Jump to content

Add the (stale) condition to food, similar to (fresh) and (rotten)


Sedgwick

Recommended Posts

I see a lot of newer players especially getting confused about food that has boredom/unhappiness and they aren't sure why, as it's safe to eat.

 

Pizza (Fresh) is pretty clear, Pizza (rotten) is too, but then you just have Pizza. If you happen upon the food after it goes from fresh to stale, you may not realize it was previously (fresh) as not all food has its current condition listed, like Chips.

 

I think adding in the text for food that was fresh but has gone stale would make this a lot easier to understand at a glance. Oh, this pizza makes me unhappy because it's stale, and not just because maybe my character hates pizza?

 

So FoodName (Fresh), FoodName (Stale), and FoodName (Rotten) would help describe what's going on here. Thanks for your time!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When food is no longer Fresh, it just says the name of the food item. This is when the food is stale. The fact that it gives unhappiness reinforces the idea that this is its "stale" stage, especially as it's the direct precursor to rotting.

 

I.E:

Bread

Steak (Uncooked)

Salmon (Cooked)

 

As opposed to:

Bread (Fresh)

Steak (Fresh Uncooked)

Salmon (Fresh Cooked)

Edited by PoshRocketeer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

44 minutes ago, PoshRocketeer said:

When food is no longer Fresh, it just says the name of the food item.

 

Right, I understand. But when food is non-perishable it also just says the name of the food. So a new player encountering a food they haven't seen before, or just new to the game in general and still learning, will have to make that connection. There are plenty of people who aren't realizing this and see "Pizza" or "Chicken" and don't understand why it's causing them unhappiness. Whether it's that they don't know the food is on its way to going bad, or they think it's some trait of the character, or not liking certain food items which isn't even a system of the game. Especially with the vast amount of new food options in game there are many food items people are seeing for the first time and not knowing it's a perishable item and get confused. I've had to explain it on multiplayer a few times.

 

44 minutes ago, PoshRocketeer said:

The fact that it gives unhappiness reinforces the idea that this is its "stale" stage

 

Which is why I think it'd be a relatively easy addition to just add in the (stale) condition to the food. We already have (uncooked), (cooked), (fresh), and (rotten) so the fact that stale food just gets the food name without the condition makes it the outlier when describing fresh food. It would also help you easily identify anything at a glance as perishable. If it has one of those conditions then you know it's some kind of perishable, if it doesn't have (condition) then you know it's non-perishable which wouldn't have it. Let the (stale) condition make it obvious and the unhappiness, as you say, reinforce the downsides to the stale stage.

 

edit: I'll add in that while I had the idea that it should be added from my experience, a thread here is another example of many people in the comments not knowing or understanding the (fresh)>no condition>(rotten) system for food. While a joke post the comments have a lot of people mentioning things like 'why is my fresh food causing unhappiness?' without knowing that it's no longer fresh, because they just see something like "strawberries" without the condition, or even thinking it could be the unhappiness from eating food that has the note that it's "better hot."

Edited by Sedgwick
Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Sedgwick said:

I see a lot of newer players especially getting confused about food that has boredom/unhappiness and they aren't sure why, as it's safe to eat.

 

Pizza (Fresh) is pretty clear, Pizza (rotten) is too, but then you just have Pizza. If you happen upon the food after it goes from fresh to stale, you may not realize it was previously (fresh) as not all food has its current condition listed, like Chips.

 

I think adding in the text for food that was fresh but has gone stale would make this a lot easier to understand at a glance. Oh, this pizza makes me unhappy because it's stale, and not just because maybe my character hates pizza?

 

So FoodName (Fresh), FoodName (Stale), and FoodName (Rotten) would help describe what's going on here. Thanks for your time!


Sorry, but this feels very useless/pointless if you will ... what I'm trying to say is that you don't have to be Einstein to connect basic facts in your head just to realize that a fresh piece of lettuce that's been sitting in your house in the middle of the summer at soaring temparatures is going to shrivel up, get dark green patches and no longer be fresh + change in taste which is obviously going to make you unhappy, though we don't have those visual changes, but it's still pretty obvious, time goes on as you survive, the apocalypse has started, no one is there to replenish the stores and food is no longer fresh since it's been 10 days and some of it that's been sitting in the open is already rotten.
Don't worry about the new players, some people are slow learners, like my best friend whom I taught how to jump to reach higer ground in source games with ctrl + space when he was 14-15.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a hard time following that logic, because it leads me down a path of thinking why we have the condition text displayed on food to begin with. My thought was it is there so, at a glance, you can tell if food is safe to eat so you can quickly open a refrigerator and see (rotten) so you don't grab it. If I go down the reasoning used above, then I would say remove all condition text on food like (fresh) and (rotten) and then you just have to look at every food item you find and tell based off the hunger, unhappiness, or "dangerous" text which takes longer.

 

If you open up a full container with a mix of perishable and non-perishables, then at that point you would have to already know which items are perishable vs. non-perishable or hover over each of them to see if it's worth grabbing or not. The (stale) condition text would help clarify it for those who don't know, and make looting a little bit faster for those who already know, and finally create consistency between non-perishables and perishables by have a text identifier. It's a small thing, but helps everyone quickly identify a food's value.

 

So while not a necessary addition, I wouldn't consider it pointless, just a small quality of life feature.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/5/2022 at 10:54 AM, Sedgwick said:

I have a hard time following that logic, because it leads me down a path of thinking why we have the condition text displayed on food to begin with. My thought was it is there so, at a glance, you can tell if food is safe to eat so you can quickly open a refrigerator and see (rotten) so you don't grab it. If I go down the reasoning used above, then I would say remove all condition text on food like (fresh) and (rotten) and then you just have to look at every food item you find and tell based off the hunger, unhappiness, or "dangerous" text which takes longer.

 

If you open up a full container with a mix of perishable and non-perishables, then at that point you would have to already know which items are perishable vs. non-perishable or hover over each of them to see if it's worth grabbing or not. The (stale) condition text would help clarify it for those who don't know, and make looting a little bit faster for those who already know, and finally create consistency between non-perishables and perishables by have a text identifier. It's a small thing, but helps everyone quickly identify a food's value.

 

So while not a necessary addition, I wouldn't consider it pointless, just a small quality of life feature.

I agree and disagree. Yes, it might help new players understand freshness states better, but really it's pretty obvious just from the way food in the game works now.

 

The conditional text for (Fresh) and (Rotten) are there to indicate the "extreme", Fresh is in the best condition it could be in, while Rotten is unsafe to eat. These are genuinely necessary to indicate to the player, and the state in between is food going stale. Non-perishable foods don't need condition text because they have no conditions, and canned non-perishable food does have condition text once you open the can. 

 

I don't directly oppose this decision, but I also don't think it would add anything to the game. There are better ways for the devs to spend their time like finishing out the rest of the item sets they need to add, finishing out the missing animations, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...
On 8/10/2022 at 2:23 AM, Faalagorn said:

would be nice to have it in game eventually :D

Thanks for sharing Faalagorn! My forum search didn't reach that far back, it seems, before I had made the post.

 

I recently had seen another instance where this would help. With 41.73 having changed Granola bars from perishable to non-perishable, I had seen a player with some confusion on why the stale granola bar wasn't giving a negative. They hadn't known about the perishable to non-perishable change, and thought it was a messed up item. A (stale) condition would have helped here.

 

And I concur on the spoiled change, it's a more food-focused word.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...