Decay for drinks - Freshness

[Euphoric 48]

Right now, I hate how thirst mechanics is implemented. Only thing you have to do is to keep few jugs filled with water and drink from them from time to time. There is no depth to it. It just removes few spaces from your inventory. I'm also sad there are no alternate ways to store water or different drinks like beer (well, yeah, but who makes that other than alcoholic role-players), wine, juices, etc..

 

Now that food has decay, so can have drinks. Lets call it freshness. The moment the drink looses all it's freshness, it becomes undrinkable and needs to be removed from the container and replaced. How long the drink stays fresh depends on type of the drink and container it is in. Beer and vine have longer freshness than water, but juice has shorter. Clay jug keeps the drink fresh shorter than leather water skin and that shorter than metal or glass bottle. Also, the nutrition system could work with drinks too. Beer restores grains and juice or wine restores fruit. Water doesn't restore anything, but that's because it is abundant. There could also be taste system for drinks with drink-saturation benefits.

[Forgelander 4]

I actually like this idea! this can really add some difficulty to thirst!

[WingedRayeth 11]

I don't care for this idea. It doesn't really add much to the experience to me, plus it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For one, beer and wine both degrade unless kept in the dark, and in an air tight container, that's why beer and wine bottles are usually green or brown, it's all about keeping the beer from going skunky and the wine from turning into vinegar. Water, however, should never go bad unless it was bad to begin with. Without prior contamination there just isn't anything there for bacteria to feed on. Not to mention, with the ease of refilling your water sources, it is more of an annoyance that your water in your jug will go bad than any sort of hindrance.

 

As far as nutrition goes, only juice really has any sort of nutritional value. Beer and wine do have antioxidants in them, but as far as any real nutrition like vitamins and minerals, they are lacking, and any sort of distilled alcohol has no nutritional value what so ever except calories. Not to mention alcohol makes you sweat, which makes you get thirstier, so drinking beer or wine really should lower your thirst bar, or make it degrade faster, instead of re-filling it.

 

If this was to be invented, I'd also probably reverse your two container ideas. A wineskin will make the drink degrade much faster than a clay pot, the leather of the skin itself has contaminants in it, while the pot has been fired and is much more likely to be sterile, and it can be cleaned easier. Glass would probably still be the best though.

[Euphoric 48]

This is again getting into realm of believability vs realism. Lets talk about realism first.

Water in nature is hardly clean. Even the most cleanest water contains tons of inorganic and organic stuff. Flowing water is usually safe, but put it into container and it goes bad quickly. Second, pottery is bad container unless it is glazed. Non-glazed pottery is actually rough, which allows contaminants to stick to it and is destroyed by water quickly. Glazing could be added too to improve the jug. Also, just because it was fired once doesn't make it sterile for all the time.

 

As for nutrition. The nutrition system right now is hardly realistic. Categories like "vegetables", "fruit" or "grain" may be representative of real nutrition groups, but are far from it. (or at least I think that). So adding drinks to this nutrition system doesn't seem far-fetched. And I didn't talk about distilled alcohol.

 

I was trying to create some difficulty progression. Leather is harder to get than clay, so items made from it should be better. Just because it is like that in real world doesn't make it bad for a game.

[WingedRayeth 11]

You make some valid points, I'd actually say the trade off would better be represented in that a leather skin could hold more and doesn't break, while the jug can't hold as much and does break occasionally, however the jug keeps whatever liquid fresh longer than the leather skin does.

 

Either way though, it still feels like the system you propose would be more of an annoyance than a hindrance and it doesn't sound like very much fun in that case.