by Sevenless » Fri Apr 14, 2017 2:16 am Problem:
Noobs intuitively eat food available to them, which in the early game is actually quite disadvantageous for the two following reasons
The game incentivizes eating food immediately for hard labour, however:
Early findable foods (bush/tree berries, foraged berries, foraged mushrooms) are for the most part not good foods to eat early game due to the hunger/satiation system.
The 300% start also means that if you make a mistake, beginners lose a lot of potential stat gain (int being the most important) due to exploring the system
Suggestion:
New ingame XP event suggesting to cook food the first time you eat raw berries/mushrooms that can be cooked.
New cooked food item, scorched berries/mushrooms, which is a good food for early, but has satiations that make it bad for endgame.
Starting satiation now starts at 100%, because 300% really only advantages alts being started in villages and new food should make early FEPs more available.
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Having taken a fresh look at the current FEP system, I feel the early game could be tweaked slightly to make the system more intuitive. This comment is mostly inspired by scoping out various newbie claims and looking at what it is they were eating when they quit, and it quickly made me realize their lives must have been terrible. Their adorable tables with wooden cutlery, stuffed to the brim with bush and tree berries. The main issue I see is that they're eating things like hazelnuts, which give 0.15 feps per 2% hunger. Further, many of the easily available foraged foods that seem attractive to naive beginners are actually quite detrimental to them to eat like yellowfeet. The satiations on yellowfeet are punishing to early game food groups. However, it's quite difficult to manipulate the satiation system early game with limited food choices and limited food volumes.
To alleviate this issue, I'd like to propose a new XP event, and a new type of cooked food. The new XP event would be something along the lines of:
(triggered by eating raw berries, or raw mushrooms)
Junk Food:
Cold, raw food might fill an empty stomach, but it still leaves a nagging feeling that more nutrition could have been had. Scorching something on the fire might not be much, but it's something.
This would guide beginners towards cooked food options, of which the new food type would be found. The new food would be the equivalent of "cooked meat", but for berries and raw edible mushrooms. This would push foraged foods to 1.0 FEPs base for berries and 2 FEPs for mushrooms, reduce their hunger to 1%, and push their satiations down to something along the lines of 5% satiation of 2 items @ a 5% chance. Further, if concerns about this becoming impactful in endgame, it could be softcapped at all times by Q10, require multiple items to cook (3 berries per handful of scorched berries? etc), and/or give endgame satiations that make it unpalatable as a spam filler.
To keep early game pacing, and to avoid an easy mistake on beginners part, I feel all new characters should start at 100% FEPs instead of 300%. That 300% is a bit of a punishment both due to early game mistakes, and due to trying to form a group due to the energy used to build wilderness beacons. Of course, this hurts alt spammers a bit, but if they already have a developed town and are spawning raw characters in I don't think they particularly need the help.
