PC it appears that if you exert yourself you use more food

ElCabong

ElCabong

Well-known member
This may not be the case and is only my poor assumption. It seems that when I am digging or cleaning out a level one poi, I tend to burn up calories. This is okay and for the most part I like the way food has been handled. I'm worried about the large places that might take a few hours to clear such as the crack a book factory. If you're not careful to have enough food you're going to be extremely hungry and at a big disadvantage when you get to the top.

yes there are places that you might pick up some food but I wouldn't count on it. and by the time I'm ready to tackle something like the big factories I might find that I have all the food I need. I think the calorie burn when you're exerting yourself needs to be tailored back a little.

Like I said I'm really liking the way food is handled. It has turn me into an alpha predator and I used to very reluctantly hunt deer. That's because of how I felt when I was a kid and worked out what happened to Bambi's mama. Of course, in a pinch, I would hunt deer but for the most part I left them alone if I had plenty of food.

Not anymore. Poor Bambi, he's an orphan cuz of me.

 
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If I understand it correctly, it has always been the case that "recovering stamina" (stamina bar filling back up) = "consuming food/burning calories". The food is the 'battery' used to refill the stamina bar. No matter how you drained the stamina, you consume food when it fills back up. So moderate exercise - chopping a tree perhaps - results in moderate food consumption since it takes a while for the stamina bar to drain. Heavy exercise - sprinting, jumping, power attacks - drains the stamina bar very quickly, resulting in frequent need for stamina recovery, meaning frequent consumption of food.

Standing still, walking, riding bicycle slowly = 0 stamina drain = 0 stamina recovery = 0 food use.

This is me remembering a post from Gazz/Madmole from months ago. Could be a hallucination or a result of alien mind re-programming.

 
Yep it does, and TFPs have a recent history of cranking up stamina costs at the beginning of each new alpha then slowly rolling consumption rates back somewhat. I'm guessing this cycle is repeating itself again. And from MMs recent post related to how he went about gathering materials for his horde tower, cement from pois rather than stone mining, any reductions might take a while, heh.

 
It is annoying, but I'm not quite ready yet to demand a nerf (de-nerf?). I am after all a nearly-dead weakling survivor, accustomed to a soft suburban life playing video games, but now thrust suddenly into a harsh and unforgiving zombie apocalypse. Maybe chopping down a tree with a sharpened hunk of flint on a stick ought to make me wheeze and gasp and have to stop 3 times before I'm done?

I just tried a new 18.4 game and it is, IMO, absurdly easy to just dig or chop non-stop as a level 1 player with a stone tool. Seems too easy. Maybe A19 is too harsh, but I'm not sure of that just yet.

 
Boidster said:
I just tried a new 18.4 game and it is, IMO, absurdly easy to just dig or chop non-stop as a level 1 player with a stone tool. Seems too easy. Maybe A19 is too harsh, but I'm not sure of that just yet.
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Agree. Things swung a wee bit too far.

To me the real fix for this isn't just leveraging Stamina/Food consumption. It's expanding options for resource gathering. All rock isn't granite, all trees aren't just shrubs or 60 feet 30 years old.

While I don't like the current 8 foot tree model, change it from 300 HPs to 100. Add sandstone outcroppings where a block has 200 HPs instead of 500, add mud blocks around lake/stream shores for easy digging, that kind of thing.

And though it'll never happen, Little Blue Dress aka 'working out n gettin fit' would make a lot of sense for the first week or two. Could simply hard code a daily + to 'fitness' to avoid the sitting on cacti cries from folks. Because you're right, going from a couch potato to rugged survivor would require getting fit. A way that was immersive to mimic that tranformation just makes good sense to me (shrug) :)

But I've always been pro, -rational- LBD. Not the annoying make a thousand stone axes stuff.

 
I think it's over tuned.  In the space of about 8 hours, i ate 3 eggs, 2 pieces of raw meat, 1 can of tuna, 2 cans of Miso Soup, 1 can of Chili, and 1 can of Chicken Rations, and i was still hungry when i logged out.  

 
Tourist said:
I think it's over tuned.  In the space of about 8 hours, i ate 3 eggs, 2 pieces of raw meat, 1 can of tuna, 2 cans of Miso Soup, 1 can of Chili, and 1 can of Chicken Rations, and i was still hungry when i logged out.  
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Agreed. I think in my first day I consumed the equivalent of 20k calories and was still not at full food. This is also when I swapped out of heavy armor and went with padded. It's still a drain but not as bad. 

 
Tourist said:
In the space of about 8 hours, i ate 3 eggs, 2 pieces of raw meat, 1 can of tuna, 2 cans of Miso Soup, 1 can of Chili, and 1 can of Chicken Rations
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Egg: +5 each x3 = +15

Meat: +2 each x2 = +4

Tuna: +5 each

Miso: +5 x2 = +10

Chili: +15

Chicken Rations: +15

So in total you ate +64 food. If you ate all of it except the Chicken at once, it wouldn't quite be enough to take you from "Hungry" to full food. You ate many things, but not a huge amount of food value. It seems unrealistic, but the game needs to allow room for the advanced foods like meat/veg stew and sham chowder. The canned foods and plain meats are low-quality, low-utility foods that tide you over until you can make better stuff. Or alternatively you get a steady supply of dukes and just keep buying canned food. But you still will need to eat four cans of Chili (for example) to go from "Hungry" to full.

 
Food/animals also seem sparser; in my latest playthrough, it seems like the majority of what I do is gather obscene amounts of food just to try to stave off starvation.

I'm also extremely disappointed to see that the farm plot system returned.  I hated it in 18 and I hate it now; I liked the more immersive system of requiring fertilizer in 16 instead of the clunky blocks.

 
I'm the ones who welcome a change in food consumption, I started to play at A18.4 and I was just eating a couple cans every night, I didn't eat in the whole day, at 4 AM grab my motorcycle and come back at 22.:00 just with less than a quarter stamina bar missing, and was first time player at my 30's level.

I will be fully playing tomorrow with my friends, can't give an opinion till I play the long run.

I read a lot from the comments, if works like that the game will force us to hunt or grow crops, gonna be awesome.

 
IMO, it would make more sense to have the "higher tier" foods keep you full longer instead of having to scarf down an entire buffet line of food to stave off hunger for another hour.

 
Tourist said:
IMO, it would make more sense to have the "higher tier" foods keep you full longer instead of having to scarf down an entire buffet line of food to stave off hunger for another hour.
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That would make more sense, but easier said than done especially since they have been trying to simplify the whole stamina/food/water mechanic. It can be difficult to disconnect IRL knowledge of what two cans of tuna does to hunger vs. what "cheap, weak food item" should do to you in a game. I do think the stamina drain has been cranked maybe a bit high; we'll see if they adjust that in a future release.

 
Tourist said:
IMO, it would make more sense to have the "higher tier" foods keep you full longer instead of having to scarf down an entire buffet line of food to stave off hunger for another hour.
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That's exactly what they do tho. They are worth more in food value so they keep you full longer....

 
JCrook1028 said:
That's exactly what they do tho. They are worth more in food value so they keep you full longer....
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What i meant was that they should cause you to gain hunger more slowly.  As it stands no matter what you eat, the hunger meter falls just as quickly.  Not to mention that it's odd that we have to eat soooo much just to fill up, only to be hungry/starving again after running 1k meters.

 
Stop looking at it as 6 rl cans of food. Look at the numbers. Burning different types of food at different rates? That's a really good way to tie up CPU time for a meaningless "feature".

 
I wonder also if the food drop is linked to game stage too.  It seemed to me that day 1-5 we (party of 3) were struggling to keep ourselves fed, even resorting to old sham sandwiches and just guzzling goldenrod tea to deal with it.

Once our day 5 horde was done we were a few levels higher and actually found real guns, in addition to those guns however, we also started getting more food.  We were still on the edge but better then before.  After the day 10 horde we had actually started a small stockpile of food.

Although even at 150% loot it seems that egg drops have been heavily nerfed, I want my bacon and eggs, dagnabit!

I've resorted to hitting the 3 traders on restock day to buy food items.

 
Darthjake said:
I wonder also if the food drop is linked to game stage too. 
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It is not. It's tied to stamina use only.

It seemed to me that day 1-5 we (party of 3) were struggling to keep ourselves fed, even resorting to old sham sandwiches and just guzzling goldenrod tea to deal with it.
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In multiplayer, especially in the first few days and when looting together you it might be a struggle, because you don't find enough for all. Spreading out, means different people looting different POIs helps.

Although even at 150% loot it seems that egg drops have been heavily nerfed, I want my bacon and eggs, dagnabit!
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Eggs are somewhat rare, especially if people don't care looking into nests, and if you don't spread. If all players are walking the same path, of course they won't find many nests, because the one before them already looted them.

 
This has been a massive issue on the server I play on. I scraped by early game with experience, skill and making food a primary focus (to the point of being competitive). Most everyone else was starving to death repeatedly.

 
JCrook1028 said:
Stop looking at it as 6 rl cans of food. Look at the numbers. Burning different types of food at different rates? That's a really good way to tie up CPU time for a meaningless "feature".
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I look at it as how much time I have to stop what I am doing to eat and wait through that animation. It's monotonous. It doesn't add any depth to the game other than being a time waster especially when you have to do it 6+ times to even get out of hungry. 

Look, I'm all for there being survival aspects in a survival game. Food should be important. I should feel good that I found a can of chili and I'm able to keep myself fed for awhile. I should not find a can of chili and think "great, only 17 more to find to feed me for the day." I should feel good about downing a deer because that should feed me for weeks. Not for half a day. 

Also, out of 14ish days played total this alpha, I've seen a one boar and one rabbit. All of this in forest biome with plenty of movement over a good 1.5km radius from base. 

 
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Just wishful pondering here, I appreciate that 7dtd menus would really struggle to support this & would be little gain from the dev cost.

(just came to mind, not thought out, might be more steps than just simply eating things as they come)

(was thinking of long backpack trips where you're throwing whatevers left into the pot & you start eyeballing squirrels & birds, heh)

At some point some game is going to introduce a 'Stone Soup' mechanic where you can just throw in any old thing, and the magic pot will combine everthing into a generic stew, with combined stats. Add in say a 3-5 portions Thermos to carry the cooked stuff in and use another to dump in contents from cans for later cooking... or have magic Thermos combined cold stews? maybe give small bonus for cooked/warm stews?

Point would be you'd be able to use all gathered food without having to have exact number of x y z. Could still have 'real' recipes, with better buffs cause they'd be balanced nutrition, but early on, just like rl, when you're really hungry most anything gets ate up immediately :)

 
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