Food spoiling and lighting fires

toores

toores

New member
I've been checking out some "The Long Dark" and now I'm convinced that 7 Days needs food spoiling and fire lighting mechanics for increased enjoyment of the game.

This would add so much to the survival aspect of the game. Lighting a campfire shouldn't be automatic. It should require matches, lighter or firebow if you have neither of the previous. Then you would consider when to light fires and wheather to keep them going for multiple tasks in a row to optimize your time.

On the same note, torches should run out and putting them in your inventory should extinguish them. But you should be able to use torch to take and carry fire from any campfire/furnace to any other source.

Food spoiling would make food managing interesting part for the entire game not just for the beginning. Crops should also go bad if not harvested at a right time to prevent easy "always fresh" food source. Refridgerating and processing for longer food preservation should be a thing.

Different biomes would provide different gameplay:

Snow biome - slow and hard (chance - % determined by skill) to light fire; endless drinking warter via smelting snow; easier to preserve food by dropping it in the container in the snow (this would be the first real benefit to otherwise inferior snow biome)

Desert biome - faster, easier firemaking; no abundant drinking water; food spoiles faster without electricity and refridgerators.

Forest biome - middle ground

All this extra work for lighting fires and managing food should be balanced by actually getting decent amounts of meat from deer (big animals) and gaining more food from one piece. This way it would not be so bad if each piece of spoilable food item took 1 inventory slot - which i'm guessing is needed with food spoiling mechanics. Also more complexe recipes would be beneficial because more food value per 1 slot instead of separate items. Some items could still stack though...

Anyways, just thinking out loud here...

 
I agree with food needing to spoil over time. Not so much to make starting a fire harder. (maybe requiring a simple stone + dry grass as starter. But I dont think making this mechanic more complicated adds much to the game.)

With food spoiling, there is more value on "low grade" foods, that give less perks, but last longer (long or no perish time for canned goods).

For the player to have the best foods, he needs to craft them on time and consume them within a day.

For longer trips or stockpiling, the player can alternatively choose to craft food with long perish times (but less perks to it).

Additionally: light should be more in focus. With the player starting out from simple torches, to battery operated flashlights (with a draining battery, or solar powered versions with a draining accumulator). Then all the way to the head-mounted lamps (separate from a fixed mining helmet...) wich are the most convenient, but draw the most power.

Even in the later game, torches should have their place, as a very cheap alternative to running light with batteries.

So that the player decides: do i need the power of a flashlight but its drawbacks (battery as resource). Or I just need a simple torch-light now, that I can recraft without much effort.

Regarding the campfire: there should be several alternative looks to choose from before placing it.

It can also serve as decorative element. With a version that looks closer to a larger/higher campfire, a fireplace fire, and a glimming coal fire.

 
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Agree about the torches - we have an end-game alternative that can be permanent now anyway. Most importantly though I agree about food spoilage. Been asking it for ages but I haven't seen any willingness from the devs to implement such a thing.

And now some whining - RPG elements are nice to have but I really wish that wasn't their focus. Have played most survival games in existence, but I daresay 7DTD has the largest (unrealised) potential when it comes to becoming an amazing survival experience. Food spoilage, a more smooth, long-term progression curve and more intuitive challenges (less superzombies/frame-skipping dogs etc, more RNG combat behavior) would be a start.

Also I don't think that dungeon POIs, traditional quests or the current gamestage system is an answer to "more end-game content". They will become stale fast imo. So much more could be achieved with extra focus on survival, different loot distribution, a better progression curve and "random events" imposed on the player ("imposed" sounds bad, until you realize that the game is an imposition of various elements).

 
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Im also missing a larger endgame goal (for singleplayer).

One be would be something like "defend survivors".

Each major city has a hard POI, where one or two human NPCs are holed up.

When the player "frees" them, they follow the player to his base.

At the base, they require basic utilities such as food, water and a place to sleep.

The zombies will try to kill the survivors, as much as the player.

The survivors can walk around the base, (pathfinding can determine the maximum safe distance). And sit down, keep the fires burning when those workstations craft something.

And maybe even defend the base, from a predefined "lookout" position (a chair).

If the player fails to provide enough supplies and safety (some survivors got killed), morale goes down and they leave the place.

-> Basically very similar to the mechanics Fallout 4 used for their settlements.

Its an interesting mechanic that can give the player dozents of hours of gameplay content, trying to extend and optimize the base.

And getting the "economy" good enough to supply more and more survivors.

 
When the player "frees" them, they follow the player to his base.
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Agreed, creating a settlement as an end-game goal would be very interesting and could be tied to random events and much more. That started with this fallout 3 mod https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/7070/ which imo even did a better job than Bethesda did in 4 with settlements.

However it is a larger undertaking than most of the simple things or fine-tuning TFP could do to alleviate that lack of end-game goals... Could be very bare-bones but the NPCs would need a little bit of sophisticated AI in order to act in a realistically acceptable manner.

 
Agreed, creating a settlement as an end-game goal would be very interesting and could be tied to random events and much more. That started with this fallout 3 mod https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/7070/ which imo even did a better job than Bethesda did in 4 with settlements.
However it is a larger undertaking than most of the simple things or fine-tuning TFP could do to alleviate that lack of end-game goals... Could be very bare-bones but the NPCs would need a little bit of sophisticated AI in order to act in a realistically acceptable manner.
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Its shure not a small system.

But the game has already needed core components for that in place:

-pathfinding (getting the survivors to move to different locations in the base)

-UMA Character + Animations (could need a few more. like sitting, sleeping, messing at a workbench)

-mechanics to create resouce/supply items, to give the settlement an economy

it would need some ai state machine for the survivors of how to behave in the base.

That could include actions such as:

-follow player when commanded

-sleep

-sit on random seat-object

-stand at "lookout" position

-go to workbench and play some "messing around" animation

-sit and play "eat" animation

-walk to supply box and pick up food

-walk to other survivor and play some random "chat" soundfiles

-run to base center (some safe-room for example) when zombies are spotted

-walk to an area on base, that has no line of sight to other survivors and take a dump

The base itself could be defined either by an object (like a flag) or any place where there is a forge.

The area the survivors are allowed to move is defined in "max tiles from center".

Or even better: doing a floodfill search from the center, up to any point that is not directly connected to the "outside" area. (where doors block the passage). This would keep the survivors inside the bases walls.

When the player moves too far from the base, the AI stops, and the game only does a general background calculation of how many supplies are being used up. When there is a blood-moon night, and the player is far from the base, the game kills of a random number of survivors unless morale and defenses are high.

Morale is affected by a disruption in food supplies (and their quality), amount of light/electricity, lack of beds and seats, and zombies managing to enter the base area. And killed survivors.

A long term goal could be to aquire more conveniences for the base (pool table, DvD player, card game, shower, toiletpaper). Its a pretty open ended option to improve the game by including more options to stuff the base with.

 
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A long term goal could be to aquire more conveniences for the base. Its a pretty open ended option to improve the game by including more options to stuff the base with.
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Well personally, regarding this for one long term goal, what I always wanted was for the player as well to have a mental well-being state, without micromanaging more bars etc. Could have been integrated into "wellness". There are a lot of cosmetic items at the moment. Take

of a base for example.
It would be great if all those cosmetic/luxury items had actually some use so that the player is encouraged to make something more than a defense bunker or a hole in the ground. Pre-apocalypse decorations/furniture improving x in a range, sleeping on normal beds for a x next day bonus, fridge to prevent drug/food spoilage, an oven to cook better quality food and so on. Maybe even room detection with special rooms providing bonuses in the future.

Definitely would be great if colonies became a reality. Given that bandits are taking quite a while though, I wouldn't count on it, definitely not in the near future. At least hopefully some of the more basic "issues" (which may not even be considered issues for TFP or others) will be addressed.

 
Another long term goal (when there are some bandits in) could be a bandit "caravan", that shows up at the players place every couple of weeks.

If the player is at the base, they will demand loot as "protection money".

That could be realized with them placing a loot chest, with a value-bar indicating the total value of the items in it.

The player must fill it with items, until the requested value-sum is reached.

They will return the next day. If the chest has not enough valuables or is destroyed, they will attack the player or any nearby player structures.

(forges, workbenches etc)

The bandits have some kind of hideout, far away.

If the player manages to kill everyone there, the bandit band will not come again.

(until some other base spawns)

Important would be that the bandits are strong enough for the first few weeks, so that the player cannot just take them out easily.

Fighting them should be hard enough to make the option "pay them" a valid strategy for the first few weeks.

The first few times they should also request relatively small "protection payments", but then progressively asking for more.

I like this setting (similar to the Walking Dead) of being extorted, but then finally having the option to strike back.

 
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Well personally, regarding this for one long term goal, what I always wanted was for the player as well to have a mental well-being state, without micromanaging more bars etc. Could have been integrated into "wellness". There are a lot of cosmetic items at the moment. Take
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Fairly sure this is in one of the mods. Pictures, plants etc give a reduction in your sanity level. Where as combat, stress increases the sanity meter. After a point with too much negatives you get negative effects ( aka go insane that affect your character ). Think it was "Starvation Mod" that did it. It works very well and you keep track of your insanity. Pictures and other items end up being useful to loot and place near your campfire at night or in your base.

But I do not see TFP implementing a system like this. It does not fit with the simplification they have been doing for a lot of alphas.

Its like asking for more complex recipes ( what mods do ), when TFP have been reducing crafting recipes complexity with each alpha. It actually took more work in the past to build things in past alphas instead of now simply base ingredients like wood/grass/stone/clay and you can build 50% of all the products.

By the way, if you want a more complex solution: Ravenhearst Mod is much more realistic and actually makes looting worth it. Unlike vanilla. But Ravenhearst Mod suffers ( like other mods that add more items ) from the "crafting menu load time / stutter" because the devs have not blessed us in years to actually fix the menu load times when you have a lot of items.

Its like the whole Zombie counts, that have been massive reduced compared to the past. First this was done because of the UMA zombies, now we get more zombies again but nothing like the past. Because its eating too many resources on low end pcs ( and the multithread support is kind of bad with 7D2D for dealing with large zombies and base physics ).

So a lot of things you are simply not going to see in 7D2D or will never come back. Even more so when more resources are spend on beautifying 7D2D, what also eats resources. To think, when 7D2D first alpha came out 5 years ago, PC's used to be half as fast, now we got 8/16 thread cpus, two generation of graphical cards but 7D2D has actually been getting more and more simplified. What is kind of ironic ;)

 
Fairly sure this is in one of the mods. Pictures, plants etc give a reduction in your sanity level. Where as combat, stress increases the sanity meter. After a point with too much negatives you get negative effects ( aka go insane that affect your character ). Think it was "Starvation Mod" that did it. It works very well and you keep track of your insanity. Pictures and other items end up being useful to loot and place near your campfire at night or in your base.
But I do not see TFP implementing a system like this. It does not fit with the simplification they have been doing for a lot of alphas.

Its like asking for more complex recipes ( what mods do ), when TFP have been reducing crafting recipes complexity with each alpha. It actually took more work in the past to build things in past alphas instead of now simply base ingredients like wood/grass/stone/clay and you can build 50% of all the products.

By the way, if you want a more complex solution: Ravenhearst Mod is much more realistic and actually makes looting worth it. Unlike vanilla. But Ravenhearst Mod suffers ( like other mods that add more items ) from the "crafting menu load time / stutter" because the devs have not blessed us in years to actually fix the menu load times when you have a lot of items.

Its like the whole Zombie counts, that have been massive reduced compared to the past. First this was done because of the UMA zombies, now we get more zombies again but nothing like the past. Because its eating too many resources on low end pcs ( and the multithread support is kind of bad with 7D2D for dealing with large zombies and base physics ).

So a lot of things you are simply not going to see in 7D2D or will never come back. Even more so when more resources are spend on beautifying 7D2D, what also eats resources. To think, when 7D2D first alpha came out 5 years ago, PC's used to be half as fast, now we got 8/16 thread cpus, two generation of graphical cards but 7D2D has actually been getting more and more simplified. What is kind of ironic ;)
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yes its starvation mod

 
Fairly sure this is in one of the mods.
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It is ironic :p Even though I believe that in general, complexity does not equal rich/intuitive content, I think that sometimes the changes they make go further and further from the latter.

I will definitely use these for my single player experience when they get updated to A17, but to be honest, I tend to post, not only about what I would wish to see in the game myself, but also about what other players I've played with have experienced, and mostly about what I personally believe would be good for the game's further success (as a hobby), even if it clashes with the former. Naturally, they are all personal opinions of course, but there is a difference. One of the things that make these different is the following.

I really don't have solid statistics, but I'd be willing to bet anything on the "fact" that the vast majority of people will not get informed about modding, much less get into the process of modding. Not to mention that a lot are prejudiced (like the people I play with) when it comes to modding, even if most modders have proved that they can do a damn fine professional-looking job.

What I am trying to say is that, while modding is and should be a big part towards enriching the game, TFP can't rely on them to "complete" it. Of course the general term "complete", may mean different things for each person. One example of an already "complete" game, in my eyes, that gets enriched with mods is Fallout:NV. The reason why I don't consider 7DTD to be complete is because I think it has many "incoherent" elements. One example of those imo are the various survival elements - like food, which is virtually exploited by the game only in the first couple of hours of gameplay, since there is no food spoilage, or like death, which essentially has no impact despite the presence of all these survival elements (injuries, diseases, hunger etc) that has been put into the game. Same applies to the abrupt progression curve that essentially allows you to skip a lot of content. Or as another example, in a more general scope the game is advertised as survival, but gives you ways to skip having to survive. In other words, what I mean by "incoherent" or "incomplete" is that the game contains a lot of things that get countered by others.

It's EA ofc, not complaining, merely suggesting.

 
I think in general the number of players who play multiplayer or use mods in the game, is a way lower percentage than people think.

Providing good game mechanics is first of all a job for the developers for the vanilla game.

Its defining what the majority of players will experience.

Mods can add to that, but will reach much less players overall.

Also: the job is to make the game as entertaining as possible for the typical "normal" player.

With lets say good content for 20 to 40 hours of gameplay overall.

Mechanics that specifically suit people who have played hundrets of hours should have much less of a priority.

 
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What I am trying to say is that, while modding is and should be a big part towards enriching the game, TFP can't rely on them to "complete" it.
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Mods keep this game alive but even mods needs developers support. When you have mods that almost needs to "break into the game" to change assets, you know its not as mod friendly as stated. Even more so with things like the crafting menu...

How many alphas people have complained that mods that implement more items, suffer from massive annoying lag spikes when opening or search or ... in the menu. The issue is fairly simply, the menu loads all the item configuration file into memory upon opening the menu = lag spike. All those items then are searched when you press on a resource = Lag spike. Manual search = ...

Instead of storing that information into a in memory SQL database, when you load the game. So data retrieval can be fast and you can use indexes on resource columns for even faster retrieval of what resource = where. Then adding 200 more items in the game has totally no impact on the menu operations. Even adding 10.000 will have no direct impact.

But because the devs are not looking to add more items to the game, fixing this is a low priority and people who play the mods can suffer for years with this issue.

And its really bad, try opening the menu when you have zombies running towards but you quickly need to craft something or you need something and your entire game lag-spikes. No matter how powerful pc you trow at the problem, its a basic design issue that gets ignored "its not our problem". When at the same time we have Moderators telling people: If you do not like how TFP design the vanilla game, us mods. But mods suffer from issue that are game related... Its like a doom circle. :)

If you look at the mods, you see a common theme.

* Harder survival because of less food or other mechanism

* More crafting possibilities

* More enemies

* More complex recopies that make sense ( wood -> planks + iron -> (scrap)nails = wood frames ) instead of this toddler simplified crafting we have now

* Food Spoiling / Food preservation / Fridge that actually mean something

* Rodents that attach food

* More mechanics ( steam before electricity ). Notice how Electricity seems to be ignored in A17 Vanilla.

* Mechanism like Sanity, resting, etc ...

* ...

Its filled with creative designs and a lot of mods share one or several of them. You expect TFPs to say: "Hey, it seems that people actually like a lot of this stuff, maybe we are going in the wrong direction".

But no ... The answer is: Use a mod, when a mod is actually more difficult to use for a lot of people. And Mods are constantly exhausted because every 7D2D minor update, can break every mod. Every Alpha breaks all the mods, so you need to wait weeks or months, before a mod author in his free time, can port all the changes and adjust his mod to deal with all the new Alpha features.

Mods are great if a game is stable like Skyrim and the mods authors have a base image they can work with. But 7D2D is never stable... You never really know when a new version is going to drop. Do not forget, A17 was supposed to be a short alpha after the 8 months waiting for A16. The time frame was maybe 3 months because TFPs also did not like long alphas and now we are at 14 months. That also makes it hard on the mod authors who do this in their free time! You can really tell that TFP do not take in account mod authors. Yes, the game is partially mod able but that is where things stop.

In my personal opinion there is a major cultural divide between TFP and the community and this is very much reflected into the mods their content and design, vs what Vanilla keeps changing into.

 
The mods don't run so good also. I'm sure I will try many of them after 7d2d goes gold.

Another thing with mods is that while they give some cool stuff, they might also add lots of wat is unwanted.

(I don't remember which mod it was but I found it aggravating that everything was unreasonably gated behind artificial stuff. I could not cut some meat with my hunting knife because I needed kitchen knife.. wtf?)

Additional reasons the "fire lighting" would add to immersion:

*Early game when you have no flashlight, you would have to prepare before night comes. If you have no matches you can't just jump into a building and pop out a torch or campfire. Primitive firemaking would take time and preperation that you'd have to consider. Also you'd have to consider if you have enough buring material to last you through the night. Candles could actually be quite a nice step up from torches that run out quickly.

*Stormy weather would extinguish campfires/candles/torches so you'd have to find shelter first.

*This, in turn, would make food prepping something you'd have to plan out better.

 
If you look at the mods, you see a common theme.

* Harder survival because of less food or other mechanism

* More crafting possibilities

* More enemies

* More complex recopies that make sense ( wood -> planks + iron -> (scrap)nails = wood frames ) instead of this toddler simplified crafting we have now

* Food Spoiling / Food preservation / Fridge that actually mean something

* Rodents that attach food

* More mechanics ( steam before electricity ). Notice how Electricity seems to be ignored in A17 Vanilla.

* Mechanism like Sanity, resting, etc ...

* ...

Its filled with creative designs and a lot of mods share one or several of them. You expect TFPs to say: "Hey, it seems that people actually like a lot of this stuff, maybe we are going in the wrong direction".

In my personal opinion there is a major cultural divide between TFP and the community and this is very much reflected into the mods their content and design, vs what Vanilla keeps changing into.
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To comment on that, as Richard said recently, in a nutshell, I think this is because TFP tried to "please everyone". At least some time ago, considering MM's comments, one would think that this would be the direction they were going.

The thread went into the pimp graveyard pfff.

 
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