Half Every Time - a Standardized Approach to Repairs and Refueling

[ZombieDupe]

Since you have taken a look at finally making the lazy forager refuel with nightmare fuel, I thought it would be useful to give some feedback on the refuel amounts and how it affects player interaction with the need to refuel items. I have had some time taking a look at the game code (though not since the last update) and I understand some of the intricacies of the refueling and repair mechanics much like some modders here might.

What I find happens on a regular basis is that the current set of repair and refuel values often create some tedium, so you  need to continuously repair/refuel a given item on the go or after you have used an item for an extended period of time. Those extra actions take seconds, but why have the player refuel something more than once or twice after a set period of time or why have them refuel it frequently?

The 50% approach means everything that needs repairs, would more or less always be repaired by a single use of a fuel/repair item by 50%. So, for example, instead of the tamoshanter being repaired by 20% by a sewing kit, or 19% of a lantern being refueled by a light bulb, they would be 50% every time. This means the player doesn't need to stop so often to refuel. The point of refueling is to keep a resource cost for the player to not have a permanent solution to a problem, but that up-keep can become tedium. So why 50% for most things in this game? Because it may very well be the ideal for making sure the player refuels once every now and then without having to wait till the item is almost empty or broken at max efficiency. You don't have to think about it as much, it's just the ideal.

There is one problem however, and it has to do with the tuning values of some of the repairs, but that is not the only thing affecting fuel. The lazy forager only repairs, what 22% of its durability with nightmare fuel, while the magilluminessence repairs 37.5%. That seems fairly random, but I know exactly why that is, and it has to do with the fuel value assigned to the nightmare fuel item itself in relation to the total fuel value assigned to these items. It has a value, I presume since when the Night Light was first added, as that was the first item that ever used nightmare fuel as a fuel source that I can remember. Changing the fuel value itself doesn't work here, the repair is not a tuning value.

There are however still 2 approaches to get 50% to work while still keeping the nightmare fuel value as it is, without interfering with other item refuel/repair values. You could tweak the tick rate of fuel drawn. So, if the magilluminessence has a total fuel value of 800 (as an example, not the actual value), but nightmare fuel repairs only 200, you could decrease the total fuel value to 400, making the item refuel exactly 50% of the durability, but making the tick rate of the total fuel value 0.5 instead of 1 every second. The other approach would be overwriting the refuel function for a given repair to times the fuel value by 2 for it, in this example scenario. This way, the magilluminessence and the lazy forager could have completely different fuel values, if you wanted that, but the refuel percentage per nightmare fuel would still be the same.

In addition I would suggest that below 10%, each item would show signs of breaking/losing fuel. Currently, the miner hat, magilluminessence and many other items get to 1% without the player noticing until it is too late and then break or run out of fuel completely. The lantern is different, it goes down gradually but even at 80%, the light radius is significantly smaller, so it incentivises the player to continuously refuel it every 20% to keep the most light radius available, which can become tedious. I know this first hand and have observed other players do the same. Instead, I suggest that the light radius for both the lantern and the miner hat should decrease once below 10% and at max radius anything above that. It would keep the player on their toes but would not make it so they would be stranded without a light source when they least expect it, not taking the availability of fuel/repair into consideration that is.

In cases where there's bigger and smaller refuel values (big/small meat for eyemask and terror shield, glowberry/lesser glowberry for moggles), the major item could give 50%, while the lesser one could give 25%. While this does go against the idea of making things cost less to make it less tedious for players to make items more available, I would further suggest making the moggles for example, take 2 glowberries to craft. You could remove the extra doodad and the extra mole, so it would cost x2 glowberries, x1 doodad and x1 mole. This means that players won't be incentivised to consider whether to make a new set of moggles with full glowberries or whether to use them for fuel on their existing moggles further into the game. The 50% repair and the 1/2 glowberry to craft cost of the moggles would be the same either way, and if anything the player would be more incentivised to use it as fuel, since crafting a new set of moggles would also require a mole and a doodad to go along with it. You can apply this type of crafting cost principle further into the crafting values of items, but that is another topic entirely.