Water and Food for a few Days then Done

[StaceyMyers]

Absolutely love the game, 4307 hours played to date, please tweak Water and Food and add an end game. With my friends we play on lower difficulty, but if I play alone I play on insane, horde every 2 days and it sadly goes like this:
1. Zip through starter quest, get to first trader
*Must be near a town or move on, need mailboxes and kitchens
*Buy one level of healing to solve issue of eating/drinking bad food which injure you
*Buy animal tracking to hunt for meat and leather (or find 10 leather in a POI)
2. Build first combat and crafting base near the quest giver and near some water to wash off after eating
*Washing after eating completely removes that element except for digestion issues, see below
3. 3-5 days of water and food focus
*Find a cooking pot or 4 books to craft a forge and make a cooking pot because you can't boil water any other way (not logical)
*Golden rod tea solves digestion issues so now I can eat and drink whatever I find
4. Magazines to get to bacon and eggs and red tea
*When you are level 10 cooking, the game is basically over
5. Game is solved, I can survive forever, I could set it to every night and it would not matter.
*I farm but I have never bothered crafting higher food, the game is over by day 8. I live on bacon and eggs and red tea the entire game, never even bother
*I build small combat bases all over the map and draw the zombies out of the POI and smush them, eazy peezy
*Horde night I kill anything that comes in a simple base, building traps is not needed
6. I should mention electrical fences, they are super powerful, like broken powerful

Please address food and water, it is only interesting for a couple brutal days, and it is brutal
Please address end game, I skip all biomes and just go to the end biome as I have food and water solved
Please create survivors to save and add mouths to feed or something, has to be some mechanic that forces me to build a base
When the game first started horde nights were craziness, we had to fight super hard, now I only care about food and water for a couple days and it is over

 

[8_Hussars]

*Buy one level of healing to solve issue of eating/drinking bad food which injure you
*Buy animal tracking to hunt for meat and leather (or find 10 leather in a POI)

Unfortunately, Healing Factor uses food to replace HP. So if a player is struggling for food its a sub-optimal choice. There are animals everywhere (especially at night) Animal Tracking is not necessary.

Living on basic food and drinks is easily managagable but not optimun. Scrounging for eggs (or buying them) is not difficult but can be a chore for some players. Eating one high level meal and drink at the start of the day frees a player up (and inventory space) to do other things.

Consider putting those two points into Living off the Land for the harvest bonus (more potatoes, corn, yucca, etc) and lock picking for Forge Ahead magazines to rush the forge, and take the RNG out of cooking pots and grills. With three points into Lockpicking and serious looting (not quests) a player can can have a workbench unlocked and built in the first 24 hours (which really compromises early game)...

The survival challenge pyramid is there to direct players into meeting needs. They are designed to be essential and harder early on and then just become maintenance tasks. Physiological needs establish sustainable food and water. Safety Needs establish shelter and protection from danger. After that get fighting, building, looting, and questing.

 

[StaceyMyers]

Unfortunately, Healing Factor uses food to replace HP. So if a player is struggling for food its a sub-optimal choice. There are animals everywhere (especially at night) Animal Tracking is not necessary.

Living on basic food and drinks is easily manageable but not optimun. Scrounging for eggs (or buying them) is not difficult but can be a chore for some players. Eating one high level meal and drink at the start of the day frees a player up (and inventory space) to do other things.

Consider putting those two points into Living off the Land for the harvest bonus (more potatoes, corn, yucca, etc) and lock picking for Forge Ahead magazines to rush the forge, and take the RNG out of cooking pots and grills. With three points into Lockpicking and serious looting (not quests) a player can can have a workbench unlocked and built in the first 24 hours (which really compromises early game)...

The survival challenge pyramid is there to direct players into meeting needs. They are designed to be essential and harder early on and then just become maintenance tasks. Physiological needs establish sustainable food and water. Safety Needs establish shelter and protection from danger. After that get fighting, building, looting, and questing.

You may have completely missed the point, the game is only about water and food for a couple days then the game is basically over. There are no safety needs, even on insane difficulty. Getting a cooking pot is either you find one or you build a forge, which as I said is quick. Then you get to cooking level 10 and the game is over. 3-5 days, 8 if unlucky or bad start, and the game is over. I would like it to not be over so fast.

Your statement about eating at the start of the day is not accurate. If you go out playing the game you will burn far more than 50 food in a few game hours.

Happy to jump into a game with you and we can chop this up, but a few hours and it is all over.

 

[Kyoji]

5. Game is solved, I can survive forever, I could set it to every night and it would not matter.

I don't understand how the game is "over" due to cooking. You have sped through the early game food/water as efficiently as you could and wonder why food/water isn't an issue?

Please address food and water, it is only interesting for a couple brutal days, and it is brutal

Food and water should be more challenging early on with less canned food until you get into T2-3 POIs. POI loot container reworks would fix a lot of this. Add uncooked meat into the loot table as well as ingredients to cook and lessen canned goods until you get into higher tier POIs.

Please address end game, I skip all biomes and just go to the end biome as I have food and water solved

You don't go to the other biomes for food but better loot generally speaking so I don't see how food and water would prevent you from going to the desert or snow biome. Generally there should be more distinction between the biomes without compelling people to go to them every day (due to distance). I think the quests will guide players through the biomes once finished, but it would still be nice to go there for unique biome POIs or something (other than ore).

Please create survivors to save and add mouths to feed or something, has to be some mechanic that forces me to build a base
When the game first started horde nights were craziness, we had to fight super hard, now I only care about food and water for a couple days and it is over

The mechanic that pushes you to build a base is the horde nights.



All in all while I don't think it's quite as dramatic I do think the early game should slow down a touch. I can progress through primitive weapons by day 2. The same can be said for food and water, to which I offered my ideas on that.

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

@StaceyMyers
Here is an option if you are on pc, to change your startup.
1 Spawn a map
2 log into the game, dm spawn to a point or a few points
at far end of the map or in other biomes away from the
forest.
3 Use f3 to record the coordinates, f9 printscreen
4 log off, Copy it to worlds folder, and go to worlds folder
5 remove all of the original spawn points and replace them
with the places you manually spawned.

Between 10 and 20 minutes total.

Log in new game and pick that map. Work your way back up
to insane.

Reuse the map a few times, then rinse repeat, It will change
the early game rules. Then let me know how it goes.

 

[InfiniteWarrior]

Absolutely love the game, 4307 hours played to date, please tweak Water and Food and add an end game. With my friends we play on lower difficulty, but if I play alone I play on insane, horde every 2 days and it sadly goes like this:
1. Zip through starter quest, get to first trader
*Must be near a town or move on, need mailboxes and kitchens
*Buy one level of healing to solve issue of eating/drinking bad food which injure you
*Buy animal tracking to hunt for meat and leather (or find 10 leather in a POI)
2. Build first combat and crafting base near the quest giver and near some water to wash off after eating
*Washing after eating completely removes that element except for digestion issues, see below
3. 3-5 days of water and food focus
*Find a cooking pot or 4 books to craft a forge and make a cooking pot because you can't boil water any other way (not logical)
*Golden rod tea solves digestion issues so now I can eat and drink whatever I find
4. Magazines to get to bacon and eggs and red tea
*When you are level 10 cooking, the game is basically over
5. Game is solved, I can survive forever, I could set it to every night and it would not matter.
*I farm but I have never bothered crafting higher food, the game is over by day 8. I live on bacon and eggs and red tea the entire game, never even bother
*I build small combat bases all over the map and draw the zombies out of the POI and smush them, eazy peezy
*Horde night I kill anything that comes in a simple base, building traps is not needed
6. I should mention electrical fences, they are super powerful, like broken powerful

Please address food and water, it is only interesting for a couple brutal days, and it is brutal
Please address end game, I skip all biomes and just go to the end biome as I have food and water solved
Please create survivors to save and add mouths to feed or something, has to be some mechanic that forces me to build a base
When the game first started horde nights were craziness, we had to fight super hard, now I only care about food and water for a couple days and it is over

I think I understand what you mean. Find or forge a cooking pot and grill, unlock a few decent recipes and you're pretty much good to go for the rest of the game. Most veterans probably decide to get that covered before even finishing the tutorial. To that point, there's a little (RNG) struggle to find what you need not to starve or thirst to death. Thing is: you still have to hunt (or roadkill) and/or find farms to raid for corn and the the ever-elusive potato to cook some more decent foods at 15 points a pop instead of 10 until or unless your avatar becomes a vegetarian and decides to start up a small farm. If you don't, you can still survive on the plentiful canned foods scattered about, only 10-15 points of nutrition and cold/lousy as they must taste, etc.

What would you suggest by way of improvement? Just how harsh do you want it to be? Do you want it nearly impossible to find or cook enough to eat and drink for the duration? Is canned food just too plentiful, in your opinion? Would you prefer the "progression" of more hearty meals, as it is now, possibly to remain but be somewhat tweaked for greater difficulty to achieve postapocalyptic chef status and, perhaps, reduce dependence on bacon and eggs? Do you have any improvements to suggest or just feel the system is inadequate or personally unacceptable as it is?

On a side note, it's hilarious FO76 now has a player icon called "soup chef" because most people just don't want to bother with gathering specific ingredients for specific dishes in a video game and don't actually have to worry about their avatars thirsting or starving to death anymore anyway because C.A.M.P. builders complained their avatars were dying because their drivers were too busy spending hours (and losing track of time) putting together the perfect "home" with flame thrower traps and a prayer to have their avatars drink, cook or eat anything.

If there's any number one criticism I have of the game, it's that it's over-reliant on RNG and automation. The proposed hybrid LBD/LBR system might help, but -- fact is -- not everyone is going to be pleased with anything TFP does to try and bridge the gap between pure survival sandbox and RPG players.