Why is the balance of food in this game so damned bad?
Roasted Haunch is so damned good for how easy it is to obtain, and Grilled Steak is pretty good for being so common you can get thousands in a minute or two. Not only that, but you can cook both of these into food that is straight up inferior.
You went and added like a thousand things to cook and none of them are worth it because I can kill an elephant and have food and healing for days.
My advice.
Nerf the amount of hunger gained from simple foods by at least 50%. No one is going to whine that they need to eat an extra roasted haunch/grilled steak or two to fill their hunger bar. These things are common.
Nerf the healing received by all food by a lot but especially by simply foods (by at least 90%). I’m always carrying around a fat stack of 50 roasted haunches because it’s 4000 healing in total (8000 with 40 vit). That is like 1 elephant kill and if I face tank it, it doesn’t even do enough damage to make me use 1 roasted haunch.
When I say simple food, I mean things you either just pick up, or throw on a camp fire to cook. Berries, bugs, meat, fish and so on.
Now that this is out of the way, you need to make the remaining food more interesting. Give me a reason to make and use a variety of food.
To start off with, add something like a “well fed” buff. It doesn’t do anything but it’s just gained when you eat food so you can only receive buffs from 1 food at a time. Then add food with various effects.
At minimum you need the following effects…
Bonus stats, both weak but long lasting and powerful but short term (for example, +1 str for an hour, or +3 str for a minute).
Health/Stamina regeneration that persists even if damage is taken (very low amount, like 0.5 a second).
A variety of healing specific food. Basically it provides little nutrition but is good for healing. At least a weak, medium and strong healing.
A bunch of stuff to make movement better. Faster sprinting, higher jumping, faster climbing, faster swimming, reduced stamina for each of these and so on.
By my estimation this is 27 different food items with different uses and most of these effects already exist in the game.
God I can’t be the only one sick of eating roast haunches and the rare jhebbal sag feast. Can I?
First all food to me gives the same regeneration I honesty don’t see a visual difference or effect in stats, secondly I agree food needs to be overhauled however due to the recent removal of the thrall and pet feeding system food has become wildly useless outside basic regeneration, I find healing potions are the way to go with bleed wraps and antidotes. That being said I agree that a lot of this is good, and some great ideas but I wouldn’t expect this any time soon due to the removal of the food system for thralls and pets. But if they could eat the food for different 1 hour bluffs that would stack in duration and allow 1 of every buff my thralls at camp would be sufficient for building damage periods and allow me to sleep in or garden knowing that 1 clan member should suffice. But love the idea want this to happen as well.
You eat roast haunches? I just carry a large amount of honey 2.0 pounds if I recall right I maybe wrong I know I found a food 100 stock only 2.0 pounds, tho its good for healing, long shelf life and fat grubs for hunger, my woman probably would castrate me if she was real.
Roasted Haunch is 80 hunger and 80 healing, 160 with 40 vit. And it’s so common I never run out of it. Can even find it on the go. It’s great for hunger and for healing and it stacks with potions if you need it in combat. (Roasted Haunch + Aloe Extract at 40 vit = 500 healing total, that’ll get you to full health in a few seconds)
Weight is barely an issue either, since most food weighs 0.1 each anyway and a full stack is 50 so 5 weight total.
Odd, all food I have consumed always tells me 10 HP Per-second how odd maybe I will check this later. It would be nice to have more efficient passive healing. Never lasted very long in duration either.
Roasted Haunch heals for 80 Hp over 10 seconds (about). Honey heals for 20 Hp in the same time period.
There is only 6 food items in the game that heal for more than Roasted Haunch and several of them aren’t worth the effort to make. Roast Haunch is both easy to obtain but still powerful which is why I use it.
The river near the starting area is littered with grubs and eggs. Every bush you harvest will give you a handful of bugs. You’ll probably have close to a stack of 100 by the time you craft your first set of clothes.
Food is so abundant in almost every part of the map that dying of starvation is almost impossible. I know it’s never happened to me and I don’t know anyone it has happened too.
Low level healing can be sorted out by adding some sort of crappy low level bandage made from plant fibre and aloe that heals something like 20 hp but is unlocked once you hit level 2 as with other essential stuff.
No need to throw off the entire balance of one part of the game just because new players might struggle for the first 20 minutes of the game.
I disagree with you suggestion for this reasons @Garfy
In the beginning of the game it’s quite difficoult to farm things like food. Before you build your first shelter if “simple food” don’t make you stay alive the game will be long 5 mins before rage quit.
Simple food simple don’t heal you without using tons of it, but keep in mind a low level character can’t store it, so when a low level heal himself it consumes almost everything he had.
Medium and high level food divide themself in 2 different categories: healing food and hunger food. Hunger food is food good to sate hunger, sometimes also thirst, or for gaining additional bonuses, but very bad in combat because it’s regen is slow and it last very fast. Healing food is good for combat because has longer and faster health regen.
There’s no point in nerfing it, I use tons of it in combat and I find it balanced.
Best healing food is herbal tea + aloe soup, it’s time and resource consuming to produce large amounts of them, but they can restore your health even when very low in 2-3 secs during a fight, and that’s why, on another topic, I said I don’t find the spear granting passive regen so op.
Cooking and alchemy have barely been touched since early access and both need a complete overhaul. They should work in the same way blacksmithing does. Right now T3 and T4 Cooks are virtually no different then T1 or no cook at all. They should cook a flawless variants of regular food with increased gains and some feasts should only be crafted by them. I don’t venture into the Exiled lands and bring back T4 cook to make me a honeyed gruel or loaf of bread.
I’ve never once had difficulty finding food. Nor have I ever seen anyone complain about food being difficult to get. Since about level 5 I’ve been throwing away excess food.
Simple food heals tons for a low level character. 10 bugs/berries or 5 grilled steak will fully heal a character. Pretty much everything you pick up and eat will heal 20+ hp when you start with 200. Provided you can get a stack of 100 bugs in minutes with no danger at all, that is a hell of a lot of healing.
Storing food isn’t that difficult either, not like it use to be. Any cooked meat lasts at least an hour now, a full stack lasts 50 hours. You should be nearing max level by the time the first stack of meat you ever get goes rotten.
As for medium/high level food. Very little of it (5-6 food items) heals for more than Roast Haunch.
Herbal Tea and Aloe Soup are only good healing items because they count as food and a potion. Using a Roast Haunch and an Aloe Extract will heal for more and faster (but aloe extract is heavier and takes more aloe to make).
Besides, my suggestion was to make these kinds of items more useful while making stuff like roast haunch less useful (because it’s easier to obtain despite being so strong).
I made a new character just one month ago on another server and:
never been able to harvest more than very few savory meats from shalebacks with stone hachettes.
Shredded Roast requires feral flesh, you obtain 3-4 of it if you’re lucky form a animal with a stone Hachette, you need 4 of them to just reach 100% hunger refill, 5 to fully heal you.
hadful bugs: you need 50 to fill you hunger, like berries (you need 100) the only way to obtain them at low level is with hands, so without any harvest bonus. I see now they are stated as healing more after last update, (from 10 to 20), that is just a good thing because the point is a low level (1-10) character has no heals.
That’s not totally true: Roast Haunch + Aloe Extract is easier to make, of course, and it’s a viable way for combat healing.
I use them usually.
But even if Roast Haunch grants a better regen in terms of points healed x second it lasts before Aloe soup granted regen.
Aloe extract simple heals less of herbal tea in each terms (pts x sec and for how long).
The new Infused Aloe Extract is better than all of them, but it stacks at 10, like aloe extract, not at 50 like Herbal tea (having the stack almost the same weigh !) making it unconfortable to use it while raiding the Unnamed City (7 boss fights) for example, and requiring Dagon scales intensive farming.
I found more effective aloe soup + herbal tea to fight a boss.
But in any case I found this system balanced, in the game exists also better food than this ones, I don’t use them so much just because the resources they need to be prepared or their weigh.
And after all of this I don’t find the healing system unbalanced or op.
Yep, and then boost the stats of Suvival for everyone too lazy to farm for more than hunch and make the first Suvival effect not only raw meat based but also give 10% more damage against animals and 10% less from animals. Two problems solved.
WAit! What? Feeding system is gone again? Why the fudge would they cancel that?!
Yeah… the good ol’ “servers cant do it” excuse… I am no expert, but since conan exiles seems to be their only truly profitable game, they should consider either getting better servers or more servers with decreased max. population. Invest to grow.
I am on board with tweaking the foods.
I use both Roasted Haunch and Meat Mashup (1 ferrel + 1 savory–gives 10 thirst as well) early on and for farming runs on PVP official.
Aloe soup, herbal teat (iced if i have it adds to decay) added in for raiding/fighting.
well, they might not be a AAA-Developer yet, but they sure act like one. Sell a broken game, saving on server quality, constantly patching… if they add microtransactions now, they can become the next Bethesda.
Though I understand the point here, I don’t think that nerfing the more commonly acquired/used foods is the way to go, especially the healing effect provided. I don’t think that diminishing these effects would make the game more fun or engaging, just slightly more tedious.
Instead, I think that the various recipes which tend to go unused should come with some other incentives. Temporary attribute bonuses, stamina boosts, further increased temperature gains, or a more varied range of healing vs time would be much more interesting effects.
When gearing up for an adventure, rather than thinking “I won’t bring Roasted Haunches because they suck at healing now”, I’d prefer “I should make some Cimmerian Meals to bring, because I’ll want the extra Vitality where I’m going”.
Though I wholeheartedly agree that the food system is due for a change, I think that it would be more beneficial to show unlocked recipes some love instead of diminishing other things.
I am sorry I was able to kill them on a purely vanilla server no issue but that’s also because I was dual wielding and bleeding them. It’s easy hard tiny bit but eggs are all over and killing isn’t as bad as one may think.
