This game has resource scarcity. Good.

[Seeks]

Can I just comment SKALD for something subjective in a game, that I approve of? Because SKALD does something that not even some post-apocalyptic RPGs has the gall to do. It actually gives you scarce resources, forcing you to make tough decisions on where and when to use them.

Vitality and especially Attunement potions are really helpful. And shopkeeps have a limited stock at any given time. And are kinda pricey, unless you've just gotten a huge gold reward or have a magic item to sell, which isn't often. Thus, resting and rations are important. Let alone having my Ranger and Iben help pick up the slack for Driina when healing, so I can save my good heals from Driina when I need them.

A stack of ten to twenty arrows costs about the same as a single potion, but are also scarce and also helpful. Between playing a Ranger and having Kat and Iben on my team, I go through a lot of arrows. It's kinda painful for at least my main character and Kat, as both aren't particularly built for raw melee damage (well, outside of Kat getting a backstab). Plus, Kat is also my squishiest party member. Thus, I try to compensate by making my Ranger be a jack-of-all-trades, and Iben lean into a melee focus.

Being able to score damage from afar with arrows -- especially if Kat nails a backstab or a crit with hers -- is helpful to whittle down the enemy. But surprisingly, it's a dark fantasy game of all places where ammo is a privilege and a boon. A genre that usually focuses on melee, while apoc games are usually gun-based and where scarcity would make sense.

I appreciate the challenge.

[Ninth Hour]

Yes and no, Arrows are expensive and relatively scarce.

Food, however, is abundant. I am at the beginning of Chapter 5 and, to this point, have camped only 4 times, as I "reserve" level ups and only use them when my characters are critically short on HP (e.g. when they start taking wounds in combat ). Hence, the need to sleep or eat is almost nil.

I am currently lugging around a veritable pantry. Even if I did rest more regularly, there is no way I would be able to consume all the food I have cooked (listed in order of descending food value):

Fried Steak x 15 (FV 18)
Meat Skewers x 15 (FV 18)
Apple Pie x 1 (Food value 17)
Mushroom Soup x 18 (FV 16)
Baked Mushrooms x 10 (FV 16)
Vegetable Soup x 47 (FV 14)
Mushroom Omelette x 10 (FV 14)
Fish Stew x 6 (FV 14)
Cheese Sandwich x 10 (FV 13)
Farmer's Omelette x 27 (FV 12)
Rations x 17 (FV 10)

And that's not counting all the raw ingredients I have yet to cook. Altogether, I am carrying around 90+ lbs of food (I actually added it all up). And on the ship I've stashed another few wheels of cheese and 50+ fish.

Potion ingredients are also copious. My potion inventory is just as varied, from all the brewing I did across 5 Chapters:

Lesser Attunement x 57
Lesser Vitality x 67
Cure Disease x 26
Cure Poison x 22
Acid Resistance x 18
Stoneskin x 14
Agility x 12
Bless x 7
Strength x 6
Moderate Vitality x 3
Greater Attunement x 3
Moderate Attunement x 2
Electric Resistance x 2
Fire Resistance x 2
Fortify will x 3
Frenzy x 2
Greater Vitality x 1

And I would have many, many more if I actually bothered to use all the ingredients clogging up my inventory.

In short, the scarcity only applies to ammunition. For everything else, there is a healthy surplus.

[C-zom]

There is nothing stopping you from rambling about the open world map to get merchant RNG, using your best diplomat, and buying up all the food and healing gear you need.

There is also nothing stopping you from robbing every single one of them blind of their highest value items, but I've been hearing that exploit will be addressed soon in a patch.

I haven't played in a second but at the start of Chapter 3 I have top tier armor, weapons, bows, 250+ arrows and months worth of food while floating 2k gold just by stealing everything under the sun.

[IlluminaZero]

Hmm I was sticking out of the topic due to scarcity making the game better IMO. However you can easily break it. I will say though that:

World map merchant RNG can be surprisingly infrequent and annoying. Both because of how much more likely you are to get forage + random battles and secondly because their actual inventories are specialized. For example: I suspect you won't be overjoyed with a magic tomb merchant.

[Dire Wombat]

I think the game gives a feeling of resource scarcity at the beginning. But once you get established & learn the fairly simple mechanics & rules of thumb it becomes trivial, even without stealing.

Especially food. I think the game would actually be better if they just cut that mechanic completely.

[Ninth Hour]

I would add that I did not buy a single crumb of food, a single potion ingredient, or any potions in the entire game and still ended up with way more consumables than I could use. Everything I accumulated was just by harvesting from the wild or from fields (funny that farmers don't mind you taking their crops, right in front of them).

And while I started fielding 3 archers by Chapter 4, I still ended the game with close to 300 arrows in total. So even the scarcity of ammo lifts eventually.

In the end, the game is way too short for you to run out of anything. I ended up not using 95% of the potions I brewed. I thought that there might be a difficult battle that might require me to use Stoneskin or Potions of Agility but, in the end, that never emerged. The only potions I used consistently were the ones for Lesser Attunement.

I never felt like wasting an action by chugging potions in battle and didn't test whether or not you could take them out of combat to gain buffs for the next one. If they did, I might actually have used them.

Don't get me wrong- I like having "stuff". But let's not pretend that resource management is much tougher in this game than others in the genre.

[danielkg]

So I think your statement about resource scarcity is true for the early game, but by mid-game you have enough food to camp a bunch of times and then have your characters fletch arrows during camping.

I never actually needed to hunt for food during camping, simply because it is so abundant. And then there is a turning point in the game when you reach a certain level and have enough gold where you can simply buy all the arrows at all times. Suddenly you end up with hundreds of arrows and not enough enemies to shoot those at.

Also, if you give Kat a couple of items to increase her thievery skill you can literally rob all wandering merchants of their whole inventory and sell it at other places. And this is not limited to wandering merchants, but to almost all kinds of vendors.

I think there is only one or two vendors (of magical items) that have "anti-theft protection spells" going on where you can not steal their inventory. Which actually makes perfect sense. If I were a high level magic user and wanted to buy and sell magic items that are of high value I'd put in some anti theft spell protections as well (great job by the devs to think about this scenario btw).

Also, regarding cooked food and potions, I don't think there is any scarcity after the early game, because you are given means to cook stuff and prepare potions yourself - you are getting a lot of ingredients for both of those throughout the game actually.

In the late to end game I ended up with over a hundred attunement and healing potions (of all levels).

So yeah, I think this is just an early game limitation, which makes sense from a RPG perspective, but then once you hit mid-game turns into a non-issue in my experience.

Great game. I love it.