Don't Cut the Rot

[Brass 2]

B78 added rotting food and nutrients, which would be great features... wait, "would"?Yes, "would", there's something that is not quite right with them, and as I played the game these four months I had the feeling that something was amiss. Did you too have this same feeling? Well, I think I now have an explanation of what is not okay with rotting food and nutrients... and that is the ability to cut rot!Yes, cutting rot is paramount to the conservation of food right now (as decaying has an exponential trend), but in B79 new ways of preserving food will be implemented, and I hope that we'll get some others in future builds too, so cutting the rot to preserve food won't be as vital. And it has to go.Why, you may ask, and I oblige with an answer to that question:Food decay should add the concept of scarcity and renewability of a resource to the game. There are some food that can't be renewed ever (venison, as deers don't breed), others that take time to renew (crops, berries, fruits, animals) and some that are always abundant right away (fish, but that's going to change soon).This however is only a problem in the early game.As soon as you settle down and start farming you will have an overabundance of crops to eat (most of them can just rot for all they will ever be used for), animals to slaughter, berries to pick etc...By cutting rot from your stored food at least once a month during winter (during summer crops can be just left in your garden to be picked as needed) you can easily avoid loosing them to decay. And that is wrong for two reasons:1) it means that by performing a simple task one can effectively ignore the decay mechanic, as any amount of food can (and will) be conserved for a long time, making decay ineffective and reverting the game to the previous builds.

2) it adds a tedious task to game. cutting decay is very boring and adds little to the game (in fact it subtracts a lot from it)What wold the consequences be?Storing food will become much more challenging, and winter will become a very dangerous time for the unprepared.Since in the early and middle game storing certain foods (like fruit) will be difficult, getting more than one variety of them will be much more important.Fruit and vegetable deplete quickly and their lack during winter can be another problem for the first year.Overall the game would make a much stronger point about the importance of getting and storing different foods.Do you agree? Do you not? Why? Discuss!

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

eh...

 

personally, I don't think the decay mechanic is really that big of a deal, but I'd like to see what others think too.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

In regards to the tedious task reason, Bioxx has actually added two hotkeys in 79. Simply open your inventory with all the rotted food and a knife in in your inventory (not in a vessel) and press 'D'. The game will instantly simulate the process of crafting all of that food with a knife, and all of the decay will be gone. Then simply press 'S' and the game will instantly simulate crafting all of the similar food pieces together, combining them into as many 160 oz pieces as possible, leaving a single non-160oz piece left over.

[CreepyD 9]

Wow that sounds great!

[Dano6655 7]

In regards to the tedious task reason, Bioxx has actually added two hotkeys in 79. Simply open your inventory with all the rotted food and a knife in in your inventory (not in a vessel) and press 'D'. The game will instantly simulate the process of crafting all of that food with a knife, and all of the decay will be gone. Then simply press 'S' and the game will instantly simulate crafting all of the similar food pieces together, combining them into as many 160 oz pieces as possible, leaving a single non-160oz piece left over.

 

 

holy crap. good change

[kaldskryke 27]

Brass has a good point.Food is pretty darn abundant in TFC, and will be even more abundant with the fixes to lillypad generation. The decay mechanic could help remove some of that abundance, but so long as you're willing to put in the "tedium" of trimming decay once a day or so, the decay takes a very long time to destroy the food. With the new trimming/stacking hotkeys, it's easier than ever to keep food "fresh".

 

Staying fed in TFC is not at all difficult, even in the cold polar latitudes. Starving doesn't even kill you anymore, at least not very quickly. It's arguably less challenging than vanilla. Does that really fit with TFC's theme of "Survival mode the way it should have been?"

 

Food yields could be given a balance pass, even if it means sacrificing some realism for the sake of gameplay. Yes, real life cows and pigs weigh a lot,.. but in TFC a single cow can feed a player for multiple years.  Some crops (carrots, for example) yield significantly more food than others, maybe there could be some attention there.

 

I don't want to suggest removing the decay mechanic entirely, because it is a good idea and creates gameplay decisions, but I think it needs to be reinforced. Perhaps cutting decay should always incur a 1oz or 2oz loss in addition to the decay. Or maybe the total age of the food can be tracked to increase decay rates as the food gets older and older, but that would be a nightmare to implement.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Food yields could be given a balance pass, even if it means sacrificing some realism for the sake of gameplay. Yes, real life cows and pigs weigh a lot,.. but in TFC a single cow can feed a player for multiple years.  Some crops (carrots, for example) yield significantly more food than others, maybe there could be some attention there.

 

One big thing to keep in mind is that TFC is balanced for multiplayer. Yes food can still be abundant in a multiplayer environment, but it does take a bit more effort. That single cow may feed a player for multiple years in a single player world, but on a server where time is constantly ticking even when the player who owns the meat is not online, as well as the meat being used to feed multiple people, it is used up a lot faster. 

 

This results in much larger farms to keep everybody fed, and steps are being taken to change the "Set and Forget" method of farming for crops as well as animals.

 

Edit: It should also be noted that there is more to food in TFC than just "staying fed." There comes the problem of having a balanced diet in order to have any sort of decent health value. It may seem like nutrition doesn't play that big of a deal in 78, but now that 79 has a number representation on the health bar as an overlay, you really learn to appreciate just how huge of a difference food variety makes.

[kaldskryke 27]

Yes, I realize multiplayer balance takes priority, but I still think food is too abundant. Bioxx has put tons of work into the new cooking mechanics, which sound awesome btw, but the reward for creating a perfect meal is Satisfaction. As far as I can tell, satisfaction effectively makes food filling and little else (no status effects etc). If food isn't scarce, that's not much of a reward.

 

Now that starving results in faster nutrition drain, I feel like staying fed and keeping a decent health value are one-and-the-same. Furthermore, not having enough food to go around doesn't mean instant death. Players can starve a little bit now and then and still survive till the crops grow. A lack of food means that every player in the village (ie on the server) will have less health, which will drive players to do A) more exploration for crops, or B.) improving their cooking skills to improve how filling each meal is. I really think it's better to err on the side of scarcity.

 

I don't mean to derail this thread so much. If anything, the message I want to convey is that decay should be "buffed" a lot so that starvation can be a frequent problem now that it's nonlethal.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

When you're constantly having to stop to eat, and when you have to carry multiple food items for a balanced diet instead of a single multi-nutritional food, there is definitely a visible reward.

 

Even with the starvation values, staying fed and decent health value are still very very different. You can easily keep yourself fed with just meat, but in doing so you're only going to have a health value that's 20% of what you actually could have. No-levels means 200 HP instead of 1,000HP, and the average damage done by hostiles mobs is 100 HP, so that's the difference between essentially a 2 hit kill from hostiles, versus actually being able to take somewhat of a beating while you fight back.

 

Starvation is also still very much lethal. It may not be the direct thing that kills you, but it does drop your health to such a low enough value that pretty much taking any sort of damage is going to kill you. A good analogy would be to a disease that gives someone a weakened immune system. The disease itself doesn't kill the person, but it makes them very sensitive to infections which will quickly kill them when normally the person could fight them off.

 

Starvation means that your nutrition levels drain at 3x the normal speed. To put this into perspective, for every 5 minutes (or about every 6 in-game hours) that a player is starving, they are losing 14.4HP for each nutrition category that isn't already empty (max total of 72). If the player with no levels had every nutrition level maxed out, they'll last about 3 in-game days before their HP bottoms out at 50, meaning that even getting punched by another player a few times would kill them, and all other damage is basically a 1 hit death. That player who was sitting at 200 HP because they only eat meat will be at 100 HP in about an in-game day, and bottomed out at 50 in about 2 days.

 

*Edit: The HP lost through starvation is percentage-based. A no-level player will lose the 14.4HP. A player with enough levels to have a max health of 2,000 would lose 28.8 HP per category (max total 144HP). This means no matter what level you are at, the length of time it takes to get you down to the bottom 50 HP limit is the same.

 

Also keep in mind that most servers do not use the default year length value. The most common value that I see is 360, meaning that many crops take on average 120 days to grow, instead of just 32. This also affects how long animals are pregnant for, and how long it takes for the babies to reach butcher-able age.

[kaldskryke 27]

*Edit: The HP lost through starvation is percentage-based. A no-level player will lose the 14.4HP. A player with enough levels to have a max health of 2,000 would lose 28.8 HP per category (max total 144HP). This means no matter what level you are at, the length of time it takes to get you down to the bottom 50 HP limit is the same.

 

Also keep in mind that most servers do not use the default year length value. The most common value that I see is 360, meaning that many crops take on average 120 days to grow, instead of just 32. This also affects how long animals are pregnant for, and how long it takes for the babies to reach butcher-able age.

That's really interesting. I guess I ought to start playing with longer year lengths.

[Dano6655 7]

I actually think most servers do use normal year length. Changing the year length is a lot less common than you think

[TonyLiberatto 364]

We try extending the year lengh but it was kind of buggy, some crops would not grow properly. After some research I found that other servers had experienced similar problems. We just reverted to the default year.

Another problem with changing year lengh is that all players have to do it in their client, which sometimes they do not do it. We have a copy of the modified config file for download in our forum, so inexperienced player don't have to edit the file. We also include it in the modpack.

Since we are aiming for multiplayer it would be good if we could change config options and not worry about the players config.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

We try extending the year lengh but it was kind of buggy, some crops would not grow properly. After some research I found that other servers had experienced similar problems. We just reverted to the default year.

Another problem with changing year lengh is that all players have to do it in their client, which sometimes they do not do it. We have a copy of the modified config file for download in our forum, so inexperienced player don't have to edit the file. We also include it in the modpack.

Since we are aiming for multiplayer it would be good if we could change config options and not worry about the players config.

 

That is a bug that is already listed on the official list as solved for 79. The server will properly overwrite the client configs, so clients don't have to do anything special. We've also extensively tested crop growth with custom year lengths, and everything is working as intended.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

Thanks kitty. That's good news.