Food System - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

[Senyin]

Everyone seems to be hating this food system, but I will give you my honest feedback.
Me and the husband started a game from scratch just like you recommended.
It's just us two VS the world.
For Context on how far we are - We just started going into the swamp.

The Good
I have to plan what I eat depending on where I go or what kind of weapons I use.
The timer on the food is a massive help. It lets us decide better on when to eat the next meal instead of wasting food.
I appreciate that the health/stamina slowly ticks down - and isn't just a sudden drop off when your food buff is gone. However, I do think it should start going down at half-time or when the image starts to -blink-, not when my character still feels full.
The multiple new food items makes cooking far more fun.
I love the new cooking stations and now I can set the table with food? I LOVE that.


The Bad
I have only found 1 food item that gives a stamina buff. Queens Jam.
As someone who is trying a dagger/stealth build, I need Stamina. I am constantly running out of stamina from just swinging my dagger and dodge rolling. I often get killed quickly because I must choose to either take a hit, swing my dagger, or run away.

My husband wanted to use two handed weapons, but since we can only make meals with large HP boost - he has gone tank with a shield. However, he runs out of stamina quickly from blocking/swinging. Eventually leading him to get hit to much and killed.

We got a bit of Iron and I was able to make an iron cooking rack. We thought this would provide more stamina items... but it didn't.


The Ugly
I think the issue lies in that the food items simple do not give enough Heath and Stamina on a base level. Especially Stamina. Something required to do absolutely anything in this game.
Wood Cutting/Mining/Running/Exploring/Swinging/Blocking
/Dodging/Hoe/Cultivator/Building/Repairing/Etc.
Absolutely everything you do in this game requires stamina and after this update, my character is always exhausted. So much of my time is now spent waiting for my stamina to recover instead of playing the game.

On the subject of cultivating. Farming is a bit of a nightmare.
Planting carrot seeds and only getting 1 carrot is understandable. It makes sense in a real world situation, but game-mechanic wise - especially when you have more foods that need more vegetables - it becomes a time consuming mess.
Not to mention if your feeding up to 10 people.
Farming needs to feel rewarding. Taking the time to make a cultivator, create some farmland, plant a good 10-20 seeds and waiting several in game days should feel rewarding.
If I plant 10 seeds and got back 30 carrots [3 per seed] I would be thrilled. That makes cooking far more easy, and I can set 10 carrots to the side to get 30 seeds back, and continue growing.
Tamed animals should be the same. If I have taken the time to capture an animal, use resources taming them, take time breeding them, I should feed rewarded.
Boars you have tamed only dropping 1 meat [or just leather if unlucky] makes taming creatures simple not worth the time or effort.
Yes you can tame 2 star Boars, but it comes back to the question of - is it worth it?

This all ties back to the new food system. Which makes you need more of everything for meals that do not feel like they provide you with enough HP or Stamina.


My Final Thoughts.
I think the stats of all food should be changed to give more stamina.
Add more meals that give huge stamina boost.
You could add Mead and Wines to the Fermenter that are not potions, but instead drinks that give large stamina boost. Or add in Coffee Beans and let people brew their own coffee for a massive stamina boost.

The meals that take more time, more work to prepare need to give more HP as well. Such as the meals you can cook in a cauldron.
You don't want to make this game to difficult, you want everything to feel rewarding. You want to feel like you've EARNED this and it feels good.
I want to know that 3 days of waiting on my farm to give me carrots and turnips is going to be worth the wait.

I think the food timers should also be increased. I don't know about other players, but when me and my husband go dungeon diving, we tend to be gone a good hour or more.
I think cauldron cooked meal timers should be doubled. Let 30 minute meals last an hour.
This will free up a lot of players inventory as well. You could eat up all the food at the base and run out to adventure without needing to carry extra food.

Not gonna lie, an item that increased my bag space would be heaven.

I want to thank you all for the time to read this, and I hope my ideas are good. I want to see ideas that others have besides my own so feel free to comment.
Let's try to keep it civil and not lash out at these game creators.
They have an excellent concept laid out before us, it just needs a bit of adjustments to work like they envisioned it.

Adding a Note |
My husband noticed a massive issue with cooking.
Take a look at the ingredients VS the food you cook.

Deer Stew for example gives 40 Health and 13 Stamina.
If you ate the 3 ingredients instead of cooking them [Carrot, Blueberry, Deer Meat] you would get 53 Health and 69 Stamina.

That's a large imbalance. I could understand maybe the cooked food gives only 50 health and 60 stamina, but to reduce the stamina it gives you by 80% is shocking.

[Microsoft EXCELSIOR!]

In regards to ingredients vs stamina of final product I noticed that honey (35 stamina) is a component in boar jerky (1 boar meat + 1 honey, 20 stamina) which isn't a huge difference especially since you actually get 2 boar jerky out of it. It shouldn't be that the volume of honey I plan to produce makes the problem irrelevant, the problem is emblematic of what I feel is poor implementation of a concept I am completely ok with.

I say that planning to make as much boar jerky as possible if for no other reason than it will be a 2nd out of 3 foods I can eat at any given time and it might not even be worth it on account of the new mechanics of max health = max block over cooked boar meat.

At the level of bronze technology my only other option for stamina foods are cultivated crops and for someone that hasn't obtained surtling cores yet their only option for stamina food is wild berries. Especially when early game is characterized by exploration of your starting continent-island and chopping down dozens of trees. Not blocking draugr attacks.

[Polaris]

Something that helps a lot with stamina management is tasty mead :D


It's fairly cheap to make, and has a low cooldown, but it gives a stamina regen buff (100%) and a health Regen debuff (50%). So not good if your low on health, but if you just need to press an attack, it's great, and you can keep it bound to the hotbar up top for ease if use :)

[IronLisa]

Thank you for the very in-depth feedback! It has been forwarded to the team

[Moonshine Fox]

Originally posted by Polaris:

Something that helps a lot with stamina management is tasty mead :D


It's fairly cheap to make, and has a low cooldown, but it gives a stamina regen buff (100%) and a health Regen debuff (50%). So not good if your low on health, but if you just need to press an attack, it's great, and you can keep it bound to the hotbar up top for ease if use :)

Tasty mead has been one of my main go to’s when I need a stamina boost. Between that and stamina mead I rarely ever run low.

[Moonshine Fox]

Originally posted by Senyin:

Originally posted by ruedic:

I was going to make a post basically outlining the s

Take a look at the ingredients VS the food you cook.

Deer Stew gives 40 Health and 13 Stamina.
If you ate the 3 ingredients instead of cooking them [Carrot, Blueberry, Deer Meat] you would get 53 Health and 69 Stamina.

That's an insane imbalance. I could understand maybe the cooked food gives only 50 health and 60 stamina. But to reduce the stamina it gives you by 90% is insane.

And that's all the cooked food. Look through the list. I didn't realize how bad it was until he pointed it out.

I’m going to raise the counter argument that you are comparing the values of a single health food slot vs a health food slot plus two stamina food slots.

If you take the ingredients and brake them down you get your 53 health/69 stamina total, which works out too 17.6 health/23 stamina per food slot. A slightly higher stamina as is fitting for 2 stam food, but far less health for a single slot at 40/13 vs 17/23.

Now pair that deer stew with two stamina food, the carrot and blueberry, and you get a total of 58 health/70 stamina total, or 19.3 health/23.3 stamina per slot.

Not huge gains, but gains nonetheless. They are still low tier food, and wild swings between each tier leads to massive number bloat as the game progresses through the future biomes.

[loppantorkel]

Good arguments OP. This is construcive criticism, in contrast to many other negative posts.

I agree to many of your points - gaining more resources from farming crops and animals would be nice. I'm not sure stamina adjustments or prolonged timer are necessary if you can make full meals more easily (by easier base food gains). Might become a bit too easy, but to be fair, I haven't played from start after H&H. Overall, I'm not too concerned about the revised food system, but some balancing doesn't hurt.

[Irongate Smiffe]

At the stage as you seem to be. Carrot soup is your friend with 45 stamina and also eating honey.

Rested buff gives +100% stamina regen and like Moonshine Fox mentioned. Tasty meads are really nice to have.

The food system is still under review if it's good enough, or needs to change.

[Dante]

I understand your gripe with the return value on food, once i noticed i was like hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

But i then realised if i was to take 3 shoddy items around with me, thats 3 item slots of mediocre food that could be instead utilised for other stuff, more important stuff. I think the idea was, combine to get almost same stats to then be able to eat something else, to gain even more and in the long run it does pan out better. Just early on in swamp and below it seems a bit poop. But after those early biomes, it does have a better return.

I was personally running sausages, muckshake, black soup. That was a big boost and allowed me to take big mobs and trolls on with bronze gear.
Just also bare in mind, stamina took a big debuff with the wet/cold state so if you are either of them and you are using daggers, perhaps fleeting might be a better idea than fighting.

BUT i do understand the gripe early on and maybe they should tweak it a bit to give more for the effort of farming and crafting.

[The n00b A]

Originally posted by Microsoft EXCELSIOR!:

In regards to ingredients vs stamina of final product I noticed that honey (35 stamina) is a component in boar jerky (1 boar meat + 1 honey, 20 stamina) which isn't a huge difference especially since you actually get 2 boar jerky out of it. It shouldn't be that the volume of honey I plan to produce makes the problem irrelevant, the problem is emblematic of what I feel is poor implementation of a concept I am completely ok with.

I say that planning to make as much boar jerky as possible if for no other reason than it will be a 2nd out of 3 foods I can eat at any given time and it might not even be worth it on account of the new mechanics of max health = max block over cooked boar meat.

At the level of bronze technology my only other option for stamina foods are cultivated crops and for someone that hasn't obtained surtling cores yet their only option for stamina food is wild berries. Especially when early game is characterized by exploration of your starting continent-island and chopping down dozens of trees. Not blocking draugr attacks.

Yeah, the recipe may give more food items than just one, but since we cant eat more of the same food, it wont make much sense. If a recipe with 2 ingredients give another 2 foods but the ingredients have more health and stamina than the foods combined, something is off. Theres no reward for cooking. You'd need to make several different recipes to get sometimes 30% more health or stamina than if eating them separatly.

And when you take into account the timer of cooked food/recips is longer than the ingredients but still start decaying from the moment you eat, refresing said timer to have a higher amount of stamina and health ends up being easier with ingredients.

Not even weight wise some recipes make sense, since they are heavier or can stack less items than the ingredients counterpart.

[hazelrah]

Originally posted by Senyin:

Originally posted by Webbman:

if your in the swamp you have access to carrot soup and likely turnip stew, both of which give big stamina boosts. I'm currently in the mountains in my fresh start play through and have had no issues with food at all. I like the new system much better.

I agree, this system is much better. We both really like it.
But when cooked items, like Deer Stew, only give 13 Stamina while the ingredients alone would give 69 Stamina, there is a problem. The Deer Stew should be giving at least 50-60 Stamina.
I think adjusting the food groups to give proper amounts of stamina would greatly help.

agreed. overall i like having to really think about and plan my meals.
i hadn't really thought about comparing ingredients vs cooked foods, and i agree with you there too. balance is off if it's best to eat the raw ingredients.
i'd like to see more recipes, especially more balanced foods. and more high tier recipes that include lower tier ingredients. for instance, there's currently only two things you can make with deer meat, both hp focused, making that ingredient nearly useless for a stamina build or once you move to higher tier foods.
another issue i noticed this morning when i finally ate a bukeberry... in times when i could see this mechanic being necessary the mechanics of it make it impossible to use. you're running around your base building, eating high stamina foods and a raid comes... it makes no sense to drop hp to 25 and reset stamina, wait 15 secs, eat and then wait more while your health and stamina return? more likely your food is flashing and you can just eat something new.
i noticed another new change that i think has actually been causing a lot of people to hate the new system. used to be if you ate new foods, there was a short time when they would stack with the previous foods, so stamina and health was a blend of like 4-5 foods.
now when you eat it over writes the previous hp/stamina values, you only get the combined values from 3 foods, thus your total of hp/stamina can never be greater than the sum of the 3 foods you've eaten.

[[NaM] Tek]

The food system is a joke now. Especially now that you added having to make an uncooked lox pie and then have to bake said pie to get the finished product. The devs really outdid themselves with this. Instead of adding CONTENT TO THE GAME, they made things we already have to do more TEDIOUS to do. Well done devs... well done. You've killed your own game.

[blankitosonic]

Originally posted by Tek:

The food system is a joke now. Especially now that you added having to make an uncooked lox pie and then have to bake said pie to get the finished product. The devs really outdid themselves with this. Instead of adding CONTENT TO THE GAME, they made things we already have to do more TEDIOUS to do. Well done devs... well done. You've killed your own game.

???
Making a pie or a bread in a cauldron didnt have much sense when we have to make flour in a windmill ...
A stone oven its fine , and devs low flour cost for best stamina food now : breads cost 5 flours and not take time to bake

[susume6]

I agree with the health/stam issues and how grindy food is now but I do enjoy the variety and now deciding what to bring and where/when.

I learned real fast that feeding more than myself requires farms of large scale.

[[NaM] Tek]

Originally posted by blankitosonic:

Originally posted by Tek:

The food system is a joke now. Especially now that you added having to make an uncooked lox pie and then have to bake said pie to get the finished product. The devs really outdid themselves with this. Instead of adding CONTENT TO THE GAME, they made things we already have to do more TEDIOUS to do. Well done devs... well done. You've killed your own game.

???
Making a pie or a bread in a cauldron didnt have much sense when we have to make flour in a windmill ...
A stone oven its fine , and devs low flour cost for best stamina food now : breads cost 5 flours and not take time to bake

Then let us just make the thing in the oven instead of adding an additional step. Tedious is this updates middle name.

[The n00b A]

Originally posted by Tek:

Originally posted by blankitosonic:

???
Making a pie or a bread in a cauldron didnt have much sense when we have to make flour in a windmill ...
A stone oven its fine , and devs low flour cost for best stamina food now : breads cost 5 flours and not take time to bake

Then let us just make the thing in the oven instead of adding an additional step. Tedious is this updates middle name.

Its to get more in line with the mead that goes in the fermenter.