Any thoughts on food spoilage? I don't want to pressure Red51, just something I want to poke at in a light manner while also frustratingly half asleep as I'm probably known to be now. I curse you random 'private number' for waking me up.
Well, food indeed has to spoil in this game because we're over producing to the point of heavily stockpiling on it. We need other NPCs to eat from our supplies, as well as ways to offer up an interesting 'supply & demand' with food related stuff. Trading with NPCs, and such. Food spoiling would balance things out that you would only harvest as much as you would need, or capable of storing in your storages. The way it's done in Starbound is that your food would naturally expire, yet would 'stop' the timer on spoilage when you kept it in a fridge object. I actually approve of that Starbound fridge gaming mechanic because it's not as severely harsh and hardcore as 'Conan Exile' where your food would spoil near instantly. You would only store what you're capable of, and you would keep what you've earned and entitled to in game. You would be given 1-2 in game days before your food spoiled into a green rotten mess, something Rising World should avoid at all costs in hardcoreness. Food spoilage should be natural, as in Starbound. I guess even 'Rimworld', yet it's now been too long I can't even use it efficiently as a reference point. Haven't even played '7 Days to Die' long enough to know how long food spoilage was, yet it managed to hang in there long enough that it must be good. Food should be able to last you a nice long decent while without frustrating the player.
The cold should indeed be taken into effect that you should use underground area as a way to preserve food in medieval era, as in modern. Those tunnels, stone layers, and such should cool your food to stay preserved for longer. Even keeping it at the bottom of the pyramid should be efficiently proper for keeping food intact. Living in a cold winter biome should keep your food intact near an infinite number that you could probably work out a transport network of sending food to a winter biome, then back again via horses, trains, and trucks back to settlements when needed. IN the real world, in Sibera, people preserve their food outdoors, yet protected from animals behind a wooden wall (somewhat like a garage) because of how naturally cold the environment is in that fridge-like state. If you're in a modern era then I bet people would make 'cool storage warehouse' in their modern era settlements to keep all the food from spoiling. Frozen foods, and such. Smoked salmon, smoked fish, ice cream, among other various sorts of more worthwhile foods relating to meat, fish, and maybe even veggies & fruits.
I also love the mention that we'll be able to smoke & salt our food to preserve it, something that adds a nice awesome touch to the survival side of things.
QuoteYes, definitely. Keeping things underground in caves sounds like a good solution. Other options would be to preserve food (e.g. salt or dry meat).
We just want to do something about the "food part", right now it's too easy to survive (planting a few tomato plants already solves all your food/water problems^^). But of course it will be possible to disable food spoilage in the settings.
if anything, we're at the mercy of Red51 on the vanilla side of things. We should however be able to tweak this via plugin API, configs, and such. I'm curious to see how Red51 tackles this as to not piss off the casual players, nor the hardcore players, even if we can tweak it plugin API wise.