Balancing food, freshness and fridges.

[Lurler]

Question to everyone.

I saw many of you say in the game chat that fridges aren't particularly useful and that food still rots.
Well, that's to be expected as adding food that never spoils is bad for game balance. Especially considering that it's already quite easy to obtain food and water.

But still, I would like to better balance this system.

Currently food is separated into 4 categories:
- Perishable (1h)
- Normal (3h)
- NonPerishable (8h)
- Preserved (2d)

I will probably bump it to 1.5h, 4h, 8h and 2.5d to make it slightly more convenient.

Now, about fridges. They slow down freshness decrease by 10 times. I think it is quite a substantial increase.
But if you log our and login the next day and  your food has rotted away in the fridge I can see how fridge can feel a bit useless. But increasing it further, more than 10x would introduce disbalance.

Anyway, before I make final changes I'd like to hear what you think. Maybe there's a better way to fix it?

[ai_enabled]

I believe that the most discomfort is caused by the "normal" food with 3h shell life. Increase to 4.5h (so total more than 2 real-life days) should be enough with everything else kept as is.

Another consideration: addition of an icebox in the Tier I technologies will help on the early stages of gameplay until players will be able to build a fridge. To keep the balance, icebox should have only a minimal amount of slots and might be a little bit less efficient than a higher-tier fridge (for example, 7 times instead of 10 times of freshness decrease speed).

[kordenox]

well from my experience the fridge is completely useless!
food is really easy to find in the wild.
and we all ready have a perfect non-rotting food which is wheat flour!
i love wheat flour!:) it won't root, can be sold to others with no means for them to reproduce it, and you can easily make your self some bread for you gathering runs.

[Lurler]

@kordenox, hm, not sure what you mean about batteries, as currently the fridge doesn't use any energy or batteries (it's supposedly powered by solar power). So it just functions like a container where you can put any food and it will last 10 times as long.

[kordenox]

I am terribly sorry, I never actually build the fridge and herd from someone that it needs batteries, my bad.

[Magnus]

What about making the fridge more effective when none of the owners are online?
That would help with making it more useful.

	Default	In fridge online	In fridge offline
Perishable	1.5h	15h	30h
Normal	4h	40h	80h
NonPerishable	8h	80h	160h

And what about not being able to store Preserved foods in the fridge? Shouldn't they be kept on a shelf?

[Lurler]

What about making the fridge more effective when none of the owners are online?
That would help with making it more useful.

That wouldn't work unfortunately as fridges are not tied to particular people and can be owned either by single person of by group of people. And frankly tying them to player's online status seems a bit unexpected from player's perspective, especially given that we don't do anything like that for any other thing in the game.

And what about not being able to store Preserved foods in the fridge? Shouldn't they be kept on a shelf?

Well, that's fine
You can store your coffee in the freezer in real life and it will store for 10 years instead of 2 or something. I see no good gameplay reason to prevent players from doing that.

[p0ki]

I've never used the fridge because of its cost. I always preserve my meat with salt

[Lurler]

Everything is noted! The fridge will be rebalanced in the next update

[EvilMammoth]

 My feedback on fiedge :

It is only usefull during 1 game session. Becouse on next real life day food in fridge is spoiled or near spoiled. I taked some time to get meat and cook kit with fat, to have food for next few days. But next day I come and see that about 30 roasted meat is almost gone. So...there is no any point in using friedge, becouse presering food in it works only for 1 real time day, what usually means - 1 game session.
But during 1 game session it is easuer to take few meat from atacking animals and feed yourself. So cooking anything, preserving complex cooked food, making berry jams or collecting berrys to make that jabs in future are pointless. Everything will be gone before next games session.

That means that it is easier to eat even raw meat and berrys, pass nausea if needed, but not spent time on cooking, preserving food and ,сonsequently, farming. Becouse it is better to use time for more profitable work.

The only use for friedge I see is holding some waterberrys in it ,if I turned back to base with some of them unused, to craft herbal healing, becouse it spoils too fast.

My idea is that there should be 2 types : friedge and deep freezer. Becouse freezed meat and berrys in real life could be preserved and used for few years. Let it be very expensive to build or whatever.

[Warbot]

Freezers are actually a nice idea, and to balance it with fridges, in a way that it is not simply "fridge <<< freezer" it could go like this:

- Freezer, comes in 3 stages or settings (could be configured on the freezer, could be 3 different freezers)
- there are 3 "frozen" states for food, equaling the common 1-3 stars "*", "**", "***" found on freezers
- food spoils progressively slower in these 3 frozen states
- when put into a freezer, the food takes a couple of seconds/minutes to reach "*" and following "frozen" states,
up to the max of that the fridge
- the lower the temperature ("***") the freezer is set to, the faster food freezes
- "*" could be relatively fast to freeze/unfreeze, "**" and "***" could take considerably longer and have a much higher effect
- ofc, food also takes time to un-freeze and may or may not be edible when frozen, though it would be certainly bad to do so

This would allow longer term storage for food or valuable spoilable objects.
Having different freezers (or differntly configured freezers) would allow you to, for instance:
...take some things you want to use tomorrow or later today from the "***" into the "*" (or a fridge) so you can use (fully unfreeze) them faster, yet they stay somewhat frozen until then.

In retrospective, 3 freezers might be overkill, though I like the idea of 3 stars ("*" to "***"), so it could just as well be only 2 freezers or freezer settings ("*" and "***") with the middle one ("**") only existing as transition state for the food.


Optionally:
Microwave to fast-unfreeze stuff (may have side effects on the food, depending on what it is, and how fast you unfreeze it)

Additionally:
Means to long term store "edible" ingredients like sugar.
There could be a recipe to preserve it, or just a proper container.

+ This game needs more and easier ways to interact with containers (I mean inventory items, not buildings), like,
is there even a way to empty a bottle of stale water as you just came home and you don't need it anymore as you have your well there,
instead of boiling it just to get rid of it?
And how do I fill more oil into an oil lamp? Using it only fills it once and only if it is empty.




[edit:]
I know it's a delicate thing to balance between "spoils too fast" and "basically lasts forever",
in addition to "convenient / no extra work required" and "work / micro-manage yourself to death with it",
and also "easy to survive" vs "hard to even get enough to eat" plus the difference of early game and endgame,
and then add realism to the mix...

What I see as a problem is, that you need to eat too frequently, which is ok judging by the ingame day/time,
but maybe too frequently for making it fun and meaningful.
So, how to solve that?
Add another bar! ...yea, more complexity, but not too hard really!
And, the food bar in general should "feel" bigger, meaning it decays slower and the food gives less (equaling out, maybe a bit more food needed).

So it would be either 1 or 2.

1.:
- make the food bar "bigger" (same length, but decays slower, and food adds less)
- make it separated into 3-4 parts
- letting it empty into the lower parts has slight but not yet severe effects
- severe effects only if empty or near empty

2.: (preferred)
- also "bigger" food bar as describe in (1.) but without separated parts
- additional bar "fat layer"
- shrinks when food bar is empty or very low
- grows when food bar is full or near full
- only has negative effects if the "fat layer" is empty or near empty
- when food bar is low/empty, eating a little bit (berries and the like) will temporarily stop the "fat layer" from going lower

But for what, you ask?!

=> eat less often, without losing on realism
=> prepare good food to eat good stuff every once in a while, instead of eating low tier food frequently
=> provide reason to prepare and use good food
=> while preserving the possibility to survive on low tier food (new players)
=> food-tech progression brings a feeling of satisfaction and convenience in form of less total time for preparing and eating food

As a practical example how I'd imagine food:
(with the afore mentioned "fat layer", and a food bar basically holding ~2 times the amount it has now,
and a "good meal" only being necessary if it's really low)

Going out and collecting all the stuff while doing your things...

- (new and advanced players) Eating berries as you go to further delay the need for a good meal (optional),
unlike now where eating the berries alone will keep your food bar topped.

- (advanced players) Instead of harvesting and eating the berries all the time, have some slow-spoiling prepared food with you.

- (new player) Resting every once in a while, either make a fire or go home to cook your mushrooms and maybe some meat/eggs and such for an actual meal.

- (advanced player) Get home and eat some of your advanced food out of your stock, or use some prepared and slow-spoiling food without the need to get back home and/or start cooking.



Sorry for the long post!
I know it sounds like much, but in the end it should just be:
- less work for advanced players
- reason to use better food
- more "survival" feeling for new players

[Xargt]

[EDIT]

Hi.

I'm not sure about buffing time of food before spoiling is the answer to make the fridge useful...
(Not unless the food in fridges will never spoil)
Because I see the realistic idea that we're all following game time, although it's fast when we compare the game time to real time... For me, it's fine.

One thing I can think of right now to make the fridge really useful is to have another feature - Heat.
When characters feel heat, they need something cold to drink, right?


I just want to help with ideas.

---

"Food is really easy to find".
Imagine a new start. 100 players online, all started at level 1. Will the players kill each other just to grab food?

[MilesD37]

So, perishable is 1h real time to rot... but 10h in any fridge.

I'm assuming that our farmed foods are what's considered perishable... why not adjust fridge time by level of fridge? so primitive fridge is 8h, small fridge is 12h, and large fridge is 16h? (or insert more appropriate numbers). Basically, i think the only thing we really want in this is the ability to grow something on monday night and it not be rotten tuesday evening when we log back in.

[ai_enabled]

@MilesD37, the food from plants is not rotting until you harvest it. And it has quite a decent duration (4 hours for vegetables) before it starts rotting. You can see the constants we're using for different kinds of food here:

Code Select Expand

// Must be used for food that spoils very quickly such as fresh meat, picked berries, etc.
Perishable = TimeSpan.FromHours(1.5);

// Should be used for all normal food, such as vegetables, prepared meals, etc.
Normal = TimeSpan.FromHours(4);

// Should be used for things that last a bit longer than normal.
NonPerishable = TimeSpan.FromHours(8);

// Should be used for food that has been preserved in some way to last much longer.
Preserved = TimeSpan.FromDays(2.5);
Add the fridge spoil rate multiplier and it will be way longer.

[MilesD37]

Thanks lurler!