarely sheep. Thanks for that info! And yeah, that info has definitely gone under along the way.

@LadyWYT already mentioned sheep can eat hay... to quote a certain someone in this forum: ''Reading is a nice skill to have.''

 

33 minutes ago, Kulze said:

The only existing thing here is you wrangling words around randomly to fit into your personal narrative, that's plainly spoken all it is.

I mean... sure man if that makes you feel better.

I'm gonna stop trying to engage now cuz it seems you have convinced yourself that everything I say is somehow ''twisting words'' and thus not true even if other people say the exact same thing...

Theres no point in me trying to talk to you if you choose to only read/quote half of what I say, ignore the rest and then follow it up by saying I am somehow the one misrepresenting YOU

[LadyWYT]

11 hours ago, Kulze said:

And 'feeding them up' kinda would be hard when 'all perishable food rotted' is the case.

Again, it depends on the animal. Goats and sheep can eat grass, which never spoils and is easy to harvest en masse. It can be compacted into haybales for better storage.

12 hours ago, Kulze said:

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.

Have you got a code source for this? I've played for a long time, only feeding my animals when I want them to breed or produce eggs, and have never seen them lose weight. So to my knowledge, this just isn't true, outside of some mod shenanigans.

11 hours ago, Kulze said:

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?

No, it's the other way around. Male animals have slightly higher yields than female animals. 

11 hours ago, Kulze said:

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.

Okay so here's the thing--any server worth its salt is going to be trying to ensure a fun experience for both regular players and newcomers. Yes, as a general rule, the regulars might not be actively offering help to the newcomers, since it can be rude to offer to just do everything for someone in a game. However, if there are known difficulties for newcomers, or the newcomers otherwise ask for help getting set up...it's probably a good idea to help them if you want the server to be friendly to newcomers.

And food spoilage is also a problem on the large servers that are busy; if no one is online, then time isn't passing and food is therefore not spoiling. So if a new player joins a large server, but no one is ever around...then they don't really need to worry about food spoilage as much now, do they? Given that the general purpose of joining a large server is for the higher social activity, the bigger question here is why are they joining a "dead" server, or why are they joining a server where clearly they do not play at the same time as anyone else?

9 hours ago, Kulze said:

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.

Okay, hold up. Here's the thing--one of the core aspects of Vintage Story is that it takes time to do things, and the game world has natural cycles that the player will need to respect and engage with in order to succeed. Food spoilage and preservation is one of those things, and a quality that sets VS apart from other titles(like Minecraft and Valheim), where food often never spoils. So shouldn't the goal be to find some way to make the system work on large, active servers so that all players can have fun with it, rather than just tell the more casual players "just grind out Minecraft food"?

The main argument with the "forever food" solution is that it's supposed to be a solution that players can use at the very start of the game, so they don't have to concern themselves with food at all when they next log in, right? Which means that such a food needs to easy to acquire in a couple hours of gameplay, and provide good satiety, since making it difficult to acquire or giving it poor satiety will be forcing new players to spend all their time grinding out this food to make sure they don't starve, rather than enjoying playing the game and making progress. However, by making such a food easy to get and putting it on par with the satiety values of the existing preserved foodstuffs, the entire preservation loop is rendered useless, because players are not going to invest their resources in food that spoils when they can have food that doesn't for just as much work, if not less. That affects both the multiplayer and singleplayer experience.

Since we don't want to unbalance the game like that, what we do is simply tweak the spoilage rates for player inventories and claims. That solves the food spoilage problem easily without changing the core gameplay itself.

[Kulze]

39 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Have you got a code source for this?

Well, the wiki states it at least and I've also experienced weight-loss in livestock if not feeding it for a while.
So likely true unless the numbers are messed up, or there's bugs with the system I imagine. Could be.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Animal_husbandry#Creature_Weight under 'Creature Weight' it's described.
 

42 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

No, it's the other way around. Male animals have slightly higher yields than female animals. 

Oh, good to know! Kinda odd for pigs though since it's the other way around usually. But interesting that this is included, very nice overall.
 

43 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

So if a new player joins a large server, but no one is ever around...then they don't really need to worry about food spoilage as much now, do they?

Yeah, all your arguments are absolutely fine, though specifically for the 'permanency' based server type this is usually not the case, outside of a few rare people. Sure, the amount of times where time stands still because nobody is on is also larger, I agree with you there, 100%, but also the timeframe until any individual comes online again is vastly larger. Weeks... months... and as long as a single person is online time still does pass, which leads to that.

Also absolutely agreed that after a specific timeframe this does drop significantly in chance to even happen as it's more likely for someone to stay away permanently or come back at any sort of semi-regular basis... but making an actual cutoff point there? That's really hard as the timeframes are just... very long.
 

46 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

the game world has natural cycles that the player will need to respect and engage with in order to succeed. Food spoilage and preservation is one of those things, and a quality that sets VS apart from other titles(like Minecraft and Valheim), where food often never spoils.

Yes, and this is more then fine. This is actually quite good, I agree with you there as well!
But the interesting part about this system is that it does allow something which in those others isn't possible either, and is 'partially' implemented, if intentional or not, it exists at least.
And that's that it doesn't negate the option for non-perishables, but it demands them to have a significant downside in some form.
-Livestock which isn't managed looses return when slaughtering.
-Bees do attack you when you harvest their goods.
-Vintage Beef is more of a joke item and only available in minimal quantities from ruins.

These are all good options, but they're not the only available ones.
Other options include:
- A reduction in nutrition by making it last longer or indefinitely, which is a situational argument and a balancing act.
- A significant aspect of oversight like with livestock but with direct oversight, similar to steelmaking which mandates to not let the fire go out. Non-automatable methods like quickly burning down wood chips/cuttings is what I suggested, but that's only one of many. Desalination from direct heat (instead of passive through evaporization) could cause the pottery to break for example if left 'dry' for too long with heat. Such stuff... which is a respective downside of engagement which could otherwise be used.

But those are all feasable methods and solely demand a respective amount of downsides of some form. There is definitely design-space available for it.
 

56 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Which means that such a food needs to easy to acquire in a couple hours of gameplay, and provide good satiety, since making it difficult to acquire or giving it poor satiety will be forcing new players to spend all their time grinding out this food to make sure they don't starve, rather than enjoying playing the game and making progress.

Yeah, I think this is the major point of contention, isn't it?
Conflating together the 'easy' one which is more meant for late-game setups... and the 'at least something available' for early-game setups.

If we split that up then it would rather be something in this regard:
- For early-game it would be simpler methods which are 'easy' to make. The primary task of that is a 'I don't immediately starve but get a small amount of leeway'. Fishing is good for that already, though being proactive would also be a choice.
Hence those come at the cost of nutrition. Your 200 calories become 50 for example, and that's with the scarcity in the beginning a distinct choice to be made, one which falls apart as soon as easily available resources become abundant... like livestock is set up, honey production or the first harvest happens. Then this switches around and they can become serious issues if not implemented properly. So my suggestion is at 'non-abundant' resources. Bushmeat, which cannot come from livestock, hence needing active action making it even worse nutritionally then it is. Mushrooms also are a prime candidate for this as they are more prevalent but limited by not only finding them but also the time for them to regrow naturally and travel distance as you remove them.
- For late-game we already have utter abundance. So I don't see any issue there anyway. This is where distilled alcohol already has the place after all... but I don't see problems with 'high technology' setups which need a lot of work to get going to produce extremely long-lasting or even non-perishable products from it at that point. Food has become post-scarcity anyway. Storage space and availability are huge and the primary thing done at that point is simply done for RP reasons or convenience, food looses the 'scarcity' function entirely after the first harvests and especially so if combined with livestock when it is available and proliferated. Bees too... alcohol available from orchards as well. The time has gone where food would ever be an issue, the biggest issue now is finding actual ways to have a reason to even do a bit 'more' then already available. So at that stage? I really don't see an issue about any implementation only becoming available when a reasonable player has been since a while in that stage already. After all... what hurdle is to overcome at that point? So it shifts from functionality to variety for the sake of variety... and any form of differing functionality simply does expand the available types of gameplay which are enabled... unless the food systems are overhauled for those stages to enforce some form of scarcity in different forms... or needs to have actual variety existing beyond the 'one time setup' aspect for cheese, fruits, grain, protein and veggies.

Since I - by my fault - talked with them as one topic this has become heated. But if we split the topics I think it makes more sense to see the reasonings individually behind them... and which portions are applicable to each.
So early game would be a form of 'reductionist' outcome while end-game is 'whatever' anyway, and as @SnapJelly said even up to a stage where it is not majorly different from a form of creative mode. Because that was any survival experience unless enforced to stay inside a stringent limitation universally becomes... it turns from active survival into homesteading.

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Kulze said:

But as for access and realistic methods... we could go with dehydration of mushrooms, optimally powdered and dried out for early-game long-term storage which incurs a loss of nutrition simply.
Also as mentioned options with bushmeat as that's a sadly ignored type of food after the initial progression passes, and only to counteract the loss - if even - from fighting the animals which provide bushmeat in the first place for many people.

I find that drying, primarily for meat and possibly for other foods including mushrooms and fruit, would be a good candidate for a simple and effective method for easy and accessible long-term food storage, with low upfront cost, little active effort and a high satiety malus for balance.

The main reason why I specifically focus on drying meat is that, ideally, I think this would tie in well into some kind of a revision to animals which could make them more difficult to initially obtain and process, but increase the yield significantly and possibly even reduce the spoil time of unprocessed meat, to reduce the mass slaughter that the player needs to perform just to keep themselves fed. Drying would then be integrated more tightly into the gameplay loop as a critical means of increasing the return from a single animal beyond its baseline spoil time.

 

An additional potential idea I would like to mention is decay without spoilage - reducing the satiety value of food items over time. Or just the nutritional content, i.e. the satiety to nutrition conversion ratio. This could apply to all foods, but its primary point is giving foods with indefinite spoil time an incentive to eat them earlier rather than store them literally forever, which could be applied to dried foods among other things.

As an extra note, an opposite effect could be applied to items like cheese, wine or pickled foods, so that their value increases over time, up to a point.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Here's the thing--one of the core aspects of Vintage Story is that it takes time to do things, and the game world has natural cycles that the player will need to respect and engage with in order to succeed. Food spoilage and preservation is one of those things, and a quality that sets VS apart from other titles(like Minecraft and Valheim), where food often never spoils.

Frankly, I tend to feel like food spoilage is actually too slow on default settings to facilitate this idea of natural cycles properly, great idea though it is. Grains last 6+ years in a storage container in a cellar. Even something that might seem easily spoilable like fruit actually ends up lasting well over a year in a cellar in the case of apples, which means that you can eat fresh fruit all year long if you store a couple stacks. The only food category where spoil time can be really meaningful is protein, but fresh protein can often be obtained readily at any time of year, especially once you get any sort of animal husbandry going, or completely circumvented with soybeans that last 12+ years in a cellar.

There isn't actually all that much in terms of proper seasonality in the game, I would say. Or no proper seasonality at all, even, depending on how you define it. I was advocating for a seasonal growth system for berry bushes and fruit trees instead of the current system which causes a whole bunch of problems, and the only answer I got was that it is some kind of a long-term goal which would ideally be applied to virtually all plants in the game but there's no telling when it will be done, if ever.

 

1 hour ago, Kulze said:

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Have you got a code source for this?

Well, the wiki states it at least and I've also experienced weight-loss in livestock if not feeding it for a while.

This stuff is defined in BehaviorHarvestable.cs.

Animal weight changes as follows:

• if the animal has eaten within the last week => increases by 5% per hour, up to a maximum of 100%,
• if the animal has eaten within the last 4 months => increases by 0.1% per hour (2.4% per day),
• if the animal hasn't eaten for at least four months, and the current temperature is at or below 0 °C => decreases by 0.1% per hour (2.4% per day), down to a minimum of 50%.

Animal weight currently only has one purpose - it's a multiplier to the quantity of food items among the animal's drops, which for most practical purposes means meat and fat. If it's at 100%, you get 100% food, if it's at 50%, you get 50% food, and anything in-between.

Edited Wednesday at 05:07 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

29 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Well, the wiki states it at least and I've also experienced weight-loss in livestock if not feeding it for a while.
So likely true unless the numbers are messed up, or there's bugs with the system I imagine. Could be.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Animal_husbandry#Creature_Weight under 'Creature Weight' it's described.

Okay, sure, but it's worth noting that the wiki can contain incorrect or out-of-date information. It is useful sometimes, but what the wiki says here doesn't track with my in-game experience. I'd prefer to see some code covering how this works and what the weight brackets are before I go saying that "yes, this is definitely a thing that happens". 

 

31 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Yeah, all your arguments are absolutely fine, though specifically for the 'permanency' based server type this is usually not the case, outside of a few rare people. Sure, the amount of times where time stands still because nobody is on is also larger, I agree with you there, 100%, but also the timeframe until any individual comes online again is vastly larger. Weeks... months... and as long as a single person is online time still does pass, which leads to that.

Sure, but again...if the server is that inactive, you don't need to worry about food spoilage, unless you're only playing for a couple of hours maybe once in a blue moon.

 

34 minutes ago, Kulze said:

- For early-game it would be simpler methods which are 'easy' to make. The primary task of that is a 'I don't immediately starve but get a small amount of leeway'. Fishing is good for that already, though being proactive would also be a choice.

Hold up, no, no you do not get to demand that we ignore fishing as a solution, and then present it as a viable solution to the problem later. Either it is a solution, or it isn't. You can't in good faith say that it's both at the same time, that's contradictory. 

That contention aside, here's the problem with an easy-to-collect resource in the early game: it's also going to be easy to collect in the late game. If you give this "forever food" 200 satiety points, then you're putting it on the same level as cured redmeat, which is a late game food item that spoils. So why would players bother using later-game preservation methods when they have access to something that's much easier to acquire that offers the same benefits but doesn't spoil? I know I wouldn't be crafting the stuff that spoils--I'd be using the "forever food".

Okay, so let's solve the above problem by letting this "forever food" be easy to obtain so it can still be used in the early game, but make it have 50-100 satiety instead so it's worth less than the later-game preserved foods. It's more inefficient, so the new player now needs to spend more time collecting it, when means they can easily spend their whole session scraping together enough food to get them through the couple hours they have for next session without starving...and then what? If they don't focus on food at all next session, that means they'll have nothing for the session after that, and need to drop what they're doing to focus on not starving. Or they could just spend their session grinding for another two hours' worth of food, in which case, they're just trapped in a loop of scratching out a barebones existence every single session and not actually getting to play the game. And of course, while this "forever food" might be more inefficient, it still doesn't spoil and is easily acquired, so established players are still encouraged to favor it over options that require more effort and will spoil.

Trying to solve the above problem by lowering the stack size of the "forever food" doesn't work either, as that just makes life harder for the new player. When you're first starting out, inventory space is at a premium, and most players aren't going to be thrilled about needing to burn a lot of inventory slots to carry this stuff around, or grind out a ton of baskets or storage vessels just to store it all. Maybe they get lucky and find an aged crate, but crafting a crate itself is going to require a saw, which requires metalworking, and there's only so much one can grind out in a couple hours. Especially if they're having to deal with a grindy food on top of that just to avoid starvation. And not every player wants to rush everything either, so those that want to take their time aren't going to be happy about getting pushed to rush certain things.

52 minutes ago, Kulze said:

So my suggestion is at 'non-abundant' resources. Bushmeat, which cannot come from livestock, hence needing active action making it even worse nutritionally then it is.

The problem with trying to turn bushmeat into the exclusive early-game survival option is that there are other, better meat options available. If the player can't use any of the other, better options to craft the survival food option, they're going to be frustrated about the lack of consistency. I think it's also worth noting that while players might not be competing heavily for bushmeat now, they certainly will if bushmeat can be turned into a high-value survival item.

And of course, if the goal is to give new players an easy-to-obtain survival food option for the early game, you don't want it to come from a non-abundant resource, as those don't make for easy-to-obtain supplies.

56 minutes ago, Kulze said:

For late-game we already have utter abundance. So I don't see any issue there anyway.

The point of progression is to achieve an easier, more abundant life, and take some of the pressures off the player so they can more easily do other stuff, like go on long trips or spend less time hunting/foraging and more time working the forge or building or whatever else they want to do. That doesn't mean the player gets to completely ignore the natural cycles of the game world though.

 

9 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I find that drying, primarily for meat and possibly for other foods including mushrooms and fruit, would be the simple and effective method for easy and accessible long-term food storage, with low upfront cost, little active effort and a high satiety malus for balance.

I'd like to see this too, and Primitive Survival had a good way of handling such a concept...albeit with smoking and not drying. Basically, smoking would extend the shelf life of fresh meat significantly at the cost of some satiety and taking the time to preserve it, of course. It wouldn't last as long as cured meat, so that preservation option still remained quite viable. 

 

12 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

An additional potential idea I would like to mention is decay without spoilage - reducing the satiety value of food items over time. Or just the nutritional content, i.e. the satiety to nutrition conversion ratio. This could apply to all foods, but its primary point is giving foods with indefinite spoil time an incentive to eat them earlier rather than store them literally forever, which could be applied to dried foods among other things.

This wouldn't be the worst thing, but it is just the same thing as spoilage, without the gross visuals and pile of rot at the end of the timer. I think it's better to stick to the spoilage system, really, since the visuals help the player notice that the food is becoming less valuable.

 

15 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

As an extra note, an opposite effect could be applied to items like cheese, wine or pickled foods, so that their value increases over time, up to a point.

This would be a nice feature though. Expanded Foods has it for alcohol. It would still be the kind of thing that spoils, so not something the player can just keep around forever, but having some "fancy food" options would be a great way to make the late-game homesteading more interesting.

 

18 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Frankly, I tend to feel like food spoilage is actually too slow on default settings to facilitate this idea of natural cycles properly, great idea though it is.

Oh it definitely is, but it's a small concession made for the sake of gameplay. There is at least a setting to increase it, but the default provides just enough pressure to get the player to manage their time and resources carefully, without completely removing their option of focusing on other aspects of the game instead of just food. IE, the player can spend half an hour hunting and have enough food to spend their next hour or so of playtime doing things like building a house or mining ore, etc.

 

22 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

There isn't actually all that much in terms of proper seasonality in the game, I would say. Or no proper seasonality at all, even, depending on how you define it. I was advocating for a seasonal growth system for berry bushes and fruit trees instead of the current system which causes a whole bunch of problems, and the only answer I got was that it is some kind of a long-term goal which would ideally be applied to virtually all plants in the game but there's no telling when it will be done, if ever.

There's kind of a concept there, but it doesn't really apply until the second year of gameplay(which is technically counted as Year 1). I'd like to see berry bushes become more like fruit trees, in that they have a specific time of year(maybe two, depends on the berry variety) in which they yield their crop before becoming just part of the background. Would also depend on the local weather as well. Maybe it would be as simple as providing some sort of check to stop the bush from flowering again that year if it's already produced a crop? Not sure.

Same with animals--some should breed all year round, but others should have breeding seasons, so that the player needs to plan around that factor if they want fresh dairy products or want to keep wild herds populated or something.

In short, it would be tough to pull off properly, and is the kind of thing that probably needs to be several smaller changes over time rather than one big patch. At least, I think. 

[Kulze]

29 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

An additional potential idea I would like to mention is decay without spoilage - reducing the satiety value of food items over time.

I like that idea quite a lot, which would apply to anything which makes no sense to simply 'spoil'. Though to be fair... things do spoil, besides a few specific ones. Probably something which is an idea for the future to expand the overall system with, which I think could be somewhat in the following direction:

- 'Non optimal' stored food has a spoilage timer, which is the usual, and what primarily happens. Here we could expand onto things like rendered fat (getting rancid over time) or honey (not pure enough and it also molds).
- 'Optimal' stored food then looses that spoilage timer, but gets a timed decay which is reducing the provided satiety over time. This is dependant on the type of item how it's stored and how hard/easy it is to make happen. Honey for example would be very easy, into a cleaned pot and closed so it doesn't get anything on top which can cause mold to form ultimately. And with others like meat or cheese it simply never happens to work completely, but the extension for time is huge.

This allows a more granular progression for food storage, but it's not anything important to happen, would be interesting though. The question is if that would become too complex to manage or still 'fine' overall.
 

29 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Frankly, I tend to feel like food spoilage is actually too slow on default settings to facilitate this idea of natural cycles properly, great idea though it is.

Yep, that's plainly spoken it.
Spoiling time is important, and it makes the starting stage very interesting. But as we progress it passes as a functional system.

This is actually a common thing to happen. Usually done with freezers to simulate a upkeep system of some sort in return for non-perishable food. And as soon as that is achieved it becomes either a one-time managed thing which just runs... or a tedious upkeep adding nothing to the gameplay.

So in VS where the spoiling time can be significantly increased instead it's a good middle-route for the both extremes of no-spoilage at all or spoilage but with a way to circumvent it completely leading into abundance at that moment.
The downside is what you say, you swiftly get to a position where food storage is just so good that you have no need to actually put much effort into things, but if you make it less then the starting stage becomes a slog instead easily, which is a vastly worse and dangerous state to have.

Addition since the post came at the exact same time as I posted:

@LadyWYT Well, first off... the fishing was re-introduced by splitting the premise, different premise, different inclusions/exclusions possible. So obviously that's a thing? But besides that:

All which is described just changes the timeline in terms of reaching abundance.

If a player struggles the first 20 hours for food, starts to build up stocks in the next 10-20 hours and afterwards lives completely in abundance forever.... if the 'food struggle' stage is increased intentionally in favor of convenience to 30-40 hours before we get the ability to build up stocks.... what's the problem here?
It just needs to suffice to be 'fine' through winter-time.

And for late-game it really doesn't matter for anything, could be... non-perishable galore... doesn't matter since abundance is reached since ages. Could be new effects specifically for late-game enabled recipes giving buffs... just a bonus, hence incentive, doesn't matter either. If you never got to worry about starving then the whole perishing of food itself turns from functional mechanic automatically into tedium anyway, it looses the function.
The function of a perish system is to either enforce proper storage methods - which we then got - or to keep available food scarce enough to necessitate regular action to acquire new one... hence a gameplay cycle. And with the current methods? Making a vast field every 4 years is not a 'cycle', it's just a 'Ah... yeah... need to spend 30 minutes seeding and harvesting this year again' and be done with it. The perishing entirely fails at such large timeframes anyway to have any function applied to it.

So while I get what you mean with it... late-game it simply doesn't apply anymore... so 'eh' plainly spoken, there is no need to uphold a premise which doesn't exist, if abundance is existing and you basically only need ~1% of your play-time - if even - to manage this aspect then it is similar to just being non-existent. It fails to uphold the function. At this time variety and immersion itself becomes more important then the functionality, so solving fringe issues is a better result then to try and uphold something which already is countered entirely by that time.

Early-game though as long as it upholds that the struggle is simply expanded in timeframe but instead adds a alternative use-case... I don't see an issue with anything leading into the late-game then.

Edited Wednesday at 05:41 PM by Kulze

[LadyWYT]

32 minutes ago, Kulze said:

If a player struggles the first 20 hours for food, starts to build up stocks in the next 10-20 hours and afterwards lives completely in abundance forever.... if the 'food struggle' stage is increased intentionally in favor of convenience to 30-40 hours before we get the ability to build up stocks.... what's the problem here?

The main problem this entire thread is about is the players who only play maybe two hours a week, and choose to spend their playtime on a large, active server. Simply making the early game more of a grind doesn't really do anything to help this player.

Regarding players in general? You need to be careful when it comes to increasing the amount of grind in the game. Some players enjoy grinding for grinding's sake, while others distinctly do not. If you just make them run longer to get to the same goal, without a very good reason for doing so, they tend to get rather frustrated.

40 minutes ago, Kulze said:

And for late-game it really doesn't matter for anything, could be... non-perishable galore... doesn't matter since abundance is reached since ages. Could be new effects specifically for late-game enabled recipes giving buffs... just a bonus, hence incentive, doesn't matter either. If you never got to worry about starving then the whole perishing of food itself turns from functional mechanic automatically into tedium anyway, it looses the function.

No, food spoilage and supply absolutely still matters in the late game. Sure, it's all easier to manage, but if the player gets lazy and ignores that management guess what...they run out of food, and need to drop what they're doing to go get more. So no, they shouldn't need to worry about starving in the late game, but it's something that absolutely can happen if they fail to plan properly. That's part of the appeal of Vintage Story--you have to respect the game world and the natural cycles that go with it. You can't spend an hour collecting a mountain of steaks, shove them all in a box, and expect to be fine on food for the next several many play sessions. If you don't store your food properly, it goes bad rather quickly. If you preserve food, that does extend the shelf life, but if you never bother to actually manage your food stores and make sure you're using the old stuff and replacing it with new...then it rots and you get left with nothing to eat.

In contrast, Minecraft doesn't have that kind of gameplay. Food never goes bad, and you can just automate everything so you don't even have to bother doing the farming yourself. The player also cannot die of hunger, except maybe if they play on Hard difficulty. So there's nothing here for the player to actually manage. Which is great if you just want a sandbox with no consequences, but it's not very satisfying if you were hoping for a realistic survival experience in a world that actually provides consequences for actions.

 

45 minutes ago, Kulze said:

if abundance is existing and you basically only need ~1% of your play-time - if even - to manage this aspect then it is similar to just being non-existent.

Which doesn't mean it's a non-existent factor that the player can ignore. As I said above, if the player fails the simple task of basic food supply management, they suffer the consequences of needing to immediately turn their attention toward not starving.

 

54 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Early-game though as long as it upholds that the struggle is simply expanded in timeframe but instead adds a alternative use-case... I don't see an issue with anything leading into the late-game then.

Again, it boils down to the kind of player you want to cater to. And simply extending the early game grind doesn't fix the issue that very casual players have when it comes to large, active servers. The best solution here is still to just tweak how spoilage works for the player inventory and claims while offline. It fixes the multiplayer problems without affecting singleplayer, and without altering how the general game plays.

[Kulze]

It's more about the ability to choose the type of preparation. Foregoing immediate calories available but not lasting until used up if prepared too much in favor of less calories but later on.
This is what usually in such a system non-perishables become, which we see with distilled alcohol being the case after all, albeit the ratio there is plainly spoken a bit too high while the fruits themselves last too long. But that's another topic again.

Also it's not increasing the grind, nothing from the existing baseline changes. It solely adds another route on top of the existing ones. This is not problematic with upholding the status quo.

As for late game and the management still being important? Nah... not really. You need to significantly ignore anything going on for extremely extended timeframes which are just unrealistic to run into any problems. Which means ignoring livestock entirely, not farming, not doing any bee-related stuff, no orchards either. That... just doesn't happen plainly spoken. It goes substantially against the starting premise where the game pushes onto you to be prepared heavily or suffer the consequences. Running out of veggies or fruit? Possibly. Running out of grain? That's basically a non-existent situation. To then also not have rendered fat, honey or alcohol available at all is extremely unlikely already.
Sure, can happen... but that's just the same as entirely ignoring the hunger bar in itself and then starving as you just don't eat the available food.

And I agree, you cannot spend an hour of collecting a mountain of steaks and shove em in a box.
But you can spend an hour being attacked by angry bees gathering combs, or an hour of harvesting fruit and making it into massive amounts of wine, or an hour of harvesting grain and having food stocks for a longer timeframe then that grain even lasts inside food stores.
But I will also agree that games like Minecraft don't have that thought process at all, which foregoes a lot of immersion simply for existing.
This still allows the option for doing unrewarding long-term stuff (which in SP wouldn't be done outside of travel rations at best functionally or otherwise RP reason) which plainly spokens 'punishes you' to treat your food this way... or to prepare the usual way.
And from some ideas of mods like the jerky of 'Primitive Survival' and how people are adverse to them because of the miniscule nutrition they give it's also clear that high caloric food feels more convenient then large stacks of low caloric food which you have to eat one by one with the eating animation.

Another point I'll have to actively speak against is the premise that such a option would forego the active food management. Since storage times currently are very long already (mroe then a year of multiple years) in such a case it is about not preparing enough... which a non-perishable production line which punishes the lack of spoilage by reduction of caloric density would only make worse after all... so you're more prone to actually mismanage it rather then managing it as at least needed. The reality is that people usually do at least a single harvest a year and have massive stockpiles with miniscule effort needed.

Also as one more thing to take into consideration, such food would be excempt from the hunger pause. Not only has it relatively low calories compared to other foods... but the hunger pause is something which people who know how to use it is actually a massive thing. Eating a red meat stew at half or a bit less hunger bar does cause multiple minutes of no way to loose calories at all (30 second per 100 calories if the hunger bar hits the maximum). This is often done for woodcutting, as woodcutting incurs a 25 satiety per block cost which hence... is simply '0' instead. Which wouldn't be possible and which does significantly reduce how long your rations last.

This all pushes any form of suggested non-perishable idea already very firmly into the position of 'emergency ration' as it's just not worth it to use otherwise. And emergency rations are used when you either screw up... there is mechanically a limitation which simply can't be countered (MP) or for travel as a backup to know 'I need to get back now' rather then thinking about pushing on.

[River Oak]

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

fruit actually ends up lasting well over a year in a cellar in the case of apples

Apples really do last a long time when stored in a cool and dry place. You just need to pick out the ones that go bad first to stop the rot from spreading and of course eat the softest ones first. I saw it on Tales from the Green Valley, or one of the other experimental archaeology reality TV programs made by the same people.

[MKMoose]

22 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This wouldn't be the worst thing, but it is just the same thing as spoilage, without the gross visuals and pile of rot at the end of the timer. I think it's better to stick to the spoilage system, really, since the visuals help the player notice that the food is becoming less valuable.

I see no reason why decay without spoilage couldn't have an effect on the visuals of the food as well. Some changes to the visuals before food starts to spoil could in itself be a nice new feature for existing items.

To say that it would be the same as regular spoilage is also mildly absurd given that it literally wouldn't be the same on a fundamental level, as the food would remain edible indefinitely.

A simple though not ideal implementation using existing mechanics could involve either capping the spoilage to a maximum of less than 100% for certain items or converting them to a lower-quality item instead of rot when spoiled, so that the food remains partially edible indefinitely.

 

22 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Oh it definitely is, but it's a small concession made for the sake of gameplay. There is at least a setting to increase it, but the default provides just enough pressure to get the player to manage their time and resources carefully, without completely removing their option of focusing on other aspects of the game instead of just food. IE, the player can spend half an hour hunting and have enough food to spend their next hour or so of playtime doing things like building a house or mining ore, etc.

I have no clue why you're bringing up "focusing on other aspects of the game instead of just food" when the whole point of natural cycles seems closely related to different foods being available at different times and essentially unrelated to how much time the player spends on food in total.

You could easily increase seasonality and emphasize natural cycles while keeping the total time that the player needs to spend on preparing foods roughly the same or even significantly reducing it. There's even a fun trick you can do: make a specific food item abundant almost to the point of absurdity, but only available within a very short time. If the food spoils quickly enough, then that strongly incentivizes food preservation to extend its availability and naturally communicates seasonality and imposes food variety through limited availability windows.

 

16 hours ago, River Oak said:

Apples really do last a long time when stored in a cool and dry place.

I know. I've kept them in a cool basement in real life. The point is that if I can eat apples throughout the year with no issues, then dedicated fruit preservation methods like jam or alcohol lose most if not all of their gameplay purpose and end up largely delegated to vanity. I've personally never even made jam in survival, even though I've had honey on many occasions, just because on standard settings you can keep your fruit satiety topped up through the winter, or at least most of it, with regular berries made into pies or something of the sort, not to mention apples.

Edited Thursday at 03:41 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I see no reason why decay without spoilage couldn't have an effect on the visuals of the food as well. Some changes to the visuals before food starts to spoil could in itself be a nice new feature for existing items.

To say that it would be the same as regular spoilage is also mildly absurd given that it literally wouldn't be the same on a fundamental level, as the food would remain edible indefinitely.

That's my point though? What's the use of eating it if it provides no satiety? Rot doesn't provide satiety either, but it can at least be turned into compost. A food that offers no calories but doesn't rot is useless, outside of being decoration. Which in fairness, many players would like, but probably won't enjoy needing to a wait a long time to let the food in question decay into a decoration when there could easily be an alternative offered with some sort of wax/borax processing.

 

5 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

A simple though not ideal implementation using existing mechanics could involve either capping the spoilage to a maximum of less than 100% for certain items or converting them to a lower-quality item instead of rot when spoiled, so that the food remains partially edible indefinitely.

I could see this working, but only with a status effect system so the player risks getting sick if they eat the spoiled preserves. But even so, that still leaves the player with the problem of a food they don't really want to eat, and no way to actually make use of it otherwise. You probably shouldn't feed food that spoiled to animals, and if it never actually rots fully then it can't be composted.

 

8 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I have no clue why you're bringing up "focusing on other aspects of the game instead of just food" when the whole point of natural cycles seems closely related to different foods being available at different times and essentially unrelated to how much time the player spends on food in total.

Probably because I'm trying to think of all the various things the player needs to do in order to stay alive and progress throughout the game. Realistically, raw meat and fat should spoil faster than it does in the game, and yes, you could give the player a way to dry it so that it can last for a few days instead of spoiling within a few hours. However, that also means that the player is going to need more time hunting/fishing and/or preserving whatever they caught, which is less time to do things like...build a shelter, or look for ore, or work on claystuffs, etc. Realistic? Sure. It would probably even be fun, in some respects. But for me personally, at least, I'm not sure that I'd want the early game to become that much of a slog. One of the strengths of the current design is that the player can choose to take their time if they wish, but if they want to just get on with things then they can rush some of the progression or do things like hunt several many creatures in one day and not need to worry about the meat spoiling before they can get it home or if they store it raw in a cellar.

 

20 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

You could easily increase seasonality and emphasize natural cycles while keeping the total time that the player needs to spend on preparing foods roughly the same or even significantly reducing it. There's even a fun trick you can do: make a specific food item abundant almost to the point of absurdity, but only available within a very short time. If the food spoils quickly enough, then that strongly incentivizes food preservation to extend its availability and naturally communicates seasonality and imposes food variety through limited availability windows.

Sure. I just think it's the kind of thing that needs to be done carefully, is all. A lot of suggestions I've seen about foodstuffs and the early game is that they tend to be weighted too far one way or the other(too much grindy hardcore or too easy like Minecraft), or place far too much emphasis on a very niche kind of player(like a very casual player on a large, busy server).

 

23 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

The point is that if I can eat apples throughout the year with no issues, then dedicated fruit preservation methods like jam or alcohol lose most if not all of their gameplay purpose and end up largely delegated to vanity. I've personally never even made jam in survival, even though I've had honey on many occasions, just because on standard settings you can keep your fruit satiety topped up through the winter, or at least most of it, with regular berries made into pies or something of the sort, not to mention apples.

I like making jam in the game. I typically don't make it from apples and pears and such, since those have long shelf lives and aren't really what I would consider a good preserves item IRL. It's not that you can't make preserves from them, or that such preserves aren't tasty. It's just not that much of a thing in my region, that I'm aware of. 

The main gripe I have about jam in the game is that it can't be used as pie filling or in stews or whatever. A lot of canned pie fillings are basically jam, so...I mean it makes sense to me? Same as using jam in stews--it's not the typical stew ingredient, but it's not unusual either to cook meat alongside fruit or fruit preserves. Since we don't have a roast option or anything, the meat stew is as close as it gets. Same for porridge--a dollop of fruit preserves makes oatmeal a lot tastier. What doesn't make very logical sense to me is just eating jam by itself; sure, you can do that, but I don't know anyone who actually does that IRL unless they're licking the spoon after scooping jam for a recipe.

[LadyWYT]

57 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

You could easily increase seasonality and emphasize natural cycles while keeping the total time that the player needs to spend on preparing foods roughly the same or even significantly reducing it. There's even a fun trick you can do: make a specific food item abundant almost to the point of absurdity, but only available within a very short time. If the food spoils quickly enough, then that strongly incentivizes food preservation to extend its availability and naturally communicates seasonality and imposes food variety through limited availability windows.

Revisiting this since yesterday's brain fog is starting to lift a bit--here's how I could see things working in the early game.

For meat, I think the shelf life of raw fat and cooked meat could be shortened to put raw fat on par with raw meat, and cooked meat only having an extra day compared to its raw counterpart. Same goes for certain fruits and vegetables, though perhaps not to the same extent(that is, they'll last for a handful of months in storage before going bad, rather than a whole year). That puts a little more survival pressure on the player and gives a bit more value to preservation methods, without outright forcing the player to spend a lot of time grinding for food just to survive when they'd rather just be pushing through the earlier stages of the game. That being said, we're also going to give the player some additional options for how they cook food, in order to give them more ways to play the game.

Drying/Smoking: Cooked meat could be cooked again, at a slower rate, in order to dry it out. It's going to lose some of the satiety in the process, but it's a food that can last for a week in the player inventory, and can be eaten as-is or used to make other sorts of food(like soups and stews). The cooking time is a little slower than for raw meat, but it's not something the player will need to spend all day doing just to preserve a bit of food. Players who'd prefer a faster game pace can safely ignore this if they wish, but players who prefer a slower game pace can have a lot of fun with it. It also makes a nomadic playstyle much more feasible, and is very useful for situational circumstances like harsher climates. Additionally, drying can be used on certain other foodstuffs, like berries, vegetables, and mushrooms, to make them last longer as well(while reducing satiety and limiting what foodstuffs these can be added to). It also lets the later game options like cured meat and pickled vegetables retain their value, since those things are a little tougher to acquire but last for a much longer time.

Pemmican: Rendered fat, dried fruit/vegetables, and dried/cured meat can be processed into cakes of this stuff. It can't be used in meals, but it can last quite a while before it spoils--maybe a year? Better than the basic stuff, but not as good as more "advanced" options like salted meat and vegetables. A good option for nomads or travel rations.

Anyway, you get the idea. Is it incredibly realistic? No, but there's enough realism there to feel plausible, while leaving the player enough freedom to decide how they'd like to play. 

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

What's the use of eating it if it provides no satiety?

Why would it not provide satiety? I'm talking about decay reducing the value of food, but not reducing it to zero. Partial satiety, or unchanged satiety but removed nutrition, or both.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I could see this working, but only with a status effect system so the player risks getting sick if they eat the spoiled preserves. But even so, that still leaves the player with the problem of a food they don't really want to eat, and no way to actually make use of it otherwise. You probably shouldn't feed food that spoiled to animals, and if it never actually rots fully then it can't be composted.

I've been referring to it as "decay without spoilage", because the point is expressly to make food decay without spoilage, so this counterpoint is almost entirely irrelevant. The original motivation that I mentioned was to make it possible to make unspoilable foods a core element of the game while retaining an incentive to eat them reasonably early instead of just keeping them forever without the slightest worry.

Why would it even work only with risk of getting sick anyways? I can certainly get behind something like this, but I don't quite see why anything of the sort should be a requirement.

As for not being able to compost unspoilable food, I would also mention that only being able to compost rot and not any organic matter is in itself something that I would want to see changed regardless, because it just doesn't make sense from practically any perspective, not even simplicity in gameplay or implementation. Why wait until your excess food completely rots inside out in your storage containers and only then throw it out? If you don't need it, dump it into a composter - it should be as simple as that for the most part. Whenever I have large farms, I tend to end up making storage for unspoiled food which I have no purpose for, but can't compost yet.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Realistically, raw meat and fat should spoil faster than it does in the game, and yes, you could give the player a way to dry it so that it can last for a few days instead of spoiling within a few hours. However, that also means that the player is going to need more time hunting/fishing and/or preserving whatever they caught, which is less time to do things like...build a shelter, or look for ore, or work on claystuffs, etc.

If that's the only change you make, then sure, it could increase the time the player needs to spend on food. But why not just counterbalance that change with another adjustment? It is only natural that achieving some kind of design goal should be done while minimizing undesirable side effects. In this case, those side effects are so easy to address that I didn't personally see any need to even bother mentioning them.

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For meat, I think the shelf life of raw fat and cooked meat could be shortened to put raw fat on par with raw meat, and cooked meat only having an extra day compared to its raw counterpart. [...] That puts a little more survival pressure on the player and gives a bit more value to preservation methods, without outright forcing the player to spend a lot of time grinding for food just to survive when they'd rather just be pushing through the earlier stages of the game. That being said, we're also going to give the player some additional options for how they cook food, in order to give them more ways to play the game.

Personally, what I would be interested to see for meat especially would be to increase the meat yield from medium animals to well beyond what a single player can reasonably eat before it spoils when prepared in standard ways (i.e. raw, cooked, and in some basic meals). Naturally, increase it proportionately for other animals as well, beyond what multiple players can eat in the case of large animals. The specific spoilage time is arguably much less important here than whether the player can eat all of the food before it spoils. Saving meat from spoiling is how drying, curing and other preservation methods would then become an actually integral part of the process and significantly reduce the amount of time that a player needs to spend on acquiring meat in the first place. As long as it's balanced in this way, meat preservation doesn't even need any satiety reduction or anything of the sort from a balance perspective - making preservation properly worthwhile would be a great way to incentivize actually doing it instead of letting the leftover meat spoil and killing another animal.

Do note that this is different from seasonal plants and crops in that the player should generally be able to decide themselves what they kill and when they kill with little to no inherent pressure or specific windows. Fruit could be more of a carousel where the player can pick and choose what they want to preserve, and crops likely shouldn't change greatly from their current situation and at most could get more reasonable planting and harvest seasons (e.g. "this has to be planted in spring and ripens in summer", instead of "this can be planted and collected when it's not winter").

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Drying/Smoking: Cooked meat could be cooked again, at a slower rate, in order to dry it out. It's going to lose some of the satiety in the process, but it's a food that can last for a week in the player inventory, and can be eaten as-is or used to make other sorts of food(like soups and stews).

As a general rule, I think that virtually all foods should be usable in meals, especially in soups and stews. Fresh, cooked food could get some special purpose in particularly fancy meals.

For drying and/or smoking, I would much prefer to have distinct processes, not just cooking again. Especially for drying. My initial thought is that adding both would be quite fine:

• Air drying could be as simple as leaving raw meat over multiple days in appropriate environmental conditions (mainly low moisture during cold months, although the current game doesn't support that too well), with full air exposure (i.e. ideally on a drying rack in an open space, and certainly not in a cellar).
• Smoking would use fire, and could be done more easily in conditions and climates less suitable for air drying. An added fuel cost over air drying, but greater reliability and flexibility.

A lot of simplifications always need to be made here, because the real factors that affect the safety of drying with the required temperatures and so on are too complex to reasonably implement them, and they would more than likely just cause problems in a gamified environment.

As a side note, I think drying, curing and possibly cooking should be reworked into an effect of sorts which is applied onto an item, because having them as separate items largely just adds unnecessary clutter. Possibly also allow to combine preservation methods, which is realistically nearly required to achieve properly reliable preservation.

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Pemmican: Rendered fat, dried fruit/vegetables, and dried/cured meat can be processed into cakes of this stuff. It can't be used in meals, but it can last quite a while before it spoils--maybe a year? Better than the basic stuff, but not as good as more "advanced" options like salted meat and vegetables. A good option for nomads or travel rations.

I find that pemmican tends to be extraordinarily overrepresented in suggestions and in media. It's just a single regional variation out of a whole spectrum of related fat preservation methods (which we somewhat have in the game in the form of sealing crocks with fat), so it generally seems too narrow for the vanilla game to me.

Edited Thursday at 08:58 PM by MKMoose

[qualicabyss]

A bit late but I think I have a better solution to food rotting in multiplayer servers.
Players can claim areas for themselves, right?
Just disable food decay in claimed areas when their owner isn't online, now your food store stays good while you're logged off. 
Crops would be a different issue though, especially because of seasons

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Why would it not provide satiety? I'm talking about decay reducing the value of food, but not reducing it to zero. Partial satiety, or unchanged satiety but removed nutrition, or both.

Ah. That's a bit different. I'm still skeptical of it, but if it had to be a thing, I would vote for both nutrition and satiety being lost. Because I mean, something old enough to lose its nutritional value probably isn't going to be very satisfying to eat either.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I've been referring to it as "decay without spoilage", because the point is expressly to make food decay without spoilage, so this counterpoint is almost entirely irrelevant. The original motivation that I mentioned was to make it possible to make unspoilable foods a core element of the game while retaining an incentive to eat them reasonably early instead of just keeping them forever without the slightest worry.

Why would it even work only with risk of getting sick anyways? I can certainly get behind something like this, but I don't quite see why anything of the sort should be a requirement.

Probably because to me, if it's old enough to start losing nutritional value, then it's a dodgey food item that you probably shouldn't eat, because it can possibly make you sick. That doesn't mean that will, but that doesn't guarantee you'll be fine after eating it either. I don't think the nutritional/satiety decay would be enough to discourage players from simply ignoring their food stores and exploiting the food that don't ever spoil, hence the other reason that I think it should potentially cause the player to get ill if they eat it. The risk doesn't need to be exceptionally high, and it doesn't need to be a serious illness or anything. But it should be just enough to take the edge off the player if they do get sick, and otherwise get them to think twice before happily ignoring the freshness timers.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

For drying and/or smoking, I would much prefer to have distinct processes, not just cooking again. Especially for drying. My initial thought is that adding both would be quite fine:

• Air drying could be as simple as leaving raw meat over multiple days in appropriate environmental conditions (mainly low moisture during cold months, although the current game doesn't support that too well), with full air exposure (i.e. ideally on a drying rack in an open space, and certainly not in a cellar).
• Smoking would use fire, and could be done more easily in conditions and climates less suitable for air drying. An added fuel cost over air drying, but greater reliability and flexibility.

A lot of simplifications always need to be made here, because the real factors that affect the safety of drying with the required temperatures and so on are too complex to reasonably implement them, and they would more than likely just cause problems in a gamified environment.

That was my general rationale for simplifying the process. Air drying is a little difficult to simulate in the game, and to my knowledge it usually requires a little bit of smoke to help keep insects away from it while it dries. I also didn't want to just rely on a block item or structure, like Primitive Survival does. Hence the campfire cooking--it gets the idea across fairly well, and can be easily done almost anywhere.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I find that pemmican tends to be extraordinarily overrepresented in suggestions and in media. It's just a single regional variation out of a whole spectrum of related fat preservation methods (which we somewhat have in the game in the form of sealing crocks with fat), so it generally seems too narrow for the vanilla game to me.

That's fair. It's just the name I'm most familiar with for that kind of item. I don't really care what the item gets called, but it would be nice to have an option like it, although it's not the end of the world if that option is never added either.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

As a general rule, I think that virtually all foods should be usable in meals, especially in soups and stews. Fresh, cooked food could get some special purpose in particularly fancy meals.

I mostly agree, but I split hairs earlier when writing the concept because while dried meat makes sense to add to soups and stews(where it can be rehydrated), it doesn't make as much sense to add to something like a pie. Now in fairness, the game does allow the player to cook some pretty goofy recipes, but still...I wanted at least a little logic.  I thought about suggesting some sort of requirement for soaking cured meat in water for a couple of hours to remove the brine, allowing it to be used in meals and pies, but that seemed a bit much(even if that is what you need to do to prepare salted meat for cooking).

 

3 hours ago, qualicabyss said:

Players can claim areas for themselves, right?
Just disable food decay in claimed areas when their owner isn't online, now your food store stays good while you're logged off. 

I did suggest this earlier, along with disabling the spoilage in player inventory while they're offline as well.

[Kulze]

9 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't think the nutritional/satiety decay would be enough to discourage players from simply ignoring their food stores and exploiting the food that don't ever spoil, hence the other reason that I think it should potentially cause the player to get ill if they eat it.

Yeah, this is the major point of contention after all.
It entirely depends on how it's implemented here.

For example, if the process of drying/smoking/whatever is used causes already a tradeoff to 'pay in nutrition to gain preservation time' and this preserved time is then not kept to have the food further 'decay' it's more then viable.
For example: If we use berries then we have a 80 satiety food material. Which we then dry and loose 50%, hence it turns down to 40 satiety. This immediate hit is already a hefty one. And if it then goes beyond the 'best before' it drops further down, towards 20 satiety for example with 50% degradation... or in a 75% degradation towards 10 satiety.

And plainly spoken? A full 1500 satiety bar filled with 75 or 150 pieces of food? That's a massive undertaking for storage and actual tedium to eat it because you'll stand there and watch the eating animation for a very long while... or move about without running and instead watching the eating animation.

Sure it 'can' be done. And sure, it also will be done... but plainly spoken? If someone managed to stock up enough stores to last them for a winter this way then food definitely wasn't any form of problem since a long while anymore. The system by that point has lost nearly all functionality anyway, but even if we want to upkeep the functionality then we could still introduce a caveat into it.

Such products would be fairly awful to eat anyway. Imagine trying to sustain yourself on dried leaves, dried fruit, dried berries... nothing fresh, nothing has the right texture anymore. Everything universally tastes as 'powder'. And any soup, stew or the like is basically either something similar to gruel or you get a tea.
So one solution for that is that it incurs a further satiety malus if eaten as a form of 'primary' food. Everything besides the non-perishables provides always full satiety, but non-perishables besides all of their downsides can only make up let's say... 50% of the food taken in at any time (tracked in the background for the last 15000 satiety for example or whatever) has to be of the 'perishable' variety, and everythign beyond incurs a further reduction. So those 20 or 10 satiety can turn even worse... down another 80% for example, which makes it absolutely nonsensical to sustain yourself off of it... but not theoretically impossible. In practicality though? Absolutely so. We're now talking about 2-4 satiety in our example, and if someone manages to get through a winter with that... then they earned it, plain and simple