Survival is Optional

[PhotriusPyrelus]

DISCLAIMER:  I'm very new to the game.  I've played quite a lot the past few days, but as far as progression my next goal is making a Copper Anvil.  Lotsa Lead, not so much copper...  So maybe something changes later.  I think it's almost September in my game, and this has been on my mind as I'm staring down my first Winter with an empty cellar.
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Much like in MineCraft, it really bothers me that for a "survival" game, survival doesn't really seem to be all that important, it's really only as meaningful as the player chooses to it to be.

If I'm starving near my spawn point, why would I eat instead of just letting myself die and getting 50% satiation for 'free'?  Through this lens, the importance of food preparation and preservation seem almost kind of superfluous.

I understand you don't want the player to respawn starving because if you died a thousand blocks away, deep in a cave, you don't have time to go wolf down a meal and sprint to where you think you died and spend frantic minutes trying to find where exactly you died.  But this does raise an issue that if you're just building around your spawn point, you get essentially free food forever.

MineCraft almost kinda sorta solved this with its levels, having you irrecoverably lose a vast amount of the XP you've acquired if you die.  Buuuuuuuut...  you can make manifold variations of XP-farms which render that a non-issue.  Also, that's a stick, and I prefer carrots; that is, I'd prefer a system which rewards survival rather than punishes death.

I hate identifying problems without offering solutions, but I don't really have enough information what with not having a seat at the developer's table.

Perhaps this has already been discussed to death.

Perhaps this is deliberate to make the game easier for n00bs like me (if I hadn't restarted my world about 5 times, I'd probably be on my second Summer by now and in much the same place in terms of progression having starved-to-death umpteen times through my first Winter, as I'm probably going to do even in my current game if I don't restart).

Perhaps the death penalty (or survival reward) system is planned but the design isn't finished yet (Enchanting in MineCraft wasn't added until the 1.0.0 launch version).

It just seems so weird to me to have these deep food systems (which I love!  It's a wonderful fusion of the simplicity of MineCraft and the @_@ complexity of Eco!), to have seasons that affect food abundance and scarcity but...none of it really seems to matter.

To be clear, I'm *NOT* asking for hardcore.  If I wanted to play Hardcore, I could just delete my worlds when I die.  But I would like to see survival rewarded when it seems like you guys are trying to make the survival aspect of the game more interesting than MineCraft's "get seeds from grass, find water, make hoe, eat bread forever!".

...also...could you reduce the Wolf's attack damage a bit?  Being two-shot is pretty lame, given they tend to live in extremely cluttered environments and your first 'warning' that there's even a wolf around is a bite on your butt.  =(

[Streetwind]

There are already two mechanics that partially address this. Both are optional settings that are enabled in the Wilderness Suvival preset, disabled in the other presets, and can be manually toggled in the Customization screen.

One is the fact that setting your spawnpoint with a temporal gear is no longer permanent. It only has a limited amount of revives before it expires. Wilderness Survival has it set at 2. So the third time you die, you no longer have a saved spawn point, which means you either get punted back to world spawn, or fall prey to the second mechanic:

Two, when you die without a spawn point, you will respawn roughly 5,000 blocks away in a random direction. You won't know where you are and which direction you have to go to get back to your base. It practically means starting the game over from scratch in a different location.

 

As for wolves: It's fine, they are super easy to avoid and deal with. At default settings you outrun them like Usain Bolt versus your grandmother, And even in worlds with reduced player speed they still only match you, so if you have a head start you can lead them around forever. They stupidly die every time to cheap tricks like jumping into water or pillaring up, to the point where experienced players think "yay free food and hides" upon seeing a wolf. Then there's the Improvised Armor which costs practically nothing, can be made on day 1, has zero downsides for wearing, and gives you an extra hit or two in combat. You can also make it harder for wolves to detect you in the first place by playing Malefactor, or just straight up tank an extra hit by playing Blackguard.

[Thalius]

Also, by eating regularly and not dying you build stats that result in higher health points, allowing you to not die so easily when you encounter baddies. Dying rests your health points, and all the health bonus you gained is lost.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

21 hours ago, Thalius said:

Also, by eating regularly and not dying you build stats that result in higher health points, allowing you to not die so easily when you encounter baddies. Dying rests your health points, and all the health bonus you gained is lost.

I had no idea.  I saw the nutrition breakdown, but I didn't really know what it meant, and didn't realise it was diminished on death. 

[Hal13]

On 9/3/2021 at 6:56 AM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

I understand you don't want the player to respawn starving because if you died a thousand blocks away, deep in a cave, you don't have time to go wolf down a meal and sprint to where you think you died and spend frantic minutes trying to find where exactly you died.  But this does raise an issue that if you're just building around your spawn point, you get essentially free food forever.

like thalius mentioned eating a healthy diet increases your HP... significantly... each nutrition bar adds up to 2.5 HP (if i remember correctly there are 5 tresholds to reach in the upper half or upper third of the bar worth 0.5 HP each), if you keep all of them full you nearly double the default health... But you can't just eat all the time, if you are not even slightly hungry you won't add to your nutrtion levels no matter how much you eat. I'm not sure atm if having too many nutrition bars at 0 gave a debuff, but dying depletes a huge chunk out of all of them (definitely enough to lower the bar below getting its bonus), of course they deplete over time, too.

Another thing is you regenerate HP from satiety and regeneration takes time, therefore even though you may revive on not eating and starving to death over and over, to thrive you'll need foodsupplies. and of course with temporal gears optionally only allowing for so many respawns and with more or less starting from scratch at death if you don't have a respawn point (optional too) and temporal gears kinda being rare enough in most cases and especially early game, the potential of losing quite some progress might be enough external motivation to try not to die constantly... And the nicest thing about VS is you can tailor all these and more options to your prefered playstyle...

As a sidenote i often play with keep inventory on death and losing the HP boni and durability on everything carried (that iron chainmail was really tedious to craft after all) and foodstuffs in inventory seemingly getting a spoilspeedboost for a short time (the time from dying until respawn), even though i could take the shortcut to my respawn point through death when venturing too far away i normally try to avoid it (of course that partially has to do with me using the crafting grid as additional inventory slots too, just keep the inventory window open, and at least that stuff would get dropped by dying, because windows get closed)...

[DArkHekRoMaNT]

On 11/14/2021 at 2:05 AM, Hal13 said:

that iron chainmail was really tedious to craft after all

By default, you do not drop armor and clothing. Also, as far as I remember, you can customize the individual categories of saved items. For example, you can save everything except the hotbar.