Food System Additions/Fixes

[Zoik]

After reading some of the posts, I came up with a few ideas. Hopefully this will make the game more fun and fix some existing issues.

Exclusive Food Storage - perishable items will deteriorate fast if not stored in appropriate food storage(like a refrigerator or lunch bag). Limit the number of food storage that can be made. This will still allow players to stock up on food for an expedition or to get through winter. This could have prevented the hoarding issue in the first place.

Preserved Food Recipe - if you don’t limit the food storage space, preserved food can still be hoarded. Maybe add more time to create the preserved food compared to regular dishes. This encourage “making enough for what you need” because anything more than that will be a waste.

Durability on Crock Pot Dishes - instead of being able to stack it, it will have durability like tools so it takes a few bites to finish one and it will also have a spoil countdown. Hopefully this will be less complicated than dealing with how to stack food with different spoil value. The durability of the dish will also vary depending on how much ingredients you used. "Only the freshest and finest ingredients will make the 'Ultimate Dish'”.

Berry Bush Cycle Reset - make the berries “fall off” if not picked after a long time and then it will reset to the start of the cycle. You might need to rebalance gobblers for this because replanted bushes will have more vulnerability to getting picked too early or make them only pick the ripe ones. This might be more exciting because you will have to compete with a gobbler to pick the ripe berries or it will just fall off and rot if left unattended. This will also remove the “replant and forget”, then come back with bushes full with ripe berries.

[mobius187]

After reading some of the posts, I came up with a few ideas. Hopefully this will make the game more fun and fix some existing issues.

Suggestions are always appreciated.

Exclusive Food Storage - perishable items will deteriorate fast if not stored in appropriate food storage(like a refrigerator or lunch bag). Limit the number of food storage that can be made. This will still allow players to stock up on food for an expedition or to get through winter. This could have prevented the hoarding issue in the first place.

A similar idea was proposed by Kevin (Dev) and some players. For example, I suggested that perhaps we could craft an ice box that could help keep food cold and reduce its decay rate. In most cases the solution was never permanent, it only delayed the innevitable. As such, players still need to eat the food Sooner or later before it decayed anyway.

Hoarding food is currently an issue, but once the Devs introduce decay then it will put an end to this approach.

Preserved Food Recipe - if you don’t limit the food storage space, preserved food can still be hoarded. Maybe add more time to create the preserved food compared to regular dishes. This encourage “making enough for what you need” because anything more than that will be a waste.

Well keep in mind that even preserved food have a "shelf life", or simply, they are still decaying... only more slowly because they last longer. As such, Sooner or later you need to eat the food or risk it becoming rotten. As for a reason why players should preserver all their foods, well in the case of salted meats, to preserve meat, it was suggested that the Hunger value restored by preserved foods was less than that of fresh food. So preserving the food allowed you to keep it longer, but now it satiates less hunger than fresh food. So if you have a choice it's always better to eat fresh food.

Durability on Crock Pot Dishes - instead of being able to stack it, it will have durability like tools so it takes a few bites to finish one and it will also have a spoil countdown. Hopefully this will be less complicated than dealing with how to stack food with different spoil value. The durability of the dish will also vary depending on how much ingredients you used. "Only the freshest and finest ingredients will make the 'Ultimate Dish'”.

Well the system Kevin proposed did not involve tracking decay values for individual foods, but rather averaged the decay off the food in the stack. So by adding fresh food, of the same type, to a stack it improved the overall freshness of the food by a ratio of teh total foods. Of course the fresh food that was just added is no longer fresh.

For me, I suggested that all foods maintain/track their own freshness and that foods within stacks were organized from the oldest (top) to the freshest (bottom), so you always ate the odlest food first and thus reduced the chance it would spoil.

On the topic of "dishes", Kevin did suggest clay pots, which we assume is in reference to preserved fruits/vegetables (i.e. jams, ect). Whether we will re-use these pots is unclear, but I like to think they'll work like wooden bowls from Minecraft (i.e. used for Mushroom Stew).

Berry Bush Cycle Reset - make the berries “fall off” if not picked after a long time and then it will reset to the start of the cycle. You might need to rebalance gobblers for this because replanted bushes will have more vulnerability to getting picked too early or make them only pick the ripe ones. This might be more exciting because you will have to compete with a gobbler to pick the ripe berries or it will just fall off and rot if left unattended. This will also remove the “replant and forget”, then come back with bushes full with ripe berries.

Well the Gobbler is already a chore, if you ask my opinion.

As for berries falling off, that might work. To date the only suggestion I made along these lines was that when Winter arrives all berry bushes should lose their berries and not grow new ones until Winter ends.

[genmike9]

"Berry Bush Cycle Reset" love the berries drop off if not picked within a certain time limit. would definitely help stop the berry hoarding