Nerfing Berries

[Ender Riens]

It is a relatively shared issue/opinion that berries are too strong. They are one of the easiest to obtain and lowest-maintenance food sources in-game, and are very easy to collect in mass quantities until the player effectively needs no other food sources outside of winter (given you're not surviving in extreme climates). Though, there are a matter of "false" solutions to the problem:

- Nerfing saturation threatens more problems than it solves. Berries are already one of the lowest time:saturation ratio growables, and lowering them further would make them tedious to eat and require more berry gathering (which is tedious on its own) for the same satiety.

- Increasing natural bush rarity, making bushes harder to translocate, decreasing berry harvest size, or increasing length between harvests doesn't solve the issue, it just increases the labor it takes players to reach the aforementioned tipping point where they need no other foods. Players can still collect berries in mass to reach this status, and the problem persists--you just have to eat more of them for the same satiety, which adds tedium.

Both of these changes add tedium to the berry-usage process (and makes them generally less useful), which can threaten the abandonment of berry usage as a whole. Though, making all of these changes but in small amounts may avoid more glaring consequences while still maintaining a nerf to overall usefulness, but it is a patch over the wound at most--not a full fix. The problem lies with how berries are obtained and cultivated--they are far too easy to collect and plant in obscene quantities. The solution relies on changing how berry planting functions with minor tweaks elsewhere to complement such changes, but nothing severe enough to discourage berry use altogether. A few example solutions:

- Berry bushes must be planted in tilled soil like crops, and consume nutrients. A rather unelegant solution, this poses problems: they may have to be removed to regenerate soil nutrients, they don't naturally grow/function like soil crops (no growth stages, seeds, etc.), they'd now need water for the soil, etc. On the other hand, berries would now be limited (like other crops) by soil quality and quantity, access to water, nutrient regeneration/crop-cycling, etc. which begins to solve the prolific-propagation problem.

- Give berries alternative, useful uses. Encouraging players to use berries for uses other than eating will simply reduce the amount of berries used for satiation. Things like brewing alcohol (which can be drunk or traded for non-satiety benefits) or baiting wild animals (have them eat stray berries on the ground) provide alternative use that creates more content or solves other existing problems, respectively. One could also make berries significantly more useful for generating rot/compost than other options (which helps solve the problem that compost takes so much rot it is not worth actively pursuing... it takes 1 stack of rot for 1 compost and 8 stacks of rot for one high-fertility soil block). The main issue with this is that it is a pseudo-solution: players do not have to actually pursue/utilize these alternative uses.

The reason I mention "minor tweaks elsewhere to complement such changes" is that, with proper tweaking, one can create the most solutions while preventing the most problems. I personally think that a combination of a slight all-around nerf to raw berries as food plus enough alternative uses would slightly discourage their usefulness (and commensurately use) as food while greatly encouraging using berries for other purposes. This would not only create more content and depth to berries in the process (a positive change), it would largely avoid the negative repercussions that may come with major numbers nerfs.

There are definitely more potential solutions I have not thought of, but I think it is safe to say that berries need some form of tweaking in order to balance them.

 

[LuuBluum]

Another option is to simply have berry regrowth time be more reflective of actual berry regrowth time, which is to say roughly once or twice a year. Though I think that would only realistically be an option once fruiting trees are also added.

[Brynn Bernstein]

I think a major change to berries that would reduce simply eating raw berries would be making the jam-making process more accessible by including sugar as an alternative to honey, making it a little more labor intensive (maybe fruits have to be smashed in a press first? maybe it needs to be moved to a glass jam-jar and then submerged in boiling water so it keeps?) and making jam itself not a meal but an additive to bread and meals. It's always been super immersion breaking for me to eat just a bowl of jam, I don't think I know anyone irl who just eats jam and nothing else for breakfast. Furthermore, berries should be available as an additive to more kinds of food, baking them into baked goods and using them in teas and deserts. The more players have a positive alternative in cooking with the berries, I think, the less they'll simply keep a stack of low-satiety food on their hotbar.

It occurs to me that having a solid stackable food option between the completely no-cook option of berries and the kind of preparation-intensive bread (flour has to be milled in a quern, which either requires lots of time or a mill setup) would be a good idea to discourage eating berries raw after the stone age. Maybe this gap could be filled by a trail mix of some sort where you can combine a serving of nuts, a serving of berries, and then anything from nuts, berries, unprocessed grains, and fruits as your extra and rather than getting a pot of a meal you get 16 units of trail mix? or maybe the answer is a food bag similar to the mining bag so that carrying meals or even just one stack each of cheese, cooked meat, roasted vegetables (which they should add imo), and berries is more convenient if one is headed on a long trip and wants satiety management on the go. 

[Silent Shadow]

Why do people think berries are too strong? Sure you can live off them until winter but your max hp will be stuck at a low level until you get new food sources. Once you get new food sources for max hp you really don't need excess calories and so berries become obsolete as a main food source.

I would like to see brewing in the game though, it is one of the first things we learned to make as a species. Maybe have it restore temporal stability but your character gets progressively more drunk (wavy screen, movement becomes non-linear, attack speed goes down) until blacking out?

[Fredrik Blomquist]

Not sure what to do about it - but i do think berries gives to much saturation. You don't need any supplies exploring in summer - berries will be more than enough to get you though. It means getting other kind of food that takes longer to gather is unnecessary. On the other hand, the first day is usually pretty hard. You need to set up a base, get a fire going before nightfall, you don't have to much time exploring and all your stuff is very basic. The first days can't get to much harder. But perhaps lower growth rate is a way to not make the firsts days harder. I think gathering berry bushes and planting in your base is a litte overpowered as food source.

[junawood]

8 hours ago, Ender Riens said:

It is a relatively shared issue/opinion that berries are too strong.

? Really? Never heard anyone complain about berries, not once.

I don't see any problem with them. They are an easy and often necessary food source at the beginning that helps people survive and they're nice on some trips when it's warm enough for them to grow, but they don't grow when it's cold and now also when it's too hot and they're not very saturating and only fresh for a few days or you have to make jam if you have honey and actually want to spend time and resources. Also just eating berries sucks for HP, and there are a lot of other things to eat, and so even on trips during the first summer I also eat a lot of vegetables and grain and sometimes meat. And there are things with a much higher saturation level (meat stew with cabbage, for example), so once I start cooking I mostly eat cooked meals, and a few berries here and there are just a nice little additional snack and necessary if you want to keep your HP up.

Edited August 15, 2021 by junawood

[Sengorn_Leopard]

"It is a relatively shared issue/opinion that berries are too strong." -This is the first time I've seen someone make this claim as well, I love how berries currently work.

I think berries are just fine the way they are; without them I would easily starve over, and over, and over as a beginning player on any server. We need an easy basic food source for new players; something that is almost guaranteed to have food ready on login. No tools required, no specialized knowledge of the game required. 

Silent Shadow is correct in my opinion, eating solely berries would already provide an adequate stat nerf just because only fruit bar would be filled. 

[Ender Riens]

6 hours ago, junawood said:

? Really? Never heard anyone complain about berries, not once.

I don't see any problem with them. They are an easy and often necessary food source at the beginning that helps people survive and they're nice on some trips when it's warm enough for them to grow, but they don't grow when it's cold and now also when it's too hot and they're not very saturating and only fresh for a few days or you have to make jam if you have honey and actually want to spend time and resources. Also just eating berries sucks for HP, and there are a lot of other things to eat, and so even on trips during the first summer I also eat a lot of vegetables and grain and sometimes meat. And there are things with a much higher saturation level (meat stew with cabbage, for example), so once I start cooking I mostly eat cooked meals, and a few berries here and there are just a nice little additional snack and necessary if you want to keep your HP up.

12 minutes ago, Sengorn_Leopard said:

"It is a relatively shared issue/opinion that berries are too strong." -This is the first time I've seen someone make this claim as well, I love how berries currently work.

I think berries are just fine the way they are; without them I would easily starve over, and over, and over as a beginning player on any server. We need an easy basic food source for new players; something that is almost guaranteed to have food ready on login. No tools required, no specialized knowledge of the game required. 

Silent Shadow is correct in my opinion, eating solely berries would already provide an adequate stat nerf just because only fruit bar would be filled. 

I've heard a couple people in various places say that berries make surviving hunger too easy, though it is fair to point out that the nutrition system naturally encourages players to eat other things. It is 100% valid to believe berries are fine as they are, though it's impossible to appease both sides of the matter. It would be much better to keep berries "broken" to some than nerf them and make them "bad" to others.

 

[Wiktor Krawczyk]

I use berries to make humus.

18.05.2021 o 22:17 l33tmaan powiedział:

W związku z brakiem środków ochronych mamy możliwość samodzielnego przechodzenia przez stypendium. Jest to problematyczne, które możesz obecnie udostępniać w wielu różnych metodach.

 

W dniu 4.07.22021 o 23:03 LazyRoll powiedział:

Jestem próbnik kolorów 

 

Edited August 16, 2021 by Wiktor Krawczyk

[Fredrik Blomquist]

I still think berries ar overpowered towards crops and meat early game, specially before being able to craft pot and bowls. I have been thinking you should be able to make a wooden bowl, but that don't make much change in this regard.

 

Still, it's not a mayor thing for me.

Edited August 16, 2021 by Fredrik Blomquist

[gabby]

Hey, so I've come across this issue when I was trying to balance/plan my Plants Expansion mod... And I came to the conclusion that Berry Bushes are too easy to propagate. Think about it, you can run through a field/forest, pickup 40~ berry bushes, and then plant them the next day no problem! It's always felt a little immersion breaking to be carrying around a stack of berry bushes that you can store indefinitely, and then plant again whenever you want.

The "solution" I came up with was first of all, not being able to break a berry bush and get the bush back (perhaps with shears you could). Instead, you would need to use a knife, on a flowering berry bush to get a "cutting" (this would revert the berry bush to its empty state). A "cutting" would basically be a sapling, but for berry bushes, except that the "cutting" item would dry out over 36~ hours, so you'd need to plant it before it dries out and dies. AND, cuttings would have a smaller stack size (I was thinking of a stack size of 8).

The next part of my solution was to possibly add a year counter to berry bushes, and increase berry yields over the years (so a bush that is 10 years old would have better yields than a 2 year old plant ). Plus, I'd change the world gen to make more rare, but with much larger berry bush patches. This could be thought of as a resource that you'd routinely come back to (no different than how you have to go looking for mushrooms)

This would obviously drastically change how we use berry bushes right now, but I think it'd be awesome if we could find a massive old growth patch of blueberry bushes, and then keep coming back there. The current meta is to just grab as many berry bushes as you can, plop them down at your base, and forget about them, which, while fun,  leaves me wanting more.

I think this system (or something like it) could help make berries feel less broken, while still leaving them as an important food source.

Edited August 20, 2021 by gabby

[redram]

If you think they're op now, you should have been here when they used to heal you as well (pre-poultice)!

Berry bushes, along with all crops, and fruit trees, will eventually be on a whole-year schedule.   So that your berries and fruit/nut trees will indeed yield a crop only once a year.  In addition, berry bushes will not be nearly as simple to transplant as now.  When you replant they'll start as a smaller version with 'transplant shock', and won't yield anything that year.  There's also a fair chance that water an fertilization factor in.   Crops will be more variable depending on the crop, and the climate, you may be able to grow more than one a year, which is true irl.  But their schedules will be more like irl, generally taking around 3 months to mature.    Seed and produce yields will all go up in proportion with these changes.  These things have been planned for a long time, but it's a very significant change to gameplay, and requires several other supporting mechanisms be in place.   Which is why it hasn't happened yet.  But hopefully soon!

[Omega Haxors]

Solution: Why the *bleep* are berry bushes movable?!?!

Literally every multiplayer game goes like this:

"Oh i'm starving to death where are all the berry bushes?"
"Wait, I see a town, maybe they have some food"
*Huge MFing wall of berry bushes*
"OH WELL HELLO THERE!"

Like IDK how anyone playtested this and thought "yeah, this is OK game design" Having a system designed to give new players and nomads a shot then proceed to allow one guy to 'collect every coconut on the island' completely trivializing hunger for someone that doesn't even need it at the expense of the people it was designed to help in the first place. Berries aren't overpowered, they're just poorly designed.

Edited September 5, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[PhotriusPyrelus]

For the longest time, I assumed berry bushes weren't obtainable with only a fist.  I think I discovered this was a misconception when I accidentally LMB'd a bush by accident.  It was probably behind a leaf block I was breaking.

They are a good traveling and early-game food source, but if you can't easily move the bushes, I don't see them being a terribly useful long-term food source.  I think if they required a copper-or-better tool (I suggest shovel, makes the most sense to me: digging it up to replant it) to collect them.  I think that would fix most of the problem with them.  By the time you can move them, you should have better sources of food more readily available.

Though TBPH, boars are a much better source of food.  Easy to kite into deep water and murder while they're slower than you, give you lots of meat which is more satisfying and keeps for more than twice as long.

On 8/20/2021 at 8:23 AM, redram said:

If you think they're op now, you should have been here when they used to heal you as well (pre-poultice)!

Berry bushes, along with all crops, and fruit trees, will eventually be on a whole-year schedule.   So that your berries and fruit/nut trees will indeed yield a crop only once a year.  In addition, berry bushes will not be nearly as simple to transplant as now.  When you replant they'll start as a smaller version with 'transplant shock', and won't yield anything that year.  There's also a fair chance that water an fertilization factor in.   Crops will be more variable depending on the crop, and the climate, you may be able to grow more than one a year, which is true irl.  But their schedules will be more like irl, generally taking around 3 months to mature.    Seed and produce yields will all go up in proportion with these changes.  These things have been planned for a long time, but it's a very significant change to gameplay, and requires several other supporting mechanisms be in place.   Which is why it hasn't happened yet.  But hopefully soon!

It seems strange to me to echo an IRL crop schedule while having months that are - by default- not even a week-and-a-half long.