A touch of reality

[Aerow]

Suggestion to implement a new type of cooking system

Firstly, before I start off, the suggestions I have would be more suitable if the following suggestion by our member Xizzzy were implemented.

Currently, food can be a bit simple to get and has caused problems which nerf berry bushes and harvest whole rabbits from traps and such. Which is fine, but I have a bit of depth to add to this food chain we are surviving in which I think would make it quite interesting to live through and perhaps give those who sought out more difficulty 'something to chew on" so to speak. We have 3 food groups in the game at the moment, the meats, fruits and vegetables (if I've missed anything so be it but this is what I'm working with for the concept of this idea) In actual survival if you eat only rabbits you will die of protein poisoning regardless of how many you eat. Its called rabbit starvation and the only way to counter this delicious fate is to balance your diet in the wild ie. eat other things than rabbits vegetation etc. So, if you hadn't already guessed where I was going with this I'll tell you. balance your diet in order to maintain your hunger meter and/or create an alternate meter for nutrition that unless you take an interest with the amounts of meat vegetables and fruit you eat you could begin to lose hp and hunger due to malnutrition. This forces a player to broaden their horizons for food and eat what is available. It also gives a player incentive to use the crock-pot which can easily combine these attributes together and create more nutritious meals that satisfy more than one food group.

Bon Apetite~

http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?4103-End-of-the-Farmer-Birth-of-the-Survivor/

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As we all know, the current state of Don't starve is quite challenging for newbies but its difficulty keeps decreasing as the days progress. It is true that the game is just in the early game stage of the free play mode. But there are some interesting suggestions that I've come up with to make even mid game a tad bit challenging.

The game is focused around 2 key elements as of now and they are

1. Hunger

2. Health

Besides the darkness, if one of the above components falls to 0, it results in the protagonist dying.

1. Hunger

As of now, the hunger system does have some drawbacks due to how food can be interacted directly. As of now, eating any food will replenishing x amount of hunger points(and y health points)

Consider having 2 Crock pots in the base camp. Also about 2 lvl 3 Spider nests, close enough that you can kill about ~5-6 of them a night. And 2 Bee hives.

So, in theory if you do have the things, you can have an unlimited supply of Honey and Ham(2xCooked Meat + 2xHoney) which will restore ~80 Hunger points and ~20 Health points and eating ONE of them a day will let you live seamlessly and without having no real challenge since you can cook up to 2 Honey and Ham a day and it requires only 1 of them to survive a full day. This can lead to infinite stacking of the particular item used in the example.

If you think spiders are too hard for you to kill, just having 2 Turbo farms will do the trick. Make sure you harvest a DragonFruit, use a birdcage and get unlimited seeds, get as many Dragon fruits as you can. Now, make a DragonFruit Pie(1xDragon Fruit + 3xRoasted berries) and just one of these can last you a full day.

Due to this, people can just hoard food and keep on living without the challenge of it. But comparing it to reality, one can definitely not hoard food he/she cooks for a long time, in fact they got bad after sometime and eating that would be harmful to the body. So here's my suggestion

Rot Factor :

All food materials, cooked or raw must have a rot factor similar to how a torch or a miner's hat has when they are equipped in their respective slots BUT the catch being food will have a rot factor regardless of it being in the bag slots or the inventory or the chests or even on the crock pot itself.

"Oh ok Mr. Nerd, so how will that help?"

Now, whenever the food runs out of freshness points(idk what to call this), it turns into wet goop or something similar which is useless and does not refill any stat.

"Uhhh... so what if I eat it when it has 1% freshness remaining? Your theory just got bypassed, fool!"

Now, the way how hunger points and health points are restored do not only depend on the food we consume but how fresh the food is.

So for example when we have a Honey and Ham with 55% freshness points intact, you restore only 0.55*(hunger restored by honey&ham). Same with the health.

"Hmm, I'm still not convinced by this"

Of course this has different rates at which the food rots, depending on the day of time, etc. And when seasons are implemented, it might work out even better.

Now, moving along.

2. Health

Honestly, when was the last time someone died by getting their health to 0 and did that by not getting attacked by a mob?(Well prolly when you ate monster meat or the Durain fruits, but why would you kill yourself that way?)

Stale food :

If any food is below a certain level of freshness, it would be considered as stale food and instead of adding to your hunger points, it removes your health points.

Sleep Factor :

Sleep is one factor many people ignore in the game. So why not have a factor that affects your health for a certain amount every day you spend without sleeping? Sure this can be overcome by eating some honey but the factor that affects the health must have something to do with the days lived without sleep. So in theory, if you started a new game and didn't sleep for the first 10 days, the amount of health you'd lose would be more than what you'd lose if you slept once in the 5th day. So sleeping resets the counter that depletes your health. Also doing work such as Mining can also lead to the decrease in the health factor since its more of a fatigue than a killer.

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So any thoughts or suggestions to my suggestions?

Edited December 19, 2012 by Aerow
minor edits

[Xizzzy]

Rot Factor

Now, whenever the food runs out of freshness points(idk what to call this), it turns into wet goop or something similar which is useless and does not refill any stat.

Wet goop, could be useful as a method to create compost which when combined with manure produced 2x compost. We don't really want garbage items.

If there were a way to create or mine salt in the game, you could salt meats to make them not lose freshness but retain a new value as jerky or cured meat. the tradeoff with this is you would no longer be able to use this product in cooking to create more efficient foods in say your crock-pot.

I think rotting food could be interesting as a mechanic overall and would definitely up the difficulty but as I mentioned above there should also be methods to preserve food's freshness as there are in reality maybe making berry preserves somehow with the crock-pot.

Stale food :

If any food is below a certain level of freshness, it would be considered as stale food and instead of adding to your hunger points, it removes your health points.

stale food I think might be a bridge too far if our food is already rotting. stale is usually something which happens when food is kept safe to eat for too long and it hardens (in the case of breads mostly) its a more specific style of aging that wouldn't apply to say meat which goes rancid. the cycling down of effective use with fresh percent seems to cope with its longevity nicely enough I think. at the lower levels of freshness perhaps a larger percent chance that something food specific could happen to it. 'this meat has gone rancid - wilson' once below say 15percent the chances of it instantly turning rancid would increase with each dropped percentile unless salted or preserved in some other way. also, freshness should reset when a food is cooked so it becomes a new food item that has its own longevity (like in real cooking).

Sleep Factor :

Sleep is one factor many people ignore in the game. So why not have a factor that affects your health for a certain amount every day you spend without sleeping?

sleep is a novel idea, and could also build into the insanity meter that is coming. the more sleep loss you have the more touchy your insanity meter becomes. Its certainly an interesting idea if handled properly in conjunction with everything else.

[Aerow]

Yes, the manure idea is nice and maybe the stale food was pushing it too far.

[Syd]

I'm all for food being able to rot away. I think it's absurd that food can be stored indefinitely, giving the player the ability to build up a massive stockpile and potentially bypassing what will be one of the main threats of winter (food being more scarce).

My concern, though, is a technical one. Since food that wasn't made in a crock pot stacks (and crock pot food may stack in the future), it would be difficult to keep track of the freshness of individual pieces of food in that stack, and even if the technical hurdle of tracking the freshness of each part of a stack of food is overcome, how would that information be displayed to the player?

One way I could see it working is if a stack of food is only as fresh as the oldest part in it (explained by mold spreading to the rest of the food, perhaps?). Granted, I haven't put a lot of thought into this, but it could encourage players to not keep adding to an increasingly large stack of food day by day, as that new food will quickly go rotten along with the rest of the stack.

[Aerow]

Nice thinking with how the rot factor would stack up Syd. I didnt know that the cooked food was gonna be tweaked so that there are stacks.

[Trollgaard]

I think it's a great idea. Then you might have to think a little about what(and when) to storage before winter, rather than just fill the chests with meat. And, of course, the mixing of different food sources would make sense.