mdf25
Refugee
The farmer class gives you early access to some of the seed packets (which allow you to craft one food item into 3 seeds instead of 1 seed) and on mastery gives you the rest, plus the ability to make a fertiliser workstation which will allow you to produce fertiliser much faster than in other workstations. Not the greates reward but very very good in MP when food is initially quite scarce. I'm thinking of making the copper garden hoe and the pig iron variant of the garden hoe as well, that would plug the gap a little bit. I can then make them slower than the iron one.I'm surprised to read this, because when I read the description, this was exactly what I thought farmer would do: give you early access to a tilling tool and possibly some farmer-themed exclusive weapon choice/boost of farm tool entity damage.
Athlete class is very good, though they do have increased food metabolism currently. Perhaps vitamins could be moved to the scientist class to allow some diversity and a limiting ingredient that you can only loot would also be a good thing. Eggs could be one, maybe making protein extract on a chemistry station from eggs and a syringe that you can only loot from pill stores (which then go into vitamin crafting) would be good so you have to use several steps as well as a long crafting time to get the vitamins.I don't have much to say about the class-balance yet, because I'm still on my first savegame and I think it would be wiser to wait for the update to drop, before I start a new one. There's one thing though, that's standing out pretty obviously: athlete seems to have an issue quite opposite to the farmer class. It's very good with little drawbacks. I'm worried, that it's so good right now and combines so well with whatever other classes you pick, that it will change from choice to mandatory with more competitive players.
You get early help with stamina, which is strong, but it's kind of expected and fine. The bigger problem in my opinion are the later game perks. You'll continue having a stamina bonus all the way through the game, effectively saving you skillpoints for the higher level stamina conserving skills and worst of all: steroids and vitamins. While the steroids come with a debuff to partially negate the benefit, they will also be a really good way to make room for more food and enable you to stuff your face and get the food type buffs going after a death. So the debuff isn't really all negative at all. The vitamin recipe does not have a single limiting ingredient, just pop them by the dozens. So one class to completely cancel out stamina issues, wellness issues and food buff issues after death? That appears a little bit strong to me.
As a solution I'd suggest to either give the athlete a more speedy metabolism, increasing both hunger and thirst and an increased amount of food for the food type buffs OR take away the pill recipes and give them to some other class instead. The vitamin recipe could be changed to include a resource that's hard to get in quantities and is useful for other good recipes. Eggs seem to be a good candidate here: in Fennec Mod, eggs are quite rare and used in many of the good food recipes. This is awesome, because this way they turn into a very good balancing tool.
I was also thinking about having the steroids debuff negate any other good buff given by the variants of foods (so I can say double the tickrate of how fast your food bonuses go down), and perhaps a steroids concentration variable that on excessive use of steroids would start to drain wellness at a faster rate and cause a loss of health over time. That would stop their overuse and maybe the same with vitamins - take too many in a row and they will start affecting your player negatively, since the whole 'too much of a good thing'. So I could say taking more than 2 vitamins in a 12 hour period would start to cause bodily imbalance, making you need to drink more to clear your system, and losing wellness over time.
I see what you mean - there will be some sink upgrade kits and oven upgrade kits that you will be able to craft in order to upgrade the sinks and ovens into working variants. I do eventually want the player to be able to settle fully after a good deal of effort, and I think since you can do electricity and assemble guns in game, plumbing and piping should be achievable also, so eventually you'll be able to have sinks and ovens and toilets in your base.There's something else I noticed: I tried a few different options (traders, land claim blocks) but have not yet been able to drag a working oven into my womancave. I'm starting to wonder if that's intentional and the player is supposed to travel to that workstation in later game stages still? It starts getting a bit tedious here with the wide variety of food ingredients in game. If that mechanic is intended, how about changing it from ovens to sinks+toilets instead: the sinks mostly because it would make sense to have the same limitation as toilets explaining it with the water pipe access, the toilets because I think they would make it more fair, challenging not only in early game stages, by requiring the player to travel no matter how many resources they collected, while the ovens challenges would become less and less later in game, depending on how many resources a player collected and how many meals they can queue up in one run.
The current way you'll need to do the ovens and sinks would be to buy a non-working one from the traders, and then use an upgrade kit on it after placing it in your base. Or find a sink in the world to upgrade same with the nice wall ovens.
Good spot - I'll give this a lookOh, on the topic of sinks: we have a slight stacking problem here caused by the number empty glass jars and jars of clean water stack to, since you can fill a 500 stack on a working filtered sink. Suggested fix: make all the jars, empty and all three types of water stack to 250.

