Feedback Request 08/01/2014: Farming and Cooking (Test Server)

[Xsyon]

The upcoming massive Farming and Cooking update is ready for final tests on the Test Server!

*Important* The server will up and down today as I find and fix issues. During this time you may time out logging in. I will remove this note when I'm done with the minor issues.

Cooking
- Cooking is accessed by right clicking a lit fire. This gives the Roast option.
- The cooking panel allows you to create a custom recipe from a set of Primary, Secondary and Seasoning ingredients.
- As you gain skill you can combine more ingredients to create a recipe.
- You can scroll through the recipe levels to create simpler recipes below your current level.
- Food ingredients include animal parts, fish, foraged plants and grown crops.
- Items serve as either primary and secondary ingredients or secondary and seasoning ingredients.
- The effectiveness of the resulting food item is determined by your cooking skill, cooking stats and the quality of your cooking utensils.

Cooking Properties and Buffs
- Food ingredients combine to create food with various properties.

- Primary ingredients provide 4 types of buffs:
-- Health - restores health quickly as you eat.
-- Energy - restores energy quickly as you eat.
-- Health rate - increases health restoration rate for a set period of time.
-- Energy rate - increases energy restoration rate for a set period of time.

- Secondary ingredients provide a stat change buff that increases one stat and decreases another.

- Seasonings provided 4 types of effects:
-- Power - increases the power of applied positive stats buffs.
-- Mitigation - reduces the stat loss of applied negative stat buffs.
-- Duration - increases the duration of your applied rate and stat buffs.
-- Consumption - reduces the time it takes to eat a food item.

- Buffs applied by consumed food appear in your buff display with timers showing the time left on the buff.
- Food buffs are lost if you die.
- You can only gain stat buffs from your most recently eaten food. Eating food without stat buffs will not affect any currently applied stat buffs.

Cooking flavors
- Each food item has a flavor type.
- Primary flavors are: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter and Savory
- Secondary flavors are: Pungent (spicy), and Astringent and Cool (minty)
- Combine flavors to create a balanced taste for best results.
- Too many mixed flavors or too much of a flavor type will affect your final recipe.

Cookbook
- You can save recipes that you like in your cookbook. The cookbook can be opened from the cooking panel.
- You name your saved recipe and this name appears on your cooked product.
- The number of recipes you can save is noted in your cookbook.
- The number of recipes you can save is determined by your skill and intelligence.
- Saved recipes are tracked for usage (use count displays after the recipe's name).
- Recipes that are used 1000 times become 'signature dishes'.
- Signature dishes are denoted in purple and give a chance of increased power and duration.
- Your chance of extraordinary results is increased by your charm.

Food decay and storage
- Food ingredients and cooked food rot quickly over time if not properly stored.
- Special food baskets and pouches reduce food decay by up to 200% based on the quality of the basket.
- Food baskets protect a specific type of food (meat, fish, plants or cooked products).
- Food basket and pouch recipes can be gained by characters with a basketry skill over 80.

- Food can be further protected by storing your food in baskets kept in a commissary.
- Tribes of Band size and larger can set 1 to 4 buildings as commissaries.
- To set a building as a commissary, right click the building to bring up the 'Set Use' option.
- Commissaries reduce decay on food items stored there by up to an additional 200% based on the quality of the building.

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Farming
- Farming skill added to the character's skill and action lists.
- Farming action opens a farming panel, with one action, plowing.
- Plowing prepares a tile of terrain for planting seeds.
- Plowing requires a shovel.
- New crop plants can be found through foraging.
- Extract seeds from crop plants. Right click for the menu. Extract one or extract all.
- Plant seeds on plowed terrain. Right click seeds to plant.

Plants gauges
Sun Level - Currently this is constant.
Water Level - Decreases every update. Increases through watering.
Weeds Level - Weeds have a chance of growing or increasing every update. Cleared by tending.
Pest Level - Pests have a chance of appearing or increasing every update. Cleared by tending.
Fertilizer Level - Decreases every update. Increased through adding fertilizer (currently guts).
Growth Level - Increases every update based sun, water, fertilizer and tending levels.

Right click a plant to perform the following actions
Water Plant- Requires a full water skin in your packs. Fills the water level of the plant.
Clear Weeds - Clears weeds from the plant.
Clear Pests - Clears pests from the plant.
Fertilize - Increases the fertilizer level of the plant. Requires animal guts in your packs.
Harvest - Available only when the plant is ready. Only the farmer (owner) can harvest the plant.
Destroy - Available only for the owner or for any tribe member if the plant is dead.

Tending your plants
- Immediately water your plant. You will need a full water skin in your packs.
- Plants update once every game day.
- Check your plant once per real day (or as you desire) to ensure the plant is well tended.
- Plants that lack water or tending will wilt and eventually die from neglect.
- Plants reaching maximum age will die. Days left in the plant's life cycle show in the plant's info display.
- Plants can be harvested when they reach 75% growth.
- Plants yield more produce as they continue to grow (up to 100%).

Well tended plants grow faster. The goal is to tend your plants well so that they can reach maximum growth (100%) before they reach maximum age.

Notes
- With your Farming panel open all nearby plants will display their information.

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Toolcraft
- Skewer recipes added as first set of cooking utensils.

Resources
- Salt is found as a rare item on sand surfaces.
- Tar is found as a rare item on basalt surfaces.
- Leaves and sap are found as rare items on forest surfaces near trees.
- Butcher option available on creatures to allow gathering of animal meat.

Interface
- Buffs sorted in a better specific order.

Improvements
- You can now eat while sitting.
- Buffs that increase health or energy while eating apply the same while sitting or standing.
- Terraforming animations and shovel position corrected and improved.
- Shovel models re-sized to be consistent.

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Still to be done
- Revision of food ingredient base duration.
- Revision of calories for food ingredients that can be eaten raw.
- Skill requirements for growing different crops.

For near future patches
- Grass planting on tribe land
- Tools required for all farming actions.
- Provision upkeep requiring food, provides a select-able farming or cooking bonus.
- A secret surprise improvement for foraging and growing crops.

Under consideration
- Hoe added as a tool for plowing and a weapon.
- Performing actions (water, tend, fertilize) on all nearby plants (range determined by skill).

Notes
- For testing purposes only, homestead can set 1 commissary.
- Crop plants are easier to find than they will be in the final update.

A lot of changes and finishing of systems has gone into this update. I may have missed some changes in the descriptions above.

Cooking will be easily expanded to other cooking types such as boiling, smoking and baking, requiring new equipment and utensils and providing slightly different results.

---------------------------------------------------------

Primarily I am looking for feedback on any bugs, missing art, or anything that seems to be working incorrectly with the new systems.

Secondarily I am looking for feedback on any adjustable variables (farming times, buff power, buff duration etc.) that do not seem balanced.

Please keep feedback short and sweet to best assist me in getting this update to the public!

I hope you all enjoy this upcoming big update!

[MrDDT]

Unable to connect to the test server. Tried 3 diff toons, even using a different connection.

Update, able to log on now, but the server got locked up and rolled back or something.

[Gruu]

O.O

I try to login to the Test server and i get a timeout...have tried to restart game 3 times with same result

Gruu

[Xsyon]

The server will be up and down. I posted a note regarding this above. Thanks!

[Whorlok]

Yes... our Xsyon is with this patch on the next Phase to be ready and complete ...;)

[Bejaymac]

Fish aren't being consumed when eaten raw, doesn't matter if it's one fish or a full stack, you will still have them after you've filled your nourishment bar.

EDIT

So far the only way I've found to remove plowed land is to raise/lower terrain, can you link it to the clear terrain function under terraforming please.

[MrDDT]

Crafting armors with bonuses are giving 2x the bonus, it lists the bonuses 2 times and also gives the bonus 2 times.

[Bejaymac]

If your cooking a stack and the utensil breaks, then cooking doesn't finish instead it gives you a missing utensil message for the remainder of the stack.

EDIT

some bins/containers have developed a bug where they open but don't show the contents on screen, if it happens to a bin in a cart then you can't use the cart any more as the bin remains open, even apparently after relogging.
After checking my bins I started getting a maximum containers open message even though I only had one cart open.

[Gruu]

O.O

The bin bug is same but different for me. if a bin in the cart is opened in the cart....some open but do not show on screen. you can walk away from that area but it does not close...says bin is already open. You can attach to your cart with that bin open and it does not close it. eventually you will have too many invisible bins open and no more bins are allowed to be opened. I relogged but this did not change. I then went to the peace server and the bins work normal so this is on test only.

Gruu

[Emilie]

Regarding bin issue: I walked up to a chief tent, tried opening it, can't- get message "already open by me" (it wasn't). Walking away did nothing. Other containers worked as normal.

When fertilizing plants I get the scavenging animation and sound, seems kinda weird IMO! The foraging, or perhaps the pulling sand animation would make more sense.

[thurgond]

When extracting seeds from a stack, the Extract action provides one seed but decreases the stack by two. Extract all properly gives one seed per plant in the stack. A single plant will also properly give one seed.

I added 25 green points to cooking before starting cooking. Ended up with 24.9 skill. The Novice roasting recipe didn't have a seasoning option. After adding one more point for 25.9 skill, the seasoning line was there.

I agree with Emilie that the scavenging animation for applying fertilizer is out of place.

[Bejaymac]

Since the reset my bins/containers appear to be behaving themselves, and fish are now being consumed when eaten raw.

I'm assuming your using LOD, as it appear that the Spinach plant has problems with its LOD, it turns into a small blob when you start to scroll out with the mouse wheel, and at even further out the Spinach plants vanish while the rest are still visible and selectable.
Only found rice grass, spinach, cattail and sunflower since the reset so I don't if any of the other types I haven't found have a similar issue.

[unclean666]

When I found some salt in sand it would not let me harvest/ pull it up.Tar is the same wont let me harvest.

douglas squirrl livers secondary effect gain agil and decrease agil.Rabbit meat is the same agil and agil.Squirrl meat is agil-agil.If and of these that have the same buff + and - the buff does not show up after cooked.

Cooking skill does not show an increase unless you close it out.

When you walk away from the fire the cooking window stays open and you can cook at any distance away from the fire.I think it should stay open so if you go to grab something real fast you dont have to reopen it etc but you shouldent be able to craft unless you have the fire buff.

[Xsyon]

I'm working on fixes for all of the issues reported and will run a closed test first. I'll open the Test Server up again later today.

Thanks everyone!

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is up with some fixes and changes. If you can confirm some of these fixes or still find problems with these issues or anything else, please post. Thanks!

Fixes
1) Problem with bins not opening fixed. This was due to the revised larger size of item messages exceeding the past size limit for such messages and causing the bin open command to fail.

2) Raw fish can’t be eaten. Only crop plants and some foraged plants can be eaten raw.

3) Problem with some armor displaying and applying double bonuses fixed. This was an error in the script converting the current database to the revised database required for this update.

4) Seeds should properly remove one count when extracted from a plant.

5) If a utensil is broken while cooking a stack of food, your cooking will stop.

6) Tar and salt should be properly gathered from basalt and sand surfaces respectively.

7) Ingredients with both a plus and minus to the same stat corrected.

8) Fixed issue with some recipe names changing at the wrong skill level.

9) Flavors should display on all food ingredients.

Improvements
1) You can remove secondary ingredients from a recipe to cook. This will allow for more variations when players want food for health and energy without any stat effects.

2) Skill updates on your cooking panel if you gain skill while the panel is open.

3) Fertilize animation changed to a gather animation.

4) You can move with the cooking panel open, but you can only cook when within range of a hearth fire.

[thurgond]

The fertilize animation is now gather, but it never completes after the timer.

[BoneBasher]

I have tried the test server a everything seems to be working fine. I foraged... planted two sweet potatoes and 2 carrots... watered fine... I even saw the water level drop after a while and I had to re-water. Cooked up some fish kebabs and carrot kebabs and ate them fine. The only thing I did notice was that after eating the cooked items the buff wasn't showing up but a 0 was showing up in the buff bar. When near the fire the hearth buff was showing fine but after eating several cooked kebabs there was no energy gain buff just a zero. Other than that it all seems great.

[MrDDT]

I'm not understanding, might be a bug but currently if I make a food with 1 primary, I get about 12% Nourishment. If I make a food with 4 primary, 3 secondary, and 3 seasonings, I get 12% Nourishment. Skill also seems to have no effect on Nourishment.

It seems like this should change, as in some cases I don't want the buffs as much as just eating less. 30 seconds times 8 is a lot of eating, and if you are making the best foods that is a LOT of food items ate.

Also harvesting a bear gives the same amount of meat as a rabbit. Doesn't make much sense there either.

[wastelandstoic]

Had a little time to get on test yesterday and try the new content. The single best improvement for me was being able to kill an animal and harvest meat! Finally a hunter can get his grub on without fishing or foraging. :)

Hopefully we will be able to eat the meat raw, like fish, for some base sustenance.

I do agree that the amount of meat should vary based on some factor, size being the obvious best or alternatively it could be done like gut harvesting -based on power. This would still have bears and hamsters yielding one meat thought, at lowest power levels...

Question: I found the skewer recipe in my tool craft menu but did not find any of the new preservative basket recipes in my basketry menu (basketry 89). Do these have to be grinded for in order to get them?

Also, in running around collecting all the necessary ingredients for cooking my water and food levels both dropped to 0, I ran out of energy and I went into exhaustion. At 0 in both food and water exhaustion last for at least a full minute and it may have been more like a min. 30 sec. This seems like overkill. Especially for newer players who may have a slow time of it getting their chosen food collection skill up before they can begin to provide for themselves. Maybe a minimum of 30 sec exhaustion in the most extreme cases? or some minimum less than what there is now. Just a thought.

Other than that, and some of the things already brought up, this patch looks great!

Grats on this huge content addition! I'm sure it was a long slog.

[Bejaymac]

Hopefully we will be able to eat the meat raw, like fish, for some base sustenance.
From what I seen earlier, almost everything now needs to be cooked before you can eat it, the only things that I've found that don't need to be cooked are fruit, water cress and the new plants, everything else has had the "eat" option removed.

EDIT
Scrapper's rod only shows three lines of info, the name, who crafted it and the quality level, the durability and condition lines are missing.

[wastelandstoic]

Understood. I'm assuming that that is current on test but will be adjusted by patch release based on these comments:

"Still to be done
- Revision of food ingredient base duration.
- Revision of calories for food ingredients that can be eaten raw.

Fixes
2) Raw fish can’t be eaten. Only crop plants and some foraged plants can be eaten raw."

Fishing skill would be useless otherwise unless you also had cooking. Same for other base food source skills.

[Bejaymac]

Just learned how to make the Pauwalu Plant Pouch, it's asking for 1 grass, 1 leaves and zero sap.

EDIT

Hugaleti Meat Pouch is the same, the third Material salt shows as needing zero, this means you have to right click the material to add it the crafting window before you can craft, but you don't use any of that third material to do the craft.

If two of the pouches are like this then odds are the rest of them are.

[unclean666]

Everything I listed is now working right.

A couple of things though I noticed.When you get tired with no food or water it takes 1 min 40 secs to go back to normal.That seems a bit harsh for new players that dont know what there doing and be an instent turn off after they do that 3-4 times within 20 mins of play.So maybe the time from breathing hard to normal can be cut shorter.

When your done eating food the animation keeps going for about 5 secs.

This is more of a request but can you make it so we can see our energy numbers on the bar?

[MrDDT]

Had a little time to get on test yesterday and try the new content. The single best improvement for me was being able to kill an animal and harvest meat! Finally a hunter can get his grub on without fishing or foraging. :)

Hopefully we will be able to eat the meat raw, like fish, for some base sustenance.

I do agree that the amount of meat should vary based on some factor, size being the obvious best or alternatively it could be done like gut harvesting -based on power. This would still have bears and hamsters yielding one meat thought, at lowest power levels...

Question: I found the skewer recipe in my tool craft menu but did not find any of the new preservative basket recipes in my basketry menu (basketry 89). Do these have to be grinded for in order to get them?

Also, in running around collecting all the necessary ingredients for cooking my water and food levels both dropped to 0, I ran out of energy and I went into exhaustion. At 0 in both food and water exhaustion last for at least a full minute and it may have been more like a min. 30 sec. This seems like overkill. Especially for newer players who may have a slow time of it getting their chosen food collection skill up before they can begin to provide for themselves. Maybe a minimum of 30 sec exhaustion in the most extreme cases? or some minimum less than what there is now. Just a thought.

Other than that, and some of the things already brought up, this patch looks great!

Grats on this huge content addition! I'm sure it was a long slog.



Fishing skill would be useless otherwise unless you also had cooking. Same for other base food source skills.

I do not think you should be able to eat meat raw (currently you can't) I like the change where you have to cook it or eat veggies/plants.

I do not want to see meat based on power, that doesn't make much sense it should be based on size of animal. A bear would give 50x more meat than a rabbit pretty easy. Just scale it along the way for other animals.

Wastelandstoic you have to grind for it or find the recipe for the new baskets.


About not eating and exhaustion. Finding food is very very easy, even without cooking I could easy keep myself fed with low foraging skill, at the very least water is super common. I feel that there should be a survival aspect to not eating/drinking. People that run around with no water/food should slowly die much like in the mist only maybe slower.
The exhaustion part of it, again if you are not watching your energy, food, and water, you should be punished for it. I do not feel that 1 min is much of an issue considering using the right food you can get a full energy bar in less than 12 seconds. When you consider eating alone basic food takes 30 seconds, 1 min is not long at all.

Fishing would be useless without cooking just like many of the other resource gathering skills. I think it's fine considering that fish is likely to be the most common way to get meat, unless they change it so that animals give a lot more meat, then I think they need to change the fishing time from 20s to 10s instead.

[MrDDT]

The amount of guts to fertilize plants is way to high, there should be a recipe to make fertilizer from animal parts where it yields more fertilizer than 1 use per gut. I would say about 8 fertilizer per gut to balance out the game correctly.

Currently it takes 4 guts for 1 plant to 100%.
My think it should be 1/2 a gut per plant. Making this a recipe to make fertilizer out of 1 gut (using things like maybe water and fish and a tool) to make 8 fertilizer, I think would be balanced.

[Gruu]

O.O

Unfortunately the char i want to use for cooking is unpaid so I could only try out the basics. I had points to use that would have brought me to 30 in either skil but alas i cant use them.

I have to agree with Unclean...the time of exaustion is way to long for a new player and would discourage them tho i also agree with DDT that in this situation you would have a more dire penalty.

I have in the past put in a suggestion for having a composter added to woodcraft and/or scrapcraft to make fertilizer in. Granted this should only be available as is the water barrel, level 40 +. Decreasing the amount of fertilizer needed would be a good idea as is the suggestion of adding a way to make small batches of it by hand without a future suggested composter.

Fishing becoming non-important i can see happening to a point. I can eat 3 berries and get a 1/4 bar of stamina versus having to eat 5-6 cooked fish. If i am going to take the time and effort to learn to fish and cook, the cooked fish should give more stamina otherwise why cook or fish...just be a vegitarian. Yes i understand that at higher levels of cooking the food can be of way more benifit. a fine line to tread indeed.

If i member right...plowing has to be on Tribe property, so farming is out for FTP correct? unless they are in a tribe and allowed to?

Since i am still struggling to keep my house i will let the Paid people finish the testing. all i can do atm is supply info based on if i were a new FTP. Good luck and happy Farming

[MrDDT]

Splitting a stack of cooked food will mess up the buff timer / buffs to 0s 0s.

[wastelandstoic]

I do not think you should be able to eat meat raw (currently you can't) I like the change where you have to cook it or eat veggies/plants.

I do not want to see meat based on power, that doesn't make much sense it should be based on size of animal. A bear would give 50x more meat than a rabbit pretty easy. Just scale it along the way for other animals.

Wastelandstoic you have to grind for it or find the recipe for the new baskets.


About not eating and exhaustion. Finding food is very very easy, even without cooking I could easy keep myself fed with low foraging skill, at the very least water is super common. I feel that there should be a survival aspect to not eating/drinking. People that run around with no water/food should slowly die much like in the mist only maybe slower.
The exhaustion part of it, again if you are not watching your energy, food, and water, you should be punished for it. I do not feel that 1 min is much of an issue considering using the right food you can get a full energy bar in less than 12 seconds. When you consider eating alone basic food takes 30 seconds, 1 min is not long at all.

Fishing would be useless without cooking just like many of the other resource gathering skills. I think it's fine considering that fish is likely to be the most common way to get meat, unless they change it so that animals give a lot more meat, then I think they need to change the fishing time from 20s to 10s instead.

I think raw meat would be fine, just like raw fish giving a minimal sustenance. Cooked more. IRL both are acceptable albeit risk of contamination is higher in animal meat. This gives the player more options. (Which attribute dependent skills to raise and which not)

Agreed, size is best for determining amount of meat.

New Baskets -right on, assumed.

Exhaustion-
Keeping in mind the rule of 3 for water and food I think there is plenty of room to have a survival aspect to sustenance but also not frustrate new/ beginning players. One min. 30-40 sec. is too long for anyone, IMO. And I'm speaking of being locked up with exhaustion specifically.

I'm opposed to adding content that make someone’s work to raise a skill obsolete. There's no reason why you can't allow, fishing say, to still provide meat with some sustenance and then cooked fish more sustenance. Same with animal meat, same with plants.

Guts to fertilize plants-
Yeah, agree here.

Lots of other things would work here too as has been offered by myself and others in the last farming thread. Personally I think it should not be guts but if so fewer make more sense.

[Bejaymac]

Just learned the other three skewers, only Forager's skewer has an icon, the other three are blank.

[Emilie]

I agree that the fertilizer is terribly unbalanced right now. Needing 4 guts to fertilize one plant is extreme, and I don't see people doing that to be honest.

I too prefer the idea of making fertilizer from guts instead, but if adding a whole new aspect would slow release a lot then it could be as simple as with seeds: have an extract action to get for example 15-20 fertilizer pellets/dollops from each gut, and then using these pellets or whatever on the plant. So that each gut would fertilize 3-4 plants fully. Alternatively there could be a crafting process of some kind, but I guess that would take some time to develop.

Eating fish and meat raw should be discouraged, or what is the point of cooking? I don't see fishing becoming obsolete, rather the opposite, even if you can't eat them raw people are going to need more fish now. There isn't really a need to eat them raw anyway since all you need is a fire and skewer and then you can cook, no need to specialize in a whole new craft. If there is an option to eat them raw, then at the least it should a significantly lower boost, and perhaps be slower to eat than cooked food.

Berries should give a lot less sustenance than any cooked food. Eating one meat or fish dish, should be equal to at least 30 raw plants IMO.

I can't wait to try these basketry recipes! Over all, I love love love this new content! :D

[Dorsie]

after logging in with 82 basketry and no recipe , just to here from another person , i got them with 66 and a few baskets later.... keep on grinding , maybe they come up , i have to say , i give up
i'm talking about the new pouches, baskets
it's enough grinding allready , for what ? , i dunno actually , because there's no market to talk about , carts and bp's sell , to vets , the rest is just worthless junk nobody wants or needs
sorry , but just a waste of time , not even relaxing , no chat , no social events , nothing but grinding , and wait 30 secs for a kebab to fill 12 % of your bar ?
where's the fun ? the mmo feeling ? and don't tell me to join a tribe , because they are empty aswell
anyway , very frustrated now , might be better maybe , after all , a few month to go with my sub , lol

[Emilie]

Dorsie, join a tribe.

[Whorlok]

Look to this thread with my IDEAS for Fertilizer with Pictures
http://www.xsyon.com/showthread.php/8895-Feedback-Request-Farming-(Test-Server)?p=99291&viewfull=1#post99291

[MrDDT]

I like the changes to butchering on test, based on size of animal, power, and mutant or not. Much better and makes a lot more sense. So far I was able to get 44 meat off 1 shadowbear, which seems about right to me, and a chicken gives about 1 to 3 meat. Which seems about right.
Fishing might needs a slight tweak in speeding up (maybe about 20% if it were up to me) to make it more inline with risk/reward.

So far I like the changes a lot.

Waiting for my crops to finish growing to see the yield but so far the yield would have to be huge for them to really be worth while as a food source. Currently it takes 4 to 6 guts per plant at 91 farming, 1 to 3 water uses, around 5 to 10 other actions plus the plant seed itself. In total you are looking at around 15 actions plus timer. Compared to foraging for the same food. Meaning I would have to forage 15 times and get LESS than this 1 plant does. I know you are changing the foraging rates, but my guess is that 20 foraging actions likely to yield about 10 to 40 "somethings". So that means planting would need to be at least 10 to 40 yield.

Currently foraging 20 times yields me about 80 to 120 items.

Now putting this in line with hunting, and I would say that farming likely is going to be the best source of food IF the yield is around 20ish per plant. I think cutting down the guts requirement to 1/8th like I said before and make it 1 action like watering is, that means plants could yield something like 6 to 10 each, which would be very much inline with hunting.

Of course this is all at max skill.

[wastelandstoic]

If you are able to provide details on food decay/storage I have a question. Assuming 400% reduction of decay, what is the shelf (or basket) life of properly stored food?

I know most tribes have baskets of fish and herbs in storage and if they are willing to make new baskets and assign commissaries I would hope that that would allow for a return to a relatively permanent storage capacity. If not permanet are you open to input on storage times?

Thanks

[Xsyon]

The following changes have been made on the Test Server:

Fixes
1) Fixed fertilize animation from getting stuck.

2) Corrected material counts on new pouch schemes.

3) Tool tip on scrapper's rod should display duration. (apparently this was a very old issue).

Improvements
1) Meat from animals increased based on type and size of creature.

2) Fatigue should now set in at 5% energy instead of 10%.

[Xsyon]

A few notes on the feedback so far.

Data variables such as calories and crop yields have not been finalized. I wanted to gather feedback on these first as balancing these numbers to make these systems valuable is the trickiest part (and will likely continue after the public patch).

Regarding calories per food item, I am considering two options.

1) Food items supply a different amount of calories and resulting cooked food is based on this. This would give more calories to more advanced recipes. This was the original design.

2) Cooked food items give a set amount of calories (for example 20% hunger filled) and edible raw foods give a set lesser amount of calories (1/4 to 1/2 of cooked dishes).

Currently, I am favoring option 2 for several reasons [edited to fix typo]

- The system is already complex enough I believe and adding another layer of complexity may make it too complicated. I think it's better to go simple with the calories for now and add this extra complexity if it seems that it will benefit the system in the future.

- In many instances a player may not want a high level recipe to give too many calories as they will want to switch food buffs or use food for the fast health and energy recovery more often without becoming over stuffed.

These things need to be kept in mind:

- The goal is keep your hunger level within the normal healthy range. A full hunger bar is not a goal and is detrimental.

- Consumption times can be reduced with the correct seasonings. This will allow a player to create different types of foods, for example: Foods with fast consumption (10 seconds or less) to quickly satisfy your hunger or apply quick stat buff changes. Foods with deliberately slow consumption so that you can restore health or energy quickly with one meal. Foods with slow consumption that will apply buffs that you plan to have active for a while.

- You get the same calories applied regardless of the consumption rate.

Currently, food increased your hunger bar by 12.5%. I could increased this to 25%. That would give players two meals to go from the low end to the high end of your optimal healthy hunger range.

With all the above in mind, do you players feel that the amount should be increased to 25% or kept at the current rate?

Regarding food preservation

The duration of food items has not been set yet, but I was thinking around 1 real time week for ingredients (more or less depending on the item type) and 1 week for cooked food. Proper preservation would keep food for up to 1 real time month.

I think food decaying at this rate or faster is a good thing. If food could be stockpiled forever, again the supply will greatly exceed the demand and another opportunity for trade will be missed. For now, I am carefully reading the feedback here and weighing the options.

Hunger depletion and Food per Day

One thing that is difficult for me to simulate in tests is the rate at which hunger depletes during average and intense game play and how much food a player will consume in an hour, several hours or an average day of playing Xsyon. I would like feedback on this.

Thanks for all the input so far!

[wastelandstoic]

Hunger depletion and Food per Day

One thing that is difficult for me to simulate in tests is the rate at which hunger depletes during average and intense game play and how much food a player will consume in an hour, several hours or an average day of playing Xsyon. I would like feedback on this.


Just last week I went out exploring/ hunting and went about half the distance around the lake taking 3 hours to do so. In the beginning for 30 mins. or so I foraged until my cloth pack was full of stacks of eatable plants 4-10 in number, I'd say about 80 plants of junk quality. In the 3 hours I used just about all of the plants, only a few left, to keep myself in the normal healthy recovery rate range. Same with water drank from streams.

[MrDDT]

Regarding calories per food item, I am considering two options.

1) Food items supply a different amount of calories and resulting cooked food is based on this. This would give more calories to more advanced recipes. This was the original design.

2) Cooked food items give a set amount of calories (for example 20% hunger filled) and edible raw foods give a set lesser amount of calories (1/4 to 1/2 of cooked dishes).

Currently, I am favoring option 1 for several reasons.

- The system is already complex enough I believe and adding another layer of complexity may make it too complicated. I think it's better to go simple with the calories for now and add this extra complexity if it seems that it will benefit the system in the future.

- In many instances a player may not want a high level recipe to give too many calories as they will want to switch food buffs or use food for the fast health and energy recovery more often without becoming over stuffed.


I'm confused, option 1 sounds more complex than option 2 first off, second off is that it seems like you are favoring option 2 not 1 based on the notes below.

I like option 1 better, IF not all advanced food give massive amounts of calories because 100 skill food will require 8 slots of food + 4 seasonings means it would be a massive amount of calories AKA hunger filled. I think there should be good limits for this.
I would do option 1 with it capping out at around 40% hunger filled for the most advanced cooked food. The most basic cooked food (ex. 1 fish kebab) would be about 12% hunger filled. Make non cooked items give about 3% hunger filled. IMO it should take a lot of strawberries to fill you up, but put it with some meat and potatoes and it should fill you up fast.





These things need to be kept in mind:

- The goal is keep your hunger level within the normal healthy range. A full hunger bar is not a goal and is detrimental.

- Consumption times can be reduced with the correct seasonings. This will allow a player to create different types of foods, for example: Foods with fast consumption (10 seconds or less) to quickly satisfy your hunger or apply quick stat buff changes. Foods with deliberately slow consumption so that you can restore health or energy quickly with one meal. Foods with slow consumption that will apply buffs that you plan to have active for a while.

- You get the same calories applied regardless of the consumption rate.

Currently, food increased your hunger bar by 12.5%. I could increased this to 25%. That would give players two meals to go from the low end to the high end of your optimal healthy hunger range.

With all the above in mind, do you players feel that the amount should be increased to 25% or kept at the current rate?


If you are set on this system (which to me sounds like option 2) I would increase it to 25% for all cooked items, and non cooked items down to 5%.




Regarding food preservation

The duration of food items has not been set yet, but I was thinking around 1 real time week for ingredients (more or less depending on the item type) and 1 week for cooked food. Proper preservation would keep food for up to 1 real time month.

I think food decaying at this rate or faster is a good thing. If food could be stockpiled forever, again the supply will greatly exceed the demand and another opportunity for trade will be missed. For now, I am carefully reading the feedback here and weighing the options.

1 real week sounds fine to me for raw. Cooked items should last 2x longer in my opinion. Making 1 real month for raw in a commissary and 2 real months for cooked in a commissary.



Hunger depletion and Food per Day

One thing that is difficult for me to simulate in tests is the rate at which hunger depletes during average and intense game play and how much food a player will consume in an hour, several hours or an average day of playing Xsyon. I would like feedback on this.

Thanks for all the input so far!

I use up 1 full hunger bar every hour 1 and 15mins. This means currently I have to eat every 20mins real time to keep my hunger up. I believe this is a bit to often.
While running around hunting, I seem to use up hunger much faster having to carry around a lot of food, in a 10min trip I will have to eat at least once from a full hunger bar to keep out of going into a hunger issues (lower than 20%). I believe this should be longer, water I'm ok with at the current rates.
Changing how often you eat also means changing how much % food gives per meal also.

My opinion is to slow the rate of food/hunger used by about 3x but also lower the % food gives by about 1.5x. Which is like doubling the current size of hunger food gives. I like the slower rate because less times you have to stop and eat. I like the lower % because gives a chance to use the insta healing/energy gain buffs better in common play, while still making it feel like you are eating.

[MrDDT]

While eating the animation doesn't stop right after the food timer is over, it keeps going for another 2 seconds or so.

[momodig]

Just curious what tools will be needed for farming and can the special item the harvester be used?

[unclean666]

I think the rate hunger drops for game play while out in the world (extreme game play) is a bit high.

chopping a tree at 30 skill drops hunger 2% thats 1% fell then 1% to chop

10 secs of sprinting drops my hunger 1%

I had to eat 4 cooked fish to start off my 20 mins of game play and 4 more to maintain it around 45-50% so 8 cooked items for 20 mins of gameplay.

[thurgond]

Food buffs currently do not go away on death.

Separated two kebabs from a named recipe. One ended up with a no buffs and Consumption 0 s, Duration 0 min 0 sec.

Cattails cannot be used as a primary ingredient.

[MrDDT]

Thurgond, pretty sure none of the seasonings can be used as a primary.

[Kenbrimm1]

Has there been any thought as to our natural rainfall in the area watering plants for farming? The lake Tahoe area, (Xsyson) included gets plenty of rainfall to naturally water the plants. Unless you are going to create drought conditions, then why is watering needed for the farm plants? Grass and trees seem to grow just fine. In real life I can't go out and water an entire farm plot and so I have a lot of organic food in potted plants that I water. All the stuff grows fine here in Missouri except in the hottest part of the summer. Some of the quicker growing crops you can get in two plantings a season. If you have to use guts as fertilizer, why can't you also use dead fish? A lot of us don't like to kill off all the animals just for farming fertilizer and meat. My wife Kat is an expert fisherperson and a person should be able to sustain hunger requirements from fishing. The cooking I have not tested, but if there are fish recipes that will be awesome. I am not sure people have the extra time to keep watering farm plants. Please allow for the natural rainfall to do some of the watering or alas I will find I have no time for farming. Not sure about everyone else. Hope this helps.

[wastelandstoic]

Regarding calories per food item-

I'm not understanding the 2 options either. Under option 1 Would raw foods produce zero calories and cooked food be the only method of calories? If so I'm for option 2.

With all the above in mind, do you players feel that the amount should be increased to 25% or kept at the current rate?

I'd go with 25% but don't mind 12.5% either.


Regarding food preservation-

I can't think of a single game I've played in 15 years that makes food temporary. Rather than giving food value this makes it worthless in my mind. Who's going to buy something that will rot in one month? Not I.

My perception is that there are a strong percentage of players that are do-it-yourselfers who want to be as independent as possible. They will just collect enough to consume/cook for a month and do it all again the next month. There is no incentive to gather more food beyond what’s needed temporarily in this scheme. This kind of forced fix would put more limitations on players rather than offer more choices/ options that you'd expect from added content. Why not work your way completely through the development list then take a good look at trade/economy with a full picture and make possible adjustment from there? Trying to both add content and fix the economy may just be two contradictory things.

I do actually like the preservative baskets and structures and think that cooked food should be temporary. Under the system you have listed I would add a salting/drying/preserving method that would allow the base food staples (edible plants, fish and animal meat) to be made permanent, with the food storage methods.

Just my opinion.
Anyhow, Massive fish and plant give-a-way at Raven Moon after the patch. ;)

[Mactavendish]

Please check out the New Trade hub!

[MrDDT]

Please check out the New Trade hub!

No opinions on the topic at hand just advertising your trade hub?

[mmogaddict]

Regarding calories per food item, I am considering two options.

1) Food items supply a different amount of calories and resulting cooked food is based on this. This would give more calories to more advanced recipes. This was the original design.

2) Cooked food items give a set amount of calories (for example 20% hunger filled) and edible raw foods give a set lesser amount of calories (1/4 to 1/2 of cooked dishes).

Currently, I am favoring option 2 for several reasons [edited to fix typo]

- The system is already complex enough I believe and adding another layer of complexity may make it too complicated. I think it's better to go simple with the calories for now and add this extra complexity if it seems that it will benefit the system in the future.

- In many instances a player may not want a high level recipe to give too many calories as they will want to switch food buffs or use food for the fast health and energy recovery more often without becoming over stuffed.

These things need to be kept in mind:

- The goal is keep your hunger level within the normal healthy range. A full hunger bar is not a goal and is detrimental.

- Consumption times can be reduced with the correct seasonings. This will allow a player to create different types of foods, for example: Foods with fast consumption (10 seconds or less) to quickly satisfy your hunger or apply quick stat buff changes. Foods with deliberately slow consumption so that you can restore health or energy quickly with one meal. Foods with slow consumption that will apply buffs that you plan to have active for a while.

- You get the same calories applied regardless of the consumption rate.

Currently, food increased your hunger bar by 12.5%. I could increased this to 25%. That would give players two meals to go from the low end to the high end of your optimal healthy hunger range.

With all the above in mind, do you players feel that the amount should be increased to 25% or kept at the current rate?


I believe that option #2 is the best option at the moment, it can always be made more complex later on.

Regarding the hunger bar, I would increase it to 25%. As you pointed out this would equate to two meals to return a starving person to optimal hunger levels. If people, especially new players require too many meals or need to eat too often they will start to feel they spend all their time trying to survive rather than experience the rest of the game. This would deter new players from remaining which is something we all want to avoid as more people = more fun and people having fun will be more likely to sub which equals more development money which also leads to more fun for vets and newbs combined.

[mmogaddict]

Fertilizer and Fish

Allow fish to be gut.

Right click stack of fish would bring up the option to gut. Gutting a fish would produce - Gutted Fish + Fish Guts.

Gutted Fish is a cooking ingredient (Un-gutted fish could no longer be used as a cooking ingredient).
Fish Guts can be used as fertilizer like other guts.

Gutting fish could either tie into hunting or fishing.
Gutting fish could require holding a knife in the right hand.
If tied to hunting could allow for the production of small bones as well but I'm not sure that would really be necessary at this point. The main point would be to produce both a cooking ingredient and fish guts for fertilizer.

[Xsyon]

First to answer questions:


Just curious what tools will be needed for farming and can the special item the harvester be used?

New tools such as a hoe and trowel will be added. The harvester is a shovel which is currently used in place of a hoe for creating plowed land.


Has there been any thought as to our natural rainfall in the area watering plants for farming?

Yes, rainfall does actually increase your plants' water level, so you'll have to water less (or not at all) when it's raining often.


If you have to use guts as fertilizer, why can't you also use dead fish?

I've added fish as a fertilizer (see the forthcoming notes below).


I'm not understanding the 2 options either. Under option 1 Would raw foods produce zero calories and cooked food be the only method of calories

No, they will just provide less calories than a cooked meal, same as option 2.

[Xsyon]

Next, I have a few questions:

1) What is the problem with the spinach mesh / LODs? Is it that the spinach plant when small disappears as you scroll out to a far distance? Or is there another problem with the spinach?

2) Regarding the eating animation playing for too long: Does this happen when you are sitting, standing or both? Does this happen with food of all consumption rates or a specific consumption rate only? Does this happen consistently? (I tried eating 30 second food both sitting and standing and didn't see a problem).

3) An issue with the buffs was reported above by BoneBasher (here (http://www.xsyon.com/showthread.php/9158-Feedback-Request-08-01-2014-Farming-and-Cooking-(Test-Server)?p=100913&viewfull=1#post100913)). Can this be reproduced? If so, I would like full steps to reproduce. The issue currently isn't clear to me.

[MrDDT]

Next, I have a few questions:
2) Regarding the eating animation playing for too long: Does this happen when you are sitting, standing or both? Does this happen with food of all consumption rates or a specific consumption rate only? Does this happen consistently? (I tried eating 30 second food both sitting and standing and didn't see a problem).


Test server has been down (or set to private) so I can't test anymore, but the food it was happening to and when was raw food, and standing (foraged items).

[mmogaddict]

I assume from the fact that there is a Sun gauge that eventually you will be altering the grow rates either based on the actual sunshine that a given square gets (I guess this would be harder) or based on a flat seasonal rate (the easier way) with it getting more sun during Summer and less during Winter and average amount during Spring and Autumn.

So as to have crops grow faster during summer and slower during winter. If not, please consider doing so.

Variable Decay Rate based on Season

If you are doing the above, consider altering the rates of decay also based off the season. During Summer food would decay faster and during Winter slower than the norm.

Regarding Food Presevation Time, I would aim for 40 RL days (1 Xsyon Year) with proper storage. That would be 10 RL days without proper storage.

That would be the norm.

Under variable seasonal decay rate, for example you could set the decay rate during summer to double and half during winter.

With proper storage the Food Preservation Time would remain the same [40 RL days] (because summer and winter would essentially cancel each out of the course of the RL 40 days)

Without proper storage however you would see food rotting away within 5 RL days during the summer, while food would last through an entire winter as the decay would effectively be 20 RL days during the winter. Due to the mechanics of a Xsyon season only being 10 RL days long the decay would actually be shorter than 20 RL days as some of that time would be outside of Winter and subject to the 'normal' decay rate. (My maths says the longest food would actually last (without proper preservation) would be 15 RL days as you would have 10 days of winter (half rate decay) and 5 days of normal decay = equivalent of goal of on average having food last only 10 RL days under normal conditions without proper preservation.

This would reward players for stocking up prior to Winter when crops are hard to grow.

Could extend this to foraging with decreased success rate during winter and an increased success rate during summer.

Anyway just an idea I thought I throw up while I wait for the server to pop back up.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is open again with the following changes:

1) Right click guts or fish to create fertilizer.

2) Fertilizer is used to fertilize plants (no longer uses straight guts).

3) All food buffs (stats, energy and health) should be removed on death.

4) Splitting a stack of food should keep the correct bonuses, rate, duration and name. This should work correctly in all stack splitting situations: inventory, quest panel and vendor totem.

5) Calories burned adjusted and reduced. (Hunger should drain overall at less than ½ old rate).

6) Crops set to yield 1-10 products based on maturity of the plant.

7) Food decay set to 1 week for raw and 2 weeks for cooked food. Can be preserved up to 4x in proper containers and a commissary. This may be adjusted further.

8) Icons for all skewers should be correct.

9) Energy bar should display % (by request)

10) Food calories revised (cooked 500 calories 12.5% hunger, raw 150 calories)

Some of these changes went straight to the Test Server with only quick internal testing. If you find any problems with these or anything else, please post. Thanks again for the feedback and help!

[thurgond]

Tested what I could and everything seems to be working as designed. Fish gave fertilizer (one from a cutthroat). Fertilizer from fish and guts fertilized plants. Buffs went away on death. Stacks of kabobs split and re-stacked correctly. Hunger drain has definitely slowed, perhaps a little too much.

My surviving crops are still 4 days away from harvest/death, so I can't test crop yield changes, but I think the yield will still be too low for the risk/reward ratio. Did a lot of planting with farming skill around 30. At this level, it was a 50/50 chance for a planted seed to grow and fertilizer to spill/fertilize. So, on average it would take 10 edible items (2 vegetables plus 8 guts/fish turned into fertilizer) for a chance (after a long time and further actions tending the plant) of a maximum yield of 10.

Extracting vegi seeds doesn't seem to increase any skill or stats.
Several suggestions to help this:

increase yield to 20 or more if multiple stacks are possible
extract multiple seeds from one plant
add non-edible items that can create fertilizer

Non-edible items that could become fertilizer:

feet and small (non-dissectable) heads
ground bones (bonemeal made from bones with mortar and pestal)
decayed plants, fish, meat, and food, i.e. compost


The conditions seem to vary on guts, meat, organs, herbs and food. My old stacks of guts are at 1 / 4 while newly extracted guts are at 30/30.

Extracting vegetable seeds doesn't appear to add to any skill or give stat gains.

[BoneBasher]

Sorry for being slow but been busy this weekend. I managed to get back on the test server just now and it was a bit weird. My other character Wazcool was the one that had the problem with a zero showing up in stead of the buff icon so i decided to try the exact same thing again to see if it was fixed. What i was doing was very simple, making fish kebabs and eating them. Anyway, the first fish kebab i ate still had the zero problem BUT i ate a second and the buff showed up as normal showing the 9minutes or whatever buff time. However, when eating fish kebabs with BoneBasher I couldnt get any buffs to show up at all, which was weird.

Can others recreate these problems? If not, i would say its just something weird going on at my end.

[MrDDT]

The Test Server is open again with the following changes:

1) Right click guts or fish to create fertilizer.

2) Fertilizer is used to fertilize plants (no longer uses straight guts).

3) All food buffs (stats, energy and health) should be removed on death.

4) Splitting a stack of food should keep the correct bonuses, rate, duration and name. This should work correctly in all stack splitting situations: inventory, quest panel and vendor totem.

5) Calories burned adjusted and reduced. (Hunger should drain overall at less than ½ old rate).

6) Crops set to yield 1-10 products based on maturity of the plant.

7) Food decay set to 1 week for raw and 2 weeks for cooked food. Can be preserved up to 4x in proper containers and a commissary. This may be adjusted further.

8) Icons for all skewers should be correct.

9) Energy bar should display % (by request)

10) Food calories revised (cooked 500 calories 12.5% hunger, raw 150 calories)

Some of these changes went straight to the Test Server with only quick internal testing. If you find any problems with these or anything else, please post. Thanks again for the feedback and help!

1) Working able to do it. Uses farming skill. The major point of making fertilizer from fish/guts was the cost, it still costs the same 4-8 guts/fish per plant.
2) Working.
3) Working.
4) Working.
5) Working, I like it so far.
6) Unable to harvest yet, it will take at least 4 days to test this. 1 to 10 yield just doing basic math is not enough. It takes 4 to 8 guts/fish to keep a plant at proper fertilized levels, then it takes 1 to 2 water, plus 0 to 12 actions of removing pets and weeds. Plus it takes 1 full unit to get the seed from. Even at max yield you are getting 10 plants (assuming no fails) and you started with 1, so now you are down to 9, plus guts you are down to 1 to 5 units of food per plant after waiting 3.5 days and using extra many actions.
7)Food is decaying correctly. Pouches for slowing decay is working correctly, and storage buildings is working correctly.
8)Unable to check.
9)Working.
10)Working.

[Xsyon]

I will check the fertilizer function. It should (and will) give 4-8 fertilizer per gut / fish.

Bonebasher, could you send screenshots of your issue to support (support@notorious-games.com)?

Regarding duration of existing food ingredients, I will need to run a script to adjust these in the database before the patch to bring them to current levels.

Regarding failure to plant, water and fertilize: these aspects were added when farming was started and I was assisted by other coders. Do these add at all to the farming experience? If not, I can remove the failure rate altogether (it's not part of my original design at all).

[mmogaddict]

I seem to be bugged on test.

* Eating raw food or basic kababs only takes me 12s, even the ones that show up as 30s consumption.

* Loading a saved recipe - doesn't display the primary ingredient or allow me to add a primary ingredient making saved recipes unusable.

* Number of recipes allowed in my cookbook - Max of 12 @ 80 Int and 29.5 cooking. - seems a little low.

* Fish only gave 1 fertilizer.

* Extracting seeds from plants doesn't count as a skill use. (Not sure if it should, but would make sense if it did.)

* IF the QL of a building DOES have any effect when set as a commissary, it's not possible to see the QL of the building, either a flat rate should be used or the QL should somehow be displayable.

* I don't see any buff timers when eating buff food.

[thurgond]

I don't mind farming failures, if they would go away as skill increased. Since there do not seem to be new actions or schemes to farming, there should be some thing to show for increasing skill. It does not seem to be coded that way though. Failures at 5 skill are about the same as at 30 skill. Like you do not fail making thread at a fairly low tailoring skill, the basic plant/water/fertilize actions should stop failing in the 10-20 skill range. Higher skill would reduce multiple levels of weeds/pests in a single action.

If that is too much trouble to code, no failures would improve the experience.

In my testing, it's one gut per fertilizer whether it is a hamster or bear guts.

[MrDDT]

I will check the fertilizer function. It should (and will) give 4-8 fertilizer per gut / fish.

Regarding failure to plant, water and fertilize: these aspects were added when farming was started and I was assisted by other coders. Do these add at all to the farming experience? If not, I can remove the failure rate altogether (it's not part of my original design at all).

Only gives 1 fertilizer per gut/fish. Uses farming skill.

I think failing to plant is fine as long as the guts/fish/fertilizer is worked out. All add farming exp. Even failures.

[Bejaymac]

7) Food decay set to 1 week for raw and 2 weeks for cooked food. Can be preserved up to 4x in proper containers and a commissary. This may be adjusted further.
Is that a real world week or a game week?

I ask because all of my raw stuff is down to worn with 1/6, even the plants in the special plant basket are almost only fit for compost as they are down to worn as well. Cooked food in the food pouch is at 95/100 so that seems to be working correct.

[Emilie]

Failure in planting, watering etc is fine as long as success rate increases with skill. If it doesn't increase then just compensate by increasing yield with skill. I think having a failure rate adds something to the experience.

Very importantly, the yield from farming needs to change, IMO from what a previous poster stated. Having to use 10 foraged plants to yield 10 grown is nonsensical. Why grow anything then? In the real world you'd expect a significantly higher yield than 10 to 1 for most plants except grain. A yield of 1 to 1 makes farming useless.

Also having yield go up with farming skill makes a lot of sense, I wouldn't expect having to water or weed that much less for being an expert farmer, but I would expect to spill less when I do, and to get a better crop for my efforts than my hobby farmer friend.


How about being able to extract more seeds from a foraged plant depending on foraging skill? So at low skill you get one seed from each plant, then more up to 10-20 for 100 skill.

Failing to plant could also depend on seed quality, like in real life sometimes seeds don't grow if they are old, damaged etc.

[MrDDT]

Good points Emilie.

I would like to add that make sure that fertilized crops have greatly more yield than non fertilized crops, for 2 reasons.
1)Makes sense :)
2)At the current ratios (and even planned ones) if it takes 1 seed to yield 5 crops unfertilized, 1 seed + 1-2 guts/fish to yield 10, then no point in fertilizing when you can simply just plant another one. Fertilizing to 100% should give about 3x more yield (3 for unfertilized, 8 to 10 fertilized).

Also note that farming is 100% upfront cost. Land usage area, 4 fertilizers, 1 water, 1 seed. If you do not properly farm/harvest it correctly you are out all those resources.

Yield should be effected by skill. Allow the best farmers to want to plant/harvest. Let the trainees and workers learn skill by tending the fields, which have no effects on failures but only when the work is done. Allowing new players, and helpers to help with farming without messing up the crop size.
A large worry is that if you are low skill you will not get food, well farming at low levels will yield still a LARGE harvest IF you use fertilizer and it has the effect as noted 3x. But I think it makes sense this way while still allowing low skill helpers to get skill through farming without messing up the crops for skilled farmers.


I think getting more than 1 seed from extracting makes sense also (should be done for forestry also IMO) however, I think more than 5 is a bit over kill. You can base this on skill.

[Emilie]

2)At the current ratios (and even planned ones) if it takes 1 seed to yield 5 crops unfertilized, 1 seed + 1-2 guts/fish to yield 10, then no point in fertilizing when you can simply just plant another one. Fertilizing to 100% should give about 3x more yield (3 for unfertilized, 8 to 10 fertilized).

A very important point. I hadn't thought if that. I hope this is considered. Players expending effort = playing the game deeply using the game mechanics to their fullest, should always be rewarded in comparison with players expending little effort = just walking around in the game world picking up stuff.


I think getting more than 1 seed from extracting makes sense also (should be done for forestry also IMO) however, I think more than 5 is a bit over kill. You can base this on skill.

I'd like 10 to be max, it is quite realistic IMO, but even 5 is better than 1. One reason I hope for this change is that it would make foraging a more useful skill.

[MrDDT]

Yvonne also pointed out in game that Farming and Cooking skills offset each other in locks/+ on the skills list. You can only have 1 or the other set to lock/+. Not sure if this was planned like that or not.

Also there is only 2 skills in the pool yet they decay each other. Unlike other pools. Again not sure if this was planned like this or not.

Personally I do not care either way. Just making it noted here.

[GuideXaphan]

Primarily I am looking for feedback on any bugs, missing art, or anything that seems to be working incorrectly with the new systems.

Secondarily I am looking for feedback on any adjustable variables (farming times, buff power, buff duration etc.) that do not seem balanced.

Please keep feedback short and sweet to best assist me in getting this update to the public!

I'm all for talking about different ways of attracting players and how systems work or should work, we have general discussion for that if you want to start a thread, but this thread is for the aforementioned.

Please keep personal call outs and bashing down, it doesn't achieve anything to the topic at hand. You all will have personal differences regarding patches or feedback on systems but calling out that person for a difference of opinion doesn't speed up any progress and doesn't discredit or make your claims any more sound.

[Emilie]

removed- oops, I didn't see the post by GuideXaphan before I posted.

[Tupux]

I planted a Sego Lily( location Z:896 X:490.48 Z:511.47) of which I can see the bars but not the plant itself. With a lot of clicking I managed to select and fertilize the plant though.

After changing the camera view all bars above plants disappeared which was fixed by re-logging. Changing the camera view again replicated the problem.

Golden Retriever eyes can be used as primary ingrediënt but this does not show up on the status bars of the eyes.

For me too, the recipes from the Cook Book do not show the primary ingrediënts.
Adding the other ingrediënts and the skewer will start cooking and give a "missing ingrediënts"message after every cooking action.
No foods are actually cooked but the amount in the Cook Book does go up.

I like the amount of attention farming needs but am not sure if with all the materials and time spent it will be worth the trouble with a maximum yield of 10.

The rate at which nourishment and hydration drop now seems a bit too slow to me but is better than before when it went too fast.

[Bejaymac]

Could someone explain to me how this decay system works.

ATM what I am finding is that any food items(fish/plants) I had before decay was activated has a "shelf life" of 5-7 game days, most of which has reached the broken stage and been deleted by the game, and that is despite some of them being in the special baskets/pouches.

Now anything I catch/forage is giving me a 20-25 game days of a "shelf life", and it doesn't matter where I store it as that doesn't change.

It appears to be the same with cooked food, 100 games days on every kebab I've cooked, and yet again it doesn't appear to matter where I store them.

Oh and cooked food relies only on the QL of the raw items, rather than both the QL and decay state, as you get the same stats from a broken moderate QL rainbow trout as you do from a pristine one.

[MrDDT]

I don't believe decay state is meant to lower the QL of the finished product. Pretty much it's good until its not then you can't even use it (or see it)

The decay system seems to be working fine for me, not sure how you can see 20 to 25 game days when the test server has not even been up long enough to see that. (That would be over 3 real days)

The special containers only work on the items they are meant for, meat for meat, fish for fish etc.
Buildings work for any food type placed in them. Remember its based on QL of the building (which we can not see) to slow the rate down.
Just because a kebab says 100/100 doesn't mean it decays 1 per game day, it's based on a % of the max.

Also I believe he is still changing some of this to work correctly.

I've tested meat, fish, pouches, and buildings they all seem to work correctly.

[Bejaymac]

What I mean is yesterday I had a rainbow trout Mod QL that was pristine 6/6, today when I logged in it read broken 0/6, I then started fishing and caught another Mod QL rainbow trout, this one said pristine 21/21, tomorrow when I log on I expect it to read 15/21 or there about. just as a test I caught a second rainbow that's Mod QL but 22/22, that has been put in a fish pouch while the first one has been put in a regular grass pack, when I log on tomorrow I expect to find both have lost the same amount.

[thurgond]

Jordi said:
Regarding duration of existing food ingredients, I will need to run a script to adjust these in the database before the patch to bring them to current levels.


Old food had durability set from 4/4 (guts) to 10/10. You never saw these numbers. When Jordi decided to implement decay on food, he increased these numbers but didn't go back and change durability for preexisting items. He will do this for the live servers before cooking/farming goes live.

In other words, your old fish had a preexisting condition on the test server. Under Jordicare, your fish on War and Peace will be covered.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is open with the following changes:

1) Duration of cooked food set up to 64 (at 100 skill and stats). This currently equates to a little over 14 real days (128 game days). (Duration can be higher if stats are over 100)

2) Guts and fish can be sorted to create from 1 to 18 (at 100 skill and stats) fertilizer based on animal type, skill and associated stats. (Count can be higher if stats are over 100)

3) Crops normally yield 4 to 40 crops based on skill and fertilizer levels. (Fertilizer levels can quadruple the amount of crops harvested).

4) Failure to harvest results in half crops instead of none.

5) Seed sewing failure rate based on skill and seed quality.

6) Failure to fertilize and water based on skill. (Was already implemented)

7) Animal eyes should show the proper primary ingredient tool tip.

8) Extracting can gain 1 to 5 seeds based on skill.

9) Extracting from plants gains foraging skill.

10) Extracting from cones gains forestry skill.

11) Duration of existing ingredients set to 32 (64 game days, roughly 1 real week, in normal storage).

12) Commissaries display the quality of the building and the amount of decay reduction.

13) Cook book recipe counts increase AFTER success.

14) Fixed issue with changing camera views making the farming bars disappear.

15) Missing ingredient icons (for saved recipes) patched out. This was causing recipes to show blank icons for fish ingredients and preventing the recipes from functioning correctly.

16) Cooking and farming should not be capped as there are only 2 skills in their current group.

17) Saved recipes slightly adjusted. Character can save from 5 to 30 recipes based on skill and intelligence.

18) Characters can die slowly if hunger or thirst reach 0. Buffs indicate if you are starving or dying of thirst. It currently takes 15 minutes of starvation to drain a full life bar.

19) Your hunger and thirst are set to 10% after death revival.

There are other minor changes and improvements I want to make, but I will keep them for a small future patch. For now I am looking for further feedback on balancing variables (times, duration, amounts etc.) and reports of any bugs that can still happen.

I still can't reproduce the following:

1) Eating animation continues for several seconds after you stop eating.

2) Eating takes 12 seconds regardless of time indicated on the tool tip.

3) Buffs or buff timers not displaying correctly.

If you can reproduce any of the above issues please contact support (support@notorious-games.com) so I can get more detailed information.

Thanks!

[Tupux]

Health drops during activity, 5 fishing actions lower health 11 points. This happens with both my characters while well hydrated and nourished.

Animals and revenants have 0 health, like a marmot with an empty health bar that shows 0/75.

[Bejaymac]

Animals and revenants have 0 health, like a marmot with an empty health bar that shows 0/75.
Sounds like the death penalty for not eating is affecting everything and not just the players.

[Xsyon]

I'm restarting the Test Server with a quick fix for the health drain issues reported above.

[Tupux]

I'm not sure if it is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, but I get the message "Too Many Primary Flavors" with the Sous and Artisan recipe's with every combination I try except the Sous recipe without secondary ingrediënts.

[mmogaddict]

18) Characters can die slowly if hunger or thirst reach 0. Buffs indicate if you are starving or dying of thirst. It currently takes 15 minutes of starvation to drain a full life bar.


1. I think new players will find this overly burdensome. If you go down this route consider adding to new characters on creation the following :

1x Food preservation bum bag (this will also get them used to what pouches do). - should be small, perhaps 5 slot.

5x MRE's (non tradeable - similar to preorder items, but expire on use) MRE's will satisfy both hunger and thirst.

2. The gamer demographics are getting older. A game such as Xsyon also tends to attract an older demographic anyway. With older gamers real life has a tendency to intrude. People need to go afk etc. At the moment people tend to not log out due to the amount of time to log back in (mostly due to the amount of time it takes to analyze the files every time you start the launcher.

If you go down this route add the ability to logout to the character screen



19) Your hunger and thirst are set to 10% after death revival.


I think the above is set way to low, its not going to give you long until you start starving to death, and you are not going to have a lot of energy to work with because your recovery is going to be low.

I can see new players dying while reading through the tutorial, getting sent back to founders and then dying again before they can get too far, then get sent back to founders again and again. Boy that's going to be a great first impression. The steam crowd will write lovely reviews of the game when that happens.

On death I would set hunger and thirst to 50%, again this is really going to affect casual and new players, which are both the kind of players we want to attract to the game. It gives vets more people to play with and Xsyon more money to develop the game. Everybody wins with more players playing the game.

[mmogaddict]

2) Eating takes 12 seconds regardless of time indicated on the tool tip.

3) Buffs or buff timers not displaying correctly.

Both now working correctly on my Test server toon.

[thurgond]

Looking good so far.

Getting 4 seeds with 100 forage skill. Assume stats are involved.

Cooked 2 sets of 2 of my saved recipe. Resulting 4 kabobs did not and would not stack due to tiny differences -- +health gain from 149.98 to 150.01.

I think death due to starvation and hydration is a good thing and shouldn't cause much of a problem. The only problem this would cause is with brand new characters and players that like to go afk for long stretches. I suspect someone laying down by a lit fire could survive as long as the fire stayed lit.

Revived characters should come back with higher hunger and thirst. After revival, mine was down to 9%. The first couple times a ftp player revives at the maze that is Founders Isle, they could be very low on thirst before they can make it to the lake. A 20-25% level should be enough as a new player would have enough time and incentive to find food and water.

[mmogaddict]

Also don't forget to think about what it will be like on the PvP server with a Steam release.

With the current situation you aren't going to be able to swim for it very far. so everybody is going to be coming out the north end of the island low on food & water.

[MrDDT]

The Test Server is open with the following changes:

2) Guts and fish can be sorted to create from 1 to 18 (at 100 skill and stats) fertilizer based on animal type, skill and associated stats. (Count can be higher if stats are over 100)

3) Crops normally yield 4 to 40 crops based on skill and fertilizer levels. (Fertilizer levels can quadruple the amount of crops harvested).

4) Failure to harvest results in half crops instead of none.

8) Extracting can gain 1 to 5 seeds based on skill.



2), 3), 8) is a massive increase. I understand they needed to be increased but you increased it by 8000%.

Before it used 5 to 9 food/guts/fish to get 10 food.
Now it uses .4 to .5 food/guts/fish to get 40 food.
This by far is way way way way out of balance, and needs to be cut down to 10 to 15 from crops at this ratio of fertilizer / seeds.

Notably you increase the yield of seeds from food by 500%, you also increased fertilizer from guts by 1800%, then you increased crop yield by 400%

Please think about cutting down the yield to 10 to 15 for balance issues!!!




18) Characters can die slowly if hunger or thirst reach 0. Buffs indicate if you are starving or dying of thirst. It currently takes 15 minutes of starvation to drain a full life bar.

19) Your hunger and thirst are set to 10% after death revival.


I love this change, and much needed.
I think 10% on respawn is a little low, 20% to 33% would be good I think. I believe at current rates thats about 30 to 45 mins before you start to die, which takes another 15mins.
I think this is important for the survival aspect of the game, and really glad to see it come into the game.

Lets also not forget that currently there is no punishment to death from lack of food and water other then spawning back at your base. No loss of items, or stats etc.

[MrDDT]

Also don't forget to think about what it will be like on the PvP server with a Steam release.

With the current situation you aren't going to be able to swim for it very far. so everybody is going to be coming out the north end of the island low on food & water.

They can forage on founders (safe area) to get full food.

Water can be found anywhere!

[Emilie]

Nice changes! I remember watching a couple of "lets play Xsyon" where the guys enter the world for the first time and immediately starts looking at the different bars, and going "hunger, thirst, I need to find me some food! I wonder how long it takes before I die", and then after running around a bit they realize that starving and thirst does nothing and they always seem a little disappointed. No longer! Yay!

So I think that new players aren't going to be so stumped, I think they are more stumped right now when having a hunger bar makes no sense. Also without hunger there is no sense of risk at all in low danger area, especially on peace server.

Regarding balance issues, please don't change the seed extraction yield, 5 max isn't too high. If there is a balancing issue it is better to adjust the yield of fertilizer a little, and the harvest yield a little. Both need to be higher than they were, but perhaps not as high as the new changes make them.

[MrDDT]

On one of my accounts ( a free to play one ), I was at 0 food and 0 water dying, left tribe, died from lack of food/water respawned at founders isle, and now can't die from lack of food and water.
I left founders, still can't die from it.
I ate/drank and let it goto 0 again and still can't die from it.
I joined another tribe, and still can't die from it.
I died to an animal, respawned, and still can't die from it. After respawn my food and water were also the same as when I died. 0 water, 1% food.
Relogged still can't die from lack of food/water.
Left the tribe area after logging back on, still can't die from lack of food/water.

In all cases I have the debuff saying I'm slowing dying but my HP is not going down.

[Whorlok]

2), 3), 8) is a massive increase. I understand they needed to be increased but you increased it by 8000%.

Before it used 5 to 9 food/guts/fish to get 10 food.
Now it uses .4 to .5 food/guts/fish to get 40 food.
This by far is way way way way out of balance, and needs to be cut down to 10 to 15 from crops at this ratio of fertilizer / seeds.

Notably you increase the yield of seeds from food by 500%, you also increased fertilizer from guts by 1800%, then you increased crop yield by 400%

Please think about cutting down the yield to 10 to 15 for balance issues!!!




I love this change, and much needed.
I think 10% on respawn is a little low, 20% to 33% would be good I think. I believe at current rates thats about 30 to 45 mins before you start to die, which takes another 15mins.
I think this is important for the survival aspect of the game, and really glad to see it come into the game.

Lets also not forget that currently there is no punishment to death from lack of food and water other then spawning back at your base. No loss of items, or stats etc.

I think what Mr.DDt is wroting is good and if it is then released we would see if it is good over a longer range of time

[Bejaymac]

Nobody has given me info on just how the decay system works, as a result I ran a little experiment to see if I could figure it out.

What I did was catch two rainbow trout and put them in different grass containers, the first trout was pristine 21/21 and was placed in a regular grass pack, the second trout was pristine 22/22 and was place in a high QL (62) fish pouch.

After several real days I would expect to find a bit of a difference in the condition of both fish, however that is not the case as fish one is now 13/21 while fish two is 14/22, which means they have both decayed by the same amount.

IMHO that would show that the fish pouch isn't doing anything to slow down the decay, and I suspect that the other special containers are going to be the same.

[Bejaymac]

I wasn't able to get on earlier to harvest my plants, problem is that when I could get on there was only a couple left and they were dead. Now because the game removed most of the plants rather than me destroying them, I find that I can no longer plant in that area, as far as the game is concerned there is still something growing there, even though the ground is empty.

Simple solution to this would be to stop the game from deleting the plants, and leave it up to the player to delete them.

[Xsyon]

On one of my accounts ( a free to play one ), I was at 0 food and 0 water dying, left tribe, died from lack of food/water respawned at founders isle, and now can't die from lack of food and water.

I'm testing some changes so that very new players (with less than one bar of experience gained) don't suffer the starvation or dying of thirst effects. This is in progress and I will post after preliminary tests are done.

[MrDDT]

I planted 2 plants a few days ago on test server, and fertilized/watered one, and only watered the other. Kept pest and weeds off both.
Both are dead. This morning (few hours ago) they said 2 days left. I log on just a min ago, and they are both dead. Not sure why they would be dead.

Food items that I fished/cooked didn't even decay during this time, so no idea why they just died.

[wastelandstoic]

The consumption time for raw foods and cooked foods are the same (with exception for some combinations of cooked foods going higher). This should be adjusted by at least half to three quarters so that raw foods take less time to consume as they provide less nourishment/ no buffs.

[Xsyon]

I planted 2 plants a few days ago on test server, and fertilized/watered one, and only watered the other. Kept pest and weeds off both.

Both are dead. This morning (few hours ago) they said 2 days left. I log on just a min ago, and they are both dead. Not sure why they would be dead.

How many hours exactly elapsed while you were offline? The 'days left' should be the number of game days left before the plant is dead (regardless of care). Plants should be harvest-able well before the maximum age. Caring for the plants increases the amount of the potential harvest before the plant reaches maximum age and dies. Ideally plants should be harvested when there is 1 game day left.

2 game days left could mean slightly over 1 game day left, so slightly over 2 hours, 40 minutes left. If you're certain that you were away for less than this amount of time, I can set up tests to speed up farming and double check that this is all correct.

[MrDDT]

Oh, I thought the game days left were until harvest. So yeah, for sure they died from the time running out haha. I was waiting for those days to count down to harvest them.

How large is the harvest window? Hard to test this so late because it takes days to see what you planted.

[thurgond]

Glad to know what the days left means, although I was beginning to suspect it was days to death and not harvest.

For me the majority, maybe 7 in 10 still show Growing and not Ready to Harvest with 1 or 2 days left. This is after full fertilizer and regular tending. The water bar hasn't dropped below 80-90% so I haven't been watering after the initial watering. Is this the problem, or is there just a low percentage chance that crops will be harvestable?

Kebobs are stacking now. Thanks.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is open again with the following changes:

1) Amount of fertilizer created from guts reduced by roughly ½.

2) Crop yield reduced. Crops now yield from 2 to 20 crops depending on skill, stats and most important the maturity level of the plant.

3) New players (with less than one bar of experience) are not affected by starvation or dying of thirst. The tooltip on these buffs should display that death in this case is inactive.

4) Plants display their current maturity level as a %, after the 'days left' text. This is in addition to the maturity bar with is the lower right bar on each plant.

5) Containers that were not reducing decay (reported by Bejaymac) corrected.

6) Plant growth is sped up 24 times (updates per game hour now instead of per game day). Each 'day left' currently is a game hour left. Crops should last for roughly 3-4 hours. This is for testing only!

Notes:

1) Regarding crop growth: Crops can be harvested at 75% maturity. Crops reach maturity faster based on water, fertilizer and tending levels. Yield increases with maturity. The goal is to get crops to 100% maturity before the 'days left' run out. If you are at 1 day left and maturity has not reached 100%, it's still time to harvest, you just won't obtain the maximum yield.

This was tested extensively in earlier rounds, but if there seems to be a problem reaching 100% maturity, please let me know. With the sped up crop growth times, this will be easier to check, however, you will need to check your plant levels more often to may sure water, fertilizer and tending levels are optimal.

2) Regarding crops being removed (reported by Bejaymac): I checked these on the Test Server and the plants are still there. I believe you are zoomed out and can't see the plants as they disappear from view when zoomed out. I will be adjusting the scale of some of the plants so that this shouldn't happen.

3) Regarding consumption of raw foods: Since hunger fills over time while you eat, if I reduce the amount of time it takes to eat raw food, the calories per second gained will increase which will bring raw food closer to the level of cooked food. I don't want this change. The goal here is to encourage players to either cook at least simple dishes or trade for food if they aren't interested in cooking. The raw food is supplemental and shouldn't be the primary food source.

4) Regarding 'too many flavor' messages: This depends on the combination of flavors. There are 5 basic (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory) and 3 supplementary flavors (astringent, cool, pungent). If you get any flavor messages, you are combining too many flavors overall and your resulting bonuses are reduced. I have changed the messages to hopefully be more clear. Flavor combinations take into account all ingredients equally.

5) Regarding increasing hunger and thirst after death revival. The current levels (10%) are intended as a death penalty. If your death was from hunger or thirst, it's a slight increase to allow you a bit of time to eat and drink without having life drain set in right away.

Since I've removed this for new players, I think more experienced players should be prepared to cope with the penalty. If I increase the levels, death will provide a hunger and thirst bonus to players who don't eat or drink.

[MrDDT]

Thanks for the update, all of it sounds good. Going to jump on and test some of the farming/cooking/decay on containers.

[MrDDT]

90QL fish, 90QL guts.
Farming skill = 55
Farming stats = 98 int, 95 str
Fish gives 1 fertilizer.
Gut gives 2 fertilizer.

Pretty sure this should be higher.
Not sure what 1/2 was, according to my numbers, it should be 4 at 50ish skill alone, not counting the stats. (Should be 9 for 100 skill, 100 stats)

Fertilizer has no stats on it other than QL. Normally items have found/crafted/hunted by etc.


Extracting seed uses foraging skill. Gives me the correct amount of seeds.
Extracting all seeds, uses no skills, and gives me 1 seed per plant. Pretty sure this is a bug.

You said you were going to balance foraging for crops. Currently you get a LOT of stuff foraging, so much it's like 3 to 6 items for 1 foraging item, and I've yet to fail. 94 skill.

[Bejaymac]

2) Regarding crops being removed (reported by Bejaymac): I checked these on the Test Server and the plants are still there. I believe you are zoomed out and can't see the plants as they disappear from view when zoomed out. I will be adjusting the scale of some of the plants so that this shouldn't happen.
I'll log on in a minute and see if things have changed, but when I made that report I wasn't zoomed out, there were only a couple of the dead plants visible, atm it's really hard to tell as this might just be yet another of the weird graphics glitches I've been getting recently.

Nope, I'm standing on an empty farm, and every time I try to replant where dead plants used to be all I get is "Crops are already growing here", only parts of my farm I can now plant in are in the areas where I destroyed the dead plants.

Edit 2
when I logged on I had the same problem this time, all of my plants were dead and most of them missing, now I'm trying to remember what it was that's missing, sunflowers were still there as were spinach, but rice grass and cattail were all missing.

[MrDDT]

Finished testing the new changes (not the new player thing) and I like the changes, other than the bugs or possible bugs noted above.

[thurgond]

I can confirm what DDT reported about Extract All. Using extract all give one per even with just one to start.

I'm getting the "Too many basic flavors. Food greatly affected." message on Sous and Artisan recipes (don't have higher). This happens even with filling all the top two rows with the same ingredient, e.g. 5 onions in an Artisan recipe. Also tried 5 different flavors, 2 flavors with different ingredients, 2 flavors with 2 ingredients. It sounds like these recipes have the number of basic flavors set to 0, or the message appears by mistake. The 5 onion kabob has a 245% energy gain buff.

What is the maximum number of flavors? Does this increase for higher recipes? This should be available somewhere -- on the cooking panels or in the tutorial (nothing I could find on cooking and farming in the tutorial).

The number of guts from innards, and fertilizer from guts have been reduced way too much. I got 1 gut from 5 innards and 3 from one. From those 8 guts I got 1 fertilizer five times and 2 three times.

[Xsyon]

Bejaymac, please patch through the launcher and check your crops now. The meshes for dead rice grass weren't properly patched as we noted in game. I just patched them so your crops should be visible.

If something still seems to be missing, please let me know.

[Xsyon]

Issues in progress:

1) Extract all. Good catch. The extract all function was not updated. I've updated this and will restart the server with this change later (I will post when it's been updated).

2) Fertilizer amounts. I forgot to post that charm also affects the amount of fertilizer created. Most amounts (such as scavenging amounts) are currently affected by luck which is affected by charm. The effect is slight and not noticeable enough for charm to be valuable. With fertilizer, this is the first function where I've increased the effect of charm as a first step in making charm a valuable stat.

The only change I made from the previous update was to divide the amount of fertilizer created by two. The reason I posted 'roughly' is because the amounts get rounded off (so a previous amount of 3 could end up being 1).

Currently fish should yield 1 to 3 fertilizer (previously was 2 to 6). Guts depend on the type of creatures, with guts from larger creature yielding more guts.

I can again change this easily and am open to the input. Without player input it's difficult for me to determine what are reasonable amounts. I am open to feedback on exact amount ranges for the various parts (guts for different size creatures, fish) rather than going back and forth.

3) Foraging balance. Crop plants will be set as rare before the update. As for foraged amounts, I am open to input.

4) Flavors. I will run more internal tests on flavors and will add more information to the messages. more than 3 basic flavors should affect the recipe as will more than 2 supplemental flavors. You can also get messages such as 'too salty' etc. if you load up a recipe with all of the same ingredient.

Flavors can be adjusted as well and I will focus internal tests on this today.

[mmogaddict]

2) Fertilizer amounts. I forgot to post that charm also affects the amount of fertilizer created. Most amounts (such as scavenging amounts) are currently affected by luck which is affected by charm. The effect is slight and not noticeable enough for charm to be valuable. With fertilizer, this is the first function where I've increased the effect of charm as a first step in making charm a valuable stat.

The only change I made from the previous update was to divide the amount of fertilizer created by two. The reason I posted 'roughly' is because the amounts get rounded off (so a previous amount of 3 could end up being 1).

Currently fish should yield 1 to 3 fertilizer (previously was 2 to 6). Guts depend on the type of creatures, with guts from larger creature yielding more guts.

I can again change this easily and am open to the input. Without player input it's difficult for me to determine what are reasonable amounts. I am open to feedback on exact amount ranges for the various parts (guts for different size creatures, fish) rather than going back and forth.

Perhaps round up or set the guts from fish to the 2-4 range.

Note Cha is the primary stat for scavenging, probably the most important skill in the game, if you intend to make Cha even more effective (which I am in favour of along with the bonus for INT that is also suppose to affect things like the number of schemes you can remember) I suggest start looking at paring back the role Scavenging has on the game.

Also Scavenging is the only effective way at the moment of raising CHA, we need an alternative skill to grind with CHA as a primary otherwise you are just making Scavenging essentially mandatory.


3) Foraging balance. Crop plants will be set as rare before the update. As for foraged amounts, I am open to input.

Foraging should be a viable survival skill, as part of overall balancing all Resource skill need to be looked at in future to make sure that they are all as valuable as each other in the game and that none are consigned to 2nd class skills.

Speaking of which, why not make Fire building useful by having the QL of a fire impact the time it takes to perform a cooking function. As part of this you would also need to set lighting a fire to a skill check that counts towards increasing the skill rather than skilling up being only via greenpoints or building the fireplace.


I still think the 'death penalty' is not optimized, it's more an annoyance rather than a penalty. I would perhaps consider setting the hunger and thirst levels to 20% after death. It's low enough that people won't use it as a way of 'filling up' but long enough to run around and get things done in order to cook. (Get raw food ingredients, build fire, Get wood, light fire, cook food, eat food, get drink)

[wastelandstoic]

Foraging should be a viable survival skill, as part of overall balancing all Resource skill need to be looked at in future to make sure that they are all as valuable as each other in the game and that none are consigned to 2nd class skills.

No mystery here that I second this thought. ;)

[Xsyon]

A few notes to address issues brought up above.

1) Charm. It's true that charm is valuable for scavenging. However, for whatever reasons, it's current the least valued stat by players overall (by far) and 3rd least valued (behind intelligence and dexterity) by high level players (the top 200 most active players). I determine how valued a stat is by gathering data on how often the stat is used, if the stat is boosted (by armor) and the current level of the stat across all players. Other stats (such as intelligence) do need more value. Balancing stats and skills is very important but difficult to do and will happen over time. It can't all be done in this update. It's grown quite huge as is!

2) Foraging. I believe the value of foraging has increased greatly with this update. I don't feel that it's necessary to have foraging be an alternative to cooking. Foraging is intended as a resource skill and resource skills are intended to provide the materials and not the end products.

3) Death hunger rates. I appreciate all the input but for now I'm going to stick to what I believe is best. From the input given it sounds like keeping the hunger and thirst rates low after death will provide an impetus for players to be prepared before they go adventure (and risk death) rather than race against the clock to prepare a meal after they die and revive. I think that's good.

Preparation is as simple as having some cooked food in your inventory, or simpler yet, stocking up on cooked food (either cooking it or if you're really adverse to even simple cooking, trading for it) once per month and keeping it at your tribe or homestead, where you end up after death anyways.

4) Fire building quality. It's a good suggestion and I've put this on my list for future improvements. Fire building is meant to be expanded and there also will be different types of cooking using different equipment. That's all for future updates though.

5) Energy and health rates. Just to make sure this is clear, there are two bonus types: Gain and Rate. Gain bonuses are high (can be 400% or more) and apply ONLY while you are eating the food. These provide fast health and energy recovery (healing). Rates are lower and apply over time. They are intended more for overall recovery rate increases while adventuring.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is open with the following changes:

1) Flavor system corrected and messages revised.

2) Saving and loading of current buffs when the server restarts set up properly.

3) Extract all updated to match the extract function.

4) Tool tips added to health and energy rate buffs.

I'm still looking for more feedback on:

1) The proper amounts of fertilizer from guts and fish.

2) proper amounts on foraged plants found.

3) Can crops with full tending reach 100% maturity within a reasonable time before the plant expires?

I am looking for feedback on the these so that I don't go back and forth raising and lowering amounts and guessing what 'feels right' in game.

Thanks!

[mmogaddict]

A few notes to address issues brought up above.

1) Charm. It's true that charm is valuable for scavenging. However, for whatever reasons, it's current the least valued stat by players overall (by far) and 3rd least valued (behind intelligence and dexterity) by high level players (the top 200 most active players). I determine how valued a stat is by gathering data on how often the stat is used, if the stat is boosted (by armor) and the current level of the stat across all players. Other stats (such as intelligence) do need more value. Balancing stats and skills is very important but difficult to do and will happen over time. It can't all be done in this update. It's grown quite huge as is!

Agreed, just pointing out that it is something that needs to be addressed in future patches.

Out of interest, I assume when gathering metrics you ignore all the low level alts we have for things like tribe expansion? Due to the whole point of many of these is to just to get from point A to point B and join a tribe or plant a totem as fast as possible so would be max str/fort/agil and high spir. For example of my 25 accounts, 21 have CHA/INT of around 10, I also don't actually use any of those 21.


3) Death hunger rates. I appreciate all the input but for now I'm going to stick to what I believe is best. From the input given it sounds like keeping the hunger and thirst rates low after death will provide an impetus for players to be prepared before they go adventure (and risk death) rather than race against the clock to prepare a meal after they die and revive. I think that's good.

Preparation is as simple as having some cooked food in your inventory, or simpler yet, stocking up on cooked food (either cooking it or if you're really adverse to even simple cooking, trading for it) once per month and keeping it at your tribe or homestead, where you end up after death anyways.

The only downside to this will be casual players or players coming back from breaks, any food that they may have may be gone due to decay (homesteaders in particular). But if it becomes a problem it can be adjusted later.


4) Fire building quality. It's a good suggestion and I've put this on my list for future improvements. Fire building is meant to be expanded and there also will be different types of cooking using different equipment. That's all for future updates though.

Looking forward to it!

[thurgond]

Bottom text line in farming display is too short by four characters when plant is "Ready to Harvest."

The flavor system messages are a huge improvement. Still took a while to get straight between supplementary flavors and secondary ingredients. Seem to be getting more burnt food failures than in last release. Artisan Recipes and below have maximum supplementary flavors set to 1.

Well tended plants, even with no fertilizer are maturing before they die. Fertilizer makes the plants mature sooner, ready to harvest with 20 days left of growing with 4 fertilizer at planting. The no fertilizer plants were at 100% (displayed as 1 due to truncation) with 5-6 days left and harvestable for several days more.

Fertilizer seems to have minimal effect if any on yield if harvested at 100% maturity. E.g. 16 yield with 1-4 fertilizer, 13 and 16 yield with no fertilizer. I would like to see fertilizer have a bigger effect on yield and a smaller effect on how fast the plant matures. As it stands fertilizer just increases the window when a crop can be harvested.

With hunting 92.3, agility 90.9, dex 84.7, charm 97.2, supreme knife, I'm getting less guts per innards than on production. On production the guts/innards ratio seems to be based on the power of the critter, but I'm not sure since power doesn't display on innards. With rounding, most small game has gone from 2-3 guts to 1. If fertilizer continues to have minimal effect yield, I suspect this will effect bonecrafters more than farmers. On test the amount of fertilizer per guts is 3 for big game (coyote, raccoon, deer, bear), 5 for mutant big game, and 1 for everything else including small mutants and dogs. I suggest making this 2 for dogs (and possibly marmots, martins and cats) and 4 for the non-big game mutants.

It will be hard to judge the amount of foraged plants found until we can tell how rare crop plants will be. At 100 forage I find something every time over eligible terrain. My alt with 22 forage finds something 20-25% of the time. Quantities are about the same. The recent change to make everything found edible made foraging too powerful vs fishing. As it is on test now, foraging is roughly equal to what it was at launch with edible crop plants replacing plants like lomatium that are no longer edible. Making crop plants too rare could make it hard on newbies to survive on just berries. Being able to cook and eat what you kill will make up for this for new survivors, if there are more small critters to kill in low and medium danger areas.

[thurgond]

16) Cooking and farming should not be capped as there are only 2 skills in their current group.


Cooking and farming are linked. I've lost 2 cooking points leveling farming.

[Emilie]

Regarding fertilizer, I am not sure if this is already the case but it would be nice and realistic if using fertilizer lessened the risk of plants attracting pests (IRL, if a plant is well nourished, it has a much better resistance to pests and disease). I think it would be a nice balance to have the extra work and care of making and applying it pay off in somewhat less chores in tending. Weeds would not be affected. It should also have a noticeable effect on yield IMO, say a 30-40 % increase. Otherwise I think I'd rather eat the fish than make it into fertilizer, since I don't mind waiting a little longer to harvest.

[Bejaymac]

Bejaymac, please patch through the launcher and check your crops now. The meshes for dead rice grass weren't properly patched as we noted in game. I just patched them so your crops should be visible.

If something still seems to be missing, please let me know.

Looks like that fixed it, now have a farm full of dead rice grass plants that I can destroy ;)

[MrDDT]

I hate giving balancing changes when they are really minor that hold up the update/patch.

Having said that, I think fertilizer should have a larger effect overall, it's where most of the resources are going to cost. Meaning, putting a plant down the costs are mostly in fertilizer and your time.
I think the yield amount for 100% crops are fine getting about 18, with high skills/stats. Getting to 100% seems to be fine on the speed. My worry is that people will put in 0 fertilizer wait the extra 10 game days and then have a 4-6x less cost yielding the same amount of crops.

The amount of fertilizer from guts and fish seems low, I can't seem to get 8 out of anything as you say they should be, I'm getting 1 to 3. Having said that, I think 1 to 5 should be fine.

thurgond, the power of the animal gives more resources. So a max power animal will give 4x the resources.

Foraged plants need to be lowered by about 10x in my opinion. Seasonings should be mostly foraged, and from farming. Foraging shouldn't be a good primary source of feeding yourself.
Fishing is underrated because of how strong foraging is, if lowering foraging to 10x, I think all the food supplies are balanced. Meat from hunting, Fish from fishing, Foraging goods, and Farming yields.

I think most of these changes are minor, and really getting it on the live server will help balance test the small stuff. Seems like we are waiting days for feedback, and only from a few people, on very minor updates.

[Xsyon]

I'm restarting the Test Server with these minor changes:

1) Cooking and Farming should not decay with skill balancing.

2) Text box size for plant information increased (to fit full Ready to Harvest message).

Regarding fertilizer: Fertilizer simply increases the rate that plants get to maturity. I can't revise the system to make fertilizer directly increase the yield right now (the work involved would far exceed the gain).

What I can do is adjust the times. There are various options here.

1) Extend plant life and have plants mature to 100% without fertilizer right before they expire. With this option fully fertilized plants could reach maturity maybe 4 times faster than unfertilized but plants would last more days before expiring.

2) Require fertilizer for plants to reach 100% maturity. Basically without fertilizer, plants may reach somewhere between 75% and 80% maturity before expiring.

Regarding guts: The amounts gathered from creatures are slightly different than on the main servers as I adjusted the amounts to be more based on the creature type (more guts from larger creatures, less from the small critters).

You also get more fertilizer from guts of the larger creatures right now. I can adjust this so the gut to fertilizer ratio is even for all creatures (in other words 1 gut or 1 fish = base 2 + up to 4 more based on skill and stats, regardless of the creature it comes from). I'm open to feedback. Thanks!

[Emilie]

I think fertilizer from fish and guts should be 1 fish/gut yields 2-8 fertilizer. A yield of 1 is too low IMO, you have to take into account that at the early stages you spill a lot on the ground so it ends up being something like 7 fertilizers used to fertilize one plant. That is 7 fish I could just be making into kabobs and eating straight up. That is a very high initial cost, for no real yield increase.

I think eating berries instead of food should be possible but you should need to eat a lot. Like 20 berries should just about make your hunger bar go into the yellow.



EDIT:
Regarding the above options, since I'm not clear on exactly how much the harvest is affected by early harvest I don't know which is better.

Would it be possible with a combination of those two things? Like, increase plant life a little and make fertilized plants reach maturity 2x faster (4 times seems a bit much IMO) and also make it so that unfertilized plants don't mature past 80%.

That would give a clear advantage to using fertilizer but without making farming too long winded OR too fast, whilst also keeping the unfertilized option viable- just less so.

[MrDDT]

Regarding fertilizer: Fertilizer simply increases the rate that plants get to maturity. I can't revise the system to make fertilizer directly increase the yield right now (the work involved would far exceed the gain).

What I can do is adjust the times. There are various options here.

1) Extend plant life and have plants mature to 100% without fertilizer right before they expire. With this option fully fertilized plants could reach maturity maybe 4 times faster than unfertilized but plants would last more days before expiring.

2) Require fertilizer for plants to reach 100% maturity. Basically without fertilizer, plants may reach somewhere between 75% and 80% maturity before expiring.

Regarding guts: The amounts gathered from creatures are slightly different than on the main servers as I adjusted the amounts to be more based on the creature type (more guts from larger creatures, less from the small critters).

You also get more fertilizer from guts of the larger creatures right now. I can adjust this so the gut to fertilizer ratio is even for all creatures (in other words 1 gut or 1 fish = base 2 + up to 4 more based on skill and stats, regardless of the creature it comes from). I'm open to feedback. Thanks!


Given these options, I like #2 but worried because you can not harvest before 75% maturity unless I'm wrong. This means the window would be extremely short.
I would like to see option to harvest at 50%. Allow non fertilized plants to get to 50% (with everything else correct) in about 80% of the max time. Allowing 20% growth timer left for extra growth and harvesting times. So at best plants can unfertilized plants would yield 60% yield if harvested 1 second before they died. Max fertilized plants currently take 75% time to get to 100% harvest. Unless I'm wrong. This would give a large boon to fertilizing, and still leave people with the feeling they don't have to log on at special times. Plus with proper planning you can even set the 100% yield rates based on your log in times, with using the right amount of fertilizer.

My worry is that making the window small will hurt people that are not able to log in at special times to harvest.
Increasing the total time a plant can live, while making it take longer for unfertilized plants to get to 75% would be the best idea I can think of, if that is doable.

Like I said my worry with both of these options is the forcing of people to log on at special times to get any harvest at all.

Having said this, I think the current ratios are good enough for now, and I would hate to hold up a patch/update for minor changes.

Guts from larger animals is a great idea, I've not tested it on the test server, so not sure the #s yet.

[MrDDT]

I think fertilizer from fish and guts should be 1 fish/gut yields 2-8 fertilizer. A yield of 1 is too low IMO, you have to take into account that at the early stages you spill a lot on the ground so it ends up being something like 7 fertilizers used to fertilize one plant. That is 7 fish I could just be making into kabobs and eating straight up. That is a very high initial cost, for no real yield increase.

I think eating berries instead of food should be possible but you should need to eat a lot. Like 20 berries should just about make your hunger bar go into the yellow.



EDIT:
Regarding the above options, since I'm not clear on exactly how much the harvest is affected by early harvest I don't know which is better.

Would it be possible with a combination of those two things? Like, increase plant life a little and make fertilized plants reach maturity 2x faster (4 times seems a bit much IMO) and also make it so that unfertilized plants don't mature past 80%.

That would give a clear advantage to using fertilizer but without making farming too long winded OR too fast, whilst also keeping the unfertilized option viable- just less so.

I agree with everything stated here. :)

Minor disagreement posted below.

[mmogaddict]

Personally I don't see why the need to have the crop die at all, just have it stop growing once it's reached it's maximum days.

That would be far more casual friendly.

If doing that, I would then structure it so that an unfertilized crop only 75% (minimum harvest) by the time growth had completed.

Then not only would you have a reason to fertilize but you would also encourage more casual farmers, at the moment I think a casual player is going to look at the farming system and go 'why bother with all that', it's a game, not a job.

Plus then I could use a crop as a nice decoration ;)

[thurgond]

thurgond, the power of the animal gives more resources. So a max power animal will give 4x the resources.

The ratio of guts per innards has been changed so, as Jordi stated 3 rounds down to 1.

On the production servers the guts per innards power ratio is something like:
1 guts / 0.2 innards power, 2 / 0.4-0.6, 3 / 0.8, 4 / 1.0
On test, this becomes:
1 guts / 0.2 - 0.8, 3 / 1.0

Since 1.0 power creatures are nearly extinct, this means every creature will give a maximum of one guts based what's on test currently. Plus, any 1.0 power guts would be much better utilized in bonecrafting than for fertilizer.

What I'm advocating is going back to the old guts / innards ratios, and leaving the fertilizer per guts based on the creature size. The fertilizer per guts should probably scale up from one for hamsters/squirrels to 10 for mutant bears, rather than the 1/3/5 scale that is on test now.

As far as adjusting crop maturation times, I could live with either one but for option 2 would increase the maximum yield to 24 or 25 to keep the non-fertilized maximum yield to 20.

And thanks for two really fast fixes. You're the man Mr. Grau.

[MrDDT]

The ratio of guts per innards has been changed so, as Jordi stated 3 rounds down to 1.

On the production servers the guts per innards power ratio is something like:
1 guts / 0.2 innards power, 2 / 0.4-0.6, 3 / 0.8, 4 / 1.0
On test, this becomes:
1 guts / 0.2 - 0.8, 3 / 1.0

Since 1.0 power creatures are nearly extinct, this means every creature will give a maximum of one guts based what's on test currently. Plus, any 1.0 power guts would be much better utilized in bonecrafting than for fertilizer.

What I'm advocating is going back to the old guts / innards ratios, and leaving the fertilizer per guts based on the creature size. The fertilizer per guts should probably scale up from one for hamsters/squirrels to 10 for mutant bears, rather than the 1/3/5 scale that is on test now.

I understand now thanks for clearing that up. My worry about doing it like this, is we will see a lot more bear STR guts vs other types of guts like INT guts (mutant rats). My only suggestion here would be balance it to size of animal like you said, giving small animals 1 to 3 range, and large animals 2 to 5 range. Still makes sense, but not massively overwhelming them on the rarity levels.




As far as adjusting crop maturation times, I could live with either one but for option 2 would increase the maximum yield to 24 or 25 to keep the non-fertilized maximum yield to 20.

And thanks for two really fast fixes. You're the man Mr. Grau.

This would make it much better to simply just plant 2 crops instead of using any fertilizer at all. Yield for fertilized crops needs to be much greater than unfertilized.

I like the current ratio of fertilized vs unfertilized, I think the issue is the small in window players will have for unfertilized crops on which they can harvest. From what my testing shows is they have about 24 real hours to harvest it. Which means if they do not log on at a special time, they will have dead plants.



I think fertilizer from fish and guts should be 1 fish/gut yields 2-8 fertilizer. A yield of 1 is too low IMO, you have to take into account that at the early stages you spill a lot on the ground so it ends up being something like 7 fertilizers used to fertilize one plant. That is 7 fish I could just be making into kabobs and eating straight up. That is a very high initial cost, for no real yield increase.



It wont take 7 to 8 fertilizer to fertilize 1 plant, unless you are talking about only to 100%. It will take closer to 10 to 20 for a low skilled player to keep it fully fertilized to 100% and through its growth cycle depending on how much you do it.
If you are talking 1 fertilized then its only about 1 to 5 per plant.

Having said that, I agree with your statement that it can be pretty high, I think anywhere in the range of 0 to 10 fertilizer from a fish/gut is fine. I believe my ideal would be 1 to 5 fertilizer per fish/gut. 1 being 5 skill, 0 in stats, using a 5QL knife. 5 being 100 skill, 100 stats, using 100QL knife.
I hope that clears that up for exact numbers =P

[thurgond]

Emilie, DDT, I don't think foraging should be nerfed. Players shouldn't be forced to hunt/fish/farm/cook to survive. I consider foraged berries/currants to be a handful, not a single berry. As it stands, you need to eat non-cooked berries or raw vegies 11 times to go from dead (10%) to yellow (76%).

You do not get enough out of fishing now, so I would support a future change to get fish filets (2 to 8) and guts from fish.

I think harvesting at 75% is about right. Each application of fertilizer increases growth by 7-8% so, thanks to the effects of cumulative interest, a plant fully fertilized at planting will mature to "Ready to Harvest" with 18-20 days left to grow.

[MrDDT]

Emilie, DDT, I don't think foraging should be nerfed. Players shouldn't be forced to hunt/fish/farm/cook to survive. I consider foraged berries/currants to be a handful, not a single berry. As it stands, you need to eat non-cooked berries or raw vegies 11 times to go from dead (10%) to yellow (76%).

You do not get enough out of fishing now, so I would support a future change to get fish filets (2 to 8) and guts from fish.


Currently I can get 300 foraged items in 5 mins of foraging. This would last me, 10 hours of game play worth of food. Compared to Farming.
5 mins of farming yields about 400 crops. Which is about 12 hours of game play worth of food. Not counting the mats it takes to yield that much also.

Farming is ONLY used for seeds/cooking items. Foraging has added use of faster picking up grass, higher QL grass, branches, twigs etc.
The current rate of foraged items is way way way to high, it should be cut down massively, it should NOT be an ideal as primary source of food system in the game.

[mmogaddict]

Currently I can get 300 foraged items in 5 mins of foraging. This would last me, 10 hours of game play worth of food. Compared to Farming.
5 mins of farming yields about 400 crops. Which is about 12 hours of game play worth of food. Not counting the mats it takes to yield that much also.

Farming is ONLY used for seeds/cooking items. Foraging has added use of faster picking up grass, higher QL grass, branches, twigs etc.
The current rate of foraged items is way way way to high, it should be cut down massively, it should NOT be an ideal as primary source of food system in the game.

At the same time, farming is also going to be a lot more predicable in regards to what sort of outcome you are going to get.

Of those 300 foraged items, how many are going to give a precise bonus that you might be chasing.

Foraging may need a slight adjustment, but to say it needs to be cut down massively is a gross exaggeration.

[Bejaymac]

DDT if those amounts are on the test server then you need to remember that everything has been ramped up to make things easier during testing, foraging find rates have been drastically increased, and the places to find stuff has been increased as well, I just found potatoes in a bald patch and strawberries (crop version) halfway up a granite rockface, I very much doubt if I'll find them there once it goes live.

[MrDDT]

DDT if those amounts are on the test server then you need to remember that everything has been ramped up to make things easier during testing, foraging find rates have been drastically increased, and the places to find stuff has been increased as well, I just found potatoes in a bald patch and strawberries (crop version) halfway up a granite rockface, I very much doubt if I'll find them there once it goes live.

Bejaymac, which is why he is asking for the feedback because he has to adjust them for the live server =P

[Xsyon]

Thanks for all the feedback. It helps a lot.

Regarding fertilizer: Plants are updated once per game day. What I could do it that if there is no fertilizer during an update, the plant will not grow beyond 75% (or 80%) during that update. This would be the easiest method of achieving a limit on plant maturity (thus plant yield) without fertilizer.

There are many additional factors to take into account when comparing foraging, fishing and farming. For example:

1) With farming you know what you're getting. With foraging, you have some control over what plant you'll find, but with crop plants being rare, you'll get more seasoning plants than crop plants while foraging. I'll restart the server tonight with the crop plants set as I intended for the final so players can get a feel for their rarity. Current plants set to the same rarity level include Serviceberry, Fern Leaved Lomatium, Mountain Strawberry, Gray's Lovage and Red Sierra Onion.

2) Most of the more common foraged plants will need to be used as seasonings (or secondary ingredients).

3) It's hard for me to know right now how often players will be making simple one ingredient food, just to fill up, versus multiple ingredient food for the fast recovery or buffs.

4) I was planning to make foraged food more regional (like scavenged items - which I also want to revise further) and not simply based on surfaces. I don't have time to do this for this update, but I do want to keep this in mind for the near future.

5) I could also (now or in the future) set up seasoning ingredients to only be seasonings and not secondary ingredients. That's something I considered but I do like the flexibility offered by having all ingredients fit two slot types.

I'll set up some values based on these considerations and the factors mentioned in this thread and will post when the Test Server is up with these revised values.

Thanks again!

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is up with one minor change:

1) Crops are now set to be 'rare' finds through foraging. I'd like to hear opinions if this feels ok, they are too rare or too easy to find.

Thanks!

[mmogaddict]

3) It's hard for me to know right now how often players will be making simple one ingredient food, just to fill up, versus multiple ingredient food for the fast recovery or buffs.

Due to uncapped base/white stats, most people will in practice probably just stick to making mostly one ingredient meals to satisfy hunger.

If you want to promote stat equipment, stat food, totem upkeep buffs and eventually stat magic buff then you should look at capping UNBUFFED stats and have people get their edge from the use of the aforementioned buffs, rather than just grinding skills for stats.

So for example you could set UNBUFFED cap to 120 for stats and people could use food, equipment, totems etc to go beyond 120 (at least while their buffs last).

Obviously the above is way outside the realms of this patch as it would have major ramifications to the game and the playerbase.

Players who have pushed their stats beyond whatever a cap would be set to would need some form of recompense (Perhaps by allowing a one off ability to shift points above the cap to other stats but beyond the 90 redistribution point that is currently in place for a stat redistribution. So for example if somebody had 200 stats A and every other stat at 100, they could redistribute to 120 stat A and raise 4 of their 100 stats to 120).

All the above figures are just placeholders to illustrate and not the actual figures that could be used.


4) I was planning to make foraged food more regional (like scavenged items - which I also want to revise further) and not simply based on surfaces. I don't have time to do this for this update, but I do want to keep this in mind for the near future.

Sounds like a good idea.

How about also vary availability based on in game season. Some plants are more often found during the during the winter, others more often during the summer. For example :



Plant
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter


X
Common
Common
Rare
Zero Chance


Y
Rare
Zero Chance
Rare
Common


Z
Common
Zero Chance
Zero Chance
Zero Chance




5) I could also (now or in the future) set up seasoning ingredients to only be seasonings and not secondary ingredients. That's something I considered but I do like the flexibility offered by having all ingredients fit two slot types.

Keep the flexibility. It's a sandbox, the more flexibility in the game and it's systems the better.

[Bejaymac]

I'm finding it just as easy to find plants and crops today as I was yesterday, the "failed to find" are what's rare and my foraging skill is only at 46.

I went out foraging with 30 empty slots in my packs and filled them in under 5 minutes, 5 of the items were crops while 8 of the others were edible raw.


3) It's hard for me to know right now how often players will be making simple one ingredient food, just to fill up, versus multiple ingredient food for the fast recovery or buffs.
For me just being well nourished is enough, so simple fish kebabs will be normal for me, but the min/max'ers will be looking for every worthwhile buff going.

[thurgond]

I am not seeing a big difference in rarity of crop plants when foraging. Got 35% crop plants and 65% herbs and berries with 100% foraging.

On my alt with 24 foraging, I got 9.7% crop plants, 33.3% other plants, and 55% nothing.

My test with one fertilizer showed that there was a tiny amount left at 75% maturity, so cutting off crops with no fertilizer at 75-80% growth would achieve the result you want. In one test an unfertilized potato only went to 80% maturity with one day left. On my 2nd test an unfertilized cattail was at 80% with 11 days left and reached 100% with 6 days left.

If you put in the limit on plants without fertilizer, I suspect that most players will use one fertilizer. This will pretty much insure the plant will be at 100% maturity if the player logs on 3 real world days after planting (27 game days or 5 days left till plant death). With or without this change, I suspect a lot of crops will go without fertilizer when players start out and tend to spill a lot of fertilizer.

The buffs from food are good enough I suspect players will use higher level recipes when they can. Specially if they are hunting or doing a lot of terraforming. I'm not sure players will routinely use the highest recipes since they take a lot of ingredients.

I like making foraging more regional. I doubt this will encourage more trade in seasonings since they are perishable. Crop seeds could make a good trade item.

On the bug front, the use count on saved recipes gets reset when the server resets.

[Bejaymac]

On my 2nd test an unfertilized cattail was at 80% with 11 days left and reached 100% with 6 days left.
That is strange as the cattails I tested reached 100% with just 3 days left, all I did was keep their water over 50% and weed and pest them, wonder if growth rate is also tied into QL of the seed and skill level.

[MrDDT]

I predict almost no one using buffed food after about 1 or 2 months and using it just for hunger mostly because buffs rarely matter for a +10ish or less.

The first 1 or so months people will likely be running through the resources they have, so leveling up skills, testing buffs, and using up resources before decay.

I think the buff system on food is good, just that until some reason why we need these buffs. Most games have end game content that require high stats. Either PVP, or Raid Bosses etc. Considering a 1 week old toon can get gear from players that anyone can wear and kill the hardest animals in the game. Being there is no PVP in the game (PVP server is dead) there is no competitive aspect to use buffs.

I expect the side of buffs being used from cooking is likely to lower the eating time, eating them for healing HP or energy. Buffs are likely not a major factor. Eating food in 8s vs 30s is a factor.

[Whorlok]

PVP is not dead "ABT" we are with 4-5 daily active ..;) and a small amount of other people


I predict almost no one using buffed food after about 1 or 2 months and using it just for hunger mostly because buffs rarely matter for a +10ish or less.

The first 1 or so months people will likely be running through the resources they have, so leveling up skills, testing buffs, and using up resources before decay.

I think the buff system on food is good, just that until some reason why we need these buffs. Most games have end game content that require high stats. Either PVP, or Raid Bosses etc. Considering a 1 week old toon can get gear from players that anyone can wear and kill the hardest animals in the game. Being there is no PVP in the game (PVP server is dead) there is no competitive aspect to use buffs.

PVP is not dead "ABT" we are with 4-5 daily active ..;) and a small amount of other people

I expect the side of buffs being used from cooking is likely to lower the eating time, eating them for healing HP or energy. Buffs are likely not a major factor. Eating food in 8s vs 30s is a factor.

[mmogaddict]

Foragaging: 71.4
Int: 79.3
Spirit: 52.2
Cha: 52.8

Foraging Attempts: 50
Foraging Terrain: Grasslands

23 different plant species.

Consisting Of:
-- 7 non-crop edible varieties (berries and such)
-- 10 non edible varieties
-- 6 crop varieties

Total Individual Quantities:
-- 41 non-crop edible (berries and such)
-- 63 non edible
-- 37 crop

Checking for a specific buff (decided to use FORT as I as sum it will be more popular than most)
3 plants had Fort buff, 1 edible, 1 non edible and 1 crop.

Out of 141 plants collected, 13 had a Fort buff (6 lowered PER, 7 lowered INT).


BUGS:

[Extract All] on crop plants does not count as a skill attempt. (Extracting singularly does - Foraging)

[Extract All] not present on Cones (tested only Douglas), Single Extract on Cone works ok and counts towards Forestry.



ADDITIONAL TEST:

Picking up any combination of branch, twig, cone, sap, seed, or leaf on the same spot 4 times still leaves the ground as bare earth

[MrDDT]

PVP is not dead "ABT" we are with 4-5 daily active ..;) and a small amount of other people

How much PVP have you done while you were "active" over the last week or 2? I rest my case.
Let's go with this, how many people outside of your own toons and tribe have you seen in game? Not talking in global but wondered around and ran into them.

It's really pointless to have a debate when people try to misrepresent the facts. It would be like saying Xsyon is doing great because there is lots of people playing. Wanting it to be so, and it being so are not the same.

[wastelandstoic]

Currently I can get 300 foraged items in 5 mins of foraging.


It's really pointless to have a debate when people try to misrepresent the facts.


"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth."

[Xsyon]

Some quick notes:

1) Seasonal foraging variation is something I want to do, just not for this update. It's in my notes.

2) Stat uses (and skills) do need balancing, but again that's for a future update. This update does give some additional value to some less used stats and skills.

3) I like the idea of getting guts and fillets from fish and have push this on my list.

4) After testing foraging amounts with assistance over the past few days, I found that the greatest difference between this type of gathering in Xsyon and in other games I've played is that you don't have to move much in between foraging attempts. This makes it easy, especially for high level players, to quickly gather an abundance of plants.

I've adjusted this distance and may adjust it further.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is up with some changes.

1) Growing plant life extend to 38 game days. This is slightly over 4 real days. I adjusted the time so that the expiration time for a plant falls within the same hour range as the planting time. This should work well for players that only log in during certain times of the day. This also allows for a larger harvest window.

2) Mature plants do not grow during an update if not fertilized. This limits plants never fertilized to 75% maturity.

3) Distance between foraging attempts increased from 10 m to 25 m. I may increase this more. (as noted above)

4) Foraging max amount per gather adjusted and now based on skill and stats. Previously the amount was random between a fixed min and max.

5) Foraging chance to fail revised. Low level characters will fail less often than before. 100 skill players have a small (5%) chance of failure.

6) Foraging chance of rare and very rare plants revised.

7) Plant rarity indicated by the color of the plant's name using the same system as scavenged materials.

8) Character gains skill (foraging or forestry) when using Extract All.

9) Guts from animals revised, ranging from 1 to 8 based on the type and size / power of a creature.

10) Fertilizer amount from guts revised, ranging from 2 to 5 based on skill.

11) Chance to spill fertilizer reduced.

12) Extract all should work on cones.

13) Use count on recipes saves during a server restart.

14) Homestead are set to have 0 commissaries (as mentioned earlier).

Some of these changes are based on my own personal tests over the past few days, trying to get the feel for foraging and farming that I want. Personal tests like this is something I rarely get the time to do!

Regarding amounts and distances, I would rather err on the side of making things too difficult or having amounts be too low right now that to have things be too easy. Resource upkeep will be coming in game and will provide bonuses such as increased amounts, smaller distances, less chance of failure and possibly faster gathering times. If things are too easy as is, these bonuses won't have value. Please keep this in mind when providing feedback.

I welcome all feedback and confirmation of fixes or reports of any outstanding problems. Thanks!

[mmogaddict]

1) Growing plant life extend to 38 game days. This is slightly over 4 real days. I adjusted the time so that the expiration time for a plant falls within the same hour range as the planting time. This should work well for players that only log in during certain times of the day. This also allows for a larger harvest window.

2) Mature plants do not grow during an update if not fertilized. This limits plants never fertilized to 75% maturity.

Not Tested yet


3) Distance between foraging attempts increased from 10 m to 25 m. I may increase this more. (as noted above)

Seems fine, 50 attempts had me wander the length of my valley around 800 coord units. I wouldn't recommend going any larger than 25m though.


4) Foraging max amount per gather adjusted and now based on skill and stats. Previously the amount was random between a fixed min and max.

Foraging Skill: 71.7
Primary Stat: 79.4
Secondary Stat: 52.2
CHA: 52.8

Foraging Attempts: 50
Foraging Terrain: Grass only, High danger zone

Amount of Edible non Crop Plants: 22 common, 3 uncommon
Amount of Non-Edible Plants: 18 Common, 13 uncommon, 15 superior, 9 rare
Amount of Crop Plants: 3 rare
Total Amount of plants: 83

Seems fine mechanically, but it is a rather boring way to live. Between the time it takes to gather food and prepare before you can get on with your current non-food project you kind of get the feeling that you are 'wasting your time' a little.

Will need to see how we go after a couple of weeks on live to make a judgment if the 'work'/'play' balance is correct.

It certainly acts as a disincentive for casual solo players to continue/start. Hardcore players will see it more as an annoyance. I would be less inclined to recommend the game to friends/guildmates unless I thought they were a more hardcorish player.


5) Foraging chance to fail revised. Low level characters will fail less often than before. 100 skill players have a small (5%) chance of failure.

Noticed the improvement, only had maybe 3~4 fails out of 50 attempts, last test it seems almost around 15~20% fail rate.


6) Foraging chance of rare and very rare plants revised.

Rarety seems ok. Maybe crops too rare (1 find of 3 units in 50 attempts with moderate high skill) , will need more testing since sample size is too low to make proper judgment.


7) Plant rarity indicated by the color of the plant's name using the same system as scavenged materials.

Good improvement


8) Character gains skill (foraging or forestry) when using Extract All.

Working, though I think 'extract all' would be better if it worked like batch processing of crafting, that is to say that each green bar 'extract' should just be 1 extraction and all 'extract all' does is automate each extraction attempt. So a stack of 10 cones for example would automate 10 extractions on the stack each extraction being 1 rather than 1 extraction being all 10 cones.

Therefore extract all on a stack of 10 cones/plants would be 10 skill attempts and take 10 times longer than extracting a single cone.

'Extract all' should just be saving all the mouse movements and clicks/RSI rather than doing a whole stack in the same time as it would take to do 1 cone/plant.


9) Guts from animals revised, ranging from 1 to 8 based on the type and size / power of a creature.

10) Fertilizer amount from guts revised, ranging from 2 to 5 based on skill.

11) Chance to spill fertilizer reduced.

12) Extract all should work on cones.

13) Use count on recipes saves during a server restart.

14) Homestead are set to have 0 commissaries (as mentioned earlier).

Not tested yet.


Regarding amounts and distances, I would rather err on the side of making things too difficult or having amounts be too low right now that to have things be too easy. Resource upkeep will be coming in game and will provide bonuses such as increased amounts, smaller distances, less chance of failure and possibly faster gathering times. If things are too easy as is, these bonuses won't have value. Please keep this in mind when providing feedback.

Sounds fine.

[Emilie]

Seems fine mechanically, but it is a rather boring way to live. Between the time it takes to gather food and prepare before you can get on with your current non-food project you kind of get the feeling that you are 'wasting your time' a little.

Will need to see how we go after a couple of weeks on live to make a judgment if the 'work'/'play' balance is correct.

It certainly acts as a disincentive for casual solo players to continue/start. Hardcore players will see it more as an annoyance. I would be less inclined to recommend the game to friends/guildmates unless I thought they were a more hardcorish player.

There is another option, you could trade for food. In most games I have played, there have been crafts I have not enjoyed, and then I will buy the thing I need from someone who does/NPC. I am not sure why in this game there is such resistance in the community to trade for things. I will be cooking and farming a lot, and you are very welcome to buy your food from me, I can do a special price for returning customers and even deliver it to you for a small fee. :P I could set up a meals on wheels service and go round the lake regularly! :)




Working, though I think 'extract all' would be better if it worked like batch processing of crafting, that is to say that each green bar 'extract' should just be 1 extraction and all 'extract all' does is automate each extraction attempt. So a stack of 10 cones for example would automate 10 extractions on the stack each extraction being 1 rather than 1 extraction being all 10 cones.



This is a really good suggestion, but not urgent IMO. If it would push back release of the patch I'd rather wait til future update.

[Bejaymac]

14) Homestead are set to have 0 commissaries (as mentioned earlier).
Had to set the use of the tent in my homestead to none to stop it working as a commissary, this means that any tribe that loses members and drops down a level will keep all of it's commissaries, you might need to add a check in there to force tribes to remove one (or more) of their commissaries if that happens.

[Tupux]

The amount of fertilizer I got from guts with 5 Farming,4 Int, 115 Strength, 64 Charm was 2. With 74 Farming, 105 Int, 83 Strength and 97 Charm I got 7 fertilizer from guts coming from the same stack. All stats are the buffed numbers.

I did not keep numbers on foraging but just tried to get a feel for it. At high level foraging I got more than enough plants to live from if needed while getting a decent amount of other plants, including some rares and very rares, for cooking. The number of crop-plants was very low making farming worthwile.

I feel that like this Farming and Cooking will both be valuable skills, where Foraging will probably mostly be a skill for more dedicated players with the amounts of plants per pull like it is now. Which I think is a good thing as it might create more trading.

I agree with mmogaddict that extracting should not extract a whole stack in 1 action.

[thurgond]

A larger harvest window would be good, but with plants wilting this window can be down to one game day right before the fertilizer runs out. I think you should be able to harvest wilted plants, otherwise no fertilizer will mean no harvest, not a reduced harvest.

After years of "take five steps and harvest/forage" the new harvesting distance will take a lot of getting used to. I do not see the need for this. I can still fill my pack up with plants that I mostly don't need, just like I can fill my pack up with useless scavenged items. It just takes a few minutes longer with the longer distance, less if I sprint between foraging.

Crop plants are truly rare now. I foraged for an hour and found crop plants only 3 times, 1 rhubarb, 2 rhubarb, and 3 onion. I like this as it makes farming necessary to get enough vegetables to cook with them. Didn't fail once at 100 skill.

My alt with foraging in the upper 20's, found 1 rhubarb in an hour. With the changes, failures went down from 55% to 46%, but foraging went up 2 points while testing. Berries and other edibles were found about a quarter of the time. Thus taking a minute to make 8 forage attempts would find on average 4-6 edible plants. Even at ftp levels, it will not take long for someone to find enough to eat.

I'm not sure your ranges are right on guts and fertilizer. I got 2 guts from an old canis armidillis innards (probably low power) and 7 fertilizer each from the guts.

I had two carrots that took many attempts to harvest. Over two game hours, I went from 80.9 to 81.4 farming skill trying to pull up these wascally carrots, but eventually got the harvest.

[MrDDT]

Pretty sure wilted plants have nothing to do with fertilizer, but water. If you do not rewater the plant it will become wilted at about 10% water left.

[thurgond]

Pretty sure wilted plants have nothing to do with fertilizer, but water. If you do not rewater the plant it will become wilted at about 10% water left.

Plants wilt when the fertilizer runs out or when unfertilized plants reach 75% maturity, even if they have just been watered. No amount of water will bring the plant back, only fertilizer.

[Xsyon]

The Test Server is restarting with the following changes:

1) Fix for plants wilting unfertilized at 75% maturity. At this point they should stop growing but not wilt (unless they are also not watered or tended).

2) I posted in error regarding the fertilizer amounts as I forgot the charm bonus. I adjusted the code for this and the amounts should range from 2-6 (including the charm bonus).

[MrDDT]

Plants wilt when the fertilizer runs out or when unfertilized plants reach 75% maturity, even if they have just been watered. No amount of water will bring the plant back, only fertilizer.

Great bug catch, glad it was fixed quickly.

Xsyon any idea when this might go live assuming no other issues?

[thurgond]

1) Fix for plants wilting unfertilized at 75% maturity. At this point they should stop growing but not wilt (unless they are also not watered or tended).


Quick fix, but not quite. When unfertilized plant reaches 75% it can be harvested, but the next day it wilts.

[Xsyon]

I think my last Test Server patch failed to update fully, hence the problem still with unfertilized plants still wilting.

I've updated the Test Server again and we tested crops since late last night. They seem to be working correctly now and can be tested again by players.

Thanks!

[thurgond]

Working now! Unfertilized crops do not wilt.

Looks like you're ready to put a skewer in this patch and go live.