Food and water and indeed most things decay too fast.

[T0nedude]

As the title, these are just some of the more unfun aspects of the game once you get over the initial hurdle and my brother and I constantly find ourselves moaning about the housekeeping of all the consumables, when all we want to do is explore the next island or story mission.

The easier difficulties shouldn't just affect the HP of the hostiles but maybe also tone down the decay rate of the consumables. Steaks for example and cooked potatoes I don't eat that many in a day ffs, I'b be spending the next 3 weeks in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I did.

Items made with metal ingots for example, don't last that long at all...and after a while the search to replenish items just isn't that fun as everything decays or wears down so fast.

Give it some thought please devs...and yes I know there are mods to alter this but I thought I would bring this to the devs for their feedback.

[Kathykins]

Properly prepared meals, made using the Cooking Pot, will last much longer than grilled food. Beets/potatoes are pretty usless when grilled, they hardly fill anything. I usually have a harvest station for drumsticks (2 nests for seagulls), those will last me through until I have the cooking pot. The initial material cost for the bow and arrows are worth it, because I don't need more than 3-5 arrows. You get arrows back when you loot the bird/s.

Now water, that's another matter. I seem to drink all day, and fortunately it is water not something stronger. Poor Maya would be permanently drunk otherwise. And I play on Peaceful. It doesn't seem much different from the other difficulties at all. I've not played the others enough to actually see any difference, anyway. At least there should be a noticably slower decay the easier game setting you use.

[Scourn]

Go to raft modding, honestly, this game is pretty terrible without the community of modders there. There is mods for both food/water and other spammers these devs think should be there just for the sake of it. I could understand if food/water was hard to get but neither is. Its just pointless tedium for the sake of it.

[Kathykins]

I started using mods a few weeks ago, and quite frankly I can't go back to vanilla now. Not using any for food/water yet because I have practically a chest full of food I can't hope to empty any time soon, and electric purifyer works very well for filling my bottles. I'm only ever playing solo, though, so when someone is playing with more people.....might want to look into modding.

To be honest, I mod almost every game where mods are available. Sims 4? Played modded almost since the start. Tried unmodded earlier this year for testing purposes, but didn't last even a week XD I NEED mods there to even be able to play mostly bug and annoyance free. I chuckle a bit when people say games I play on Steam are bug-ridden. Clearly they haven't played the Triple-A buggy mess that is Sims. Their Answers HQ is full of reports.

Sorry, didn't mean to go on a Sims-rampage :D

[SnakeEyedBlaze]

I haven't dealt with any decay, not sure why everything is breaking down on you.

[T0nedude]

Originally posted by SnakeEyedBlaze:

I haven't dealt with any decay, not sure why everything is breaking down on you.

So you don't have to eat/drink constantly or items wear down over time? You must have installed a mod and forgotten about it then.

And to others thanks for the suggestions - I have used the cooking pot to give a bit of a boost and cooked meals - but after over 40 hours of playing one particular game with my brother - the decay still seems a little aggressive - I guess it's going to have to be looking at mods to maybe tailor the game a little to what i think it should be.

Thanks all.

[ajfusch]

For me, it was a problem at the start, but once I had 2 grillls I didn't have real problems with water or food anymore. Of course if you play with another person that would be 4 grills ...
I got the impression that it's easier to play by yourself than with friends, tbh.

As for the items ... yes, they get used up eventually, but not *that* fast. Again, might be a problem at the start, when your very first hook or spear wears down, but a bit later I have several pieces of all tools and weapons stored up.

As for food now, that I have the big grill and the cooking pot: I have food stored that will probably last me through the whole rest of the game .... And I pick up ingredients all the time.
And talking about the food being unrealistic in this game: Depending on what you eat you eat much more than IRL, yes. On the other hand no food EVER goes bad. Or cold. You cook a warm meal, store it in a chest and can eat it 30 days later and it's still tasty, filling and hot ;-)

No idea where your problems lie if you play on easy as I do. Apart from, yeah, maybe it's harder with 2 people.

Oh, and for both the grill and the cooking pot I also can recommend the seagulls. I don't use the bow for them anymore, though, I just kill them with the spear.

[Kathykins]

I'm too slow to kill the seagulls with a spear. They fly away before I get a hit in. I just find it clunky to handle, and prefer ranged attack :)

[Scourn]

Originally posted by Kathykins:

I'm too slow to kill the seagulls with a spear. They fly away before I get a hit in. I just find it clunky to handle, and prefer ranged attack :)

turn a scarecrow around so it's facing away from you and they will attack the back of it most of the time. Easy kill for drumsticks for meals. If for some reason it still goes to the front put a fence post in front of the scarecrow and it will only go to the back.

[Puma]

The problem is that survival games need constant upkeep tasks to keep up the "countdown to death". To stave off the countdown is a core aspect of the genre. Balancing the "housekeeping" and maintenance with the need to explore and progress is one of the core element of this game. And the game does a pretty good job at keeping the player busy while also offering solutions to make a larger initial investment for reduced need of tedious human labor in the future.

Drumsticks are a fine solutions when you're rafting alone, but it doesn't scale up well. With more people, more birds wont' show up. So for more people you need a solution that you have more control over. And the game offers pretty good farming solutions to reduce the time the players spend farming. The problem is that humans tend to naturally want to optimize maintenance tasks. And to way to optimize farming is to get into a sort of routine, which in turn becomes repetitive and tedious very quickly. So the natural solution to try farm the food where you get the best return for the human labor and to scale up even further. So you can farm when you have the time, so you can then abandon the farming while you do the exploration etc.

The problem is that the game disincentivizes this with an absolutely insane "craving" mechanic, where you get less hunger the less hungry you are. Which makes no gameplay sense or real-world sense. To minimize the need for tedious and repetitive human labor, the player will gravitate towards a behavior that make the food last longer. And that is to eat only when you're close to starving.

In terms of gameplay mechanics this turns the hunger into two separate countdowns. The countdown-to-death (ie. when your food stockpile actually runs out) and need-to-eat. And incentivizing the the player to keep the need-to-eat timer low turns it from a meaningful gameplay element to an annoying nagging pop-up that you constantly need to click away.

And making the player choose between the tedium of farming and the tedium of small meals is a terrible gameplay design. Because both are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tedious and offer nothing in terms of challenge.

And on a semi-related note, the cooking pot is absolutely useless. All the recipes give way less satiation for the effort compared to just cooked potatoes.

[Kathykins]

I honestly never farm, all the ingredients I have I gather while exploring and looking for other materials. I end up with chests full of all the ingredients I could ever need. And a full chest of cooked meals too. I never just cook potatoes/beets, except maybe in the very beginning of a game. I'd rather get materials for a fishing pole. Fruits from islands are also better, as they satisfy thirst as well, though they don't do much for hunger. I pick everything regardless.

I don't find any use for potatoes/beets (I don't even use them for biofuel) before I have the cooking pot. The meals from the pot satisfy a lot more, and give a bonus to your hunger bar.

[Puma]

Kathy, random loot is subject to the same limitations as the drumsticks. It doesn't scale well.

When there are more people on the raft, there is still the same amount of barrels in the trash flow. The raft speed remains the same. The frequency of encountered islands remains the same. Even assuming that you loot every bit of food that you possibly can, there is still some fixed average maximum amount that you can possibly collect per hour. And at some number of players, that just isn't going to be enough anymore. And at that point, you need a scaleable solution that you have control over.

And when it comes to scaleable solutions farming is so obviously more efficient than fishing. I will have harvested, re-planted and watered 3 small crop plots before your first fish bites.

And meals from the pot don't "satisfy a lot more". In best cases they satisfy a little more, but in a lot of cases they satisfy less than just cooking the ingredients individually.

For example in the case of Simple Fish Stew, cooking and eating the ingredients individually will give you +70 hunger, where as the stew will give you +40 hunger. Vegetable soup will give you +40 also, where as the ingredients would give you +60. Catfish deluxe will give you +100, where as the ingredients would give you +130. So when you take into account that every meal also consumes a half a clay, the cooking pot just isn't worth it.

[Kathykins]

Puma, I do see your point, absolutely. And you are right about the amount of hunger from raw ingredients vs. cooked meal. I just believe they need to increase the hunger satisfaction on the meals, to make it more worth while. I have no experience with multi-player, so can't add anything meaningful on that.

If using the example of the Simple Fish Stew, I'd need to eat 4 times (+time to grill at least he fish first), 2 fish and 2 beet/potato. Instead I choose to cook it all together and eat once. I never let my hunger go very low, so one meal should be enough. Though, have to mention, I very rarely actually use fish in my cooking, at some point I just stop fishing (usually before hitting Vasagatan). Only the large fish are worth grilling at this point, the rest just doesn't fill much. From there, food isn't a problem. There are enough cooked meals found in the story locations to last me quite a long time. For me its a time vs how filling the meal is. Less time eating is good.

It makes sense to me, for the bowls to vanish after a meal. They're made from raw clay and wouldn't realistically last long. But, not every bowl, so I use a mod to some times give a bowl back from eating a meal. And while farming is more efficient, its not something I want to spend time on, or allocate space on my raft for.

[Puma]

I have never played this alone. And this isn't the kinda game I would ever consider playing alone. I bought the game on christmas and started a new game with a friend. Steam tells everyone on your friends list when ur playing a game (I have 70+ Steam friends), and by day 3 there were three of us, and by day 4 there were 4 of us. I doesn't matter even if you have never personally played multiplayer, you can still do math, and understand that more players means more mouths to feed. If you alone can loot 150% of the food you need from islands and barrels, and thus have a 50% surplus filling up ur storage boxes. When you add just a second player the food consumption goes up by 100% and suddenly ur at a 50% deficit. Add 2 more players and the deficit is much more obvious.

Time-spent-eating is a non-issue since you can eat while walking/swimming/diving/exploring. I'm not stopping to eat ever. I have a full stack of cooked potatoes in my hotbar at all times and I'm eating whenever I'm about to starve and walking from one end of the raft to the other. The problem is that the game incentivizes you to only eat when near starvation, even when you have room in your hunger bar and food on you.

Wasting food is a non-issue in situations where you already have a surplus, and have done nothing tedious to get that surplus. But when you have to resort to farming to feed everyone, then you're going to want to make the best of the food you got, to minimize the need for aforementioned farming. So when player faces a penalty for eating when not starving, then they won't.

When it comes to evaluating the cost of food in game, I think the only relevant metric is the amount of repetitive and non-engaging human labor. I mentioned the clay, not as a criticism of the bowl being consumed, but as a thing we need to take into account when determining the relation between effort and yield. Because getting the clay takes human effort, we need to take it into account when determining the total cost of the cooking pot meal.

Cooking on the large grill scales up much better than the cooking pot. In the time you have taken a meal into a bowl, added ingredients and re-started the cooking on a single cooking pot, I will have harvested and re-filled so many large grills that it's not even funny. There is a reason why in our playthrough, we mostly ended up eating cooked potatoes all the time. And if I were to start a new game today I would go even more hard core with the potatoes, so that we could more readily absorb the penalty you get from eating when not starving.

I don't have anything against tools wearing out. It keeps up the constant demand to gather-or-perish. Without it the game would become stale and boring super fast. And arguments can be made for and against the nutrition you get from the cooked meals (I personally agree with Kathy, that the nutrition from cooked meals could use a boost). But there is no sane justification for the craving mechanic. It doesn't add difficulty or challenge, it's just an annoyance to have to press a couple of buttons every 2 minutes. It's the equivalent of an annoying nagging pop-up window that you have to dismiss over and over again.

[Shame on you]

Originally posted by Puma:

....

You are right that the Ressource income dont scale with more players
So in the Startgame you maybe dont get enough ressources to survive with 4 men on a mini raft. (Fishing rods need material, and Firewood usage raises per player)

As soon as you have Solar Water cleaner and some Garden plots it doesnt matter anymore.

At that point one can Fish and Farm and gather enough Food for 10 Players
And no the pot is not senseless, you know, you can build 5 or 10 (more slow down the Ship upgrading) I havwe now 2 Crates full of Prepared meals, and enough to Cook enough to fill several additional crates

[Kathykins]

Puma, you have about 60 more Steam-friends than I do XD Glad people are joining you and you all have fun with it. Me, I'm not that interested in multiplayer. Heck, I'm "offline" on steam all the time, so nobody would see what I'm playing anyway. Unless they check, of course. 4 of my 9 friends have previously played. 1 plays pretty regularly, but she's not someone I know really, but someone I talked to in a discussion here. Would it be fun to play with others? Why not, I'd like to try it, I'm sure my buds will play again some day, maybe when the next chapter releases. I'm not into joining "randoms" in any game, not even in the MMO I'm playing. I've not had many good experiences with unknown people in games. I find it very awkward, as I'm quite reclusive, and it transfers over to my games as well.

Anyway, sorry for derailing! Its a whole different game you play, compared to mine. I only have myself to provide for, and of course, I have to provide all the human labor as well. There is more than enough resources around so I don't have to go searching for it. I pick up whatever is on my way, with very little effort. I've played through the game up to and including Tangaroa at least 10 times, so probably learned something along the way. I find every new game, I'm a bit more efficient in current playthrough than the previous. I remember ('ish) where all the lootcrates around the islands are (both on land and in water/caves), so don't have to search much for those. I don't spend much time fishing, last 5-6 games I've used up maybe 3 fishing poles, and that was early game. Grilled meat/shark is more filling + of course seagull drumsticks. The latter cooks really fast and they are pretty filling.

The problem is of course, as mentioned, same resources spawn no matter how many people are playing. I don't know how difficult it would be to add a system with multipliers for resources, though. But something the devs might give some thought. Same with grilled food vs cooked in pot. Make cooked meals more filling. As they should be. I love a good baked potato, but 1 is never enough, its not a proper meal.