Food spoilage and food preserving

[Zepar72]

Every village sooner or later gets to the stage when raw food just plies up endlessly, from hordes of veggie stockpiles to whole house floors full of meat cupboards. Along with that, once the village settles, heartlings eat basically 10 same dishes, usually made from easily farmable stuff. There's almost no variety based on season or region, as you can always just farm and stockpile more.
To change it H&H could implement what most other survival games do - food rots and you have to preserve it. Smoked and dries meats that can be used in recipes in place of raw ones, pickled veggies (more use for vinegar!), jams and candied fruits (no more barrels of barrels of honey). Maybe even snow as a way to stop spoilage of stuff that's in the cupboards.
With cooked dishes it could go from sizzling (bonus to FEP) to normal, to stale (minus to stats) and then create rot you can use for animal food or compost.

[TheServant]

People used to preserve food with salt.

Would be a lot of work sorting rotting foods if you want realism, (rotting based on biome ?). It just feels as something not worth the time with the current state of the game and how much work it still needs. Seems related with the idea of temperature too.

[Sevenless]

We already achieve this effect by making the preserved product better than the raw. Dried fish, smoked sausages.

We don't need it to be a pain in the ass to make preserved foods part of the game.

[vatas]

Salem devs, at one point, gave just a heads up that they're considering food spoilage as something to implement in the game. The response from people who actually played the game was overwhelmingly negative.

In general, most cooking has some kind of "economics of scale" where crafting 10x the food is less than 10x the effort - at least if the initial batch size was relatively small. I've heard cook say that they will take custom recipe orders but only if provided mats to make them in one batch of at least 50-100 (IIRC.)

For example with Autumn steaks, you can set up salad greens in a pile, mushrooms and meat in containers and open them all while using a fire with a frying pan.

Food spoilage enforce very unfun meta where you have to coo kind eat all the food immediately.

[yym331]

The impact on server load primarily depends on the system's architecture, but implementing a decay system for each individual food item, like in SCUM, can lead to an increase in server load.

[Aerona]

I agree that other changes would need to be implemented before spoilage would be worthwhile. Right now players are worried about not being hungry enough, not about having a shortage of food. I think the best way to handle food spoilage technically would be to have containers degrade the quality of their contents randomly at intervals, with the probability of a decrease depending on the type of item and the type of container. (I assumed this already happened, but maybe there's another reason I'm finding so much Q1 food.) Cupboards are a good place to store food long-term, out on the table not so much. Naturally, items reaching Q0 would just be deleted.

[Massa]

yes!

we SO need this. this idea is fun! sure will add a lot of fun to my game!

[Aerona]

While it's not fun to lose what you've worked for, it's also not fun to have infinite resources. The game already has containers and buildings themselves decay (at least when unclaimed), if items degraded in storage, it would make it harder to have half the gameplay ahead of you disappear just because you found an abandoned mansion that gives you enough LP, FP, and tools to skip past months of exploration and inventory management.

Still seems like a 'for (much) later' thing, though.

[overtyped]

To change it H&H could implement what most other survival games do - food rots and you have to preserve it.

Don't you ****ing dare. Bob Dole will find you.