Harvest directly into bearers

It’s a simple1 idea: bearers (and camels and another caravan pets) should have an additional option in the interaction menu wheel, apart from “Follow”, which puts them in a special “follow and help carry” mode. In this mode, all harvesting actions should first try to store the harvested items into the follower’s inventory; only if the follower’s inventory is full should the items go into player’s inventory.

By “harvesting actions”, I mean anything you get from swinging a tool. It would definitely not include picking stuff up from any kind of container, such as corpses, loot bags, chests, crafting stations, etc.

With this mechanic in place, and combined with a few other changes (bearers’ inventory increased to 50 slots, followers immune to lava and fall damage), the 5th encumbrance perk wouldn’t be as irreplaceable for PVE players who specialize in building as it is right now2.

EDIT: I’ve changed the post so that it makes this new behavior optional, activated through a special option in the interaction menu wheel.

EDIT 2: Just making it clear that this thread is not for discussions of 5th encumbrance perk. There’s a thread for that, so if you’re replying to this thread, make sure that you’re discussing this suggestion and not the perk.


1 I meant it’s simple to describe, not necessarily to implement.
2 I am not advocating for or against the perk replacement in this thread. There’s already a thread to discuss that topic. This suggestion should hopefully have a merit of its own, regardless of the perk.

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Being the lazy sod that I sometimes am, that would be frightfully convenient.

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It’s a fine idea, making bearer type followers more convenient and a step towards making the removal of the 5th enc perk (if it happens) less of a disaster for builders.

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A nice idea and a great QOL improvement.

But I wouldn’t like it to replace the 5th encumbrance perk.
Unless you could also craft and build from your bearer without having to interact all the time.

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Oh god yes! Bearers are almost useless as it is right now. I mean, Horses have 10 slots and make you move faster, i’ll never trade that for extra 10 or 15 slots.

Also, during late game unless you are using 50 enc. You will be getting overencumbered every three swings because the tools will take massive chunks of resources every time, leading you to interact with your bearer every time.

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Oh for the record, I didn’t mean to say that it should, nor do I want to turn this discussion into for/against 5th enc perk (we already have that one, also started by the unstoppable @CodeMage!)

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But using a skinning knife, cleaver, hatch or pick / pickaxe on a corpse / dead body of a creature you just killed, is an harvesting action. That means all meat gathered will go straight to your bearer inventory. And will disappear instantly. I’m not sure l’ll like that.

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That’s an excellent point! On the other hand, I find it really crappy that thralls eat so fast. The feeding system is a bit of a mess…

I hesitate to propose a special exception logic, along the lines of “if it’s edible, don’t put it into the thralls inventory automatically”, because I know that special cases increase the code complexity.

If they like this suggestion, but don’t want to change the follower feeding system, maybe bearers and caravan pets should have a special option in the interaction menu, i.e. “follow” is one and “follow and harvest” (or whatever) is another.

No, nor do I. There has been so much said without saying much in that one already. Let’s keep this one clean.

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Nah its already easy enough as it is.

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Oh man, this would be a wonderful quality of life improvement, not to mention my RSI would love the elimination of the extra clicks and movements involved with repeatedly dumping stuff onto my follower as we currently have to.

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OK - If the thrall can decide itself which (or is it “witch”?) parts of my inventory to carry, can´t it eventually store these goodies in the right chests in my base? Because unloading can be annoying de temps en temps, you know? I don´t know… to me, this sounds VERY immersion breaking. Next step are chests that automatically fill with what you collect? Automated crafting and building? Well, perhaps we can have explosive arrows that find the weak spots in buildings by themselves?

No, it can’t. The thrall is not deciding anything. You’re deciding to automatically pass everything you harvest to your thrall.

Except you unload once, when you come to the base. On the other hand, not being able to carry enough while you’re farming means that you have to transfer your inventory items frequently.

That’s understandable. We all have different triggers that break our immersion. The difference is that if they implement this as a separate option on the interaction wheel, you wouldn’t be forced to break your immersion by using it.

On the other hand, if they yank the 5th momentum perk, I would be able to carry less than 3k stone before having to fiddle with my bearer’s inventory. That would completely break the flow of what is already a dull (but at least efficient) activity and forcibly shove the UI in my face every minute or two. That wouldn’t only be immersion breaking, it would be forced on me with no alternative.

And as a coup de grâce, we could have thralls that automatically log onto forums to post fallacies about suggestions for new game mechanics that nobody would be forced to use :wink:

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I was against this idea at first until my toon wore heavy armor and made a harvest run. I figure we have the choice to up encumbrance or automatically put it in the bearer. In this case, I agree that the bearer should get most of the loot, not the food.

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No, my dear Sir. We would have thralls posting walls of text - but this time in MY mother´s language :wink:
As the translation tells me, “fallacy” is a synonym for a “mistake of thought”. Sorry, but I feel a little offended by this term, because, even if my post was provocative, it is an opinion. To suggest my opinion beeing a “fallacy” sounds a little arrogant to me. I will blame it on a misunderstanding, maybe caused by foreign languages, maybe caused by a misapprehension of my objection. Therefore I will try to elaborate:

To me, partially transferring items to the inventory of the thrall does not fit the current system of handling inventories. It feels like witchcraft. If the player is killing the red mother, for example, she will take a famous torch directly into her own inventory, same as the haunch, because if not:

whereas the dragonbone and -horns will be “transmitted” to the inventory of the follower. We are making these kind of decisions by ourselves atm and they require an action, for me, this resembles an analogy of reality. If an automated system will be introduced that will transfer only selected items, how will we explain this from the point of view of our hyborian avatars? It would be someone else (ergo the follower) making these decisions (and actions) for us. This is why I proposed as an ironic exaggeration that when the decisions about what to put in thrall´s or player´s inventory are made by the thrall (or the coded routine), there could also be other outsourced decisions.

What about a new player, having the first follower? Wouldn´t it be strange to suddenly have nothing in the inventory while farming?

I know I postulated myself that we stay open minded to new ideas regarding the 5th encumberance perk, but I wish a more immersive, more comprehensive solution would be available…

Hey, I have no problem with walls of text :wink: If it’s a language I understand, I’m happy to read it. If not, things can get lost in translation, such as:

It’s a mistake of logic. To be specific, I was thinking of the “slippery slope fallacy”, where you take the original idea – have only certain actions under specific circumstances put items into your follower’s inventory instead of yours – and claim that it’ll lead to a chain of events – “chests that automatically fill”, “automated crafting and building” – that results in something much bigger and worse, such as “explosive arrows that find the weak spots in buildings by themselves”.

I’ve got no problem with your opinion, that you don’t find the proposed mechanic immersive. My problem is with what you present as a logical argument why it’s bad, because it would somehow magically lead to all these bad things that nobody’s proposing.

The torch is something you loot from the corpse. The post specifically limits the automatic transfer to harvesting actions and explicitly defines those harvesting actions:

No, the meat and the dragonbone and the horns would all go to the follower’s inventory. That’s what @Wolfrider4594 was concerned about. And if you read that, you probably should’ve read my reply:

And the update to my original post that says:

Speaking of reading the replies…

I also answered that:

In other words, the explanation for the proposed mechanic is that it’s your toon (your character, your avatar in the world) that is handing these items to the follower, without requiring your input or showing an animation. Kinda like when you eat meat or drink from a water skin, there’s no animation showing that. Or when you swing your hatchet at a tree, there’s no animation showing that you’re splitting it into pieces of wood and picking those pieces up.

And again, the decision to activate this behavior (or not) is yours – it would be an option in the radial menu.

It would, which is why the suggestion was modified to make this a separate UI option. So now if you have your bearer and you see two options, one that says “Follow” and the other “Follow and Help Carry” (for example), you know that there’s some difference between the two. On top of that, there are other GUI cues that could be implemented to help. For example, when you’re harvesting with this mode on, the little pop-up that says “+12 stone” could have a tiny bearer pack icon overlay in the corner.

All in all, this would be much less confusing and better explained than the current surprises with followers, such as “Hey, I told my follower to stop following me and it disappeared and I can’t find it.”

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Sakrament! Can we go on with this argumentation in bavarian from now on?
Unfortunately not I suppose…

I did not claim that my exaggerations were a logical argument. See the question marks? They are only rhetorical elements driven by the the fear of alienation, so please just stop calling it a mistake of logic, because it is not (we could go on here about different concepts of logic, but that´s off topic).

I am sure you can accept that your understanding of your proposed game mechanic is not the only possible way to adopt this in-game-situation. The fact that to me this direct transfer to the bearer feels a little odd, does not mean that your proposal is by itself a bad idea. I don´t have another idea either.
So before we go on like this:

I already understood that, m8!

No need to repeat that information furthermore :yawning_face:

Yeah, read that… But that´s exactly a possible reason why we will HAVE to make differentiations!

Sounds good!

… on and on - I would prefer to make it short and point out why i am afraid of this mechanic: I have seen similar mechanics on rust modded servers, where harvesting directly into chests was a thing and I hated it. The possibility to not use those kinds of mechanics has no significance in a competitive environment like pvp, by the way, because a player who would skip a potential legit advantage would miss out substantially. As long as this would stay limited to the bearer grabbing what the player collects, perhaps that would work - You can have that one. :sunglasses:

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Ooof. We can try, but I’m guessing Bavarian isn’t the same thing as Deutsch they taught me in school, right? :slight_smile:

No problem :+1:

I called it a fallacy because I believed you offered it as a logical argument. My apologies if that offended you, it wasn’t meant as a personal attack :slight_smile:

That’s definitely the extent of my suggestion. And I freely admit that the reason why I came up with it in the first place is because of the encumbrance perk discussion. Despite that motivation, I tried to make this a suggestion that can stand on its own legs, but I can live without it just fine as long as the perk is there.

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So a little off-topic German then: Do you know the saying “Der Elefant im Porzellanladen”?
It´s the true nature of my inner “power animal” :man_facepalming: :innocent:

elefant

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We have a very similar saying in Serbian and sometimes I feel just like that :laughing:

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