The eating requirement is breaking emersion

[Scyris]

43 minutes ago, ElCabong said:

I know how you feel. The food does need to be worked on. For instance things like baked potatoes and corn bread should give you more food value than they do. I haven't had a problem with food after day 2. One of the first four points I get after doing the initial quest always goes into the recipe thing under strength, I forget what it's called now. Master Chef? 

 

That lets you make bacon and eggs and then it's just a matter of finding a lot of eggs and shooting every critter you find. Bacon eggs are about the only thing you can make that work, it gives 36 hunger points. Which is why other things need to give more food value so that you don't have to rely on one thing.

I never invest in master chef, or intel at all and I do just fine. In fact on day 10 in my a19 game, I have 2 stacks of 125 meat and tons of canned food sitting in base storage for when I find the schematics to make the food out of them. It is a lil rng though, as I rely on schematics to learn  how to craft most things. Current RWG world the trader 150 meters from the poi I base in sadly doesn't have a single working station in it. I also have 0 perks in the hunting stuff. Are you guys utilizing the trader and vending machines as well as trader quests to find food? while also finding loot in the trader quests?

 

I notice many players ignore the trader quests, when those are some of the best sources of things in the game. I have over 600 .44 rounds I got from 4 diff quests, each offered 150 as a choseable reward.

[Adam the Waster]

4 minutes ago, ElCabong said:

Doing level one buried quests is a very good way to get recipes. Most of what I have found from them are things I already have from MasterChef level one. You get seed recipes and those are vital to start your farm. Just picked up the pumpkin bread recipe from a level one buried quest and I have a pumpkin growing on the roof.

That is a good idea. If we could somehow trap chickens and keep egg coops with our farm. Or perhaps hatch an egg that we find. something to keep a steady supply of eggs rather than having to rely on spending half an hour running around finding bird's nest. I go to the burnt biome and hunt for nests there and really haven't spent a whole lot of time before I have plenty of eggs. Having a chicken coop would be a lot of fun I think

well sense Madmole said they won't do that chicken coop! i think if you gut Chickens or vultures you could get eggs.

 

 

[Scyris]

1 minute ago, Maddy said:

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. 

I usually start out with 1 in str, 2 in miner 69'er, and 1 in adv engineering so I can get a forge up on day 1 and start smelting iron etc. Block damage is king early game as it helps you bust into things much faster, the 2 in it is a 60% block damage boost, its pretty significant. For weapons I use: Shotgun, Bows, Melee (club or sledge), and later on I get machine guns. I also go down agility for the sneak improvements and sneak attack improvements. I  have 1 in archery and a t6 primitive bow with 2 mods in it, and I can 1 shot normal female zombies on a sneak atatck already with iron arrows, and 2 shot male ones.

 

As for your bow accuarcy issues, it just takes pratice, remember the arrow has a drop unlike bullets as arrows are not raycasted, they have travel times. Eventually you can be able to headshot zombies at very large distances by arching yoru shots correctly, just takes pratice.

[Scyris]

11 minutes ago, Roninwolf said:

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

Get sex t-rex to 2 or 3, and stamina (and food use) is much more manageable when mining. Going from sex t-rex 0 to 2 was game changing in terms of mining and such.

[Maddy]

1 minute ago, Scyris said:

I usually start out with 1 in str, 2 in miner 69'er, and 1 in adv engineering so I can get a forge up on day 1 and start smelting iron etc. Block damage is king early game as it helps you bust into things much faster, the 2 in it is a 60% block damage boost, its pretty significant. For weapons I use: Shotgun, Bows, Melee (club or sledge), and later on I get machine guns. I also go down agility for the sneak improvements and sneak attack improvements. I  have 1 in archery and a t6 primitive bow with 2 mods in it, and I can 1 shot normal female zombies on a sneak atatck already with iron arrows, and 2 shot male ones.

 

As for your bow accuarcy issues, it just takes pratice, remember the arrow has a drop unlike bullets as arrows are not raycasted, they have travel times. Eventually you can be able to headshot zombies at very large distances by arching yoru shots correctly, just takes pratice.

My husband is the one that does that part. We break up the tasks so we can specialize. He has now put a point in huntsman. He is also deadly with the bow. I like the crossbow. 

[Tommerhawk]

new alpha means maybe also you have to change practice you played before. Other perks are more important in the beginning now ;). Also some POI are nice to handle the food problem. There is something with boars...

[RestInPieces]

Loved the wellness system, except that in A16's context, it was more or less terrible. Now, in A17+ with death being of some consequence and a few more incentives to raise it, it might actually have been nice.

As for hunger, I haven't played A19 yet, but I can't help but be skeptical when people say they are starving to death, because the same thing was being said for A18, but with 25% loot and never buying from traders/vending machines, I never encountered such a problem. (And no, you don't need hundreds of hours of playtime to learn where to get food.) 

 

Also, are people actually going for high level recipes, or just expecting to survive with lvl 0 recipes like boiled eggs and charred meat, without investing in food/hunting related perks, as they did in A18?

 

[ElCabong]

57 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:

well sense Madmole said they won't do that chicken coop! i think if you gut Chickens or vultures you could get eggs.

 

 

I didn't know that. Well he's wrong. You can get chicken coops in a mod, don't know if it's applicable to alpha 19 yet.

if he doesn't want to go for chicken coop so I doubt if he go for gutting vultures. You're eating zombie eggs though...

[Adam the Waster]

24 minutes ago, ElCabong said:

I didn't know that. Well he's wrong. You can get chicken coops in a mod, don't know if it's applicable to alpha 19 yet.

if he doesn't want to go for chicken coop so I doubt if he go for gutting vultures. You're eating zombie eggs though...

eh you get animal fat from zombie animals and its fine!

 

 

[Dracula]

19 hours ago, FileMachete said:

hmm.., some solid points you make there @Lemmers , and I like the idea-comparison to upgrading building blocks, it would fit in nicely.

 

Couple points I think are worth mentioning about the prior no-farm-plots system.

Required a Hoe. Some might consider not having hoes in the game a loss.. err.. this isn't coming out right... <stepping quietly away...>

 

anyway, one big advantage of the farm-plot blocks, are they're blocks. So they have clean edges, can readily be used for roof gardens and the ceiling below is nice and smooth. And as I recall there have been a fair number of grumbles about the transitions between block edges and ground blocks.

 

That said, there does seem like there's room to expand the farming mechanic as you mention. As a SP only player I'd personally like to see something along the lines you suggest. Just mulling on it for a minute I can imagine it being balanced so that for SP there's the hard way, no/little point cost, while for MP where there's the ability for players to be more specialized, the farmer/hunter/cook would want/need to perk into the more productive farm skill; like I'm guessing the perks were designed for?

I have a perfect solution to this:  garden hoe+seeds turns the land into farm land with nothing else required and lower yield, farm plots produce 5 to 6 times the food yield due to their difficulty to craft; maybe even ratchet up the difficulty of them so that they're harder to make than they are now, but you use the A17 farming system for low yield to supplant the gated system of farming that removes the need for food supplies when you have acres of farmland.

[Kosmic Kerman]

20 hours ago, Galifrey1965 said:

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. 

2 hours ago, Roninwolf said:

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]

2 hours ago, guardianangelmp said:

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]

5 hours ago, Maddy said:

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]

21 minutes ago, Darthjake said:

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]

48 minutes ago, ElCabong said:

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]

21 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

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]

On 7/5/2020 at 4:54 PM, guardianangelmp said:

"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]

20 hours ago, beHypE said:

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]

21 hours ago, beHypE said:

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.

 

21 hours ago, beHypE said:

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]

34 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

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.