Raw mealworm should have a chance to cause illness

[chromiumboy]

Given the ease with which a player can set up and forget mealworms in planter boxes and never have to worry about food again, I'd like to suggest that mealworm have a chance to cause illness, similarly to how mushbars can cause diarrhea

One possibility: parastic worm - while infected, a duplicant consumes more food and tires more easily

To avoid illness, the player should pickle the mealworms, or make liceloafs. That way the player has to invest some resources (dupe time / water) to keep dupes healthy if they stick to the most basic of foods

[Kasuha]

Well, Klei already stated that they're planning to nerf the art spam "solution" players are using to manage stress. That could make stress much more of an issue and that could ultimately drive players towards using quality food.

I'm a bit torn on the issue though since in my gameplay, I had to feed my dupes lice till rather late stages of the game (~cycle 200) before I was finally able to set up  a reliable plant farm.

[Coolthulhu]

Stress alone won't make lice bad. I'm currently playing a "challenge" where I build no statues, paintings or massage tables and it's all perfectly manageable as long as you have no destructive dupes. Having to mop up occasional pool of tears or vomit is a bit tedious, but it adds no real difficulty in a well managed colony.

[BlueLance]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Stress alone won't make lice bad. I'm currently playing a "challenge" where I build no statues, paintings or massage tables and it's all perfectly manageable as long as you have no destructive dupes. Having to mop up occasional pool of tears or vomit is a bit tedious, but it adds no real difficulty in a well managed colony.

I have also tried this, cleaning the floors quickly from debris and keeping the area well ventilated really does help but sometimes I can go ages without anything and then suddenly someone just decides LOL im gonna freak out and they climb up to 70% whilst everyone else is at like 11%

[brummbar7]

8 hours ago, chromiumboy said:

Given the ease with which a player can set up and forget mealworms in planter boxes and never have to worry about food again, I'd like to suggest that mealworm have a chance to cause illness, similarly to how mushbars can cause diarrhea

One possibility: parastic worm - while infected, a duplicant consumes more food and tires more easily

Kind of the problem I think, is that that suggestion doesn't scale with relation to the ever-present issue of difficulty for newbs.  Food can be a bit dicey in the early game, and this idea would penalize newbs further, while not really providing any dis-incentive for late-game play; since you quickly end up with huge amounts of seeds, you can just spam yet more mealwood to overcome any hunger issues.  Meanwhile tiring more easily could be considered forcing everyone to be a narcoleptic for a time, which is not great.    I think whatever happens with mealwood, it would be best if it were arranged so that the penalty increases the later in the game you are, and probably the easiest way to do that is to make it relative to dupe level, which makes the easiest hook stress, which is why people keep saying the stress penalties for bad food need to be upped.  It's a solution that scales with dupe level, meaning it doesn't penalize (and hence hopefully does not alienate) the total newbs.

That said, reducing the ridiculous seed spawn rate would help a lot.  Either drastically nerfing it, or bringing back 'yield-like' mechanics, wherein plants don't die from off conditions (only stifling like now) however they don't yield seeds unless within a somewhat narrow 'ideal window' of temperature and pressure and perhaps irrigation and fertilization.  In this way, mealwood is a bit less easy to spam.  Especially for newbs.  Yet it's not a total penalty for newbs, but more of a brake on colony size.  More limited starting biome food could also help push people to expand, rather than turtling in the start biome. 

[BlueLance]

In the beggining a noob can fall back on mush bars (They will have dirt and water in abundance to get them very far on these I used to live off of the stuff until i moved to mealwood) and mealwood would be a direct upgrade to that, I do think it needs either water or fertilizer requirements though, with the mealloaf being the next upgrade. 

Mush Bars = Diarrhoea.

Raw Meal Lice(if they do not add any additional requirement) = Some Plant based disease? Or a stat reduction for X amount of cycles when eaten, Only applies if it is grown by a player.

Mealloaf = No side effects as they have been cooked out of it

 

Edit - Plant disease can be harmless to Mealwood plants but possibly can kill other plants? 

Edi 2 - I completely glazed over the parasitic worm mentioned, sorry but I do agree that raw mealwood should have a negative effect that is worse than Mush bars since it is virtually free easy to spam food, but the effect shouldnt be to the point that it can kill new players and it will just inconvenience veteran players thus stopping it being spammed. Since right now 4 plants = 1 dupe/cycle

[chromiumboy]

7 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

Kind of the problem I think, is that that suggestion doesn't scale with relation to the ever-present issue of difficulty for newbs. 

With the introduction of the germ system you can now get around that problem; rather than have a fixed chance of illness eat time a dupe eats something, you could just have eating raw mealworms give the dupe a small dose of germs (food poisoning or something else). That way dupes will initially be fine, but reliance on raw mealworm in the long haul will cause problems

[brummbar7]

33 minutes ago, chromiumboy said:

With the introduction of the germ system you can now get around that problem; rather than have a fixed chance of illness eat time a dupe eats something, you could just have eating raw mealworms give the dupe a small dose of germs (food poisoning or something else). That way dupes will initially be fine, but reliance on raw mealworm in the long haul will cause problems

That still doesn't scale - there's nothing abut it that will give the late game more problems than the early game/newbs.  If the food poisoning sources became greater in the later game, it might scale, as the player would need to dump any source of FP that they could.   But that is not how it goes currently.  FP becomes less of an issue in the late game, not more.

[brummbar7]

To build on the thought of germs though, meal lice could carry a disease that is deadly to other plants.  Dupes then need only have the germs on their surface, and they are transferred by fertilizer, seeds, building farm tiles, and maybe even harvesting.   This disease is not problematic in the early game as it does not affect starting biome plants - lice and bristles.  But it does affect other plants, stifling or killing them.  This allows this new disease to be not a problem in the early game, but once the player exists the start biome, if they continue using meal lice, they risk contaminating plants *in the wild* which in the current iteration especially would be disastrous as wild harvesting is by far preferable for sleet wheat and pinchas.  This is a scaling threat.  It lets newbs use the food, but later game player will want to move on,  unless they can carefully control their mealwood farms with wash stations and possibly limited access.   It's a soft and abrupt scale: soft because it could still be controlled, vs dupe expectations which would be a hard scale.  And abrupt because there would be incentive to drop it as soon as the player exits the starting biome, rather than a gradual incentive.  But, it would fit the bill of a later game incentive to drop mealwood, that does not penalize newbs and early game too harshly (or at all in this case).

[chromiumboy]

2 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

That still doesn't scale - there's nothing abut it that will give the late game more problems than the early game/newbs.

If we make it a new type of germ rather than food poisoning, and make it so that it can only be reduced/expire by waiting it out, eating the raw mealworm each day will gradually build up the amount of germs and will eventually start weakening dupe immunity, which is becomes very dangerous when your dupes enter regions with slime lung. You can scale the amount of germs to the amount of immune system weakening as you like. Food poisoning already weaks immunity far greater than slime lung does, for example.

Your ideas about pests and disease affecting crops are interesting though

[BlueLance]

10 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

To build on the thought of germs though, meal lice could carry a disease that is deadly to other plants.  Dupes then need only have the germs on their surface, and they are transferred by fertilizer, seeds, building farm tiles, and maybe even harvesting.   This disease is not problematic in the early game as it does not affect starting biome plants - lice and bristles.  But it does affect other plants, stifling or killing them.  This allows this new disease to be not a problem in the early game, but once the player exists the start biome, if they continue using meal lice, they risk contaminating plants *in the wild* which in the current iteration especially would be disastrous as wild harvesting is by far preferable for sleet wheat and pinchas.  This is a scaling threat.  It lets newbs use the food, but later game player will want to move on,  unless they can carefully control their mealwood farms with wash stations and possibly limited access.   It's a soft and abrupt scale: soft because it could still be controlled, vs dupe expectations which would be a hard scale.  And abrupt because there would be incentive to drop it as soon as the player exits the starting biome, rather than a gradual incentive.  But, it would fit the bill of a later game incentive to drop mealwood, that does not penalize newbs and early game too harshly (or at all in this case).

Another option would be have a harmless disease, which only flares up If certain conditions are met, for instance if you are in a place or in the presence of things that only late game players would usually have. For instance the Ice Biome, the onyl downside to this is after they rejig the maps again it probably wont work.

[Le0n1des]

The mealworm spamming problem is a single case of any food spamming (it was sleetwheet in AU), and will remain (simply by shifting to the next easiest plant). I'd suggest implementing a "Variety" mechanics - meaning a dupe will be reluctant of eating the same thing over and over (unless its the only available food). And will suffer "lack of diversity" stress penalty. If fed the same food source (meal lice, raw, pickled or fried, are still meal lice) for 10 cycles - we could have an "avitaminosis" status debuff

[BlueLance]

12 minutes ago, Le0n1des said:

The mealworm spamming problem is a single case of any food spamming (it was sleetwheet in AU), and will remain (simply by shifting to the next easiest plant). I'd suggest implementing a "Variety" mechanics - meaning a dupe will be reluctant of eating the same thing over and over (unless its the only available food). And will suffer "lack of diversity" stress penalty. If fed the same food source (meal lice, raw, pickled or fried, are still meal lice) for 10 cycles - we could have an "avitaminosis" status debuff

I think the problem isn't so much that people will shift to the next easiest plant, that will always be the case, and depending on your dupes food requirements will also influence it if the stress toll is big enough The problem is that right now Mealwood needs nothing at all to be so good, at least sleetwheat you had to set up stuff etc, variety would be a good idea actually, and 10 cycles seems like a fair amount imo, especially since players have access to several types of food at the beggining, and then they can grow meal lice and mushrooms with relative ease.

[Le0n1des]

You would also want to save up wild berries/mushrooms/roots as emergency food to fight of the avitaminosis, maybe even hunt down a hatch if things get bad.

Variety should also apply to the different methods to prepare the food, to inject some importance to pickled/fried varieties of the meal lice (which should not fend off avitaminosis though)

[BlueLance]

16 minutes ago, Le0n1des said:

You would also want to save up wild berries/mushrooms/roots as emergency food to fight of the avitaminosis, maybe even hunt down a hatch if things get bad.

Variety should also apply to the different methods to prepare the food, to inject some importance to pickled/fried varieties of the meal lice (which should not fend off avitaminosis though)

Saving up food isn't exactly new player friendly, Either there needs to be a grace period at the beggining, otherwise we will have the "THIS GAME IS BROKEN I DIE AFTER 10 CYCLES" complaints, Then Klei will nerf it. Same thing that happened with Germs.

So either a grace period is needed, More variety in starting food, Obviously for players who have played the game enough I think after about 15 cycles I could set up 2 farms 1 for Mealwood and 1 for Mushrooms. After that the issue still persists because that is a variety.

With players needing to eventually meet the food standards of a dupe, to avoid stress buildup players, plus having a 10 cycle variety thing, I think most new players would be overrun. Between Disease, Food Expectations, and Food Variety, that coupled with Stress, Carbon Dioxide, lack of Oxygen, Lack of a tutorial, i think it would be a lot to take in for new players that are not in for a rollercoaster of death and re runs.

[Kasuha]

5 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

it would be a lot to take in for new players that are not in for a rollercoaster of death and re runs.

I thought that's how Klei games work. At least it was for me when I started playing Don't Starve...

[BlueLance]

Just now, Kasuha said:

I thought that's how Klei games work. At least it was for me when I started playing Don't Starve...

That's true, but I find it less daunting to start over in DS and DST than I do in ONI, and everyone is different, so I am not sure how new people find these games, I had friends with DST so i played it even if we all died.

[chromiumboy]

18 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

That's true, but I find it less daunting to start over in DS and DST than I do in ONI, and everyone is different, so I am not sure how new people find these games, I had friends with DST so i played it even if we all died.

Also in Don't Starve, it tends to be rather obvious what you did wrong when you die, and you have a good idea on how you could do better next time. In ONI, it's the small things that build up over time unnoticed that get you, and that makes it harder to unpick what went wrong and how to improve, because everything was going so well....

Heh, the only thing I remember from my first few colonies (just after early access started) was that they were a beautiful disaster, always balanced on a knifes edge. I really love that feeling

[BlueLance]

7 minutes ago, chromiumboy said:

Heh, the only thing I remember from my first few colonies (just after early access started) was that they were a beautiful disaster, always balanced on a knifes edge. I really love that feeling

For me my first couple of deaths were a mix of Binge Eaters consuming 10,000 Calories, and Carbon Dioxide filling the floor so my dupes couldnt reach the oxygen above them...

[Le0n1des]

57 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

With players needing to eventually meet the food standards of a dupe, to avoid stress buildup players, plus having a 10 cycle variety thing, I think most new players would be overrun.

It seems to me upon seeing a single warning such as "Dave has avitaminosis from eating nothing but meal lice lately" most players will notice there are other food sources in the game...

[brummbar7]

Food variety is just another form of dupe expectations tied to level.  As Blue says, you can't put that kind of thing on newbs, at least not without providing more food available in the start biome.  So you'd have to only have it come in later in the game.  There's nowhere near enough hatches to make that sustainable, and bristles are not reliable till you have hydroponic tiles and likely also thermoregulators and even then you have to have a good grasp of pipe radiators.  Unless maybe hydrofans were fixed to actually function in a newb-friendly way so you could reliably keep your wild bristles growing.  I'm not sure newbs get access to mushrooms fast enough to make that the alternate.  Klei would also have to hard-code the alternating of foods, because right now you would have 0 control over making your dupes eat alternate foods.  You'd have to micro their permissions under the current system - not fun. 

[BlueLance]

4 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I'm not sure newbs get access to mushrooms fast enough to make that the alternate.  

The other issue is even if they can get to them fast enough (It is possible) They would then have Slimelung start spreading which will most likely be their doom

[Kasuha]

3 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

bristles are not reliable till you have hydroponic tiles and likely also thermoregulators and even then you have to have a good grasp of pipe radiators.

It's not all that bad, plants now weigh only a few kg and they accept the environment temperature fast. If you build your farm in ice biome, it can work well for quite long time without conditioning. Hydroponic tiles are necessary though and so are abyssalite pipes.

[BlueLance]

17 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

It's not all that bad, plants now weigh only a few kg and they accept the environment temperature fast. If you build your farm in ice biome, it can work well for quite long time without conditioning. Hydroponic tiles are necessary though and so are abyssalite pipes.

For New people they wouldn't think of or understand the exact reason why, or that abysallite pipes are useful for that application. They would also have to travel to find an ice biome. So adding a new constraint with to food would be pretty heavy on new players.

[Kasuha]

46 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

For New people they wouldn't think of or understand the exact reason why, or that abysallite pipes are useful for that application.

Well okay, I'll correct my statement. I believe even new people will notice that their plants are stifled due to heat, and will check the temperature overlay, will realize that it's their water pipes what is too hot - and they'll either build insulated pipes (-> less reduction of farm lifetime), find out about abyssalite (solution of choice) or will simply cool the water using the aquatuner. So I don't think there's a problem that newbies will have no clue how to solve.