Nightly question about food...

It is a small issue. Purely survival features such as hunger aren't, and will never be a core feature of Starbound. Which is also why devs could allow themselves to remove hunger in the first place. It is something you like and want, but frankly - when the personal wants of your "camp" become a nuisance to everyone else is where a certain line is crossed.

Also, I'd prefer it if you backed up any statements such as "people wanted it". Because currently, there are like... three people talking about it. We don't even talk about removing hunger, either. We talk about food stacking and rotting. Support for the existence of a hunger mechanic doesn't mean that the current execution of the idea is a good one.

 

People seem to get a little steam up over this subject so I am going to lay out the facts as they currently are. They are subject to change of course.

1. There will be three modes. Casual, Survival (replacing normal) and hardcore.
2. Survival will have a hunger system where casual will not. Even so it been stated that the devs might allow players make their own custom settings for the different modes. Options includes if you will be able to teleport underground, drop items or pixels on death, if you need to eat and if the character will be deleted on death.
3. Casual players (as of right now anyway) will no longer drop pixels on death and like before don't need to eat or even touch food whatsoever. Their pixels can only increase unless they buy something.

Most of the complaining I seen is simply casual players want to grow and farm pixels (not even for the food as they don't even need them) where honestly you should either be playing legit and earn their money or just go into admin mode and spawn how many pixels they want. With the way some of them are talking they act like they need to food items where currently they still do not. Try actually playing the game before you cheat yourself unlimited pixels though, who knows? Maybe you will enjoy working for your stuff. They redoing the way you make progress so you might agree with it this time around.

If you like Starbound as it is currently is then simply play on casual or change the settings of survival (would be more of normal again at that point) or hardcore to remove the hunger system. The only thing that will change with 1.0 when it comes to food is that you can't literally grow pixels anymore. People are really overreacting.

 

I'm mostly angry. I used to stock up on things I find, plants and seeds alike, just like on any other crafting ingredients. I'm not talking about hunger or pixels. I'm talking about items I pick up clogging my inventory - and being forced to constantly clear my inventory off food items, because they just refuse to stack. All because of a gameplay mechanic - rotting - which is completely irrelevant to my preferred playstyle and is only going to obstruct it.

It's not about pixels for me. It's abut my inventory space, where 2 potatos and 3 raw steaks, 3 pieces of wheat and 2 pieces of rice are going to as much space as 10000 stone blocks, or 10 weapon items. That's insane.

 

To my knowledge seeds will still work as they always had. I can see how clearing your inventory can be annoying but plants only grow on the surface and unless you are building something massive there is very little reason why you would have to mine very plant that you see after you get a few seeds to work with. Trust me, I do the exact same thing. I will place down 5 torches to mark my spawn on that planet and just wipe the surface out collecting all of the chests/containers with the loot within them, all of the dye items and plants and sometimes I will even pick off vines that are a decent length until I reach my torches. You just have to adept to keeping the resources on the plant until you need them. With colonies being a thing with 1.0 you have a perfect excuse to have a greenhouse now.

In your case though you do have a legit compliant, I gotta admit that. It seem silly you can carry enough stone to build 50 houses but with the same amount of space you can't even make 10 carrot cakes. Hopefully refrigerators will have a ton of space to work with if you are planning to play as a chief.

 

You know, I don't see why we can't have both rotting, AND non-rotting food at the same time.

It'd just take a few extra IF statements...

Let's say ALL food drops with With a Rot Value of 0 and the game adds X to the rot value per second, and the food will be destroyed when it reaches Y.

So here's some psuedo-code:

DoFoodPickup()
{
if ($challenge="survival")
{
DoFoodRot();
}
}

DoItemStack()
{
if ($type=food && $rotvalue=0)
{
$stack=yes;
}
else ($rotvalue > 0)
{
$stack=no;
}
}

So basically... all food has a rot value of 0 UNTIL it is picked up by somebody who is on Survival (and it will stack). Then it begins to rot while they hold it, at which point it stops stacking. If a food is picked up by somebody who is NOT on Survival, then the food will NOT rot, thus having a rot value of 0, which means it WILL stack. If that person drops the food on the ground and someone with Survival picks it up, it will start rotting and thus will not stack anymore. If someone on Survival picks up a stack of food, the game will immediately drop all the foods on the ground and attempt to pick them back up, one at a time because now they have a rot greater than 0.

 

I would hope some food would naturally never rot. Don't Glitch have metal related food? I never understand how non-Glitch beings were able to eat it but I would like to think they wouldn't rot no matter what.

 

I was more meaning to apply that to ALL food. If you're a Casual person, and you pick up food... the "Rot Value" would stay at 0 which means the food should stack. If you're a Survivalist, the very moment you pick the food up, it has a Rot Value greater than zero and as such, wouldn't stack.

Shouldn't be that hard to code surely?

 

Or what about just making them stack to 10 or something similar like that?

Just judging on how much meat I accumulate just exploring planets and killing thier inhabitants the inv most likely will be full of meat by the time I actually come across something that is actually worth taking up that inventory space.

In short I think 1 is far too few. But stacking to 100 is far too many. Can we find a middle ground?

 

solution that might work for all make food stack but a limited number of slots dedicated to food, possibly do something like you get less effect from each subsequent food as the time before. first time 100% food value, second time 95% third time 85% ...sixth and subsequent times no benefit, cycle resets when you change to a different food. for casual players this should have little effect on game play, for those of you who want more challenge, it should make things challenging. as far as i can tell ALL hunger is an egg timer mechanic,
why make farming things nonviable when the Devs said farming was going to be one of the paths people could use to not have to go down the kill everything just to have to go to another planet and kill everything there only to repeat yet again route.

 

Dunno if this was mentioned, but why not use the Don't Starve system? You can stack food and it takes average of all items in the stack. Yea, it is not exactly realistic, so what? I am fairly sure that convenience outweighs realism in this particular case.

If the concern is that this would make hunger obsolete, then allow ingredients to be stacked, but make them unable to be consumed or so that they give very little in terms of fulfilment. This way farmers can do their thing, and players will have to make some actual non-stackable meals to take with them so that they don't die.

Also if everything spoils now, we could use a freezer chest object to store food indefinitely (or placing food in regular chests on frozen worlds).

 

^^
This would actually make a lot of sense. You're not going to live solely off of tomatoes, corn, apples, etc unless you eat a metric TON of them. So it would make sense that unless you stocked up on thousands of them, you wouldn't get very far because each one barely gives you any replenishment whatsoever.

To actually get REAL replenishment, you need COOKED/PREPARED food. Maybe we can make THAT food not stack. That way, farmers don't get screwed and no Casual cares about cooked food (except for that Cake quest, and that probably won't exist anymore).

 

So much of this game has gone to crap... the unstacking food, contact damage, selling farmed items in bulk.... it's all just broken. Someone with a brain needs to rip off this game and make a new one for us that doesn't have an idiot behind the helm.

 

While I don't agree with some decisions they make, this is kinda harsh and not very constructive. I think that for the most part, CF is doing a decent job at the game (even if I don't agree with everything they do).

They've shown int he "Road to 1.0" video that Contact Damage will actually be much more fair in 1.0 -- when you hit an enemy, you get a brief window where the enemy can't hit you either. This means that faster short-range weapons will be much more viable, just as much so as the longer but slower 2H swords and spears. I didn't like contact damage at first, but I have to hand it to them: I'm pleasantly surprised with the compromise they've made and I'm willing to give it a chance as on paper it looks like it could actually work.

Unstacking food, well, I don't think I gotta mention that -- my posts in this thread should already tell you enough about that.

Selling Farmed Items in Bulk, who knows maybe in 1.0 they might give us a way to make a reasonable amount of pixels doing something else, who knows. But then if they do that, and don't fix the unstacked foods... then farming is useless for casuals and I'd hate to see it go to that extreme.

But we'll see.

I think calling them "idiots" and saying someone should rip off the game is just not appropriate or constructive, though.

 

Xylia:

We'll see. And being constructive doesn;t really help. They don't read the forums and trying to post suggestions usually makes them make the complete opposite decision. Look at the poll on the contact damage that happened. It had like a near 70% disapproval rate or something? On deaf ears it fell. Same will be with everything else. I hate to buy a game that looks so good and promising and just see it die a horrible death of blinders on development. Next thing you know they'll take farming out entirely because noone does it anymore. Duh, you made it completely a time a sink while adding no value to the process at all. Feature nerfing is the death knell of all indev games. Rather than think it through they start changing core mechanics on the fly and it throws the baby out with the bath water. It's endemic to indie games, lately. It shows a lack of clear vision or leadership.

 

You say that about contact damage, but yet in the 1.0 video, they showed off something that could potentially make me (a very staunch opposer of CD) rethink my views on the subject entirely.

I'm willing to give them a chance with the proposed tweak to contact damage. It sounds like it could actually work well.

As for farming, well that's kind of a mess. We'll see what happens with that. Hopefully at some point they'll realize that they should, you know, listen to what we have to say. Another thing that nails the coffins on games? Listening to a radical minority, such as the "I WANT CHERRENGE!" people. They seem to forget that the vast majority tends to be more casual and just wanting some fun. There's a reason why there's only a handful of players doing world tournament SC2, but yet millions of casuals who are just having fun.

 

yeah it's just not fun to play with those mechanics. The tech tree nerf to get us to use the crappy hoverbike is another example... "Hey here's a new feature!" (noone's using it) "Fine! We'll screw up the gameplay so bad you HAVE to use our great new idea!!"

Yeah seen it way too many times. I hope you're right but thus far I'm not impressed and getting more and more distant from the game.

 

Why ripe off the game when it is so easily moddable? Don't like a mechanic? Change it! Once steam workshop is integrated, I bet the vanilla servers disappear and a master mod of all the community fixes comes out to solve the problems of this game.

The devs saving grace is mods. I'd have left a long time ago if it hadn't been for modding.... And I bet there are many more like me.

 

Xylia, are you not currently able to produce items worth pixels from wood? Forests can be raised very quickly in Starbound, and the more space, the more wood.

Even if wooden crafts are not worth anything, there are still plenty of ways to make money in Starbound. I've actually been very fond of farming crops for pixels in the past, but nowadays I feel like the discontinuation of this method would force people to go out and look for planets to explore. The highest-tier of planets are incredibly rewarding when it comes to pixels, and I never really find myself short of funds because of how easy it is to simply explore and kill on them.

Since your plan for the mass-production of crops is no longer likely to be viable, why don't you simply look into other methods of farming pixels? You do seem to have made quite a big deal over crops not being stackable, and it seems futile, because there are so many other ways of making pixels in the game. This is a sandbox game, and to complain about them removing one mechanic that you exploited instead of adapting and moving on to the next best method is even more pointless. I've just done a quick search on YouTube and have found many methods of amassing funds for whatever purpose.



I wonder whether or not the tinned food and drinks available for purchase from the outpost are going to be loaded with preservatives...

 

"High Level Worlds" oftentimes means some of the most annoying places ever to go. The higher level frozen biomes has your character slowly plogging away in the snow, it takes forever to get anywhere. Hot worlds that are in Fiery Star worlds almost always have wind weather which slows you to a slow crawl (and are full of blocks that take forever to mine). There's poison oceans which are pointless because you would be wasting more bandaids than actually making by whatever's on those worlds.

What's left? I can go explore random tropical worlds and such, but the pixel gain is rather slow... you can spend 30, 45min and circle a planet surface looting and killing everything you find and come out of it with 3k-5k pixels, but then my coralcreep/reefpod farm would have made 2x, maybe 3x that in not even half the time depending on the size of the farm.

As far as making items from wood... nothing that's actually worth anything comes to mind, to be honest. And if it does have a pixel value, it is so low that it isn't even worth bothering with. Most sell-able items in the game are worth 20 pixels or less except for the higher tier weapons, then ok, some of them might go for up to 150-200 if you're lucky. Even if I could make, say, wooden chairs for 20 pixels... it would take a ginormous amount of them to get anywhere (you'd have to make 100 chairs to get 2,000 pixels...)

 

If you want to skip my survival experience, the bottom of this post contains a couple of starred items in bold that may quell your pixel worries!
SO I read a few of these posts and decided to chime in, as a normally casual player who would prefer not to grind...

I played Glad giraffe on Casual ,ode and it was fun, but quickly became irrelevant and boring. I didnt find settlements (real challenging ones at least) until end game tier 6 and the addition of better difiiculties was much needed. I went ahead and booted up the nightly, admined, then tiered my ship to 3 and grabbed my MM (you have to in the current state of beta) but after that I was purely on survival mode.

Now I'll admit that when I first started doing some testing on the nightly and I played casual with admin commands I was like WTF, why is my food not stacking? why cant I just keep a ton of food on me at one time? this is lame, it needs to change. I hit the forums before playing survival and many people agreed so I HAD to try this survival mode! especially since a youtube LP'r I follow started his 1.0 preview series on survival. I watched him and said, eh, cant be too bad?

Wow, This mode is totally different than casual! It's like difficulty has actually been added to the game (for me at least) I started on planet one and died twice, I was seriously like WTF this is too much! I was hyped. I ran back to my dropped gear both times and realized that some of my food items had become rotten food and everything else, either inorganic or without a shelf life was still in good condition and ready to be picked up!

At that point I started a motto, 2 meals per planet and were good. Now i was still in the first solar sysatem and attempting to find all the cotton fiber I would need to go straight into tier 2 armor, no wasting time for me. But I did end up wasting time....Not as much as I learned my lesson though. Starbound is new in 1.0, it's almost like starbound 2! (for me at least since I only played glad giraffe previously) I had to save some food that would not rot quickly, yet still give decent hunger values, and only cook meals when I was ready to beam down.

it's so cool, I make breakfast lunch and dinner, then eat them according to when I can get my bearings on planet time (and when I have a moments peace/need it enough)! usually 3 pieces of food, and main course and 2 sides. It's like a space life sim almost, I effin love it! and with the new crafting components tab I have MORE SPACE for these meals!

Another thing that was a turn off at first is these constant settlements, and even the odd abandoned shack that seems useless? Wow, these are so handy for a quick base on the fly when you need to start a mine, store important things before a mini boss fight, or ANY TIME! it could even become your first colony! Which you actually need to start a real mine instead of digging straight down. Unless you're really good but I dropped so much wood so many times I was just over chopping a stack of lumber. Since I couldnt make the platforms (considering they cost plant fiber too now) and didnt want to hunt to farm them, I made a real mine to get tungsten on my second planet. It took me 3 planet cycles and in the down time when I needed other mats or wanted to farm id hop around that system a bit and hunt, plant crops, or mine when topical enough to coincide with my meal schedule. I was able to do this due to the base camp up top that was convenient enough to have a nice glitch guy, and 2 of his buddies that I picked up on quests. I could have done the floran settlement but i'm a floran and it was way too crowded.

I'm now into other systems and upgrading my crafting stations but I dont want to go too far because really want to enjoy the experience of 1.0, But a few things I have gathered are:

*You can collect geodes in early star systems(or even later I suppose) that will drop a hidden reward when broken and some rewards are valued at 5k. I found these geodes around volcanic and toxic mini-biomes on my starter system 10 to 15 at a time! (they were a pain in the ass; the biomes that is, not so much on casual)

*Casual mode no longer drops pixels on death so I think they should really change this mode name to GOD MODE, J/K lulz!

*The food system being unable to farm quickly is hardly an issue on casual since i've died 8 times and can still afford a hoverbike on my SECOND solar system, AND I have tier 2 armor (crafty lil MF I am)

*Merchants are ALL OVER, so in essence you could sell some ores and materials along the way that you would have used to craft your tiered armor (because they carry tiered armor, not sure on what it depends on though) and you actually come out on top since the said armor pieces are only 250 pixels and you could make 500+ selling the mats!( now I do realize that this non hordeing thinking probably comes from the game mod and how its experienced, but c'mon, do you really need every leather that drops? every copper bar? every sharpened claw (absolutely yes claws and save 30 030)

*the mini-biomes are a treasure trove and since I love the simple double dash and double jump techs i'm able to sell excess tech cards when I feel I wont need them (Keep in mind I have stockpiled some because I feel later the wall and triple jump will become crucial, as well as blink dash and wall ball) You find SO MUCH STUFF; it's hard not to sell it, even if you aren't juggling food!

*All this and I still spend 50-75 pixels every time I craft a BASIC food item, I dont even have a kitchen table yet! I could only imagine my pixel count had I been on casual, maybe 100k!

*im getting 250-300 pixels in wooden crates sometime, thats more than a pixel random pod! Now that could be because of difficulty level but I dunno man, pixels seem WAY EASY TO GET WITHOUT FARMING!!!!


Thanx for your time, sorry I wrote a lot of stuff but I mean seriously! THE SURVIVAL MODE IS COOL WITH SLOTTED FOOD!