PC POLL: Would you like to see food spoilage added?
- Thread starter ZombieSurvivor
- Start date
AtomicUs5000
Refugee
OK, if that's what you are getting at. On that note though, like I said before, this ruins the overflowing food chests argument. You would not buy more canned food than the amount you would need to have "overflowing chests" in the first place.
Right now, the 2 hr player still can survive on vending machines alone... as I have already tried this. It wasn't frugal, but I was always full and still had enough dukes coming in to buy other things. Not to mention, there are several vending machines on any map. Shrink the day length, the vending machines restocks faster... but guess what? doesn't matter... if you can survive on vending machines alone in a 2 hr game, you can do it on any day length.
You originally said (and the whole purpose for all this back and forth)
"So people playing solo on short days will likely have experienced only chests overflowing with food and will thus vote yes add spoilage because they perceive food is too easy."
I'm just pointing out that the day length doesn't matter and therefore votes will not be swayed by that setting.
Since food is tied to stamina, it would make the most sense if vending machine restock happened in real time, not in game time.
Since I am saying 2hr days is enough to live on vending machines alone, the vending machine restock should be something like once every 4 hours of real time. So, for a person playing 10 minute days, the restock would happen every 24 days.
Now, add 7 more people in MP. You just balanced for SP by making these vending machine changes because it was too easy to avoid spoilage, and now it's instantly way imbalanced.
Whoops... not going to work.
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PPanda0421
Refugee
Clearly you don't read people's messages before answering. I said spoilage adds more challenge to survival games which is the main reason why I want it to be added. Sure, spoilage will reduce stacks of food in storage in the beginning but for hoarders like me I'll evenly have my stacks and stacks of food/resources no matter what. Again (to repeat myself) I like to craft food and what is your problem with that?
Well I make about 1.5 stacks of steak and potatoes and 2 - 3 stacks of drinks every harvest (3 days). I eat about 2-3 steak/potatoes and about 2-3 drinks per day and are over day 120 in my game. Do the math why I have several chests of food... What I do with my time is none of your business and most certainly does not mean I'm wasting time.
Again that is YOUR style of gameplay which suits YOU. You manage your time how you like and don't say that I'm wasting time because I like to mine more or spend more time hunting/farming/crafting food/hoarding. You need to get this THROUGH your head, everyone has different playstyles/preferences and they don't always align with yours.
Ghostlight
Refugee
But as we have seen in this very thread, many of the people who are pro-spoilage are so specifically because their experience is having overflowing food chests. So this is why I've said they need to manage their time better instead of wishing for spoilage on all the rest of us.
Once someone had collected say a half chest of food - more than they'll ever need - why would they keep collecting more to make it "overflowing"??? And then come here and vote for spoilage! The mind boggles.
Ghostlight
Refugee
You just said yourself you are a (food) hoarder. You admit to enjoying mass stockpiling of food and (presumably) major farming operations, and - let me guess - have more than a few points in Living Off the Land? Food spoiling will therefore have little to no effect on you because you are basically already playing as if spoiling was in the game and you enjoy chests overflowing with food. I doubt many others play like that. I for one would not have the time to mass produce food like that (learned from experience - see below*), so I efficiently produce what we need and get on with more important job like preparing a Steel base for gamestage 500. Others like me will therefore get clobbered by spoiling much more than you would. It would force a play-style onto us akin to yours. I don't want that. I doubt many would.
*My first playthough of A18 I went for Living off the Land 4 early as being able to make vegetable seeds and also collect 3 x veggies every harvest seemed required since I had to feed the rest of the group. I also focused on a huge number of Planters. All this meant was a huge surplus of food that we will never eat. Next playthough I learned and adapted and put 1 point in LotL, used about a dozen Planters and thus made just enough food to keep us going, which freed me up to do my job (mining). And never looked back.
How is amassing so much food to have multiple chests overflowing with it - so much that you could not possibly ever eat it all even if you tried - not wasting time? Are you expecting 13 dwarves and a wizard?
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Ghostlight
Refugee
So Bilbo ate it all and framed the dwarves, huh?
AtomicUs5000
Refugee
Maybe that's what you see in this thread, but it's not what I see in this thread. Most of the very few people who support spoilage and are posting in this thread aren't even using full chests of food as a main argument. If they are even using it as a smaller, supporting argument, I have not read it in this thread... at least not within the first 4 pages where at the end of that page when you stated that the votes are swayed because of this. Perhaps you were foreshadowing your discussion with PPanda0421... if so, PPanda0421 never claimed that to be the reason for wanting spoilage.
In fact, the first person who really brings it up uses it as an argument to not have spoilage because they want a chest full of food:
You think spoilage will ruin the game. It would be best to focus on that instead of waiting around for that one person to say that they want spoilage because they have a chest of food so you could at least prove that a single vote was swayed by this.
Ghostlight
Refugee
Fair point. Anyways, I've gave my reasoning why I think it would be a bad addition - and it's mainly due to I'd rather the devs spend their time on something like endgame, fixing the atrocious melee combat etc etc. The spoilage being a right royal pain in arse is actually my secondary reason. So I'm out (I hope).
AtomicUs5000
Refugee
I didn't mean to pick on you... I'm not like sitting here trying to lay waste to your posts. As someone who really doesn't have a personal opinion on a spoilage system, I just want to hear the real arguments from both sides as it comes from them. This topic is very interesting because food spoilage is pretty common for survival games and with many people thinking that the game is losing its survival feel or becoming a looter/shooter, it is surprising to me that not many people would welcome it.
Kalen
Refugee
Not too get off topic, but I wonder how many people actually want it to be a survival game? I can say that the game appealed to me because I loved building things with the ever present threat of zombies wandering by. I was never really interested in the survival aspects of the game.
Liesel Weppen
Refugee
Agree, but (at least) in MP it does not come with time, it comes suddenly. It is a real problem in the beginning and once you started growing a garden it is "for free" it doesn't even need management, because there is no spoilage. You don't even waste time if you plant to much.
There is no need for better management. Harvesting the vegetables is a matter of seconds. You can do that by running by and the cooking is done afk. But i think there should be a reasonable effort to to that.
I also thought about harvesting like opening chests. Not punching it (i hate that anyway) but "open" it. Would be more realistic and take some more time. Self planted food is curenntly basically "for free".
I'd prefer even if "living of the land" then might decrease harvest time.
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.
Sure might be a performance issue, but i wish for something like that anyway. Food ist just to easy.
Currently you (can) only go for potatoes, corn and mushrooms and you can craft vegetable stew in masses and don't even need meat or fat. Just Boring. Food is just completely irrelevant.
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PPanda0421
Refugee
Obviously you haven't heard of hoarders. Look it up on google...for your own sake. In addition how is mass collection of food/drink any different from collecting lots of other resources? We store them for use later when we need them. For example, I'm sure you have tons of gunpowder lying around or perhaps stacks and stacks of wood, iron, as well. Same goes for bullet casings/tip. Or perhaps you've already turned them into bullets, shotgun shells, etc. All of them for later use. For me since I'm SP things pile up which is fine because as I'm a hoarder, I collect mass amounts of everything and keep them, even if I don't need/use them.
The mind boogles because you don't understand that people have different playstyles and that 'managing their time better' does not make sense in that regard.
AtomicUs5000
Refugee
For me, it was the combination of survival, voxels, and tower defense. If the game were aliens, robots, monsters, mutants, etc it wouldn't have mattered much to me. Zombies do interest me, but I only own a couple zombie games. They Are Billions is the other, another tower defense game that happens to involve zombies. Anyway, the thought of a tower defense game where I could actually build that tower block by block using the resources I've gathered while surviving for the sake surviving was genius to me. So, survival in itself isn't what really appeals to me in this game, but the fact that it is meshed in with voxel tower defense completes it for me. If survival goes, my interest will follow. If voxels go, the same. If tower defense goes, the same. Do I want to be all about survival? Nope. I Have enough of those games... but for me, it's a very important component of this game.
I do own many survival games though. At least 10. Some have spoilage, some don't. I never looked at one game with spoilage and said I wish the food didn't spoil, nor vice versa. I have always accepted that each one of these survival games has at least one thing that I really hate doing because I always see these things as rewarding to get through in the long run. There must be struggle to feel the accomplishment later. Spoilage has never been that thing. I've never seen food spoilage contribute to that struggle in a significant way in any game, even in a game where it probably suits the most -- Don't Starve.
Roland
Community Moderator
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 âdeadâ so that they would have to be harvested in a timely manner or lost. I would replace rotten flesh with a âmulchâ 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 âfuelâ 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.
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 âdeadâ so that they would have to be harvested in a timely manner or lost. I would replace rotten flesh with a âmulchâ 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 âfuelâ 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.
PPanda0421
Refugee
Obviously I would get food harvests by putting points in that skill. Though I respeced and reduced the LOTL level because I'm at endgame and I wanted to try other builds.
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'm sure that food would spoil in 1 or 2 days, not weeks if they added that mechanic). Collecting mass amounts of meat for example will cause the majority of that meat will go bad fast unless something is done to slow down spoilage. That brings us to the second point. I'm presuming that if TFP implements spoilage they'll allow you to connect power to fridges/freezers (which makes more sense) so that food will spoil much slower. Once you reach that point food spoilage would be less of an issue, depending on your luck and/or playstyle. Since you play with others I'm sure you'd be able to have working fridges in no time. So it will not affect you guys as much when you're progress further in the game, either through luck or by leveling.
Forcing a playstyle? Just like weather affecting your temperature in 7D2D and having to wear puffer coats or dusters? Just like having to eat/drink? Spoilage adds more to the survival aspect of the game and makes it more realistic.
BTW, I also hoard other things as well, but since the thread is about food I only mentioned food.
Yes that's your playstyle. You learned something about you and your team's playstyle in this alpha and tweaked it in a different game.
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.
Person 1: Likes to spend time playing games.
Person 2: Likes to spent time reading.
Person 3: Likes to spend time doing outdoor activities.
Each person might think that the others are wasting time but each individual enjoys doing their own activities so it's not wasting time for them.
Secondly, I only take few hours in game to harvest the food. Then I batchcraft stews, drinks, meat/potatos in separate campfires, each with their own timers. I leave and do other things like go exploring, quests, or mining. So it doesn't really use that much time.
AtomicUs5000
Refugee
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.
Liesel Weppen
Refugee
I really like that idea.
Kalen
Refugee
This is the first spoilage idea that I could get behind.... the only real challenge would be how to deal with stacks of food. The most logical way would be to only allow you to stack food that has the same poison %. This would result in multiple stacks of the same item, but I think its worth it.