PC The eating requirement is breaking emersion

[Kosmic Kerman]

I didn't say I wanted more meat, I just don't think that you should burn through a whole deer in one day, I have plenty of food because I know what I am doing, I also have a lot of farm plots. If they want to make it harder, then make it less easy to catch/kill deer, not make you burn it faster. The current burn rate of food is nuts, you just spend all the time eating!

I’ll support this change as soon as TFP puts realistic weights in the game. Of course you need to eat a deer a day. You are regularly carrying 1000s of pounds of gear. It’s a game mechanic not a simulator. Early game food sucks, mid to late game food is fine. If you are trying to live off of boiled meat (a tier 1 food) or canned  food it’s going to get annoying. Buy perks or find schematics, the more advanced foods are more filling and less of an issue. 

wife put up 18 wood bars and went from full to 30%......mining is totalally a pain in the @%$*#!.....yes the warning is annoying at times however and yes it is not immediately deaddly  but the simple fact that you have stop everything you are doing  because your stamina delpetes after breaking 3 blocks thts a bit much...seriously it drops 3x faster than water......kinda busted

That has not been my experience at all.   Maybe there are other things going on that are depleting stamina and increasing hunger (cold weather, heavy armor, using metal tools without enough points in sex Rex, not keeping water filled, or not drinking red tea/purified water).  Or maybe your install is bugged or there are still mods installed.

 

[Forgotten Memes]

You MUST put one point into Master chef at the start cause bacon and eggs is the only reasonable way to survive.

You can get piles of canned food from buried treasure quests and vending machines.

 

[Tommerhawk]

there are many ways to survive

 

[Teacyn]

I've found that doing Buried Supplies quests is an extremely good way to get food, there's a ton of random food items in them along with the supplies you have to turn in.

 

[Darthjake]

I usually start out thus:

1 pt lucky looter

1 pt Master Chef

1 Point Living off the Land

1 pt in either spears or Sexy Rex. 

I can't hit the broad side of a barn with the primitive bow. This has reduced me to forage for veggies and canned stuff as I can't hit game. I am practicing more with the spear to see if I can hunt with it. 

Get them to come straight at you, sideways arrow shots suck.

Aim slightly above their head, unless they are very close, then go to spear.  LOL

Be warned all bows will miss, but the faster the arrow the better chance you have.  Don't be discouraged if you hit to the left or right of the target, it may not be you, it's possibly the bow.

 

[ElCabong]

Get them to come straight at you, sideways arrow shots suck.

Aim slightly above their head, unless they are very close, then go to spear.  LOL

Be warned all bows will miss, but the faster the arrow the better chance you have.  Don't be discouraged if you hit to the left or right of the target, it may not be you, it's possibly the bow.

Always go into stealth mode before you use the primitive bow. If you hit them and they run at you done the most damage you're going to do with the bow and you can frequently finish them off with one hit of your club when they get to you. Deer are going to run away. I think I was one shotting the does with the primitive bow in stealth. I'd have to shoot the bucks then sneak up on him again and shoot him a second time.

 

[Darthjake]

Always go into stealth mode before you use the primitive bow. If you hit them and they run at you done the most damage you're going to do with the bow and you can frequently finish them off with one hit of your club when they get to you. Deer are going to run away. I think I was one shotting the does with the primitive bow in stealth. I'd have to shoot the bucks then sneak up on him again and shoot him a second time.

This.  Also once you have 2 or 3 points in bow, if you get lucky you can one shot stags.  Moe, Tourist and Stags I will use iron arrows on.

Screw Bikers, I go straight to Blunderbuss or something else equally damaging.

 

[FileMachete]

Want to preface the following with this. The food mechanic as a whole has worked ok for me. Over the various alphas we've adjusted to changes, some bigger than others, but nothings been truly 'terrible' imo. While I really didn't like that cooked food could make you empty your guts, there were vitamins to combat it and thats been changed now. I'm also in the camp of wanting early game food to be relevant, even challenging, but not wanting food to be a long term everyday chore, I do mine and build quite a bit & from reports it looks like a19 (not playing it yet) will require more food and the 'right' drinks to do so, along with different perking strategies. Ok, adapt and overcome time again So take the rest of this as simple musings of one player who isn't to fussed about things. (though I am still keeping my hopes up for really ornary zombie chickens)

Without spoilage, and I honestly don't care if its never added, then it seems inevitable that we'll wind up reaching a point where food just isn't an issue anymore, and you might not pick your crops for weeks. Saying that because I don't see a way to 'balance' food consumption/acquisition for widely varying playstyles. Player who doesn't mine, gets & uses vehicles early on, wears light armor and uses firearms vs. heavy armor wearing brawler who mines every night and has bad luck getting or doesn't really care if they have a vehicle.

If design wise TFPs are ok with food no longer being an issue by mid or later game then they could potentially do something like this;

Stage animal spawns. No large animals for the first couple weeks. Have large animals give quite a bit more meat than they do now. Could keep the dangerous night spawns and possibly tweak night time hunting as needed so SPs would have to be really hard core to attempt, while MPs could reasonably team together and be successful. Idea being to provide a way for MP to get enough meat so they'd be similar to SP who'd need to hunt small game for meat early on.

And if they're truly ok with overabundance later on then they could even possibly add in a 'baiting' bit or two; salt-licks for deer &/or corn~potato piles to lure pigs/bears.

Farming wise it'd make sense to me to have "tiers" of that as well. Something like @Lemmers & @Dracula said. If they bring back early-game/SP 'dirt farming' that requires a hoe I hope there'll be a no-perk/schematic stone version.

 

[guardianangelmp]

You can get piles of canned food from buried treasure quests and vending machines.

"Piles of food" being 2-4 items from a buried supplies quest, 2-4 from a vending machine, and I have yet to loot any treasure map in 14 days of a19.

Don't forget that a lot of the canned food only gives 5 points to hunger, so you'd need 20 of them to go from zero to 100.

If you have only one person to feed you could get by on canned food alone, but it would always be a fight and you couldn't mine much, but more than one person couldn't do it.

 

[beHypE]

I feel everyone should preface their point of view with details about how they play. Honestly, even A18 was tough food wise for the first week or so, as a 4man group. We never starved to death but it wasn't a breeze either and we bought every can of every vending machine and every trader we came across. And then, once you get some farms going and someone starts becoming a decent cook, it quickly shifts towards food being a total non issue.

SP is obviously a different beast.

Then again, buried supplies aren't that great of a food venue in my experience. Again, in SP you get to keep everything to yourself, but there's only 1 chest full of goods regardless of how many people you share the quest with. 

And obviously, digging up the chests is a huge stamina drain, factor in the way to and back from the digging location and it's more often then not a 0 sum game. 

 

[Feycat]

Yeah, the food thing is REALLY aggravating. I don't mind food being scarce and hard to come by in the beginning, but I shouldn't have to SPEC INTO food being at all useful. 

 

[meganoth]

"Piles of food" being 2-4 items from a buried supplies quest, 2-4 from a vending machine, and I have yet to loot any treasure map in 14 days of a19.

Don't forget that a lot of the canned food only gives 5 points to hunger, so you'd need 20 of them to go from zero to 100.

If you have only one person to feed you could get by on canned food alone, but it would always be a fight and you couldn't mine much, but more than one person couldn't do it.

I play a SP and a 4-man MP game (both at difficulty 2, one above default) and surprisingly both weren't THAT much different in how the "food crisis" went (unlike A18). In both games I/we had not much luck with finding animals. Food came from quests, daily treks to vending machines, raiding kitchens. Making a farm was the most important task of the first week, but now day 9 it is slowly getting useful (MP faster than SP even).

I had to learn saving stamina by generally not overloading the inventory, not running while being overload. Since I am not speccing into strength/miner I had to postpone doing mining (this is MUCH different to A18) and invest 2-3 points into stamina-saving perks. But that is a good change, in A18 I practically could perk up my main weapons immediately and ignore most utility perks.

My first horde night I fought in a very simple derelict wood building, even upgraded some blocks to cobbelstone (for SI) but that was really unneccessary. In MP our building similarily didn't get much damage. In consequence I think you don't need to upgrade mining and fighting asap, solving your food problem is an excellent starting quest line.

 

[Kirtonos]

Then again, buried supplies aren't that great of a food venue in my experience. Again, in SP you get to keep everything to yourself, but there's only 1 chest full of goods regardless of how many people you share the quest with. 

And obviously, digging up the chests is a huge stamina drain, factor in the way to and back from the digging location and it's more often then not a 0 sum game. 

This would be an interesting test to run. See what the food delta is before and after you complete the quest and how much the "rewards" would fill in the loss.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Then again, buried supplies aren't that great of a food venue in my experience. Again, in SP you get to keep everything to yourself, but there's only 1 chest full of goods regardless of how many people you share the quest with. 

Multiplayer is different as you noticed and from my experience food is a bigger issue in MP since A18.

But that is regarded on how you play. If 2 players share one BS quest, both have to run the way to the marker. But each has only to dig half the amount. You still have the double drain for walking the way, but not for digging. So the loot is still more than half the value.

But nobody forces you to share a quest. If each player does his own BS quest, it's exactly the same as in singleplayer.

It's still RNG, if you find the chest fast, you don't use that much stamina. If you have bad luck and have to dig a whole sinkhole until you find the chest, of course it is less efficient.

And obviously, digging up the chests is a huge stamina drain, factor in the way to and back from the digging location and it's more often then not a 0 sum game. 

Couldn't say it was a 0 sum once in SP. I picked BS quests for my first 4-5 quests and they fed me quite easily through the first day. Plus you find food by doing conventional looting.

Another thing in multiplayer of course is, vending machines don't give twice the amount for 2 (or more) players.

 

[Mahnogard]

Couldn't say it was a 0 sum once in SP. I picked BS quests for my first 4-5 quests and they fed me quite easily through the first day. Plus you find food by doing conventional looting.

Another thing in multiplayer of course is, vending machines don't give twice the amount for 2 (or more) players.

I feel like I've come out ahead in SP BS quests. Also, I need clay anyway, so I might as well get paid for doing it.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Also, I need clay anyway, so I might as well get paid for doing it.

Right, and the digging itself also gives a valuable amount of XP.

 

[Arcueid_Brunestud]

Just to jump onto this.

My experience so far is i went from A18 where with 5/5 Iron gut (0 sexual tyrannosaurus) i could generally keep myself going with a few sham chowder doing a day of mining.

A19; sexual tyrannosaurus + iron gut and i can't leave base without 2 stacks of sham chowder to get through half a day of mining.

From what I've noticed exertion-based food depletion hasn't changed much. its just the passive depletion over time that's gone nuts. Even if I'm massively hot in the wasteland my food will passively tick down faster than my water. Even constantly chugging red tea and mineral water its gone in an instant.

Playing in multiplayer just standing around for a couple minutes waiting for a craft to finish I've been tempted to log out while I'm waiting because I'll lose about 1/3 of my bar just standing around. And once again in that time I'll maybe see a sliver of the water meter.

So realism or not; the current system seems to undermine the talents that are supposed to make you better at handling this resource. Not to mention with sexual tyrannosaurus somehow contributing more to hunger depletion than iron gut, it feels like str is the wonder-stat; and Fort has barely any point now, especially considering how ignoring the baseline regen nerf, the way max health works now makes the regen perk way less useful; iron gut barely helps anything now because most things don't have a dysentery chance; and the things that do were significantly nerfed (and now do HP damage to you); and with heavy armor moving there i can barely justify messing with that tree anymore.

But i guess that's a bit off-topic.

 

[FA_Q2]

Have not really had an issue with food tbh.  Most of the problems with it are overstated IMHO.

First, the stamina hit is only to max stamina, not to stamina regen as far as I know so it actually does not effect mining in any shape or form.  If I am mining and I get hungry it does not matter - either my stamina is continually around 0 the entire time or it is maxed and that max is not all that important.  Even questing the having a slightly lower max stamina is not a huge deal.  In 18, your stamina could go as low as 25% and that was a major deal, now the stamina loss is far less and can be managed.  Further, starving is almost moot.  The HP loss from starving is very slow and almost all of it will be healed the next time I bother to eat a proper meal.  I put a single point into living off the land because that first point is OP considering it doubles the effectiveness of all farming.  Never spend any other point in anything to do with food, hunting or cooking and have no problems with eating past the first few days.

 

[warmer]

If you have ever had an super hard physical job, I can tell you, 4 hours after stuffing your face, you are ready to do it again. Mining is certainly that type of job.

Now sitting at a desk typing... You can do a whole day on 1500 calories, vs the 3000 you'd be eating working in a warehouse just to maintain body mass.

What you are doing matters a great deal. Level up a few skills and you are a machine that never gets tired and hardly has to eat. It is all about how you play the game. Personally I like that you earn something later in regard to food/water. It widens the player progression experience.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

Just to jump onto this.

Playing in multiplayer just standing around for a couple minutes waiting for a craft to finish I've been tempted to log out while I'm waiting because I'll lose about 1/3 of my bar just standing around. And once again in that time I'll maybe see a sliver of the water meter.

That sounds like a bug. There should be no depletion of the hunger bar for just standing still. Apparently, there is also an issue of some servers not updating to the most recent build causing a mismatch between server and client. In SP, hunger depletion is not occurring the way you describe.