Hunger and Thirst
gamer1000k
Join Date: 2017-04-29 Member: 230121Members
Join Date: 2017-04-29 Member: 230121Members
Randomly stumbled across this article on PCGamer. It's from 2015 and there's a good chance some of the devs have already read it, but it's still a good read. If any of the devs haven't read it, it could be useful for them when balancing everything.
For the record, I agree with the author's sentiment that hunger and thirst demands too much of the player's time, especially in the early game. Even with the accelerated timescale, the player character can only live for about a day without food, which if you think about it, is completely ridiculous.
What I would like to see is the hunger and thirst go down at a significantly slower pace than they do now. It would be even better if the rate was tied to the amount of physical activity the player did. Additionally, stages of hunger would be great. Eat regularly and you get a bonus to swimming speed. If you get too hungry or thirsty, you get a debuff. I would also like to see some low value stationary food items in the safe shallows like the acid mushrooms used to be (creepvine samples could fill this role if their food values were revised). Chasing after fish to get food in the early game gets very annoying very quickly, and having something to quickly grab to take the edge off hunger would be great. Maybe have some underwater plants that produce fresh water as well (or just let the fabricator do it, why can it cook fish without extra ingredients, but for some reason requires bleach to purify water instead of just, you know, boiling it?).
As an aside, the water filtration machine draws, far, far, far too much power for the amount of water it can purify. It's producing water at about the same rate as a solar still, yet draws half the output of a NUCLEAR REACTOR.
Anyways, that's a little rambling, but I would like to see the whole hunger/thirst system rebalanced. I like the challenge of building a self sustaining farm in my base, but freedom mode looks more and more tempting with the current state of the hunger and thirst system.
For the record, I agree with the author's sentiment that hunger and thirst demands too much of the player's time, especially in the early game. Even with the accelerated timescale, the player character can only live for about a day without food, which if you think about it, is completely ridiculous.
What I would like to see is the hunger and thirst go down at a significantly slower pace than they do now. It would be even better if the rate was tied to the amount of physical activity the player did. Additionally, stages of hunger would be great. Eat regularly and you get a bonus to swimming speed. If you get too hungry or thirsty, you get a debuff. I would also like to see some low value stationary food items in the safe shallows like the acid mushrooms used to be (creepvine samples could fill this role if their food values were revised). Chasing after fish to get food in the early game gets very annoying very quickly, and having something to quickly grab to take the edge off hunger would be great. Maybe have some underwater plants that produce fresh water as well (or just let the fabricator do it, why can it cook fish without extra ingredients, but for some reason requires bleach to purify water instead of just, you know, boiling it?).
As an aside, the water filtration machine draws, far, far, far too much power for the amount of water it can purify. It's producing water at about the same rate as a solar still, yet draws half the output of a NUCLEAR REACTOR.
Anyways, that's a little rambling, but I would like to see the whole hunger/thirst system rebalanced. I like the challenge of building a self sustaining farm in my base, but freedom mode looks more and more tempting with the current state of the hunger and thirst system.
Comments
If anything, I would want them to tweak hunger/thirst in mid to late game when hunger and thirst completely stop being an issue. Once you get melons from the underwater island, there is never again a need to catch fish again. Hunger and thirst become complete non issues then. I find the entire game world to be so small that I can almost just put a base in the Safe Shallows with melons and then go anywhere on the map and then back to my base before I get hungry or thirsty. Yes, of course, I'm exaggerating a bit here. Of course, I keep a few salted fish and water on me to give me just a little extra range.
I think it is well balanced now. Again, if anything, I think I would add significantly increase the penalty to the player from eating only or mainly melons and/or plants in the base--just to force the player to catch fish *more* often rather than not at all.
Again, wow, yeah, I just really assumed you would be going the other direction.