[Poll] On Food Sources, V2

[GetNerfedOn]

6 hours ago, W0l0l0 said:

Might be deserving of a thread, but I'll ask here first:

How many people are still using Reap What You Sow content? I've noticed myself subconsciously not using farms at all in favour of transplantables and meat farms. Aside from Wormwoods and people who enjoy it, is there a point to traditional farming now?

here we are! repeating the format from last year so its convenient:

heck we can also comapre to see if results are consistent.

Anyways, vote and feel free to discuss in the comments!

[gaymime]

i dont really know how to "fix" the complicated issue of breaking people from the habit of over-optimization in cooknig but i do feel that surely there is more that could be done to better weigh the "reward" of going out of one's way to make more complicated recipes

[GreenBowers]

I pretty much only farm crops. Its crazy how many worlds I start just to farm crops the entire time then restart. Farming crops is my life.

[Arcwell]

Meaty stew main (yes it's a thing) here, these are the sources I use. I don't go out of my way to farm these specifically for food. These are tasks I'd be doing regardless.

• Meat: Bosses & MacTusk
• Monster meat: Hound waves
• Small meat: Frog rain & Moslings
• Leafy meat: Brightshades
• Filler: Kelp or whatever's around

[DegenerateFurry]

As a Warly main, I get a lot of my meat from voltgoats whenever I play solo. Did you know that it's possible to use walls and fence gates to glitch one onto a boat, then very slowly row the boat back to your base so that you can have a conveniently located, very contained herd you can get meat, horns, and milk from whenever you want? Yes, I know about auto farms for horns. No, they're not as good as what I just said since you can't get milk from them and the meat the goats drop will be rotten by the time you check the farm.  Because you can. That's a thing I've done in my current world. You do have to row it very slowly (with anchor down and probably a wooden oar), though, so that the herd spawner moves with the goat. Still less fiddly than relocating them the normal way, and it also keeps them permanently contained in a boat-sized area since they can't jump off of a boat.

[Wormboi]

I dont really use crock that much anymore tbh, I just use a farm and eat most of the raw crops and turn whatever monster I have into meatballs.

[abrocator]

For normal characters in a solo world I get enough meat as a by-product of daring to exist in a hostile world. Vegetables are stone fruit, cactus, kelp. Filler is the same or berries, twigs, ice.

As Wurt (my current world) I almost only use stone fruit and kelp. I use jelly beans for healing and I don’t fight much directly myself because of merm army. But if I do fight directly I can make flower salad since I can quickly bundle 40 cactus flowers in one run with the beefalo during a summer (this lasts me many years). In my old world I made figatoni but I don’t have a large enough fig supply for that yet.

Yeah. Most of my vegetarian crockpot food is figatoni and flower salad. I have had a need for sanity food lately because of dreadstone armor so I’ve started drying kelp in batches of ten. I should also make a honey setup for taffy and just honey itself because it’s so time-efficient to amass once you have twenty bee boxes or so. But that always gets put on the back burner when I don’t have a character that can eat honey ham. 

[Zima Blue]

I voted "hunt animals" because I didn't see an option for volt goats. In my current world I have 7 herds of them in a pen that I kill with catapults, I get a ton of food and horns.

[W0l0l0]

Thanks for making this. Its eye opening to me that more people use traditional farms than I thought.

(I'd personally think it would be cool to see crafts that involve veggies)

[A random guy]

Ive been playing a lot more solo lately and honestly Kelp farms are a godsent
i need to see more people use them, they are insanely good for everything

want hunger? 1 meat 3 kelp
want sanity? 5-10 dryed kelp and youre good as new
want health? make pierogi with them 

you can get them in huge quantities in lunar island, dont need to be fertilized, and are useful for all characters

[Evelo]

I love Wobsters, they suck at generating hunger though. I rely mostly on Crops. Specifically Pumpkin + Potato + Garlic/Asparagus in Winter/Autumn. Toma Root + Dragon Fruit in Spring/Summer.

[YouKnowWho]

As much as I adore the farming mechanics introduced in Reap What You Sow, I rarely actually find myself committing to any harvest because of just how bountiful they can be. It's not even a balancing thing, I just don't enjoy seeing all the excess crops go to waste when they rot away (crockpot recipes never requiring more than 2 non-filler vegetables probably has something to do with this.) Not to mention all the other, more convenient ways of obtaining vegetable ingredients you can snag just wandering around like mushrooms and carrots.

Important to mention this is coming from a singleplayer perspective.

[marshyds]

A lot of crockpot dishes just need a straight up buff..

as for cooking itself, dishes could have EXTREMELY specific recipes so that the cookbook becomes more useful. (As for how they're discovered, i dunno.)

[ADM]

I wish it was less simple to get carried by Lureplants, figs, banana bushes and even stone fruits.

Like I know they've got a lot of fans and contribute to food diversity… it wouldn’t be better if they weren’t there or used in so many recipes or if their stats were nerfed too hard… not all of that. But there should be more to do and like than having so many free food generators deployed around. I prefer much more to harvest barnacles, go fishing, do tallbird coops, goat pens, grow weed (don’t we all) and farm birchnuts. Crop farms are very generous too but at least it’s fun to work with them.

I only play multiplayer so between my friends it’s difficult for me to avoid those sources. So its Banana Shakes and Pop, Figatonies, Jelly Salad or Beefy Greens 80% or so of the time. There’s so many fillers that grow and spoil into more fertilizer and these plant need a mere rot every so often to give top tier foods that pulverize the need for anything else.

It’s fine if you like those but they’re under my nose all the time and bother my idea of a food and farming "meta", sorry for the word.

[GimplyGoose]

Marotters are pretty meaty

[Flarezen]

As a wx-78 main i don’t understand the concept of food and only eat gears i get from resetting the ruins after many fw kills.

[Frashaw27]

I look into my icebox and plan from there. It's mostly just eating raw veggies from my garden though.

[Reiko24]

There is an absurd amount of food sources, and deciding which one to use is fun. Cooking different dishes using different ingredients is fun.

It is however, unbalanced. Back in the day it was much harder to get this much food. Kinda wish it was a bit harder to get food than it is now. Or at least I see it this way because of my experience. I mean, the times where the staple was just a very big berry bush farm, bee boxes and pig farm were boring. I don't know how they could make it harder to get food without limiting food options, which would make food unfun again...

[Notecja]

on what I rely depends on character... Sometimes is hard to say what is my primary source.
Wendy:
* splumonkeys - One wisit and I am set with poop, bananas, morsels, poop, nightmarefuel, beard hair, poop, more poop, dont forget about more poop. ~~and then I turn Maxwell chest into sewer~~
* butterflies - free flying food.
* seeds. Just seeds.
* Ice. Just ice.
Woodie:
* any tree loots, depending on mods, or just base placement (birchnuts?)
* morsels from birds, because as Woodie I bother to farm gray feathers
* honey
* Warly
WX:
G E A R S
(and spoiling food that no other character would eat)

[Lovens]

I chose "other" as the first option. I usually live primarily off the bosses and monsters I kill on my way. Usually just killing a hound/depth worm wave and some bosses/enemies in between make it more than enough food for me. 

A few examples: I've done a bunch of Wigfrid all boss runs where I would prioritise getting CC first. My foods would be, early exploration: raw meats from tallbirds, catcoons, beefalo, volt goats, pigs, werepigs - depending on what I stumbled upon. Usually I convert monster meats into werepigs but sometimes I would eat those cooked. In the ruins: AG meats, occasional splumonkey morsels, fried monster meats from spiders and depth worms. After moonstone event: large food haul from werepigs and hounds on night of day 11. Enough to last through archives, astral detector hunt pearl prep, until sea exploration. In the ocean: cookie cutter monster meats, fried. Occasionally hounds if they spawn on Pearls island, or rockjaw meats. Winter: large meat haul from CK and maybe McTusks/volt goats if they happen to be nearby. End of winter: 8 meats from deerclops, Klaus deer, Krampi from the Klaus fight, 6 meats from dfly. Spring: tons of meats from all the Moose Goose families, and additionally Malbatross. Enough to last the entire spring really, and I can cook them into honey hams or bacon and eggs if they spoil too fast to my liking. With occasional hound attacks here and there it's usually too much food and I have to bundle it because I can't eat that much. If it frog rains I don't even bother picking them up during those runs. Summer: Antlion, maybe volt goats if my old food supply spoiled and I didn't bother bundling or picking it all up, toadstool. Somewhere in between: Varg for a mutated varg completion which is a ton of monster meats. Occasional spider/catcoon on the go if I feel like it. Beginning of second Autumn: 8 meats from bearger. 

 

My other games are similar to that, with the exception of the order/pace at which I kill bosses. I'm currently doing a Winona run and I'm just similarly living off whatever I happened to kill (whatever attacked me), occasionally picking up mushrooms, carrots and cacti here and there. I happened to base near a pig village with 40 berry bushes in it and I don't even bother harvesting these anymore. They were useful for beefalo taming early game but now feel redundant to me. 

Another example is Wanda in my megabase who can live off the entire year from a yearly harvest of seasonal bosses (4 Moose Goose families, Antlion, Bearger and Deerclops) cooked into bacon and eggs. Any additional boss kills (dfly, malbatross, AG) and I can't finish the old stack of bacon and eggs I made from last year's meats. Oh and cooking them into meaty stews is too efficient and will guarantee I won't finish even a half of the stack before it goes yellow in my bearger bin. 

On the food situation in general:I feel like it's too easy to get and it's super abundant, especially in solo game. I never make any hunger food farms for this reason (but I do have honey and banana farms for sanity dishes usually). But I also realize that I look at it from a perspective of a somewhat skilled player who knows where and how to get food and doesn't need to farm it specifically. When I started though, I remember really struggling in winter with my friends. We had rabbit stews and barely growing crops that would not yield any seeds back and would take forever to grow. We mined ice from pengulls and put tons of rabbit traps around our base in the savanna. Hounds were devastating but pengulls helped with them. And then of course we died to deerclops on day 30, clueless how to deal with him. So even though right now the game's main "Don't Starve" challenge feels a bit too easy for me, it is because I became better at the game and not because the game's balance is bad. 

[Maxil20]

6 hours ago, ADM said:

I wish it was less simple to get carried by Lureplants, figs, banana bushes and even stone fruits.

Kinda shocked you mentioned figs, which while I do think are good, I do feel are fairly up there in terms of effort as well, with how you need to get the tree nuts, drop the tree seeds off, tend the trees, and then you're rewarded with being able to harvest figs. It’s Free after that, but so are tallbirds and (technically) barnacles, both of which you mentioned.

On the contrary, I’m impressed you didn’t mention beeboxes, which is like, the absolute “I win” of food sources since vanilla DS. It has a decent startup cost, but that pales in comparison to the immense benefits. Honey itself is great for all 3 stats (raw for hunger and health, crockpot to taffy for sanity), makes decent crockpot dishes, works as excellent filler for many dishes, and has a strong spoilage time to boot. There’s a reason honey was by far the food source I used the most in DS/T and kept me feed in my megabase world for IRL years.

For me personally, I think the problem is there’s always going to be “dominant” food sources and people are going to gravitate to it, especially with how frequent guides showcasing where to get these foods are and making the dishes en masse. I don’t think you can really fix that without tweaking crockpot dishes, and I shudder to think how the community would react to something like meaty stew getting nerfed…

In terms of the thread, honey as mentioned is by far my most used source of food, but thanks to the polar bearger bin (my beloved <3 ) I also grind figs/stone fruit to mass cook figatoni (recently made over 2.5K to set me for awhile)m and also tried out barnacle linguine (which is pretty good, just wish it lasted a tad bit longer), Tall scotch eggs (wish tallbird eggs stacked to make cooking this less tedious…), meaty stews (boring fallback option), honey nuggets (funny fallback option), and banana shakes (not used as much thanks to figatoni).

[Notecja]

8 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

Kinda shocked you mentioned figs, which while I do think are good, I do feel are fairly up there in terms of effort as well, with how you need to get the tree nuts, drop the tree seeds off, tend the trees, and then you're rewarded with being able to harvest figs. It’s Free after that, but so are tallbirds and (technically) barnacles, both of which you mentioned.

I think it's a bit how some foods are too simple. I mean (is not example from me) some food just require one specific ingredient and else can be anything. I woudn't mind if figatoni required not just fig, but corn + random veggie instead of "insert two fully random veggies" (or three? Usually is not me who cooks that). Or for Beefy Greens to require a tomato + 2 random veggies instead of "insert three random veggies". These foods feels a bit a tier of meatballs in simplicity but better.

[Maxil20]

1 hour ago, Notecja said:

I think it's a bit how some foods are too simple. I mean (is not example from me) some food just require one specific ingredient and else can be anything. I woudn't mind if figatoni required not just fig, but corn + random veggie instead of "insert two fully random veggies" (or three? Usually is not me who cooks that). Or for Beefy Greens to require a tomato + 2 random veggies instead of "insert three random veggies". These foods feels a bit a tier of meatballs in simplicity but better.

I personally don’t mind that, although I also don’t really like dishes that have multiple “forced” ingredient requirements. Moqueca is a pretty good example of that. It’s really nice statwise, but it taking a toma root and onion on top of the fish requirement makes it something I usually steer away from.

Im not trying to say that’s bad or anything as I know people do like dishes that do that, I just personally prefer “one forced ingredient with another food type/filler requirement” then “multiple forced ingredients and Maybe a filler”  requirements. 

Spoiler

This is a completely unrelated tangent, but this is apparently going to be my 1,000th post on the forums. I will celebrate by posting a completely off topic picture of Loki from the hit game The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance to commemorate this accomplishment

 

 

[GetNerfedOn]

2 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

 

  Hide contents

This is a completely unrelated tangent, but this is apparently going to be my 1,000th post on the forums. I will celebrate by posting a completely off topic picture of Loki from the hit game The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance to commemorate this accomplishment

 

 

Congratulations! 

In the old pre nuke klei forums you would have been able to add a forum title to your profile which showed up under your PFP. 

Also tho

13 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I also grind figs/stone fruit to mass cook figatoni (recently made over 2.5K to set me for awhile) 

[Tranoze]

I dont rely on one primary food source. I just eat what happened to be availabe for me at each moment. I need to kill some beefalo for a beef hat in winter and spring beef tame and got unlucky? Guess i ll eat meat for the next few days. I need to sail to knobbly tree and harvest some nut? Guess i ll eat leafy meat and ocasionally some monster meat. I visit ruin? I ll have some lichen, bananas and some morsel then. I need some healing in cave? Blue mush it is. Friends just finished a whole plot of veggies? Veggies it is.