Feeding System Breaks Survival and Opens Up New PVE Grief

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…).

2 Likes

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.

4 Likes

No I think you’re entirely correct.

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.

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

2 Likes

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to be consumed … however I can no longer find that post, so I am wondering if he posted that by mistake and has now withdrawn it.

1 Like

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.

2 Likes

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.

1 Like

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

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.

1 Like

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.

Why not just tether 20-25 thralls to food bowls (food bowls have decay timers) only allow food bowls to be placed within a certain range of one another the range will limit the number of thralls you have and if food bowls decay the thralls" run away".

Only allow 20-25 thralls to be placed in the radius of the food bowls. Food bowls would not need to be filled with food because you’re not just limiting the number of thralls but also removing them if the food bowl decays.
Food bowls with a cook T3-T4 could hold more thralls in the radius.
T1=5 thralls, T2=10 thralls, T3=15 thralls, T4=25 thralls,
Same mechanics for the pets with pet feed troughs but through and food bowls can overlap each other. The pet could be manned by an animal handler thrall.

Food placed in the food bowl and the through could be to help Health regeneration and the better food the faster healing the NPC gets.
AND make the purge specifically target food bowls and animal feed boxes

1 Like

All this talk about realism. Why? Conan is a video game. There is nothing realistic about it. There are no giant snake people, there is no magical corruption debuff in real life nor can you put braclets on people and if they walk through a magical wall they die. Come on guys, stop the realistic crap. What about taking a poop and piss? You don’t do any of that in game. What about women have a menstrual cycle? That doesn’t happen in game either.

With that said, the current feeding system is awful and should not be implemented as it is.

2 Likes

Then why do the players need to eat and drink? Why build shelters from the storm? Why dress for the weather? It’s just a video game.

But it’s a survival video game.

The thrall feeding mechanic is a nice touch but like you said - should not be implemented as it is, it needs some changes to be a fun mechanic - not a daily grind.

2 Likes

Changelog says thralls will eat Gruel, Shredded Roast, Grilled Steak, Roasted Haunch. The ultimate grief is starving enemies of these finite resources. I’d say we should all start filling our bunkers with seeds, especially PVE players.

This is not a good mechanic when we eat the same food, yet I can subsist on sickled berries, scrounge and what’s left of a Set-skinned human during any given 6-hour session. Any rate of consumption entirely diminishes our own daily struggles to the point where you just feel kinda worthless. Why not just be a thrall?

I think there needs to be a simple overhaul which allows them (in addition to all human foods) to eat a long-lasting thrall stew and grog that stays in the kettle/Pot like zeal. This proposed meal fueled by a T4 cook, so there’s some achievement to it.

1 Like

TG there are T4 cooks that are easy to find unlike the T4 Carpenter or Alchemist. But if they went with that idea they would probably nerf those spawns too.
Right now it seems they are trying to nerf everything fish traps thralls staying alive ect.

1 Like

One of the changes that they said was coming (and then deleted) was gruel being usable. It as deleted, but still on the dev tracker:

Jens [ Community Manager ] posted in Ideas to improve the upcoming Thrall feeding system

Hey y’all! I posted this in the main Testlive patch thread, so apologies for the re-post, but I think it’s good to give this information to as many people as possible.

Thank you very much for all the feedback! Several of devs on the team have already been looking at the Testlive feedback and I’m compiling it into a document for the rest of the team.

Let me assure you that there are changes underway. One of our designers has made these changes on our internal builds and we’ll get these pushed to Testlive.

Changelog:

  • Make human thralls eat Gruel, Shredded Roast, Grilled Steak, Roasted Haunch
  • Reduce rearing costs by 50% in terms of food
  • Reduce costs of Shadespiced pet food to match the reduced rearing cost. The amount of Shadespice required to make Shadespiced food will also be lowered
  • Change in pet health (no specific numbers were given, and values for these may fluctuate quite a bit during our Testlive pass, since this requires a lot of feedback and testing)
  • Reduce how fast food decays in pet pens. Higher tier pens give even less reduction
  • Increase inventory space for Tier 2 and Tier 3 Pet pens
  • Make pet eggs hatch twice as fast (Note that you do not have to hatch eggs in a pet pen. Your inventory works just fine)
  • Increase preservation box inventory space
  • Make preservation boxes preserve food indefinitely (as long as they have ice in them)
  • Make Thrall Pots and Feeding Trays reduce decay rate of food to 10% of normal rate
  • Make fish traps require only 1 Insect/Fat Grub to catch fish (to match Shellfish traps, which had the correct values)
1 Like

Ok, if we talk realisme, and like it would be in real civilisation, then i fact many things would be different.

At first, i doubt i would be sweating and mining in the desert, while my slaves are standing around and looking at me. I would use my slaves to cut my stones, and mine my ore.
Of course, alone i would not be able to hold an army. If i chose to have a group of slaves, i would need some supervisor. A person looking for safety, but also that they don’t escape, think mutinery, and do the works they asigned to.

Maybe this could also a way in Conan. You want let’s say 5 worker thralls, you need a supervisor thralls, let’s call it a kind of taskmaster. If you want 10, you need 2 of them. They’re harder to get, rarer, and have highter needs.

You can add to this still more. If you have several groups, you need a commander. Maybe one player could just have one commander, what would limite tralls, and people would have to chose what thrall they need realy, and which are a luxe.

Of course, this is an total other way we go right now, not just about food, and a pure extrapolation. But i think, it would realy look more real to me.

For the moment, of course, feeding thralls is way to extrem. When i look at them right now in testlife, i don’t think “slaves” but luxury good. They’re picky as hell, and eat like a full army, ever if you have only few.

Food should be hold way more simpler, gruel, or similar for most slaves. Maybe some exeptional ones who need special treatement, but thats.
Like i said in an other post, slaves shouldn’t have to eat more and better than the player. This make no sens, and is not fun for most.