Ezekiel Rauch

To preface, I understand you can tweak difficulty options. This is not a qualm which involves that. In survival and other "realistic" difficulty options, you can easily starve within a day if you don't find a surplus of food. However, as is prevalent in speculative research, the human body can survive upwards of 3 months without any food. The difficulty present does not seem to be at all based in realism and rather the sake of artificially inflating the difficulty. Additionally, most biomes and entire regions can feel unusually scarce of food, and even when you find food it is too undeveloped to be considered edible or provides so little nutrition it could not stave you over for more than 30 seconds. As a thought experiment, I'd like to go through the existing plants in the game and analyze their real world edibility compared to how useful they are in-game: Bamboo Shoots --- Edible in real life --- Edible in game --- Fern Sprouts --- Edible in real life --- Not present in game --- Inner Bark --- Edible in real life --- Not present in game --- Leaves --- Edible in real life --- Non-obtainable in game --- Seeds --- Edible in real life --- Mostly non-edible in game --- Fruits --- Edible in real life --- Partially-edible in game --- Mushrooms --- Edible in real life --- Edible in game --- Cactus --- Partially-edible in real life --- Barely-edible in game --- Water Lily Root --- Edible in real life --- Not present in game --- Croton Plant --- Non-edible in real life --- Non-edible in game --- Berry Bushes --- Edible in real life --- Partially-edible in game --- Pumpkin --- Edible in real life --- Edible in game --- Pineapple --- Edible in real life --- Edible in game --- Flowers --- Half-way edible in real life --- Non-edible in game --- Herbs --- Edible in real life --- Non-obtainable in game --- Could be better, especially considering as almost all of the edible things in game are unreasonably hard to come across. I don't think I've actually encountered a fruit tree or pumpkin or pineapple in game before. And not only that, but any edibles like crops are spawned in such miniscule groups of 2-4 that you can not glean so much as a snack out of them. The separation between seeds and crop is very unrealistic too. The entire concept of 'grain' is the seeds of a grass-like plant, and yet the grain and the seeds are two entirely separate items. Same thing with vegetables and fruit. You can't even plant new berry bushes with berries, or fruit trees with fruit. Humans survived for 2.5 million years in traveling family units and living for upwards of 60-70 years without so much as a dream of fire or armor or clothing. Life was easy and comfortable, and most peoples only had to seriously look around for food for maybe an hour or two each day. --- Now, its okay to want difficulty in a game, and many aspects of Vintage Story lend itself to having many ways to do a few things. However, toting a difficulty as realistic and then making food one of the least prevalent materials imaginable is simply laughable. The struggle should not at all be found in the simple act of finding something to eat, but finding enough to eat to have spare time to mine ores and smith and build homes and armor and go questing into ancient ruins. Perhaps instead of having raw ingredients give you saturation worthy of tears, it would instead wear away at your sanity to eat unprepared foods... bring you closer to the primal and insane. If you want to be above this dark change, or perhaps maintain your mind while exploring the evils of the depths, you would need more refined food sources. --- Now, back to the game old argument to just tweak settings. Yes, while you can reduce the hunger rate, you cannot increase the amount of naturally occurring food sources. You will still only find 3 carrot plants, with only 1 one of them at most being matured. There is no way to increase this. And as stated before, despite the theoretical abundance of real life edible plants, you will not be able to so much as lick them. I hope this is seriously changed. Starvation is- unusually- a key aspects of most survival games, but if one were to observe nativist tribes they would find food to be so abundant that it would become a conscious effort to restrict ones over-usage of it.