PC Stamina Softcap feels too harsh

OnlyMeiya

OnlyMeiya

New member
Within the first 5 minutes of the game trying to get your standard basic survival needs met, crafting plant fiber armor, make a stone axe, a bedroll and craft a bow and collect materials to get enough arrows crafted to last you through Day1 your stamina softcap has already depleted too 85 from 100, it can be regained through eating food, but the food poisoning chance on raw food like corn, potato,yucca, ect, 10% seems far too much to try and counter act this.

I think its very unfair to lose that much this early just trying to follow the basic survival guild quest line.

So you have to run around with <15% less stamina till you can find canned food that will hopefully not give you food poison.

Anyone else think the softcap is a bit too much or depletes too quickly?

Or should we now try and counteract this by sacrificing water to boil an egg, (since you should be farming bird nests for feathers for arrows) a resource that will likely be very scarce this early in the game?

Is it fair?

 
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I don't like that a softcap exists at all. It makes the game less fun.
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I also agree because it penalizes you for performing actions you have to do. prior having a softcap was only thrust upon the player for excessive dying, here its for performing very basic actions.

 
I like that there is some penalty to it and that it degrades. I think it is a bit too much, though.

What if it stayed at 100 until say 75 or 50 hunger and THEN started to decay?

 
I like that there is some penalty to it and that it degrades. I think it is a bit too much, though.
What if it stayed at 100 until say 75 or 50 hunger and THEN started to decay?
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I would much rather have some sort of exhaustion mechanic tied to stamina rather than hunger, at least in its current form. Constantly eating seems to be unnatural.

I think the entire hunger/stamina system likely needs to be re-conceptualized.

 
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I think that the impact of food and drink (as well as how this information is displayed to the user) needs to be rethought. Currently, here are the problems I see:

1) Fullness (and hydration?) can go over 100%, but that is never displayed in the UI. There is also no information available about how far over the cap you can go.

2) The moment you are no longer 100% full or hydrated, you start taking penalties to max stamina (or stamina regen for hydration). This causes a strong incentive to keep consuming as soon as you have penalties.

3) Your fullness and hydration are not visible unless you go digging into the stats in the inventory screen. If the intent is that they be micromanaged to manage stamina, they need to be displayed on the main game UI or the game starts getting a lot more annoying to play.

If the mechanics are going to be kept similar to now, I’d like the pimps to address all three of the above problems in some way. As it is, food and water management has become like clothing was in previous versions: a constant micromanagement annoyance.

 
Within the first 5 minutes of the game trying to get your standard basic survival needs met, crafting plant fiber armor, make a stone axe, a bedroll and craft a bow and collect materials to get enough arrows crafted to last you through Day1 your stamina softcap has already depleted too 85 from 100, it can be regained through eating food, but the food poisoning chance on raw food like corn, potato,yucca, ect, 10% seems far too much to try and counter act this.

Is it fair?
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have you actually tried it?

i've been running around eating the snowberries like they're goin out of style

for like 4 game-days, only got sick twice.. and it really wasn't that much of an issue at that..

 
I haven't had too much trouble finding/preparing early food in my A17 playthroughs. I can usually find an animal or two and even cooking pots seem to be quite common (lots of kitchens have them), so the food situation is usually under control by the end of day one. But I agree with people that the current way of stamina management is tedious. Chugging food and drink every 100 meters just wrecks the fluidity of gameplay, it's aggravating rather than challenging.

I'd much rather have a system where food is harder to find and penalties are progressive and harsher, but they don't kick in unless you're really starving, just like in real life. You'd still have to make sure to get a few meals a day in you, but you wouldn't have to interrupt what you're doing quite as often. A spoilage system would prevent players from avoiding this challenge just by killing one or two animals, and lowering the drop rate of canned foods would obviously be necessary as well.

The metabolism and chef perks could be reworked a little to make them feel like actual perks instead of being either useless or a quality of life improvement at best.

 
The food poisoning percentages are kind of misleading. If you get "food poisoning", you actually only get the first level of a buff that doesn't do anything. After 90 seconds there's a random roll to determine if the debuff progresses. It's a 1/5 chance without Immunity perk. So really 5%/10% food poisoning chance is more like 1%/2%.

 
I haven't had too much trouble finding/preparing early food in my A17 playthroughs. I can usually find an animal or two and even cooking pots seem to be quite common (lots of kitchens have them), so the food situation is usually under control by the end of day one. But I agree with people that the current way of stamina management is tedious. Chugging food and drink every 100 meters just wrecks the fluidity of gameplay, it's aggravating rather than challenging.
I'd much rather have a system where food is harder to find and penalties are progressive and harsher, but they don't kick in unless you're really starving, just like in real life. You'd still have to make sure to get a few meals a day in you, but you wouldn't have to interrupt what you're doing quite as often. A spoilage system would prevent players from avoiding this challenge just by killing one or two animals, and lowering the drop rate of canned foods would obviously be necessary as well.

The metabolism and chef perks could be reworked a little to make them feel like actual perks instead of being either useless or a quality of life improvement at best.
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This is one of the best posts regarding the issue I've read. I think depleting your character's ability over time is a very nice concept, but it needs to be happening over longer timeframes and food should be made way more scarce to counter that, and gathering some a real task in itself (until you have a garden / farm *one can dream*). Quite frankly, I like hunting for food, but it's just way too easy and always has been.

If the "lootable food" was in a better state, i.e. not so many things giving you random sicknesses if you're unlucky, the animals made more rare and/or giving less meat, and stamina / misc debuffs applied to your character over a longer period of time instead of kicking in the second you stop eating, the whole food/stamina situation would actually feel like a simulation and would be much more thrilling instead of feeling like a chore. Finding an animal should feel like a real opportunity (and the killing made more difficult by accelerating the wander speed and altering the overall decision making / awareness), made easier with guns, and not just "another" bag of meat lying around, waiting to be added to the stockpile.

 
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have you actually tried it? i've been running around eating the snowberries like they're goin out of style

for like 4 game-days, only got sick twice.. and it really wasn't that much of an issue at that..
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I started with a stack of Yucca and I got sick after about 6 of them, perhaps I am unlucky and you were more fortunate.

 
I think that the impact of food and drink (as well as how this information is displayed to the user) needs to be rethought. Currently, here are the problems I see:
1) Fullness (and hydration?) can go over 100%, but that is never displayed in the UI. There is also no information available about how far over the cap you can go.

2) The moment you are no longer 100% full or hydrated, you start taking penalties to max stamina (or stamina regen for hydration). This causes a strong incentive to keep consuming as soon as you have penalties.

3) Your fullness and hydration are not visible unless you go digging into the stats in the inventory screen. If the intent is that they be micromanaged to manage stamina, they need to be displayed on the main game UI or the game starts getting a lot more annoying to play.

If the mechanics are going to be kept similar to now, I’d like the pimps to address all three of the above problems in some way. As it is, food and water management has become like clothing was in previous versions: a constant micromanagement annoyance.
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1) You can check the xml's I don't think you can over hydrate though, only over eat. Cap for over eating is 25% iirc.

2) The regen reduction from hydration doesn't start till you get below 75%

3) There are many modlets that let you see this at all times, and you literally just drop them into a mod folder in your games install. While I do wish they'd have it somewhere on the UI by default, getting a mod to do it is very easy.

 
I like the softcap but I would like to see a "grace" period where you lose nothing.

Maybe you have till noon on the first day and then a pop up explains stamina [for new players] by having you perform an activity.

 
The food poisoning percentages are kind of misleading. If you get "food poisoning", you actually only get the first level of a buff that doesn't do anything. After 90 seconds there's a random roll to determine if the debuff progresses. It's a 1/5 chance without Immunity perk. So really 5%/10% food poisoning chance is more like 1%/2%.
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This applies for any ailiment actually, at first you get the illness debuff, which bascally lets you know "hey you might catch something but you don't know what" Though if you were eating food with a % chance to food poison you know thats what it will be. After that debuff explires the game rolls if you actually get stage 1 of the illness, more often than not you usually manage to avoid it. In general every minute you can shrug off any ailiment even without the immunity perk, i've managed to shrug off 2 infections in my b240 playthru so far during stage 1 where I was actually infected.

On a side note, Infection is actually not fatal now on its own, stage 3 can just expire, however, by stage 3, its going to lower your max health to the min of 30, -5 to all stats, and massivly increased stam cost to do anything just ike stage 1. The chance of death is that your pretty much locked to 30 max health until its done as it constantly damages your health for its 300s duration, its pretty easy for a zombie or 2 to knock that 30 hp max health you got and kill ya.

 
I think that the impact of food and drink (as well as how this information is displayed to the user) needs to be rethought. Currently, here are the problems I see:
1) Fullness (and hydration?) can go over 100%, but that is never displayed in the UI. There is also no information available about how far over the cap you can go.

2) The moment you are no longer 100% full or hydrated, you start taking penalties to max stamina (or stamina regen for hydration). This causes a strong incentive to keep consuming as soon as you have penalties.

3) Your fullness and hydration are not visible unless you go digging into the stats in the inventory screen. If the intent is that they be micromanaged to manage stamina, they need to be displayed on the main game UI or the game starts getting a lot more annoying to play.

If the mechanics are going to be kept similar to now, I’d like the pimps to address all three of the above problems in some way. As it is, food and water management has become like clothing was in previous versions: a constant micromanagement annoyance.
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I am glad i am not the only one that thinks this. I starved to death in one of the more recent builds, on day one. That was so absurd that it was funny. However, a horror game tends to not go for humor.

I think that the hunger debuff needs to be tiered. you should only lose 25% a day, and the debuff should not hit until you hit 74 hunger. At 74 hunger the first debuff stage should hit, and that would affect crafting speed and xp gain, NOT stamina. The stamina debuff would hit at 49 hunger.

starving to death should be hard to do, not impossible.The caveat is that it would take two days of well fed to remove one level of debuff. this makes eating important.

 
personally, i like the new system. it adds a layer of realism and survival to the game. but i dont think you should start losing max stamina so soon. i would like to see full stamina until you get below 75% fullness, and then have a sort of accelerating loss of stamina cap after 50%. you shouldnt have to carry a grocery store with you for a mining trip

 
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