Perishable Food

[Xacktastic]

How intensly would it change gameplay if food was perishable? Like, different kinds of food had different shelf life, that way you couldn't just stockpile. You would need to have access to a food source to feel secure. I think it sounds way hardcore.

[cptCalavera]

Ye this has been brought up a few times before. Most people seem to like the idea. But it seems hard to make it happen. From a programming view point.

[Xacktastic]

Hm, that makes sense. Oh well!

[burfl]

It could be very difficult to implement a shelf life for each individual piece, since the food is stored in stacks. My guess would be that in code, they treat a stack as one item with a quantity associated with it. So handling things like adding a brand new fresh piece to a nearly expired stack would be rough. I suppose they could keep a list of expiration times and expire one piece at a time from the stack, but that would require more memory and complexity and it would be hard for the player to know when most of the stack would expire.

[Kevin]

It could be very difficult to implement a shelf life for each individual piece, since the food is stored in stacks. My guess would be that in code, they treat a stack as one item with a quantity associated with it. So handling things like adding a brand new fresh piece to a nearly expired stack would be rough. I suppose they could keep a list of expiration times and expire one piece at a time from the stack, but that would require more memory and complexity and it would be hard for the player to know when most of the stack would expire.

This. Well, it's not so much a programming issue as a user interface issue. Let's say you have a full stack of meat, all with different spoilage times. When individual pieces spoil, what should we do? Give you a new spoiled meat piece? What if your inventory is full? Do you drop it? How do you inspect the stats of individual pieces in the stack? How do you pick a particular piece? What pieces get used for crafting? etc. etc. etc.

[burfl]

Obviously, you eat and/or craft with the ones that are closest to spoiling, Kevin! :DAs for the rest of that, yea good points all.

[LadyD]

Kevin has a big point.It changes everything. It would be hard to work with and around unless say the meat VANISHED when it was spoiled?In that case people would have to have some way to know when it was going to 'vanish'And that would require ability to see all stats in a stack and that is very complicated and messy...I totally against spoilage... just because I like our creators have more time to make Fishing and monsters happen.

[burfl]

our creators

All hail Klei? I thought this was quite a funny way to refer to them.

[LadyD]

HAIL!

They have our souls in jars you know... keeps us loyal

[Xacktastic]

Wow, I didn't think about it that way. Thanks burfl and Kevin! It does seem like it would be hard to figure that out, I can't do it in my own head. Haha

[tamraine]

If you made traps cost less than 8 (!) grass each, I would consider it. But there's enough grinds as it is without entropy on your damn food supply.

[MrEntity]

Why do so many people seem to think grass is hard to come by? Just plant a giant patch of it (take a day or two digging up all the grass you pass (also twigs)) and you've got a full day worth of grass picking every week or so. If anything I always have too much grass. Then again I don't really build many traps since it just isn't necessary. It is easy enough to kill bunnies just by running at them from the direction of their warren and morsels are pretty worthless as an unaltered food. And I haven't found it very necessary to kill birds yet. I mostly survive on beefalo, berries, farming and whatever carrots or seeds I pass during my rummaging. I am very conflicted on the idea of perishable food. On the one hand it would give the game a bit of realism and difficulty in terms of storing food (right now killing 3 beefalos will let you survive for about a month). On the other hand, if food spoils I think we would need a way to prolong its life - like making a smokehouse to make jerky and dried veggies, and a recipe for jam. Otherwise you could suddenly find out your strategic reserves are ruined and you're screwed.Ooh - if you make jam you could have to store it in jars which you could make from sand on the proposed beach biome.Jars would actually be a pretty excellent food-prolonging mechanism in general.

[LadyD]

MrEntity some of these posts are from a time BEFORE you could replant grass. wHen you had to roam to find everything. When you moved island to island sometimes you had no grass at all.And the developers have already expressed their views on perishable foods.

[AzraelDR]

Hello, I've bought the game on Steam and I have had lots of fun with the game even in its beta state. However, I would like to voice my support for a spoilage system incorporated into the game. I am a big fan of roguelikes, and games like Dungeon Crawl and The UnReal World have all created a strong sense of urgency when it comes to acquiring food because of spoilage. Given that your game is entitled Don't Starve, I imagine that the constant threat of going hungry is one of your goals as developers in the game.First, let me cite my reasons why spoilage would contribute to gameplay. First, the whole problem about rabbit massacres and infinite food supplies from large amounts of farms would be solved immediately. When there is a threat of spoilage, the player will not store food supplies beyond what he can eat. The player will gauge his food needs and only take from the environment what he needs. If he doesn't, the slow regeneration of rabbit supply along with the finite amount of beefaloes will cause him to die of starvation in the future. Second, exploration becomes more interesting because the player has to make on-the-fly decisions as to how he/she will get food while exploring. An initial food supply before exploring will inevitably run out, requiring the player to plan ahead as to what tools to bring to ensure a continued food source.Now the developers mentioned that the implementation of the spoilage mechanic has some user-interface problems. If I may suggest a solution. The solution I propose would be the appearance of a small box above or beside the slot where the food stack that would show pieces that have already spoiled. This box contains an image of the spoiled food and the number, just like any other item slot. However, when the food stack is moved, the box moves along with it. However, the player can then choose to separate the spoiled food from the main food stock and put it in a different slot. Keeping the spoiled food in the box with the main food stack will make the "fresh" pieces spoil more quickly, so it is best that the spoiled food is either dropped by the player or placed in a different slot.I believe that the spoilage mechanic is strongly beneficial to the design goals of this game, which emphasizes survival through forcing players to make decisions based on a limited and random set of factors. An eternally lasting food source causes the gameplay to be to predictable, which leads to practices like grinding, hoarding and turtling. Despite this long opinion of mine, I do congratulate the developers for creating a very fun game. I'll be buying several more copies for my friends this Christmas, and you have all my support.