Feeding System Breaks Survival and Opens Up New PVE Grief

Conan Exiles PC Discussion Public Beta Client
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Yeah I can say now after a lot of stress testing that this feeding system screws up the game.

I play 1X vanilla and I dig it. It makes you do things differently. Eat frugally. I’m almost LVL 50 and I have used exactly 1 Aloe Potion. You even heal frugally.

Whenever I’m out of berries, insects are almost always on my hotbar for cheap heals. Get the sickle and even 1X yields enough bugs to eat for a long time.

Now we have thralls, who eat 2.5 STACKS of haunch (my premium fighting fuel!) just to make it through X hours? How could anyone who even casually plays this game think this makes sense?

Our own feeding needs are vastly eclipsed by thrall demands. Sniping a measly 10% of our thralls’ rations to feed ourselves becomes second nature, thus removing Survival from the game whenever pots are unlocked. Inevitably this will cause the devs to unlock different kinds of foods for thralls*, thus creating an even earlier disconnect in one of the key elements of the game.

This is not an endorsement of this system. It should be scrapped. A suitable solution in the current paradigm:

  1. Pots work as now with standard Rot Rate, as central distribution (RP players can still feed by hand, hold ceremonies, whatevs)
  2. Tier 2 and above Pot can be loaded with a T4 Cook
  3. Addition of food to T4-Cook-Loaded Pot yields Thrall Kibble which we cannot eat, and stays in pot like Zeal
  4. Thrall Kibble does not rot and greatly extends thrall satiety.

Since this Feeding “system” has been implemented to assuage the PVE bent, they need to know this opens them up to a new, damaging griefing opportunity. Want to kill someone’s PVE duders and take their stuff? Just steal their extremely useful food from a completely unlocked pot.

Finally, consuming 3 slots of a fighter’s 5-slot inventory is punishing to faithful players. It also pretty much normalizes the use of inventory-extending exploits. To me these are fundamentals that should be avoided like Scylla and Charybdis.


* Rot Rate of 10% for Pots and New Foodstuffs have been listed in the Changelog, as published by JEV.

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I have switched to x1 gather as well and can concur that berries and insects work as a stand in for our own health. I made myself a stack of gruel for this purpose, lol.

I do not endorse the feeding system in any form that resembles the current status. they’re too picky and consume far too much. People on x1 servers will have trouble keeping a single thrall alive.

Working on easing the data load sent out from building blocks would accomplish much more in terms of optimization than eliminating almost all thralls. You nerfed spawn rates at launch, so I don’t see how doubling down on that philosophy will make that much more of a difference now.

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They’ve really opened the balancing of the feeding system to discussion. In the latest dev stream, they did say that it hasn’t been balanced, and is likely “too aggressive”. I think they want our feedback on how to balance it.

I think an important question would be, how many thralls do you think you should be able to feed? What do you think would be fair?

I think that making thralls consume items is good. It really lends itself to developing a “siege” technique to warfare, and deepening the Settlement aspect of the game. Starve the enemy out for a few days, and they’ll have fewer thralls to defend. If you can’t control the field, then you can’t hunt. This encourages players to build wider, and control more territory to hunt.

I think it’s a great mechanic, and it plays in well to late-game. It makes long-time warfare more effective. It adds another method to ‘grind down’ big clans. It plays well into one of the major game dynamics, which is civilization and decay. Once you establish an empire, you’ll be so busy plugging all the leaks that another clan can try to topple you. The feeding system makes empires more precarious, by adding another layer to logistics.

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I find I must reach into my personal history a bit, with men and logistics, so forgive me for the frequent and recent mentioning of the military. It is in no way dominant in my life, it simply helps inform the grand vision of what I think can be accomplished. I also have a three-year history of having administered a fraternity house during my university days, but people often look pejoratively of such experiences. I have personally been able to sustain 55 men, and my Supply Personnel (god love them) were able to prepare and execute an entire battalion.

So from a delegable acts standpoint, I should be able to field 5-6 platoons of 50. From a direct personnel administration standpoint, 50-75.

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You must take into account that they are slaves so the question is how many slaves one person can keep alive without starvation and mutiny. Since there is no mutiny system then hunger system should be more challenging. Of course if we want to base it on realism. People tell here that they are slaves so we should be able to feed them anything but they forget that it’s a double edged sword. They are slaves so one person no matter how strong or skilled won’t be able to keep an army.

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This sounds like it’s in reference to a PVP situation though. Half or better of players are in solo or PVE/-C, with a large turnover rate coming from PVP anyhow. Thralls AI are too dumb at the moment for them to be much help in a raid.

What of the RP, Solo and PVE/-C communities? Many place thralls around as decor to show life inside of builds (or protect from offline purges). If we could support 50-75 thralls with minimal time spent, as @Barnes suggests, then maybe this bad idea could work without too harshly impacting the player base.

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These are all really good points that I hope re taken into consideration while moving forward with this idea. I think survival games should be as realistic as possible within reason. Where it shouldn’t take stacks of haunch to keep a thrall fed, also keeping hundreds of thralls without upkeep is also unreasonable.

This is an excellent point that I had not even thought of.

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That depends entirely on “with what level of effort”. I’m going to assume “while still being able to go offline for a period of time roughly equal to the decay timer”.

It also depends how much timer per day you’re expected to grind food just to keep your thralls alive (which obviously depends on how efficient you are and how far from the nearest foodsource).

So I’m going to say 25-ish per player (not a hard cap) with at most 20 efficient minutes’ food farming required per day. Anything more, and it becomes unmanageable.

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Still there is another problem that has or hasn’t been brought up a lot of the players are pass thru players which means they log in play couple hours then may not be back on for a few days because of work or school and if they have or want Thralls there is no way on a pve or a pvp server to do that because time does not stop on those servers so a lot of those people wont have thralls or pets because they all will starve. I don’t think those people are going to want to log in spend their 2 hrs gathering food to keep them alive.

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I entirely agree. I’m one of those who logs on intermittently - currently it’s daily, or at least semi-daily, but not always for more than 20-30 minutes (I have a wife, and a child, and a job, and friends, and other hobbies and…).

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I agree. Why have a decay time that lasts a week, but you can’t keep a thrall alive for a day. May as well just scrap the decay. And for those that are asking for the thralls to be incorporated into the decay timer, I get the feeling that is what they have tried to do since the beginning and just can’t seem to get it to work. So they come up with this idea as a workaround. I may be wrong.

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No I think you’re entirely correct.

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They did mention in the Livestream that the intent was to be able to fill up a feed pot and it last 5+ days without needing refilled. As you mention, it may be a matter of coding, where they can’t link them in the same code as static objects to decay.

The problem comes in the amount of time it takes to harvest food. It takes a LONG time in a x1 server to fill a feeder up with anything other than gruel.

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Gruel is going to be the only thing I ever use.

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I was going to use gruel as wel. However if I have read the posts correctly the thralls only eat specific foods and gruel is not one of them.
At one point Jens made a post stating that several foods (gruel, grilled steak, roasted feral meat) would be able to be consumed … however I can no longer find that post, so I am wondering if he posted that by mistake and has now withdrawn it.

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Have said it elsewhere, will say it here -

Have gruel keep them alive, better food speed healing.

Cap thralls per faction at 50 or 60 - or less.

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If you want to keep it realistic, then the food system not just for thralls but for everyone would need to change dramatically. For example how many people would a single elephant feed? 20 for a couple days at least. How about a crab trap that you just put under water and pull up once a day, probably 5-10 crabs a day. If you are talking survival and more ancient civilizations people could survive on one meal a day easily.

That said the game food system is not realistic, it is meant as a healing system and a survival mechanic that is difficult early on. Players eat way more than 3 steaks a day in food, not realistic. Thralls in the current system eat more than 20 steaks a day for a slave, and some of them demand high quality food better than the player is eating.

What would happen in an ancient civilization that had slaves, say Egypt in the time of the pharaohs if a slave refused to work unless he was fed an exotic hippo steak or something? I can think of several things, executed on the spot, whipped, tied to a wheel of pain type item, their family whipped or killed, or their gruel taken away so they starved. How many slaves do you think let themselves starve to death because they turned their nose at the particular food they were offered? I would bet it was near zero, when you are starving you cant help but eat if food is put in front of you.

Even back in ancient times a fisherman alone could feed a whole family, so it is not unreasonable for several thralls to be able to be kept alive easily. Player characters are way more than simple farmer or fishers. They can single highhandedly take down a mammoth, that feeds a village.

My suggestions to try to balance the thrall feeding system is to get rid of the specific meals required, having slaves demand specific meals is just dumb. You can use the theirs of food, gruel, low quality, medium and high quality. Possibly link it to the thrall rank. Teir 1 thralls only require Gruel or better. T2 require low quality or better, t3/t4 require medium or better. You could have t4 require high quality but i think that’s pushing it for a thrall (slave) to require same or better food then their master.

Second reduce the amount of food a thrall needs. A thrall should need no more than 3 pieces of food per 24 game hrs, and i think 2 pieces is more reasonable. It should never require more food then it would require the player to survive that same amount of time while not using it to heal.

Lastly fix the Fish traps and amounts of meat you get from various animals, right now a elephant, mammoth, or rhino don’t really give anymore meat than a dear or boar, or other smaller animals. Fish traps on test are horrible, they may have given too much food before but now they are un-usable, requiring 5 bait for a chance to catch a single fish, which will spoil in the trap before harvested is not reasonable. With a net or crab trap a fisherman could probably end up with a 1-2 dozen fish in a day or half day time. Either remove the bait or make it a fuel for the trap like gruel for the wheel of pain, then reduce the catch from before to about half the amount.

I think if those things are done there will be a good balance of requiring some maintenance for the thralls without making it impossible for a player to have any or making various food items un-usable.

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I thought all player containers were locked by default in PvE?

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You’re not wrong, but when I did briefly join PVE on Sunday I was able to transfer items to another player using a Pot, like a dead body or bag. I did record our interactions, so it does seem to be ignoring ownership.

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You can’t use gruel, gruel is only for wheels of pain, each type of thralls recuire middle-high level food. That’s the issue why most peeps are fed up, thralls are picky.