Mmm... let's do new model for that, too. Let the existing model stay the clone chamber. I'd say T1 a device block, like the operating table deco, T2 like a hospital bed, and T3 enclosed, but more like a cryochamber in style. I know most models are placeholders right now, but let's face it- they need work. Most things are difficult to integrate both aesthetically and efficiently, and there isn't an overall sense of design. There should be visual differences between alien equipment and human stuff. The new bunkbeds, closet, and especially the mobile constructor are good examples of the direction the art assets need to take- clean, sharp-looking, and fitting well in with other blocks with no weird gaps. These are "as we progress" critiques, not "gimme now"
This sounds nice... at least in theory... I do like the notion of Emergency Rations restoring health points rather than stamina. However, the only way I can describe your decision to make the template for Emergency Rations "more complex" is as crazy! The template was already complex as it was - far too complex to make very many of them. And Energy Pills are rather hard to come by. Code: Plastic Raw Material: 3 Purified Water: 20 Energy Pills: 1 Ham: 3 Bread: 1 Durian: 2 Pearthing Fruits: 2 Plant Fibers: 12 Stone Dust: 2 Now it requires some extremely rare ingredients: Code: Purified Water: 2 Varon Root: 1 Raw Meat: 2 Pixie Stalk Bundle: 2 Kavae Beans: 4 Confetti Moss Scrapings: 1 Alien Spike Lemon: 4 Alien Plasma ZR1: 1 Alien Plasma T6: 1 It is now completely impossible to craft an Emergency Ration on one's starter planet as there is no way to obtain all of these ingredients from one planet. (For instance, I've maxed out my Tech Tree and I have yet to find any Alien Plasma T6 or Confetti Moss Scrapings.) BTW: Why would emergency rations even require coffee beans? It's food for emergency use, not a caffeinated beverage! And in real life you know they do not use stuff like Pixe Stalk Bundles or Varon Root to make MRE's because those are fictional. They certainly would not use rare or exotic stuff like Confetti Moss Scrapings, either. And two different kinds of Alien Plasma? I mean... YUCK! Who wants Alien Plasma in their food?! I don't know about other players, but I know the first thing that I'm doing before I continue playing: I'm modifying my Config.ecf to restore Emergency Rations to the way they were before.
The Spoiled Food template needs to be available in the Survival Constructor. I mean, you can turn seaweed into biofuel, and spoiled food gets made as an intermediary automatically, but it seems the spoiled food template is just missing. Small oversight in an otherwise brilliant update.
I came here to voice my displeasure with the changes to how food has been affected by your recent changes. I don't recall seeing anything in the future additions list that stated you were going to change recipes and add harvested - not grown - items to making food. This is game breaking for me. I'm sure it's not to others and they will enjoy having the drudgery of going from planet to planet collecting food items. None of the recent changes are welcome to the general community but since you don't read the Steam forums, you won't know. I have advised them to come here and let you know. I hope they do. In the meantime, I'm going to be changing my review of this game to unfavorable. I don't think you're going to change your "update" regardless of how negatively it is received. You're just going to continue to take your ques from the people who regularly post on these forums and that's a shame. You have a big Steam community that you are IGNORING. We don't come here to post because your little group of fanbois will flame the hell out of us for any and or most suggestions we make. At least on the Steam community forums, they are civil. I'm done. Flame away if it makes you feel better or important.
Bit extreme considering we're still knee-deep in the middle of Alpha, no? We know Multiplayer people like to continue playing their game, but at some point new systems have to be added, old systems have to be changed to be updated, and things break. Have a Coke and a smile.
A note on that: because the config is an override, you can't just delete the lines. Any ingredient you want to remove has to be left in the template, but qty set to zero. Adding lines works fine.
Also, it looks like you already had a custom config. Survival rations ARE ridiculous now, but they no longer require pearthings or ham or a bunch of other stuff you've got there. You need to reset your config before you do anything.
I wish things from different environments had different needs, instead of everything growing under identical conditions. Maybe some special blocks to create the right conditions for certain plants. Especially things that come from a lava planet needing a hot environment, maybe some things coming from non-O2 environments are damaged by O2 in the air, some things require a hydroponic plot, etc.
Ah, you're right. I was going by the in-game recipe, which got messed up by my config. The actual recipe is: Code: WaterBottle: 2 Varonroot: 1 Meat: 2 PixieStalkBundle: 2 KavaeBeans: 4 ConfettiMossScrapings: 1 AlienSpikeLemon: 4 AlienParts01: 1 AlienParts03: 1
I think I see where you are going with this update, and it's a pretty cool/thought out idea. But what rolled out today needs more balancing. My observations, and some suggestions to re-balance this so it can be more towards where I think you are going: One of the most common effects people get is poison bite. It is now the hardest to cure. The less common "parasite" effect? That I now have enough materials to cure that until you finally release the game--and probably until I quit when I get tired of the game after that... incredibly common items--I throw away alien parts, teeth, and sometimes thorns because I get so many! This should be the other way around: if it's a rare effect, it should be harder to cure, and common should have commonly found cures. The balance between "how often do you get this effect" and "how hard is it to cure" needs adjusting, unless you really WANT people dying of poison left, right and sideways. I personally don't find this fun. If the materials were growable, this would be different. If the materials were more common, this would be different. This can be rebalanced a number of different ways: Change how often the effects are applied (make parasites most common, poison less). Change required materials for curing items (which you just did) Change frequency of finding curing item materials (or make grow-able) (any of which would work; just not balanced as is now) The "high end" food (canned meat, vegetables) all have really weird/rare pickable ingredients giving all these other nifty effects (radiation reduction? okay, that's a cool effect, but how often do I need it...?) However, the food range goes from "bread and fries - easy" to "I need to throw everything in the fridge and go gather more weird stuff" to make. There's nothing in-between except stuff made from MEAT. Can we please have some selections with no weird effects that are still "simple" to make and can be GROWN (not everyone likes to go hunt for food all the time)? Some examples (note that these exist, but either require meat, or cheese (more on cheese in a moment), or some weird pickable thing): High food filler (150+) but low perish, kept in fridge to munch around the base/ship. Moderate food filler (75-125) with a fairly high perish, for raiding. High stam booster. Does nothing else, but boost stam. Health booster. Low food, but long perish timer. Needs to be easy to make (the akua wine actually works for this, but the low stack count makes it awkward to be practical--I can burn through 80 bandages on one raid...). By making these things available without all the super-special rare-effects (radiation reduction), and made with growable foods, it will solve the basic "fill the food bar" need. Then you can add in the "super cool foods that can do the other stuff". But people need to first be able to fill their food bar, and right now, that just really seriously limited what's useful to grow. Please note that if you make it so we cannot eat the same foods in a row, people will die from starvation, because what people can get are often limited (at least, right now). It's also not really practical to have many different kinds of food in the fridge, or to carry on a raid. There's a reason we invented MREs, right? Boring, but gets the job done... So many things require CHEESE. In theory, this is okay, as it's a common staple food... ... except the only way to get cheese is to kill (hunt again!) the cows. Can we add a mechanic to tame them? Or milk the wild ones, just getting their milk? It would be cool if you could walk up to a wild cow, press F, and get a bunch of milk (and the cow runs off, of course). Right now, having to kill cows to get milk is.... strange? (not to mention they don't always give it). Or add in an alternate way to get milk somehow. I ignore all the cheese recipes (and there's a lot of them), because of how hard/time-consuming it is to chase those cows for miles for a few mugs of milk (and not many at that). How about the harvester module on HVs being able to collect pickable stuff? right now, it just destroys them, without collecting them. Even if they have to grow back again completely (as opposed to when you pick it and it just grows back the pickable part - make the plant have to grow back entire), this would be much easier/preferable to hand-picking all these odd items. It still wouldn't be very efficient, but better than what we have now. Add in a level requirement to craft some of this stuff, if you don't want people making it early on. Want the super cool radiation-reducing canned veggies? Nope, need level 20 to make those! But you can make a simple canned veggies at level 10.... (if this exists already, I can't see it, as I'm level 25, and see all recipes) Add in a level requirement to grow the higher-end plants. Last... and not least... adding stuff to the in-game vendors is okay for SP games, but I really hate using the vendors in our multiplayer world. The prices in the economy are really out of balance--some things are insanely priced, and some things have basically no value--so just making the new ingredients available at a vendor doesn't really solve the "I need this for consumables" problem, other than as a "band-aid". Now you are in a catch-22: ... must raid bases to get stuff to sell... to buy consumables to raid bases. But will I ever get "ahead"? The way the prices are for buying/selling... probably not, unless you get really lucky. This doesn't matter so much in a single player game, but in MP, the difference between lucky loot and bad luck loot is devastating. The only reason I have heavy armor is because one of my buddies gave me some. I have *yet* to get some from a POI. He sells them to vendors for cash, because he's getting so many. I haven't seen how you revamped the loot, so there's hope there (and I'll take a look), but I'm not a fan of the in-game economy as it has been. Also, people playing MP servers... want a PLAYER RUN economy. I'm trying really hard to get that going, but it's almost impossible the way the in-game trading systems work right now (especially for small gaming groups on a private server). That's not related to this update, so I'll refrain from going further into that right now: just want to say that this isn't really a good solution other than "temporary" (which is what I hope this is). Thanks for listening. Hope you found something useful in my long post here. I'm really enjoying this game, and I'm hoping this change will get settled into a better balance. EDIT: I re-read this, and I would like to say that I DO like how you are putting particular effect to certain things (I saw some people are confused by that, but I get it, and like that), and also that processed foods give MORE food than the original components. I used to not make fries, because I got more food eating the raw durians... now, it's better to make the fries. Also, another idea for milk: Would it be possible to make milk from a plant of some sort, that we can (or already do) grow? Aloe milk? Ahax milk? (like coconut milk?) The idea being to get "milk" from another source... we can make milk from soy, why not from Ahax? Thanks again for "listening"
Was the feedback harsh and perhaps even a bit extreme? Yes. Granted, it's still in Alpha. However, Sky Pilot made good arguments and I have to agree. There is no fun in requiring players to hop from planet to planet just to gather all the ingredients necessary to, say, bake a pie or grill a sandwich. If it comes down to it, you know that players are going to make and eat whatever is readily available. Looking at Config_Example, I see the changes firsthand. And there's just no way I'll be able to make most of those foods now. The move to requiring ingredients that must be gathered instead of grown is a big mistake for EGS. In time this will become obvious. As much as I've played EGS now, I've yet to try many of the recipes available - even before the Alpha 7.6 update. This was because many of them called for ingredients that I could not obtain. But now I'll either have to modify my Config or I'll just refuse to cook anything beyond the bare necessities. Most of us play this game purely for fun and as a distraction from real life. Make things too difficult or frustrating and it starts to feel too much like work instead of entertainment. The main point of food in most games is to fulfill a requirement. It's not like we can actually taste the food we make in EGS. Nor does food play that important a role in this game - nor should it. I'm reminded of the major changes to the food system that the Starbound game went through after it emerged from alpha. Originally, characters were required to eat to stay alive, like in most games with food. Some players complained about this. So, the devs did away with this requirement and left food and cooking purely as a way to get buffs.
Except that you cut off the worst parts of his post, those that weren't actually useful feedback, but rather game-bashing and community-bashing. When you do that as a poster, you can almost count on whatever you said that might have been useful, falling on deaf ears and being completely ignored. He's not recognizing the fact that we -are- all Alpha testers, and that the game -will- break and be unbalanced from time to time during Alpha. He's like an Ostrich sticking it's head in the sand, hoping to avoid a predator, expecting that good things will happen to him because he wants them to. There are FAR too many posters out here complaining that the game isn't balanced, that certain things break, and that they want to play their game. It isn't a "game", it is an "Alpha piece of software" - when it's in Beta it'll be a game. Honestly, I think Early Access does just as much harm as good anymore, since there are so many people that just don't get development cycles and want their game right now.
Plants usually produce Oxygen. If you have a garden aboard a CV or SV it seems they should add to the oxygen not take from it. I like the point that if it's growing on that plant, you should be able to grow it outdoors on that planet or one that has the same environment.
I'm a bit leary about having so many ingredients to gather in the 'wild'. I've played games where that has killed crafting, the players just do the lowest level. In starting this game I attempted to build up some Emergency Rations when I got my first SV. That took a few hours to find everything and I only yielded about 30 for the effort. The only thing that needed farming was to make the energy pills, now it requires 7 items to be gathered from different planets....this isn't a good balance. If you are going to have gathering as a main component for crafting, you need to give the player a way to find the items. It would be nice to have a 'bio scanner' or something that can direct you to material you need to gather for crafting. It wouldn't need to be as direct as the mineral deposits but something that would highlight or direct you to an area to gather. I find that the time I spend looking doesn't balance with what I actually find and harvest.
Is it intentional that the complex food can't be crafted via farming anymore? Every advanced food requires at least one ingredient that can't be farmed. Meaning that farms set up to produce advanced food (like canned veg farms previously) no longer work. This puts farms in a bit of an odd spot, since they no longer can produce productive long-term items now, just basic foods. We can't even make bandages via a farm anymore. I guess it's just tomatoes and wheat for sandwiches now?
I like farming and growing food, as I consider it one of the pseudo-realistic aspects of survival in space, so I like to see work here. I like lots of the changes but not all of them. I'll comment on individual items: Bread - OK, although unless I'm blind how do you make wheat now? Is it broken? Space Fries, Popcorn - seem too strong, or not requiring enough durians/corn as input, considering those are easily grown Steak, Ribs, Salami, Ham - good Wine, Coffee - Coffee should add a lot more stamina than wine, why would anyone drink coffee instead of wine now? Cake - if this cake is going to be left in the game, I think the recipe is strange. Emergency Rations - these are so hard to create they are almost useless, it also doesn't make much sense that rations that you start the game with (presumably supplied from Earth) require alien plasma to make them Sandwich, Stew - OK Canned Meat - Alien Spike Lemon makes little sense, meat itself can only be hunted so why add anything to it? If the food is too powerful then just increase the meat requirement Canned Vegetables - Alien Spike Lemon makes little sense, put corn in there instead. Lemon isn't a vegetable. The old recipe was 4 tomato, 4 durian, 4 pumpkin, 1 steel, 5 water. I don't see why you can't just add 4 corn. If you're trying to make people collect stuff to make it, you're already making them collect water and iron. Realistically canning vegetables is something you should be able to do entirely by farming, people have been doing it for hundreds of years. Veggie Burger - take cheese out of the veggie burger, add mushrooms instead. Cheese is an animal product, a vegan wouldn't eat it. Considering you have to KILL animals to make cheese in Empyrion, a vegetarian wouldn't eat it either. Pumpkin Cookie - got really hard to make, since both milk and eggs are hard to come by, alien spike lemon also makes no sense, is that supposed to be a sweetener? I didn't see a problem with the old recipe, if anything pumpkin cookies are now too powerful, you can live off like two cookies for days. I'd put back the recipe and maybe add honey to it as a sweetener Fruit Pie - got really hard to make, again since eggs are hard to come by. We can make bread without them but not pie crust? I like the addition of akua berries. I wouldn't mind adding lemons if I could grow them. And much like the veggie burger, the current version of the fruit pie requires you to kill animals to make it (for eggs) so it isn't vegetarian. (I personally eat meat and don't care, I'm just pointing this out because others might care.) Other comments (for 8.0 or later): Consider adding a new plant that is a source of sugar, or a recipe for sugar based on honey or something. Then use that in cake, fruit pies, a few other recipes. Or just use honey. All plants should be farmable. Some might require special growing lights or pots of a higher tech level, or some type of research to figure out how to farm it. Need a way to farm milk and eggs. You may need to create something like a pen, and then capture a certain type of beast to "plant" it there. Add Canned Fruit, including pears, oranges, maybe ahax fruit and/or spike lemon Space oranges can be grown but are useless, why not make orange juice or something out of them? You should be able to make something like tequila out of the cactus, and beer out of wheat Durian is a fruit, not a vegetable - you can make fries out of them, but it isn't a true substitute for a potato (or anything like it really) so it is odd to put it in canned vegetables
It does put farms in a weird position - in that case why bother making extensive farming systems really. But fear not, they're adding atleast some of the gatherable-only plants as growable. I feel that atleast Alien Spike Lemon is in that list. @Ian Einman About the eggs, all dinosaurs drop them now - so it's bit easier to aquire them.
