This game has too much food in general.

[Axiomatic]

On 2/7/2024 at 2:33 AM, getstoopid said:

I agree with all you said BUT if you talk about realism than you also have to talk about the time frame. Fact is all the things you mentioned last years... cans of food have an exp.date of usually 2 years (and could be still safely eaten for a few years after this date).

Wooden constructs if done by a capable person hold for years to decades depending on the quality of the wood... though we could argue that we use fresh cut planks all the time and they will deform and break sooner but not in the next two years either and therefor way out of the "default run". 

T-Shirts also hold for years and quality jeans much longer.

TIS would need to decrease the durability of those things to an absurd level to be game-play-relevant (like the tools are at the moment) but then again it has nothing to do anymore with realism but just making the game harder or better "more tedious" as you would need to constantly repair your stuff.

@EnigmaGrey

 

You're right about those time frames...under normal circumstances where we use things not so frequently and in fairly controlled situations. I'm not using a single pair of scissors to cut up 25 pieces of clothing a day. I'm not using a saw to turn the 15 trees I cut down that day into planks. I'm not using a hammer to take apart an entire stores worth of furniture over the course of a day or two. I wash my clothes regularly and baby them a bit, and I also change of my clothing daily, maybe wearing the same thing twice in a week with a few days in between. Fair enough about canned food lasting a long time, I won't advocate to make things unrealistic to make the game harder. But items like tools and clothing etc that get the amount of use and abuse they do in a normal PZ run, definitely should break down given enough use. 

 

I think the way footwear wears out with regular zombie stomping is a great example of how to take  every day items in the game and through use, slowly degrade them until they need replacement. This idea can apply to A LOT of items in the game. Time alone won't effect most items, but use absolutely should. Over 3 months of IRL time, I may use my hammer 4-6 times, but in game I use that dang hammer hundreds of times for non zombie destroying reasons. Durability should slowly go down to the point I need to repair it or replace it. Pens should run out of ink and erasers should get used up! If you wear a shirt or jeans every day without cleaning it and every day your active active and they are getting very sweaty and dirty, they will definitely fall apart quickly. A month for a cotton shirt and a few months for jeans. Again, I'm not advocating for an approach where durability loss is higher than what can be considered typical IRL, just to make the game harder, but I do think that knowing that nearly all items will break down over time/use actually fits in perfectly with the ethos of the game as a whole. That slow creeping, decaying, feeling that the end is inevitable. And if properly calibrated, this would come more into play mid to late game, which a lot of people in a lot of their runs never even reach so it wouldn't make the early to mid game tedious or harder, but it would really put some pressure on later game play. Oh, and considering all the late game work TIS is doing and setting up in B42 and later patches to make very long term games interesting, this kind of thing would fit right in. Final thought, one of the reasons why late game becomes easier and easier in PZ is because of the ability to hoard so many things that NEVER degrade, that the player puts themselves in a situation where they never need to worry about most things ever again. The need to risk their neck for an item simply goes away, and thats a problem because that risk/reward calculation is a core part of the gameplay. Items losing durability with use (besides zombie killing, cutting down trees, bashing doors, etc) helps counteract this process and would introduce some risk back into the game. 

 

edit: back on the food, while canned food should last a year or two or more and dried pasta essentially lasts forever, a lot of other food items that currently last forever should also degrade over time. Chips should go stale and eventually go bad. Plonkies the same thing. Can of Oats will definitely go bad given enough time. Sure, these things won't happen in months and months so they won't effect the vast majority of people's run, but with the way future builds are really leaning into very long term play viability, its something to consider for the future. Probably not worth the time investment right now, but it will really help enrich, what seems to be, the long term strategy and goals of TIS development.

 

edit2: after my first 800 hours, I installed the Water Goes Bad mod, and that's what really got me into this train of thought. I really loved how it made an otherwise forgettable aspect of the game, way more present in my decision making. I had flowing potable water for X amount of time, then I had potable but non flowing water for Y amount of time. After that, a basic survival necessity became a real challenge until I could collect water AND ALSO have to create filters to make it drinkable again.  Or boil/microwave it which requires a generator after power goes out. It added depth and challenge back to the mid-game (and if I get really unlucky on the timespan rolls sometimes early game.) At almost 1200 hours now into the game, I'm always looking for ways to counteract the easy / safe aspect of mid to late game.

[getstoopid]

That was muuuch text for a short morning-coffee-read *g but I have to agree with all you said. The time frame will realistically be way shorter since we use our things all the time and keep them poorly maintained most of the time, honestly I didn't think of that.

 

As for the "water goes bad" mod... that would be a nice vanilla addition. Same as fuel going bad after a few months.

[Axiomatic]

Haha, yikes that was a lot of text. Didn't seem like it when I was writing. The more I think about this, the more in depth I think this could go to. Perhaps I should look into creating a mod for this idea, for us sadistic, make everything harder types. My latest thought is that just like car parts have 3 levels (performance, standard, value) so should clothing and tools. Cheap < Standard < High levels of quality that modify the degrading variable of items on use/time. For instance, a high quality hammer should last 5x as long as a cheap one given the same amount of usage. A cheap shirt should tatter well before a high quality one. I may need to start compiling a mass spreadsheet of PZ items and working all this out.

[getstoopid]

Oh yess that would be cool