Too easy to get food?

[pokyto]

For a game that's called "Don't starve" it's next to impossible to die from hunger don't you think? I mean it's so easy to find/make food that you'd kinda need to fall a sleep to manage and die from the hunger. Anyone else thinks that the rate of getting food should be nurfed some what?

[conductorbosh]

I don't think it's too easy to get food. For me, it's definitely something I have to keep in mind as I go through the game. If you're forward thinking and spend time hunting and setting up traps, or getting farms, then yes, it's quite difficult to get into a situation where you could die from hunger. I don't see that as a negative though.

I like that I can devote a couple full in-game days to getting food, or setting up resources, and then not having to worry about it for a little while. If I had to devote most of each in-game day to making sure I had enough to eat, that would get tedious.

[501105]

It depends on how you play the game. Once you have built up a solid base with farms, planted bushes and lots of rabits nearby, then yes, dont starving is fairly easy. If you go explore and are always on the run it gets a fair bit harder. I supose it is all a balancing act that it is not too easy or hard, since both can end up ruining the fun.

[Psychonaut]

It's not easy for me, i am adventurer type and i almost died 5 mins ago because my hunger was at minimum, then i had to do something awful... Kill pigmen in order to survive :'(

[Ribkage]

I starved to death on my first character at day 9 and I even played the demo a couple times. Next character I spent like the first 5 days getting tons of berry bushes to plant near my settlement.

I think its just right. Starving is a definite possibility if you forget to keep some food on you and are adventuring, but your not gonna just keep dying of starvation over and over.

[mobius187]

This is a tough question because it comes down to two factors: what are your priorities and what is the learning curve for gathering food? For example, yes, if you don't prioritize food and light in the first few days you are screwed. You'll either starve or be eaten by a Grue at night. However, if you put those two needs as you top priorities and have a basic understanding of how to survive in the game, then it's not hard.

One of the problems I've raised time and again are the traps. The rabbit trap works great, but it can be slow. I'm sure there's a balance aspect at work here. However, with any tool (i.e. axe) you can hunt rabbits with relative ease using the "circle around/block escape" method which works 80-90% of the time. You just locate a rabbit, guess which hole it came from, then circle around it (so as not to alert it) and reach the hole... then you attack the rabbit. If the rabbit was far enough away from the hole and you selected the correct rabbit hole for the selected rabbit then it's almost certainly dead meat. I collected tons of meat this way until I had so much I started leaving it on the ground for later... this needs to be fixed. Either with temporarily removing a rabbit from its connected hole for a short duration (a few days) to signify its hole is empty (i.e. because you killed its last occupant) or leave bones behind which startle rabbits, making them stay closer to their holes and that much harder to ambush. That or simply make it impossible to hit rabbits (which sounds odd to me) or make it a chance (i.e. only 25% of hitting a running rabbit) to cut down on the successes.

I'm not sure if the same issue exists for the berry bushes, as they do take time to regrow. And if you're like me, and use a shovel to dig-up/replant the bushes at your base camp, well, that's hardly breaking the game... that's just how they planned it to work. Still I would like something in the game to place a greater reliance on either gardens or hunting larger game to get enough food to survive. Rabbits should be nice at the start, but players should need more than 4 meaty stews to fill their bellies... maybe twice that number. That would certainly impact hunting time and incite the need to hunt larger game to get more meat and thus reduce the time dependency associated with gathering food that one would have in the early game. That would make sense to me.