Stop Suicide by Sushi!

[Alamarian]

allow the roasting of onions

'Dat. Could you possibly work that into the roast meat button? Or change that to "Roast Meat/Vegetables"? Maybe just "Roast." There's all kinds of things you can roast. Like asparagus. Mmmmm.

[jorb]

General problem with present crafting. I'd like a generic "Boil" action as well. Or, better yet, a cauldron that simply boils shit. But what happens if you put lots of different stuff in? You get soup?

Not entirely trivial, all that.

[Pacho]

I'd like to be able to throw in clay, rocks, and other stuff into a cauldron and make some sort of inedible stew.

[sabinati]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup

[Cookie]

So i almost got myself killed the other day (1 hp left!).
How? Apparently, i ate too much sushi with a few onions.

Now that's just wierd. Eating raw fish and even meat isn't harmful.
If you're unlucky, you might get sick if the animal was sick. As far as i know, humans started cooking mainly because of that, and also because the food will last longer, is easier to chew and you can eat more without getting stomach ache. And what's wrong with onions, anyway?

Either way, the punishment for eating raw food is imo way over the top...

TMI Alert:

Raw meat is actually usually easier to chew and to digest than cooked meat. The process of cooking it toughens it and most types of cooking draw the juices out of it. The reason we eat it cooked? Worms. It's impossible to be 100% certain that there are no invisible small worms or eggs hiding in the meat without cooking it. Some sorts merely inhabit the gut making your food requirements go way, way up, like a tapeworm. Many sorts, including the kind hardest to avoid, incubate in the gut and then travel into the muscles and the brain. In a primitive society like ours, worms are forever. You can purge the worst of them out of the gut, nearly killing the patient in the process, but you can't dislodge them once they spread beyond that.

Of course raw fish is not remotely as dangerous as raw mammal flesh because the worms that inhabit fish rarely (never?) can colonize people. It might make good sense to make raw fish give no fep whatsoever instead of black fep. I think this is fair, because everyone knows in this day and age that raw fish is a gourmet dish that renders cultural experience on the eater, rather than a sudden stay in the hospital. If you can't trust raw fish, can you trust bread?

Hard as it is on newbies who may come into this game thinking in terms of the only possible hazards being player killers, wolves and bears and missing that jump from cliff top to cliff top, I really like the survival aspect of the game. They provide a reflection of reality that I think works well. Many people in survival situations do end up in serious trouble because of their feet. Their shoes fall apart under the stress and they quickly hurt their feet, which become infected, and they end up unable to walk around and do simple survival tasks like getting firewood. In a survival situation cut off from what you hope is civilization, you would be tempted to try swimming a river with possible lethal results. Where I live people eat the shellfish... which sometimes contains a nasty biotoxin, a game of roulette that ends so quickly most people barely have time to think, "Uh-oh, I am in trouble!" before a respirator is all that stands between them and brain death. (If you ever introduce clams and mussels in the brand new seaside terrain, it would be fair to make them dangerous.) The biggest single mistake that people make in survival situations seems to be thinking that they have to and can tough it out. Staying warm and dry and not getting worse lost than you already are is fundamental but in the urgency to Do Something gets overlooked and leads to hypothermia.

My suggestion then is to create a tutorial for newbies. Put it on the list for when the game goes beta. Or change the home page to have a button linking to a page that lists all the ways you can die. Player killers? (By all rights I should have killed my hearth mate yesterday. He ambled up just as I was cutting a tree that landed squarely on him. Now there's a realistic frontier death!) Onions are truly a greater hazard to the newbie spawned in the wilderness and wondering perplexedly what he is supposed to do now.

[Jackard]

General problem with present crafting. I'd like a generic "Boil" action as well. Or, better yet, a cauldron that simply boils shit. But what happens if you put lots of different stuff in? You get soup?

*waggles eyebrows*

[Cookie]

If they can code a "any common metal" button they should be able to code an "any common meat" and a "any common vegetable" button.

Chowder, alas, will be out of the reach of most newbs. It requires milk.

[Alamarian]

Raw meat is actually usually easier to chew and to digest than cooked meat.

Some cuts are easier to eat raw. Others not so much. Connective tissue is not pleasant while raw.

[VowOfSilence]

Arguments from realism aside, I kind of like the effect that some food is bad for you. Also... just build a fire and roast them?

Sure, but this is going to be frustrating for newbies - especially because it's not intuitive if it's not somewhat realistic, like onions. A sickness state that makes sure players realize they did something wrong would imo be better - along with a possibiliy to cure themselves again.

Hard as it is on newbies who may come into this game thinking in terms of the only possible hazards being player killers, wolves and bears and missing that jump from cliff top to cliff top, I really like the survival aspect of the game.
[...]
The biggest single mistake that people make in survival situations seems to be thinking that they have to and can tough it out. Staying warm and dry and not getting worse lost than you already are is fundamental but in the urgency to Do Something gets overlooked and leads to hypothermia.

Don't get me wrong, i love the survival aspect as well, i'd actually love to see something like hypothermia in the game. I was surprised as well when i read that keeping warm and dry is actually most important, more so than eating and even drinking.

btw: can those worms actually kill you in RL? i know my grandpa got infected with some in ~1950, but they got rid of them. Kinda gross, that stuff xP

[Cookie]

TMI alert:

Damn right they can kill you. The ones in your gut can kill you from malnutrition. The ones in your brain.... not pretty. But rather than kill you the ones in your muscle tissue turn you into a painful cripple so that predatory meat-eating animals can kill you more easily as you hobble along, thus continuing the life cycle of the worm. Or course there are lots of more benign species of worms too, like pinworms, but all in all. No. Better to cook the meat unless it has major vetrinary certification.