Natural "containers" and their inhabitants

[Sevenless]

With the addition of tidepools, I feel it's time to revisit the idea of other natural "containers" and ask again that they generate critters for hearthlings to discover. I quite enjoy picking through the fish to see if anything tasty shows up and It was a nice treat in salem to check stumps and occasionally find creepy crawlies to pick up and shove in your brain/butt.

For mirkwood stumps/logs, grubs would make sense. They're a useful early game food, but basically unused due to their spawn rarity. If we're concerned with game balance we could keep the spawns at Q10, who cares if someone wants to make a mirkwood farm for grubs it won't break game balancing. Other beetles and critters would also make sense, so long as we're not concerned with them causing balance issues (no ants for example) due to mirkwoods being something we can intentionally create en mass. For crevices, I think finding centipedes certainly makes sense. Why not rats and a new wound for sticking your hand in a crevice and getting nipped when you find a rat? Plenty of options for masochism! If we wanted to take it further, unique forageables that only show up inside crevices/mirkwoods would be pretty darn nifty as well.

Overall, I feel like these minor changes would help flesh the world out (frankly something haven has pushed for very successfully since full time devving started) at relatively little dev cost. I also feel most of us have always sort of expected these things to exist, and have been disappointed a little when they haven't been added yet.

[ErdTod]

Totally agree.

[SacreDoom]

Grubs do actually spawn in mirkwood logs, albeit very rarely. I think Jorb stated that the reason it happens so little is exactly because he didn't like that "farming" logs became such a prevalent practice in Salem and the idea of people hoarding tons of logs to make mirkwood "farms" was sucky.

EDIT: Here is the thread with Jorb stating that they already spawn there and the reason why they don't spawn more often

As for my own opinion, I think it sounds cool, and I actually enjoy the idea of more such natural containers, such as holes in trees, and in a way also wild beehives and bird's nests. The farming issue could perhaps be mitigated, if not fixed, by somehow making the chance to spawn items in the container dependent upon it being A) in a "natural" environment, i.e. on forest terrain surrounded by trees and B) making it dependent on the amount of mirkwood logs nearby, with several logs close together severely reducing the chance of anything spawning in any of them. I think, if fine tuned, this could strike a healthy balance where looking into logs is meaningful on a foraging trip but pointless to farm because it simply requires too much space.

[ErdTod]

Maybe the ability to spawn stuff can be either flagged or time-gated?
I.e. if a mirkwood log was player-interacted, it loses it's ability to spawn goodies. (If it was lifted or created with a fallen tree) A bit mechanical, but better like that than nothing - cause it'll make foraging more exciting.
Or it can be time gated, i.e. a log that have been player-interacted or created from a fallen tree can spawn only after, IDK, two month? Three month of RL time. This would probably mean that there will be munchkins that would actully build such farm and wait for it, but then it's kinda feels natural - i.e. let stuff rot for a long-long time and something will start living in it...

[Sevenless]

Oh really now? I'd seen it once out of maybe 50 logs checked and it was near a newbie's camp so I assumed they'd just stashed it.

It needs to be significantly more frequent though if it's worth having the mechanic, I agree that some kind of mirkwood proximity shenanigans might be a way to mitigate farming, but I'm not really opposed to the concept of farming grubs at least by piling mirkwoods together in the first place. If people wanted to eat grubs IRL at this tech level, that's what they'd do. And as much as realism should never drive a game, it lends credibility to its immersion.

Overall I'd personally trade off the one or two places that farm logs to get Q10 grubs in return for the mechanic existing meaningfully. Crevices though can't be farmed like that, so we're free to get a bit more fanciful with those.

[VDZ]

Counterpoint: Empty natural containers are a unique gameplay element in that things can be stashed in them, but they're empty 99% of the time so nobody checks them. This makes them relatively safe places to stash things. Even with wicker baskets, you know that somebody built it to store something inside - the expected value is low but you know there is a chance you find something. Not so for crevices; they're never worth checking, so people won't find your stuff in there.