PC Spoilage of building materials

[meganoth]

Well I don't see any other way to make starvation possible. Even if you remove the essence of farming, which is exponential growth, altogether, and left with barely any other loot source, the player would still 100% either stockpile if the avg looted food was a bit more than the avg consumption or starve every few days if the opposite happened.

The normal case (besides "things go wrong" or "I forgot something") should always be that you can feed yourself (you normally will die or at least waste a lot of time if you are underfed over a longer time because you need stamina to fight and work).

The difference is if you need to buy (hopefully) expensive food at food vendor machines and scavenge kitchens instead of the shotgun messiah, or need to go hunting, or really get part or all of your diet from your garden.

Lets just assume a system where you can't craft seeds. Lets further assume you need a garden of 20 seeds to feed one person and the average player finds 3 seeds a week (excluding seeds for teas or medicine). That would mean about 7 weeks until your garden can fully support you. In week 3 still 50% of what you need to eat needs to come from scavenging, hunting or food machines.

Not saying this rather mechanical way of upgrading your farm is a farmers dream, but it fits the game (i.e. the finding useful stuff part) and is rather easy to balance in its linearity.

I even would add a higher level perk or recipe where you finally learn to craft seeds the current way (as alternative especially for people who play as miners or base dwellers).

 

[warmer]

Who here has ever been spelunking?

I have been in a cave where it was 95 degress out and after going 1/4 a mile inside it was absolutely freezing in the upper 40's. Cave can be VERY cold. We should just dig cellar and call it good in regard to food preservation. Maybe somehow make it so a cellar chest needs to be surrounded on 5 sides to have the proper thermal properties in addition to being beneath ground with no direct line of sight to the sky.

 

[RestInPieces]

The normal case (besides "things go wrong" or "I forgot something") should always be that you can feed yourself (you normally will die or at least waste a lot of time if you are underfed over a longer time because you need stamina to fight and work). The difference is if you need to buy (hopefully) expensive food at food vendor machines and scavenge kitchens instead of the shotgun messiah, or need to go hunting, or really get part or all of your diet from your garden.

Lets just assume a system where you can't craft seeds. Lets further assume you need a garden of 20 seeds to feed one person and the average player finds 3 seeds a week (excluding seeds for teas or medicine). That would mean about 7 weeks until your garden can fully support you. In week 3 still 50% of what you need to eat needs to come from scavenging, hunting or food machines.

Not saying this rather mechanical way of upgrading your farm is a farmers dream, but it fits the game (i.e. the finding useful stuff part) and is rather easy to balance in its linearity.

I even would add a higher level perk or recipe where you finally learn to craft seeds the current way (as alternative especially for people who play as miners or base dwellers).

I agree that you should always be able to feed yourself - the game can't just tell you to die because there is not enough food in the world, it always has to give you a means.

The thing is that even without farming and even on a server with several players, the player can still stockpile enough food from hunting and scavenging alone. And they can do that with 25% loot (always play with 25% loot). And it is right that this surplus exists (like mentioned above), but with the ability to stockpile it gets out of hand.

Even if it there wasn't enough food to stockpile without farming, the way you mention would be nice for the first few weeks but in the end it would just stretch how soon you can stockpile. Yes, a fridge with spoilage would essentially do the same, but that stretching would be tied to electricity (giving it the QOL increase it should have) and a cost (electricity production), plus would not completely let you stockpile anything forever but would mostly increase your QOL and ability to easily cook and preserve good meals which use various different ingredients like meat or veg stew.

But it is possible to stockpile without farming so that is a problem. The only decent alternative way I can see is to have to use food for something else almost equally but less significant (not obligatory), but again that would not bring the risk of starvation into play, but it would just give us a food sink.

 

[canadianbluebeer]

Root cellars were where you kept stuff before refigeration.

Canned things should not be spoiling very fast (unless you do it wrong)

Raw foods shouldn't spoil very fast (you don't wanna eat them anyway) Meat excepted.

Meat: can it (requires all those stupid tin cans and a workbench. go find one)

Cooked foods: spoils over time sure, unless canned, refrigerated.

Canning: tin cans and a workbench. no spoilage, larger stack sizes.

If you want the bonus food buffs back (aka hot foods), make a campfire and heat the food.

Adding some kind of bowl/plate would also be good, for that.

Can of stew + bowl. heat in campfire, get hot stew.

etc.

bacon and eggs? Cornbread? Pie? add a jar of water. (dehydrated foods)

All it takes is adding some recipies. Not hard to do for that.

Spoilage? That would take a new mechanic.

(and with canning, I wouldn't object to spoilage. Without it? Well, either modded out, or mod food preservation in)

 

[meganoth]

I agree that you should always be able to feed yourself - the game can't just tell you to die because there is not enough food in the world, it always has to give you a means.
The thing is that even without farming and even on a server with several players, the player can still stockpile enough food from hunting and scavenging alone. And they can do that with 25% loot (always play with 25% loot). And it is right that this surplus exists (like mentioned above), but with the ability to stockpile it gets out of hand.

Even if it there wasn't enough food to stockpile without farming, the way you mention would be nice for the first few weeks but in the end it would just stretch how soon you can stockpile. Yes, a fridge with spoilage would essentially do the same, but that stretching would be tied to electricity (giving it the QOL increase it should have) and a cost (electricity production), plus would not completely let you stockpile anything forever but would mostly increase your QOL and ability to easily cook and preserve good meals which use various different ingredients like meat or veg stew.

But it is possible to stockpile without farming so that is a problem. The only decent alternative way I can see is to have to use food for something else almost equally but less significant (not obligatory), but again that would not bring the risk of starvation into play, but it would just give us a food sink.

I agree that balancing farming without balancing hunting and canned food would be pointless. But I think that is possible:

I remember a time in A16 experimental when you were dropping anything you were doing if you saw a deer in the distance. A few players "over-sensitive to unexpected difficulties" were complaining about not finding enough meat and (god forbid) having to eat vegetarian dishes. So reigning in the meat supply seems possible even though in vanilla it never will be that scarce.

Canned food is supposed to be your main dish in the first days until you can gradually replace it with better food. I think the chance for food poisoning (once the bugs are fixed) plus low food value plus inventory use of many different cans is quite effective in drawing the player to other food sources. And paying for food will hurt if money is balanced too.

It is also possible that the chance to find canned food slowly decreases with your level (isn't that already in the game for some stuff?). So even if you can feed yourself with canned food from vendor machines and scavenging in the first few days you need another food source eventually.

Is tying to electricity that much of a problem? We could dream of calamities like the food spoiled because you forgot to refuel your generator bank. Apart from that a continually running generator bank is just another heat source beside the continually running forges. And the cost in fuel is a nice sink. But there is also a disadvantage because there is this sharp QOL-singularity: Before the fridge (food stone age) turns to after the fridge (food solved). No gradual getting better and better.

Like you say, it is another way of stretching the time until the food problem is solved, and the fridge might even be one of the best features of a spoilage system. But the basic design target of keeping food scarce until end-game is achievable through linear food sources and balancing as well, IMHO.

 

[Khulkhuum]

Perhaps something similar was already suggested, but i have something regarding farming:

- Make each plot of farmland block accessible lile a chest/forge with a simple ui, based on the farming skill it would tell you more detailed information about what is growing, in which stage it is, how healthy, etc. (similar as in Project Zomboid, but this point isn't too important)

- Make each seed have a chance to die after being planted (different plants, different chances). Advancing a stage of growth may result in staying the same, growing or dying.

- Using water on the crop decreases chance of dying (once per growth phase)

- Each advancement in growth increases dying chance

- using fertilizer (may add different quality fert.) decreases dying chance a lot. Different fert. may speed up growth time or double crops harvested

- After harvesting, the plant goes down to level 1 (as it is now), without water and fertilizer, so you have to add new

- increase time of growing to the next phase, so that it lets the player to explore between phases

- Add some barrels(or some machine), that would work as a water/fert source, allowing auto watering/fertilizing. Good for late game farming

If you want you can tend to plants, but either way you can have some harvest. You can try your luck and go explore for longer, make short trips or invest into machines that enhance farming. Tedious? Maybe, but definitely more satisfying.

 

[Dimpy]

People have been saying the ease of stockpiling food is not great, but below is a problem I have with building material stockpiles (or at least the ease of carrying them around) :

If building supplies were just used for building your base, then the huge stack sizes would be fine. However, they take away from the game for adventuring or looting.More specifically, it takes away from the emergent gameplay of using the environment to your advantage. Let's say there's a house where one room has 20 zombies, and there's a large wood pile outside. A cool solution would be to use the wood outside to make spikes and use those to ensnare the zombies.

With insane stack sizes however, I already have 1000 wood on me at all times. Maybe I'd use spikes, but it would be because I considered the time spent whaling on a tree to recoup the loss to be more valuable than the potential ammo/hitpoints I'd lose going solo. Maybe I'd also harvest the wood pile, but it would because they yield more material per hit than a tree, saving me time in the long run, not because of any strategic decision based on my unique circumstances.

I would much rather the moment-to-moment decisions be "how can I make use of the limited resources available" rather than "Is this going to be worth the grind I'll have to do to make it up?".

I do have a few rough ideas on how to fix it, but player feedback is probably more important

 

[meganoth]

People have been saying the ease of stockpiling food is not great, but below is a problem I have with building material stockpiles (or at least the ease of carrying them around) :

My advice: Forget it for 7D2D. The idea would severly gimp one large important part of the game (the building part) for a cool idea that would be of relevance maybe once or twice in a typical game and ignored by most players. Cool idea, not practical for this game.

 

[Damocles]

At any rate, if the game has a per item “damage level”, as it is with tools and weapons, a free parameter to define degradation, and a repeating global event that degrades those items, then modders could mod in basic food spoilage.

 

[Khulkhuum]

Stockpiles is doable on one particular condition: You can use the stockpile as long as you're in some specifically defined range. Let me elaborate:

It's hard for a player to have hundreds of wood/rock/metal pieces in the backpack, but you can build stockpiles that could contain such amounts. Additionally, you can pick up a non-empty stockpile and put it down somewhere else, but are not able to walk with it (or it prohibits movement really hard). If you want to craft some items, you have a small addition in UI that shows materials from nearby stockpiles (let's say 5 block radius, to not make it too big range). Each stockpile is different from the resource pile (wood stockpile takes up 1 inventory space and stacks up to 2000, but wood pile stacks up to 200 and does not slow down the player) and you can use stockpiles found in POIs, in the wild, etc.

RESULTS: Gathering materials is harder in big amounts and you have to move stacks multiple times or use vehicles (more uses for them). Building is mostly the same, just place stockpiles where needed and craft/upgrade blocks, shifting stockpiles around where needed.

ADD-ONS: Create easy configuration for this, adding parameters for how much a carried stockpile slows down the player (could also make it progressive, full slows down 80%, but half-full only 40%), from what material stockpile it is (modders could make new materials and new stockpiles, even from existing items) and also the range it can be used in.