Is bundling wrap overpowered?

[Sinister_Fang]

I feel like this conversation is long overdue. I see it brought up now and then but I haven't seen a full discussion about it before.

Personally, I feel like being able to stop spoilage completely just kills the whole spoiling mechanic in general. Getting food is already easy enough and now you have an easier method of hoarding it now. I remember when it was just added and when my friends and I discovered it completely stops spoiling. We all pretty much thought "Well that's gonna get nerfed pretty soon.", but it hasn't been touched since it's introduction. I feel like at the very least, bundled supplies should only slow spoilage like an ice box instead of completely stopping it.

Now I know logic isn't this game strong suit, but the bundling wrap also doesn't make much sense. How is it that wrapping up food in some wax paper better at preserving food then a fridge?

[Lumina]

So i don't think it's "broken", but yeah it's too powerful and deserve a little tuning.

[fimmatek]

Well, I also think bundling wraps in this state are quite overpowered. The way they work is completely fine, but there can be way too much of them, like killing Klaus a few times gives a lot of wax papers which makes food storage a lot easier. 

On the other hand, for people who don't play that much or not on such high level this is just fine. It also can be annoying to make a new rope allways you want to eat, so it wouldn't replace the fridge.

Alltogether I don't know if bundling wraps should be changed or not... I think it's a bit similar to the scaled furnace: really effective and efficient, but still cannot replace firepits... 

[t1morino88eex]

Leave the bundling wrap alone. It's good as it is.

[Aeglefire]

I personally love stopping spoilage.

[HutGenerator]

Stop spoiling is quite overpower in my opinion. But if they nerf it and remove stop spoiling, bundle wrap is kinda useless.

I never use it because I am lack of slot or wrapping any non-food items. The default available slot and a krampus sack is sufficient for the game actually. Even if I have not enough slot, running twice the journey is still fine. Or you can just throw the not-so-important stuff.

The only thing I wrap is food.

So, I actually have no idea how they should balance it. :/

[Kittydub]

I never use them to stop spoilage, just seems a bit cheaty to me, since I figured as well that it would be nerfed soon enough. I only use those things (the gift wraps from Winters Feast too) to save space in my chests. I never lack inventory space. So yes, it should be nerfed imo. I don't think this is intended. 

[Rily]

I agree, since the wax paper is in the game I was using a ham bat for boss fights, the same ham bat for every boss, I have packages with light bulbs, glow berrys, jerky and all those frog legs from frog rain, yeah, is quite broken, however I like the ability to preserve food, maybe a little nerf would be good but I don't think that this mechanic should be removed, maybe reducing the stack size or making the wax paper recipe more expensive, like 2 or even 4 honeycombs to make one single wax paper, how about making one of the required items recipe a boss drop or a rare drop?, the bee wax could be obtained from a rare blueprint from a boss like the beequeen, that could limit how many B wraps your team can make until you beat the beequeen for each player 

[Zeruul]

But how can I hoard light bulbs to fuel my lantern/mushroom light powerhouse if "stop spoilage" is removed? :((

[Lumina]

It could become a "slow spoilage" instead. Still useful, not as powerful.

[Auth]

If you wrap food you could get "Sloppy bundled wrap" or something like that, which causes it to undo itself after a while. Again, only for food.
It'd stop spoiling of the food, but you'd have to maintain the rope on it constantly if you want it to keep doing that. Because I don't know about you, but I think having 160 full pots of steaming hot soup may dissolve wrapping.

[CaptainChaotica]

I dunno, I only use it to put together some supplies that kinda make sense together, to save space in my own inventory or put a little help-package near a touchstone, myself. 

...when I remember I can make it now at all, that is.  : P

Food?  Food goes in the fridge, or if I want to preserve it a bit and it's meat, on the drying rack, or if it's a veggie I want to preserve, in the pickle barrel (the Pickle It mod.  And that doesn't work for _all_ plant-style foods). 

COMPLETE stopping of spoilage...well, that's like those too-easy magic fridge mods that I am never going to download.  I'm a fairly easycore player by some people's standards, but I'm not gonna use something that feels like OUTRIGHT cheating.

...Notorious

[Sinister_Fang]

4 hours ago, Zeruul said:

But how can I hoard light bulbs to fuel my lantern/mushroom light powerhouse if "stop spoilage" is removed? :((

Maybe by taking a trip into the caves every now and then? It's not like light bulbs are in short supply...

[TemporaryMan]

Overpowered... because it can preserve food?

We already have bird cages.  We already have ice boxes.  And Wendy or Webber can get 20-60 monster meat in a day just hanging out with spiders.  And you're worried about preserving and hoarding food?

Do you know what one of the biggest personal insights I've had playing this game is?  I try to save everything.  I try to hoard everything.  I try to waste nothing, absolutely nothing.  Picked a flower by accident?  Feed it to a pig, manure is 3x as good as rot.  Every monster meat that falls gets turned into jerky, then eggs, then fried eggs, eggs again, and finally gold.  My single player DS worlds have hoards of 3000+ gold.  I used to never hammer structures to move them somewhere better because I'd lose half the cost.  Not even pig houses.  And it's all useless.  All completely useless, because saving resources and using everything at maximum efficiency makes absolutely no sense when you can just farm more.  Do you know why I did things that way?  Because I grew up poor with few if any opportunities to earn extra income, so the only thing I could do is try to manage my resources more efficiently.  It's been the same with Skyrim, or Oblivion, or Diablo II: my instinct is to pick up every scrap and hoard it until I can sell it at the optimum price, but I have a blind spot about just farming somewhere with high returns because in real life, I can't do that.  I mean, I farmed in KoL, but somehow the lesson didn't stick until now.

All you accomplish by hoarding food in this game is cluttering your base with wrapped bundles and denying yourself the gold you should have had by trading that spare meat ages ago.  Or rotten eggs.  Whatever.  Food is not scarce.  Hoarding it all makes no sense.  Build the infrastructure to replace resources easily and you'll never need to worry about waste.

In that light, no, I don't think the bundling wrap is OP.  It's more effective and space-efficient than an insulated pack and more secure and reliable than Snow Chester, but it's more hassle to use and costs production.  You're paying for that bundling wrap every time you harvest honey and there's one less bee box.

What it does is allow you to place emergency supply packages in critical areas, like the postern, touch stones, cave entrances, etc.  With proper planning, you might just save yourself in a crisis.  Of course, given that you could just mass-produce hearts, meat effigies and booster shots...

[Sinister_Fang]

5 minutes ago, TemporaryMan said:

Overpowered... because it can preserve food?

It's not overpowered because it preserves food, but because it completely halts all spoilage completely. All other methods of preserving food such as ice boxes, drying racks and cycling eggs with a birdcage can just be completely ignored for the most part. And what little utility the insulated pack had is now gone (even before bundled supplies it was pretty terrible). In a game like this, it's mostly about hoarding resources. But with food, you had to be careful and find a balance otherwise you'd just waste a lot of it. But now that it can be stopped... food is just another resource to hoard. Sure, food is fairly easy to get... but now you don't really need to put any effort into managing it.

My problem here is that they introduced a method of completely destroying a staple game mechanic. And it's not like it's even an endgame kinda thing. You can very easily get bundling wrap within the first few days. Find the swamp, destroy a bee hive and make a science machine.

[AnonymousKoala]

My issue with it is that it does too much for too little of a cost. It's entirely science machine tier iirc and essentially costs very very very very little resources to craft, followed by 3 grass for each re-wrapping. That, making it so you can carry 160 pieces of meatballs/bacon and eggs/meaty stew, without them ever spoiling...is so op I can't even begin talking about it.

Now if you stop its effects it'll likely be used far less. But if you make it a rare blueprint for Queen Bee...you got a reason to kill her at least once other than her lackluster drops, and the simple recipe becomes locked behind a rougher task.

[Mday]

Ice box, you left click to open and close it.

Bundle, you craft a rope to close it. All the item stored in the bundle drops on the floor as you open the bundle.

So while it is true that the bundle can preserve food better than the ice box, it won't be able to replace the ice box. The ice box is just so much easier to use than a bundle. Yes it is science machine tier, but it won't matter cause players will still need to build that ice box. Yes you can rely on using a bundle and completely ditch the ice box, but it is kinda silly and gives no real benefits in doing that. So from my point of view, it is not op.

[HamBatter]

2 hours ago, AnonymousKoala said:

you can carry 160 pieces of meatballs/bacon and eggs/meaty stew

What's the least amount of grass you need to consume it all without having any go stale, regular spoilage?

[AnonymousKoala]

1 minute ago, HamBatter said:

What's the least amount of grass you need to consume it all without having any go stale?

Depends on the amount of food and how much you need. Aka math that I am not going to do right now. Either way, compared to how much you can have just lying...not enough for that.

[DVGMedia]

2 hours ago, AnonymousKoala said:

Queen Bee...you got a reason to kill her at least once other than her lackluster drops,

you just havent unlocked the potential of the bee hat yet.....

 

to be honest bundling wraps seem alright considering i mostly play on long lasting dedicated pub servers it is a good way to save food in your base if you happen to log out and no one goes to tends to it or if you dont want to have a bunch of food on you when you log out. sure bundlings can get out of hand but there are also a finite amount of beehives in the world if you dont have the killer bee biome. This also makes it harder in larger servers cause more people want wraps so we have to end up killing the queen for her 2 honeycomb chance. so no people are just really overthinking this whole spoilage thing.

[AnonymousKoala]

Just now, EsaiXD said:

you just havent unlocked the potential of the bee hat yet.....

 

to be honest bundling wraps seem alright considering i mostly play on long lasting dedicated pub servers it is a good way to save food in your base if you happen to log out and no one goes to tends to it or if you dont want to have a bunch of food on you when you log out. sure bundlings can get out of hand but there are also a finite amount of beehives in the world if you dont have the killer bee biome. This also makes it harder in larger servers cause more people want wraps so we have to end up killing the queen for her 2 honeycomb chance. so no people are just really overthinking this whole spoilage thing.

I have, multiple times. It's great and interesting but there's other methods which don't require the killing of such an annoying boss, or hoping Klaus gives you that. If you have enough people or a contraption or smth to easily dispatch her though, more power to you and enjoy it. (I've seen your sanity farm too, nice job)

 

That's a fair enough argument that I can see the logic of. But it still feels too powerful for how early it can be used. In the later game it's wonderful and I want it to stay as good as it is now for that, but if it's an early game item...yeah. Though I suppose you can make the argument of choosing either that or bee boxes with your early honeycombs.

[Tosh]

I think that the bundling wrap should slow down spoilage, but not halt it entirely. I even wouldn't mind if it preserved food more effectively than the fridge/Chester/insulated pack, so long as the effect is stackable (i.e. Putting it in a fridge would double the spoilage time of the bundle).

[Prakhar]

God no. I don't want another marble shrub.

[superfast]

I agree it's very powerful. At first I thought the non-spoilage was a bug, similarly to leaving food on crockpots/drying racks all that time ago. But Klei made it clear on stream that non-spoilage is deliberate so I don't see them changing it. And if it was changed, it would make Hutch/Chester even more pointless as the items of choice for carrying extra items.

Keep the non-spoilage but make it more expensive seems the best solution to me. A blueprint drop from Beequeen seems the obvious answer.

[Sinister_Fang]

Honestly, I'm surprised at how many people are fine with the bundles. It seems like whenever it was brought up in the past there's almost always a comment about it being broken.

ANR is just making things too easy in general without adding much of a challenge...

1 hour ago, Prakhar said:

God no. I don't want another marble shrub.

This is a beta after all. Things get nerfed and rebalanced. Besides, marble shrubs makes it easy to get a lot of marble even after the nerf. And it's not like you're using marble as much as you would logs or rocks.