Harvest directly into bearers

[CodeMage]

@r4nd0mGamer

We would have thralls posting walls of text - but this time in MY mother´s language

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

@r4nd0mGamer

As the translation tells me, “fallacy” is a synonym for a “mistake of thought”.

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.

@r4nd0mGamer

If the player is killing the red mother, for example, she will take a famous torch directly into her own inventory

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:

@CodeMage

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.

@r4nd0mGamer

same as the haunch, because if not:

@Wolfrider4594

meat gathered will go straight to your bearer inventory. And will disappear instantly

whereas the dragonbone and -horns will be “transmitted” to the inventory of the follower.

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:

@CodeMage

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.

And the update to my original post that says:

@CodeMage

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

Speaking of reading the replies…

@r4nd0mGamer

how will we explain this from the point of view of our hyborian avatars?

I also answered that:

@CodeMage

The thrall is not deciding anything. You’re deciding to automatically pass everything you harvest to your thrall.

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.

@r4nd0mGamer

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

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.”