PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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I'm not sure if TFP have touched it for A19, but I haven't seen any indication of it yet. There's a trick with an often forgotten (even by TFP) resource that completely trivializes the food system. At this point I'm most interested in seeing how long it goes undiscovered.


Yes yes, everyone knows you can just kill yourself to get back to full food and water and cure all your ailments and get the exp back in 2 minutes work. It's still not a great solution.

My biggest gripe with the food system is the food poison chance is nuts. I have horrific luck to the point where it's a meme among my friends, so a 2-3% chance to get dysentery from boiled water literally means I spend the entire first few days crapping my guts out, and then every time I find food I puke it all back up because of food poisoning and empty my hunger bar

Survival mechanics are important, but food just feels like a tedious one early game, and then once you find super corn and the perk to grow it you just completely ignore food late game. Even early and mid game, it's 400 times easier to just buy food at the vending machines than bother growing and hunting it because of all the wasted perk points to actually get a sustainable food income vs just paying pocket change to eat from the machines and loot the rest. It takes way too many perks and items to cook decent food, and non zombie animals are ultra rare for some reason, so finding fresh meat is a lot of work too.

Vending machines 4 lyfe. Until you get super corn seeds and can grow them, then you just utterly ignore food entirely and live off mutated corn

Edit: Just caught up and saw that food poisoning is removed, yay! The food system is still janky because it's just objectively better to buy food than make it, but at least early game I don't have to worry about food poisoning. Health damage is fine, you can heal that back

 
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The point is, why have food in the game at all if it's such a trivial post script that's over by day 2? 

Just remove it entirely, since all it sounds like it's good for is a plus with no (in practice) negatives.  Eat bad food, lose some hp.  Eat some good food, get it back.  It's a wash. 

 
Yes yes, everyone knows you can just kill yourself to get back to full food and water and cure all your ailments and get the exp back in 2 minutes work. It's still not a great solution.

My biggest gripe with the food system is the food poison chance is nuts. I have horrific luck to the point where it's a meme among my friends, so a 2-3% chance to get dysentery from boiled water literally means I spend the entire first few days crapping my guts out, and then every time I find food I puke it all back up because of food poisoning and empty my hunger bar

Survival mechanics are important, but food just feels like a tedious one early game, and then once you find super corn and the perk to grow it you just completely ignore food late game. Even early and mid game, it's 400 times easier to just buy food at the vending machines than bother growing and hunting it because of all the wasted perk points to actually get a sustainable food income vs just paying pocket change to eat from the machines and loot the rest. It takes way too many perks and items to cook decent food, and non zombie animals are ultra rare for some reason, so finding fresh meat is a lot of work too.

Vending machines 4 lyfe. Until you get super corn seeds and can grow them, then you just utterly ignore food entirely and live off mutated corn

Edit: Just caught up and saw that food poisoning is removed, yay! The food system is still janky because it's just objectively better to buy food than make it, but at least early game I don't have to worry about food poisoning. Health damage is fine, you can heal that back
Nah i dont see an issue with having to work for your food. Having to hunt for food and prepare it etc. Even canned food I find Always come in handy.

food should be tedious. But never wasted my time with super corn I rather steak and potato. Each to their own but canned food and having to hunt for food adds extra to the game in having to keep an eye on and make sure you have enough food to go on loot runs or to work on your base etc.

 
I'm not sure if TFP have touched it for A19, but I haven't seen any indication of it yet. There's a trick with an often forgotten (even by TFP) resource that completely trivializes the food system. At this point I'm most interested in seeing how long it goes undiscovered.
I doubt you mean yucca because that's that's just a normal resource.

Real oddball ones like blood bags are not edible any more.

 
Nah i dont see an issue with having to work for your food. Having to hunt for food and prepare it etc. Even canned food I find Always come in handy.

food should be tedious. But never wasted my time with super corn I rather steak and potato. Each to their own but canned food and having to hunt for food adds extra to the game in having to keep an eye on and make sure you have enough food to go on loot runs or to work on your base etc.


I don't disagree, I don't want them to remove food or anything, the current implementation  just kind of eh. Food is a big deal for the first few days, then is basically a complete non factor after that. That's pretty common in survival games, but usually because you automate a farm.

Instead, in A18 farm plots cost way too freaking many resources early and even sometimes mid game, and farming and cooking requires heavy perk investment as well as cooking grills and other things. Instead of wasting a bunch of points on that, you can just go to a vending machine or trader and buy good food without worry.

And why would you use anything *but* Super Corn late game lol. Steak and Potatoes are fine mid game, but once you get super corn growing, it's 100% undeniably objectively the best food in the game. Well, some of the others give really minor stat boosts I guess? But the stat boosts are . . .really minor, and planting 4 or 5 super corn plots per person nullifies food completely forever. It also heals pretty well too, and it doesn't matter if you get food poisoning off it because you can just eat more for free essentially. 

The other top tier foods are okay for role play, but are just way more work than they are worth once you find a super corn recipe book and a Carls Corn.

I think the biggest issue isn't that Super Corn is OP, it's that the other food just takes way too much investment. Even Super Corn would be near trash tier if you couldn't find a book to make seeds from it because it takes SO many points to get to. There's just a lot better things to invest points into than having to learn to make a bunch of seeds, and then make all the farm plots, and then kill animals to get meat, and then use a lot of points to  learn to cook, and then get a cooking grill as well as screw around with jars of water,  then cook your meat stew or w/e, then get food poisoning off it and cry because you just wasted half your ingredients and threw them up

All that, vs just buying food from vendors / machines, while you work on  finding super corn and it's book, which aren't that rare, and getting enough rotting flesh to make farm plots. Once you've got Super Corn you have zero reason to bother with any other food type. But even until you get Super Corn, it's pretty simple to just buy your food and not have to sink 15 points into learning to cook it and then pray you actually find a deer or boar which are basically extinct. Food is super cheap and you can do 1 mission and have enough to buy a weeks worth of food, as well as loot like 3+ days worth of food from the PoI while you were doing the mission

 
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My opinion on farming, I enjoy getting a farm up and running, however with living off the land letting you get more yield per harvest makes food too plentiful. I now never invest any point into Living off the land or master chef and instead rely on finding recipes. Once I know how to make potato, corn and mushroom seeds and vegetable stew, I'm good for the rest of the game anyway.

Vitamins are so easy to come by in a18, plus all those sham sandwiches, you don't even need a farm when you really think about it.

We'll see what's changed in a19 :)
I am all for a hardcore experience!

 
I got my farm running in the backyard in real life right now! Was pissed when I went out there after Day 3 and I didn't have rows of carrots , potatoes and corn ready to harvest...fml 

 
Yes yes, everyone knows you can just kill yourself to get back to full food and water and cure all your ailments and get the exp back in 2 minutes work.....
quoted for truth

enlarged in case any devs don't have their reading glasses on....

 
So far no one has guessed it. It's not suicide (or death for that matter) and it's not yucca. In fact I doubt anyone here will figure it out.

The only hint I'll give is this:

A new player is dramatically more likely to stumble across it than a veteran.

 
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Are you talking about the Boar trick 

Or 

That the Land Claim block is edible? 🧇

Nah, you're probably referring to the harvesting bug, right?

 
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Nope and there are no bugs involved. I'd report it if it was a bug.
The only thing that comes to my mind that a new player (starting up a new game) has more than a veteran is Buried Supplies quests, which in mid to late game IIRC do not even appear in the list of possible quests anymore.

If that's the case, well, true... you can get A LOT of food from those quests and repeat them several times (a day?) maybe.

But I don't consider that an exploit.

 
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The only thing that comes to my mind that a new player (starting up a new game) has more than a veteran is Buried Supplies quests, which in mid to late game IIRC do not even appear in the list of possible quests anymore.

If that's the case, well, true... you can get A LOT of food from those quests and do them several times a day maybe.

But I don't consider that an exploit.
Nope. I'd say this is a pretty common veteran strategy for day one.

 
I'd say the ISS is probably the biggest feature of the Alpha, with maybe only the finished weapon tiers rivaling it. It is kinda amusing that it's not featured in the OP.

 
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