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Food spoilage?


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This idea. I love it. But I am curious, would seeds spoil? Because as long as they are kept dry seeds can last pretty much forever IRL.

Correct. Personally I think the realism should be maintained... seeds shouldn't spoil. However, to balance this fact another realistic factor needs to be addressed. You should really be able to survive on eating seeds. I mean, seriously. You can do that in the game right now, but I think this would need to be changed. Seeds should only provide 1% Stomach/Hunger, 2% is roasted on a fire... but once roasted they should probably spoil. in this way the true benefit from seeds would be in planting them.

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My suggested solutions are:

1) Honey should require a glass jar to be collected/stored. The current method, globs of honey, borders on the ridiculous after all. Then, by limiting access to glass jars you control how much can be stockpiled. Next, add a creature that loves honey... and berries... and fish... oh wait, there is one, the bear. Maybe not a unique creature, but it would work.

2) Seeds are fine, but what if birds dropped them far less often. What if eating them restored only 1% Hunger? I mean they're just seeds after all. Anyone trying to survivw by eating only 6-10 seeds a day should tell me how well that turns out for them. A better investment for seeds should be planting them in a farm plot.

3) Cooked/roasted seeds, which could restore 2% Hunger each, should rot.

4) IMHO, the Crock Pot should NEVER be able to turn monster meat into "good meat". It should instead make poisoned/toxic foods. Or a "wet goop" equivilent for meats. I mean who here would expect to cook poisonous food and then expect it to turn out just fine? I wouldn't.

I like the idea of needing jars to collect honey, and turn fruit/veggies into jams and jellies, but I think you should be able to make clay pots or glass jars out of clay and sand. Have a hefty "discovery cost," and have those resources to make jars and pots available like stone or flint.

And seeds restoring a good percentage of hunger is fine with me. In real life, a handful of seeds is very nutritious, and as a semi-casual backpacker/hiker myself, when you go on hiking routes (ESPECIALLY when it is cold) what do you take to snack on through the day? Seeds, nuts, dried fruit (raisins are a big one), and chocolate. It's easy to eat, high in calories, sates hunger, and gives you energy. If we're going on realism these things should be considered, and carefully balanced. That's all I'm saying.

EDIT: Maybe the 12%, or w/e it currently is, is too much for a single "seeds." Maybe tone it down to 5% or so. Because you would have to forage for seeds almost all day long to survive on that. And you'd have to choose between feeding yourself on them, or using them to grow crops/feed smallbirds.

Edited by daldingo
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I think that food should stack in order of "age", with the oldest at the top of the stack and the first to be eaten. Then when it becomes "rotten food" it creates a new stack wher all rotten food (no matter the source) collects.

But what if your inventory/chest was full then would it all just drop on the ground?

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Kevin. Your idea is nice but you need to remember that if you add more variables to the game will mean that the game will become more complex and stressing if the variables aren't tuned AND if you have a lot of them then the tunning will become harder.

Meanwhile.........GIVE ME MY BABY BUFFALO

Thanks

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I like the idea of needing jars to collect honey, and turn fruit/veggies into jams and jellies

Who wouldn't? :p

...but I think you should be able to make clay pots or glass jars out of clay and sand. Have a hefty "discovery cost," and have those resources to make jars and pots available like stone or flint.

While I could certainly see "glass jar" replaced with "clay pot", I would be leery about setting the only hurdle as the initial invention cost. After all, we want to prevent honey hoarding since honey would last forever once collected, until eaten. And I know I wouldn't want the solution to be "rain bears down on the player all the time". Rather, maybe a new resource, clay, could be added to the game and it could be rare. I suggest it could be found in swamps. Players find a grey patch of soil on the ground, use the shovel to dig it up, and the patch disappears... and out pops some clay. However, like flint and stone, it would be finite in quantity. Once all the clay has been dug-up there wouldn't be any more for that world... (i.e. portal to new world eventually).

However I do suggest allowing clay pots, in this case, to be reusable. Like the wooden bowls in Minecraft used to create mushroom soup. You eat the soup and get an empty bowl back. Same here. You eat the honey and get an empty clay pot back.

And seeds restoring a good percentage of hunger is fine with me. In real life, a handful of seeds is very nutritious, and as a semi-casual backpacker/hiker myself, when you go on hiking routes (ESPECIALLY when it is cold) what do you take to snack on through the day?

Well yes, I'm not saying you couldn't survive on seeds. I'm just saying that right now the game lets you satiate 4 Hunger from one seed, or 8 Hunger if roasted. Could you see yourself surviving on 12 roasted seeds a day? Maybe 24? I couldn't. Now if we lower the effects to 1 and 2, for uncooked and cooked, well then yes... eat 100 seeds and that would be a filling meal. But now it doesn't make as much sense in game terms where seeds aren't that common.

Seeds, nuts, dried fruit (raisins are a big one), and chocolate. It's easy to eat, high in calories, sates hunger, and gives you energy. If we're going on realism these things should be considered, and carefully balanced. That's all I'm saying.

Talking about food baance reminds me of another thread... one that tried to balance meats vs vegetables for realism.

And you'd have to choose between feeding yourself on them, or using them to grow crops/feed smallbirds.

Never sacrifice your smallbirds over seeds. That's crazy talk! :o

But what if your inventory/chest was full then would it all just drop on the ground?

Ah, now there's the rub! This is the same problem Kevin debated ages ago. What happens to a stack when there is no room for it? Personally I think it should pop/drop.

Meanwhile.........GIVE ME MY BABY BUFFALO

I'm sure this is in the works... that's a guess of course. ;)

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Maybe I'm misinterpreting Kevin's post, but doesn't freshness combine when you put together different stacks rather than being ordered in a stack from most fresh to least fresh? I was under the impression that freshness is added together and averaged out in a stack so if you added one good item to a stack of bad item, you would end up with a stack with homogeneous freshness somewhere between the two freshness values.

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Maybe I'm misinterpreting Kevin's post, but doesn't freshness combine when you put together different stacks rather than being ordered in a stack from most fresh to least fresh? I was under the impression that freshness is added together and averaged out in a stack so if you added one good item to a stack of bad item, you would end up with a stack with homogeneous freshness somewhere between the two freshness values.

You may be understanding the idea correctly. To be honest, I'm just not sure. :)

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I mean who here would expect to cook poisonous food and then expect it to turn out just fine? I wouldn't.

I don't want to be that guy, but that is totally legit actually. In Sweden we have for example (one of many) a mushroom that is called "Murkla", it's poisons if eaten raw, but if you cook it it's a really tasty and fully eatable piece of food.

So I don't know where the HELL you got the idea. Anyway now you know.

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I think it'd be fun to add a sand or beach biome to the game. In it you can burn sand to make glass. Glass will be a requirement to make jars. It's not really realistic since you have to heat the sand to a very high temperature in order to melt it properly, but it tracks in-game logic pretty well (burning trees in the open to make charcoal, etc).

Edited by Arcita
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... Edit: just realized this would require a way to actually examine food...

CTRL + Click, I believe. If not, Shift + Click should work.

Edit: It is Shift + Click, CTRL + Click splits a stack

Also, I like the idea of food spoilage. Even when I was a noob, on my first world of Don't Starve, I made it to day 20 and food was never the problem.

Currently, I have 3 stacks of raw meat that I will probably never run out of because of Tallbirds.

Sidenote: Tallbird respawn rate needs to be nerfed, every day a new one spawns and I get free meat and eggs.

Edited by Enchanter
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And here I was going through this game thinking there was no way to split a stack. I'll have to remember this.

If you're holding a stack and control click an empty inventory slot or just the ground you can drop just one of the item too. :D

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I don't want to be that guy, but that is totally legit actually. In Sweden we have for example (one of many) a mushroom that is called "Murkla", it's poisons if eaten raw, but if you cook it it's a really tasty and fully eatable piece of food.

Fair enough. However there are still options, for example, maybe monster meat could rot faster than normal meat, or maybe hounds would stop attacking during winter.

I think it'd be fun to add a sand or beach biome to the game. In it you can burn sand to make glass. Glass will be a requirement to make jars. It's not really realistic since you have to heat the sand to a very high temperature in order to melt it properly, but it tracks in-game logic pretty well (burning trees in the open to make charcoal, etc).

Well I fully support a beach biome, which would give us two options. Either we melt sand for glass or we could find bottles/jars washed up on the shore. But as was mentioned earlier, instead of glass we could also opt for clay jars.

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1: Realism isn't always a good thing. Game balance is, but different people have different ideas about what is "too difficult". Food spoilage is a great way to deal with the ease with which players can currently stockpile infinite food supplies, but making it *too* complicated/realistic takes away from the cartoony game-y aspect, and adds more boring scutwork. Kevin's idea seems close to the far end of complexity, beyond which this idea could become hindrance rather than help.

2: "Canning" doesn't actually mean you have to use cans. Apparently, it also includes glass jars, in modern usage, and for the purposes of don't starve, should mean any sealable container. We already have the most important element for food preservation: Preservatives (honey works. Salt would be better.) Smoke is also usable. A smokehouse, using grass for fuel (very small amount of fire is used for smoking foods) would be a great addition. But canning would be another great option, requiring two new elements: A container (say, a clay pot) and a seal (wax. Specifically beeswax, which should be a drop from beehives and a harvestable product from bee boxes, or alternatively, should be obtained from honeycomb, which would then have to be renewable and a lot more common) To top the clay pot you could simply have it come with a clay lid, and seal the lid with wax, but more interesting would be to seal it with paper (papyrus) or cloth (made from beefalo wool, probably) treated with wax.

3: Kevin, please correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe when Kevin said that food will "stack linearly" he means that the stack's total freshness will simply be the unweighted (linear) average of the stacked elements. There's no "top" or "bottom" of the stack, you just get one big mess of food with freshness the average of all the elements. This is not (as pointed out by others) realistic, but it is fine for the game, and well-balanced. "But, that means you can add a little bit of good food to a pile of bad food and make (barely) good food!" Yup. And that's not only game-balanced (the good food loses *exactly* as much freshness as the bad food gains) but it's also realistic. Using bad food as filler in recipes is an ancient and honorable tradition... And what would you do with the combined stack of barely-fresh food? You'd cook it over the fire or stuff it in the crock-pot immediately, or it would just go bad again, just like in life.

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I'd also like to add that most of what we consider 'cuisine' started out doing one or both of two things: Adding undesirable food (e.g. veggies in stir-fry) to desirable food (e.g. meat) to make the desirable food go further, or overcoming spoilage (adding salt, and maybe smoke, to rotting pig gave us this thing called bacon, which I understand is considered by some today to be more desirable than the pig, even fresh. Also, virtually all spicy food is derived from warm climates where meat tends to spoil rapidly. Spice conceals the flavor of rotting meat. Not an accident.)

Now, we've refined these techniques to the point where they actually add dramatically to the taste and in some cases the nutritional value of the food (stir-fry is much healthier for the modern human than is plain grilled meat, because, you know, veggies) and we generally use refrigeration and chemical preservatives so we rarely eat rotting or rotten meat, veggies, et c. even when we are adding spices, but the techniques have their origins in these practical needs.

Also, living on seeds is highly 'realistic'. Seeds contain the richest nutrients (fats, proteins, et c.) of any part of almost any plant. The highest-energy-use animals are birds, and many types of birds live entirely on seeds. Relative to total body mass, even humans with our highly energy-hungry oversized brains don't need nearly as much energy. And seeds have always been a major component of human diets, as well.

The single unit of "seeds" is "seeds", not "seed". Nowhere in Don't Starve does it say how many seeds are in a "seeds". Also, it's a game.

And on the anti-seeds front: Several people have pointed out how long seeds last if kept dry (or "properly stored") and I just want to ask any of you if you've ever tried to keep anything dry in the wilderness without modern artificial materials (plastics, foils, et c.)? I do think seeds should last longer than other stuff, and maybe they could even turn into sprouts instead of going bad? But definitely they would not last forever without preservation.

And roasting or toasting the seeds should make them last longer, not shorter. It's good for realism and game balance, because cooking the seeds does take time, effort, and resources.

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I like the idea of food spoilage, but I feel that farming has been nerfed more than enough already. Without having turbo plots, it is very very hard to grow enough food to self sustain as long as you have the seeds to do it. with food spoilage however, I feel like it will make those efforts worthless for the most part. I have found myself using the crock pot more and more to cool monster meat to supplement my meager farm. and store some food.

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Okay. I really like this idea overall.

Honey. Using honey in the preservation process and allowing bees to hibernate in winter makes it so people have to decide whether to use it to keep their food fresh, or to heal. It will make the resource naturally more limited without overdoing it. Honey doesn't spoil and was used in the preservation process because it is actually antiseptic. They even use it to treat wounds because it kills germs.

If you try to make it too hard to get regular food during winter, people will be playing sim-canning instead of Don't Starve in order to make it through winter. No veggies is awesome, of course bees hibernate in winter so no new honey till spring either, but pigs respawn slower now and other sources should remain available. Making it so that the dried food takes a lot more to keep you fed will result in grinding, and I know you are trying to avoid that.

We could make drying racks out of rope and sticks to dry fish and meat on.

Edit: And about the meat effigies... I disagree that they should spoil, but maybe they should have a limit to the number you can make, like only 1 at a time?

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I love this idea, and I certainly want it now. My only gripe is in the averaging of food freshness. The way you wrote it, you could essentially keep a batch of morsels fresh forever by constantly picking up new morsels. I think it should still average, but the formula would be heavily weighted in favor of the spoiled food, so one stack would eventually go bad no matter how much you added to it.

Plus, it makes sense realistically to keep your food separated. As in, each day you go hunting, move the new food to a brand new stack to keep it separated for later.

Also, cooking spoiled meat should not result in fresh cooked meat. That not only makes no sense, but imbalances the entire system.

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Also, cooking spoiled meat should not result in fresh cooked meat. That not only makes no sense, but imbalances the entire system.

See my previous post about the origins of 'cuisine'. Not only does it make sense, it's one of the primary functions of cooking. Cooking kills harmful pathogens in foods and other types of preparation mask the taste so that food can be eaten much later than otherwise. Just because we don't do it that way now doesn't mean it doesn't work. Remember, when you're starving, your definition of 'spoiled' changes.

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See my previous post about the origins of 'cuisine'. Not only does it make sense, it's one of the primary functions of cooking. Cooking kills harmful pathogens in foods and other types of preparation mask the taste so that food can be eaten much later than otherwise. Just because we don't do it that way now doesn't mean it doesn't work. Remember, when you're starving, your definition of 'spoiled' changes.

Okay, but it should at least not increase its freshness to 100%. Perhaps it only adds 30-40% freshness to the food.

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