Lol ok maybe just half the planet. Heh naw I typo'd should take down the plant. Now that I think about it rotting plants left alone should spread a disease to the whole green house. People never understand how tricky growing indoors can be until they try to do it.
Been playing a lot, and crops and food are starting to bother me. The only plants initially worth growing are Pumpkins, Durians, Tomatoes, and Wheat. 1. Only 1 fruit per harvest is not fun, especially when I need to stay on the same side of the planet for them to grow. I built a large wooden stand to start assembling my capital ship on just so I could stay nearby. They should constantly produce, not stack, and have each fruit decay separately. Maybe even with a spoil multiplier while on the plant. I really like how ARK does farming. Edit: With fertilizers, making nutrient solution required to grow in Empyrion. 2. Corn is useless unless you want to make plastic. 40 food uncooked, 50 food cooked. Raw durians are 40 food and durian fries are 75. 3. Aloe and Ahax are only useful once off Akua, and Ahax only if you don't have a stock of fiber because ointment is worse than bandaids. With all the large medis the Crog drop, I've never needed to craft one. 4. Coffee/Water/Adrenaline Shots are all pretty useless. Stamina regen needs to be hurt a lot for these items to be helped, and I'm not sure that'd be good gameplay. Maybe add thirst and use that to counter Coffee/Adrenaline shots by having to drink water to counter the stam buff? 5. Pearthings suck. 35 food, 80 food when baked into a pie with water, sugarcane (another non-growable handpicked resource) and flour. Durians are less work for more food with fewer mats and processing time. 6. The minimum build height stack for a farm is four high, and this sucks for capital ship design. I need a ceiling block, a full block worth of grow light space, an empty block of space for the plant to grow, and then a growing plot. If I want to have the plot protected, that's another hull block. I was trying to build a sweet farm dome on my capital ship, but grow lights won't stick to undersides of the glass panels. Maybe a radial set of grow lights that put out light in a circle would help. Will we be getting the sun factored in to growing, so we could grow in space/on planet without lights? It could use similar methods to solar panel calculations. I find I only cook Dino Stew Royale if I have a stock of meat, or Ratatouille if I don't. Salami is for early adventuring. Canned veggies should use corn instead of Tomatoes, that way you can produce Canned Veggies and Canned Meat without sharing ingredients. The Crog also drop too many canned veggies, have two or three stacks just from clearing Akua.
I pretty much live off of the Crog's veggie stew. I agree it drops way to much. Also your other suggestions are really good. It bothers me just as a gardener that I only get one fruit per vine. Although of squash/pumpkins that is almost correct. However only one tomato from a vine? Seriously nobody would grow it anymore if it was like that in real life.
Some feedback on food and medical items. 1. Food stacking this high is bad! It should stack to at most 5, since large stacks has made hunger a non-issue. Having said that, stacks of 1 was a pain too! Non-usable ingredients (e.g. aloe, wheat, fiber) should still be able to stack to the high heavens, since they don't affect difficulty either way. 2. Aliens drop too much food. 3. I've never found a use for corn or wheat. Bread needs a boost, c'mon! It's the staple of all staples. 4. I have never needed stomach pills or antibiotic ointment in 300+ hours of play, and can't imagine why anyone would. 5. Antidote pills I have not needed since 1.6, since no enemy so far has survived long enough to get in melee range (perhaps more of a problem with the speed of melee enemies than the pills themselves...alien doggies also need longer perception range...c'mon, that's what hunting doggies are for!) 6. Medkit ingredients are harder to find in the current iteration, which I like! 7. Bandages are just fine the way they are. 8. What someone mentioned above about having to actively attend your crops or else they become diseased etc I like the sound of, but I can also imagine some people would hate it... perhaps that could be part of a Casual/Survival/Hardcore difficulty slider if the game ever gets one. That's all for now! As always enjoying the game
Corn's main use was for turning into Plastic Raw Material which used to have use in large quantities for making decorative Building Blocks which got removed in the Transition between Pre-Alpha & Alpha, & now ya get the decorativeness simply by using the Symbol & Texture Tool. Now Plastic Raw Material mostly only gets used in modest amounts as one of the Ingredients for Emergency Rations.
Well if we could USE those items... sit in couches, desks, tables, use beds, sinks, consoles......... then I would see an increase in their need in every BA/CV build
Would be nice if there'd be some distinction between meats of different creatures and soil requirements of plants. I don't need some really bothersome and sophisticated chemical tracker, but having planting plots for plants of different type (Akua requiring one type of soil, Omicron requiring another) as well as different light requirements would be nice as would be having source of meat actually matter (some more filling than others, some absolutely poisonous, some lasting a better while than others - with all those modifiers affecting food or other items made out of them). Right now it's mostly just aesthetics, anyway, since you can just live easily off one type of meal thorough your whole life. Space durian is nothing like durian. More like bellpeppers. Why not to give it original name. In general, I think we could do more than "Space [Earth's edibles]". Other than that, I'd like it if there could be substitutes for certain ingredients in recipes - not only for food but food is the best example.
Currently I think the food system works well, however I do have a massive amount in the fridges on my CV and in my base, and that's not even with a massive farm! I'm not really complaining about that as it's going to take some serious negligence on my part to starve to death, however it does make things a bit easy. The aliens that spawn in POI's drop an incredible amount of food, I don't think I've got through all of the canned veg they've been dropping. I think they carried more veg than ammo! There doesn't seem to be much of a need to craft different food items, canned veg/meat does fine when I'm really hungry and space fries for when my guy needs a bit of a top up. Maybe add some buffs to different types of food? Rather than simply replacing stamina/food maybe have some like 5% increased stamina for a limited time as well as replenishing food/stamina/health or something along those lines?
Isn't that already in since... quite a long time? Most types of food affect more than one stat. I'd like varied food to have more of an effect myself but I am not sure how to do that without making food system even easier - up to the point of worthlessness. The only thing I can think of is actual nutrient system (different foodstuffs having different values for proteins, vitamins etc) but that's rather ambitious and I am unsure if really good (though frankly, as long as people wouldn't overdo it - I could enjoy it).
Checking some of the foods out they don't buff you per se, but replenish your different stats. What I was on about was more like temporarily increasing your stats like say boosting your health to 550 instead of 500 for a limited time. However, I didn't check all of the foods so if there are foods that do such a thing please ignore me.
First, I would like to say That this is a great game and is extremely polished for still being in alpha! Tweak the stamina bar to have a max pool setting in addition to an active amount available to use. That sets up the option to implement some ideas below. I would like to see an option in the settings to turn on complex food/water management. The player should strive to keep hunger and max stamina at 75% or higher or start taking penalties (to damage, work speed, max health? some penalties) . For water, the max stamina bar could slowly lower like the food bar. Liquids would restore the max pool and give a bump to replenishment rate. perhaps tie rate of weapon fire or other work activities to stamina. I just think having access to a steady supply of water should be even a higher priority than food, and protecting the oxygen and water systems should be a top priority. For food (and possibly even drink), what about exploring a "craving" system. Yes, a person could live on salami or berries alone, but in a complex system the player could be rewarded for maintaining access to a full variety of foods. For example, the player can eat anything to help fill hunger, but if they match the craving, then they could get a bonus of some sort (bonus to damage, mining, etc.) this bonus could grow for each craving met up to a max and then be sustained as long as the character eats the appropriate food, so not just eating to survive. as a possible example: 1st craving met: +5% damage from weapon 2nd craving met: + 5% mining yield 3rd : +5% max health 4th : +5% damage reduction 5th: + 5% damage from weapons and so on, cycle through each one so that at the 16th craving met the character would have +20% to all 4 categories. Missing a craving would roll back the last bonus and keep rolling back until the craving is met. At max, the craving could give an xp bump or something or just be used to maintain the bonuses. --Krieger
I'd like to be able to find an unknown alien plant, study it with some kind of new research device to make it edible and then upgrade it through random genetic mutations selection and transgenesis. We could have an automatic scientific naming system for new plants "citrus omicronensis". For upgrades come to my mind automated growing plots (robotic arm picking mature fruit), hydroponics, aeroponics, stronger growing lights, aquatic farming, biofuel production, life support. Gathering is a bit boring, there is not enough weird hostile plants, it's a pick up race, why not some space cactus with expensive fruits throwing its needles at incoming players, alien creepers catching players in dark woods? Please, add some kind of giant brain sucking mosquito. (from Time Masters film) Now for hunting: We should be able to make our own hunting reserve. We find animals, we put them asleep to collect biologic material and install a transmitter so we can inseminate them to increase population growth and find hordes later with minimap marking. We could have overall less animals spawning, less spreads out spawns and dense hordes due to players becoming space cowboys. We should be able to trade frozen food. It should be difficult to stay in good shape for space farers, it should require quality food and drugs, we could have something like dune spice or alien royal jelly, or some player made through research to trade. We could make things even better with exotic life forms, dextrogyre, silicon based, ect.
Empyrion Food Restructuring Goals: The goal of this is to enable Eleon Game Studios to easily modify their Alpha 4 food system to something more interactive, engaging, and perhaps even a bit playful. Everyone loves waffles. This restructuring should be as efficient as possible, requiring no new art assets, and only changes to the internal database. It removes the need for certain items that have been seen as problematic: Fiber, Sugarcane, Magnesium Powder. It rebalances food based on some initial rarity/difficulty settings (see: computations), and then builds on the new base food values to enable computational derivation of 'better' food items. Each T0 item is given values based on the 'three values, pick two' triangle based around Food, Health, and Stamina. Perish time is then derived from the difficulty/rarity rating. All of these initial values can be tweaked, and the higher tier foods can then be derived. It attempts to handle the current "tomato" problem, and give players a reason to make more than just canned food. Finally, it attempts to add a larger diversity to the food items, expand the reach of the game to players who may be vegetarian, vegan, have celiac disease or gluten-sensitive. By doing so, more players will feel included. There's a lot of "attempt", here, I hope I have some success. Enjoy! --Brian You may view the spreadsheet online, here!
And now, my thought processes. Changes: Starting escape pods should have only "Terran" foods. Tomatoes, Durians, Pumpkins, Wheat, Corn, Pears. Plant monsters should only drop spoiled food. Evil things that they are. Terran ship cargo containers should only have Terran sprouts. for harder games, with no sprouts in the pod, this is how you regain your Terran food base! Alien containers should only have Alien Sprouts. Okay, fiber, sugarcane, and pixie stick bundles are awful to try and hunt. They blend in too easily with Ye Olde Lushe Foilage of these verdant, alien words. Plus, fiber is needed for so many things. Now that alien honey is plantable, sugarcane should just be dropped. And wood should be able to be made into grow plots, and fiber removed from the game entirely. DEATH TO FIBER, LONG LIVE WOOD. Get those chainsaws out. Second, good gravy, everything is tomatoes! I like a good ragu like anyone else, but, yeah. Third, as a caterer/event-planner, I know that if there's in-game options for vegetarians, vegans, gluten-sensitive, and celiac, it will increase game sales. People want to feel like they've been noticed, and it is the small touches that guide a community to greatness. Lesse, what's next. Medical supplies. I chose to expand the requirements to a flat four items for all things. Plastic, an easily attainable item like dust or O2, something from Akua, and something from Omicron. Did a bit of rebalancing, and tried to have the ingredients make sense, based on their existing modifiers. I don't want to make it easier, because I like the idea that you have to harvest two planets to produce medical supplies. But I did re-work bandages to remove the fiber requirement. I removed magnesium powder from ALL medical supplies, because it is just too valuable for weapons. Added Small O2 to the medkits to represent hyposprays. I added more use for wood, because wood is good. And plentiful! Maybe they'll fix chainsaws and harvesters. Wood planks for early game smoked meat, when you're stingy with iron. Wood for growing plots, instead of fiber. Reasons for steak AND smoked meat AND ribs AND ham. Really different numbers for various foods, which follow a logical progression, that can be easily coded into a game for expansion purposes. Also, I didn't want to make NEW food (I'm looking at YOU, honey+orange+lemons=fruity alcoholic beverage), because I want the devs to be able to slip this right into the next release. No new art, no new foods, just a quick run through the DB to update numbers. ingredients, and some names! Boom. Also, swapping ingredients around to make a little more sense. Club sandwich = Ham, Bread, Tomatoes. Trying to get a good diversity in products, in case you don't luck out and get all your sprouts. Right now, no tomatoes == serious suckage. Plastic is now the "Permanent Preservation" additive. Plastic cases for medicine, and plastic cases for your survival rations/MREs. Steel plates vastly increase the perish time, but I have found that once you get a T1 Fridge up, Perish times become MUCH less important. In a big way. So, why long perish time foods, like canned food? So you can build vehicles without fridges! Or missions! Imagine a SP/CoOp mission where you have to pack a cargo container full of food, and deliver it. Etc. Rejiggered the emergency rations to reflect their ubiquitous nature. Food, food, sugar, snacks, coffee, no perish time. Now, they're easier to make, but not EASY to make, and you can have some true survival rations for your no-fridge vehicles, in the mid-to-late game. In the end, I love the gardening/food prep aspect of survival games, and I'd like to help grow Empyrion's take on it. I think this is a very easy way for the devs to slip a food update in, that'll make a lot of people happy. The people who do not want to deal with it have some easy options. Meat + wood = Long duration meat, and Terran foods don't give food poisoning. Folks who want a little more complexity can graduate up to the middle tier of foods, and produced canned goods. Then, for the full on horticulturalists, there's crazy mode. Than then there's me, who needs waffles and coffee and pie for his [WAFFLE] [HAUS]. YMMV, --Brian
Okay, tweaked the spreadsheet based on some feedback I've gotten, thank you! Removed the need for plastic for the early game medical supplies, and did a little re-balancing. Now, you're not hosed if you can't find corn. --B.
You brought some good suggestions ScaryOne. As an FYI, if attempting to place a light on a surface that wont accept the light, delete the block in question momentarily and replace it with a flat wall. This will allow you to place your light and you can then switch back the original block.
