Food System

it still takes me a long time to find the eggplant, seems still to rare to me or is it only supposed to grow in certain places? takes me like an real hour to even find 2 of them. maybe half as frequent as the alien spike lemon would be better?

 

I agree. It's one of the reasons I would prefer it if it were possible to culture them as well.

 

Thanks guys for all your feedback, I collect the scaly pods (elien egg things) at the beginning and all through my games, they have a low perishable time and a high spawnrate so can be collected in good numbers and spoil quite quickly if left out of a fridge. You can also get spoiled food from anything which has a perishing time, ie Aloe Vera plants, Lemons, Fruits, meat, Although i would avoid using lemons or fruits for spoiling as they are much better for eating until you get a base going and can cook up Meat, I usually go out past the silicon meteors and collect all the lemons from over round that lake carefully avoiding the drones and the tower bases there, Upon returning to the escape pod I usually have enough to fill a couple of small ship fridges. Which will give you a good food reserve until your base is up and running.

 

OK so I have spent 5 and a half hours yesterday just making all the foods there are in the menu, collecting and creating foods.

The food system needs some balancing quite badly in my opinion.

The gains you get from processing complex foods are not worth the time you put into it.
It is cheaper, faster, and easier to just live on salami sticks for ever.

Processing food into a tin is fiddly and takes time, its the same for most of the foods that require 3 or more ingredients.
There has to be a much better pay off for the time used to make these things, gaining a bit of storage time isn't really good enough.
Things like pizza, sandwiches, tinned food, all the complex foods in the menu should give you at least half of a full green bar of health.

Its just not worth the time to make the food unless there are really good gains for doing so.

And making those emergency rations, the big square yellowy one, totally not worth the effort at all whats so ever.
Cant see me bothering with another one of them ever again the way it is now.

Also there are no ''special'' foods, where you can say, eat a special food, that has multiple ingredients, that gives you a real advantage, like boost the speed at which you run, or megga jump, or bio food matter for suit giving it a shield for 60 seconds and things like that.
This might be for future, but the food gains problem is pretty important for steam release I would hazard a guess.

 

Eh, I kinda like them. They're the only food that doesn't spoil, so you can just toss them in a storage bin in an SV or GV and not need to worry about a fridge.

On the other hand, with all the ingredients that go into them, you'd expect to get more than one emergency ration from crafting.

It'd also be nice if the canned foods didn't spoil either. That's..really the point of canning, after all.

 

Canned food does spoil after a while. But I do feel your right in that it's shouldn't spoil in the game. The MRE's in real life do soil over time, and have about the same shelf life as some canned food depending on owe you get your ration from.

I'd still like to see some kind of freeze drying or at least basic food drying.

 

They reckon that if there have been any abandoned canned foods in the Antarctic research/whaling stations, they'd still be good to eat. A mixture of the salting, canning and freezing makes it pretty much everylasting.

Canned food in game does have the longest expiry time at least. The problem is balancing the relative ease of canned food against the MRE. Currently the MRE is much harder to make, though it does also provide a full hunger bar. Perhaps as Eviscerator said, it should output multiple. Though speaking of the Emergency Rations in game, why do they need Rock Dust? Is that an actual ingredient in MREs?

 

Not an actual ingredient, but I think it's a placeholder ingredient for a mineral supplement. And balancing canned food should be relatively easy. An MRE has something like 3000 calories in it, half again as much as the average human needs for a day. I'm looking at a can of mixed veggies and a can of pasta as they're what's in game and they only give..hmn.. 260-290 depending on brand and type of pasta. The veggies...can't be right.

Only 70-90 calories, depending on which veggie mix and brand you pick. So..yeah..canned food, easy, doesn't spoil, also doesn't fill much. All the more reason to make it nonperishable and stackable, eh?

 

Makes sense. Though 3000 calories is half the recommended amount? In the UK, 2,500 calories is the recommended calorie intake for an adult male, 2,000 for adult female (unless I am remembering it wrong). Then again, MRE's are often used by the military, and because of the level of activity they'll be doing, it would make sense for an MRE to be half a day's worth of food.

Note that I didn't mean the above in a game balancing context, this is more IRL curiosity.

 

Also I would just like to add here, perhaps some kind of 'fullness' system similar to Minecraft?

In Minecraft when you top off your hunger bar and become full, the time it stays at full depends on what food you ate. For example, bread isn't as filling as steak, so you become hungry again sooner.

Or perhaps some kind of 'buffer' that goes beyond the 500 point maximum, so if you eat a food that is more than enough to top you off, the rest isn't wasted. Like say 500 is a full bar, but you can actually eat up to 600.

 

Personally, I thought it added a nice incentive to get the more powerful foods. You could easily have an infinite wheat farm and eat only bread, but you'd get hungry quick, and IIRC you would only regenerate health if your hunger was 100%.

Though I guess the system here works as well, since (at least currently) your hunger bar doesn't really matter whether it's at 1 or 500. Only when it gets to 0 do you have a problem (ie starving).

 

Half again, as in 50% more than. The general recommended amount is 2000 calories a day.

As far as food potency goes, it just seems like a mechanic that would add complexity. The game is supposed to be primarily about exploring, building, and finding Empyrion, not simply surviving, right?

That said, I am a fan of how 7 Days to Die handles food, any 'fullness' you eat in excess of your hunger bar is added on, though you're unable to eat until you burn through the excess and are able to visibly deplete your hunger again.

 

Speaking of over-stuffing your face, reminds me of Haven and Hearth. You could over-eat there, though the downside was that your character could only move at a snail's pace due to their overstuffed belly until your hunger dropped to 100%.

I just figured I'd add the fullness idea there as perhaps something to make more complex foods more appealing. Someone else mentioned that it's way easier to make a load of ham/salami and call it a day.

 

If you go eat a full tin of baked beans [ high in protein ] 450grams and come back here and then tell me your still starving hungry Ima gunna laugh at you.......Then consider the tinned food in the game scale wise looks like 1kg size tins. If you can even eat 2 tins of baked beans and not be sick, your not going to be hungry for hours.

Tinned food is such a hassle to make vs salami sticks its not worth the time.
If the food you spend hours messing around to make doesn't have a LARGE pay off for doing so its defeats the point of having it in the menu at all because 90 to 95% of players will just live on salami sticks because they would rather be doing other things and not be stuck in the kitchen for hours at a time , a lot of effort for a little gain.

 

95% of why you think making the tinned food is a hassle is because perish items don't stack, plus you need to go through many steps as you can't just click 'make sandwich' with the raw wheat, raw meat and tomatoes in there. You need to make the wheat into bread, the meat into salami, then combine bread, salami and tomatoes into a sandwich.

Pretty sure this will be changed in a quality of life update.

 

There is one point about the food in the game. The game has the ability to make meat dishes, but absolutely no possibility of breeding animals. It would be nice to get such an opportunity in the future.