Please twink the Food consumtion back to "normal"

[1stbiker]

Hey there - my first game was before the survival-mode and I loved it.

Some weeks ago I started over again and had to do the survival, which was challenging game. The last patch has made the game unplayable to me because the food-level still goes down quick, but the efford to make food has now increased 10 times (you now need 50g Flour for one Cereal Bar instead of 5g).

The Game is now just a constant run for food-generation. Not much time for anything else anymore. Thats a pitty.

[Corbit]

There is a slider setting in gameplay options for hunger.

[CaPY]

Also starting amount of food is low, I cant start on mars without running out of food before growing starts. I run on default settings and eating when health is below 10.

[garyp156]

Set your food slider to .1. That'll keep you from having to eat all the time.

Truly, it's not the food that is the problem, it's the time scale is turned up way too far. A 24hour day in 10 minutes sucks.
This means you have to eat 3 meals in 15 minutes. That's a LOT of cereal bars.

I'd love to see a way to set the 24hr clock longer, then we wouldn't have to eat so much.

[PipAlmighty]

They added the solar slider, but I've never gotten it to move. Supposedly you can increase and decrease the length of the day with it, but I've not ever gotten it to slide.

[garyp156]

Originally posted by ßȺ Verrtig0:

They added the solar slider, but I've never gotten it to move. Supposedly you can increase and decrease the length of the day with it, but I've not ever gotten it to slide.

Where is it located?? I must have missed it.

[5$ Lewdboxes]

The solar slider is locked while in a game. It should work when still in the main menu.

[Mazian]

1. Make a baked potatoe instead of a cereal bar. The current caloric value of a baked potatoe makes it the best compared to any other food item in game. (When you compare hunger restored vs time invested. And it's been that way since before the recent increase in flour cost to cereal bars.)

2. Always wait until you're taking health damage before eating. When you eat before then, you top off at 100% hunger (full) and waste food calories that you consume. When you take damage from hunger and then eat, eating both restores your health as well as hunger. A baked potatoe can take from you starving/damaged and 0% hunger up to 100% hunger and heal starvation damage at the same time. The alerts related to hunger add an increased sense of urgency that probably needs to be tuned. (I think the alerts create an unreasonable sense of urgency, once I learned how to stretch food supplies using this technique.)

3. I don't believe solar slider changes the actual biological clock on food consumption, just the rate at which the day-night cycle alternates. I'll admit I haven't tested it myself.

4. You can hit ESC > Settings to look up the Hunger Rate and turn it down, even all the way to zero and completely remove the hunger mechanic.


Honestly, I think everything in the game needs a tuning pass. This is still very early in the Early Access process. They're adding content and are not side tracking themselves excessively by trying to tune everything that is in game already (when they would rather spend those work cycles adding more content, which would only then have to be re-tuned again after the new content gets added.)

Waiting until the polishing pass to finalize how things are tuned saves them a ton of hours in labor. It's just normal behavior.

[Qybat]

Proposal for the devs: Suit/food link. Spacesuits are heavy things - it makes sense for a character who is moving around in suit to burn through calories substantially faster than one who is not suited. So reduce food usage when the suit pack and helmet are taken off (Or, equivilently, increase it when they are worn). That way players will be able to practice food conservation measures, and it gives a real incentive to maintain a breathable atmosphere within the base. Plus you get to show off the uniforms more.

As players will surely be unhappy about the loss of inventory space, you might want to also add a backpack item which fits in the same slot but does nothing other than provide inventory slots.

[Daggoth]

Originally posted by Qybat:

Proposal for the devs: Suit/food link. Spacesuits are heavy things - it makes sense for a character who is moving around in suit to burn through calories substantially faster than one who is not suited. So reduce food usage when the suit pack and helmet are taken off (Or, equivilently, increase it when they are worn).

Problem is that front-loads the hunger burden on those who can least afford it, people just starting a new world and are running around madly trying to set up hydroponics.

I'd suggest a sort of stop-gap measure that trades hunger for something else. Possibly some sort of powered device that slows the hunger rate. Trade power management (which you get almost immediately but never seem to have quite enough) for retaining those quickly-depleting cereal bars.
It'd also take up an inventory space and battery so you'd have to think if you really need it early on. At the same time, established players can handle it easily so you reduce the food grind. Have an advanced version that provides better hunger/power efficiency to aim for so that you can pretty much forget about food for a while when doing end-game stuff.

[Qybat]

If the rush to hydroponics is too difficult, perhaps the solution is just to increase starting food supply. I still like the idea of reducing food use when out of suit though, just because of the incentive it provides to really get into atmospherics.

[Daggoth]

Originally posted by Qybat:

If the rush to hydroponics is too difficult, perhaps the solution is just to increase starting food supply. I still like the idea of reducing food use when out of suit though, just because of the incentive it provides to really get into atmospherics.

Increasing starting food is fine, if a bit "lazy". It works at the moment because early access and all that, but we're already getting a full crate of cereal bars dropped down at it just seems out of place to have so many of a single-stack consumable at the start.
The reduced hunger out of suits is a good idea, so maybe perhaps combine it with a new super-powered "survival rations" spawn item to help the startup. That way you get enough time to startup without having the disconnect of having a supermarket's worth of supplies drop with you (just tweak how much the rations fill you up instead of dropping more cereal bars), as well as an incentive to get breathable atmosphere at some point.

[Qybat]

If we are thinking of a special starting 'super-ration' then I suggest also thinking a bit about how it might tie in to the food production system as a whole, and into wider manufacturing beyond that. We have the rudiments of a chemistry system in place which may be involved. Perhaps a 'suit pouch' container which is unique in being the only food item that can be consumed with the helmet closed, but which can only be manufactured or refilled at a chemistry station once the initial supply is depleted.

[Treveri]

Just about every survival game out there over does the food and water needs. As one person said, here it appears to be the RL time of a day makes the need to eat become a monotonous, constant, task.

Think about it, almost every survival game cripples you with food and water needs at the low levels until you finally over come it to the point its never a threat again, just an annoyance that eventually leads you to search for another game to play.

Its why I prefer God Mode base builders to First Person base builders. Then the minions are the ones that have to worry about eating and drinking and sleeping ... you just have to provide it.

[Heightmare]

Thats the problem with a lot of base building games I've found - initially there are many threats you need to address but once they've all been mitigated then things get pretty stale. We're working on some stuff that'll hopefully make that established-base life a bit more interesting, with the game ready with an array of spanners to toss into the works.

[PriorUniform721]

I think the method of making things like day length and hunger rate configurable is a reasonable approach.

The way I see it, its like training. I think our stationeers are not ordinary Joes dropped on The Moon, Mars, Europa into an asteroid belt. To me it seems likely that they are trained in space survival.

I came into the game only a few patches ago, hunger, depleting non-reusable filters and so on. I died because my CO2 filter went out. I learned. Now make sure to get a pipe bender early on. I lived. I did OK w/ power systems off the bat, but now I get to automated solar much faster. I still have hunger turned off. I am just now getting into atmospherics/hydroponics. I am training for food self-sufficiency.

Making these kinds of things tunable is a low effort way for the devs to make the game customizable for the end user. The devs can also learn (through feedback) good balance. Maybe in the future the raw float inputs for day and hunger scale become sliders. Or parts of a difficulty setting.

Now if you'll excuse me I have some Ice to collect.