Why We DOn't Need Food in SE

[Darkaiser]

After a lengthy period of research, I have attempted to figure out how the current level of SE tech might actually function. I hope to write a novel set in-game and I wanted to get it right as much as possible.

There are a number of pieces of technology that have been placed in the game simply in order to make the game work. This was done simply to work around the limitations of the engine itself. Space is BIG and all but the best PCs would melt down if we attempted to run an actual simulation based on real-world physics and distance. We also have to suspend disbelief on a few things:

Artificial gravity: It has been stated, many times, that this was done because the Devs did not have any other way to add gravity to the game early on. However, as a staple of the science fiction genre, I'm willing to forgive this one.

Jump Drive: Again, something added to the game to get around the engine's limitation of ~100 m/s speed. When we were limited to set maps of 50km or so, traveling at 100 m/s was dull but acceptable. With Procedural Maps, we now have a virtually limitless area to play in. Cruising at 60 mph won't cut it.

Lack of Food: This one was sticking in my craw for a while now. Lots of Survival players wanted it but we didn't want it to be just another pointless bar on the HUD. After chatting with several very intelligent friends of mine (Make friends with smart people. Trust me...), I finally worked this out; Our Engineers aren't really people any more. They're cyborgs with what amounts to a brain in a box tooling around in a body. Here's why that works:

Surviving in space is HARD. Assuming that you don't get hit by something (which wouldn't happen a lot under most circumstances), an Engineer would need food, water, air and protection from the environment. You want to know why we haven't been to Mars yet? Everyone would die from radiation. Shielding is heavy and heavy means harder to lift into space. Not to mention the whole food/water/air thing. However, later this year neuroscientists in Russia hope to complete the first transplant of a human head onto another body. Yep...science-fiction stuff right there.

SE takes place around 2077. If the whole-head transplant takes place this year then it won't take too many years before such a thing will become, not commonplace exactly but certainly less weird-sounding. Think heart transplant now. It's not beyond the scope of medical science that a human brain could be placed in a tank of nutrient fluid and then hooked up to some sort of artificial body within 50 years.

Now you have all the benefits of a human crew member, including creative thinking, problem-solving and all of that, with almost none of the drawbacks. Radiation? Shield the body. Vacuum of space? You only need to maintain the pressure of the brain compartment. Oxygen? Same thing. Keep the brain alive and you're golden. Power? Yep...you would deffinately need that. So...now you have an astronaut that only needs power and oxygen to survive, sleeps very seldom (the mind gets tired), is immune to vacuum and unaffected by radiation. Sound familiar?

Cryo tubes: The whole 'cyborg astronaut' thing works better here too. A cyborg crew would consume FAR fewer resources for a long voyage in space. They would suffer few of the hazards as well. What about boredom? With a human brain as part of the system, this would still be an issue. One possible solution could be the existing cryo tubes except that cryogenics would not be part of the system. You put the body on a trickle charge to keep it ready and then put the brain into a chemically-induced sleep for long periods. The mind dreams the trip away and the crew could be awakened in rotation to maintain the ship. The main reason would be to prevent boredom and social breakdown. Even if you liked everyone, traveling in a closed environment for YEARS with the same people would drive anyone a bit nuts.

Medical Bay: I've been shot and have lost 90% of my Health. Standing in front of this glowy panel for two minutes completes fixes everything. HUH? Of course, this is yet another staple of computer games and is done for playability. Yet, in the world I just described, it could work. If the android bodies are interchangable (no reason why they couldn't be), the only unique component would be the brain. If the brain compartment could survive outside the body (built-in batteries, a small container of O2, etc), then moving the compartment to a new body might be as simple as plung-and-play.

So there you have it. Engineers in SE don't NEED food. Much of the technology would work (gravity gens and jump drives aside). For someone like me that likes to make sense of things, this works.

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

Lol seems legit.....so instead of food and water we need uranium and hydrolic fluid :)

[Twelve]

it might make more sense to you but i still think of my char as a fragile human. if i were an andriod id just stick my hand in a fire to solve a problem no worries ill just go get a new hand.. i dont like playing like that. i like consequences.

also i strongly feel that gameplay mechanics should be fun most of all, if they are realistic as well then its just a bonus.
so adding food to me boils down to how its done, done right hell yes, done wrong, hell no.

survival is set to be reworked as you probably heard, personally for me this could (or not) be one of the best updates yet.

tl;dr i wouldnt think too much about the tech from a logical perspective.

[casualsailor]

I wouldn't mind adding a need for food and water into the game as long as it was like O2 and it was an option that could be disabled.

But for those that argue most vehemently for this option I'd remind them that people argued vociferously for planets too. And they were not the panacea to cure all of SE's ills but in many ways the source of a whole new set of issues.

[1stbiker]

A biological brain plus an exosuit would much more luck like Chappie[s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com].

I also like to see Survival elemelnts soon, have a look at Empyrion its fun to hunt/plant, grow and eat.

[Sich]

Food can be a good thing, if we get a big improvement on planet (local wildlife, plants, etc).
But it's not the most important, I think that we need tech tree, progression, reason to go to planet / moon / space...

[zignotzag]

Yet, most science fiction set far into the future still have humans eating. Heck, even in Dune which is something like 8000 years from now.

The game is not ready for a change like that now anyway. If done it has to be done with conviction to avoid that "lack of direction" which has been noted by others. KSH cant just keep adding such features and not integrate them into the gameplay experience. You cant just keep going with everything as always optional and end with a cohesive base survival mode IF that is the goal. That is how you get a game that doesnt know what it is.

Not saying that it would be good or bad, just that old bit "If you try to please all, you please none"

[2000]

Food? NO. Power management? YES

[Darkaiser]

Several very good points made here. I thank you for the civil and well thought-out responses.

Let's go a different way then. IF we go with the human astronaut in a suit method, we're back to several of the same issues. I'd like to see this done well in Survival as well. Like many of you have already said...if we're going to do it, do it right!

1) Food: Personally, I think we need to change some of the mechanics of the Engineer in order to make this work well. Nobody wants just another bar on the HUD and, truth be told, our current time scale is a bit broken anyhow. What I would do would be to require food once every 24 hours (a person can function that long without food and suffer no long-term effects). For every 24 hours that passes in-game without you eating something, your Engineer loses 5% of their Health and 5% of their carrying capacity. Face it, you're weak from hunger. If Food is another thing we can produce and then dispense at the Med Bay, then we're fine and we don't need another bar on the HUD.

2) Air: Our current system for this isn't bad right now. I would rather see the suit's base capacity raised and limit the number of air bottles we can carry but that's a relatively minor point. One thing that NEEDS to happen though is a limiter needs to be put on the O2 Generator and the O2 Tank to keep them from filling past 80% or so. I can't tell you how many times I've mined Ice, had it fill the O2 Generator and then there's no room to slip a bottle in there to refill. Same for drawing the air out of a room and into an O2 Tank. The Tank is always full and there's no room for the air to go.

3) Water: Face it, if we're going to have Food we might as well have Water. This would be easy if we hooked it into the Med Bay as I mentioned above. Use the same system as I mentioned for Food but instead of 24 hours you get 12 before you suffer ill effects. We don't need any new resources for this since Water is a natural byproduct of cracking Ice for Hydrogen. We just need a Water Tank to store it in.

4) Power. This one makes me a bit nuts. Without any use of tools, lights or jet pack, we have like 30 minutes of power, tops. Seriously? If we added a tech level system then better suits should be able to carry more Power in one trip. Either way, we should have portable batteries we can carry (like the O2 and Hydrogen bottles we have now) to extend our suit life. The top-tier suit should have a photovoltaic skin so walking around wouldn't drain the suit at all as long as there is sunlight on you.

5) Hazards: Survival Mode NEEDS more hazards other than running out of resources, drones and critters coming to get us. How about radiations storms? Solar flares? Dust storms? Weather on Planets? Earthquakes on Planets? Venting gasses on asteroids? Space is DANGEROUS. If we had more of these things to overcome, Survival Mode would be MUCH less boring!

[Malakai030]

my two cents:


for 1. and 3.) I think the "Hunger and Thirst" mod does a very good job in making food for the astronaut. You crack down water from ice, you have to clean it to make it drinkable and then you fill it into small packets of fresh water. Same for food: You need fresh water and gravel to grow plants and make nutrient paste. Another machine makes real food out of that stuff, and youre good to go.
I like how it is done in this mod. You need some machines, but you don't need new storage blocks and ice and gravel get new uses.

For 2.) In that case (what mostly regards an airlock for small ships on my home base) I have an extra oxgen tank that is not connected to the rest. It has it's own vent so I can suck the air out of the room when the other tanks are full and fill it whenever I need it.

I'm totally with you regarding usability of environment. I mean, why not eat the wolves and spiders I kill? I bet they're yummy.

4.) Yeah, some tiered modules would be nice to stack up the different capacities.
But I don't like the idea of tech levels for SE and progressing a tech tree. In the actual case your ships don't get better because you level up, they get better because you lean more and more about the game and it's functions. The timer block opened up a whole new world to me when I understood how it works and what I can do with it. So I like the idea of everything being accessible from beginning, but I think finding the stuff you need to build it should be harder.

Some ores should be only available on planets and some only in space, so that you, for instance, cannot build a jump drive unless you visited a planet and found that specific ore.

5.) Totally agree, and there should be ways to warn you about upcoming threats, like a weather radar, a seismograph and stuff. Radiation would make the gameplay much deeper, since that is a common problem in space. You could make uranium radiate, making it dangerous to farm it, plus a radiation shield or so to protect you ;)


Quote
"So there you have it. Engineers in SE don't NEED food. Much of the technology would work (gravity gens and jump drives aside). For someone like me that likes to make sense of things, this works."

I say, give the astronaut food and it works, too ;) I like the feeling of being a lonesome guy on a mission or just crashed down, working for survival and exploration :)

[Twelve]

Originally posted by Darkaiser:

5) Hazards: Survival Mode NEEDS more hazards other than running out of resources, drones and critters coming to get us. How about radiations storms? Solar flares? Dust storms? Weather on Planets? Earthquakes on Planets? Venting gasses on asteroids? Space is DANGEROUS. If we had more of these things to overcome, Survival Mode would be MUCH less boring!

this 100%. also ways to detect things like storms etc that give you prior warning of their arrival..like a radar block.

basically any reason to use your creations, right now you build a fancy new large ship.. great what are you gonna do with it? basically your gona go to creative throw some pirate drones at it then if your proud enough upload it to the workshop. game over. oh hey theres an update for xxx.
keen has to create a need to do things.

[bigbadvoodoodady_1]

Originally posted by MinionJoe:

What kind of space game doesn't have food in it? Astronauts have to eat, you know.

Especially when they're wandering around on planets and fighting off wolf attacks.

Kerbal Space Program, X-Universe, Elite Dangerous...

Need I continue? The point is... ITS A GAME, MY CHARACTER EATS AFTER A LONG GAMING SESSION (just like me). I'll pass on that hurdle, that "other game" has it, and I'm drinking water and eating every 5min, I'm surprised I'm not leaving massive turds everywhere on the planet; just plain stupid.

In other words... that's a eating and sea weed gathering simulator...I'd rather build things.

[bigbadvoodoodady_1]

Originally posted by MinionJoe:

Originally posted by bigbadvoodoodady_1:

...I'd rather build things.

Why are you playing a game called "Space Engineers" if you don't want to walk around on planets, fight wolves, and grow crops?

Because that game would be called "Space Farming/Agriculture" starring Matt Damon!

[2000]

im against adding any more check boxes. But ai reckon I would be OK with adding just one more. The "enable / disable all the rediculous crap that a bunch of people that didnt understand how or didnt have the desire or capacity to enjoy this game demanded in an attempt to make it just like other games that they do enjoy" Then players could globally disable all of the farm animals, vitamin paste vending machines, elves in magic caves, fish farms, progressive crafting systems, aerodynamics, dating sims, level up perks, barber shops etc etc etc with one simple mouse click

[SpetS]

when you don't even care if you die in a game. food mechanics turns into a decorative feature, or something to do, or to annoy someone.
Minecraft for example, if you are out and far from your base/home and then you die, there is no indication or mark of where your body and stuff dropped. I remember loosing valuable items, hours of mining, farming, because I cannot find my body location. Don't remember if there is an option in SE to turn off body location on the GPS, but if there is one, I'm pretty sure nobody is going to turn that off, like permanent dead, I don't think anyone use it.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Games are defined by pressure. This pressure can be anything. A given activity might be fun by itself, or generate fuel for a different fun activity. Pressure can come from the desire to overcome a challenge, explore new places, or see a narrative to completion. The creative urge often presses players in sandbox games to construct a new vehicle or building, or design and test a new mechanism. Pressure can even come from something external to the game itself, as with edutainment games and training exercises. But if there's no good reason pressing players to do something in a game, it doesn't get done.

The lack of pressure is a glaring problem with Space Engineers. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. In Space Engineers, resources are easy to come by, threats are minimal, and survival is trivial. There is no embedded narrative and no end goal. Exploration means little, as planets are all premade and asteroids aren't compelling. The SE community have made campaigns, PVP scenarios, and exploration mods to create new pressures, but these are supplemental to the game rather than complementary.

SE's building system and physics simulation have great depth, but its gameplay lacks direction. The idea of agriculture in SE is not about having a new bar to fill, but the implications of that bar. Filling that bar will take equipment. That equipment will need to be constructed. That construction will take resources, planning, designing, redesigning, time, and more steel plates than you originally thought. Filling that bar is going to take Engineering.