Nesting in survival

[The Ninja Scout]

First of all, I'd like to talk about what nesting is currently.
I think that making eggs should take less time in survival. There's no reason for a single egg to take 25 minutes to make, by being nested in you're not really skipping, if anything you are just going to make it take longer to grow because you start as a hatchling. I'd say it should take less, like an egg per 3 minutes or something. That time should also be how long it takes to be able to place a nest again after destroying your previous one.
Maybe the time to grow from hatchling to juvie could be reworked too to be less.

When other features that give nesting a point come in, then maybe it can be set to a higher value, but for now, along with the fact that nests do not save, nesting is unnecessarily tedious.

Here's what I think nesting could be like:

--Nest--
Max Food Capacity: 500 (Only males can put food in the nest)
Max Point Capacity: 25 (Gain one point per minute at the cost of 2 food points)
Every 5 points you get an egg unless you have the max number of eggs.
Max Egg Capacity: 4
Hatchling dinosaurs of your species can eat food / drink water from the nest.

Then maybe, spare points could be used to buy upgrades such as being able to store water, increasing the capacity of the various things you can store, adding and increasing the range of AOE effects like growing/healing/regerating stamina faster for all the group members when around it that require points to work. (Those effects could each consume maybe 1 point every 5 minutes)

Essentially, nests would become
- A "spawn point" for your friends. Lets say a herd of paras decide to move from a lake to another since they ate all the food. While traveling, some of the paras die. What would normally happen is, they'd just respawn as a juvi para in a completely random place and try to find their herd again, but with nesting, the paras that made it could just make a nest there and nest their friends in, so that they can be in a good place already with the group at the cost of having to go trough another life stage.

- Something that could be used to "mark territory". Let's say a pair of utahs are at a lake. The females could place nests all around the area and give them some AOE effects that make their group stronger, this way, if a lone carno walks in, they would have more chances of taking it down than if they didn't have nests.

- A new gameplay feature that requires players to work togheter to gain advantages.

[Sargon The Grape]

I could get behind this.

[PeasantKyr]

Nesting is not meant to be fast or easy. It is meant to be an investment.

Low values for nests would make it too easy to throw one down willy nilly, nest in the one guy who just wasted his life, and destroy that nest again.

What a nest should do, is anchor a player or group to a spot for a significant amount of time. Enough time to make players think, "is this fool worth more to the herd than the time and resources it would take to bring him back?" or "are we in a situation that would make nesting a good idea?"

The very fact that nesting is a way to grow a groups numbers is the reason it is powerful. This will be especially true when the larger maps make finding a particular person, or getting to a particular place, much harder to do.

Nesting should, and will, be easier for certain species, like utahs and gallis and paras, but not easy in general.

[Sargon The Grape]

Well I'm on dev branch, and nests already provide food for juvies (which they've been teasing us with for awhile), so we're already halfway there.

[The Ninja Scout]

Originally posted by Kyre:

Nesting is not meant to be fast or easy. It is meant to be an investment.

Low values for nests would make it too easy to throw one down willy nilly, nest in the one guy who just wasted his life, and destroy that nest again.

What a nest should do, is anchor a player or group to a spot for a significant amount of time. Enough time to make players think, "is this fool worth more to the herd than the time and resources it would take to bring him back?" or "are we in a situation that would make nesting a good idea?"

The very fact that nesting is a way to grow a groups numbers is the reason it is powerful. This will be especially true when the larger maps make finding a particular person, or getting to a particular place, much harder to do.

Nesting should, and will, be easier for certain species, like utahs and gallis and paras, but not easy in general.

But why should it not be easy? It made sense back then in progression, but now, if you get nested in, you're putting yourself in a disadvantage. At the very least, the point requirement shouldn't be 25, it just doesn't need to be that high.

[Why Watt]

Originally posted by The Ninja Scout:

Originally posted by Kyre:

Nesting is not meant to be fast or easy. It is meant to be an investment.

Low values for nests would make it too easy to throw one down willy nilly, nest in the one guy who just wasted his life, and destroy that nest again.

What a nest should do, is anchor a player or group to a spot for a significant amount of time. Enough time to make players think, "is this fool worth more to the herd than the time and resources it would take to bring him back?" or "are we in a situation that would make nesting a good idea?"

The very fact that nesting is a way to grow a groups numbers is the reason it is powerful. This will be especially true when the larger maps make finding a particular person, or getting to a particular place, much harder to do.

Nesting should, and will, be easier for certain species, like utahs and gallis and paras, but not easy in general.

But why should it not be easy? It made sense back then in progression, but now, if you get nested in, you're putting yourself in a disadvantage. At the very least, the point requirement shouldn't be 25, it just doesn't need to be that high.

Kyre adressed this; it is not useful atm, but it will be very advantageous down the line.

The maps will be large, frought with danger so being able to chose the 'where and when' is very valuable, as is being able to immidietly be in a group without having to come across others by chance.

It is not currently balanced with how short Survival growth times are, but they will eventually be roughly on-par with Progression; 20 hours to go from a hatchling to adult T.rex, for example. Therefore, being able to start off with allies that can defend you from smaller adversaries, in an area that has food, water and so on, is incredibly beneficial.

Tho, I do find your idea that males should be the only ones able to put food in nests would be a perfect thing to implement ASAP! It adresses the issue where males are utturly worthless in both Survival and Progression, yes the latter is being scrapped but a lot of people still enjoy playing it ATM while Survival is still barebones.

The group mechanics will inevitably get reworked.