Despite there being from what I can tell AT LEAST 56 different species of humans and pet creatures that each have different stat modifying foods, changing specific attributes as they level, with ten different foods each, there is not a single reference to this in-game. No game load tips, no in-game stat per thrall or pet that has the food menu showing allowed foods. It could be shown in every available thrall / pet menu and still be insufficient to explain the real complexity involved. It is quite baffling to realize my friends and I have been playing this game for a decade and had zero inclination the system even existed. That is a complete failure on your part. – Simplify it greatly and put detailed descriptions in the game and online; it is completely undocumented.
Diets is one of the most convoluted mechanics I have seen in this game. The more I learned about how diets function, the worse it got.
I think Funcom devs avoid touching or even looking at diets as much as they possibly can, because they are a mess.
I am sure any dev who considered making changes to diets eventually wound up in the fetal position crying in a corner and haunted by nightmares.
I think the best way to make any improvements to diets would be to scrap the entire system and rebuild it from scratch, but that would be a large investment in resources and can be delayed for as long as the Jenga tower stays standing.
I personally would completely remove all mentions of food in the game and do what other games have done. Auto-Level thralls making it more obvious that is happening and if the devs want, they can give players a toggle to manually level thralls, putting whatever attribute points in as they see fit (vitality, grit, str, agi, etc) as the various thralls and pets level from 1-20.
There is no reason to have food in this game and the fact that it even exists to the extinct it does to affect thralls/pets attributes at every level they achieve is completely unknown to even players that have played and hosted games for 900+ hours each.
Food in general needs an overhaul. From how its obtained, how its used, what is used, and why its used.
Right now it has arbitrary purpose. You have a ring for hunger and thirst you need to keep up or you take damage. Its just another thing we have to do. There’s no gameplay elements there. You can’t get good at eating and drinking. You find something and use it. And you have to every so often. That’s it. There’s no thought to it, no planning it, no clever way to make it better.
Its use in thralls is even weirder. You throw some random thing in their inventory and when they take damage, they get healed for 1-10hp/second depending on their diet. Sounds like you’d want to be smart and look at the wiki and use the best food that heals for 10x more than the worst.
Until you see the best food decays faster than some lesser food, so you stick whatever you feel like replacing in there. If you’re methodical, you might use better food if you don’t mind replacing it every day. If you’re not, then you’ll stick long lasting stacks of gruel in there and call it a day.
You have a leveling process in there where specific foods affect stat growths of specific states. You may bother with this, or may not. Doing so gives you an average 3pts (rounded up from 2.8) to your chosen stat that you wouldn’t get otherwise. That’s an extra 100ish hp or 1.2% damage on a Berserker on average.
The best thing with food is the buffs from eating them. Sated isn’t terrible (isn’t great and thralls get their own version). And the extra stats is like having a sixth piece of armor. This is about the only great purpose of food and its not really that engaging. And lets not forget that some stats don’t even work on thralls (stamina, encumbrance, etc).
Raw food should be a bit more scarce. Like way way more scarce. We have more food available to us within the first 5 minutes of playing a new character than Conan did when he was in Xuthal and had access to feasts created by food replicators (and there is irony here… being as Conan walked from there to the Exiled Lands).
Even with simple stone tools at 1x rate. When you harvest an animal, you get an amount of food that will last several play sessions. The decay rate is supposed to mitigate that. But that is such a badly designed stop gap measure.
But lets say you’ve been playing a couple of hours and you’ve got a preservation box, well if you have that, you also have Hardened Steel tools. That’s 12-13 meat per hit with a cleaver. Does anyone else see an issue with this? Even if you use stone tools you get 6-7.
Even if you have a hundred thralls to continuously feed for purge after purge, it doesn’t take much to gather the resources needed to keep them all fed relatively quickly.
Here’s how I think food should work:
Remove and replace the hunger and thirst system. This won’t make the game easier, it won’t make it less of a survival game. When I can smack a corpse (nearly any corpse) or bush and feed myself for literal (out of game) days. Then what is the point? The hunger and thirst system is simply there to be an “I gotcha moment” when you leave your base and weren’t paying attention. I’m sorry but I’ve never gone to work or camping while starving or in a state of dehydration where I would likely die in the span of daylight hours if I didn’t bring food or water. My character wouldn’t do that either.
I mean it kind of makes sense when you play a new character fresh off the cross and eating bugs and drinking river water. But how much sense does it make when you’re living in a stone castle with servants at your beck and call? Seriously get on the server with your highest progressed character and look at how many thralls you have. And explain to me why that character still needs to scrounge for food and is only hours (in game lore) from dying of starvation or thirst. You literally have a tavern or several.
Now we’re going to change how we obtain food. Now I would like to change how all tools work for gathering materials, but I’m going to refrain from that part and focus primarily on food gathering. Instead of harvesting 6-17 depending on tool. You’re going to harvest 1 per swing, and the number of hits you get on a creature is dependent on its size. Better tools will give access to better meats on better animals. Better tools will also last longer.
But wait a minute, isn’t this going to be pretty tedious? Well… it would be if we had to stuff down 3-4 steaks per hunger bar or keep chewing on whatever everytime that sated buff drops.
But the benefits we get are being replaced with stats that are more substantial and last much longer. You are what you eat, and the better meals and drink you make the better your character will be.
Anyone who’s played either Valheim and Enshrouded will know the kind of food-buff system I am talking about. Both games handle it in their own way. One simply has any 3 foods, the other has 3 (or 4) foods of different types (one of each). Conan Exiles can do something similar and even put its own spin on it.
I don’t want to get into details about particulars and individual stats, but the idea is that when you eat and drink, you get long duration buffs that you will want to have. Going without is a significant drop in potential. Can be done by those who choose to, but definitely something you might want to consider, depending on the challenge. And if you don’t eat or drink it can be assumed your character is automatically keeping themselves alive on riverwater and bugs as the exiled lands are abundant in those.
The quality of the ingredients and how hard they are to obtain and how many are needed will affect the quality of the finished product and the associated buffs. Get nice buffs to maximum health, stamina, damage, climbing, swimming, etc. As well as to regeneration. Now health regen is interesting. That will need to be looked at for combat purposes since sated drops after taking damage and has to be reapplied, these buffs instead wouldn’t fall off. So some mechanic of the regen will have to suspend for a time after taking damage, but then reapply itself after a time. Again the particulars would need to be left out. But carrying stacks of whatever wouldn’t be needed anymore, not unless you intend to stay out beyond the timer.
But what about our thralls? If I kill an elephant and it gives me like… 4-5 meat, I’m going to need to kill 20 of them to feed my army. I mean… that’s realistic… but no that isn’t fun. Thralls won’t get the same bonuses we will. They don’t get stats the same way we do anyway. I mean how good is +40 health to a 2,500hp thrall right now? Its not, right? You’re pretty much only using +15% damage boost food anyway if you’re even picking food for stats. Probably most are picking food just for their health per second buff.
We’re going to change how thrall pots and feeding boxes work a bit. Oh and we’re not going to be stuffing food into inventories anymore. They’re getting buffs that stay on for a decent amount of time too. The way the buffs work is the feeding boxes exert a buff around them depending on the food put in. These will be unique thrall buffs where if they buff health, its a percentage. And there won’t be any foods that have zero benefit.
As for leveling thralls. Ideally if it were up to me, we wouldn’t level thralls, we do activities like with the companion system that gives them perks and we can influence the perks. But if the thralls levels stay the same, I would just replace that with an attribute assign system like we have when we level. Thrall just gets one attribute per level. I mean we’re not eating specific foods to level up specific attributes, why are thralls? Take some of the RNG out of the game, leave it for the nerds who play table top games with dice (don’t take offense to that statement, I play those too).
Very much this! Food and drinks need a massive overhaul and have been in need of one for a long time.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate here, i actually like the system, though not how opaque it is, and it feels incomplete.
I feel like they should add icons to dishes and feed to indicate which stats it raises. So for example Exotic feasts get a small flexing arm and heart symbol on them because they raise STR and VIT.
The one thing i truly dislike however is the lack of certain combinations. Why no Agility+VIT dish?
Do you know … lol
On the diet list, the order in which the foods show is the same order of stats in the list, so the first foods are for str, the second for agi, etc.
The perks are better and foster the “thrall hunt” by being random. After a while of whining, Funcom added a potion to reset perks.
Food are not essential for thrall living like player characters, but they do foster a certain level of speed in progression too, albeit, it you play in the most generic settings, the speed of leveling is already fast enough for it not to make a difference, but if you are playing in a custom server for long run, you can notice the difference.
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