Critique: Activities outside of the base

[LadyGoo]

Hunting
Thanks for implementing curios that would actually make you go outside and hunt. Hunting is quite hard to bot due to the risks involved: you will need a somewhat decent character to kill something like hq swans or beavers. Consequently, people will at least spend some time outside hunting those. IMHO, the game should implement more things like that that would encourage people to go for hunting more often, be hard to bot, enhance trades.

Swans and beavers seem to be very nice, especially if buffed with the kingdom "Swan Lake" policy. From what I know, the hq swan feather are the must-have for any serious lp-maker (gaining up to 900 lp/h, depends on q).

Another great example is the ant queens/empresses used for the ant farm curio. People buy the royal ants for 5 pts in average, meaning 1 ant queen costs the same as 1 bar of steel. That way noobs can actually participate trades.

HQ bat wings are still a good curio as well for secondary characters.

Re-consider the mechanics for catching the ducks or the reward they're giving. At this moment people cannot be arsed to chase them. A player is better of to replace their feathers with some other curio, no-one buys them.

Hedgehogs either a bit too rare or give a minor lp/gilding boost. Same goes for the crabs.

Also, reconsider the boar tusks, deer antlers, bear tooth and moose antlers curios. All of them are not really being used for study desks. They require too much attention/exp. Maybe, some people use the moose antlers for their alts from time to time, but you're really better off crafting something for your study even in the early game stage. As a result, the curios listed are not really used in the early-game, not suitable for mid to late game. Fine for grinding alts only.

Summing up, there should be more curios available that you could acquire outside of bases and would have good lp/h boost. Hedgehogs, crabs and mallards should be reconsidered in terms of the mechanics and rewards. Either by making them more useful/common/easier to get. Large prey bone curios should require less attention to become at least ok for the nabs.


Foraging
At this point of the game, almost all types of foregables are either too hard to get, or loose in comparison with craftable/huntable curios. If you guys are so afraid of boosting the foraged curios so they'd be botted, it would be much better if you would implement composite foraged curios. Maybe in conjunction with the huntable (see the ant farm example). That way the foregables would be useful and harder to bot.
The point isn't to buff all the available curios, but make it so that the curios hunt/forage would serve as a reason to go outside, hunt, trade and etc. Right now you are better to craft some craftable curio, than spending that time on foraging something.

[NOOBY93]

+

[Sevenless]

I kind of want ducks to not plop into shallow water when you horse squish them. It's just a real pain in the butt, and they're really quite good otherwise. I'm not sure if that'd make them easy to bot and kind of defeat the purpose though. Swans I can see being left as is because you can lure them to shore via combat.

Foraged items in general have taken pretty big hits in utility due to A) food rework and B) crafted options expanding. Blueberries for example, despite being the most common foraged berry are actually bad in fruit roasts. Mushrooms are terrible early game due to the satiation system, although late game they're useful satiation resetters. Which is weird to me, the earliest foods you find (raw berries, mushrooms) are only really something you want to use late game.

I've walked by so many abandonned noob camps with horrendously useless food on the table. The system apparently isn't intuitive, and the game would be pretty punishing if you tried to live off raw foods.

I've been mulling over suggestions for that for a bit now, but I'm not ready to comment yet.

[Headchef]

+1, in-base haven is not that fun, the risk of death always lurking when you're actually outside doing stuff is not a bad thing to be rewarded for through the curios not being absolute shit.

[jorb]

More quality rare drops from animals is a good idea, yeah. Ideally almost every activity should have its own equivalent to gems for mining.