Haven as a Survival game

[Barbamaus]

The following message is less of a suggestion for specific content and more of a conversation starter on how we could get there. It's long, so bear with me.

During the devstream Jorb said something about how he sees Haven as a survival game. Personally I've never seen it as one, so I started looking at other survival games and what makes them different. Here's what I found:

Basic needs
Hunger, thirds, tiredness. Three simple elements, found in most survival games, with hunger being the most common and sleep being ofter overlooked on online survivals.
In Haven, you can stay online a whole year without starving, dying of thirst, or passing out for lack of sleep.
Energy/Stamina is somewhat based on hunger/thirst, but it's only related to what you do. Travel weariness kinda works for tiredness.
Time should be an essential factor when it comes to food/water/rest.

Health system
Taking care of your health is a big part of surviving.
Wounds & Injuries are a good starting point for Haven, but can be improved.
Wounds that get worse with time are the way to go. Infected sore and Swamp fever comes to mind. They work fine, but I think they are still pretty slow (I was really excited for swamp fever, until it got nerfed the next day); I've had 3 infections on the same character for days, and could take my sweet time before having to deal with it.
Permanent wounds should also be a thing: too many concussions? You get a permanent damage. Too many injuries? You get a scar or something.
This would make injury prevention a priority. Your nice cupboard filled with meds won't be enough forever.

Resources
You need to keep working to stay alive. That's a basic concept that survival games have in common.
From gathering essentials like food and water, to getting the rarest materials to craft amazing tools, you should always need to get more stuff in order to keep surviving. The best survival games require you to do it regularly, if you want to stay alive.
This is one of Haven's biggest issues when it comes to survival. You don't need anything to stay alive.
Even if the above suggestions about basic needs were introduced, Haven has a big hoarding issue. After a few weeks of gameplay, you would have enough stuff to last for months if properly used. In order to avoid this problem, most items should have a "limited shelf life".
Equipment could have some sort of weariness: the more you use something, the more you wear it down. After a while, it breaks (or lower in quality). Maintenance should probably become a thing (right now only seen on Knarr/Snekkja).
Most items should decay, in time. All "fresh" stuff should go bad in a matter of days: food should spoil, plants should wither, and so on.
Other more durable items should still have a chance to "go bad", to an extent: metal could rust, cloth and wood could get damaged by termites, and so on. For these kind of materials, there shouldn't be a set timer (like there should be for fresh food), but rather some randomized one. For example, after [X amount] weeks each piece of cloth has a chance to get damaged each day. The chance starts small, and grows over time. Items in the same container as a similar decaying item should have their chance increased. For durable materials, the chance would be much lower. Quality could also come into play, making better items less subject to decay.
This kind of decay would also introduce the possibility to add means to slow this process down. A new container that gets filled with snow to keep the food inside fresh (or maybe ice blocks could work in a radius way). Different locations would affect decay too, kinda like they do with cheese.

Outside dangers
We now have basic needs that force us to go gather stuff, and a decay system that makes sure we can't just hoard stuff to last us for months. What's next?
The outside world is wild and dangerous.
Right now any experienced player has only one thing to fear: other players.
Unless you're new to the game, if you pay attention you won't die to anything else. Animals are very easy to avoid, they don't follow you in/out of caves, and very few of them swim (devs said something about making wolves stalk you, which would be nice). Your chance of getting injured outside of combat is close to zero. And you can go around naked in winter without any consequence.
Haven needs more ways to get injured outside of combat. Eating spoiled food, or poisonous herbs/berries/insects; going around in bad weather, without proper gear; the old thorn in the foot from legacy; even natural disasters could become a thing.
Not all ways to get injured need to be lethal, but the more ways there are, the more player need to pay attention to their survival.
It's also important that these ways are more related to circumstances and choices, rather than to required activities in order to avoid alts/bots being the solution to avoid them (like it already is for raiding beehives or picking crabs).
I'm sure there's plenty more things you can come up with.

Progression
Getting better stuff should make your survival experience easier.
Haven does this already, to an extent.
Unfortunately, without the elements mentioned above equipment in Haven is less about survival and more about saving time. You don't need a pickaxe. You don't need a shovel. Very few items are needed to unlock new things (weirdly enough, the frying pan is).
Most tools make you do things faster, which is how it works in many games. So what's the problem? In Haven, time doesn't ever run out. Being able to gather stuff faster is only important if you have to work against the clock to survive.
Right now tools only allow you to make tasks a bit less boring by doing them faster or with less stats.

Conclusion
Haven has a lot of potential to become a Survival game. In order to do so, it's imperative to implement new elements to make players fight against the clock to stay alive (even if it's at a slower pace)

[Sevenless]

I think this deviates far enough from haven's current form that it would alienate a large section of the playerbase for a set of mechanics which may or may not be fun.

[Barbamaus]

I think this deviates far enough from haven's current form that it would alienate a large section of the playerbase for a set of mechanics which may or may not be fun.

Not everything has to be introduced at once though.
For example, food decay could be introduced by itself, without all the other decay parts. You see how it goes, and if it goes well, you add more items to the list.

Same goes with permanent injuries. In the devstream they talked about multiple concussions turning into something worse. You start with that, and eventually move on to more stuff.

The only one I've serious doubt about is how to introduce hunger/thirst into the game, which would probably require a complete makeover of the current food system. Then again, it's one of the main things that make a game a survival game.

[VDZ]

I think this deviates far enough from haven's current form that it would alienate a large section of the playerbase for a set of mechanics which may or may not be fun.

Not everything has to be introduced at once though.
For example, food decay could be introduced by itself, without all the other decay parts. You see how it goes, and if it goes well, you add more items to the list.

Same goes with permanent injuries. In the devstream they talked about multiple concussions turning into something worse. You start with that, and eventually move on to more stuff.

Oh, that works. Then you lose the playerbase gradually instead of all at once!

[Archiplex]

I am of the opinion that the closer hafen tries to pretend to be a survival game, the less fun it becomes and the less i'll want to play it. Jorb might see it that way, but i definitely didn't start playing this game as a multiplayer permadeath sandbox for the uh... survival aspect, that frankly didn't really exist a few years ago

[jordancoles]

Stop

[Massa]

probably an excellent troll post

why would you think these ideas are fun

[Barbamaus]

probably an excellent troll post

why would you think these ideas are fun

Not a troll post, just some ideas that came up after hearing jorb calling Haven a survival game.

One of the things that usually makes me and my friends stop playing Haven is when our village is so full of things that we have no reason to do anything anymore.
When you have cupboards full of any kind of metal, more hides than you can count, enough food to fill a great hall, etc, the game becomes boring.
Early on you have to explore, discover new stuff, unlock new items, and keep looking for resources to build and craft what you need. But without decay, after a few months there's really no reason to keep doing it if you can't compete with the top villages for quality.
Trade doesn't work well, going from "you need subtokens to buy anything good" to "you can sell 10.000 eggs to a barter stand and get enough coins to buy anything" as soon as community markets grow a little bit.
The quest system is pretty boring and it's always the same stuff. Credos are more of a chore, and you usually rush them early on to get the few bonuses you need instead of being some kind of achievement or some fun element.

Just grinding quality is not a great objective, and surely not one that makes the game feel like a survival game. Adding elements like decay would give you a reason to keep doing stuff, instead of just hoarding and living off it.

Also lots of people always complain how you're too much protected behind a palisade now. Decay would force you to go outside more to keep getting stuff, so that would change too.

[Massa]

probably an excellent troll post

why would you think these ideas are fun

Not a troll post, just some ideas that came up after hearing jorb calling Haven a survival game.

One of the things that usually makes me and my friends stop playing Haven is when our village is so full of things that we have no reason to do anything anymore.
When you have cupboards full of any kind of metal, more hides than you can count, enough food to fill a great hall, etc, the game becomes boring.
Early on you have to explore, discover new stuff, unlock new items, and keep looking for resources to build and craft what you need. But without decay, after a few months there's really no reason to keep doing it if you can't compete with the top villages for quality.
Trade doesn't work well, going from "you need subtokens to buy anything good" to "you can sell 10.000 eggs to a barter stand and get enough coins to buy anything" as soon as community markets grow a little bit.
The quest system is pretty boring and it's always the same stuff. Credos are more of a chore, and you usually rush them early on to get the few bonuses you need instead of being some kind of achievement or some fun element.

Just grinding quality is not a great objective, and surely not one that makes the game feel like a survival game. Adding elements like decay would give you a reason to keep doing stuff, instead of just hoarding and living off it.

Also lots of people always complain how you're too much protected behind a palisade now. Decay would force you to go outside more to keep getting stuff, so that would change too.

If you're bored, go pick a fight with a local village or something. I'm sure they'd be happy to accommodate. You don't store shit up so you can, at the end of the day, sit on your rocking chair smoking finely ground q60ish pipestuff and listen to weird Norse-esque folkish psuedorock on youtube while you watch the lighting engine jankily tick to a later hour.

The end game is PvP and personal pet projects. Decay, food and item spoilage, a literal second water/stamina/hydration meter, another literal second hunger meter, tiredness/sleep meter, fatigue meters, passing out from thirst and being unable to do shit because you didn't right click a bed yesterday would add an absolutely hideous level of tedium to a game that already struggles to retain players due to the overwhelming amount of maintenance and tedium. Your ideas are excessive and antifun. Video games are supposed to be fun, not a barometer for how much misery you can endure. Haven is coming around towards a healthier balance, with the way Jorb is changing things.