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masterblaster

Config Option: Should Nutrition Levels Restore on Spawn?

   28 members have voted

  1. 1. If TFC added a config option so that nutrients did not reset to 100% on death, would you edit your config file to turn enable that behavior?

    • Yes
      22
    • No
      6

Please sign in or register to vote in this poll.

36 posts in this topic

Without getting too deep into the details of exactly how the system works, in essence nutrition drops at a constant rate, but it does not increase at a constant rate. Unless you are eating salads and sandwiches, you're going to have a difficult time just maintaining your current nutrition.

 

The rate at which nutrition decreases is in essence tied to the rate at which food decreases, so doing actions that decrease food, such as breaking blocks, or using tools like the gold pan will decrease your nutrition and food levels even faster than the base rate. There is also the fact that when your food is empty, nutrition depletes at 3 times the standard rate.

 

Increasing nutrition is based pretty much entirely on your current satisfaction/saturation levels that you get from eating tasty salads and sandwiches. However, the more malnourished that a player is, the more nutrition they will get from eating satisfying food. Eating individual ingredients does help increase nutrition, but it only does it for that individual food group, and it will rarely if ever actually result in a net gain of nutrition.

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For a bit of reference, players actually used to start with only 80% nutrition, but we had to change it to 100% because players were becoming malnutritioned too quickly and they could never really get it up to 100% without a lot of work. So in essence, the "starvation death loop" that I'm talking about can happen even if we decrease nutrition to be as low as 80% on death. The nutrition system was designed in such a way that it is much much easier to maintain your current nutrition, than it is to actually increase any of the values.

There is an important difference though, between when you're completely new on a map and when you already have gathered food. If I've just spawned, I have no idea where food is or if there's even any non-seaweed food within 10 km from my starting position. If I'm three IRL days in and malnourished and die, I'll still have whatever food I've gathered there which, while it may not prevent all kinds of malnourishment, will keep me from starving for quite a while.

And the idea isn't really to lower the nutrition you have when you die, but rather not inrease it. So if you have, say, 95%/0%/70%/40%/95% when you die, you'd have 95%/0%/70%/40%/95% (or 95%/10%/70%/40%/95% if one wants to keep death loops away) when you respawn.

 

So dieing wouldn't make your nutrition worse, apart from the time and food you might have lost by dying, but rather not filling your nutrition state fully.

 

 

That doesn't really address the problem that Kitty mentioned, though. We certainly don't want starting a new life (or a new game!) to be a constant grind against rapidly falling nutrition. As the mechanic works now, it sounds like anything short of full nutrition is too painful to start out. If you're at 80% now, it's because you haven't been eating well and thus it's a consequence of how you've been playing. If you were to start out that way, it would be too punishing.

 

That's why I said the dev's might want to consider tweaking how the mechanic works. I think by changing the starting condition to full nutrition, they solved one problem but created a new problem of exploitative game-play. I definitely agree with Kitty that it's better now - we don't want to hurt the game for everybody for the sake of a minority that might exploit it. But maybe adjustments to how quickly nutrition drops would make the 80% starting condition viable again and close the loophole. I don't know how feasible this is - it occurs to me that I don't even know if nutrition drops at a constant rate or if it's exponential or what.

No-one's saying starting a new game or new life should be a constant grind, if you die you should be in the same situation afterwards (except for what items you might have lost), and this change would not affect a new game one iota.

 

If you're having a hard time getting nutrition after you die, it's because you had a hard time getting nutrition before you died. Dying just doesn't help you with nutrittion anymore (unless you where below a certain threshold, whether 10% or 30% or what have you).

 

 

 

Without getting too deep into the details of exactly how the system works, in essence nutrition drops at a constant rate, but it does not increase at a constant rate. Unless you are eating salads and sandwiches, you're going to have a difficult time just maintaining your current nutrition.

 

The rate at which nutrition decreases is in essence tied to the rate at which food decreases, so doing actions that decrease food, such as breaking blocks, or using tools like the gold pan will decrease your nutrition and food levels even faster than the base rate. There is also the fact that when your food is empty, nutrition depletes at 3 times the standard rate.

 

Increasing nutrition is based pretty much entirely on your current satisfaction/saturation levels that you get from eating tasty salads and sandwiches. However, the more malnourished that a player is, the more nutrition they will get from eating satisfying food. Eating individual ingredients does help increase nutrition, but it only does it for that individual food group, and it will rarely if ever actually result in a net gain of nutrition.

Thanks for the info on how it works. I suspected it was something to that effect but it's good to have it black on white.

Though personally, I think the fact that nutrititon is really hard to increase except through dying is even more of a reason to remove that benefit of dying.

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The point that I'm trying to make that you seem to be missing, is that the "minimum threshold" in order to prevent players having starvation death loops is not at 10% or 30%. It's at like 50% or even 80% if you don't use sandwiches/salads.

 

Gaining nutrition is easy if you have sandwiches or salads, and it's hard if you don't. This is intentional to add incentive for players to actually use the new taste system and make sandwiches and salads.

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The point that I'm trying to make that you seem to be missing, is that the "minimum threshold" in order to prevent players having starvation death loops is not at 10% or 30%. It's at like 50% or even 80% if you don't use sandwiches/salads.

 

Gaining nutrition is easy if you have sandwiches or salads, and it's hard if you don't. This is intentional to add incentive for players to actually use the new taste system and make sandwiches and salads.

How so? I thought death only happened at 0% in each? So if you have any single kind of food source, you should be almost stable, especially if as you say you get more when you are malnourished.

 

And if the system is set up so that you starve if you don't jump off a cliff, isn't the bigger issue with the system then?

Or am I misunderstanding something? Perhaps if I make an example scenario you could answer because I think I'm missing something now...

Say two people are on a server. They've eaten the same things, and are at 80% in each of the nutrients.

Zombies attack. Player one survives, player two dies. No relevant items are lost.

1. Right now, is the player one (who survives) likely to starve, even if they dedicate to finding food?2. If player two respawns with the same amount as before, are they more likely to starve than the other player?The thing is I feel that if there's no mechanic that makes player two starve faster than player one, then I don't see the issue with retaining starvation level. If player one IS likely to starve, then there's a bigger issue with the food mechanic, wherein players are almost forced to off themselves to regain nutrition. Or what have I misunderstood?

 

PS: Just to clarify, because English isn't my native language, I'm not out to be rethorical with my questions or anything, and I'm not out to be abrasive. Please tell me if I come across as "aggressive", it is the last thing I want, I just have a hard time with nuance in English.

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You cannot starve to death. When everything hits 0%, your max HP bottoms out at 50HP. You are alive, but one hit from anything other than an empty fist will kill you. You can eventually recover and get nutrition back up, but you'll have to exclusively eat sandwiches and salads, and it's going to take a very long time of being extremely careful to make sure you don't actually take any damage.

 

If player 1 doesn't start eating sandwiches and salads, in essence their nutrition is only going to keep dropping. At 80%, you've already lost the equivalent of 200 HP for a player that has no levels. The longer player 1 doesn't start eating salads and sandwiches, the lower their nutrition, and therefore max health will drop. Unless they start collecting XP, which can help restore some of that HP, but is lost when a player dies, creating a penalty for death because in many cases, the health boost you get from restoring nutrition is actually less than the health boost you had from XP levels.

 

Player 2 is just as likely to starve as player 1 if they don't start eating sandwiches and salads, they just have a little bit more of a buffer for time before the loss of max HP makes a big impact.

 

You must remember that this system is not in a vacuum. XP has a major role here. Take the exact same scenario that you said, but player 1 has no levels, and player 2 has 15 levels. Both are at 80% for all nutrition categories. Player 1 has 800HP, and player 2 has 1040HP. Player 1 lives, and player 2 dies. Player 2 may have had their nutrition reset, but they still just lost 40HP. If player 2 had instead survived, and regained their nutrition manually, they would have gained 260 HP for a total HP of 1300.

 

Dying in the early-game is expected. Mobs are hard, and weapons are crap. The penalty for dying at the start of the game is not harsh and may even be a little bit helpful (more HP from reset nutrition) because we expect you to die. If we further penalize players for dying at the beginning, there's going to be even more players who ragequit because the game is "too hard" or "too grindy". The penalty for death comes into play when you've actually been playing for a while, have established yourself, and have gotten a fair amount of XP. Dying at the start doesn't matter because you have very little to lose, dying in mid-game is much worse, which is also why you have better armor and weapons to better protect yourself, and prevent death from happening.

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[...]If you're at 80% now, it's because you haven't been eating well and thus it's a consequence of how you've been playing. If you were to start out that way, it would be too punishing.[...]

well, I don't see respawning as starting out... it's more like going on...If you've been playing such that you are at 80%, why is it too punishing to continue at 80%?Continuing at 100% is a reward for dying! Worse, after neglecting nutrition so it dropped below 30%, it would too much of a reward to respawn at 100% IMO. (somehow remembers me of The Ant and the Grasshopper...)Starting with 100% is ok since you had no time to search and plant any food, build a shelter (or better),...but maybe, since I do not play MP, I don't see death/respawning as I should....
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Dying in the early-game is expected. Mobs are hard, and weapons are crap. The penalty for dying at the start of the game is not harsh and may even be a little bit helpful (more HP from reset nutrition) because we expect you to die. If we further penalize players for dying at the beginning, there's going to be even more players who ragequit because the game is "too hard" or "too grindy". The penalty for death comes into play when you've actually been playing for a while, have established yourself, and have gotten a fair amount of XP. Dying at the start doesn't matter because you have very little to lose, dying in mid-game is much worse, which is also why you have better armor and weapons to better protect yourself, and prevent death from happening.

I guess different people have different expectations then. I'm an old-time roguelike fan, and so are most people I play with, so my general expectation is "if you screw up, you're dead. If you're unlucky, you better be goddamn good or you'll be dead too. Death is permanent or at least debilitating.". That works for single player (hardcore mode) but in multiplayer a set in stone hardcore mode takes away from the fun (because if one person dies they can't play anymore), so retaining nutrition would be like a multiplayer-functional "hardcore light", where continuous screwing up can lead to the whole group failing, but in general one person won't be out until everyone is nearly out.

 

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I'm hardly the only one seeing as at least 17 people have said they would use the option if it existed. So we're a minority, but not a tiny part of the player base (of course I'm not saying "YOU NEED TO DO THIS!!!" or anything, just that _if_ you felt like doing it, we would be a bunch of people who would use and appreciate it).

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The system can always be tweaked.

 

If its a problem people can't gain nuitrition without Salads/Sandwiches, then perhaps the ability to gain nutitrition with starting game food should be possible

 

As long as the starting game foods are significantly inferior (on the time basis needed to gain the same amount of nuitrition/hunger) to advanced foods, the incentive to make advanced foods will still exist

 

Also the mininum health value of 50 HP could always be raised

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I think you need to first define the goal you want to achieve with this change. Midway through your first year you should be able to subsist on salads. With luck you could even be eating sandwiches, although you'd likely want to invest any grain you have in framiliarizing animals.

With most experienced players, the people wanting this seem to be experienced, should hit a low point in nutrition at end of first year. Even still maintaining above 75% in all but dairy should usually be achievable. After that, unless you do something silly then maintaining near full nutrition should not be difficult.

So in general after first year this suggestion would have a negligible effect of player nutrition levels. However if you have a bad start or have a food crisis then the situation quickly degenerates to the point where you have no ability to fix the problem. Death loop and unplayable world, without cheating.

The point of mini-hardcore was raised. However is nutrition levels really the best way to decide your chances have run out? Seems number of deaths would be more appropriate. So you could decide how many lives you will allow yourself, or even use HQM to control how many lives you get and even give more for reaching certain goals.

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@Bunsan, the reason why I think a set limit of lives is a worse alternative for "hardcore light" is because this proposed change works well with multiplayer, while a limited number of lives do not.  With this proposed change, the "unplayable world" situation would affect everyone in a given group about equally, assuming it's a cooperative server, so everyone can partake in playing and trying to find a solution to the problem until everyone is starving and decide to quit. A limited set of lives however, means often the clumsier players will die off early, and the ones who are left have to decide whether to continue playing without them or leave a setup that might be working fine in all other ways.

I also like the focus on non-combat difficulty then, while a limited number of lives mainly affect combat scenarios.

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Generally speaking, when I do "hardcore-light" on a cooperative server, the set limit of lives is a shared pool between all players. So you start out with say 5 players and say there is a total of 20 lives. If a single player dies 20 times, or if player A dies 10 times, player B dies 6 times, and player C dies 4 times, it's game over for everybody. In that way, players have to work together to make sure that the weakest link is supported and doesn't bring down the life count for everybody.

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