Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[BFT2020]

9 hours ago, iamnuff said:

 

If people keep bringing this up, then maybe you need to re-examine it. 

 

I set up a farm in my recent game in the experimental (about 10 farm-plots) and I had plenty of seeds to plant... but few useful ones. 

 

Pumpkin seeds and goldenrod seeds are common loot in trash, but there's little point planting them. Corn-seeds can be gathered on-mass from bags in farm POIs, but then actual corn can also be gathered on-mass from farm POIs, so there's little need to plant them. 

Potato seeds seem fairly rare, which is a problem because that's the most important crop in the game. 

 

Pumpkin seeds and blueberry seeds are indeed valuable.  Blueberries are obvious used in pies which give you 45 food.  Pumpkins are used in pies and cheesecake which gives you 50/42 food back.  And that worthless cornbread you mentioned, with meat and a can of chili, you now got a chili dog that gives you back 53 food.  All which are similar to that meat stew you ate that gives you back 50 food.  Don't get me started on Gumbo stew, Tuna Fish gravy toast, and spaghetti - none of which require potatoes and all are vastly superior to meat stew (Shepherds pie is also in this group, but requires 1 potato   -----  1 potato!!!!!!)

 

And yes, meat stew also gives you 20 water back, but that is basically what you would get from drinking one jar of boiled water.  Instead of that, you could eat a chili dog and drink pure mineral water and get 60 water back (costing you just 2 jars of water = 40 water).

 

And guess what, that chili dog cost you less ingredients in terms of crops as you only need 1 corn while the meat stew costs 2 corn and 2 potatoes.

 

Players seem to focus on just a few of the cooked items, not realizing that the other items can be substitutes for things like bacon & eggs and meat stew.

[Uncle Al]

9 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

 

Mmh, I am not convinced either, I thought it was 6.

 

 

You were both close, it's 6.5 at maxxed LotL.

 

Averages are 4 with 1 point, 4.5 with 2 (4 + 50% chance of an extra 1) and 6.5 (6 +50% chance of an extra 1) with 3.

 

Note that this is for crops you planted yourself. For wild harvesting, including raiding the fields of POIs, it's 2, 2.5, 3.5.

[iamnuff]

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

Still you can get enough to start a farm, and then it is your decision at what size to stop

 

 

That's not really how it works.

You can only plant as many crops as you have seeds for. Sure, you can convert all of your crop into seeds and plant them all but if you need to do that for 4-5 full crop plantings, then your doing four or five full plant-and-grow rotations with zero actual food-gain, which is kinda @%$#ty. 

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

After finding out its only 2 potatos you could have edited your conclusion as well: "That's great, 7.5 stews!"

 

7 stews from 40 harvest potatoes (because you needed to waste most of your potatos making seeds to replant your crops) is still way too low. 

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

You should always afford to turn enough seeds into crops, otherwise your farm shrinks. And then the next harvest will be even smaller. Would that make long-term sense?

 

 

No, my point is that if you're planting enough potatoes thne even after convertring half of your crop back into seeds to replant them, you'll still have enough to at least make a decent amount of food. 

 

But planting 20 potatoes (double my previous theoretical) with LOTL 1 would get you 80 crops and probably 10 seeds. 

So you'd need to make ten more, which means using up 50 potatos. 

So you're still left with a pittance. Enough to feed your group until the new crops are grown, I guess, but only a small fraction of your actual harvest. 

 

It's not until you're getting 6-7 plants per harvest that you actually start making a decent returns for your seeds.

Hell, at LOTL:1, you any farm-plot that doesn't give you a seed back is a net-loss of one potato. (you get 4 on harvest and it costs 5 to make a seed)

 

TLDR: Living Of The Land level 1 isn't really worth it. Don't even bother making farm-plots until you've completely maxed the skill out.

Fortunately there's not a lot of levels in it so it's not a huge investment, but you still need to buy quite deep into the Fortitude tree. 

Fortunately machineguns are really good, so it's a worthwhile investment anyway. 

 

Punching is pretty good too, but I wish we had a second melee weapon like STR has with the clubs/sledgehammers option. I have no idea what another fortitude-based melee weapon would be. Shield?

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

Bacon and Eggs is one of the most inefficient foods in the game IMHO, because it uses 2 very expensive eggs for a rather low-level food. I may cook that in the first few days because of necessity, but each egg is much better used in blueberry pies. And blueberry pie is, if you can save up the eggs for it, a very good food without potatoes.

 

It is, but blueberries are also rare, and its a higher tier recipe. 

By the time you can make it, you won't be needing/making bacon and eggs anymore. 

 

It's basically the best 'Early Game' food, whereas you move onto stews and various other meals as quickly as you are able, which frees up your eggs for puddings. 

 

Grilled meat is one of the easiest foods to make with meat being so easy to get, but it's fullness value is so low that it's pretty inefficient to carry around because you need to eat half a stack to fill yourself back up once you get hungry. 

Boiled at least also gives water, but now that water is harder to get, even that feels like a waste.

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

Seeds are totally useless except for planting and plants have the chance to be used in a recipe. So even thrown out of context that sentence is objectively true.

 

Seeds might be worthless for anything else, but farm-plots are not. Given the resource cost (and attention-cost) of building/maintaining a farm, you want to ensure that you're growing something that's actually useful to you. 

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

Mmh, I am not convinced either, I thought it was 6.

 

It seems to be six with a chance of seven, now.

 

On 6/26/2023 at 11:02 PM, meganoth said:

Not sure what you are saying. If I have a handful of plots with some specific plant and want to enlarge that I convert everything I have to seeds. in the meantime hungry guys at my door have to eat grilled meat or pumpkin bread or dine at the trader.

 

My point is that growing a bunch of crops and then turning them into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds leaves you planting and growing crops but getting no actual food out of it for a full in-game week.

 

So instead I was putting the potatoes that I harvested into the food chest and having my buddy actually make decent food out of them.

Because that's the entire reason I'd been planting crops in the first place. 

 

Sure, I could have built up a huge farm while eating grilled meat all the time, but we didn't want to eat bad food. That's the whole reason I built the farm to begin with.

 

On 6/27/2023 at 2:30 AM, BFT2020 said:

Pumpkin seeds and blueberry seeds are indeed valuable.  Blueberries are obvious used in pies which give you 45 food.  Pumpkins are used in pies and cheesecake which gives you 50/42 food back.  And that worthless cornbread you mentioned, with meat and a can of chili, you now got a chili dog that gives you back 53 food.  All which are similar to that meat stew you ate that gives you back 50 food.  Don't get me started on Gumbo stew, Tuna Fish gravy toast, and spaghetti - none of which require potatoes and all are vastly superior to meat stew (Shepherds pie is also in this group, but requires 1 potato   -----  1 potato!!!!!!)

 

Pumpkin seeds are worthless because pumpkins are not the bottleneck on your pumpkin pie production. Eggs probably are. (and beer, but that's my fault for selling it all) 

 

As for cornbread, I was talking about in terms of food that you cook for yourself. 

There's no way to make tins of chilli, you can only find them.

 

I mean, with the much more common vending machines you can now probably get a decent stockpile if you want, but again, Cornbread isn't the important part of that recipe. You can slap together some cornbread whenever you happen to find a tin of chilli, but that's not a reason to cultivate corn or cook up a stockpile of cornbread in-and-of-itself. 

 

As a meal on it's own, cornbread is worthless, and there's nothing you can combine it with that you can grown in a farm-plot or cook at a campfire, to make anything better. 

 

  

On 6/27/2023 at 2:30 AM, BFT2020 said:

And guess what, that chili dog cost you less ingredients in terms of crops as you only need 1 corn while the meat stew costs 2 corn and 2 potatoes.

 

 

Actually the chilli-dog cost you a tin of chilli, which provides more food and costs more dukes than anything that goes into a meat stew. 

At the very least, it's harder to procure a steady supply of. 

 

I guess part of the issue is that if i'm making food to take with me when I go exploring, I want a full stack of it so I won't run out. 

Having one 'fish and gravy' item doesn't help me, even if it gives a lot of food. I want a stack of ten, but I have no reliable way to get ten cans of whatever food I need to make this food with.

 

With a big enough farmplot and enough ranks in LoTL, I can gather the materials to cook up ten meat stews for myself, and even ten more for my buddy to carry. 

Edited June 28, 2023 by iamnuff (see edit history)

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, iamnuff said:

 

That's not really how it works.

You can only plant as many crops as you have seeds for. Sure, you can convert all of your crop into seeds and plant them all but if you need to do that for 4-5 full crop plantings, then your doing four or five full plant-and-grow rotations with zero actual food-gain, which is kinda @%$#ty. 

 

 

7 stews from 40 harvest potatoes (because you needed to waste most of your potatos making seeds to replant your crops) is still way too low. 

 

 

No, my point is that if you're planting enough potatoes thne even after convertring half of your crop back into seeds to replant them, you'll still have enough to at least make a decent amount of food. 

 

It is very easy: I usually want a farm with a steady production of plants, enough to feed x players. And the math is simply that 1 farm plot gives me about 1.5 plants at Lotl1. TFP could have spared players the turnaround with seeds and randomness and just made a harvest of 1.5 plants for about the same result. But since they didn't everyone now has additional choices.

 

If you have x farm plots with say potatoes and x*1.5 potatoes isn't enough for you then you can either invest in more farm plots, or invest in more LotL, or draw more plants out of the system reducing your harvest in the long term like you would draw your money out of a bank reducing your interest rates. Only if you are thinking about doing the last option is it at all relevant how many plants you need to craft a seed as that is the amount you draw "out of the bank" for losing a seed.

 

But again, since I often want a steady production I simply convert plants to seeds "to make ends meet", and I don't care how many plants get wasted in the process, because if I want the wheel turning I have to invest that or invest more points in LotL. I expect on average to get 1.5 plants per harvest per farm plot. That is the important number.

 

LotL1 2 and 3 naturally have different and increasing return rates. Some players say they only accept LotL3, some players are ok with LotL2 and some players even with LotL1. There is no qualitative difference between those perk levels except that only LotL3 makes it impossible to have such a bad harvest that it could shrink your farm size.

 

 

4 hours ago, iamnuff said:

 

But planting 20 potatoes (double my previous theoretical) with LOTL 1 would get you 80 crops and probably 10 seeds. 

So you'd need to make ten more, which means using up 50 potatos. 

So you're still left with a pittance. Enough to feed your group until the new crops are grown, I guess, but only a small fraction of your actual harvest. 

 

It's not until you're getting 6-7 plants per harvest that you actually start making a decent returns for your seeds.

Hell, at LOTL:1, you any farm-plot that doesn't give you a seed back is a net-loss of one potato. (you get 4 on harvest and it costs 5 to make a seed)

 

TLDR: Living Of The Land level 1 isn't really worth it. Don't even bother making farm-plots until you've completely maxed the skill out.

Fortunately there's not a lot of levels in it so it's not a huge investment, but you still need to buy quite deep into the Fortitude tree. 

Fortunately machineguns are really good, so it's a worthwhile investment anyway. 

 

Punching is pretty good too, but I wish we had a second melee weapon like STR has with the clubs/sledgehammers option. I have no idea what another fortitude-based melee weapon would be. Shield?

 

It is, but blueberries are also rare, and its a higher tier recipe. 

By the time you can make it, you won't be needing/making bacon and eggs anymore. 

 

It's basically the best 'Early Game' food, whereas you move onto stews and various other meals as quickly as you are able, which frees up your eggs for puddings. 

 

Grilled meat is one of the easiest foods to make with meat being so easy to get, but it's fullness value is so low that it's pretty inefficient to carry around because you need to eat half a stack to fill yourself back up once you get hungry. 

Boiled at least also gives water, but now that water is harder to get, even that feels like a waste.

 

Seeds might be worthless for anything else, but farm-plots are not. Given the resource cost (and attention-cost) of building/maintaining a farm, you want to ensure that you're growing something that's actually useful to you. 

 

It seems to be six with a chance of seven, now.

 

 

My point is that growing a bunch of crops and then turning them into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds leaves you planting and growing crops but getting no actual food out of it for a full in-game week.

 

So instead I was putting the potatoes that I harvested into the food chest and having my buddy actually make decent food out of them.

Because that's the entire reason I'd been planting crops in the first place. 

 

Sure, I could have built up a huge farm while eating grilled meat all the time, but we didn't want to eat bad food. That's the whole reason I built the farm to begin with.

 

Pumpkin seeds are worthless because pumpkins are not the bottleneck on your pumpkin pie production. Eggs probably are. (and beer, but that's my fault for selling it all) 

 

As for cornbread, I was talking about in terms of food that you cook for yourself. 

There's no way to make tins of chilli, you can only find them.

 

I mean, with the much more common vending machines you can now probably get a decent stockpile if you want, but again, Cornbread isn't the important part of that recipe. You can slap together some cornbread whenever you happen to find a tin of chilli, but that's not a reason to cultivate corn or cook up a stockpile of cornbread in-and-of-itself. 

 

As a meal on it's own, cornbread is worthless, and there's nothing you can combine it with that you can grown in a farm-plot or cook at a campfire, to make anything better. 

 

  

 

Actually the chilli-dog cost you a tin of chilli, which provides more food and costs more dukes than anything that goes into a meat stew. 

At the very least, it's harder to procure a steady supply of. 

 

I guess part of the issue is that if i'm making food to take with me when I go exploring, I want a full stack of it so I won't run out. 

Having one 'fish and gravy' item doesn't help me, even if it gives a lot of food. I want a stack of ten, but I have no reliable way to get ten cans of whatever food I need to make this food with.

 

With a big enough farmplot and enough ranks in LoTL, I can gather the materials to cook up ten meat stews for myself, and even ten more for my buddy to carry. 

 

[BFT2020]

20 hours ago, iamnuff said:

It is, but blueberries are also rare, and its a higher tier recipe. 

By the time you can make it, you won't be needing/making bacon and eggs anymore. 

 

It's basically the best 'Early Game' food, whereas you move onto stews and various other meals as quickly as you are able, which frees up your eggs for puddings. 

 

Grilled meat is one of the easiest foods to make with meat being so easy to get, but it's fullness value is so low that it's pretty inefficient to carry around because you need to eat half a stack to fill yourself back up once you get hungry. 

Boiled at least also gives water, but now that water is harder to get, even that feels like a waste.

 

Seeds might be worthless for anything else, but farm-plots are not. Given the resource cost (and attention-cost) of building/maintaining a farm, you want to ensure that you're growing something that's actually useful to you. 

 

It seems to be six with a chance of seven, now.

 

 

My point is that growing a bunch of crops and then turning them into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds which you plant and grow crops which you turn into seeds leaves you planting and growing crops but getting no actual food out of it for a full in-game week.

 

So instead I was putting the potatoes that I harvested into the food chest and having my buddy actually make decent food out of them.

Because that's the entire reason I'd been planting crops in the first place. 

 

Sure, I could have built up a huge farm while eating grilled meat all the time, but we didn't want to eat bad food. That's the whole reason I built the farm to begin with.

 

Pumpkin seeds are worthless because pumpkins are not the bottleneck on your pumpkin pie production. Eggs probably are. (and beer, but that's my fault for selling it all) 

 

As for cornbread, I was talking about in terms of food that you cook for yourself. 

There's no way to make tins of chilli, you can only find them.

 

I mean, with the much more common vending machines you can now probably get a decent stockpile if you want, but again, Cornbread isn't the important part of that recipe. You can slap together some cornbread whenever you happen to find a tin of chilli, but that's not a reason to cultivate corn or cook up a stockpile of cornbread in-and-of-itself. 

 

As a meal on it's own, cornbread is worthless, and there's nothing you can combine it with that you can grown in a farm-plot or cook at a campfire, to make anything better. 

 

  

 

Actually the chilli-dog cost you a tin of chilli, which provides more food and costs more dukes than anything that goes into a meat stew. 

At the very least, it's harder to procure a steady supply of. 

 

I guess part of the issue is that if i'm making food to take with me when I go exploring, I want a full stack of it so I won't run out. 

Having one 'fish and gravy' item doesn't help me, even if it gives a lot of food. I want a stack of ten, but I have no reliable way to get ten cans of whatever food I need to make this food with.

 

With a big enough farmplot and enough ranks in LoTL, I can gather the materials to cook up ten meat stews for myself, and even ten more for my buddy to carry. 

 

Some points I want to make:

 

Blueberries are not rare, typically I find enough seeds of those through normal looting that I can start planting and harvesting them.  Once I get these (and pumpkins), my eggs go towards pies.

 

Eggs are easy to get if you just keep looting nests.  People tend to stop doing that so that is why they dry up.  And beer is only required for cheesecake, the pumpkin pie doesn't require it.  Beer is also easy to make once you unlock the recipe for it and start planting hops.

 

You seem focused that the only way to effectively feed yourself and your buddy is only if you can make food in stacks of 10.  That is not so.  On a 60 minute day, I eat before I leave and I grab one or two food items to take with me when I go out.  I don't need to carry a stack of 10 meat stews for a day as I shouldn't be using up that much energy in the first place.

[Skull the Troll]

How are you controlling how much energy you use? If you're out doing things you're using food. Yeah Iron Gut helps, but so do a lot of things. Needing to build, stock, and continuously replant 7 plots to get the output of one *might* be balanced, but it's grindy and boring. 

[meganoth]

10 hours ago, Skull the Troll said:

How are you controlling how much energy you use? If you're out doing things you're using food. Yeah Iron Gut helps, but so do a lot of things. Needing to build, stock, and continuously replant 7 plots to get the output of one *might* be balanced, but it's grindy and boring. 

 

Running drains stamina so in the time before I have a bicycle or minibike I sometimes just walk.

Digging drains stamina so in the first few days I keep mining to a minimum.

Drinking Red Tea before longer activities like mining saves 25% food

Even if you do much melee a first stealth shot with a bow saves a lot of stamina

Power attack uses lots of stamina, so I don't spam that for canon fodder enemies

Heavy armor drains more stamina, so I tend to use light armor, at least in the early game before bicycle and minibike

Freezing or overheating drains food (or water at least??) so I don't go into the desert without appropriate clothing.

 

You don't need to do all of this to save a lot of food use, every measure helps.

 

 

[Riamus]

Farming is really not so difficult as people make it out to be.  If you don't like low crop yields while keeping the farm filled with crops, just wait until you have a higher LotL before you start.  But as has been said, LotL1 still gives you profit even if it's not much.  I end up making so much farming even at LotL1 that after I've harvested crops half a dozen times or so, I often stop farming because I have so much food for a two person game.  You get a ton of corn in A21, so you don't need that anymore.  And unless you want to make a bunch of different food, you can do what I do any cut out pumpkins and blueberries even though they make decent food.  You can also skip the flowers usually aren't worth planting since they can be found everywhere and unless you like making coffee or beer, skip hops and coffee beans.  This keeps your variety lower and means you can get a good harvest with a smaller farm.  I usually stick to about 20-25 plots for 2 people and, as I said, I quickly have a surplus of food.  Mushrooms are easy since you don't need a plot.  I just plant them on the sides of the farm for convenience harvesting them.  Once you're cooking the top foods, you don't need many ingredients anymore because the food lasts a long time.  Yes, the top foods require canned food, but unless you aren't scavenging or are not picking up those cans of food while you're playing, you'll have a good stockpile of cans by the time you can cook them.  And when you run out of one, you start making one of the other top foods while you continue looting and getting more cans of food.

 

A big thing to be aware of with conserving food is to NOT put any points into the healing perk.  At least not until you have a good supply of food coming in.  It eats up your food and water very quickly.

[multiprefi]

I also don't mind the prospect of running out of new POIs to conquer, and eventually controlling 100% of the territory.  That would be a satisfying long-term goal to pursue, and it could encourage exploring the whole map.  There should still be some types of quests you could do in POIs you control.