Kajin

Finding seeds and gardening equipment in random homes isn't that unusual. I live in Kentucky and my job takes me down more city streets, suburbs, and rural back roads than I care to think about. And let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there who garden. It's most common in the poorer areas with mobile homes but, given the state of the economy, I'm seeing more and more middle and upper class neighborhoods getting into the gardening thing as a hobby to help cut expenses. I'd even go so far as to suggest the devs up the spawn rate of seeds and gardening equipment considerably. I mean, if even half of the community proposed suggestions get added we'll need all the seeds we can get our hands on to make farming even come close to being a viable method of getting food.

So long as they also introduce the different ways to counter such behavior. A scarecrow would be nice to deter birds. Having cats nearby could deter birds and rats. Dogs could deter deer. I also think that there's a type of hanging bird nest you can make out of a melon that attracts a certain species of bird that only eats insects and will attack any other birds that come nearby, protecting your crops. I can't remember what this bird was called, though. I also think it would be an awesome idea to be able to put up a tree stand or deer stand and station a hunter in areas where you have crops to shoot and bag whatever the crop tiles attract. Maybe put up some traps around your main crops to catch any small game that might try and eat your hard won vegetables. Maybe if there's a treeline nearby you could put up trap fencing going from tree to tree with occasional openings where you've setup deadfalls or dug out spike pits.

I kinda figure that mason jars and possibly even the contents within will eventually end up being the currency of the game. They'd be so useful for the preservation of food.

Well, one of the ways to die is starvation and right now food is waaaaay too easy to get. Farming just happens to be the current trending topic, I think.

Seems like that might be more difficult to program over having one big plot, but I'm not a programmer so I wouldn't know how that all works. (I swear I say that so much it should be my title. Not A Programmer, but Definitely Fluffy?)

That seems like it might be a fair bit of hassle. Instead of area of effect, why not just row of effect? You set your character up to perform the action you want, then it plays an animation of your character walking up and down the row performing that action. Rinse and repeat for every chore that needs doing on every row you have. It's going to be a bit of a slog either way, but having it as one big action on the player's end seems like it might reduce a substantial amount of the associated annoyance involved with clicking.

A three by three area of effect would definitely be a massive step in the right direction, but I'm not sure how much it would help. Remember, every decrease in the viability of farming to provide adequate sustenance will translate directly into a much larger area of land required in order to assure self sufficiency. With some of the proposed changes, having only a three by three area of use could actually leave the player in a worse position, interface-wise, than as compared to where they are now.

Not sure what you're saying, in regards to making it a mini-game. I never suggested that. In fact, one of my last couple of posts went over the concerns of too much clicking and how this could be streamlined (mostly concerning plot management and having crop maintenance actions cover whole rows of food at once instead of just individual tiles). Farming still needs to be harder and more labor intensive to get full use out of it, but anyone who wants to devote all of their time to it should be able to have a more streamlined experience to ease the burden placed on them by the clunky interface. But yeah, a more streamlined way of handling farming that involves less clicking is almost certainly a given at this point. I'd love to be able to designate a whole area or row as one big plot of land for farming and just tell my character to tend to that whole section at once in order to ease the burden on the player's end. And if you're gonna streamline it to make it less difficult like that, you might as well add a whole bunch of new farming tasks that'll give more depth to the chore that it currently is. Might even make it interesting. Pruning, weeding, and hoeing like I said. Composting like you said. Stuff like this would be far less of a pain with a more streamlined gardening interface like the one proposed, but it would also add to the much sought after difficulty spike by making gaining food take more effort on the survivor's behalf.

Okay, a couple of additional thoughts on the whole farming issue. Extend the time to grow out to anywhere between a month and a half to three months (depending on how difficult we want to make things) and halve the amount of food each tile produces. Then add a bunch of daily upkeep tasks that triples the amount of food you get per tile on harvest, but only if someone is tasked with maintaining the fields on a near daily basis. Tasks like hoeing the ground to soften it up and promote good root health, pruning away damaged leaves and stems and removing weeds so that the crops have less competition for water, nutrients and sunlight. If current yield is two units of food per tile, the new figures should by one unit of food for untended fields and three units of food for fully tended fields. All this together should vastly increase the amount of work necessary for making farming a completely self sustaining endeavor. Too much work for a solo survivor or a small group to ever achieve anything more than a supplement to their diets. Large groups should be able to protect and maintain large enough fields to become self sustaining, and that would entail a whole new array of problems and difficulties to overcome.

I'd compromise by making farming tiles produce a fair bit less food and take a little bit longer to grow (not quite up to real life times, but as it stands now farming is way too quick) so you'd require more land to get the job done and feed yourself. I'd also suggest streamlining the farming process a little bit so it's not so damn boring. Make it so the characters dig out larger plots or long rows and have farm tending actions concern that whole plot or that whole row so it's not so click intensive. Still time intensive and exhausting for the character, but less click intensive. That's the biggest frustration for me, the fact that I have to do so much damn clicking. As it stands with foraging, trapping and fishing we have enough options for food gain in the short term to keep our characters alive long enough to see the day of harvest. I did some research into this and apparently, in order to be completely self sustaining on just farming alone, you'd need about an acre and a half to two acres of land to feed a family of four comfortably. More if the land is infertile. And it's a lot of backbreaking, labor intensive work to get that food because one acre of land alone is 43,560 square feet. You'd need a silo to store the food and a drying barn to dry out the crops as well, but it's definitely possible. Having animals helps a lot, I imagine.

A couple of suggestions for changes to cooking, that I think might help out going forward. Characters with better cooking skills leave behind small amounts of food because they don't need to use as much to get the same level of hunger reduction. It kind of irritates me because it clutters the inventory and, if you're trying to cook the whole thing to eat it before it spoils, it creates a bit of redundancy that lowers the happiness and boredom rating of whatever dish you're making should you choose to throw it in as well. So my suggestion to counter this is to create a second food item whenever you cook called "Food Scraps" where all leftover bits of food get stacked whenever you cook. It stacks together just like any other prepared food dish you'd make and serves as a convenient way to locate all tiny bits of food so you can throw them into a dish later, should you choose. This would serve as a small improvement to the UI and the way players interact with the inventory. There should also be a balance in dish size. You can feel free to add as much food to the dish as you want, but larger quantities of food in one dish take longer to cook and an unskilled chef might not cook it thoroughly enough, leading to reduced hunger and nutrition values and even possible food poisoning from under cooked ingredients. Could also risk burning the food if you cook it too long since, once again, an unskilled chef might misjudge how long it takes to cook a large dish. This would also result in the wasteful burning of food, leading to a dish with lower hunger and nutrition ratings and possible stomach problems from consuming it. This would be a massive waste of food if such a thing were to happen, and when every scrap of food counts you can't afford to waste a single bite. A skilled cook that can handle larger order sizes for multiple people might be even more valuable to the day to day operation of a survivor group as a result. Not having a skilled cook to process larger orders for a sizable group of people could result in stomach aches, food poisoning, and general wasting of food. This could serve as a small bit of extra difficulty for the proposed difficulty overhaul. Nothing too huge, but it could definitely make things somewhat harder if you don't manage your food reserves carefully.

That's an awful idea. You can't just remove ways to get food. Your character will eventually starve to death after you've looted everything on the map, and that's no way to treat your players. Hey, thanks for playing the game long enough to get good enough to survive this long! But now you've reached the end, so time to starve to death! It'd be like removing all the weapons from the game and forcing your players to push the zombies away without killing them.

Where did you hear that little tidbit of information? That's absurd, boiling water not making it safer. That'd be true if it was seawater in which case it would be better to distill it. But straight river or lake water? Boil it and you'd be fine.

I guess boredom could have different effects depending on circumstances. If you're already tired to begin with, being bored increases chances of nodding off. If you're not tired, being bored makes you nervous. Stuff like that.

But it was itchy and uncomfortable, right? And you weren't currently surviving in a zombie apocalypse at the time, right? Even in normal survival situations, small things like a rash or a cut or a bruise add up over time and make you just that little bit more miserable. Try going to sleep at night with the constant fear of a horde of zombies bursting down your door. Then add on top of it constant itching and burning from poison ivy. Not fun.

Dunno about you, but boredom usually gives me a sort of nervous energy and a desire to get things done, not make me wanna lie down and sleep it off.

Eh, I wouldn't be entirely against the idea of having ointments and creams in the game for treating minor skin conditions that could be a pain for your survivor. They don't weigh much or take up much space.

I sincerely doubt that the developers are "missing the point" of their own game. Their own game which they have been painstakingly crafting into the image they have envisioned for it. While I do agree that having more variables for sandbox would be nice, I somehow doubt that sandbox is supposed to be the main mode of play. It'd be great for those who want it, but I don't think that it should be focused on to the exclusion of everything else.

To be fair it's an emergency treatment if you're bleeding out and need to stop the blood loss right the hell now. The long term risk of infection and healing complications is outweighed by the immediate necessity of stopping the bleeding. Could be a good treatment for gushing wounds that bandaging isn't doing a good job of stemming.

Two meters is still about 6 full feet down. Which is still as deep as I am tall.

I would approve of the infection mechanics, but with a difference. Add the ability to treat scratches/wounds with fire / alcohol to dramatically reduce the chance of infection. I'd do some research on the effectiveness of various treatments of wounds. I agree with the general sentiment that SailorWolf has; I want to be able to survive for longer periods of time, but I want it to be brutally hard (without being unrealistically so, like artificially fast decay of food and stuff like that). Also, NPCs will likely dramatically affect how the game is played. There is so much more that is being added that it is hard to say where things will go. This update seems to be like a step in the right direction. Fire is not a good method of sanitizing wounds. Burns can get infected and they have an even more difficult time healing than regular cuts and scrapes.

Five meters?! That's two and a half of me, stacked lengthwise. Surely that's a typo of some kind. I do believe that tending the plants should give you some xp, though. That's how you learn how to take care of them after all.

But having your avatar AI-controlled gives the possibility that someone will just plain kill you when you are offline. Surely that's worse than burning down your safehouse or destroying your crops? I'm not suggesting the meta game keep your character on map at all times. I'm not even suggesting it be on map at all. The meta game is entirely invisible to player characters, remember. Having your character be a part of it when offline would render them completely invulnerable til you log back on so there's no possible way you can die unless you're actively playing the game. The meta game would do basic upkeep of the base, and if a situation arose that would likely kill my character when I log back in, it moves my character to a relatively safe area and provides a report of what happened. Armed robbers broke in and setup shop while you were gone, you had to flee. Someone threw a molotov at your house, burning it to the ground and attracting a massive horde. You were forced to flee.

Yeah, I saw some saliva dribbling out of an air vent when I was in comms trying to avoid those damn androids. I looked at that and thought... I'll die if I walk under there... So I detoured around. I guess this was a safe bet, huh?

Not a huge suggestion or anything, just something I think might be good to have in the game. Basically, the idea is to make the cooking of bread more like how the rest of the cooking system is handled, in that you can add different combinations of things together to get different kinds of bread. At its most basic, you add flour and water to make a few pieces tough flat bread. Add a small amount of yeast to make a softer bread loaf that's easier to chew and digest (and thus has higher hunger value because easier to digest=less energy needed to process). Add milk, butter, animal fat and/or eggs to make the bread more nutritious Don't have flour? Make some! You can make flour for bread out of any kind of starch. Potatoes and corn are two good candidates. Same thing for the roots and pollen of cat tails. Take them and grind them up to get potato flour or corn flour or reed flour. Take it and add whatever other baking ingredients you have on hand, then bake it for a loaf of bread.