Management at the starts is weird.

[Ovan]

It can't just be me. It isn't weird that at the start of the game you're having to decide how much food and how much fuel the crew of the ship will use?

The Captain even says they brought in 6 months of rations if ♥♥♥♥ really hits the fan, but even before anything is out of place, the game is already telling you to decide how much each one will eat.

I understand it's a tutorial aclimitazing the player to the mechanics, but it also tells you to do thing like, go in the pantry and get one can of food for the crew, despite the fact one can isn't enough even to feed every member of the crew with 1 unit of food.

As far as the characters go, shouldn't they be using enough fuel and food to keep everyone healthy, so they can continue to do their jobs?

[Dazrix]

That part is not a tutorial...

[Inthexis]

It's not just you. If their point is that you have to ration from the start and let morale drop some, they should have made a point about it. Rather than you just inexplicably only being allowed to grab one can / one bag of coal at a time.

[Dazrix]

you can grab a lot more.... You just gotta commit people to it...

It's about stockpiling what commodities... The player should already be aware of disaster striking.

[Ovan]

Originally posted by Dazrix:

you can grab a lot more.... You just gotta commit people to it...

It's about stockpiling what commodities... The player should already be aware of disaster striking.

I don't mean after the ship is stuck and the game gives you the option. I mean the very start, when you can only gather one can of food and one bag of coal.

Even before you're allowed to put people to work on gathering those.

It feels odd that in the story, even before anything is out of order, they would travel on a diet and coal use that would condemn people to be starving and freezing.

[Dazrix]

You might notice that no one needs that coal usage... It's just a comfort level thing. Choose to burn as much/little as you want. But decisions very early on play a huge part in your decisions later.

[Dave]

I'm also really confused by the resource system. (I only got a few weeks in and still had the ship and then gave up because of the resource system)

You assign people to shovel coal, which I guess makes sense, but you're getting coal from the coal bunker... which is the place you store coal. There's nothing that says how much coal is in the bunker. And shoveling coal just creates cards... but don't you store your coal in your bunker? It's like it's treating the place your store your coal as a mining node instead of a storage pile. So I put 3 people to shovel coal from the place you store coal, and I got resource cards... so where is that shoveled coal? Did they move it from the bunker, ie the _place coal is stored_ to lying around on the floor in the engine room? What does a resource card actually represent? The coal has been in the ship the entire time, why do I suddenly have a card now?

And I need to assign people to move food through a door an into the next room? Like the coal, you have a store room, which it won't tell you how much food is in there, and you have to do the oh so strenuous task of moving it 1 room over to the galley. Why does that take so many men? What does a resource card of food even mean? Does it mean the food is on the floor in the galley now instead of in storage?

And I can shovel 1 "card" worth of coal, and move 1 "card" worth of food all on my own in 1 day while being the acting captain, but any other sailor can only move 1 "card" worth of resources in an entire week?

It all makes absolutely no sense to me and has been keeping me from being able to enjoy the rest of it, which looks like it would be awesome were it not for this horrible resource system.

[Puziko]

I agree. It was strange when you've barely left the land, but could already cut rations half, making people malnourished and freezing. And I did that, because it was my second run (after my stupidly failed first run) and I knew what was going to come and I needed stockpile in advance... Overall it is not a great decision. At the very least narratively.

Better to include more explanations and tooltips to how is everything works and give some request choices about not spending TOO MUCH of what you have, instead of giving an ability to cut rations to zero simply because you want to.

[Void*]

This was a bridge too far for me as well. I'm glad at least some other people feel the same way or were a bit baffled by this very strange 'inventory'. Why did we leave port with neither enough food/fuel to make it 1/4th of the way to the destination (and none for the return trip)?

It all makes absolutely no sense to me and has been keeping me from being able to enjoy the rest of it, which looks like it would be awesome were it not for this horrible resource system.

This is my frame of mind as well. I can not get past the awful resource/inventory management at the start of the game - as if the most incompetent quartermaster/captain put it together and somehow has lied to everyone about the totals. It breaks the immersion for me and takes me out of the games story and into 'number adjusting' mode. I no longer care about the story because the resource management at the start (I assume it gets better) is so... awkward to put it as nicely as I can.

Finally in my case at the end of week 2 I don't have enough food/fuel to give everyone standard rations or keep the engines running right. I am forced to half ration/burn and lose -20 decorum. I take it it's to make the game have some meaningful choices about where to send crew and what takes priority but alas that I was told we have enough food for months - and apparently it's enough for not even two weeks is so jarring.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Totally agree that the way resources work - especially at the start - is really strange. If the intent is to signify that this is the stuff we have grabbed from storage, then that makes no sense because:
1) At the start, there's no indication of disaster, so why would we be grabbing stuff from storage and stockpiling it already?
2) This whole stockpiling thing makes zero sense anyway, since if that's what's happening, where are we storing it? It's not the coal storage/pantry because that's where it came from, but then where else would we store these things except in those places (which are specifically designed to store these things)?
3) Finally, it's bonkers that due to bizarre restrictions at the start, we cannot actually feed or heat to what is considered "appropriate" levels...

In addition to this, while the loss of food supplies is normally represented by you losing "resource cards", there are other occasions where you lose resources from the "pot". In one case it also restricts your maximum resources - I guess we lost some pots/boilers? - but in another someone "steals" food and it comes from the pot, and they supposedly take it with them... so I guess they poured some of that stuff into some old cans or something?

Finally, although this was mentioned elsewhere, using lower rations and/or fuel should have more of an impact than it does. Having only one person become "starving" due to half rations, or two people due to "zero rations", makes little sense - unless someone was beating up those people and stealing their share of the food. As for the morale aspects, while I can understand morale continually lowering due to low rations, having it continually raise due to extra rations is a bit crazy - sure people will like it, but surely there should be some kind of threshold/limit?

[PugForce]

Originally posted by Dazrix:

you can grab a lot more.... You just gotta commit people to it...

It's about stockpiling what commodities... The player should already be aware of disaster striking.

You can stockpile it but it goes bad in like two weeks when it was supposed to be rations for 6 months.

Technically Hunt says something about the cans being tainted with Lead if you choose certain dialogues during your meeting with him if you enter the cave but there is no way to know that at the beginning so it just seems odd that we are told explicitly we have x rations but they spoil in like a week.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by PugForce:

You can stockpile it but it goes bad in like two weeks when it was supposed to be rations for 6 months.

They don't spoil from age, they spoil from damage in the flooding in week 6, though the dialogue happens in week 7.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2948120685

Supplies you stockpile never spoil.

You can acquire 15 crates of tinned food in total (4 by clicking manually in weeks 2-5, 4 from the Food Hold, 6 from assigning crew in weeks 4-5 and 1 from a request event), totalling 300 food and you start with 100 in the pot.

In total you need about 300 food to get through the whole game, so your supplies will indeed last nine months (not just six) if you ration them.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by PugForce:

Originally posted by Dazrix:

you can grab a lot more.... You just gotta commit people to it...

It's about stockpiling what commodities... The player should already be aware of disaster striking.

You can stockpile it but it goes bad in like two weeks when it was supposed to be rations for 6 months.

Technically Hunt says something about the cans being tainted with Lead if you choose certain dialogues during your meeting with him if you enter the cave but there is no way to know that at the beginning so it just seems odd that we are told explicitly we have x rations but they spoil in like a week.

As the one above me wrote, they don't spoil once you've grabbed them - the spoiled ones are those you get from the hold after it's been flooded for a while.

It's a shame that using the pumps does nothing to affect this in any way - would have expected using pumps to mitigate spoilage due to flood giving as an extra week to grab them (or alternatively not using the pumps could get things to spoil a week earlier), but nope - apparently pumps are only for combating freezing which isn't an issue at that time.

[PugForce]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

Originally posted by PugForce:

You can stockpile it but it goes bad in like two weeks when it was supposed to be rations for 6 months.

They don't spoil from age, they spoil from damage in the flooding in week 6, though the dialogue happens in week 7.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2948120685

Supplies you stockpile never spoil.

You can acquire 15 crates of tinned food in total (4 by clicking manually in weeks 2-5, 4 from the Food Hold, 6 from assigning crew in weeks 4-5 and 1 from a request event), totalling 300 food and you start with 100 in the pot.

In total you need about 300 food to get through the whole game, so your supplies will indeed last nine months (not just six) if you ration them.

The cans in my inventory spoil after a couple weeks and we can assume those weren't exposed to flooding since the coal in my inventory was not damaged. These cans were collected prior to the flood incident as you and the poster above mentioned but they change to spoiled at a certain point.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by PugForce:

The cans in my inventory spoil after a couple weeks...

No, they don't.

You get handed one Crate of Spoiled Rations by Junior in the event in the screenshot and can collect 2 by clicking the food store on the ship in weeks 6 and 7. You can also get a further 6 by assigning crew to collect food from the store in weeks 6 and 7.

Crates of Tinned Food can be left in the inventory for as long as you like, for example, here's a screenshot I just took of week 37:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2948697261
6x unused Crate of Tinned Food are still there just fine, along with the 3x Crate of Spoiled Rations that I got for free, as listed.

The item description for the Crates of Spoiled Rations:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2948718604
"Soggily exhumed from the Temperance." makes clear that the rations are water damaged. It is possible to acquire these items in weeks 6 and 7 and overnight between weeks 7 and 8. The number you have of them should never increase in any other week, and indeed a reasonably thorough check shows that this was true on multiple occasions for me - the number does not increase "like two weeks" after this period.

Perhaps you continued collecting spoiled rations in weeks 6 and 7 without noticing?

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by PugForce:

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

They don't spoil from age, they spoil from damage in the flooding in week 6, though the dialogue happens in week 7.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2948120685

Supplies you stockpile never spoil.

You can acquire 15 crates of tinned food in total (4 by clicking manually in weeks 2-5, 4 from the Food Hold, 6 from assigning crew in weeks 4-5 and 1 from a request event), totalling 300 food and you start with 100 in the pot.

In total you need about 300 food to get through the whole game, so your supplies will indeed last nine months (not just six) if you ration them.

The cans in my inventory spoil after a couple weeks and we can assume those weren't exposed to flooding since the coal in my inventory was not damaged. These cans were collected prior to the flood incident as you and the poster above mentioned but they change to spoiled at a certain point.

I've never once had non-spoiled cans turn into spoiled ones.