Suggestions regarding PER food, Fishing, Fibres and more

[kill5link]

After intensive playtesting i felt like some items/tools/professions were outright outdone in what they did by other entities of the same category.

1. Perception food: I found the variety of perception food available strongly lacking to a critical point where being a hunter is pointless. It is especially hard to find worthwhile food that gives only perception.
Merely Carrots (from farming), deer meat, certain troll parts and spitroasted swan seem to give a barely decent amount of only per. I find this just as confusing as the fact that no fish seems to give the Will stat. A hunter typically uses a bow. Even the hunter credo specializes around that. Yet there is no worthwhile food to hunt for a hunter.
The point being, there is lots of food that gives PER, but almost none of it is related to the act of hunting and those that are, are 3rd rate foods with bad stat ratios.

Conclusion: Big to medium prey with a good sausage recipe that gives only per would be a huge help to all fellow hunters. The current situation for hunters looks like this: You can rotate around food that you farm, aside from carrots there are turnip fries (farming, expensive, tedious) or Swan Necks which, at best, give equal amounts of charisma and per.
Besides, hunting small fry like swans doesn't make you feel like a hunter. Neither does baking. A hunter right now profits more from staying inside his base or chipping in a mine than going outside and hunting.


2. Fishing curiousities: While you can find a great many things aside from fish from the fishing profession, it mainly yields food as it's only steady output. And to make matters worse, the quality of said food is strongly capped in quality. And while this is perfectly fine if compared to other treats found in the wild, whose Q rarely rises beyond +40, the activity itself feels highly devoid of purpose and lacking in its self-sufficiency. While you apparently can find very rare curiousities from fishing, the fishy eyeball is the only steady supply of LP a fisherman can expect from a normal fishing session.

Conclusion: Therefore, I propose more curiousities crafted from specific fish to give fishermen better studies and to give the different fish more unique value similar as was already done with the food.
e.g. something along these lines:
(A few weaker studies from more common fish)
>Grayling curio - 750 base LP, 10 weight, 1 slot, 7 xp cost, duration 1 day in-game
recipe: 2x Grayling (the full fishes), 2x A Beautiful Dream!
>Ruffe curio - 500 base LP, 5 weight, 1 slot, 5 xp cost, duration 18h in-game
recipe: 1x Ruffe (full fishes), 4x Bone Material
(A few better studies once you catch more uncommon fish)
>Brill or Burbout or Trout(full fish) curio - 2000 base LP, 5 weight, 2x1 slots, 20 xp cost, duration 1 day in-game
recipe: 1x Brill/Burbout/Trout, 1x Fishy Eyeball, 0.10 liter of sweetener
>Catfish curio - 10000 base LP, 10 weight, 1x2 slots, 10 xp cost, duration 3 days in-game
recipe: 1x Catfish, 1x Lady's Mantle, 1x Firefly, 2x Nugget of any Metal

As far as I'm aware the Will and Survival are the important stats for a fisher, so capping some of the curious with those on top of whatever else (e.g. psy for the grayling-dream recipe) could be a good idea.


3. Wicker Picker: The costs place it into a technological blind spot position for newbies, with bone glue discovery often being left untouched until the metal cauldron and 8 straw twines requiring a steady farm, which newbies don't have. This makes it rarely used early in the game. If this item was meant to be used by foragers, then it's costs are clearly too high.
Later in the game when going after a daily rite of harvesting some mass produced, specific leaves, herbs or what not, there are easier ways of transportation.
e.g. wheelbarrow for stockpiles of leaves.
e.g. traveller's sack for general purpose.

Conclusion 1: If it's meant to be an early game/forager utility, then it needs a cost reduction, like exchanging the bone glue for something easier to produce, or an indirect cost reduction of adding a new type of glue (e.g. one created with flour, water and potentially a sweetener).

Conclusion 2: On top of that, if it's meant to stay good in late-game, it needs to compete with the other tools for transportation. But it can't do that, since the traveller's sack is just an universal tool that is more practical in any situation. As much as I like the sacks, I believe they need to be made a bit more clunky to carry around. For example, slowing the character movement for each sack equipped. Huge filled sacks are heavy in rl after all. A forager, for example, would no longer prefer the sack over the picker if he's slowed down by them. This nerf would not affect people on horse much, but horses have their limits in usability too. Even if you use a horse whenever possible, there are instances where you'll have to walk.


4. Straps, Helmets and a knife: As with most any gear, how easily you can increase the quality is what ultimately determines whether a piece of gear can do it's work. I noticed these 2 helmets and wondered why they were so tremendously difficult to craft compared to the other equally cool-looking helmets. And then a few more questions popped into my head.
I wondered why a supposed "nomad" helmet like those of the mongols required wool in a game where wild sheep are rather uncommon and the helmet therefore is more likely to be affordable and used by farmers with tamed sheep and goats.
Then I wondered why the only ingredients in the recipe that can be used to spiral are all dependant on the farm life (except for the horse hide), which a nomad does not want, since they are the opposite of a settler.
I took a look at the Woodsman's Ushanka, similar ingredients, similarly tied to the farmer's life more than that of a hunter or a traveller.
I would like to suggest a new means of spiraling items, at best loosely coupled to a farm plot or anything requiring to stay at the same place for too long.
Specifically, I want to focus on the Hide Straps for this, because I believe that this will create the least causal balance issues at other points. The straps are often just used as a replacement for other fibres, except for a few recipes who exclusively require straps instead. Most any of these latter recipes are worse early on but outclassed by similar recipes that use "any fibre" instead later, mainly due to the ease of increasing flax Q.

Conclusion: My idea would be a new tool used to improve the quality of hide straps through a refining process. The tool itself uses hide straps as ingredient in order to enable the spiraling process.
A hunter's knife created from 8? hide straps, a bar of any metal and a block of wood that, if equipped, can be indirectly used to pick up hide straps and right-click them on another strap in the attempt to create a higher Q hide strap. Each time this process is done, it will change the Q of said strap by moving it asymptotically towards the Q of the hunter's knife used +/- 1. The knife would be softcapped by the sqrt of Dex and Marksmanship. Even a cubic root of Dex, MM and Per would be fine.
This would give more mobile players a own means of increasing their fibre Q without a field.

Since animal hides are naturally found in medium-high Q (compared to q10ish crop at start) and dry faster than crops grow, it uses a slower process of Q growth. You have to always start with the Q of the hide found in the wild, then slowly increase it by consuming more straps, and in turn, craft a new hunter's knife with the upgraded straps to repeat the process. Spiraled iron can be used for this recipe like for many other already existing tools, otherwise the metal serves as a cap early on, and so does the wood block.
To summarize: a long process that consumes a lot of hides to increase strap Q, not worth the effort for anyone managing a farm, but unlocks higher potential Q for straps which will make some items like the mentioned helmets usable and enabling people who don't like the farming life to craft better fibres themselves since they tend to have immense hide surplus.


5. I also felt like some nonsensical stuff was still missing, like
...a horn of war that creates a loud sound, to send out signals, intimidate your adversaries, draw attention or even just to create some noise in the vicinity. Should be craftable with tusks of some kind.
...a Jack in the box kind of item that is worth putting into a present box or into a locked chest, where when you drop it on the ground or pick it up, it haunts you with a little wound or some other nuisance

That is all.

[MrPunchers]

Hide straps idea sound v e r y bottable, but so is spuraling metal so.

[Bad_Habit123]

Well... 1. bullshit, may be you want all the food to give some FEP exclusively? The thing is that randomization of gained stats is the only way to somehow prevent linear feasting. 2. The idea is interesting, but your suggestion looks too raw(lol fish and a dream r u going to farce it with dreams? ). Fishing curios should be implemented, i have no idea which exactly but itd be done. 3. Dont even wanna comment that, all has been said before. 4. tmtr, read some words, that didnt interested me and the idea of spiraling hide straps when there are ~1k q flax is useless... generally useless. 5. Horn +1, there are some instruments, but there could be more of them.

[kill5link]

Hide straps idea sound v e r y bottable, but so is spuraling metal so.

I also see a problem in this, as with increasing crop Q there is no way to speed it up beyond a certain threshold.
But as for hides, you could potentially increase your progress with the Q growth with an increased amount of drying frames and a mass production of the hides.

However, I believe that since the strap Q is mainly still just nearing the metal Q of the tool used and since it is softcapped by MM (which requires LP), it then falls into the scope of the quality from metal spiraling more than anything. I too would very much like not to increase the botting incentives in the game even further, so I appreciate your concern.

Well... 1. bullshit, may be you want all the food to give some FEP exclusively? The thing is that randomization of gained stats is the only way to somehow prevent linear feasting.

That is not true.
Feasting has, for one, in large parts to do with the availability and ease of production of the food, e.g. bat wings and honey buns are 2 top tier foods for agi since they drain almost no hunger, all you need to do is throw some easy to mass acquire wings on a herba table or use the immense surplus of honey (one of the least valuable resources in the game) and combine it with another rather easily mass producable resource, flour.
Next, the new satiety system works well in forcing players to rotate their food categories. Even with a food like honey buns giving only agi and to a good Hunger/FEP ratio, I can not only eat honey buns, except if I use a filler food with 2 drinks e.g. cattail roots being a good filler food since it reduces forage very fast.
And furthermore, just like in legacy, you still profit from marginal extra stats on your food, which actually makes it more valuable than single-stat food with more total stats and by reducing the max FEP needed.
You can use the vegetable category by eating nothing but carrots or you can decently increase your per by eating food I already mentioned, like turnip fries or carrot cake, blueberry pies, stuff that requires you to farm. And you will gain perception much more easily due to more total stat gains, you will also profit from extra stat gains like charisma (good for your bonfire sessions) or int (more studies are okay), which will ultimately allow you to still gain stats without completely ruining your hunger bar once your stats go a bit higher.

The problem I see with PER food is not that there is no food that gives only perception or that there is too few food that gives per. It is that the variety of good per food is lacking,
for once since the ratios of stats of food that has Per in it, always has higher or at most equal amounts of the other stat and not per,
and furthermore because hunting, as done with a bow, which requires per, does not yield good per food or make the act of hunting an exciting, self-sustaining activity.
The hunter credo seems to make me believe that the devs want this to be the case tho, as would I, since I like hunting the most in this game.
Instead, you are more likely to just use +1k Q carrots and some turnips, stay afk in your farm and wait for your per food session.
It is perfectly possible to just make sessions around 1 food category with the help of drinks and filler food, but as a hunter I find my options of hunting for the sake of some good food very limited. I can of course start eating masses of roasted deer meat, and that works early on, but unlike the fighter who uses agi, con and str and has very good food options, a hunter has difficulties gaining per later on. You could argue troll food, but
1. how often do you see a troll?
2. am I as a hunter supposed to stay in the mine all day long?
I would also like to mention that I like trading and that I could potentially just trade gains from hunting for food, but there is also not much valuables steadily acquirable from common hunts. A common hunt would be something I see everyday, like a bear or a deer. Instead I would have to go out hunting for a Mammoth to have something even considered as valuable as a high Q pie since everything from outside is losing in value as the game progresses.

2. The idea is interesting, but your suggestion looks too raw(lol fish and a dream r u going to farce it with dreams? ). Fishing curios should be implemented, i have no idea which exactly but itd be done.

Yes it is a very rough idea, since I'm not an avid fisher myself (due to lacking curiousity incentives). Let me shortly explain why I chose those extra ingredients for the recipes though. I chose them for 2 reasons. The dreams and bone material can be steadily farmed and can be used to increase the Q of the curios with low base LP. The fishy eyeball I chose because it is already a curio you sometimes get from fishing, but which is mostly useless as such. If it was part of some recipe, you would keep it and it'd gain some worth as an item (similar to petrified seashell, cavedust). And I applied a similar concept to lady's mantle and fireflies because they are bad curiosities and lady's mantle Q can be increased via gardening pots. I also chose these because of variety reasons: bones from hunting/farming, lady's mantle from gardening, firefly so you need to still go outside, fishy eyeball from fishing.

4. tmtr, read some words, that didnt interested me and the idea of spiraling hide straps when there are ~1k q flax is useless... generally useless.

I do not believe it to be useless at all.
You can not use flax fibres for all recipes. There are recipes that have a mandatory requirement of hide straps.
It would also be a great addition to the life of players with a nomadic lifestyle or hunters like myself, since keeping a field or animals aside from horses or arguably cows is undesirable and unsustainable.
The main problem I see with this addition is that it is a major change and that it would affect a great number of recipes, some of which seem to be balanced around the fact that straps are not increasing beyond a certain threshold of quality.
- Dark Effigy
- Boarhide Lining
- Wool Stuffing
- Hide Layer
In the scenario that the world ever gets resetted, I can see this cause a problem early in the game as people would be more likely to seek out hides for increased fibre Q (as is already the case but), then switch over to increasing its Q once a good metal industry is up and completely ignore flax fibres for a good amount of time until the flax Q catches up and becomes the superior fibre for quality. Basically, this suggestion would extend the period in which hide straps are superior early on, which is an unwanted side effect of my intention to make hide straps somewhat relevant in terms of Q later on in order to loosen the reliance of hunters on farm plots a bit.




I appreciate the feedback, the positive and the negative. I'm only one person and good things supposedly come from several minds put together.

[Bad_Habit123]

kk, about PER food, dishes giving ~50% PER can easily be combined with carrot and its cake, and youll get ~80% PER FEP, thats ok, but i agree that the hunter(i mean hermit with bow) cant raise his PER without farming, youre right here, so solution can be found in some new dish that uses deer meat and gives weighty PER FEP.
As i said fishing curios would be very interesting, but im not sure they have to use exactly fish. Tmm jorbtar could implement some fish parts(like scales, or tail or smthng else) which will be used in crafting those curios.
I dont really know what to think about hide straps, cos i dont use them so often.

[jorb]

Needs to be more concisely worded. Not sure what the key takeaway is.