PC I think the starvation mechanic needs some work.

SenpaiThatIngnoresYou

SenpaiThatIngnoresYou

New member
in build 223( i think it was that one), I had starved to death on the first day. while quite funny, it did however make me start questioning the starvation mechanic, because the current starvation mechanic removed my suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is important for every video game and movie, without it you can not get into the story or the game.

Thinking into it, i believe starvation needs multiple levels of debuff, and well fed 1 level of buff. Instead of knocking off stamina, it should slowly ramp up. The fist level, not eating for a day, should have an xp debuff(maybe 10 to 50 percent of xp lost, and a crafting time increase). The 2nd level should then start gimping stamina AND attributes.

A good example would be the death debuff, but instead of waiting you eat more.

Now, the other caveat. Food should have a buff and debuff. I only eat bacon and eggs, with the occasional canned food. There should be a buff for food where you get a diminishing return if that is all you eat.

 
I'll agree with you on the diminishing returns for constantly eating the same food.

Doesn't Minecraft do that?

Anyway.... I like it.

 
This sorta makes sense, eating only the same food leads to malnutrition, I like diversity personally so I don't mind it. I want a reason to farm more than potatos for meat and potato stew.

 
Except it doesn't lead to malnutrition - there's plenty of people for example following the carnivore diet (some for over 20 years), and just eating ribeye steaks and nothing else, and yet they're reversing things like diabetes, arthritis and plenty of other illnesses, infact they're all pretty darn healthy. Makes you wonder about traditional nutrition advice.

And even if you believe the RDA's on vitamins (which I don't) then eggs are nutritionally complete, so bacon and eggs would do you fine.

 
I agree with the OP though, that a debuff on starvation would be better than instant death, considering an average human can last 3 or 4 weeks without food given their fat reserves - though it wouldn't be much fun.

 
Except it doesn't lead to malnutrition - there's plenty of people for example following the carnivore diet (some for over 20 years), and just eating ribeye steaks and nothing else, and yet they're reversing things like diabetes, arthritis and plenty of other illnesses, infact they're all pretty darn healthy. Makes you wonder about traditional nutrition advice.
And even if you believe the RDA's on vitamins (which I don't) then eggs are nutritionally complete, so bacon and eggs would do you fine.
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Yeah, i started following grandpa's high fiber diet recently. He had eaten like that since the 1950s and lived to be 99. He did it not just for the health, but because he was a cheap guy who hated spending money. I personally suspect that most of that nutrition advice is the work of agricultural industry lobbyists. But that is a crazy rant for another day.

So lets say for game play sakes that it's a psychological factor from the end of the world, having to cope with no more pumpkin spice lattes and no more take out restaurants.

From a game balance and game theory stand point: it forces you have diversity of food. combine this with a different hunger debuff, and the game would feel more like wild man in the new wilderness instead of fat guy who can't go 5 seconds without a burrito.

Something needs to be done about the hunger mechanic however, because the decrease in stamina and stamina regen is does not feel right, and makes the game feel weird. It also hinders game play due to how dependent we are on stamina.

I think a good rate would be 25 wellness a day. after day 2 of no eating, the stamina debuff hits, offset by the slow metabolism perk or weight loss drugs. Now, what makes the debuff insidious is it has a long cool down AFTER eating. So if you go two days of no eating, but get food, you have another 2 days of debuff.

 
Except it doesn't lead to malnutrition - there's plenty of people for example following the carnivore diet (some for over 20 years), and just eating ribeye steaks and nothing else, and yet they're reversing things like diabetes, arthritis and plenty of other illnesses, infact they're all pretty darn healthy. Makes you wonder about traditional nutrition advice.
And even if you believe the RDA's on vitamins (which I don't) then eggs are nutritionally complete, so bacon and eggs would do you fine.
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Please .... oh pleeeease tell me you're not bringing "Realism" into this?

LLVhVnC.gif


 
A lack of food would not kill a human in the short run. It would take at least like 30 days, and even a lot more for healthy (or chubby) ones.

Whereas a lack of water would be pretty dangerous even after a day in hot weather, and at most 3 days in normal weather.

Without water the metabolism breaks down.

So dying by a lack of water is realistic.

Loosing stamina from a lack of food is also. But the loss should be really gradual. High in the beginning, but then stalling and loosing slowly.

And recovering from that (foot available again) should also take at least a day.

It would be interesting to balance the game to by starving at the beginning of the game (making safe food really hard to get), but not have it be that major impact. Whereas water is a necessity right away.

Getting a stable food supply should be a longrun project then.

Spoiling food: to avoid making stockpiing food too easy. Food becomes a non issue currently after a few days.

 
The problem with the spoiled food mechanic in games, is that there are too many sneaky ways to bypass it. one method is to avoid harvesting until you need it.

This is a combat game with survival mechanics, not a survival game with combat mechanics. every 7 days the zombies come to bother you, so food is not the priority, base defense is. emperyon it makes sense to have a food spoiling mechanic, because you do not get bothered as much, and if you are the turret takes care of the issues.

Now, with spoiling food, we can pull a mountain man and just live in the snow biome. The temp outside would halt spoiling. Or we could make a larder in the snow biome and store food there. Watch Jerimiah Johnson on amazon, there is a part where he eats raw bear meat that is kept at room temperature, room temperature being below freezing because rocky mountains. We would all become mountain men and do this if spoiling was a thing.

so in regards to this game, the spoiling mechanic would be too much work and hassle for too little fun. It would result in cheap tactics and exploits and would break suspension of disbelief.

the goal is a fun experience building up a fort to fight zombies. At the moment the stamina debuff and quick starvation is ruining the fun.

 
Except it doesn't lead to malnutrition - there's plenty of people for example following the carnivore diet (some for over 20 years), and just eating ribeye steaks and nothing else, and yet they're reversing things like diabetes, arthritis and plenty of other illnesses, infact they're all pretty darn healthy. Makes you wonder about traditional nutrition advice.
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Don't get your nutrition advice from some guy on the internet. =)

 
The problem with the spoiled food mechanic in games, is that there are too many sneaky ways to bypass it. one method is to avoid harvesting until you need it.
This is a combat game with survival mechanics, not a survival game with combat mechanics. every 7 days the zombies come to bother you, so food is not the priority, base defense is. emperyon it makes sense to have a food spoiling mechanic, because you do not get bothered as much, and if you are the turret takes care of the issues.

Now, with spoiling food, we can pull a mountain man and just live in the snow biome. The temp outside would halt spoiling. Or we could make a larder in the snow biome and store food there. Watch Jerimiah Johnson on amazon, there is a part where he eats raw bear meat that is kept at room temperature, room temperature being below freezing because rocky mountains. We would all become mountain men and do this if spoiling was a thing.

so in regards to this game, the spoiling mechanic would be too much work and hassle for too little fun. It would result in cheap tactics and exploits and would break suspension of disbelief.

the goal is a fun experience building up a fort to fight zombies. At the moment the stamina debuff and quick starvation is ruining the fun.
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Why would we need to be mountain men? Have you forgotten that we can build fridges in the game? With a spoiling food mechanic, TFP could make it where the fridges could use electricity to keep food as fresh as it can be. Doesn't Ark have food spoilage and ways to slow the spoilage of food. And no, this is a survival game with combat mechanics. Ark, Conan Exiles, these are combat games with survival mechanics.

 
If we're talking realism, really depends on the food...Could survive on potatoes and butter just fine but a whole year of that and you may not necessarily be in good shape. Fat is the big thing in survival situations, need fat in our diet. See rabbit starvation (protein poisoning). Could probably sort out most nutrient deficiencies with fruit and vitamins that are in the game...but that is probably unnecessarily complicating things.

Food spoilage, idk, I would be fine with or without it. Though after playing The Forest recently, it feels a bit weird to have 50 meat just sitting in a box forever lol.

 
I agree food needs to be balanced, and having a more varied diet should be a staple in the genre. When you can overcome any food issues with just bacon & eggs, the whole point of having complex recipes that need vegetables and mushrooms and what not has no purpose at all besides filling your inventory with unnecessary ingredients, and cluttering your recipe list.

I look forward to food being a challenge other than just being more "scarce".

 
Spoilage could actually make the game more fun if it's simple enough, ie only applies to meat. Currently there's a tension with animal spawn rates. If there are too many the entire hunger mechanic is made trivial, but too few and you have no idea if you can hunt when you need to. If meat doesn't keep then it's safe to increase animals, which means hunger can be set at a demanding rate without pissing people off.

 
Food should have a buff and debuff. I only eat bacon and eggs, with the occasional canned food. There should be a buff for food where you get a diminishing return if that is all you eat.
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In A16 food used to be meaningful due to the wellness mechanic. This was excellent as the player would go out his way to make the better foods because they were worth making. Now, like all the good things in A16, they changed it in A17 to something quite garbage in comparison, and all food is the same, so there is zero point in making anything but Bacon and Eggs. I hope yoou like them.

Further, I can predict RIGHT NOW that if TFP read this criticism, their response to fix it will be to make Bacon and Eggs harder to make or move them up the perk tree so they come in much later. That is the kind of lazy, un-fun, non-understanding mentality at work here. Or they will add spoilage, because that would be negative, unfun way to make food matter more, when all they need to do is add minor buffs for eating varieties of food types.

 
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