PC POLL: Would you like to see food spoilage added?

[Laz Man]

The reason I want spoilage is because it is another progression arc for the game. In the early game with no way to preserve food you can only prepare what you can eat that day and that is disruptive to plans. Later as you gain the ability to store and stockpile, your time is freed up to do other things. This transition process is fun for people like me. It feels rewarding to remember back to when things were primitive and it gives another use for electricity.
At this point, the method I would prefer would be to advance the food poisoning effect rather than turn good food into rotten food. This would allow players to choose whether to risk eating or not. I would make freshly cooked food only have a 1% chance to poison and then have the % increase by 2% each day.

For crops I would just add a fourth growth stage that would be “dead” so that they would have to be harvested in a timely manner or lost. I would replace rotten flesh with a “mulch” material that would be crafted using plant fiber, nitrate, and decayed matter. Any perishable food item could be scrapped to decayed matter.

For preservation I would have a low tech powerless icebox that consumed snow as “fuel” and then an electric fridge for later in the game. Preservation would halt the advancement of the poisoning effect indefinitely for simplicity.

This way food spoils but can always be eaten if the risk is that or starvation, there is a time in the beginning of the game where you must eat all you cook or risk it by keeping a surplus for a day or two. There would also be preservation containers with fuel costs that could be used to eventually allow over production and stockpiling

And of course Iron Gut could be twiddled to work with this as well with very little change.

I like your 4th stage idea.

 

[Roland]

There's no reason why this wouldn't work and I'm pretty sure a good amount of people would accept this even if they are against it. I can't see many people quitting because this went into the game.
What I do wonder though is how effective this would be at contributing to the gameplay. You've laid out a lot here. It's a system of systems that appears to require a good amount of attention, but what I would do with this system is purposely spoil my food as much as possible until I had enough of that magic mulch to build a large farm. Then, I would completely bypass any preservation needs by timing the crops so that none die before harvesting, but I still get the exact daily cooking requirements for each harvest.

The other problem I didn’t address is raw foods. What about raw meat? Could you keep it for three weeks and then use it in a recipe that would once again start at 1% chance of poisoning? Then people would just stockpile raw corn, potatoes, meat, etc and then cook meals as they needed them. They would have to turn poisonous and retain their rating once cooked into a meal. Seems complicated.

As for farm plots it is just a matter of balancing the economy of creating new plots. Personally I think the best limiter on farms is adding a watering can and forcing daily watering by hand. That would prevent any but the most masochistic player from building 100 plot farms.....

 

[Laz Man]

The other problem I didn’t address is raw foods. What about raw meat? Could you keep it for three weeks and then use it in a recipe that would once again start at 1% chance of poisoning? Then people would just stockpile raw corn, potatoes, meat, etc and then cook meals as they needed them. They would have to turn poisonous and retain their rating once cooked into a meal. Seems complicated.
As for farm plots it is just a matter of balancing the economy of creating new plots. Personally I think the best limiter on farms is adding a watering can and forcing daily watering by hand. That would prevent any but the most masochistic player from building 100 plot farms.....

You mean like the hoe tool but for only after the seed is planted?

 

[Ghostlight]

I personally think there should even be something like "balanced nutrition". Always eating the same stuff in a row should increase chance of food poisoning per player. Imho food is one of the most important issues in apocalypse survival, but in 7d2d its just drive by.

Anyone remember Wellness? It's not quite what you're wishing for, but it certainly made your diet matter in the game. Another neat little mechanic from A16 lost in the mists of time and replaced by.....generic.

In summary: Wellness dictated your max HP and max Stamina (your level had no effect on those things back then). When you died you lost Wellness which reduced both max HP and max Stamina. All food had a Wellness rating that brought it back up again gradually, thus eating increased your max HP and max Stamina. Easy to get/easy to make foods often gave you a lot of "fullness" (this was back when fullness was a separate meter and not directly related to Stamina) but little or no Wellness.

So a poor diet like eating all cans or boiled meat or whatever did very little to increase your Wellness/HP/Stamina; while at the other end of the scale, Meaty Stew was the the king of foods, because it gave a ton of fullness, HP recovery and Wellness (5 Wellness per Stew as I recall, with 100 Wellness in total needed to recover 1 max HP/Stamina). There were also perks that boosted the Wellness recovery you got from all foods etc. So speccing into those meant your max HP and max Stamina would recover/increase faster.

Was a nice mechanic, which gave a very balanced death penalty - which could spiral out of control if you died a lot and you max HP fell to 60, which I think was the lowest it could go.

 

[Ghostlight]

You're wrong on two points. First, food spoilage will have effects on all players but mainly in early game. We don't start with mass amounts of food (unless you spawn it). So any food you collect will eventually spoil

I think most players amass canned food at the early game. This is the best way to play since food poisoning is devastating then (and harmless later). I even explained in detail in a few threads (this one? cant remember) exactly how to do this. It's a pain, but not as much of a pain as getting food poising early game, so it really is the optimal way to play. This is why spoilage would not work imo and just push more people away from farming and towards cans. Why take the risk of poisoning AND the hassle of spoiling when you don't need to?

First of all amassing food because I like it is not considered wasting time to me. It might be to you but not to me. Are you starting to understand that wasting time means different from person to person? Not yet? Ok let me give an example.

So how will you feel when your gs gets high enough that Demolishers appear but you weren't ready for them because you farmed and filled chests with food when you should have mined and built? This game is all about time management and being efficient in preparing for the increasing hordes......At least if you're on high difficulty and plan to fight them. Time wastage is absolutely a thing in this game. I guess you could throw rancid food at them.

Person 1: Likes to spend time playing games.Person 2: Likes to spent time reading.

Person 3: Likes to spend time doing outdoor activities.

And all their houses were blown down. But the little piggy who didn't waste any time on such frivolity still had a house at the end of it all.

I'm still not understanding why you feel massing food that you can never use was a productive thing to do. Other than pure fun if you enjoy farming, I can get that but otherwise? WHY?? What did it do to help you survive? Playing 7 Days because you enjoy farming does not compute. Stardew Valley perhaps.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

The other problem I didn’t address is raw foods. What about raw meat? Could you keep it for three weeks and then use it in a recipe that would once again start at 1% chance of poisoning? Then people would just stockpile raw corn, potatoes, meat, etc and then cook meals as they needed them. They would have to turn poisonous and retain their rating once cooked into a meal. Seems complicated.

The easiest thing would be to reset the spoilage I think, provided that the ingredients weren't fully spoiled. The spoilage % doesn't need to mean the amount of the food that is spoiled. It could just mean the percent of time until it is spoiled. Like leaving a frozen package of chicken out a little too long before cooking it. Make your soup and bacteria gets killed. The cooked soup will take much longer to spoil.

As for farm plots it is just a matter of balancing the economy of creating new plots. Personally I think the best limiter on farms is adding a watering can and forcing daily watering by hand. That would prevent any but the most masochistic player from building 100 plot farms.....

Yeah. The mulch/compost or whatever shouldn't replace the rotten flesh, but maybe you make the compost first using some recipe at a compost bin that includes rotten flesh, rotten food, plant fibers, nitrate... let it sit for a few days. Compost would then be used with clay and plant fibers and whatever else for farm plots, or alternatively as a fertilizer to give crops a growth boost. It's a shame they removed the fertilizer before changing the farming system because I think it would make farming a little more worthwhile now. Crop boxes do need food. You can't keep planting things in them as much as you could in the ground.

The watering can wouldn't be bad as long as there is some late game QOL alternative. Even that stupid "Raft" game provides a sprinkler system option at some point. It would make more use for pipes and good use of the wrenchable shower heads. Build a pump, build some water storage, attach to your generator.

My farm in my current game is getting pretty big. I know making the planters is a task and a half, but once set up, I do think the crops grow a little too fast. At least for some of them like mushrooms. Mushrooms are too important in some of the crazy non-food recipes to be growing that fast. None of them vary at all to make it interesting either. All the same. Every crop extends the "cropsGrowingMaster" with "PlantGrowing.GrowthRate" set to 63.0, whatever that equates to in real time. I think I harvest every other night in a 2 hr day game, but they could be ready sooner and I just don't know because I'm busy doing other things.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

I personally think there should even be something like "balanced nutrition". Always eating the same stuff in a row should increase chance of food poisoning per player. Imho food is one of the most important issues in apocalypse survival, but in 7d2d its just drive by. That doesn't need a system like "green hell" where you need carbo, fat and protein separately, but "just" increase chance of food poisoning by 1% every time the same meal is eaten in a row or reduce the food gain. If you eat something else, reduce 1% chance of food poisoning for everything else. And wow, cooking different meals instead of just meat stew in masses becomes very reasonable. It would not even increase difficulty in the beginning when you only eat cans, because you find lots of different cans anyway. And if it is singleplayer and you still find enough various cans, it is also not a problem.

Green Hell does it well. SCUM does it poorly... way, way too complicated to a ridiculous level that doesn't match the rest of the game.

ECO Survival does balanced nutrition the best in my opinion.

4 categories... carbs, fat, protein, and vitamins. In 7D2D things like mushrooms, canned veggies, goldenrod, and chrysanthemum (and I suppose vitamins) would be the source of vitamins. Things like coffee, beer, moonshine can slightly deplete your vitamins percentage. Eating too much corn and potatoes could make the carbs percentage of the nutritional value for all your current calories too high. Now you have to counter that with more meat, fat, and vitamins. Too much meat, same thing... now you might need that starch. etc. Low on fat from a lean diet? Just eat some fat.

Being unbalanced doesn't really hinder you like lack of calories would, but being balanced 25% in each category leads to a bonus in how quickly you earn skill points. Something similar would fit just fine in 7D2D where being balanced could either give you an XP multiplier or perhaps a temporary point in each of the classes. Because the management of your nutrition is going to be based on how well you are surviving to sustain the categories at a balanced level, this is one thing that should be reward-based instead of punishment-based.

It would be a good system for XML manipulation too. It just screams modability.

 

[Laz Man]

I think most players amass canned food at the early game. This is the best way to play since food poisoning is devastating then (and harmless later). I even explained in detail in a few threads (this one? cant remember) exactly how to do this. It's a pain, but not as much of a pain as getting food poising early game, so it really is the optimal way to play. This is why spoilage would not work imo and just push more people away from farming and towards cans. Why take the risk of poisoning AND the hassle of spoiling when you don't need to?



So how will you feel when your gs gets high enough that Demolishers appear but you weren't ready for them because you farmed and filled chests with food when you should have mined and built? This game is all about time management and being efficient in preparing for the increasing hordes......At least if you're on high difficulty and plan to fight them. Time wastage is absolutely a thing in this game. I guess you could throw rancid food at them.

And all their houses were blown down. But the little piggy who didn't waste any time on such frivolity still had a house at the end of it all.

I'm still not understanding why you feel massing food that you can never use was a productive thing to do. Other than pure fun if you enjoy farming, I can get that but otherwise? WHY?? What did it do to help you survive? Playing 7 Days because you enjoy farming does not compute. Stardew Valley perhaps.

Ding ding ding! Yes, some people like the game for different reasons which is a good thing imo. For all you know he has horde nights configured to once every 2 weeks and plays on the lowest game setting and that's perfectly fine....

 

[mr.natural]

Maybe it can be used as the new glass. I'm down for more ways of committing suicide.
- - - Updated - - -

What if they added a perk that allowed you to eat rotten food and not have any ill effects, would that help solve this problem?

You can, just take a vitamin pill and there you go, eat rotten meat and sham sandwiches until you burst.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Anyone remember Wellness? It's not quite what you're wishing for, but it certainly made your diet matter in the game.

As you say it i vaguely remember it.

But that adds no real variety too.

It's just a third value.

If you become thirsty, you drink some liquid that gives you the most thirst.

If you become hungry, you eat a meal that gives you the most fullness.

If you not feeling well, you eat a meal that gives you the most wellness.

Yeah, i think it was good decision to remove it. Just another value with no real mechanics behind it.

That's why i'd even prefer nerfing food when you always eat the same, even over a system like in Green Hell. Instead of just water and food you then have 4 values of water, carb, protein and fat. There you always end up with cooking exactly the same 3 meals, the on that gives you most carb, the one that gives most protein and one that gives you the most fat.

But if you need to eat different stuff, every different meal you can make bringes an advantage. Even if it gives you less food it will increase the value you get next time when eating a different meal that gives you much food.

 

[Ghostlight]

Ding ding ding! Yes, some people like the game for different reasons which is a good thing imo. For all you know he has horde nights configured to once every 2 weeks and plays on the lowest game setting and that's perfectly fine....

I know, I know, but I'm still curious as to what benefit stockpiling food conveys.

 

[Ghostlight]

If you become thirsty, you drink some liquid that gives you the most thirst. If you become hungry, you eat a meal that gives you the most fullness.

If you not feeling well, you eat a meal that gives you the most wellness.

Ah but the point was that all foodstuffs gave Fullness and Wellness, however the easier to acquire foods give only a tiny bit of Wellness. And you could not over-eat back then remember. This meant that the player would have to actively seek out or make the better food types if we wanted to increase his max HP.

In A18, it doesn't matter a damn what you eat, as long as you eat. It increases your Stamina and leveling up automatically increases max Stamina end of story. Nowadays a diet of the easiest to come by foods (i.e. cans) is perfectly adequate. In A16 this was not the case because cans gave very little Wellness so you went out your way to eat better. If you didn't and just ate whatever came your way, you'd get full but without increasing your Wellness. Every single thing you ate that did not increase Wellness (or not by much) was a liability as you could only eat so much per day. Put another way, every food you ate which was not a Meaty Stew (which was the best Wellness food) meant you had less max HP than you could have had wherever you were in the game. But you had to eat, right? Two players on day 100, neither of whom had died at all, could find that one of them, who had just eaten any old crap for 100 days, had 120 HP while the other, who went out his way to hunt and farm and eat well, had 200 HP.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

You're right, at least in singleplayer wellness was a reason to cook and not just eat cans.

Since i only play multiplayer, we go for self-cooking anyway, and if you do so, you just focus on two meals one giving max food and one giving max wellness. We also went for garden and cooking in A18, because it is just anoying always looking for cans everywhere and then need to eat dozens of them all the time.

 

[Vedui]

No thanks

The problem with food spoilage is that you need to really enhance the actual food system to work around it. We now have crops that grow from seed to maturity in 2 days (alien virus is great!) ... and most food consumed is still done so within probably a few days, or maybe a week.

Implementing food spoilage means you need to properly implement food preservation. Ie, a freezer (or just storing it in a snow biome) should keep food indefinitely (30-500 days is indefinite in 7dtd and then you have to start implementing food preparation too (ie, re-heating, re-cooking, thawing).

In the end:

Early game - No difference. You generally eat all food within days, or find cans which last for months.

Mid game - No difference. Store it in a snowbiome (or grab ice for an ice box in an underground cave).

Late game - No difference. Store in a freezer and take out when you need it.

I think instead of spending time on this, spend it on things people all benefit from (bandits, npc's, more content, underground caving, water/rafts/boats) and so on

 

[Laz Man]

No thanks
The problem with food spoilage is that you need to really enhance the actual food system to work around it. We now have crops that grow from seed to maturity in 2 days (alien virus is great!) ... and most food consumed is still done so within probably a few days, or maybe a week.

Implementing food spoilage means you need to properly implement food preservation. Ie, a freezer (or just storing it in a snow biome) should keep food indefinitely (30-500 days is indefinite in 7dtd and then you have to start implementing food preparation too (ie, re-heating, re-cooking, thawing).

In the end:

Early game - No difference. You generally eat all food within days, or find cans which last for months.

Mid game - No difference. Store it in a snowbiome (or grab ice for an ice box in an underground cave).

Late game - No difference. Store in a freezer and take out when you need it.

I think instead of spending time on this, spend it on things people all benefit from (bandits, npc's, more content, underground caving, water/rafts/boats) and so on

You forgot ziplines...

 

[hotpoon]

...

That's right, after you put the effort into making a farm and wrestling the canned food out of your player's hands, your reward is food that not only has a chance to make you puke regardless of the skill of the one who made it, but now progressively spoils and can make you puke more, and possibly other side effects? Oh the food has special powers, so it makes the risk worth it?

...

For space purposes, I've only included the one paragraph that I want to address, but I though the rest were fair points.

I voted 'yes', but in my mind, the food spoilage replaces or at least changes the food poisoning, so that you don't get food poisoning randomly, but rather that your chance of food poisoning increases the closer the food gets to its expiry date. If they were to keep the current 4% random chance nonsense and add spoilage, I would say 'hell no'.

The other thing that I just assumed is that with food spoilage, we get rotten meat - which is useful for farming. If, on the other hand, the meat just disappears when it expires, then that would be a shame.

 

[hotpoon]

...No more stack of food, each individual food and ingredient is now on a timer till food spoilage.

....

Not necessarily. In Ark, you can stack steaks up to 20 (if I recall correctly), and the counter only affects the top one. Once it expires, the 19th steak starts rotting. Because rotten meat is actually needed for narcotics, it's a strategy to un-stack meat to single pieces for faster spoilage.

 

[crazywildfire]

Not necessarily. In Ark, you can stack steaks up to 20 (if I recall correctly), and the counter only affects the top one. Once it expires, the 19th steak starts rotting. Because rotten meat is actually needed for narcotics, it's a strategy to un-stack meat to single pieces for faster spoilage.

But then how would the post you made above work if you did it like ark? You said as it gets closer to spoilage it increases poisoning you. If you have it stacked then what you take that top one off and the timer starts over? Then what is the point one will just max stack everything and everytime they the just do away with the first one.

It seems like a bunch of micromanaging for this game and I haven't seen one idea that I can get on board with personally. It would be something that gets modded no matter how it gets done and will use up coding and resources for something that only the left hand wants in game and the right hand doesn't. Even the left hand that wants it in game will mod it to adjust it because not everyone will like how it will be done. For me I don't see a good way of doing this and it being a fun mechanic. I say leave this to a mod and let them work on more important things or what I would call more important. I get that the left hand feels this is important and that is fine more power to those. "Shrug"

 

[hotpoon]

But then how would the post you made above work if you did it like ark? You said as it gets closer to spoilage it increases poisoning you. If you have it stacked then what you take that top one off and the timer starts over? Then what is the point one will just max stack everything and everytime they the just do away with the first one.
It seems like a bunch of micromanaging for this game and I haven't seen one idea that I can get on board with personally. It would be something that gets modded no matter how it gets done and will use up coding and resources for something that only the left hand wants in game and the right hand doesn't. Even the left hand that wants it in game will mod it to adjust it because not everyone will like how it will be done. For me I don't see a good way of doing this and it being a fun mechanic. I say leave this to a mod and let them work on more important things or what I would call more important. I get that the left hand feels this is important and that is fine more power to those. "Shrug"

I hadn't really thought about it, but you're right - the current food poisoning would have to only apply to fully rotten meat instead of gaining an increased percentage to poison. In that case the spoilage would work exactly like Ark. I'm ok with that personally. I think Ark does a great job of it, and I like that it makes it a goal to work towards attaining preserving bins and refrigerators. Conan Exiles also has something you can craft fairly early on which allows you to dry meat for longer preservation. I like that too.

You're also probably right that it will cause a bit of a split. I think it will cause less of a split if they implement it well. If you haven't played Ark, it sounds like a micromanaging bore, but in practise it actually works well. The only thing that's a chore is that in Ark, you aren't just feeding yourself, but also all your dinos, so it's not nice when all the food goes rotten and your dinos start pegging off from starvation. In 7DtD, you're only worrying about yourself so it would be a lot easier.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

But then how would the post you made above work if you did it like ark? You said as it gets closer to spoilage it increases poisoning you.

I guess that have been two separate ideas where no one has anything to do with the other.

Of course it makes no sense to combine the chance of food poisoning with the stacking system from ark.

In ARK iirc the meat does not get worse when the timer ticks down. It changes it's state immediately from "meat" to "rotten meat" once the timer runs out. So it made no sense to remove the "top one". And irc if you removed the top one or halfed the stack, both new stacks had the same time remaining. So there is no way to reset the timer by just removing or adding something to the stack.

It is just a system to make a constant slow loss. From a stack of 20 you lose 1 item per hour, instead of lose nothing and after 20 hours the whole stack vanishes.

Using food poisoning in 7d2d as food spoilage would be the exactly other way round. The meat doesn't change once from "good" to "bad" but it becomes worse slowly but constantly. I guess you don't want to eat a meal which already has reached 80% poison chance, right? But there are still 20% "left". That makes no sense in combination with stacking. At least (don't know if the item system in 7d2d could handle this) you still need to have a counter for every single item, nevertheless it is a single item or a stack of 10.

Anyway the more thinking about it using food poisoning for that might not be a good idea, because that makes people finally only eat really fresh cooked stuff, and avoid storing food at all, because it just becomes worse. That on the otherhand i'd find anyoing. Yeah, maybe it is some kind of realistic, but it's still just a game. My intention with food spoilage is not to create useless overhead and micromanagement but just make food not as self convenient as it is right now.