Suggestion: "The Rotten patch"

[Dust]

Before I post this,

I've read the "Common Suggestions (and responses)" - http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?1164-Common-Suggestions-(And-responses)

and "Don't Starve Roadmap" - http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?2832-Don-t-Starve-Roadmap

To make sure that I won't post another common and redundant topic/suggestion and to address some mid-game problem which is stated in the Roadmap.

The game is called "Don't Starve" so me must focus on it.

Currently, once you have establish a "base" and have a lot of food, it is very easy to survive everyday. You'll end up having more stock pile of food the longer you play the game. So the plan is to make some challenges in mid-game without affecting the early-game... and this is my suggestion.

"The Rotten patch"

In this "patch" we will introduce food spoilage, new monsters, new items, and food recipe. all is related on rotting stuffs.

Food Spoilage - This mechanic will definitely lessen those food hoarder out there who just love to stock food as many as he/she can. It will not affect the early-game since you will mostly eat what you have to survive. Each food will have different spoilage times. depending if its a fruit, meat, cooked, etc. with some exception like honey and raw seeds (or seed will have much longer life than other food except honey).

Originally Posted by Kevin

Let's say you have a full stack of meat, all with different spoilage times. When individual pieces spoil, what should we do? Give you a new spoiled meat piece? What if your inventory is full? Do you drop it? How do you inspect the stats of individual pieces in the stack? How do you pick a particular piece? What pieces get used for crafting? etc. etc. etc.

We will have three stages of food. fresh,normal,rotten. so when you have a stack of food with different spoilage time the one that will spoil will automatically change inventory slot, creating a new item for it. If your inventory is full it will automatically spawn on the ground.

To make it simple, "fresh" food will have longer life than "normal", "normal" food will be a warning that you must consume it or use it before it spoils. Like the yellow light on the traffic light.

Also when"Winter comes" food will have longer life or even cant spoiled as long as it is winter

New Monsters

We will introduce new monsters for those who just love to stock foods even if it's rotten and cant be eaten anymore.

Flies- Flies will not post any threat on the player(like the one on manures), it will hover to any rotten food on the ground. It will also hover on the chests and follow the player if you have a rotten stuff on your inventory. Flies will be the sign that you must dump or use your rotten stuff or else....

Giant Maggots-This hungry guys will spawn from the ground near rotten foods and will try to eat it. It will attack the chests or player where the rotten stink is coming from. The maggot that got a chance to eat one will grow on size. They will stop and submerge itself again on the ground after they eat or there is no rotten food to eat anymore. to balance it out, birds will try to attack this maggots, attracting them like seed does.

Monster Fly- When a "Giant Maggot" manage to eat and safely submerge itself again on the ground. It will spawn in a few days as a "Monster Fly". With the speed and elusiveness of Gobblers This giant fly will eat every food on sight, including berries on berry bushes, farm, and on ground. Tall bird chicks will chase and try to attack it.

New Items

Small fertilizer- this will act like a manure with lesser effect. you can make one by digging a rotten food on the ground. this will help you use rotten stuff and prevent "Giant maggots" on spawning.

Stink bomb- throw this thing to an area and it will emit a sticking smell that attracts Giant maggots. this will serve as a distraction on Giant maggots to give you time to clean your rotten stuff. you can also use this to attack someone. maggot will emerge near the area like there is a rotten food near it. you can use it on pigs, spider nest, etc. You'll need some web,rope,rotten foods to make one.

Scare Crow- The monsters and animals will interact on this as if it is a player but with wider range. you can also use it as a mannequin and put your equipment on it like pumpkin lantern, miners hat, backpack (with rotten food on it), etc. you can use it to scare birds and "Monster fly" from getting near it. making it easy to pick up seeds and defend your crops. but with no birds, "Giant maggots" can roam freely giving the player a choice of what is suitable for a certain situation.

Food recipe

With this spoiling food, we can add some recipe that have longer life like berry wine(which can even use on sanity mechanics), meat jerky, etc.

I hope some of my idea helps this awesome game get its goal. more power to you guys! keep it up!

[horatio_svetlana]

Lots of the stuff you suggested have been talked about a lot before. If you want to you should provide links to those threads.

The harmless flies idea is pretty cool, nice mechanic. The giant maggot sounds like a good way to get rid of rotten food, I think it fits with the idea of attacking the player like the Krampus does instead of just destroying the food eventually. I mean you could have the rotten food just be destroyed eventually, but it's more fun if it causes monster problems.

What if, if food rots for too long it turns into manure? It would take so long it wouldn't impact manure harvesting too much early game.

[themastadon85]

Love some of the stuff, hope you get some attention. Also helps the problem of having food too easily, right now the only threat to ur food is a Gobbler, so having some other things that steal ur food is good to have

[MilleniumCount]

This sounds great for me.

[Dust]

Thanks for the feedback,

Actually you can make a manure-like item but have lesser effect by putting rotten food on the ground and shoveling it. I put the shoveling part just to make the player a small expense using shovel's durability

and to make it more realistic since soil + rotten stuff = fertilizer.

Besides, rotten food wont take that long before the swarm of maggots appears. It will spawn for 2 to 3 maggots until the rotten food disappear.

[mobius187]

"The Rotten patch"

In this "patch" we will introduce food spoilage, new monsters, new items, and food recipe. all is related on rotting stuffs.

Yes, as was pointed out this is a semi-popular topic with players who agree this would be a good idea. In fact, I'm one of the people who supports the inclusion of "rot" into the game. That being said, I learned that the Devs have also been considering this option as well, but that the technical issues of how to implement the effect have held them from adding it. Of course the last Dev post I read on the topic was over 3-4 weeks ago. Still, I do like discussing it and I've collected plenty of ideas: some my own, some from another indie game, and some from other players.

Food Spoilage - This mechanic will definitely lessen those food hoarder out there who just love to stock food as many as he/she can. It will not affect the early-game since you will mostly eat what you have to survive. Each food will have different spoilage times. depending if its a fruit, meat, cooked, etc. with some exception like honey and raw seeds (or seed will have much longer life than other food except honey).

Yes, in reference to this suggestion a similar approach was taken in Project Zomboid. The game started with every food item spawned, but each had its own "spoil counter". If not eaten by a set duration the food became rotten. Refrigeration offset this counter, extending the life of certain foods, but I'll discuss this later.

I agree seeds should either have a very long shelf life (i.e. 30-45 days) or never rot. Why? Because they also serve dual purpose roles as food and crop sources. I would relent that should seeds be cooked then they should spoil/rot after a set duration, as they can no longer be planted.

Honey... should never spoil/rot. Down the road this should factor in to how often the player should be able to harvest honey.

We will have three stages of food. fresh,normal,rotten. so when you have a stack of food with different spoilage time the one that will spoil will automatically change inventory slot, creating a new item for it. If your inventory is full it will automatically spawn on the ground.

Remember when I said the Devs had trouble deciding how to handle rotting food... this was one of the key issues. The Devs didn't like the idea that food items would simply drop to the ground if there wasn't any room in the inventory for rotten foods, and with three types of "freshness" you would be tripling the number of stacks.

I suggested that instead of splitting the stacks, why not have have the spoil counters determine where food sits in a stack. So say you have 5 hams. The one at the top could be the oldest, so when you are ready to eat you'll eat it first, which helps reduce the chances it will rot. If you combined two stacks of hams of varied spoil counters the stack of hams sorts itself again, placing the "freshest" ham at the bottom and the oldest at the top again. When the food rots the top-most ham would chnage to a rotten ham. The player would then need to hold the CTRL button and click the ham to remove it from the stack.

The alternative, to reverse the order so the oldest food is at the bottom. While you do run a risk of letting food rot without you even realizing it, the benefit is that when you do eat down to the very first rotten food item you'll know the rest of that stack is all rotten and you can simply discard them. No need for CTRL clicking.

To make it simple, "fresh" food will have longer life than "normal", "normal" food will be a warning that you must consume it or use it before it spoils. Like the yellow light on the traffic light.

While there is some benefit to the warning, I'm just not sure it merits creating a new stack. I'm more of the opinion that food should have two states, "fresh" and "rotten". Well, I say that, but I do have a third stage in mind, only it's not really a progression of rot, rather it involves preserving foods. The reason why is because of...

Also when"Winter comes" food will have longer life or even cant spoiled as long as it is winter

...this. I suggest we simply rely on what people commonly do in real life under these circumstances, they preserve foods. To do this the Devs would need to add some new resources, but a key resource would be salt. I suggest that combing any meat with salt in the crock pot will create "salted meat". The purpose being that salted meats last much longer than normal meat, long enough to at least survive winter. The downside? Salted meats wouldn't taste as good, so they wouldn't satiate as much Hunger as non-salted meats. This would then give players a reason not to just salt all their foods outside of preparing for winter.

In addition to preserving meats, I also suggested creating fruit/vegitable preserves. This suggestion was connected to another, the beach biome, where I suggested players could dig-up message bottles (among other things, but I want to stay focused). The bottles, very jar-like, could then be re-purposed to store preserves. This would be done by placing a empty jar and fruits/vegitables (various cooking recipes I would assume) into the crock pot. When done you would get a jar of preserve determined by what you cooked/boiled. As with salted meats these preserves would last longer, but wouldn't taste as good (less Hunger satiated when eaten).

Now there was a third suggestion that I'll throw out that was made by another player. He suggested that we should be able to smoke/dry fish as a means to preserve them. I think this is a good idea, but it would require crafting a drying rack... which seemed a bit much for just fish. Then again, why not? Worst case we just go back to it being "salted fish".

As a note, preserves will eventually rot. And when that happens to meat it just becomes the same as if the meat had rotted normally (nothing special because it was salted). For the jarred preserves they all become the same "disgusting goop", which can all stack together no matter what they were originally made from.

Flies- Flies will not post any threat on the player(like the one on manures), it will hover to any rotten food on the ground. It will also hover on the chests and follow the player if you have a rotten stuff on your inventory...

Good idea. I 100% agree. I'll willingly suffer Sims 2 flashbacks for this useful feature.

Giant Maggots-This hungry guys will spawn from the ground near rotten foods and will try to eat it. It will attack the chests or player where the rotten stink is coming from. The maggot that got a chance to eat one will grow on size. They will stop and submerge itself again on the ground after they eat or there is no rotten food to eat anymore. to balance it out, birds will try to attack this maggots, attracting them like seed does.

That doesn't sound like a maggot... it sounds more like a worm. Maybe a giant fly should drop by your rotten food, land, buzz for a bit, and then fly off... only to have a giant maggot spawn from the rotten food. Now that's a cycle of life I could believe in.

Monster Fly- When a "Giant Maggot" manage to eat and safely submerge itself again on the ground. It will spawn in a few days as a "Monster Fly". With the speed and elusiveness of Gobblers This giant fly will eat every food on sight, including berries on berry bushes, farm, and on ground.

Mmmmm... while I'm not against giant maggots or giant flies, per say, this sounds seriously harsh. Now why is it the Giant Maggot can break open chests, but the giant fly cannot? The maggot sounds a lot like the Krampus, only it appears whenever food rots (which probably will happen with reasonable frequency) and then cause all sorts of chaos/ruin. So I'll pass, as the Krampus is bad enough. What I do suggest is this: Have giant flies be attracted to rotten food and if players come to close to them, the giant flies will attack. By giant, I suggest they be the size of birds or hounds. This way players who store food in chests at their camp will find giant flies buzzing around and they'll have to deal with them. No need to have them break anything or eat everything.

Small fertilizer- this will act like a manure with lesser effect. you can make one by digging a rotten food on the ground. this will help you use rotten stuff and prevent "Giant maggots" on spawning.

Maybe rotten food could simply function as manure in everything but name (i.e. you can click on farm plots with it). Also, animals should still eat rotten food. So rotten carrots would still attract rabbits and rotten meat would still be eaten by hounds. Whether or not this has a detrimental effect on them... well, that's open to debate.

Of course while I'm generally against adding new items, especially if they're just replicate an existing item (i.e. manure), it may be worth it if only to allow various rotten foods to be combined into a single stack. So there is that.

Stink bomb- throw this thing to an area and it will emit a sticking smell that attracts Giant maggots. this will serve as a distraction on Giant maggots to give you time to clean your rotten stuff. you can also use this to attack someone. maggot will emerge near the area like there is a rotten food near it. you can use it on pigs, spider nest, etc. You'll need some web,rope,rotten foods to make one.

Interesting. Of course as this is connected to the giant maggots I'm not 100% sold on the idea.

Scare Crow- The monsters and animals will interact on this as if it is a player but with wider range. you can also use it as a mannequin and put your equipment on it like pumpkin lantern, miners hat, backpack (with rotten food on it), etc. you can use it to scare birds and "Monster fly" from getting near it. making it easy to pick up seeds and defend your crops. but with no birds, "Giant maggots" can roam freely giving the player a choice of what is suitable for a certain situation.

Yes and no. First of all I should mention that there are strong signs that the Devs have already created a scarecrow. Apparently some players are decent programmers and they found traces of the word in the code. IMHO, the scarecrow should only serve one or two purposes, to scare away birds and maybe scare away rabbits. When crafted and the player is choosing where to place it a radius should be shown to indicate the scarecrows "effective range", so should the player have multiple farm plots they may need multiple scarecrows. Then all the scarecrow would do is frighten away birds/rabbits similar to as if the player had approached them. The downside is that birds scared by the scarecrow would never drop seeds.

On a side note, this suggestion went hand-in-hand with a suggestion that birds should be able to eat seeds planted in farm plots (before they grow to their next stage) and rabbits should be able to eat any crop growing in the farm plot after it matures from a seed... so crops need to be protected just like vegetables and fruits left on the ground (when it comes to rabbits).

Food recipe

With this spoiling food, we can add some recipe that have longer life like berry wine(which can even use on sanity mechanics), meat jerky, etc.

Wine is an interesting idea, however I would hope that there would be a means other than using "rotten berries" to make some.

What if, if food rots for too long it turns into manure? It would take so long it wouldn't impact manure harvesting too much early game.

This could work and is similar to what I considered... if not an entirely accurate in process. Hmmm. Wait a minute. Maybe you could feed rotten food to pig men...? Yessssss! MANURE!

[Dust]

I suggested that instead of splitting the stacks, why not have have the spoil counters determine where food sits in a stack. So say you have 5 hams. The one at the top could be the oldest, so when you are ready to eat you'll eat it first, which helps reduce the chances it will rot. If you combined two stacks of hams of varied spoil counters the stack of hams sorts itself again, placing the "freshest" ham at the bottom and the oldest at the top again. When the food rots the top-most ham would chnage to a rotten ham. The player would then need to hold the CTRL button and click the ham to remove it from the stack.

That auto sorting is a great idea, it will solve inventory slot problem on rotting food if they manage to pull that up. In addition of the command CTRL click to pick the top part of stack, you can click the whole stack and right click on your inventory space to put piece by piece like minecraft does. so you can easily separate a bunch of rotten food.

In addition to preserving meats, I also suggested creating fruit/vegitable preserves. This suggestion was connected to another, the beach biome, where I suggested players could dig-up message bottles (among other things, but I want to stay focused). The bottles, very jar-like, could then be re-purposed to store preserves. This would be done by placing a empty jar and fruits/vegitables (various cooking recipes I would assume) into the crock pot. When done you would get a jar of preserve determined by what you cooked/boiled. As with salted meats these preserves would last longer, but wouldn't taste as good (less Hunger satiated when eaten).

That beach biome sounds cool. currently we only have a cliff like edges onto the sea. it will be nice to have some sort of shore in the form of beach biome.

That doesn't sound like a maggot... it sounds more like a worm. Maybe a giant fly should drop by your rotten food, land, buzz for a bit, and then fly off... only to have a giant maggot spawn from the rotten food. Now that's a cycle of life I could believe in.

Well actually I just categorize it as a "giant maggot" coz we're living on this weird creepy world. My plan is to make a slow crawling monster that will spawn near the rotten stuff and the only way do it is it will be coming from above or below. Since its a slow crawling monster, it is better if it will emerge from the ground.

Mmmmm... while I'm not against giant maggots or giant flies, per say, this sounds seriously harsh. Now why is it the Giant Maggot can break open chests, but the giant fly cannot? The maggot sounds a lot like the Krampus, only it appears whenever food rots (which probably will happen with reasonable frequency) and then cause all sorts of chaos/ruin. So I'll pass, as the Krampus is bad enough.

those "Giant Maggots" dont have any eye, and they will go wherever rotten meat is. they are slow and dont have an ability to fight back. they will just rush unto the rotten stuff, eat, then vanish. besides, it will easily noticeable when and where they will spawn because of the flies that hover on every rotten stuff. like the hounds sound before they attack but with more delay. Then they will come back again (if they manage to eat some rotten food) as a monster with fly wings. Now they have eyes for threat. They will not attack the player but focus only on food. they will cower like a Gobbler but they will steal food more aggressively (like a real fly, they will flew then come back again) and that is the only threat of this two monster. it will ransack your food stock. At this stage, you will fight for your foods. So we can live up on the "Don't starve" theme of the game.After the latest patch, I don't feel that much trouble on Krampus. We need more challenge and chaos on the mid-game. lets make the player strive more to survive.