How to fix foraging now

[Zentetsuken]

Okay, so we got some foragables back, but I think the general consensus is that most foragables are still useless because they are outmatched by things that you actually CAN raise quality on. There are far too many recipes out there and far too many food options for each fep. This is okay, here's some ideas on how to make foraging more worthwhile.


IDEA 1

An idea to fix foraging would be to make it so that a foraged good like a blueberry is automatically given a tag when it is picked like (wild) or something. Maybe when a foraged plant is used in a recipe, the recipe can have a "% wild" based on how much wild, foraged items are in it. The higher % your wild factor is in a food the higher percent chance you have of rolling a double fep bonus when this food item completes your FEP bar. Maybe it could also just roll a second fep from the mix too. Lots of room to play here. I can picture it being worthwhile to NOT complete a fep bar with 1 piece of food if completing it with 2 will give you a chance of getting double feps.

IDEA 2

New foragables tied to a new system similar to fate. I know a lot of people hate fate, but we need SOMETHING that makes relevant foragables unbottable. It doesn't have to be fate, but something that is not a static guaranteed spawn.

Example - New local-resource type spawns that despawn after being harvested, like a weird dead tree stump with bracket mushrooms like "chicken of the woods" growing on them. These are very rare to spawn and maybe have like a global max or some shit.

Example - crazy random time/day based spawns, add some mystery to the game or some shit, there can be so many interesting ways you could make something spawn rarely or by event that would leave us scratching our heads and unable to bot the foraging of them.

IDEA 3

New or existing foragables given a new FEP event type. We have FEP1 and FEP2, what aboubt FEP3? That would surely be a desirable as fuck foragable, even at low quality. What about instead of FEP2, a FEP+FEP? Like maybe a fep event that gives 2 DIFFERENT feps? Imagine a foragable mushroom that would add STR+AGI FEP to a recipe. That would be a good fuckin foragable.

[MrBunzy]

An idea for foraged curios not being shit is to replace them with crafted curios that have foraged ingredients. For example, instead of studying edelweiss you could study bouquet of edelweiss which has string in recipe, or instead of studying flotsam you study shipwreck button, which has linseed oil. This allows quality to scale a bit more with industry so they will not simply become obsolete when crop/metal quality gets too high.

The edible forageable FEPs could for sure use some rebalancing, but our devs are notorious for tipping game balance too far in one direction or the other, and its probably better that foraging be useless compared to extremely overpowered (see forage bots).

[Aceb]

Well we have realms so why not just make them buff it?

Sacrificing at coronation stone / any buff giving statue / cairn an item of type: (Cooldown for 24hour, every 30 in-game days maximum cap increases by 1)
Foul smoke -> increase mountain and cave forage quality by 1
Ancient root -> Increase quality of herbs by 1
Clay pit -> Increase gray or cave clay quality by 1
Driftkelp -> Increase water forage quality by 1
Fairy Mushroom -> Increase all mushroom (stalagom included) by 1
Notes of Symphony -> Increase frequency of Driad appearing for some time period (also resets / highly speed up reset dryad event timer)
Bat Guano -> Increase all overworld forage by 1 (cave not included)
Spring Water -> Increase water forage and fish quality by 1
Hearthwood Leaves -> Increase all overworld forage by 1
Icycle -> Increase all crafted curio LP by 1% ( )
Mother of Pearl -> Temporary increases chance for pearls OR just increase pearl quality by 1
Salt Crystal -> All edible forages increase quality by 1 + first meal of day doesn't count toward hunger for some time period (which means 3 by in-game time)

Making everything temporal will be bad idea as it would lead to nowhere, while having everything be increased by sacrificing something instead of quests (or together with quests perhaps, since those affect directly only 1 thing from a big pool) would lead to slow quality increase of forage. Can see people trading to realm stuff to increase it as well. 30 in game days cap would allow realms to expand with world progression instead of shooting sonic fast with everything. Would also give some initiative to keep everything alive.

[Ants]

I like idea 1 the best. Wild forageables could give slightly more FEPs/LP than the ones you can farm in bulk.

An idea for foraged curios not being shit is to replace them with crafted curios that have foraged ingredients. For example, instead of studying edelweiss you could study bouquet of edelweiss which has string in recipe, or instead of studying flotsam you study shipwreck button, which has linseed oil. This allows quality to scale a bit more with industry so they will not simply become obsolete when crop/metal quality gets too high.

Good idea. Maybe we could get more food/curios that encourage you to collect forageables like the bug collection.

Well we have realms so why not just make them buff it?

Sacrificing at coronation stone / any buff giving statue / cairn an item of type: (Cooldown for 24hour, every 30 in-game days maximum cap increases by 1)
Foul smoke -> increase mountain and cave forage quality by 1
Ancient root -> Increase quality of herbs by 1
Clay pit -> Increase gray or cave clay quality by 1
Driftkelp -> Increase water forage quality by 1
Fairy Mushroom -> Increase all mushroom (stalagom included) by 1
Notes of Symphony -> Increase frequency of Driad appearing for some time period (also resets / highly speed up reset dryad event timer)
Bat Guano -> Increase all overworld forage by 1 (cave not included)
Spring Water -> Increase water forage and fish quality by 1
Hearthwood Leaves -> Increase all overworld forage by 1
Icycle -> Increase all crafted curio LP by 1% ( )
Mother of Pearl -> Temporary increases chance for pearls OR just increase pearl quality by 1
Salt Crystal -> All edible forages increase quality by 1 + first meal of day doesn't count toward hunger for some time period (which means 3 by in-game time)

Making everything temporal will be bad idea as it would lead to nowhere, while having everything be increased by sacrificing something instead of quests (or together with quests perhaps, since those affect directly only 1 thing from a big pool) would lead to slow quality increase of forage. Can see people trading to realm stuff to increase it as well. 30 in game days cap would allow realms to expand with world progression instead of shooting sonic fast with everything. Would also give some initiative to keep everything alive.

This also sounds like a good idea to me, although I don't think it would help much in making foraging better. It would just be another incentive for realms to fight and expand.

[jorb]

Probably should make it more so that you need both domestic and wild stuff to get the best end products.

[azrid]

An idea for foraged curios not being shit is to replace them with crafted curios that have foraged ingredients.

This is the big brain move.

[Zentetsuken]

An idea for foraged curios not being shit is to replace them with crafted curios that have foraged ingredients.

This is a great idea but it still doesn't fix the issue of botting. If good ingredients can be easily foraged by a bot or an alt then it's more likely that they will not become and integral part of economy. There should definitely be some more curios added that are a mixture of foraged and quality-raised ingredient, but atleast some of the foraged ingredients need to be walled behind some form of randomness. Make them more likely to be found by the random wanderer than the bot.